Except for unionizing
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He's always been terrible -- labor exploitation, lies, a deeply unpleasant guy born on third who got billions in government subsidies and thinks he earned it all. Any reasonably inquisitive tech critic should've been able to see this before last month.
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I know everyone thinks this Time essay is 
but I clearly point out Musk’s “boundless imagination and relentless drive” too, including his achievements in cars, rockets and energy. That is precisely why is why the toxic downward slide is so profoundly disappointing, at IMHO.
but I clearly point out Musk’s “boundless imagination and relentless drive” too, including his achievements in cars, rockets and energy. That is precisely why is why the toxic downward slide is so profoundly disappointing, at IMHO.
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I think that this piece captures part of why there's been pushback against generative AI in fandom communities. There are STRONG social norms (this was literally the topic of my dissertation) for attribution/credit and against perceived plagiarism.
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Generative AI is "a Marxist nightmare: the work of millions accruing to a few capitalist owners who pay nothing at all for that labor," says @datasociety research director @jennaburrell:
techpolicy.press/chatgpt-and-co
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During the Prop 22 campaign, I debated Vikrum Aiyer, then at Postmates. He repeatedly referred to research from "Berkeley" to defend his points. Only afterwards did I realize he was referring to the BERKELEY RESEARCH GROUP - a corporate consulting form.
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one very important part of the story of why Europe is on the cusp of killing the gig economy while the United States has facilitated a million compromises is that straight up many U.S. unions abandoned the effort to fight app-based ride-hail tooth and nail
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Writing about union responses to Uber and remembering this 2018 letter in which David Rolf from SEIU 775 wrote a letter alongside Dara Khoshrowshahi about how what drivers needed was not a secure wage floor…but portable benefits. 
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Great and depressing post about how your onetime favorite Google Reader alternative is now offering strikebreaking and worker surveillance as-a-service
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Twitter is sending laid off employees a legal notice warning them about a non-disparagement clause in their separation agreements. The company says this "applies to you whether you signed the agreement or not."
Curious if any labor lawyers want to weigh in!
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“Language is a living, breathing thing. A computer program doesn’t go out into the world to fact-check what it scraped off the internet.” – workers in on the ChatGPT hype, what it hides, and the people it claims to replace.
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Google workers will stage a demo outside the company’s King Cross HQ tomorrow over the ‘appalling treatment and union busting’ of staff facing swingeing redundancies.
🗓️ 1200 hrs to 1300 hrs, Tuesday, 4 April
📍Google, King's Boulevard, London, N1C 4BU
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Unfair redundancies are widespread in gaming & tech. By coming together in unions, we can change this.
Full support to union members at Google taking action tomorrow for their jobs.
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Google workers will stage a demo outside the company’s King Cross HQ tomorrow over the ‘appalling treatment and union busting’ of staff facing swingeing redundancies.
1200 hrs to 1300 hrs, Tuesday, 4 April
Google, King's Boulevard, London, N1C 4BU unitetheunion.org/news-events/ne
1200 hrs to 1300 hrs, Tuesday, 4 April
Google, King's Boulevard, London, N1C 4BU unitetheunion.org/news-events/ne12
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This is what tech worker power is all about — proud of our members fighting back against one of the world’s most powerful companies
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This letter by & colleagues at the is so powerful & on point. Critical resetting of the narrative of inevitability,human adjustment to AI, & future dangers of AI. What harms are present now & why are we assuming we lack power to make policy for change?
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Since we've been looking for more things to do, @emilymbender @mmitchell_ai @mcmillan_majora and I wrote a statement about the horrible "letter" on the AI apocalypse, the very first citation of which, was our #StochasticParrots paper.
dair-institute.org/blog/letter-st
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read image description
ALT
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Google raters are contractors who help ensure Google Search runs smoothly.
Under company policy, they can't work more than 29 hours a week, so they don't qualify for health insurance.
"The magic 30 hours a week is what we can't go past," one rater said.
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new from me & jane slaughter for
with new reform leaders, the big UAW bargaining con makes a jerky, unmistakable start: towards a massive manufacturing strike this fall to end divisive tiers & unionize the electric vehicle transition ⚡️🪧🚘
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their playbook looks like:
>claim "open" source AI democratising "alignment"
>ride on the hype & support
>incremental successes a la "move fast and break things"
>fearmonger & call for regulation while ensuring monopoly
>stack lobbyists in your favour
>solidify techno oligarchy
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Y'all thought we were "overreacting" when talking about the eugenicist roots of the #TESCREAL bundle at the helm of "AI" research. Articles about sexually predatory behavior, their founders calling us the N word, one of the biggest frauds in American history weren't enough.
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Similar to many who think deeply & holistically abt AI ethics, I didn't sign "the letter". A letter-signing to change a system, without tying it up in an advertisement/endorsement for your org, looks like this piece recently re-shared.
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“Malcolm urges us stop reminiscing about the 1967 theatrics of levitating the Pentagon and to start retelling the Pentagon bombing and other direct action to dismantle the war machine built by software company leadership.” 👀
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love 2 live in a world where every human interaction is mediated by a platform that ultimately answers to three vampires in a patagonia vest
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We just published Abolish Palo Alto news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/03/28/iss
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We just published Abolish Palo Alto
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We have to press AI shills on what they are talking about because they’re slippery and packaging multiple claims into one. Are they saying AI will disrupt certain labor that is organized in forms it shouldn’t be? Are they saying it will undermine more established institutions?
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Young engineers: please don't do this. Learn the fundamentals; tech is all the same bits and bytes on the lower levels. This knowledge will serve you no matter what the flavor of the week is, because you'll be able to understand them all
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if i was 20 now i’d drop everything and jump into AI. i feel a great deal of FOMO tbh but also hesitant about abandoning all the context i already have in my field. not sure what to do.
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Nationalize the grid, nationalize the renewable sector, double the workforce
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Let’s hear your ideas on fixing the interconnection problem
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“This is the end of company unionism, where the companies & the union work together in a friendly way, because it hasn’t been good for our members..These companies have enjoyed record profits for a decade, & our workers are still..struggling to get by.”
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when someone says "alignment" you can be sure that they've completed the process of turning concepts like algorithmic harms and justice into utterly worthless corporate drivel lol
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The can't help itself with the patriarchy. They have a concept of who is an expert in tech & those are the ppl getting megaphones. What's this nonsense about "AI with godlike powers"?
Their tech coverage is only getting worse whether it is the articles or opinions.
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These folks are not experts, not one of them has carried an on-call pager or dealt w/the grimey material infrastructure on which this tech depends, & while kids getting scared of ghost stories they made up is sympathetic, it's not newsworthy.
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Look, we only have $10B and we're on a mission to build a god that will bring utopia (not the devil kind, that's what China is building). So we gotta be scrappy here, duct tape and all. So you know, we use these open source libraries (that we don't pay for) and they have issues🤷🏽♀️
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we had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating.
a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.
we feel awful about this.
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If you were impacted by the mass layoffs and want to do something about it, our DMs are open!
We are part of an existing union organizing committee and preparing a rapid response.
Together we are stronger 💪🏼🔥
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From the whistleblower above: “I want to clarify that I do not endorse the campaign by the US government to pathologize China. They have an approach of “It’s okay if we do mass surveillance, but not you,” which is fundamentally wrong.”
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“As a principle, I am firmly against mass surveillance by software companies. The issues here are not unique to TikTok, but are prevalent among all mainstream social media companies.”
Blowing the Whistle on TikTok Content Moderation |
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We just published Blowing the Whistle on TikTok Content Moderation
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Friendly reminder that we've bailed ourselves out of and moved to 😊
To get tomorrow's special feature in your inbox, subscribe at
news.techworkerscoalition.org/subscribe/ ✍️
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As always, self-improvement regimens, meditation retreats, and coach-advised resume tweaks aren’t going to solve this hellish job market for you. This is an ongoing structural problem that demands a collective response
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This. Google just quietly re-started its work on Maven, creating "AI" drone targeting+surveillance tech for the US military after protest killed the contract 5 years ago. I've heard crickets in response, even as the millionth "sorry GPT isn't a person" oped floats across my TL.
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GPT v whatever is just an elaborate public relations campaign that seems to be successful in that people continue to be debating sentience claims instead of focusing on the corporate capture of academia, centralization of compute power and the sectors active military applications
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These people are such dishonest snake oil salesman. Altman runs two companies which explicitly aims to restructure our political order, his network is full of people running or funding firms along similar lines, they love to make things political then cry wolf as much as possible
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i believe that if Silicon Valley Bank were instead called Farmers Bank Of Santa Clara (they bank a lot of winegrowers!) we would have had this easily resolved.
unfortunately it became somewhat political.
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