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Tech Workers Coalition
@techworkersco
We are a coalition of workers in and around the tech industry, labor organizers, community organizers, and friends. Subscribe to 💫
A workplace near youtechworkerscoalition.orgJoined May 2015

Tech Workers Coalition’s Tweets

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.
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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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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
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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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screenshot of this link until the end of the image: https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023

"March 31, 2023

Tl;dr: The harms from so-called AI are real and present and follow from the acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems. Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices."

Image is "A yellow window with three images. On the right is an under water photo of a single bright blue and yellow tropical fish. The two on the left are simplifications created based on a decsion tree algorithm. The work illustrates a popular type of machine learning model: the decision tree. Decision trees work by splitting the population into ever smaller segments. I try to give people an intuitive understanding of the algorithm. I also want to show that models are simplifications of reality, but can still be useful, or in this case visually pleasing."
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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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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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“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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We are adding support for plugins to ChatGPT — extensions which integrate it with third-party services or allow it to access up-to-date information. We’re starting small to study real-world use, impact, and safety and alignment challenges: openai.com/blog/chatgpt-p
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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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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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