They’ll offer you exposure, or they’ll offer you a chance to build your portfolio, and none of it means jack. They’ll devalue the years - literally, years - you’ve spent growing and honing and building your skills, through sheer blood, sweat, and tears, by trying to barter it out of you for exactly zilch.And when you say no? When you tell them you can’t afford to work for free, because you still have to pay for your own rent, your own bills, and your own food out of somewhere  -  they act like you’re the entitled one. They act like you’re the asshole.Their message is this: “If you don’t help me for free, you’re a bad person.”

He told me that features he generated using Claude Code ended up crashing their product on two different occasions. His boss told him that if it happened one more time, he’d be fired. “I’ve never had quality issues like this before in my career.” The problem is that code produced by an AI agent looks reasonable, but can contain ‘hard-to-spot bugs’ that end up causing major problems. As a result, you should carefully review your agent’s output, but this is difficult. As the engineer told me, it’s “famously hard” to understand code you didn’t write yourself, so this extra step becomes “easy to just blow it off (especially when we are all trying to ‘10x’ our velocity).” Soon, systems start to break. “The coding harnesses are useful and make life as a developer easier,” he summarized, “but they also encourage laziness.” In response to these issues, this disillusioned engineer has returned to largely programming by hand.

Are techno-optimists right? Can Care AI offer women a better organized, fairer, and more carefree existence? History suggests otherwise.Technofeminism has long criticized the idea that technology is the solution to the problem that has no name. In her influential 1985 book, More Work for Mother, historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan documented how the rise of “labor saving” domestic technologies like washing machines and vacuums actually increased women’s load by raising cleanliness standards and expanding housewives' responsibilities. Because technology is laid over existing cultural beliefs and social relations, it rarely fixes social problems. Innovation has not brought about women’s liberation. In fact, it’s added to women’s plates.

Answer: a bit of both, but the main reason is that they are, overwhelmingly, males who come from narrow Stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) backgrounds and are trapped in a particular mindset that the technology writer Evgeny Morozov called “solutionism”.This is an ideology that recasts complex social phenomena such as politics, public health, education and law enforcement as “neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimised – if only the right algorithms are in place!”Solutionism has been endemic in Silicon Valley from its earliest days, but the arrival of AI has dramatically turbocharged it.

The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around. But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics

East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms – they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything. Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and – again, per Piketty – this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down.

These businesses aren't just wasting billions – they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shovelling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage.

A source familiar told Axios that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has expressed concern about new talent coming to the firm for the money rather than the mission.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are shown a pasture with a herd of sheep, and told to put them inside the smallest possible amount of fence. The engineer is first. He herds the sheep into a circle and then puts the fence around them, declaring, "A circle will use the least fence for a given area, so this is the best solution." The physicist is next. She creates a circular fence of infinite radius around the sheep, and then draws the fence tight around the herd, declaring, "This will give the smallest circular fence around the herd." The mathematician is last. After giving the problem a little thought, he puts a small fence around himself and then declares, "I define myself to be on the outside!"

So, whenever you hear that “a trend is irreversible,” the more important question to ask is this: Is it truly a prediction, or is it a command?

In truth, nate relied heavily on teams of human workers—primarily located overseas—to manually process transactions in secret, mimicking what users believed was being done by automation

Authoritarianism in all its forms depends on people acting against their own interests, in this case seeing the abdication of agency and giving up of rights as something positive, as almost a relief. Let the leader decide for you! Let the leader, who is an agent of divine providence, decide your destiny! Getting people to believe this is one of the main functions of personality cults that depict the leader as infallible.

This weakness became impossible to ignore earlier this month, when Anita Natasha Akida (popularly called Tasha), a Nigerian reality TV star, called out Grok. People had been prompting the bot to generate edited versions of her photos, and Grok responded with humiliating and inappropriate images. Grok replied and apologized to her. It promised never to edit her images again. Minutes later, it broke that promise and generated another image mocking her.

In particular, the manufacturing of semiconductors, which underpin advanced AI hardware, is an extremely resource and energy-intensive process.

Meanwhile, nuclear energy is being touted as a solution, but it is largely a dangerous distraction. The long timelines of Small Modular Reactors and safety risks of restarting decommissioned nuclear plants, as exemplified by Microsoft’s controversial plan to reopen the Three Mile Island site, further undermine the credibility of this approach. Without addressing the escalating energy demands of AI and their contribution to the climate crisis, the promise of AI as a “climate solution” is pure fiction.

Governments must prohibit planned obsolescence and champion the right to repair. Current hardware business models encourage devices, including servers needed for AI, to break prematurely in a practice called planned obsolescence. Industry and policymakers should incentivise circularity and longevity to extend the life of existing hardware. Furthermore, the right to repair and freely modify technology products should be strengthened.

They represent the bare minimum required to mitigate the ongoing harm to our economies, societies, and shared planet.

misled investors by exploiting the promise and allure of AI technology to build a false narrative about innovation that never existed. This type of deception not only victimizes innocent investors

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. George Bernard Shaw never said these words, but Charles F. Brannan did.

In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians? https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers: https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

As the introduction has already shown, in our current system this makes total sense: Because you need to become the one company for a thing. The central social media platform, the shopping platform, the whatever. Even startups adopt the practices and methods of bigger cooperation – because that’s their aspiration: Becoming the next Goomazonbook.

Some of you might have heard the phrase “corporations don’t want to make money, they want to make all the money” (I think I heard it first from James Stephanie Sterling talking about video game publishers).

A gyrotron uses high-power, linear-beam vacuum tubes to generate millimeter-length electromagnetic waves. Invented by Soviet scientists in the 1960s, gyrotrons are used in nuclear fusion research experiments to heat and control plasma. Quaise has raised $95 million from investors, including Japan’s Mitsubishi, to develop technology that would enable it to quickly and efficiently drill up to 20 km deep, closer to the Earth’s core than ever before

Oh, compliance moats are definitely real – think of the calls for AI companies to license their training data. AI companies can easily do this – they'll just buy training data from giant media companies – the very same companies that hope to use models to replace creative workers with algorithms. Create a new copyright over training data won't eliminate AI – it'll just confine AI to the largest, best capitalized companies, who will gladly provide tools to corporations hoping to fire their workforces: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids