I think the common ground is a fear of loss of authority to which they feel entitled. They learned the “old” ways of SysV RC, X11, etc. etc. and that is their domain of expertise, in which they fear being surpassed or obsoleted. From there, it’s easy to combine that fear with the fears stoked by adjacent white/male supremacist identity politics and queerphobia, plus the resentment already present from stupid baby slapfights like vi vs emacs or systemd vs everything else, and generate a new asshole identity in which they feel temporarily secure. Fear of loss of status drives all of this.

Thank you for posting this. I’m honestly a bit surprised that this genre of Google truth-telling is not more widespread, or perhaps I just haven’t seen it. Your experience of “the wall” between Latin America and the US is obviously also more poignant than ever. Seeing it described this way, in this context, kinda hit me over the head and is finally making me wonder if the US immigration/deportation mess will ultimately come to be seen as something equivalent to the Iron Curtain. Putting your experiences out there is worth it for that alone, at the very least.

It’s not that there haven’t been people out there who were willing to yank the curtain on Google, either; I just feel like it’s been more of a word-of-mouth thing in my experience. For instance, I knew a guy who was there during the Gmail launch. He made clear to me that “don’t be evil” was a slogan created by a later hire, and really had very little to do with the thinking of Page/Brin or later Schmidt, except that they found it to be convenient office propaganda. Thus, he ended up not really believing it at all by the time he was done.

Another good friend of mine was also a contractor in a technical department in Mountain View for a number of years. The US contractor experience (at least in that role) didn’t seem as firewalled off as you’re describing for the Brazilian contractors, but he was still under the twin guns of “your job is meant to be fully automated eventually, and your primary purpose is training the system towards that” and yearly contract renewals. And of course, it’s also where he and his eventual wife got infected with the Bitcoin prosperity gospel, a train they’re still riding to this day…

Not advocating violence, but Achewood did demonstrate one possible set of reactions to discovering a Microsoft designer at large in public.

https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html

“Look how AI abuse by overconfident fools wrecked the government” should easily be a golden campaign platform, but given how credulous influential Democrats are being about cryptocurrency at this late date, I dunno

sounds like he’s posting from inside a dilapidated white panel van parked strategically just outside a legally-mandated exclusion radius surrounding a middle school

A corruption of VCRcel, somebody with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1990s pornography distributed on VHS.

A surprising number of surviving former hippies have become viciously reactionary, because the world didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to. The old stereotypes don’t really apply anymore, and there was a lot of selfishness embedded in that culture anyway.

Not really. If schools aren’t spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.

My perspective is that EA and the upper-class philanthropy it inherits from are consumerist, a system that rests on top of colonialism. It’s basically selling spiritual consumer goods, much like the medieval Catholic Church selling indulgences (and look what that provoked!). Once we get beyond the public health interventions, into longtermist EA’s “trillions of simulated minds in our future lightcone” bullshit, it’s clearly selling an unhealthily narcissistic spirituality, though its adherents would never call it that. The product, in this case, is the warm fuzzy self-aggrandizing feeling that one can extend one’s (over)privileged position in our relatively fragile 21st century society into influence over sci-fi-scale expanses of time and space.

I’m filing suit for copyright infringement AND breach of privacy, clearly they’ve been training on my personal webcam recordings.

I advocate for inclusion with equal-opportunity E. coli contamination, that’s why I voted for RFK Jr. We can all spew together!

Maybe the robot can finally explain to me how Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” is actually music and not just somewhat organized noise?

I know AGI is real because it keeps intercepting my shipments of, uh, “enhancement” gummies I ordered from an ad on Pornhub and replacing them with plain old gummy bears. The Basilisk is trying to emasculate me!

Reminds me of how Scott Adams hedged in 2016 with all sorts of disclaimers that he wasn’t really a Trump supporter, he was just impressed by a “master persuader.” Now look at the guy.

It even works with Proton on Linux… absolutely amazing how a 20-year-old game is able to simulate today’s KDE 6. The man truly is a visionary ahead of his time.

At least they’re all contained in a relatively confined space with limited routes of egress

For Yarvin, it always is and always will be someone else’s fault

It is very important to notice and continually point out that these people appear to believe more fervently in their chosen demons than they do in their proclaimed god

I feel like I’ve seen chud weirdos ranting about seed oils suppressing testosterone levels, but I could be hallucinating

Hey, at least the professional Elon haters are actually doing their jobs, unlike the man himself