This week’s big headline is: “Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation“. Uh huh. [Business Insider] The idea is that instead of getting paid dollars to work for an …
  • flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)@feddit.ukEnglish
    91·
    16 hours ago

    This is not in any way a “new” idea. It’s company scrip — a company’s own made-up money that you can only spend in the company store.

    At least you could buy food with company script. Tech bros have really invented company script, but worse.

    • DigitalAudio@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      22·
      8 hours ago

      This is exactly how the banana massacre in Colombia took place 100 years ago. Workers were being paid in United Fruit Company bonds, which caused revolts and protests, the US government threatened to invade to protect the company’s interests, so the Colombian government deployed the army to suppress the protests and murdered thousands of farmers.

      This still shapes Colombian politics to this day, has appeared in A Hundred Years of Solitude, and has absolutely helped power the leftist movements in the country since. The parliament and president have constantly referenced this instance in recent years too as examples of American neocolonialism.

      It’s a tale as old as time.

        • DigitalAudio@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          2·
          53 minutes ago

          Don’t worry, the Colombian right wing has done its absolute best to victim blame the farmers, or to diminish the atrocity or to claim it was a necessary sacrifice.

          Meanwhile the Colombian guerrillas did their absolute best to shit on the popular movements that fueled them initially by allying themselves with drug traffickers and committing atrocities themselves against rural civilian populations.

          So basically the Colombian civilians of the 20th century were sandwiched between an overzealous fascist right wing and a violent and reckless left wing.

          Nowadays both sides are politically mostly rhetorical and the left wing is far less violent while the right wing is more careful about their image after losing elections and Congress seats to the left.

    • Jiral@lemmy.orgEnglish
      5·
      9 hours ago

      Yes, at least that company script could buy you real stuff, food etc. AI tech bros want to pay you in hot air. Anyhow, isn’t that illegal even in the US? It surely is in the EU.

      • Formfiller@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        We didn’t have many worker protections prior to this president and they just completed the biggest deregulation in history by far gutting the few agencies that investigated violations of labor law. Thiel, Karp and Musk have been very clear about their intentions to destroy democracy and replace it with feudalism supported by big tech. The EU will follow if you don’t stop supporting fascists because these tech companies have already infiltrated your governments.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      watching the saltman interview (in this frame) is…so much worse

      I was planning to get drunkwatch it but I haven’t really had the headspace to get that mad this week

      • Jiral@lemmy.orgEnglish
        4·
        9 hours ago

        Read the Business Insider article prominently linked in the source. They are creating the pretense of oh so scarce AI tokens critical for career success of programmers to push for a modern, more useless version of company scrip. Something outlawed back in the days following the industrial revolution for a reason.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        22·
        13 hours ago

        oxy is a mastodon user who follows David so they’re most likely telling the AI startups in question to GTFO and lemmy has kindly reinterpreted that as a tag

        however,

        Why are people hating on / blocking dgerard?

        let’s go down the list! depending on the subculture, you’re blocking dgerard because:

        • you’re a Scientologist and interacting with dgerard will cost you your Operating Thetan rank
        • you’re a Rationalist and have read the Lightcone Infrastructure memo about how dgerard is the devil, beating out all other contenders for most evil being on the earth
        • you’re a cryptocurrency gambler and you think dgerard’s critiques lost you money
        • you run an AI startup and you think dgerard’s critiques lost you money
        • you’re on the far right and dgerard won’t let you edit misinformation straight into Wikipedia

        there are more, we can go deeper

        • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          10 hours ago

          You’re an AI addict who has been one shotted and you are deeply in denial about the technology. DGerard is calling your favourite drug “a bad thing”

        • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          10 hours ago

          Well I’ve definitely misinterpreted.

          This might be a UI issue, because I see the post as coming from ‘David Gerard@awful.systems’ and then I see your comment as

          @dgerard gtfo. Lol

          Which to me I interpreted as ‘lol this is David Gerard - gtfo here’. Especially with the reply from second user, “thanks, blocked”.

          • pet the cat, walk the dog@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            6 hours ago

            Mastodon just adds the username in the comment when replying to a Lemmy post or comment. It seems to be possible to remove the @-tag manually, but many people don’t do that.

            P.S. This also kinda illustrates how people tend to reply to the imaginary correspondent, even with rather rude language, when actually their replies go to the OP.

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            9 hours ago

            adding to the confusion, the shithead who replied with “thanks, blocked” is, I’m fairly certain, already banned from our instance

            anyway yeah the lemmy/mastodon interop has many sharp edges

            • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
              4·
              8 hours ago

              at least the federation works even with auth fetch these days. (and yeah, it’s a nice jank, the very different reply styles, the way the posts + replies are handled etc.)