As a developer: yes to the developer and data scientist and data engineer. Scientists and engineers should be responsible for their work.

The BI analyst: maybe, if they're responsible for collecting data that ignores the impact of the service on teens. If they're doing sales-comparisons between Anthropic and OpenAI... eh, I donno.

The janitor: probably not since I don't feel like the deaths are widely publicized and they probably work for a contracting company that handles the building.

As with dating apps, if the mental health recommendations actually worked then engagement would go down. I doubt they even need a human putting their thumb on the scales; the algorithm optimizes engagement in whatever way it needs to.

Statutory damages for copyright infringement can reach up to $150,000, but there’s no double-dipping.

Does this mean that, at most, OpenAI would be forced to pay him 150k? That seems irrelevant (to both parties, in fact).

Their "real" job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.

Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it's invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of "he's not working very hard so he doesn't deserve the money."

This exactly. It's nonsense to say that the party can't change because it has changed.

Belgium controlled the Congo in the early 1900s and used slave-labor to extract rubber. There's a ton of documentation on the atrocities committed. Things like stealing all the children, then sending their parents the severed hands of their kids and telling them if they didn't meet quota they'd get feet next.

It's not like other colonial powers weren't also incredibly evil, but Belgium's crimes were quite recent and well-known (both now and at the time). Very much like Israel!

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. It's good to see a hopeful take on the world trajectory!

But delete-instead-of-downvote is how you drive out the trolls. If you give shitty people a platform labeled "I think this person is wrong" then you've still given them a platform.

Just saw: they're changing it back because you don't appreciate it enough :(

Thanks for linking that. Reading the paper, it looks like the majority of the "self-host" population they're capturing is people who have a WordPress site. By my reading, the wording of the paper would disqualify a wordpress.com-hosted site as "self-hosted". But I'd be very suspicious of their methodology and would expect that quite a few people who use WP-hosted reported as self-hosted because the language is pretty confusing.

Commercial software has advertising: people whose job is to advertise it. That means TV and web ads for Bluesky, influencers talking about it. It also means a team of software engineers building parts of the system specifically to draw people in, whereas non-commercial software often rejects that (lack of infinite-scroll on Lemmy's default UI, for example).

Activity Pub also requires a different mind-set that doesn't exist elsewhere on the internet today. You need to decide which instance to join, or maybe to host your own instance. But it doesn't really matter, because you can federate with other instances. But you have to drive some of that federation, so it does matter a little. It's pretty complex and confusing and its a problem that only exists in this one niche of software.

Bluesky gives you an infinite feed that feels like you're connected to the entire Internet without you doing any work. I think the AP service are doing really well, considering what they're up against.

Dead plants from before there were decomposers who could properly devour the corpses. Oil is lich-ferns