A brown area.

And he thinks the US will control the energy, chips and computing infrastructure in the future? Sure Europe isn’t in a great position at all, but the US’es future leadership isn’t all that obvious.

It’s not mindless rejection. It´s just the argument taken one step further - the system we live in will put the fruits of AI into corporate and therefore capital’s (the bad actors) hands, along with the power and control that come with it. We won’t reap much of the benefits and we’ll suffer the costs. Without a fundamental change to the system we take that as the almost certain outcome. Hence the rejection. I think the rejection would change with a material change in the system.

Run.

ProtonPass is run by a non-profit if you have to move to another hosted solution.

Otherwise there’s multiple self-hostable options, including plain file sync options.

Use this example as learning experience that the type of the firm you’re buying a service from is very important as it changes whose interests it puts first, second and last.

If they aren’t signing union cards, they aren’t revolting.

🤗

This plant was supposed to make EV batteries. Then Trump got re-elected.

That’s mostly a problem in capitalist economies. We already support some 3 times more elderly per person today than we did after WWII. How did that happen without the economy scuttling? Productivity growth. We pooduce way more products and services per head than we did back then. The problem is most of that is collected by the owner classes. If the owner class consuped less resources we’d be able to provide more to our elderly. A non-capitalist economy can allocate production and distribution more based on need and not on return on investment on private capital. Part of that would be using productivity gains from mass automation to fulfill these needs with fewer people. Under the capital system automation gains go into more hyperyachts and private space trips.

This is just looking at the material reality of the problem. I can’t effectively threaten someone who I’m heavily dependent on without present alt. Kinda how Trump got slapped when he tried economic coercion on China. If the EU has a domestic alternative to Big Tech’s cloud services that’s in wide use and easy to scale up, the they can legitimately threaten Big Tech. That said even then that would not be enough given the newly developed dependence on US - LNG. Threaten Big Tech and the US threatens cutting off the gas supply. A gas supply shortage topples governments.

It’s like they’re hellbent on living out the antisemitic stereotypes. It’s getting difficult to fight antisemitism outside of Israel.

And I don’t think the war and $5 gas are fully reflected in these opinion surveys quite yet.

The technically lirerate people aren’t exempt from the power dynamics created by the vast market share of Chrome and Google, created and reinforced by Google. Even if they/we have some more freedom to maneuver. We still only test our web app features on Chromium because there’s limited time for testing, if any, and we can’t convince product that making sure the feature works, or fixing bugs on a 2-3% browser is priority. If all the developers in the world used Firefox, it would still not change this power dynamic.

This is of course thanks to all the people shitting on Firefox over the years and saying that Chrome is just better and that there’s nothing wrong with giving Google control over the web. So yeah, thanks.

No it’s not thanks to those people. Blaming individuals for not stopping what a much bigger, infinitely more resourced, organized actor has been/is doing to maximize profit is shifting the material responsibiltiy from the actor with real power to the actors without. It’s like the personal carbon footprint oil&gas came up with to shift responsibility for climate pollution from themselves to individuals. Or plastic and recycling. It feels good to lay blame on those people who did something we did not but it doesn’t help change anything material beyond that. Divides us into camps which prevents us from organizing against the profit-driven culprits.

Yeah, what I said in no way invalidates their thesis, which is well done. Rather I’m highlighting the problem is much bigger and entrenched than what it appears to be in our industry. Arguably change in our indistry could be more impactful for the whole working class since we can stop the whole economy now that critical parts of it run in the cloud. So if the message is targeted at us, it’s probably good targeting.

Erm, I don’t know where the author’s from but workplaces in North America outside of the software industry have always been authoritarian like that. Especially given that levels of unionization peaked at 1/3 of the workforce ever and are now way down in the US and Canadian private sector. The software industry experienced an exception to the tendency due to chronic labour shortage for nearly 2 decades that created expectations uncommon in other workplaces. Now it’s regressing to the mean. What we’re now experiencing has been the reality of most our comrades.

Then no. However if the replacement produces 1000000 widgets with 1000 rejects, then the boss might say - alright, we need more QA to catch those rejects and we’re still X ahead, then yes. Productivity isn’t measured by the output of one person of particular widget but the output of the unit as a whole, or more importantly the profit of the firm altogether divided by its workers. So if the boss can get more output while controlling the quality to the point of the customer not noticing too much from our replacement, we both get a pink slip.

There’s already an increased productivity KPI at the corpo I work at. They expect faster completion of deliverables by some percentage as AI adoption grows (imposed).

Meanwhile:

Productivity gains from AI are appearing in many of the same fields where entry-level employment is starting to decline. Employment among software developers aged 22–25 has plummeted nearly 20% since 2024, even as their older colleagues’ headcount grows. The pattern repeats in other jobs with higher levels of AI exposure, like customer service. Meanwhile, firm surveys indicate executives expect this trend to accelerate, with planned headcount reductions outpacing recent cuts. Translation: The disruption is targeted and just beginning.

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report

Use local AI people!

Perhaps there’s a market for private AI for organized crime. 🤔

In Sam Altman’s voice:

“I cannot imagine having gone through, figuring out how to make a drug cartel without ChatGPT”

I got worried for a second.