At some point choices were made, with full awareness of the tradeoffs, to move products in a specific direction.

Absolutely none of this, the harms, the patterns, the tech, is unknown to people who work in trust and safety, content moderation, and policy.

At various times, meta and other tech firms did try to hold the line, but they eventually succumbed to the financial pressures they were under.

If there is any lesson to be taken, it is that ideals don’t survive beyond a few years in contact with market incentives.

The headline talks about parallels. A closer example is gambling if you are concerned with physical properties of a system. Light and sound.

Plus I’ve been seeing where AI productivity is highest and it’s been when leveraged by an expert.

> Palantir’s extremely controversial CEO Alex Karp scored the lowest, with 81 percent choosing “don’t trust,” while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fared the best — albeit with a pitiful 35 percent “trust” score.

We are already paying for the externalities from ad tech. We’ve got entire worlds of predatory information behavior and near zero defenses for humans.

If you are on HN, you hopefully know enough to keep yourself clean and safe, but the rest of humanity is essentially getting mugged, defrauded and addicted 24/7.

Their incentives would be aligned to users, not advertisers.

The ideological changes alone would be like living in a different world entirely.

Heck, maybe micropayments would become viable at that point.

Theres many people I know who write notes that I know would be great to read. However they never publish them.

So… are we saying that the only public writing in the future is meant to be consumed by the machine?

As I recall there are data labelling jobs now for people who have experience working at McKinsey.

still, at least the existence of IP laws indicates that there is a need to reward creators for their creations.

Other than that I would agree.

But maybe that is the future.

Every country starts erecting their own towers of babel that we talk at, and it constantly compresses our conversations down to the most effective distribution of weights.

At some point talking at the machine becomes a high status job, and we give respect to the people who whisper to it the most.

The internet was a magical thing when it was introduced to society at large. However this is NOT the same era.

If we are fighting for privacy and freedom, then why the heck is ad tech still allowed to be accepted as part of this conversation? If we are talking about freedoms, this is one of the greatest moments to say lets not sacrifice any privacy at all in the first place?

There is no functional and effective defense of our values if people are showing up to argue what they feel like fighting, instead of where the challenges actually are.

Patents, copyrights, trade marks exist because rewarding people for their insights and inventions matters.

Conversations where the root submission talks about failures at social media firms and the evidence of harms, or evidence from trials.

Conversations on the attacks against freedom and privacy.

I see very little hope that an actual rebuttal or alternative to the desire to muzzle tech will be forged, because the two conversation streams seem to rarely intersect.

We are not in the 90s anymore. Tech as most people experience it is not the new new thing, and most parents are tired of tech. A more recent pew survey showed that nearly half of teens think that social media is bad for teens. We know that Meta went ahead with features even after their own internal research told them it was bad for teen mental health.

How in hell, is there any effective response created, if the social pressure parents and children are driving, is being dismissed as a conspiracy?

This should be the time that the business models and incentives that allow loot boxes and addicting design mechanisms should be discussed.

There needs to be an actual solution that addresses the issues users are facing, or else they are simply going to choose to sacrifice freedoms for the hope of gaining some control.

There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”

There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.

The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.

Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.

Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.

The only report that I know of that is available is the ICRIER report.

I haven’t read the report itself, but it’s supposed to show modest hiring growth.

Conversely I know that most of the outsourcing vendors are seeing reductions in headcount when it comes to outsourced tech operations.

Eventually MS dealt with piracy by going after firms, and finally by offering something cheap enough.

Between the legal aspects, and the fact that its MS office, paying Rs 1800 a month is possible.

I’ve been trawling every source I can find to understand what the story on the ground is, and when it comes to productivity it’s a huge mixed bag. The variance in outcomes between independent coders, frontier labs, someone in SV and someone in India is mind-bending right now.

Most firms which talk about their AI plans are not seeing traction, and the AI projects are going to the same place that the ML projects used to go to die.

It’s at the individual level that I am seeing productivity gains, however that isn’t something firms are happy to hear right now.