since botting is so easy, probably they used a lot of accounts to access data that, in theory, is somewhat public. I mean, in an ideal world in which engineers have infinite time sure, they would have noticed, but I do investigations on platform apps for work and trust me, they miss a lot of more fundamental stuff.

spotify has a whole economy of bots signing up, uploading fake songs listened by other bots and earning lot of money in the process. I know several people living out of this. A little army of scraper bots is definitely not what they should be the most concerned about.

No union in the world asks rates that high. You’ve been probably have been served some kind of management union busting material if you have ever seen a number that high. 3% is considered very high already.

Anyway AWU is not necessarily trying to bargain for higher wages, but they do work on better job security, better working environments, fairness against abuses, sexual harassment and similar stuff, and obviously they support the political work of anti-genocide groups within Google.

There’s always a reason to join a union if you’re a worker.

I would add exploitation of precarious workers both in the USA, Europe and third-world countries. That said, were you involved in Alphabet Workers Union? If not, why?

I don’t think AIliens are the same as AGI. I believe in this frame AIliens exist in the mind of people, rather than in the machine. It’s behavior complex enough to be interpreted as such, rather than a sentient being thinking of itself as sentient, as AGI implies. It’s alive in the same way an organization is alive and thinking, or a mycelium network. AGI is human-like intelligence reproduced in silicon. AIliens are… alien.

A lot of these spaces are reading, writing and designing around so-called “anti-capture” protocols exactly to avoid that.

yeah, I conveyed a similar feedback to the author of the article. Thanks for the analysis

what’s wrong with the title?

I don’t understand your downvotes. If they are from scabs, or they are from people who only read the title and thought this is some managerial shit.

because I joined a long time ago?

So the author’s argument is that youth have just gone to gig work instead of traditional jobs. OK, maybe true, but first of all, this is not a good thing on its own either. And secondly, we have to consider why gig work even exists, aside from being a fresh new way to exploit workers and deny them the traditional protections of the labor market. Because there is a specific reason gig work exists right at this very transitional moment in the workforce, and I’ll give you a spoiler: It exists because of AI.

Considering the author is possibly the most relevant scholar on (against?) platform work, I’m quite sure he would agree with you. The article implies that AI is deskilling and displacing workers and that’s intrinsically a bad thing.

I’ve met the author IRL. He’s quite famous in his niche

there’s an argument that this is just the targeted ads bubble that keeps inflating using different technologies. That’s where the money is coming from. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors, but this time it seems like they are betting big on a single technology for a longer time, which is different from what we have seen in the past 10 years.

It’s Germany, they have labor rights that they want to uphold. This is a so-called “warning strike”, to signal that there will be collective legal action if they get fired without abundant severance pay.

Basically TikTok doesn’t want to negotiate with the union and the union is showing that there’s support for collective legal action instead of a 1-on-1 dismissals that would cost the company way less. The company has an interest in negotiating because it’s quite sure to lose the legal battle.

Most people don’t know they are allowed to dream, let alone in which direction. While this might not connect with you, there are millions of tech workers who have zero perspective on what’s out there.

Many of my direct friends lost their job for doing it. Look up “exposing Zalando”.

Here in Berlin it’s a regular occurrence that any exhibition, cultural or political event criticizing Israel receives at the very list a threatening call and a visit from the police. Sometimes it escalates into vandalism or violence, sometimes with getting raided by the police, sometimes with defunding if it’s a public thing.

If they silenced Albanese and banned Varoufakis, they can silence anybody.

You might have missed a lot of news about Germany. They passed a new law that suspends freedom of speech when it’s against Israel. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-passes-controversial-antisemitism-resolution/a-70715643

There has been plenty of extra-judicial retaliation, i.e. against Francesca Albanese or Oyoun, and we got close to having 4 cases of extra-judicial extradictions without an accusation against pro-Palestine protesters, which a judge eventually blocked.

It’s an elixir skeleton that runs a system of modules you can combine (just with configs) or that you can extend by adding new modules.

The skeleton does the bare minimum and the modules contain all the logic. It’s not a no-code tool (that would be astounding, but doesn’t exist yet), you still need to write some config files (flavours) or write some elixir.

It’s a toolkit to build federated apps, with a social media+blogging+collaboration platform built on top of it.

I followed a similar trajectory, leaving the tech sector to pursue politically-motivated jobs. Am I locked-in? Probably, my linkedin is full of agitprop. Do I care? No, the world is on fire, there’s no coming back. I get to the end of the month, I’m doing important stuff, fuck careers, there are more important things.

The person I know that got fired is even more gung-ho than me so I can imagine they don’t care either.