Technology

It‘s exactly this dangerous mindset that‘s riding us in some AI service hellhole. Too many super talented developers have told themselves exactly that instead of standing up for their principles or even allowing themselves to have principles in the first place.

Only recently have they started leaving companies like OpenAI and taking a stance because they‘re actually seeing what their creation is used for and with how little care for human life it‘s been handled.

Of course many critics knew this was headed towards military contracts and complete Enshittification. It was plain to see OpenAI founders aren‘t the good guys but „someone else would do it anyway“ kept the underlings happy. This deterministic fallacy is also why anyone still works for Meta or Google. It‘s a really lazy excuse.

One thing I like to tell people with that attitude is: whatever someone does, there’s always someone else who will see it as an example and challenge to do it “better”. Do you want to be the company that started that chain? Are you prepared to compete in that race?

For something borderline malware, someone will take your lead and make it “better malware”. If you are not prepared to respond in kind, then why did you even go there? If you’re not ready to be known as the top of the line malware creator, why start the product line?

It is unfortunately one of the darker aspects of the hyper-growth-focused tech and engineering is the often highly mercenary/transactional nature of many people in the field. Like, there’s a reason Facebook pays engineers 250-400k or more. Sure, the work can be difficult, but most of the time it’s not that difficult. They’re paying people that much so that they ignore their morals, shut the fuck up, and just take the paycheck and do the work that is helping to destroy society.

It’s immensely distressing to me as a software engineer. I am fully aware that my morality is limiting my earning potential, and that makes me kinda furious - not so much at myself, but that our economic system is set up in such a way that that’s not only possible, but optimal (in terms of earning a nice paycheck and being able to retire somewhat early).

That's what it is with a union too, it's just more organized. You can strike without a union, it's just a lot harder to organize and the stakes are way higher.

Not blaming anyone, just saying words don't mean a lot.

Yeah same. I used to recommend them whole heartedly but now Im afraid they will go downhill

I guess I'm out of the loop, what's wrong with Canva?

You're not wrong! But at least for now I got a decent PS alternative for $45. We'll see how things go.

Well the good thing about their licensing is that you can buy a version and stick with it in spite of whatever the parent company does, and you're not banned from using older versions like with Adobe's T&Cs

...for now.

• See above convo about acquisition by Canva.

Remember: in most cases the c-suite consider you merely as resources(human) a source of labour.

To them employees are things.

Customers are just a revenue source, they are also just things.

CEO's are just chasing their next quarterly performance bonus.

I don't think there any proprietary 3d software, where you can just call dev and he will make it 10 times faster.

I hope we shift out of Adobe completely where pdf is concerned, Acrobat is the first program I've seen with such a massive userbase that's somehow updated to be worse with every passing year. I had to stick to that shovelware for company laptops but I NEVER want to deal with large documents on Acrobat again.

Saw this in one of the Linux forums. I hope its useful.

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