These are all general opinion statements. There aren’t any verifiable facts like, “on this date at a meeting with x we discussed how AI project y is myopic and non-user-centered.”
Some companies have you sign things after leaving.
Obviously, when you start laying people off, or do stupid shit like stack ranking, some people are going to walk out and just blab about all the dumb shit your employer does/did - and they’re heroes for doing so.
I think that Amazon and Meta (where this is a known practice) do both. I’ve not signed anything in tech that stops me talking about internal company practices or any work that might have resulted in “voluntary” dismissal, but others in these companies that do the Jack Walsh thing and fire their employees do…
What are they gonna do if you refuse to sign? Fire you?
If this guy voluntarily left, then he wasn’t getting a severance package that they could withhold (and on that note, this is a good reason to include involuntary severence in your employment contract, if you can negotiate it).
For many, it’s the severance offered that makes them sign. If you’re about to lose your job, a few months pay, and free relocation back home if your visa is due to be cancelled is likely enough to make you sign something.
I’m not condoning it, at all. I think the practice is fucking disgusting, and have seen it wreck lives, but it’s a reality in many tech companies, including Google under Sundar.
My understanding is that while you’re 100% being terminated (and are ineligible for rehire) what you sign indicates that you’re actually volunteering to resign.
For more info on it, look up Amazon’s Focus and Pivot programs.
Laws will differ in different places, but I’m familiar with 3 categories of terminations:
With cause (firing)
Without cause (layoff)
Voluntary (quitting)
When someone is terminated with cause or quits, they are not entitled to severance and they do not collect unemployment insurance. When someone is laid off, the employer is obligated to pay a severence package.
The Amazon focus and pivot program is interesting. That definitely looks like they’re bribing low performers to quit, and I smell an ulterior motive. Maybe it’s to get them to sign an NDA but I feel like it’s to avoid wrongful dismissed lawsuits. Although I suppose why not both?
I won’t say they’re not making it up, but their screenshot has “AI overview”, yours doesn’t. It is probable that “normal” google gives different results than “AI” Google.
No, that’s a card that’s been standard in Google searches for years. It basically copy pastes an excerpt from an article written by someone else.
The AI card is an entirely new feature that is being rolled out where an LLM attempts to fill the same roll without deliberately copying a third party source.
Uuuuum ok, JK Rowling is a shitty person who does her best to be on Twitter 24/7 with the other animals. Bigot, competly enamored with her own creation, and totally believing everyone who’s ever said she’s a genius. Ego driven nightmare.
What does that have do to with you being objectively wrong and kind of an asshole in this thread? You know it all, terminally online jackasses never fail to out yourselves with your goal post moving.
Oh I get it… Your ego is a problem for you personally as well, right?
Wow, you are really butthurt by being wrong about the Google AI…
Oh my God, I see, you are conflating the fact that I confirmed that people will call you a transphobe for buying the Harry Potter game by calling me a transphobe. Then I think went back and forth with a terminally online twatter (was that you?) who really wanted me to engage in a debate I wasn’t having.
I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, clearly this made much more of an impact on you than it did on me (I think this was like months ago). Yes, I don’t agree with performative boycotts that have no true impact beyond preaching to the choir, that includes all the fucking incel stellar blade shit. I think I also pointed out that by engaging in these performative boycotts, you just encourage other people you don’t agree with to also engage in performative boycotts.
Again, so crazy you got so butthurt that you had to drag a discussion we must have a quarter ago that didn’t impact me at all.
I mean, you’re getting the message, clicking reply, and typing out your reply, I’m genuinely amazed at you ability to both interact with this text but but ignore it. It just seems like so much more work than blocking.
Your’s is a “featured snippet”, which is where it highlights a relevant portion from a top result.
The AI results have the AI synthesize a new sentence or set of paragraphs answering the question using data from multiple sources.
They’re different results because you didn’t seem to get the AI search results. After making it available to everyone they’ve been hit with a bunch of weird results and have started scrambling to manually remove the particularly strange ones as they crop up.
Yes, the sense of humor is still somewhat limited in AIs. Anyway, Andi is not designed to tell jokes, but rather to give reliable answers to questions and this it does quite well…
There’s actually a bunch! My favorite is called aquamation or alkaline hydrolysis, where they dissolve you in water with some chemicals and then pour you on a tree or whatever!
It doesn’t really affect this meme, I just think it’s neat.
As “down”, I hereby grant maculata retroactive permission to make the above joke; and formally proclaim that I found said joke to be at least somewhat amusing
On iOS, I set my default search to DuckDuckGo, and enabled Hyperweb on the DDG domain to redirect to SearXNG. I use a Google Images bookmark saved as a favorite when I need images (SearXNG results inferior even when using Google as the sole engine).
I anecdotally suspect Kagi of astroturfing btw, but after some free trials it seems to be about the best Google alternative - gotta be [earning like] a [US-based] knowledge worker though, or really care about search.
One thing that keeps me coming back to Google is shopping, or searching for online stores, or searching for prices. The shopping tab is somewhat useful and I don’t know any other search engine that does it (because it’s barely a search engine thing tho)
you don’t even have to go to the shopping tab anymore… even if you’re just looking for information on something they mix in shopping results right at the top
I start with !ddgi but more than half the time hit it with a !gi bang to go over to the Alphabet Adware Image search. I swear I’m gonna catalog this stuff and then maybe it’ll be apparent:
I do weird searches
Google is search bubbling me even when I’m private browsing
I’m misperceiving the frequency at which DDG image searches actually fail me
Or maybe my use cases are fairly normal and Goog really is superior, TBD!
Thats actually a really good dilemma if you think about it. Like if everyone doubles it you basically don’t kill anyone. But you’ll always risk that there’s some psycho who likes killing and then you will have killed more. And if these choices continue endlessly you will eventually find someone like this. So killing immediately should be the right thing to do.
Now, what if you’re not the first person on the chain? What if you’re the second one. Or the n one? What now? Would you kill two or n knowing that the person before you spared them?
Yes, but it also kinda depends on what happens at and after junction 34, from which point on more than the entire population of earth is at stake.
If anything, this shows how ludicrously fast exponentials grow. At the start of the line it seems like there will be so many decisions to be made down the line, so there must be a psycho in there somewhere, right? But (assuming the game just ends after junction 34) you’re actually just one of 34 people, and the chance of getting a psycho are virtually 0.
It’s not that interesting. If you rephrase the question as a choice between a good option and a less good one, it’s still barely even a choice.
“Would you rather have only one (or, say, trillions) die now, or would you like to allow *at a minimum *twice that many people die the second we talk to a sadist?”
If you can’t choose the smaller number, all it means is that you lack moral strength - or the test proctor has put someone you know on the tracks, which is cheating. A highly principled person might struggle if choosing between their daughter and one other person. If it’s my kid versus a billion? That’s not a choice, that’s just needless torture. Any good person would sacrifice their kid to save a billion lives. I take that as an axiom, because anything else is patently insane.
Kill fewer people now is obviously the right answer, and not very interesting.
What is interesting is that the game breaks already at junction 34, which is unexpectedly low.
So a more interesting dilemma would have been “would you kill n people now or double it and pass it on, knowing the next person faces the same dilemma, but once all humanity is at stake and the lever is not pulled, the game ends.”. Because that would involve first of all figuring out that the game actually only involves 34 decisions, and then the dilemma becomes “do I trust the next 33-n people not to be psychos, or do I limit the damage now?”. Even more interestingly “limiting the damage now” makes you the “psycho” in that sense…
There used to be an entire subreddit that basically did this. There were hundreds of fake users each posting and commenting. No real users were allowed to post or comment. I loved it because they would sort of mirror what was currently on the front page but in much more ridiculous way.
Edit: It was called subreddit simulator. And the creator said it used Markov chains. So no need to use bad prompted LLMs. Just do it the “old fashioned” chatbot way.
I am a software developer, this story isn’t really about that though. When I was first becoming interested in coding I was reading about vr and ar and how it would be this huge multi billion dollar market in the next few years and I thought that sounded awesome, as it could enhance our lived experiences with info for the curious, or decorate the real world with computer generated architecture, sculpture, even some ads to pay for the whole thing. I said I’m gonna get into computer programming and then transition into vr/ar once I learn a few things.
Of course this didn’t pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn’t innovate. When they weren’t immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down. Just another big tech grift, like cryptocurrency and now AI. Ai is probably the worst example of all because it got pushed out to soak up a bunch of excess cloud computing when crypto crashed, and now its a huge real estate scheme as well since there’s a big rush to build data centers to handle the artificial demand. You wanna know the next big bubble to bet against? Its ai and all the related industries.
It requires massive amounts of computing power to accomplish the most mundane tasks, which require electricity created by burning fossil fuels. All so your boss can spend less time writing emails letting you know you’ve been laid off, and political advisors can mass produce legislation to take away your rights.
Of course this didn’t pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn’t innovate. When they weren’t immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down.
The way advanced capitalism can’t even grow a product before trying to strangle it for every last penny is all that saves us from special Black Mirror levels of hell.
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