The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn’t have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.

Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.

Notice how Google Maps data hasn’t been improving, and if anything getting worse?

I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned…then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play “go talk to the other parent I cant do anything” when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.

I worked for Google but Google didn’t want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn’t work for Google.

Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).

My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.

What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.

Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.

(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).

A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows… that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor… except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time…

…and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?

I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to… totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out… again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.

Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.

I hate Google.

I think it is rather that conservatism has nothing to do with being conservative really at the end of the day, that is just the team colors these people wear to identify what team they are on.

Conservatives are conservative so they can hate without guilt and so they can control and possess with violence and be rewarded for it. From this angle the synergy heinous shitheads see in being a Republican and being a pedophile (but also defining your public persona completely around hating pedophiles too) is pretty straightforward in my opinion. Also probably the most pathetic thing on the face of the earth.

The FBI already investigate LEO across the country more than a decade ago and found that white supremacists were actively infiltrating our police force. Nothing has been done about this finding.

White supremacists are “infiltrating” into police forces in the same way I infiltrate into my buddies house… when they specifically invite me over to hang out with them at their house and stand up and come over and hug me with a warm greeting when I show up.

There is NO sense of infiltration here, rather we are looking at a fresh turd on a hot day (police), and there are flies all over it (white supremacists).

The way I see it is that pedos are the perfect thing for the childlike, immature psyche of republicans to focus on and unify around as the evil baddies they have to fight since an actual pedophile is one of the closest things to a disney evil villain who is evil just because.

Republicans really can’t emotionally handle problems in life being more nuanced and complex than a secret cabal of pedophiles that have to be righteously hunted down in witch-hunts. That is satisfying, that gets Republican’s to sit up and pay attention because they get to hate without feeling guilty about it.

Republicans actually can’t handle the world being complex and nuanced, they can’t handle solutions not involving them rolling out a vile hatred for people, so fighting pedophilia is one of the few places left republicans can retreat to, gripping onto their pathetically simplified and hateful world views.

ACAB

Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.

I mean… how big really is the category of software tasks that you can’t properly do on Linux in 2024? I feel like it is getting to the point where you do genuinely have to be specific about what Linux can’t do that is a dealbreaker for you rather than just falling back on “Linux can’t do what people need to do” as a general criticism of it.

Windows can’t do what people need it to do, and it fails to do so while sucking up your private data (which if you work at a business with confidential information IS a dealbreaker). At least when Linux fails it usually isn’t simultaneously violating the IT security structure of your organization….

The funny thing is businesses and government entities can’t even claim with a straight face that they can trust Microsoft to adhere to the meager insufficient data privacy laws that do exist when there is zero evidence Microsoft would behave that way based on the track record even if the financial penalties for failing to do so were actually real to the ruling class and not just theoretical thought experiments that involve a slap on the wrist or more like a light tickling with a feather on the nose.

But it will die down. People will just accept it. They always do. They always will.

I understand the frustration and cynicism that comes from wanting something to happen and waiting a good stretch of your life for it to do so but I am sorry, this is not reflective of reality.

Don’t mistake your own fatigue for the behavior of people in general.

Support for software on Linux or Wine is now orders of magnitude more complete and functional than it was 5-10 years ago. There are fundamental changes going on, just because we operated in a paradigm that suffocated the possibility of Linux adoption in the past doesn’t mean that paradigm will continue indefinitely.

There is a difference between being permanently powerless and being powerless under a certain arrangement of forces and actors.

We are entering a period of the status quo being smashed for better or worse in almost every dimension of our lives, what was likely to happen in the past 20 years does not reliably predict what is likely to happen in the next 20 years.

There is actually a true opening for Linux here in a way there never has been.

It is okay to be the person that always recommends Linux, especially if you are a kind person with the patience to explain things to people in approachable terms (and you don’t just scream at people SOMEBODY ALREADY ASKED THIS QUESTION USE SEARCH whenever a newbie walks in the door and asks the obvious questions a newbie would ask).

Now is the time, Linux is pulled up out front waiting to pick us up (with bags packed) and Microsoft is loudly shitting the bed upstairs, NOW is the time to walk straight out the front door, jump in the car with Linux and never look back. We owe it to Microsoft’s long relationship with consumers to leave Microsoft sitting confused on the porcelain throne wondering why they were abandoned and where all the toilet paper is (we are the toilet paper in this metaphor).

I have no interest in supporting a “less bad” pro-genocide person. I would sooner die, and there is nothing that anyone can say that would cause me to change that position.

Unlike Biden, when I draw a red line, I actually mean it. If that means we go to hell together, so be it. Genocide is fundamentally unacceptable.

I agree with this 100% and I would go farther. The genocide of Palestinians is a test by the ruling global western order to see how far they can push things before their citizens will revolt.

If we vote for Biden anyway despite this horrific genocide, because Trump!, we are sending a clear message to Biden and the rest of the world that liberal and centrist governments can keep moving forward in a direction of murdering citizens in cities on mass so long as they have a complimentary openly fascist rightwing opposition party to set the Overton window and lend them legitimacy as the only adult choice for voting against the fascists.

Gaza is a prototype make no mistake, we have to reject it existentially NOW. There is nothing to fight for if we don’t because the degree of violence coupled with the degree of willful blindness US media and politicians are engaging in points directly at mass scale violence that is about to come home from the colonies to the colonial powers and world order (there is a good chance if you live in the US that your cities police department trained with the IDF, if that doesn’t terrify you, you are a fool).

Look at the Herero genocide in Africa among other colonial genocides (Belgium should have been leveled to the ground for what it did in the Congo as well) and WW1 suddenly becomes quite clearly an inveitable slingshot of massive amounts of colonial violence turning inwards back towards Europe.

https://amp.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war

If Biden can successfully win without having to acquiesce to progressives and normal humans with empathy and stop the genocide of Palestinians… the resounding message it sends is that this is a new world paradigm where that is ok and it is open season for everything up to and including genocide being committed in broad daylight in the western world.

We aren’t necessarily on the precipice of WW3, but rather on the precipice of a period of increasing genocidal violence from state and pseudo-state actors (see the rightwing Gaza zionist colonialists for an example) applied to citizens, not only in manufactured events of mass murder but also in complete abandonment of the state’s duty to mitigate environmental crisis (example A being Hurricane Katrina and the US’s lack of giving a shit about the mass suffering in both Louisiana and the Caribbean).

At that point, the magnitudes of violence that are going to continue to unfold in rapid fire will make this question of Trump vs Biden pretty meaningless though Trump is of course an out in the open fascist wannabe dictator and is worse than Biden.

I will happily vote for Biden if he picks up the phone with Netanyahu and tells him it is over full stop. It isn’t even a long phone call if Biden isn’t too much of a coward to lay things out in crystal clear non-negotiable terms.

As it stands, Biden along with the rest centrist democrats are aiding and abetting conservative violent movements in the construction of an alternate reality where the genocide of 50,000 + innocent starving people can be written off with a simple phrase like “but what about the Hamas tunnels!”.

I too would rather die than live in that world and I don’t say that lightly, so yes this is where I put my chips on the table. Others can join us or not join us shrugs but this isn’t a time to live to fight another day, this is a time to escalate what was a minor tactical fight (from Biden’s perspective) into an existential one where Biden has to either give up his close ties with Israel or lose the election.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

^some internet commenter probably? not sure where the quote came from

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Billionaires have no legitimate right to exist.

Period.

It doesn’t matter if some of them “do nice things” maybe.

Billionaires should not exist.

Honestly Star Wars has always had trash writing, it was the people around George Lucas that made Star Wars good and the more success and fame Lucas got the less he listened to others and the worse the movies got.

Specifically Lucas subscribed to Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces which is a widely discredited work of anthropology and besides Campbell was an outspoken raging sexist (women can’t be the hero they have to help the hero he said many times).

It is a reductive, authoritarian way of telling stories, it only leaves spaces for the chosen heroes. I also find it makes the universe of Star Wars cynical, evil just happens because we are sinful and it is inevitable. It is boring and not very compelling.

Andor of course goes against the grain on all of these things, brilliant series!

Tired : Cybertruck

Wired: MeatSpaceHatchback

ACAB

ACAB but especially the NYPD

Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.

It won’t.

Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.

Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).

^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money

I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.

Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.

I’m also skeptical of mass surveillance laws, but I’m glad NYT posted this article so I could read an opinion from someone who disagrees, and I don’t think this establishes an opinion or stance on the part of NYT at all because it’s not what op-eds are for.

Op-ed pieces are about establishing the Overton Window, not establishing a news agencies position on anything. The fact that the NYT considers this part of a reasonable overton window is embarrassing and honestly revolting.

You know what would keep us safer? If the most prominent news agency in the US actually did its job and did critical journalism instead of acting like RT news.

For example, more intelligence gathering power given to intelligence agencies would not have stopped the Iraq war. If anything, the more power given to these agencies, the more official they sound when they make boldfaced lies because people assume they most know something actually substantiative with all that intelligence capacity.

We would have just launched even faster into the Iraq war.

Which of course is the point

Hell yeah! Go play some videooooo gamesss