UnseriousAcademic

.... Nope. In fact one of my in-laws said that they'd buy us an air frier for Christmas once the sales came. Everyone forgot about it shortly after and I don't care one bit.

I feel like generative AI is an indicator of a broader pattern of innovation in stagnation (shower thoughts here, I'm not bringing sources to this game).

I was just a little while ago wondering if there is an argument to be made that the innovations of the post-war period were far more radically and beneficially transformative to most people. Stuff like accessible dishwashers, home tools, better home refrigeration etc. I feel like now tech is just here to make things worse. I can't think of any upcoming or recent home tech product that I'm remotely excited about.

I'm banking on the primary use case being "getting Elon sued into oblivion by Disney" .

Fascinating to see that the politics of the old crypto hype train have carried over to the new hype train.

Ah OK, so it's sending the email draft in process not sending off the content of incoming messages or your final sent messages. Now I understand. Also, that's still bad....

I don't really understand how it's possible to both not store data in plaintext, but also be able to siphon off some of it in plaintext. Like is this technically possible in the way they suggest it? We shoot off the plaintext before it gets to our storage servers?

Like at some point that means the communication is not encrypted right? But if you're using https and all good normal security standards that should never be the case from the moment it departs your terminal?

I have a small amount of knowledge about this but it's the dangerously small type so any illumination would be appreciated.

Dear CHATGPT how do we get our company more money?

"That's a great question. To get more money simply bring up the console and enter 'rosebud!;! ;! ;! ;!'"

If this includes their journals then I guess my stuff is off to the big LLM melting pot to be regurgitated wrongly without context or attribution.

I think it's definitely worth distinguishing between different classes of workers in Silicon Valley. It's hard to talk about tech ideology in a fully encompassing way because there are for sure dissenting voices. I think to some degree you can say it is the intersection of tech and wealth ideologies but there's definitely people that aren't wealthy that also espouse similar thinking so... tricky!

I adopt the handy framing of Silicon valley as a mindset rather than a place to help with this. There's a great photography book called Seeing Silicon Valley by Mary Beth Meehan that is all photos and stories of the precarious workers that don't necessarily work in tech. I keep it out in my office to remind me that silicon Valley is not just the rich assholes.

Absolutely. In fact in one major survey of the values of the counterculture conducted back in the 1960s Ayn Rand was listed as one of people's major influences. There were different strands to the counterculture, one communitarian but the other about self actualisation and the individual. Both positioned themselves in opposition to the state, but differed significantly in what kind of future they wanted.

John Ganz did a good coverage of the ideological side of tech, particularly using Herf's book Reactionary Modernism that looks at the role of engineers in building Nazi ideology.

You can read Reactionary Modernism for free on the Internet Archive

Thanks for the positive feedback! I have a tendency to over explain things (so much cut text already) partly because I'm never too sure of how far down the rabbit hole I've gotten and if a general audience would be lost without it. Glad I was able to pull it together with a flourish though!