I just happen to have an extra Pi and an e-ink display sitting around and I LOVE this idea. Going to try it on my screened in porch - we typically get 10-20 Merlin detections on a decent day so this could be fun!
It might have helped draw out the layoff process, potentially. Still not convinced unions would optimize overall outcomes for employees _while_ employed.
Maybe a better conversation to have as we keep moving through this AI Engineering era and a bunch of new companies are created. If you are considering founding a company, would you start it as a union shop? If not, why?
Replying again to say: A union isn't the real objective. Greater share of profits and more democracy in the workplace is. So maybe that's union-shaped or maybe something else.
Founders are management, unions protect employees from management and shareholders. If you can build without employees, go for it.
Investors want to get wealthy, founders want to get wealthy, employees are just fuel for that machine. The examples are robust of how startup employees make out the vast majority of the time.
Union support is at record highs, there will always people who think they can do better without, best to not argue with folks who ignore data and stats. Their belief system won’t be swayed with logic and reason.
(a potential solution to this is for unions to turn into cooperatives and accelerators over time; they could build their own investment funds with their pensions an investor in their portfolio companies, if Bending Spoons was a union cooperative if you will, for example)
> We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.
Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better?
Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result."
Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.
There have been a couple of cases of honesty in tech layoffs in the last couple where the employer specifically said that the layoffs were for performance which added insult to injury to the people laid off in that round and damaged their future hiring prospects, e.g. https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performa.... I'd rather not have the honesty in that case; that's a terrible thing to do to people.
They have the same psychology the leaders of communist states had. It's a constant litany of self-congratulation and tone-deafness that has no connection to reality.
Why single out communist leaders? Seems more related to authoritarian leaders, of which communist leaders were just a small subset.
Heck our current admin can’t do any wrong in their own eyes, every thing is perfect and winning including the morass in the Middle East that was arbitrarily started on whim and resulted in economic chaos. Or the trade war with Canada.
Or Biden, he couldn’t do any wrong in his own eyes and that led to the current situation.
This would be totally doable except for a couple of recent changes during the DOGE take-over where federal agencies mandated communication on X as their primary means.
This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform.
I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.
Not a kid - I wish. My point was that (admittedly some not all) societies if faced with a loss of a major utility and supply chains that were dependent on would start to devolve pretty quickly into chaos.
That to me is the greater threat than annihilation due to autonomous weapons, etc.
This is the correct approach. I think we can do both things - try to add some controls while also ensuring it’s not a complete giveaway to entrenched interests and investors.
The problem with that hope and approach is regulatory capture. Big money is now the only thing that apparently matters in shaping policy, and changing that will require a lot of very sweeping vote and policy changes that may not ever have the momentum to succeed.
Would love to see this tested on some of the newer cybersecurity models so we could actually defend ourselves instead of getting cut off at the knees by silly regular expressions.
Hope this approach gets well tested and sees good results so we have a shot at human governance.
This comes from the before times when Internet Explorer was full of holes and Chrome was a usable browser with regular updates and before Firefox worked with all websites well.
Google has since spent the time making Chrome more locked down and user-hostile from a privacy perspective but the conventional wisdom for years was “just use Chrome” (for good reason) and that inertia continues :/
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