Well no, it’s not, because they have multiple monopolies. So we should blame them and blame government for not stopping them.

Obviously the situations are different. We all know that. The point is that it’s hypocritical of a company to say hey, let’s ask our employees to do more by throwing AI at them, and then getting pissed off when potential employees do the same thing.

Although I think it’s more funny than anything else. The company found out that people are gaming the system, which means they have a really shitty system, and rather than change how they interview people or what types of questions they ask, they’re just acting obstinate.

I think we’ve seen enough changes in social media platforms over the past few decades to say that your claim is true until it’s not. As payments to content creators fall, and as garbage postings increase, the actual value to the average user of the site is clearly decreasing. So we’ll see how long YouTube is relevant.

So you’re saying that other options do exist but some companies don’t want to use them because Microsoft is very popular, which is kind of a circular thing, and I understand, but it’s a sign of laziness, not quality.

I have to quibble with you, because you used the term “AI” instead of actually specifying what technology would make sense.

As we have seen in the last 2 years, people who speak in general terms on this topic are almost always selling us snake oil. If they had a specific model or computer program that they thought was going to be useful because it fit a specific need in a certain way, they would have said that, but they didn’t.

One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It’s not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that’s not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.

But if you’re trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper’s own decision making over the past few decades.

Didn’t Luigi have something to say about that?

How cool! This is one great point of FOSS.

The federal government lawyers have said in court that Elon Musk was not the leader of that organization. Therefore, the fact that he said he has departed from Washington would not affect that organization.

Of course we know that he was leading it, and the president has said as much, and the above claims are all being contested in court by quoting the president. But anyway, if you want the official answer, now you have it.

But the official answer also changes over time. Because if Musk was not the leader of that group, then many of the actions that he claimed to take and many of the actions that people attributed to him would now be actions of a private individual, which would expose him to massive civil liability. Therefore, we can be sure that the government’s lawyers will continue to change their story about when and where and how he worked for the government.

Definitions are important, but you don’t get to unilaterally choose them. Depending on the person you’re talking to, sometimes it’s more effective to ask them to define the terms first, or to ask them which dictionary they prefer.

So depending on the situation, it might be more beneficial to bring in the quotes from various Israeli leaders about how they’re trying to get Palestinians gone, and how they’re happy with Palestinian death, and then bring in those graphs that show the numbers of the dead, and ask whether they think that’s acceptable.

Another way to think about it is that sometimes questions of definition can distract us from questions of morality, and if the person that you’re trying to talk to is running away from the issue. By doing so, you can reasonably adjust your focus back to the facts.

Exactly. Reverse DNS lookup matters in some situations.

That’s true but it doesn’t solve the problem now.

I think what you mean to say is that we should be pressuring public officials to try to bust up Google’s monopoly on many things. And we are doing that, and it is showing some progress. But there is much more work to be done.

YouTube took down the video because of its own policies, not because of copyright law. So we should be blaming YouTube.

I think it’s easy to see exactly why if you consider how YouTube treats small content creators. If I post a video and companies claim copyright on it, the video gets demonetized and I might lose my account. I can respond and contest the claim and maybe I can win but I still lost money in the meantime, and perhaps more significantly, the companies that made their copyright claims will never face a consequence for attempting to burn my channel. In other words, if I get things wrong a few times I’ll lose my channel and my income source, but if they get things wrong a million times, they face zero consequence.

And you might be inclined to blame the media companies. But again, this is YouTube doing what YouTube wants to do of its own volition, and not something that’s required by law. If YouTube valued small-scale content creators and end users, it would create different policies.

It’s certainly true that the system is broken, but at the same time you’re suggesting we should forgive HR employees for the bad stuff they do, and I don’t think that’s how morality works.

Not only that, we all understand that sometimes employees don’t have control of a situation and they’re going to follow company policy or go along with their bosses. But we can see through their words and their body language how they feel about it, and we can recognize small actions that they could take to make a bad situation slightly less bad. In my experience it’s very rare that you will encounter such behavior in HR, because the vast majority of HR workers are perfectly happy to f*** us over as much as they can.

Last year I was talking with a veteran coworker who was worried about where the company was going to end up in 10 years, but my contract ends in a year and will not be renewed. I told her openly, they’re not paying me to think about 10 years from now, they’re paying me to make the next year a good year, and I don’t really care about the long-term future cuz I won’t be here. She was furious, but she wasn’t furious enough to go get me a long-term contract. I think she never saw the hypocrisy; even today she still thinks that I’m a bad worker.

Of course what you wrote is not what it actually says in the Bill of Rights.

You can buy loyalty. Give someone a high paying 3-year contract and they’ll probably work to the end of it. But of course HR doesn’t want to hear that.

What you just described is a system that mistreats your workers. Those temporary hires, if they lose their jobs, they can’t put food on the table. But if the company loses a temporary worker, it’s not going to be troubled, they’re just going to go hire another person.

That all being said, if you’re working under contract and your company has robust protections for retaliation by employers, some of the risk of telling them in advance goes away. That’s great, but there’s still some remaining risk. Many bosses will be vengeful, bitter, and they may sabotage your work however they can for the last few weeks or months. And you won’t be able to stop them, because you’re leaving, so even if you filed an internal complaint, it wouldn’t go anywhere.