> The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.
The problem is that all employers have certain common interests, and they are generally more organized and powerful than individual workers, which biases the market status-quo in their favor. The market doesn't fix that.
One nit: the message view seems to auto-hyphenate long words on line-breaks to pack in more text, but one of the things that's struck me about Epstein is how utterly incompetent he was with punctuation. Those correctly-inserted hyphens distract from that impression.
> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.
Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent.
Also the technology union people were dumb, seemed to focus more on hot-button political activism than worker power, and thus undermined their own project. IMHO, a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue, because controversy around those issues allows the bosses to divide-and-conquer the union.
Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).
> Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
That seems like something that should be illegal, if it's not already. It seems like a paper maneuver.
It should probably be expected that employers will play dirty, which is one of the reasons why I think the unions need to be hyper-focused on worker and workplace issues to the exclusion of all else.
Btw what was the outcome of that?
AFAICT the bandcamp union still exists and I don’t see any public news about the case from after December 2023, so wondering what happened
Edit: last news i see on their mastodon are from April 2024 and seems they negotiated some severance pay for the laid off workers and that it; so I guess the union busting was successful?
Unions should focus on worker power, but staying away form politics entirely is called "economism" and "opportunism". Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
Unions should do political education and work with issue based, socialist organizations, and invite speakers to facilitate discussions, while building consensus around what needs to be done in the workplace and fighting on behalf of their fellow workers ferociously.
> Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things like Gaza, BLM, etc. They may be very worthy causes, but there's controversy about them too, and they don't really seem to be in-scope for a union.
Here's what I'll say. Every union is a democracy and has to decide what is right for it, but unions are the fighting organizations of the working class and we are the rightful rulers of this society by virtue of actually making it run and being the literal majority in a classic liberal sense.
U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.
Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.
> Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
But the primary job of a union is to represent its workers in the workplace, not to do any particular political thing that workers are "best positioned to do." Given the weak position unions are already in in the US, it's not the time to, say, alienate the fraction of the workforce who supports Israel from the union. You need those guys to vote to get the union certified, which is already a difficult uphill battle without their alienation.
The union and its organizers need to be able to say no, and be ruthlessly prioritize and be pragmatic. If they can't, I think their chances of accomplishing anything are slim.
That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
> That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
There's nothing about representing Palestinian in a workplace that means you have to take an official position on Gaza or even spend any time talking about it. Or any analogous thing for a member of any group.
> OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
But the problem is scope creep undermines the organization. All of what you said may be true, but Tech Union X isn't going to solve those problems and getting involved with them will make Tech Union X less effective at the things it can do.
Tech unions aren't even off the ground and unions generally are weakened and getting weaker, this is not a time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue
So...should it pick and choose which kinds of workers to represent the interests of?
Or should it fight for the interests of all the workers?
Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
Either choice is a political choice.
You cannot avoid politics when one side of the political aisle has declared that the validity and ability to exist in public life of certain categories of people is against their agenda.
> Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
You fight for the interests of tech workers in this case, or truckers in a truckers union, so on and so forth.
Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
> If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
If you focused any effort on addressing that, I suspect someone who isn't even in the union would come out of the woodwork to say "that union shouldn't be addressing policy like that, it's divisive and what about everyone else?"
Union workers' rights and interests are impacted by policy that discriminates, pretending that isn't so doesn't get us anywhere.
> As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
So? Not every organization has to take on every issue. And the idea that they must has been enormously damaging and kept us from having a lot of nice things.
Unions represent LGBT workers, of course they advocate on behalf of their members. It's quite literally why they exist.
Remember, unions are democratic organizations, they do what their members want. It turns out union members want comprehensive protections against discrimination in the workplace.
If the protection of workers' rights triggers someone, perhaps unions aren't for them and they'd be better off joining a club or something.
> Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
Because the political party currently in power in our country is an actual, literal, (Christian) White Supremacist party.
They are deliberately rounding up people that look like they might be Hispanic (and various other non-white ethnicities), declaring them to be illegal immigrants regardless of their actual status, and deporting them or putting them in camps.
> You can simulate a human brain on pen and paper too.
That's an assumption, though. A plausible assumption, but still an assumption.
We know you can execute an LLM on pen and paper, because people built them and they're understood well enough that we could list the calculations you'd need to do. We don't know enough about the human brain to create a similar list, so I don't think you can reasonably make a stronger statement than "you could probably simulate..." without getting ahead of yourself.
I can make a claim much stronger than "you could probably" The counterclaim here is that the brain may not obey physical laws that can be described by mathematics. This is a "5G causes covid" level claim. The overwhelming burden of proof is on you.
There are some quantum effects in the brain (for some people, that's a possible source of consciousness).
We can simulate quantum effects, but here comes the tricky part: even if our simulation matches the probability, say 70/30 of something happening, what guarantees that our simulation would take the same path as the object being simulated?
We don't have to match the quantum state since the brain still produces an valid output regardless of what each random quantum probability ended up as. And we can include random entropy in a LLM too.
This is just non-determinism. Not only can't your simulation reproduce the exact output, but neither can your brain reproduce its own previous state. This doesn't mean it's a fundamentally different system.
Consider for example Orch OR theory. If it or something like it were to be accurate, the brain would not "obey physical laws that can be described by mathematics".
Orch OR is probably wrong, but the broader point is that we still don’t know which physical processes are necessary for cognition. Until we do, claims of definitive brain simulability are premature.
This is basically the Church-Turing thesis and one of the motivations of using tape(paper) and an arbitrary alphabet in the Turing machine model.
It's been kinda discussed to oblivion in the last century, interesting that it seems people don't realize the "existing literature" and repeat the same arguments (not saying anyone is wrong).
> I'd bet there's some calculation that people who try to sign up for a plan over the phone end up using the phone more down the line, which would mean more costly operator time. So the math works out where the overall savings of making enough people give up before reaching a human outweighs the cost of potentially lost new subscriptions by phone call.
That's an example of a weird heuristic I frequently see applied to corporations: assume some awful decision is the result of some scarily hyper-competent design process, and construct a speculative explanation along those lines.
But must of us have worked in corporations, an know how stupid and incompetent they can be.
> Or, they just didn't study that. Or, the decision-makers don't contact customer support for themselves and so don't know how infuriatingly unhelpful AI ones are.
>> One important reason people like to write code is that it has well-defined semantics, allowing to reason about it and predict its outcome with high precision. Likewise for changes that one makes to code. LLM prompting is the diametrical opposite of that.
> You’re still allowed to reason about the generated output. If it’s not what you want you can even reject it and write it yourself!
You missed the key point. You can't predict and LLM's "outcome with high precision."
Looking at the output and evaluating it after the fact (like you describe) is an entirely different thing.
For many things you can though. If I ask an LLM to create an alert in terraform that triggers when 10% of requests fail over a 5 minute period and sends an email to some address, with the html on the email looking a certain way, it will do exactly the same as if I looked at the documentation, and figured out all of the fields 1 by 1. It’s just how it works when there’s one obvious way to do things. I know software devs love to romanticize about our jobs but I don’t know a single dev who writes 90% meaningful code. There’s always boilerplate. There’s always fussing with syntax you’re not quite familiar with. And I’m happy to have an AI do it
I don’t think I am. To me, it doesn’t have to be precise. The code is precise and I am precise. If it gets me what I want most of the time, I’m ok with having to catch it.
> Re: timing - They were triggered to explode en masse, which implies that there was zero consideration to minimizing civilian harm.
Zero? The whole nature of the attack shows consideration towards "minimizing civilian harm." Tricking an enemy agent into carrying a small explosive device on his person, then detonating it, will have far less civilian harm than the standard procedure of dropping a bomb on whatever building they happen to be in.
Your thinking appears unreasonably binary here, as shown by your use of phrases like "zero consideration" and "definitely no consideration," in reaction to Israel not meeting an unrealistically high standard for "minimizing civilian harm." Could Israel have done more to minimize civilian harm with that attack? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean they did nothing.
@Cyph0n, if you think Israel's approach led to too much collateral damage, why don't you propose a solution that would have led to less collateral damage while still taking the Hezbollah leaders out of action?
I bet you won't do this, because I think we can ultimately agree it wasn't possible for Israel to take all these men out of action simultaneously and minimize collateral damage much beyond what it did.
I think where we disagree is that you think Israel should not have taken these men out of action.
Nice deflection. All I need to care about as a lowly SWE is that this attack injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. This is the real world, not a movie or simulated war game.
And I would wager that you would immediately condemn such a barbaric attack if the sides were reversed.
So you weren't able to propose a solution that would have led to less collateral damage because no such solution exists. You know it. I know it. Everyone reading this knows it.
Instead of answering directly you make a comment about deflection, and insist an obvious falsehood (the attack injured thousands of Lebanese civilians) is all you care to believe. On this, we agree. It's all you care to believe, the evidence be damned!
> FWIW, our CEO has declared us to be AI-first, so we are to leverage AI in everything we do which I think is misguided. But you can bet they will be reviewing AI usage metrics and lower wont be better at $WORK.
I've taken some pleasure in having GitHub copilot review whitespace normalization PRs. It says it can't do it, but I hope I get my points anyway.
> As I see it, the purpose of AI is the same as the purpose of every technology ever since the hand axe - to reduce labor. Humans have a strong drive to figure out ways to achieve more with less effort.
Yes.
> Obviously there are higher order effects, but same as we wouldn't expect the Homo Erectus to stop playing with stone tools because they'd disrupt their society (which of course they did), I don't understand why we should decide to halt technological progress now.
The difference is the relationship of that technology to the individual/masses. When a Homo Erectus invented a tool, he and every member of his species (who learned of it) directly benefited from the technology, but with capitalism that link has been broken. Now Homo Sapiens can invent technologies that may greatly benefit a few, but will be broadly harmful to individuals. AI is likely one of those technologies, as its on the direct path to the elimination broad classes of jobs with no replacement.
This situation would be very different if we either had some kind of socialism or a far more egalitarian form of capitalism (e.g. with extremely diffuse and widespread ownership).
I think you might have an overly noble view of Homo Erectus. I believe that a fellow member of the species is at least as likely to get that hand axe smashed into their skull as they're likely to benefit from it.
> This strategy doesn't make sense. What was the end goal? To have the other person keep buying new computers.
I would assume it was to interfere with the other student's research. That other person almost certainly had data on the destroyed computers that he either lost completely, or had to do extra work to recover when they failed.
The problem is that all employers have certain common interests, and they are generally more organized and powerful than individual workers, which biases the market status-quo in their favor. The market doesn't fix that.
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