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Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social

In the face of criticism, Tim Flock deploys the old "we shouldn't pause progress" canard — because in Silicon Valley brain poisoned culture, any widget with a microchip in it is automatically "progress" and anyone who doesn't think every such widget is good hates all progress

techcrunch.comFlock CEO defends surveillance technology amid national backlash: 'We shouldn't pause progress' | TechCrunchAt TechCrunch Disrupt, Flock CEO Garrett Langley defended his company's surveillance technology despite growing privacy concerns, arguing that its crime-fighting benefits outweigh the risks of abuse.
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social

It's regrettable that our most beloved video games trained a generation to think this way: the tech tree moves inexorably from the left to the right as you pour research into it, and consumer products fall from the tree like rotten fruit. They cannot imagine a different relationship with technology.

12 reposts88 likes

Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social

This too is "progress" and if you think companies shouldn't be getting hundreds of billions of dollars in investment to make viruses, you are "anti progress" No one stops to ask what it is that we are progressing towards when we do this, because no one is able to conceive of other futures anymore.

Reuters@reuters.com

AI models may soon self-replicate without access to data centers, Anthropic warns reut.rs/4dUgiXd

reut.rsAI models may soon self-replicate without access to data centers, Anthropic warnsAnthropic said on Monday its experiments suggested small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to ​self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, such as smart ‌ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes.
Toronto Will
@torontowill.bsky.social

I've thought about this myself, and think that myth of forward progress is at the root of quite a lot problems. Anything new in tech (hardware AND software) is by-default exciting because you just assume it's forward progress. That's only been beaten out of me by decades of contrary experience.

Toronto Will@torontowill.bsky.social

Thinking about the decay of technology, it's usually blamed on corporate interests (the "enshittification" and "rot economy" theses), but I think there's also something *else* at play, which should be much easier to fix than "capitalism". That is: the myth that technology gets better over time.