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Capitalists hate capitalism. For a corporate executive, the fact that you have to make good things, please your customers, pay your workers, and beat the competition are all bugs, not features. The best business is one in which people simply pay you money

things are enshittified when they become worse for the people who use them and the suppliers who makes them, but nevertheless, the users keep using and the suppliers keep supplying

the less competition there is in a sector, the easier it is for the remaining companies to capture their regulators

Mass tech worker layoffs have gutted tech workers' confidence

Labor organizing among all kinds of tech workers isn't just a way to get a better deal for those workers – it's key to the disenshittification of all our lives

Fehrm, the engineering analyst, explained that even if just one of the four bolts were in place, the door couldn’t move up. With that, and the intact condition of the stop fittings, “my conclusion is there were no bolts in the holes,” he said.

He surmises that when the cabin was not pressurized, for example when landing or at takeoff, if those bolts were missing then vibrations and bumps could have caused the plug to gradually work itself upward over time. Advertising Skip Ad

Aboulafia said unless Boeing returns its focus to engineering and manufacturing, further quality problems will inevitably follow.

“It’s up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor,” Fitzgerald says. “Because if they don’t, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people’s labor and content for a long time to come.”

A human’s creative work is inextricably linked to their life experiences: every piece of art they’ve ever seen, everything they’ve done, everyone they’ve ever met.

generative AI changes the economics and timescales of the market for creative works in a way that has the potential to disincentivize non-AI-generated art, both by making creative careers less viable and by narrowing the scope of creative skill that is valued by the market

the act of creation is an essential part of a life well-lived

Where is the act of creation?

It’s rare that we can successfully adapt existing laws to fully manage a new technology, especially one that has the power to radically alter the shape of an existing market like generative AI does

Our job as a society is to ensure that technology changes things for the better in the long run, while mitigating the inevitable short-term harm

Who owns a creative work? Not the pencil, not the typewriter, not Adobe Photoshop. It’s the human who used those tools to create the work that owns it.

some people have expressed the sentiment that information of all sorts ought to be free. In our view, this sentiment does not respect the rights of artists and creators; the world would be the poorer without their work

We do not think that large generative AI companies should assume that the laws of copyright and trademark will inevitably be rewritten around their needs

large neural networks are not databases in which an offending record can easily be deleted. As things stand now, the equivalent of takedown notices would require (very expensive) retraining in every instance

With generative AI, the software itself is clearly capable of creating infringing materials, and of doing so without notifying the user of the potential infringement.

the only ethical solution is for generative AI systems to limit their training to data they have properly licensed

The most culturally influential social network has had its cultural relevance destroyed by its billionaire man-child owner's tantrum-based managemenet style

There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.

As energy-depleting illnesses that disproportionately affect women, long Covid and M.E./C.F.S. are easily belittled by a sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and a capitalist one that values people according to their productivity

I witnessed almost every publication that I once held in esteem become complicit in normalizing a level of death once billed as incalculable. It was galling, crushing work that wrecked my faith in journalism and its institutions.