onfocus

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be.

This isn’t too far off from the software brain mindset that Nilay Patel was warning about in the previous post. Maybe software brain is intensified by the fact that tech culture is run by billionaires who never face consequences.

You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.

Nilay Patel explains the disconnect between tech culture and culture at large around AI.

The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.

What could we have done with $80 billion dollars? People like Zuckerberg shouldn’t control what we spend that amount of resources on.

“By refusing to cut off surveillance companies and sleazy data brokers, Big Tech companies are effectively collaborating with ICE’s lawless campaign of violence and terror. As a result, every internet ad on a website or app could be collecting location data that ICE will use for its next operation,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

Ads aren’t just an annoyance, they’re an attack vector.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

we can’t have nice things. The fact that this random web caching site run by one person is even important today is because we have lost the open web. This is a symptom of our broken system dominated by tech monopolies who don’t care about history, culture, or a shared set of information that we can use to understand our world.

Artifacts and technologies have certain logics built into their structure that do require certain arrangements around them or that bring forward certain arrangements.

This is a crucial point about LLMs. Sure the street finds its own uses for technology but the existence of some technologies requires a supporting system that is by nature anti-democratic.

The Google cofounder has cut ties between California and many of his assets that risked exposing him to a proposed new wealth tax in the state, meeting an end-of-2025 deadline, according to filings reviewed by Business Insider.

Morally bankrupt. California provided the environment, security, talent, and education that made Google possible. Running away because they ask for support is unethical.

If the far-right succeeds in its project, when your wife gets sick you won’t be able to afford a doctor. Your kids or grandkids won’t be able to get an education. Should you become successful in business they will force you to pay bribes. These people believe in extraction, not growth. Their goal is to subjugate, to dominate, to force everyone beneath them into a life of precarious insecurity.

If you can make it past the title, this is an excellent picture of where the tech industry and tech culture were in the past compared with where it is now.

In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like Marcus seem increasingly moderate. Such voices argue that this technology is important, but not poised to drastically transform our lives. They challenge us to consider a different vision for the near-future—one in which A.I. might not get much better than this.

What if we're closer to the end state of AI rather than the beginning?

The DeepMind CEO is dead-set that advanced AI models will bring about a renaissance in human existence. The “golden era” is only five short years away. “AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources,” Hassabis said.

Someone needs to check in on the standard tech CEO ketamine dosage. I feel like it's dialed too high at the moment.

…screens and all the technologies that accompany them are tools to make the world seem more predictable and less uncertain: infinite scroll; autoplay; the always-on “live” news cycle; the steady drumbeat of notifications; the apps that summon servants to our doors, hiding all the labor and improvisation and accidents (often involving blood and bone) that go into moving atoms from one place to another. These tools train us in convenience, which is training in predictability, in the facade of certainty. And when that facade inevitably breaks, we often find ourselves at sea.

Strategies for living with uncertainty.

...the Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating, companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.

This feels very accurate to me. I think it's something we need to acknowledge so we know the hazards of using these monopoly services.