Thank you for posting this. I’m honestly a bit surprised that this genre of Google truth-telling is not more widespread, or perhaps I just haven’t seen it. Your experience of “the wall” between Latin America and the US is obviously also more poignant than ever. Seeing it described this way, in this context, kinda hit me over the head and is finally making me wonder if the US immigration/deportation mess will ultimately come to be seen as something equivalent to the Iron Curtain. Putting your experiences out there is worth it for that alone, at the very least.

It’s not that there haven’t been people out there who were willing to yank the curtain on Google, either; I just feel like it’s been more of a word-of-mouth thing in my experience. For instance, I knew a guy who was there during the Gmail launch. He made clear to me that “don’t be evil” was a slogan created by a later hire, and really had very little to do with the thinking of Page/Brin or later Schmidt, except that they found it to be convenient office propaganda. Thus, he ended up not really believing it at all by the time he was done.

Another good friend of mine was also a contractor in a technical department in Mountain View for a number of years. The US contractor experience (at least in that role) didn’t seem as firewalled off as you’re describing for the Brazilian contractors, but he was still under the twin guns of “your job is meant to be fully automated eventually, and your primary purpose is training the system towards that” and yearly contract renewals. And of course, it’s also where he and his eventual wife got infected with the Bitcoin prosperity gospel, a train they’re still riding to this day…

Not advocating violence, but Achewood did demonstrate one possible set of reactions to discovering a Microsoft designer at large in public.

https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html

sounds like he’s posting from inside a dilapidated white panel van parked strategically just outside a legally-mandated exclusion radius surrounding a middle school

A corruption of VCRcel, somebody with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1990s pornography distributed on VHS.

A surprising number of surviving former hippies have become viciously reactionary, because the world didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to. The old stereotypes don’t really apply anymore, and there was a lot of selfishness embedded in that culture anyway.

Not really. If schools aren’t spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.

I’m filing suit for copyright infringement AND breach of privacy, clearly they’ve been training on my personal webcam recordings.

I advocate for inclusion with equal-opportunity E. coli contamination, that’s why I voted for RFK Jr. We can all spew together!

Maybe the robot can finally explain to me how Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” is actually music and not just somewhat organized noise?

I know AGI is real because it keeps intercepting my shipments of, uh, “enhancement” gummies I ordered from an ad on Pornhub and replacing them with plain old gummy bears. The Basilisk is trying to emasculate me!

Reminds me of how Scott Adams hedged in 2016 with all sorts of disclaimers that he wasn’t really a Trump supporter, he was just impressed by a “master persuader.” Now look at the guy.

At least they’re all contained in a relatively confined space with limited routes of egress

It is very important to notice and continually point out that these people appear to believe more fervently in their chosen demons than they do in their proclaimed god

I feel like I’ve seen chud weirdos ranting about seed oils suppressing testosterone levels, but I could be hallucinating

Hey, at least the professional Elon haters are actually doing their jobs, unlike the man himself

I am certain that many of those ignorant of the history (or even were there for it, like DHH) would still argue that Google deserves credit because of the V8 JavaScript engine. But I continue to doubt that further promulgating JavaScript was a net positive for the world.

Wow, coiners tried to parasitize YIMBY while I wasn’t paying attention?

I picked up a modern Fortran book from Manning out of curiosity, and hoo boy are they even worse in terms of trend-riding. Not only can you find all the AI content you can handle, there’s a nice fat back catalog full of blockchain integration, smart-contract coding… I guess they can afford that if they expect the majority of their sales to be ebooks.

I’m mildly surprised that music of any kind is what’s getting uploaded to something called Deezer

As I noted on the YouTube video, this is doubly heinous as a lot of CA community college instructors are “freeway flyers” - working at multiple campuses, sometimes almost 100 miles apart, just to cobble together a full-time work schedule for themselves. Online, self-paced, forum-based class formats were already becoming popular even before the pandemic, and I’ve been in such classes where the professor indicated that I was one of maybe 3 or 4 students who bothered to show up to in-person office hours. I have to wonder if that will end up being a hard requirement at some point. The bottom rung on the higher-education ladder is already the most vulnerable, and this just makes it worse.