Post by @davidgerard@circumstances.run
Bad Tech!
Well, here I go. This is going to be a long thread. I invite people to contribute.
Hoping to avoid people complaining about me putting the tech they love on this list. Please go start your own.
I can only do 500 characters at a time, FYI, which is why some, er, entries might be pithier than they should be.
I'll put in links as I find them.
I'm using https://pivot-to-ai.com/ by @davidgerard and this list as references https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/
Please share others
The OG/corps you already know about.
Microsoft
Google
Apple
Meta
Amazon
You can also think of them as much of what is ginning up the American stock market. And if you're not alarmed by that, what have you been doing with your life since 2008?
Other stuff you mostly already know and that you can live without
OpenAI
Twitter/X/whatever you want to call them
BlueSky
Anthropic
Substack*
*This is a good time to mention that anything that is fascist or Nazi-adjacent qualifies for this list. And if you court Nazis, you definitely qualify.
And now we start to have a little fun, because as you scratch a little closer, you find that the things you thought were "ethical" alternatives really aren't, and you have to admit to yourself that you don't have options.
Proton
LibreOffice
Tuta
Kagi
Mozilla
Brave
Linux...this was when it started to get really fun
Internet Archive....this was when you might have stopped breathing
Wikipedia...which we could have suspected because Wales brags about being a libertarian, so not liking unions tracks
Omarchy...but that's a Linux distribution, and eh, you already had a problem
Mullvad...someone want to list a good VPN that isn't fascist adjacent or corrupted with AI? Please?
Stripe
PayPal...This one is *special*, and maybe should have been on the first list
Discord! They are moving to "age verification", and that is going to go really badly, I promise you. But why believe me when you can just look at tumblr?
VIM
Shopify
Framework...which brings me to a certain someone who made a couple of recommendations that ended up being on this list. You know who he is. If you see him recommending anything, treat with caution.
The reason I need to put this list up is because I know I missed something even as I was typing this up. I can't keep up, which is maybe part of the design.
But it shouldn't be this way, and it doesn't have to be.
Wix
WordPress...both added because they are pushing their AI tools pretty hard
Graphene
Nvidia...It should go without saying that they are in the WTF is wrong with you category. Very difficult to extricate yourself from that--they're chips--but Huang's financial well-being seems to hinge on the AI, ahem, boom, and he's spouting all kinds of BS...which the press is eating up.
Perhaps we'll start a list of the most credulous and asinine tech journalists and outlets, but baby steps.
4 boosts
@dnkboston @davidgerard
have you miserable clowns considered not using computers at all?
I dislike AI fervently but this whole witch hunt is a waste of electricity and serves no purpose.
There are absolutely bad actors on here (Proton has just shown itself to be a shitty project! Linus is a prick who I firmly disagree with re:LLMs!) but maliciously targeting open source projects that have delivered valuable work, purely because they don’t outright ban generative AI, is a ridiculous exercise in spitefulness.
I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for presenting this nasty circlejerk as a normal and well-adjusted position.
Presenting organisations/companies like Kagi or LibreOffice, or many of the other valuable projects you have targeted, as being anywhere near equivalent to the likes of DHH, Microsoft, or Shopify etc is laughably disingenuous.
Perhaps consider proportionality the next time you harangue folks for failing your purity test.
@davidgerard I am so, so happy I blocked that server due to, I believe, lousy moderation. But yes, I got to see the post. What a clown.
@socratics@infosec.exchange
