For me personally working in big tech, there was a sharp increase of work-related malaise in 2020 that never went down. IMO it was largely driven by 1) covid-era hiring blitz followed by layoffs, 2) so-called zoom fatigue. Teams became more geographically distributed, lots of newbies showed up, coordination overhead went up, competitiveness and backstabbing increased, work seemed to progress much slower.
The book "On Tyranny: 20 lessons from the 20th century" by the historian Timothy Snyder is an excellent read for these times. The very first lesson is "Do not obey in advance". It's about how authoritarian power often doesn't need to force compliance, people simply bend the knee in anticipation of being forced. This simply emboldens the authoritarians to go further.
I've been disappointed to see many businesses and institutions obeying in advance recently. I hope this moment wakes up the tech community and beyond.
For companies / billionaires obeying in advance means they are buying their subscription to a period of favors like better contracts, lesser scrutiny over mergers, lighter enforcement of all laws.
I’d like to think that they are scared/obeying, but they’re likely just joining an organization.
From the job posting it sounds like the company value prop is AI agents as debt collector? They want to “solve deep problems like collecting more money”. What a shitty dystopia we’re creating.
Tech just became yuppie 2.0, just like in the 80s and early 90s every sociopath looking for a large paycheck jumped into finance, in the 2010s onward it's been tech.
It must be nice for you that you've never felt persecuted or treated unjustly by human systems and therefore can't extrapolate to how that might play out when autonomous killer robots are thrown into the mix.
Divinity: Original Sins was that game for me; everything I loved about U7, minus the annoying bits (collecting arrows, eating food every x minutes, time-of-day changes for NPCs).
And Divinity: Original Sin 2 improves on its predecessor in every way. It's the game Larian have been trying to make since their inception. Honestly, I'd recommend that new players skip straight to the sequel—you won't miss anything story-wise.
> Brazilians have done a terrible job of protecting their rainforest
While the Amazon is in Brazilian territory, it is one of the largest carbon sinks in the world and therefore has a global positive externality. Therefore this is not a domestic issue.
Perhaps by spreading awareness we can shift the Overton window on how these cross-border climate issues should be addressed. E.g. perhaps Brazil should be paid from a global fund to not cut down the rain forest.
