this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
326 points (93.1% liked)
Technology
59593 readers
3063 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman for those who don't want to click through.
And I have no idea which I would choose to face off from those four, let alone who would win.
You could put them in a sack and hit the sack with a stick. You'd never hit the wrong guy.
I like this idea much better than picking one of them as the worst person in tech for 2023. Can we do the stick beating instead?
But we definitely need to have Zuck in there too. And maybe Thiel, as a special guest.
The more the merrier!
Could I? Yayyyy!
Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.
Theil wants a techno libertarian oligarchy with no regulations ala Blade Runner.
Musk wants the rich to escape to Mars while destroying earth and dooming the poor's.
Bezos wants to send the poor's into space along with heavy industry and turn earth into a rich person paradise ala Black Mirror "Fifteen Million Merits".
Altman is just a shitty rich person in tech wasting precious resources to teach a computer to create porn. Becaue we all know that's what 99% of people do and will use AI for. He's also a prepper which means he's a selfish cunt.
If I had to pick just one it would be Theil. I think the man is insidious while the rest are more in your face.
Ranked choice would be Theil, Musk, Bezos then Altman.
I love your descriptions for all of them. If you have some free time would you mind writing it for everyone in the brackets?
I’m shocked that Sam Altman won out over SBF
Sam Bankman-Fried is definitely bad for what he did and his belief in effective altruism, which is just another smoke screen to not properly tax rich people because they "donate to charities". You could argue his getting into crypto also makes him bad because crypto mining is bad but he's not on the same level as Sam Altman. Not even close.
I’d rather pick someone who did something deserving of life in prison than someone who didn’t, but maybe that’s just me.
Also, Sam Altman has no equity in, and was only paid $73k by OpenAI last year. You can dislike him for the rumors surrounding his managerial style and whatnot, but it’s pretty clear he isn’t exploiting people to get shit rich like everyone else on this list.
I don't.
If he wasn't promoting AI and trying to sell it as the next best thing to sliced bread he'd just be a shitty rich prepper. Instead he is wasting time and resources on AI.
And my personal bias against crypto really lowers my "give a fuck" bar so while, again, what he did is bad I don't care if he defrauded a bunch of crypto cunts. Same as I don't care about people "loosing" their NFT's.
Under what circumstances would AI research and training not be considered a waste of time and resources, in your mind?
Well, his whole ballgame was selling crypto to normal people, not cryptobros. Do you really think the FTX Super Bowl commercial was targeted at people who can articulate the differences in technology between Bitcoin and Ethereum?
Right now? None.
All the same crypto cunts to me. Doesn't matter if you mine, trade, marry or fuck crypto they are all the same cunts to me.
I don't watch any sports and few to no ads so I have no idea what you are talking about.
Wow, this is a concerningly sociopathic worldview. I’m quite sure that a lot of people who were fucked over by FTX were people you would otherwise consider to be your brethren. Or, y’know, your grandparents.
And here I was thinking Lemmy would be less toxic than Reddit.
Okay.
I can tell you with great certainty that none of my friends or family were/are invested in crypto. None. And if even a single one had been my opinion on crypto cunts would not change.
Sorry?
That’s the thing about sociopathy: you’re convinced that your opinion is enlightened because you have successfully disregarded the human cost of the issue at hand, when in reality that is the fundamental problem with your opinion.
Please, for all our sakes, learn to empathize with people who make mistakes you personally wouldn’t. Introspect on the conversation we just had, and ask yourself what stands to be gained from the opinion you hold.
SBF hasn’t been in the headlines as much recently.
No matter who wins we all lose. That's kind of the point whenever these guys turn up.
Well, and sadly, said.
To make things slightly easier it's Musk v Thiel and Bezos v Altman.
In the first matchup, I would pick Musk over Thiel for being a bigger POS in general.
In the second matchup I would pick Bezos for the larger impact he has had on the world.
I'm with you on the second, but I would have a really hard time with the first because Musk is more overtly a piece of shit, but Thiel has had so much influence over the years, including elevating Elon Musk to the position where he is today. I guess if it's the worst of 2023 and we're restricting it solely to what we know they've said and done in 2023, it would be Musk. But I think overall, it is probably Thiel just because there wouldn't be an Elon Musk anyone had heard about without Peter Thiel.
This is the 2023 matchup, so I guess it would put Musk on top
Musk was likely worse in 2023 and does suck a lot in general, Thiel is more dangerous in general
But Musk's acquisition of Twitter is in itself subservient to Theil's overarching political goals. One has been in the limelight more, but the other has caused more harm overall.
This is the 2023 matchup. You don’t consider Jordan’s performance at UNC when determining their championship status this year. Heck, despite the past damage done, i don’t think. Bezos, for his 2023 tech fuckery, should have made it out of the first round.
By the same metric, Musk easily tops Thiel first 2023 and is the clear shoo-in as champion of the worst.
Why do people hate Altman? Genuinely OOTL.
deleted
He's not really as bad as the other three, but he did take a nonprofit company and turn it into a multibillion dollar profit machine which has a massive carbon and fresh water footprint.
Also some view ChatGPT (and the other “AIs”) as massive plagiarism machines.
AI or not, plagiarism appears to happen a lot. AI just makes it a little easier than it was before.
His world coin project is one of the sketchiest. Paying people in poor countries to get scanned by this creepy orb thing? Odd.
His sister has also vociferously accused him of molesting her for a period of time when she was 4 and he was 13.
What did Thiel do to make the internet hate him as much as the other three?
So, so, so many things.
Let's start with him saying women getting the vote was bad for democracy and we can continue on from there.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/peter-thiel-women-democracy_n_5747079be4b03ede4413f6f5
It's a full time job to answer completely, but from what I know he finances escape fantasies for the rich which they call seasteading. He calls it a libertarian ideal to create these new colonial city states, but what he means is liberty for his ilk from taxes, regulation and societal rules. Meanwhile his brainchild Palantir erodes the rights of the poor people who are left behind through surveillance, military technology and ICE funding. But this is all in line with his ideology, because apartheid "works" in South Africa according to Thiel
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
liberty
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Musk.