It's wild how many of these so-called sabotage techniques happen daily in the workspace without even realizing it. I can’t tell if this website is being serious or just having a laugh. I don't know whether I find it funny or sad.
Is this a deep philosophical reflection on the nature of work and organisational behaviour?
Or does it simply reflect the fact a good sabotage technique is something you can get away with - and therefore it has to be something that happens daily in the workplace?
That is, in fact, the point. You don't want to get caught/fired for sabotaging your company. The site suggests introducing additional perfectly explainable events which happen all the time, and are hard to assign blame to direct incompetence, but slow progress and cost money.
It may just be me or my internet, but I tried this specifically to see the effect and it was a very slow escape (seemed delayed starting to load, and then loading the escape page).
I came to say the same thing: I love the idea of the quick escape, but some of the sites take way too long to load. They should prioritize sites with the fastest loading (smallest footprint) over some of the jokey-er websites like "43 Gifts for Every Type of Boss."
I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided.
I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily work from home.
None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. All of them are enabled by big tech and none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
Yes there are drawbacks. I also find them bad to a point of threatening society. But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.
Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones.
In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too long.
As a child of the 80s, who lived 20 miles away from a city, I can tell you that my life was pretty much dark ages before I understood that driving was not just something parents did; I could also do that. And that there were people with similar interests as me at the end of that drive! Took 18 years.
I grew up in a rural township 50 miles from a major city in the 1980s. We were never isolated and there were in fact a diverse set of peers my own age with interests and heritage all across the spectrum. Yes there were a few racists or religious zealots but 99% of the folks got along just fine.
My own lasting impression is that this is the “American experience” that is not dead nor impossible to recreate in 2026. We just all need to learn to be decent Americans again.
Probably a similar environment to me. Around the peak of stranger danger + inefficient means of public transportation. So the world can feel extremely small.
I agree that big tech is and has been too powerful and too unregulated. But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements. Which is why I called it out.
I also didn't say the 80s were dark ages. I was also around back then and life was fun. But none of what I wrote was easy or possible 20 years ago. You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
>But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements.
It's not making everybody miserable "yet". But the current rate of change suggest that is the goal, and that's where the alarm comes from. We had the term "embrace, extend, extinguish" used to describe their business last decade and they clearly want to extend that philosphy to the consumers over time too. Some parts of tech are already arguably at the "extinguish" stage as we speak.
>You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
I feel inclined to nitpick a nitpicker who rejects a statement "there making everyone miserable" with "yes, but not everything is miserable".
Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.
However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.
The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).
There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.
Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)
Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.
>I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small.
>None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.
I also enjoy having those things, but we had all of them 15 years ago. Since then we got... algorithmic feeds?
You could do all those things 10 if not 15 years ago, with maybe the exception of the last one - mainly driven by the onset of the COVID pandemic forcing people to think differently about things for a brief time - in a much less hostile climate. And big tech isn't even required for let alone the best implementation of all those things, it's merely situated itself as the default.
None of the good things you described requires the existence of powerful private actors. The internet was created by public funded researchers, it is fundamentally decentralized. Wikipedia is a non-profit, video call could be p2p, etc.
> But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
It's not ranting to not ack every positive if the negative clearly outweighs it. I would much rather live 20 years ago than live now without a job. Wouldn't you?
Alternatively suppose you get to keep your job. What percentage of the population being unemployed do you think would make it worse for you personally than going back 20 years. Because there is going to be more unemployment and it will affect your environment unless you have got a private island (some people do - some ai owners do)
2005 you could do these things. Heck by 2005 I had moved to the remote mountains and still had high speed internet. 30 years ago these things weren't coming from big tech, they were coming from small scrapy startups that were going to replace evil entrenched institutions with something better.
Today, these things are actually LESS accessible due to enshitification from entrenched big tech companies.
You enjoy individual benefits and completely disregard the fact that electronics addiction and loneliness get worse year by year. You've been able to Google anything and chat with anyone back in 2010, all we've achieved since is making the average person spend 4-5h mindlessly doomscrolling on their phone and watching YouTube instead of having meaningful social interaction.
Also, we've got an entire generation growing up on ads, algorithmic brainrot, and now ai slop.
You're also forgetting algorithmic price fixing, algorithmic pricing, the billions in R&D into making internet platforms and services more addicting and effective at siphoning out your money, etc.
That's not true. All of the examples you mentioned are possible without Big Tech. There are F/LOSS and community supported alternatives for all of them. Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Relying on Big Tech is a personal choice. None of these companies are essential to humanity.
> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
That's not true either. All Alphabet and Meta products are tied to and supported in some way by advertising. All of these companies were/are part of government surveillance programs.
So you're highly overestimating the value of Big Tech, and highly underestimating the negative effects they've had, have, and will continue to have on humanity.
>Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Not only that, but big tech proprietary products have depended and depend heavily on F/LOSS and community supported code.
But seriously, this is a political problem, not a technological problem. The harms of technology are like the harms of the food industry or the gambling industry. Those of us who care, know these things can be bad for society, and we regulate them. Our society doesn’t care, we literally just legalized sports gambling, and the leagues have embraced it, forgetting the clear history of what happened last time.
Hating technology is like hating metal because you don’t like gun deaths. The problem is that our electorate has stopped caring about society.
They're not making my life miserable. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the tech we had in the 90s. You don't have to use social media. Advertising is annoying but it's not really any worse than TV ads back in the day.
The west was enjoying the peace dividend while Russians were dealing with the collapse of the USSR so the answer to your question depends on who you ask.
In most countries living in the woods on your own isn't allowed. You're forced to be connected if you want a job, social life, not be seen as a crazy person. You pretend like we're all living on some island where everything is merely decided by what you as an individual do.
In my home country several old people had to close their shop as they were forced to move to a digital accounting system, they didn't have a choice. My bank only allows me to go to their office without an appointment 1 day a week (maybe not even). My grandpa who doesn't have a phone (he never even got a landline), doesn't have internet and barely even drives, he has to depend on others to call and make appointments. If you want to apply for a job, you need internet connection. Many won't even hire you without owning a car (even if you could perfectly commute with a bicycle or public transport).
If you think we're at the end of this 'evolution', we're just getting started. My grandpa could perfectly do everything on his own until 2010, by 2018 it was getting almost impossible, 2026 he feels like a burden for not being into technology.
I do choose big tech less, but over time it finds its way to creep back in. Over time it becomes increasingly more difficult to engage with a society increasingly more dependent on it. It's not just stop using facebook and degoogle your phone.
unfortunately it will not be enough to just choose not to "do big tech" while the rest of society around you degrades. i.e. try going outside into the woods next to an ai datacenter and see if it really doesnt kill you.
It's not about the trustworthiness of the output. That won't improve, it's systemic. It's about the undue trust many people put in those inherently untrustworthy outputs (whereas untrustworthy doesn't always imply useless).
Verizon (and their MVNOs) eSIMs are the worst. Registration is tied to IMEI and enforced via the eSIM's EID. You can't use one if those "physical" eSIMs because if you give Verizon a donor IMEI during registration, the EID of the eSIM doesn't match and activation is rejected.
Verizon even does something like that with physical SIMs. My father got a new phone and we moved the SIM card to it. Some things worked, some didn't. Called customer service, they said you can't just move the SIM like that!
I was using Straight Talk prior to the Verizon acquisition and I've been holding-on to my one remaining pre-acquisition SIM like a rent controlled apartment. I've moved that SIM through a number of phones since I got it back in 2013. I absolutely hate that, moving forward, I have to get Verizon's permission to switch phones.
Interesting perspective, but, as with most writing, it seems to say more about the author of the article than the actual subject. Yes, I do get that that butthole is a way to capture attention of the reader and even with knowledge it does not help that you really, really want to see it ( with one exception ) for the analogy to work. Even if it is just a device ( and it does not appear to be ), it feels forced.
Since it's an AI company, and not actually doing anything by hand, it wouldn't surprise me if they came up with the name "manus" because it has "anus" in it, and then designed the hand logo due to the Latin meaning of the name. [this is a sarcasm, in case that was not clear]
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