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Why do the richest and powerful people on earth struggle to inform their decisions with basic ethics? Surely they could use their wealth and power against fascism instead of supporting it, it would show leadership.

Joe Steel says Tim Cook is failing us, and should be using the same skills he used to negotiate tax holidays to negotiate human dignity:

what I would like to see is Tim standing up for what he purports to believe in. Not speaking about things that have inspired him, or donating to charities as some kind of fascist-neutral offset, but devising a way to argue for the protection of human dignity for his customers and employees from this federal government. If he can transact a tax holiday, or tariff carve-outs, he can figure out what to wheel and deal to protect people. Many of whom are his employees and customers.

(From: Tim Cook Is Failing Us)

Big tech doesn't seem against building technology to aid deportation:

The Intercept posed the same question to each company, and requested a yes or no response: Would your company provide the Trump administration with data or other technical services to help facilitate mass deportation operations, either voluntarily, in response to a legal request, or via a paid contract?

(From: These Tech Firms Won’t Tell Us If They Will Help Trump Deport Immigrants)

Hadley Beeman of the Technical Architecture Group:

After reading Google’s announcement that they no longer plan to deprecate third-party cookies, we wanted to make our position clear.

(From: Third-party cookies have got to go | 2024 | Blog | W3C)

Every day, I get to work with people who do good work, who care about things like privacy, ethics and accessibility. We exist. We just are drowning, drowning in algorithmically-guarded walled gardens that are nothing more than quagmires of enshittification, of AI-generated content, of snake-oil solutions.

(From: Have we forgotten how to build ethical things for the web? - Nic Chan)

This piece from Nic resonated. There's a lot of good people in the web industry, doing good things. But there's also a lot of very bad practices that have an impact way beyond their initial uses. From content optimised for search engines (and thus not for humans) to extreme tracking (very far from just figuring out how many people visit which pages).

To avoid bad practices and build more ethically as an industry, I think what Nic shares would actually be the most effective way: to actively question practices and orders we receive as individuals in teams. In What kind of ethics do front-end developers need? I listed a bunch of other things that individuals in teams can make a fuss about.

Dan McQuillan says AI is algorithmic Thatcherism:

“Case after case, from Australia to the Netherlands, has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor. AI doesn't provide insights as it's just a giant statistical guessing game. What it does do is amplify thoughtlessness, a lack of care, and a distancing from actual consequences.”

(via Ethan Marcotte)