Somehow, 2021 is actually off to a good start

Google workers have started to unionize, and someone made an AI Wojak generator

Jan 05, 2021

First, an AI Wojak generator

Not long ago, someone created a website that generates people who don’t exist. This technology has been a breakthrough in scaring boomers and also helping disinformation campaigns astroturf their movements. If you see a 10 follower account posting QAnon tweets and their profile pic is a crisp face with a blurred background, you can pretty much bet that they’re using This Person Does Not Exist. The tech itself is cool, but generally the uses of it kinda suck and I don’t think I’ve seen any positive results from it yet.

A much more wholesome and less exploitable use of neural nets is this Wojak generator. Now this is progress.

yonder mitch @unrealchill

Training a neural net to generate wojaks and well...

If you’re not terminally online enough to know what Wojak is, it’s a meme that was originally born on 4chan as the Feels Guy. Feels Guy was used to express emotions usually ranging between sadness, regret, and loneliness. You know, the only emotions that people on 4chan have. Given how simple and blank slate Feels Guy was, he was eventually thrown into the meat grinder of internet culture and rehashed to express just about everything that could be expressed.

While originally claimed by the alt-right, the left and other social progressives have used Wojak as a stand-in for their own politics too. There’s pro-BLM Wojaks, anarchist Wojaks, communist Wojaks, furry Wojaks, and anything else you can imagine. Now I guess there’s AI Wojaks too.

Here’s my favorite one that I’ve managed to generate. It doesn’t even look like a Wojak anymore. It’s just awful.

Is this website useful in the least? No. But are the resulting images going to be used to astroturf fascist conspiracy campaigns and trick people into believing that sock puppet accounts are being run by real humans? Probably no.

Not sure what to think about this

rev. howard arson @Theophite

staring at this sentence

I’m fine with robots shooting me for union organizing as long as they do it while dancing the Macarena

Reza Zadeh @Reza_Zadeh

It's pretty awesome how dancing makes robots less intimidating. Looking forward to seeing more nontrivial Machine Learning on these robots. Credit: Boston Dynamics.

My entire grift of shit-talking techbros would be over if they stopped posting oblivious nonsense for even a single day. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like that’ll ever happen. Lately a clip of Boston Dynamics robots dancing has been circulating around the web, with the caption saying that they look “less intimidating”.

Many of you might already know that Boston Dynamics has a history of working with the US military. One of their robots, BigDog, was funded by DARPA. The project was hilariously shelved after they figured out that BigDog was “too loud for combat”. Because apparently this fucking thing creeping through enemy positions with the stealth of four speedboat engines strapped to a tortured horse wasn’t going to work.

I don’t think that Boston Dynamics has any active military or law enforcement contracts at the moment, but there’s no reason to believe that won’t change. The current owners of BD have stated that they’re just interested in doing “whatever’s profitable”, which isn’t too reassuring.

In a better world we could have been excited about these machines freeing us from strenuous and dangerous labor and giving people more time to pursue their interests, but right now, I’m hoping that these things will only be used to take jobs from warehouse workers.

But if I do get headshotted by a police-funded Boston Dynamic robot for protesting while it does a little jiggle, I hope at least one of you takes a video and uploads it for the comedy value.

An actual good thing

Alphabet Workers Union @AlphabetWorkers

We're Alphabet workers. We’ve been organizing for over a year, & we’re finally ready to share why. This morning, we're announcing #AWU, the first union open to *all* workers at any Alphabet company. Every worker deserves a union—including tech workers.

nytimes.comHundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of ActivismThe creation of the union, a rarity in Silicon Valley, follows years of increasing outspokenness by Google workers. Executives have struggled to handle the change.

400 Google engineers and other employees have formed a union. That’s a lot! I’m hyped whenever even 10 people show up to our anarchist reading group over here.

The formation of the union has been surprising to everyone except actual tech workers, who by now are pretty sick of producing economy-breaking amounts of money for billionaires while having to deal with long overtime, sexual harassment at the workplace and being forced to take part in military contracts. Unions are often seen as only being important for getting wage increases, but worker power can change basically anything, and dear lord is there a lot that needs changing in tech.

News of Google workers unionizing has come with the usual wormbrained techbros claiming that Google workers don’t need or even deserve a union since they have cushier jobs than say, a coal mine worker. This is really funny because back in the day, people quite literally used to say that coal miners weren’t real workers. Time is a flat circle, and people who have something to lose if their workers organize will always rehash old excuses for why workers shouldn’t support each other.

The main thing that I feel is standing in the way of tech workers being able to unionize effectively is that we don’t really have a shared history of struggle yet. A story that I like to tell often is that when the NSW Government was trying to pass some shitty law that would lower pay for firefighters, the Firefighters Union quite literally came out in their fire trucks and hosed down the roof of a government building, with the politicians still inside. It was awesome. Everyone in the Firefighters Union is proud of it and it’s a story that they get to tell to newcomers.

Tech doesn’t really have any equivalent history to be proud of yet, so it makes it harder to convince people that we really are capable of doing cool things if we come together. But hopefully the Alphabet Workers Union will be a part of fixing that! I’m really keen to see how it develops.

Ticketmaster quite literally hacked a competitor

The link to the full article is here.

Not much to say about this other than I think it’s really funny. A couple years ago there was a huge amount of drama in the infosec community over the possibility of “hack-backs”, an idea that companies should hack hackers who hack them. Personally I think it’s a fabulous suggestion, and I’m disappointed to see Ticketmaster’s cowardly competitor taking this to court instead of just hiring their own hackers to retaliate.

Why does this dystopia have to be so boring?