I agree. H1Bs are akin to indentured servants who do not have the ability to vote. Meanwhile, employers make large payments to politicians to keep the status quo.
What I dislike most is the cheating from H1Bs though. My friend in an AZ university described how foreigners were known to cheat on their exams based the clique of the country they came from. Similarly, I met an H1Bs who sends his work to Indian cheaper workers even though it is supposed to be confidential. They also collude to get their family and friends into the U.S.
Perplexity’s business model is still following the Google model of selling people to advertisers. The only LLM service with privacy protection I found so far is Claude. If I am paying for a subscription I would expect privacy to be included. How come people do not care?
I do not know about Perplexity because I avoid it. Instead, I prefer and pay for Claude over Perplexity because Claude offers actual privacy protections. All other services take in my data and use it to further train their models and that does not sit well with me because I had a stalker. It’s obvious that Perplexity is following the Google route of using people as products.
Just curious, what’s the connection between you avoiding services training their models based on your data, and you having had a stalker? What kind of stalkers you had to consider this an attack vector?
The bad experience made me realize how easily the data I put out there can be used against me or nefariously. If you have daughters you may know about people making indecent photos or videos using their images. Someone in Eastern Europe actually made an AI app to undress people. What happens when if I share more personal details and the data is no longer considered mine?
Do I need to really elaborate on all the bad experiences people, women in particular, face? I thought these were well known by now.
Someone who works at LinkedIn told me that Linkedin measures success by how many times a user opens the app. It would not surprise me if the numbers are exaggerated to make someone look good for a promotion. My take is that it must drive engagement somehow.
In a similar way, recruiters post ghost jobs to gather data and make companies look like they are growing.
I wonder what would happen if we purposely start polluting the training data? It may be too late for older technology but technology is always changing. If this is a way for me to protect my job and increase my value I actually consider doing this.
This is one of the most actionable and sound comments on this post. If interested, I always recommend the book “The Gulag Archpielago” because of all the repression examples and how to protect oneself. I wish you would speak with the other commenter who studied whistleblowers for 20 years.
I went to Japan recently and one of the most striking things to me was how easy it was to walk to places. Their infrastructure astounded me because it was set up with people in mind and not car companies.
My understanding (albeit only gathered from blogs/YouTube videos/Google Maps) is that the biggest difference is parking. On-street parking is mostly not allowed, free parking at businesses is mostly limited to car-centric ones like mechanics and dealerships, and you can't register a car without proving that you have a place to park it. Tens of millions of Japanese people living in less-dense areas have no problem with that, but in Tokyo it's prohibitively expensive for the average person due to land cost. This means that even in suburban areas, roads are narrower and everything is closer together.
When I worked in Japan for a year and lived in the company subsidized dormitory, a coworker half-joked that it cost more to house his car in a payed parking spot than it did to house himself in the dorm.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin control over 51% of all votes at Google. Similarly, Zuckerberg controls over 60% of the votes at Facebook.
I took a look at https://www.opensecrets.org/ and surprise surprise, Google and Facebook were major election fund contributors to Silicon Valley representatives, like Ro Khanna. This tells me who really holds power.
> Insiders Tell How IT Giant Favored Indian H-1B Workers Over US Employees
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-...
I do not understand why the H1B visas are skewed towards Indian men. It isn’t fair to Indian women nor people from other countries.
> The latest data showed around 72% of visas were issued to Indian nationals, followed by 12% to Chinese citizens. [2]
> About 70% of those who enter the US on H-1B visas are men, with the average age of those approved being around 33. [2]
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg87n2ml11o