It’s indeed a bit over-designed

that means also potentially stop selling their product in the country. Most big tech companies operate in open violation of GDPR and they are not held accountable only for political reasons. If the government has enough pressure to act, they might force Microsoft to bargain with a lot of leverage on the table. 1300 specialized jobs in Czech are no little business.

it’s not the USA. You can’t just do that. There are workers’ protections against stuff like this.

but also in the USA there’s a very strong tech worker movement. A book just came out to recount the story of the new wave. Look up Against The Oligarch

Most Italian women I know would have a panic attack if they went out with a tracksuit or a pajama like Americans do. That’s stuff that only happens in nightmares and if you’re 20 in a slum outside of Milan. Anyway Rome is not considered particularly fashionable in Italy. You find the highest attention for this stuff in most cities in the North, with Milan being the center of the fashion industry and smaller towns being more bougie, and then in the South with the “show off the bling bling” culture more common throughout the Mediterranean. In the North, the minimum is to dress like for a fashion show, in the South the minimum is to dress like for a wedding. In the center they care less.

True, but they are going to wear it with sneakers.

at the airport you also have higher chances to meet people from different countries and cultures with different standards for what is casual clothing. A fancy dress for an American is an outfit to go at the grocery store for an Italian or a French

lol, what are you even talking about? The tech sector is seeing a surge of organizing throughout the world and has plenty of unions, some even decades old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_sector#Romania

US society and politics descend from native tribes, not from Europe

Because it’s a normal, common interaction among humans, not particularly charged politically if there’s no power relationship between the two people. This guy is not asking for nudes to an intern, for instance.

Public exhibition of sexual desire is acceptable in most contexts. If there’s a topic of sexism, it is in the fact that men doing this is more acceptable than women doing it, but this should be addressed by removing the stigma from women doing it rather than adding stigma to men doing it.

But more generally, the policing of celebrities personal behavior to conform to strong social mores is a mostly protestant thing. In other cultures, especially before modernity or globalization, fame allowed you exactly to escape the commonplace social mores because you were outside of the community. Taking celebrities as role models and therefore asking them for moral behavior is a very American thing to do, even though after WW2 this system has been pushed throughout the world.

Pathetic maybe, but being pathetic is still not wrong. Creepy I wouldn’t say so. Creepy implies an indirectness and second motives: here he’s being very direct and his motives are clear.

I don’t ask for nudes, because I have no particular interest in nudes and I prefer when they are sent spontaneously. But I deliberately post horny memes on main, where I have professional contacts, to fight against cringe culture and sex-negativity.

what is the threshold for that is culturally subjective. In many contexts, asking for nudes on social media is a normal thing to do.

It’s puritan because it equates sexual desire with evil, unconditionally. It’s secular because puritanism is usually associated with protestantism, but in this case it finds its way through some kind of political moralism that is only indirectly connected with the pervasive puritanism in the American society

Most of my friends are women and it might surprise you, but I’m politically active in (sex-positive) feminist collectives. You really believe the whole world is like Brooklyn and that’s your problem.

I have a partner who happens to be American and hates the Puritanism back home that wants everybody to erase their desires. In the rest of the world, sexual desire is normal, even when you’re doing something serious with your life. And in the end, this guy’s request for nudes probably has nothing to do with sex, but with validation and proximity, but the idea that talks about sex are never about actual sex is probably inconceivable in this conversation.

By the way I’m not defending the guy. I’m attacking the pearl-clutching moralists who demand inhumane behavior from humans. The guy looks a bit like a loser for doing so, but there’s a difference between being light and being harmful.

Asking for nudes as being intrinsically sexist and objectifying is something that makes sense only in the American liberal middle-class discourse and mores. Outside, this stuff is a non sequitur.

not everybody is American

no view is radical. Political acts are radical or not. Going on a flotilla and risk your wellbeing is reasonably radical, come on.

Having a sexuality is normal. Joking about it in public is normal. Having a sexuality does not make you less moral. Having a sexuality is not in conflict with holding radical political values. Being heterosexual is not a sign of immorality. Joking in a stressful and grave situation is not immoral. Being sad and serious 24/7 doesn’t alleviate the consequences of a genocide. The puritanical values of the New York middle class are not universal despite the immense cultural power of the American empire.

If this guy sexually assaulted somebody, we can talk about it. But focusing on the evidence or testimonies, not on whatever this story means to you.

But I think your point reinforces the point of the article: since what you sell is meaningless, LLMs can be presented as “productive” because the fact they produce no meaningful value is irrelevant in the overall economic dynamic. I worked for a decade as a software developer and pretty much none of the software I wrote ever reached production with a meaningful number of real users. None of it was aimed at solving pre-existing problems. Software quality was only a performance to keep the devs happy. In those scenarios, an LLM would have had the same measure of productivity, because the actual software output was irrelevant: what mattered was marketing, sales, business relationships. For bigger tech companies now, what drives sales is lock-in, not quality, so also there the LLM productivity definition is irrelevant.