6 ms·

Brazil bans Sam Altman's tech firm Tools for Humanity from paying for iris scans

240 points by ivanleoncz 2y ago

dsr_ 2y ago
Should have named the company "To Serve Humanity". Klaatu, barada nikto.
RedditUsername 2y ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Curing Malaria is cool but is there nothing in Seattle that he can contribute to? Nothing in this sentence gave you pause for a second thought? Would you replace Jonas Salk with a community garden? The criticism of Altman is apt because he hasn't achieved anything of definitive social value. (Not in a way someone else wouldn't have on a similar timeline.) Equating anything he's done to the eradication of malaria is pure scope failure.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - perihelions 2y ago
    Maybe let's not feed green-account trolls with words of calculated malice.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > let's not feed green-account trolls with words of calculated malice Let's "assume good faith" and "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize" [1]. They may be a troll, or an idiot. Or they may be reflecting an increasingly-prevalent view that people should stick to their "own" territory, for various definitions of "own." (Whether this fuel anti-immigrant xenophobia, colonist/coloniser moral binaries, or the dismissal or a disease eradicator.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - perihelions 2y ago
        I sincerely believe "obvious troll" was the strongest possible interpretation of that comment. edit: For with it's worth, "don't feed trolls" is also an HN guideline ("Don't feed egregious comments by replying").
- atonse 2y ago
  Through their work, the gates foundation has probably saved millions of lives, maybe tens of millions of lives, over the past 25 years. They’ve also been deeply involved with various education reforms in the US. They’re definitely active here.
  - flawn 2y ago
    OP should check out Effective Altruism & studies on what the most effective way to spend your resources on is.
  - poncho_romero 2y ago
    Their work in education has often been a mixed bag, sometimes spending huge amounts of money to enact initiatives based on little or no empirical research that ultimately hurt the students who have the misfortune of being saved by yet another tech billionaire who believes skill in computer programming and business mean they’re an authority on everything.
    - atonse 2y ago
      Yeah I agree, and chose my words carefully. Their education reform work in the US has been much more murky. Their work in Africa has had unambiguously huge benefits.
- simonw 2y ago
  Seattle is home to ~750,000 people. Malaria affects ~250,000,000 people a year. From https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants it looks like Seattle is the city that they've given the most grants to - 3,609 so far. https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://static.simonwillison.net/static/cors-allow/2025/Gates_Foundation.csv#/data/Gates_Foundation?_facet=GRANTEE+CITY&GRANTEE+CITY=Seattle&_sort_desc=DATE+COMMITTED https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://static.simonwillison....
- abixb 2y ago
  Given sama is a Bay Area native now, I think he might not feel as connected to Chicago or St Louis or the Midwest in general.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  Rousseau, Emile: "The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives. Abroad, the Spartan was ambitious, avaricious. iniquitous. But disinterestedness, equity, and concord reigned within his walls. Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors."
- Arainach 2y ago
  Others have called out how silly your comparison is, but Gates and Microsoft have contributed to plenty of local things. Bill and Melinda have given hundreds of millions to local universities [1], tens of millions to local schools [2], millions to local charities [3] and you'll find their names on the donor lists of plenty of local institutions (arts, etc.). You could have seen all of this with a single search for "Bill Gates Seattle donation" but instead came here to make malicious accusations. [1]: https://globalhealth.washington.edu/news/2017/01/25/seattle-times-gates-foundation-gives-279-million-university-washington https://globalhealth.washington.edu/news/2017/01/25/seattle-... [2]: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-releases/2000/03/alliance-for-education-and-the-seattle-public-schools https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-rel... [3]: https://www.uwkc.org/donate/gates-endowment/ https://www.uwkc.org/donate/gates-endowment/
  - codr7 2y ago
    Now find anything on that list where they didn't get something they wanted in return. They're building a brand, this is marketing.
    - Arainach 2y ago
      That is a ridiculously cynical take. You can build a brand for a lot cheaper than $300 million if that's your goal.
      - codr7 2y ago
        It's a VERY realistic take based on roughly 30 years in the trenches, that's what it is.
nostradumbasp 2y ago
Concerning isn't even the word. Looks like those military contracts and all that government money has really heated things up for OpenAI's goals for human civilization.
- avtar 2y ago
  So you don’t think Sam Altruistic Altman is really just in it for helping out the human race by creating “a global identity system through scanning people's irises”…?
  - luqtas 2y ago
    yes? all hardware they use is free of conflict minerals, all energy consumed on their servers is clean and has no impact on fauna e flora, copyright with all the possible training data they need is already solved in a bipartisan way AND their company pays no more than 7:1 ratio [0] for CEOs vs. bottom of chain workers /s there's also the need for a global identity controlled by a private company of country X, as we are close to have no borders worldwide (continents drift soon will merge everything into a new Pangaea, gotta be prepared) [0] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/kiatpongsan%20norton%202014_f02b004a-c2de-4358-9811-ea273d372af7.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/kiatpongsan%20no...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - nostradumbasp 2y ago
    Thanks for calming me down. I totally forgot about how nothing absolutely horrible could be done to private citizens from generative AI implemented at a tremendous scale. I am also truly super glad we have so many tech billionaires now so openly participating in governments foreign and domestic. I was almost concerned for a moment. Have to run, I have to go ask Chat what I should eat for dinner, intimate questions about my current prescription medications leading me to worry about these things, my idea for a great start up company, and how to respond to my current boss about our financial situation. Everything is fine.
cozzyd 2y ago
He didn't name it OpenEye?
- rad_gruchalski 2y ago
  No, they called it Open Iris: https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb leads to https://github.com/worldcoin/open-iris https://github.com/worldcoin/open-iris. But why did they wrap the whole thing up under „worldcoin”…
yapyap 2y ago
Good on Brazil
idlewords 2y ago
Calling his firm "Tools for Humanity" shows an unusual level of self-awareness for Altman.
- saghm 2y ago
  Now I'm worried about all of us becoming pawns in a proxy war between them and Cards Against Humanity.
- hinkley 2y ago
  How to Serve Man.
  - RainyDayTmrw 2y ago
    In case anyone is not aware, this is a reference to an episode of The Twilight Zone[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Serve... for dinner!
    - eth0up 2y ago
      Perspective is strange. I suspect we're not far from a time when a show such as the Brady Bunch will be as bizarre to the modern mind as the most severe Twilight Zone episode was in its time.
      - hinkley 2y ago
        The Twilight Zone is a rebootable property and we have been overdue. Shit, I just looked and I forgot Jordan Peele took a stab at it. During Covid. He should get a do-over.
hinkley 2y ago
I remember when Minority Report came out how many people got sucked in by the Tom Cruise and the Max von Sidow vibes, the Oscar-winning histrionics of the imperiled character, or the sexy special effects and completely missed the subtext around all of this. That everywhere you went, They knew who you are and what you do. I was shocked that people I talked to didn't notice that every vertical surface in the mall had advertisements on it. Asking his new eyeballs if he needed more khakis? Did we not watch the same movie?
- trhway 2y ago
  Well, the every wall is just for movie visuals. In reality it will be projected right onto your retina or, using neuralink, right into the visual cortex or may be even deeper than that.
  - JoshTko 2y ago
    Future "free" LLM models will recommend advertisers products
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Our researchers have found that we can sell up to 80% of the user's visual field without triggering seizures.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > Did we not watch the same movie? "My team and I are proud to share with the world something special we've been working hard on. We are finally ready to launch the Torture Nexus, inspired by the unforgettable technology in the classic scifi novel 'Don't create the Torture Nexus'"
adamsch 2y ago
I walked by one of these scanning offices in São Paulo a few weeks ago and it looked completely dystopian. Didn't have the impression that the people who showed up there were well informed on what they were signing up for
- soneca 2y ago
  There is one near home. When I passed by I saw one man stopping a couple in the street and explaining if they couldn’t go inside and give him the money. Sort of like a beggar, but asking the couple to go inside, scan their iris then giving him the money (since it’s free money anyway). I am not sure how that would work in practice, since I just passing by. But they were paying USD50~60 , a significant amount to make the ask worth it.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    50USD? What could possibly be the value of those iris scans? I don't get it.
    - defrost 2y ago
      The bulk collection contains patterns. How much iris variation (within that population) exists, are there any repeats (or repeats below threshold), is there any correlation between (say) iris pattern categories and facial pattern categories, etc. Someone may think these are useful questions and this may be the first of many such data collection actions about the globe.
knotimpressed 2y ago
I wonder what Altman is thinking. From the outside it seems clear he’s chasing profit, but I wonder if he honestly believes something this concerning will be a force for good and actually used to benefit humanity as a whole.
- gyomu 2y ago
  We've had plenty of insights on what Altman is thinking from one of the people who spent lots of time at his side and know him best: pg. Lots of pg tweets/comments over the years about how the thing Sam is best at, and what drives him the most, is climbing up ladders and acquiring power.
  - ivanleoncz 2y ago
    "climbing up ladders and acquiring power" He urgently came to the previous administration along with a committee, presenting a plan for the construction of Nuclear Power Plants, focused on serving datacenters for AI, with the excuse that, if the US don't do this, China will do, and he or his team not even consulted the IAEA for this topic. He might have a point but, still looks like the Salesperson of a Insurance company. The idea is not absurd, but the approach and the speech, seems quite cheap. I see nothing on his talks that are genuine about solving crucial problems of the humanity... Clear to me that he's very into keeping the costumer (investors) satisfied.
dom96 2y ago
The sad thing is that this really does solve a problem that GenAI is creating. Sam Altman is selling the poison as well as the cure. I think we will eventually all need to join social networks that are guaranteed to be composed of real humans, and for that we'll need a way to prove someone is a real human. I think passports/government IDs are a good enough solution for this and we don't need to be scanning people's irises.
- nostradumbasp 2y ago
  I think it's important to remark that this "could" help solve part of the problems associated with Generative AI. It could also, without many new laws and regulations, be used to create many new problems unique to generative AI.
- CTDOCodebases 2y ago
  > I think we will eventually all need to join social networks that are guaranteed to be composed of real humans, and for that we'll need a way to prove someone is a real human. Why discriminate?
  - malfist 2y ago
    Because ai slop is not meaningful content
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      And it can easily outnumber. I think ip blocks are good enough to identify a million ai accounts, no need to do eyeballs
- franktankbank 2y ago
  How does scanning someone's eyeballs help anyway? It's not unique if its stolen. Then what?
  - theptip 2y ago
ivanleoncz 2y ago
Sometimes I think we are in a kind of civilization downgrade, but no one wants to talk about it. This initiative by Sam, proves my (not so wacky) theory. Funny though is that if you share this kind of stuff on Linkedin, people just look away. Indeed, it's not a place to say what you think: it's all about look nice and please anyone who's capable of giving you a job, even if it's some Big Tech dictator.
- bogdan 2y ago
  I imagine, most people as myself, would rather avoid such controversial conversations on what's essentially their CV.
  - ivanleoncz 2y ago
    I understand. There might be great reasons to not step up and say what is wrong, even when the truth is obvious... Not the objective of the post but, it still creeps me out that, we don't have on Linkedin, a space to say what what it's (undoubtly) wrong. It's part of our daily lives as workers, to say that we have an elephant in the room, even if it's with a company and it's eerie intentions towards the humanity, just to please shareholders and keep its value in the stock market.
  - therealpygon 2y ago
    Fear is a great motivator to stay silent, which should be bothering people…especially people claiming to want government to stay out of their personal lives. Sadly, in the end, people are generally more selfish than righteous.
tim333 2y ago
>... The ban, effective from Saturday, aims to ensure individuals' free will remains uninfluenced... As a happy worldcoiner I'd much rather be able to use my free will to sign up with who I like rather than having ill informed government officials try to ban transactions between informed, otherwise happy adults because why not stick your foot in other people's business?
- bookaway 2y ago
  And as a happy coinless worlder I'd much rather use my free will to prevent you from enabling systems being built that could endanger my free will and that of my progenies' in the future, and will exercise said free will to encourage government officials--on a case-by-case basis when necessary-- to ban said trash.

240 points by ivanleoncz 2y ago

dsr_ 2y ago

Should have named the company "To Serve Humanity". Klaatu, barada nikto.

RedditUsername 2y ago

[flagged]

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Curing Malaria is cool but is there nothing in Seattle that he can contribute to? Nothing in this sentence gave you pause for a second thought? Would you replace Jonas Salk with a community garden? The criticism of Altman is apt because he hasn't achieved anything of definitive social value. (Not in a way someone else wouldn't have on a similar timeline.) Equating anything he's done to the eradication of malaria is pure scope failure.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- perihelions 2y ago
  Maybe let's not feed green-account trolls with words of calculated malice.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > let's not feed green-account trolls with words of calculated malice Let's "assume good faith" and "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize" [1]. They may be a troll, or an idiot. Or they may be reflecting an increasingly-prevalent view that people should stick to their "own" territory, for various definitions of "own." (Whether this fuel anti-immigrant xenophobia, colonist/coloniser moral binaries, or the dismissal or a disease eradicator.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - perihelions 2y ago
      I sincerely believe "obvious troll" was the strongest possible interpretation of that comment. edit: For with it's worth, "don't feed trolls" is also an HN guideline ("Don't feed egregious comments by replying").
atonse 2y ago
Through their work, the gates foundation has probably saved millions of lives, maybe tens of millions of lives, over the past 25 years. They’ve also been deeply involved with various education reforms in the US. They’re definitely active here.
- flawn 2y ago
  OP should check out Effective Altruism & studies on what the most effective way to spend your resources on is.
- poncho_romero 2y ago
  Their work in education has often been a mixed bag, sometimes spending huge amounts of money to enact initiatives based on little or no empirical research that ultimately hurt the students who have the misfortune of being saved by yet another tech billionaire who believes skill in computer programming and business mean they’re an authority on everything.
  - atonse 2y ago
    Yeah I agree, and chose my words carefully. Their education reform work in the US has been much more murky. Their work in Africa has had unambiguously huge benefits.
simonw 2y ago
Seattle is home to ~750,000 people. Malaria affects ~250,000,000 people a year. From https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants it looks like Seattle is the city that they've given the most grants to - 3,609 so far. https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://static.simonwillison.net/static/cors-allow/2025/Gates_Foundation.csv#/data/Gates_Foundation?_facet=GRANTEE+CITY&GRANTEE+CITY=Seattle&_sort_desc=DATE+COMMITTED https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://static.simonwillison....
abixb 2y ago
Given sama is a Bay Area native now, I think he might not feel as connected to Chicago or St Louis or the Midwest in general.
Barrin92 2y ago
Rousseau, Emile: "The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives. Abroad, the Spartan was ambitious, avaricious. iniquitous. But disinterestedness, equity, and concord reigned within his walls. Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors."
Arainach 2y ago
Others have called out how silly your comparison is, but Gates and Microsoft have contributed to plenty of local things. Bill and Melinda have given hundreds of millions to local universities [1], tens of millions to local schools [2], millions to local charities [3] and you'll find their names on the donor lists of plenty of local institutions (arts, etc.). You could have seen all of this with a single search for "Bill Gates Seattle donation" but instead came here to make malicious accusations. [1]: https://globalhealth.washington.edu/news/2017/01/25/seattle-times-gates-foundation-gives-279-million-university-washington https://globalhealth.washington.edu/news/2017/01/25/seattle-... [2]: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-releases/2000/03/alliance-for-education-and-the-seattle-public-schools https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-rel... [3]: https://www.uwkc.org/donate/gates-endowment/ https://www.uwkc.org/donate/gates-endowment/
- codr7 2y ago
  Now find anything on that list where they didn't get something they wanted in return. They're building a brand, this is marketing.
  - Arainach 2y ago
    That is a ridiculously cynical take. You can build a brand for a lot cheaper than $300 million if that's your goal.
    - codr7 2y ago
      It's a VERY realistic take based on roughly 30 years in the trenches, that's what it is.

nostradumbasp 2y ago

Concerning isn't even the word. Looks like those military contracts and all that government money has really heated things up for OpenAI's goals for human civilization.

avtar 2y ago
So you don’t think Sam Altruistic Altman is really just in it for helping out the human race by creating “a global identity system through scanning people's irises”…?
- luqtas 2y ago
  yes? all hardware they use is free of conflict minerals, all energy consumed on their servers is clean and has no impact on fauna e flora, copyright with all the possible training data they need is already solved in a bipartisan way AND their company pays no more than 7:1 ratio [0] for CEOs vs. bottom of chain workers /s there's also the need for a global identity controlled by a private company of country X, as we are close to have no borders worldwide (continents drift soon will merge everything into a new Pangaea, gotta be prepared) [0] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/kiatpongsan%20norton%202014_f02b004a-c2de-4358-9811-ea273d372af7.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/kiatpongsan%20no...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- nostradumbasp 2y ago
  Thanks for calming me down. I totally forgot about how nothing absolutely horrible could be done to private citizens from generative AI implemented at a tremendous scale. I am also truly super glad we have so many tech billionaires now so openly participating in governments foreign and domestic. I was almost concerned for a moment. Have to run, I have to go ask Chat what I should eat for dinner, intimate questions about my current prescription medications leading me to worry about these things, my idea for a great start up company, and how to respond to my current boss about our financial situation. Everything is fine.

cozzyd 2y ago

He didn't name it OpenEye?

rad_gruchalski 2y ago
No, they called it Open Iris: https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb leads to https://github.com/worldcoin/open-iris https://github.com/worldcoin/open-iris. But why did they wrap the whole thing up under „worldcoin”…

yapyap 2y ago

Good on Brazil

idlewords 2y ago

Calling his firm "Tools for Humanity" shows an unusual level of self-awareness for Altman.

saghm 2y ago
Now I'm worried about all of us becoming pawns in a proxy war between them and Cards Against Humanity.
hinkley 2y ago
How to Serve Man.
- RainyDayTmrw 2y ago
  In case anyone is not aware, this is a reference to an episode of The Twilight Zone[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Serve... for dinner!
  - eth0up 2y ago
    Perspective is strange. I suspect we're not far from a time when a show such as the Brady Bunch will be as bizarre to the modern mind as the most severe Twilight Zone episode was in its time.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      The Twilight Zone is a rebootable property and we have been overdue. Shit, I just looked and I forgot Jordan Peele took a stab at it. During Covid. He should get a do-over.

hinkley 2y ago

I remember when Minority Report came out how many people got sucked in by the Tom Cruise and the Max von Sidow vibes, the Oscar-winning histrionics of the imperiled character, or the sexy special effects and completely missed the subtext around all of this. That everywhere you went, They knew who you are and what you do. I was shocked that people I talked to didn't notice that every vertical surface in the mall had advertisements on it. Asking his new eyeballs if he needed more khakis? Did we not watch the same movie?

trhway 2y ago
Well, the every wall is just for movie visuals. In reality it will be projected right onto your retina or, using neuralink, right into the visual cortex or may be even deeper than that.
- JoshTko 2y ago
  Future "free" LLM models will recommend advertisers products
- hinkley 2y ago
  Our researchers have found that we can sell up to 80% of the user's visual field without triggering seizures.
sangnoir 2y ago
> Did we not watch the same movie? "My team and I are proud to share with the world something special we've been working hard on. We are finally ready to launch the Torture Nexus, inspired by the unforgettable technology in the classic scifi novel 'Don't create the Torture Nexus'"

adamsch 2y ago

I walked by one of these scanning offices in São Paulo a few weeks ago and it looked completely dystopian. Didn't have the impression that the people who showed up there were well informed on what they were signing up for

soneca 2y ago
There is one near home. When I passed by I saw one man stopping a couple in the street and explaining if they couldn’t go inside and give him the money. Sort of like a beggar, but asking the couple to go inside, scan their iris then giving him the money (since it’s free money anyway). I am not sure how that would work in practice, since I just passing by. But they were paying USD50~60 , a significant amount to make the ask worth it.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  50USD? What could possibly be the value of those iris scans? I don't get it.
  - defrost 2y ago
    The bulk collection contains patterns. How much iris variation (within that population) exists, are there any repeats (or repeats below threshold), is there any correlation between (say) iris pattern categories and facial pattern categories, etc. Someone may think these are useful questions and this may be the first of many such data collection actions about the globe.

knotimpressed 2y ago

I wonder what Altman is thinking. From the outside it seems clear he’s chasing profit, but I wonder if he honestly believes something this concerning will be a force for good and actually used to benefit humanity as a whole.

gyomu 2y ago
We've had plenty of insights on what Altman is thinking from one of the people who spent lots of time at his side and know him best: pg. Lots of pg tweets/comments over the years about how the thing Sam is best at, and what drives him the most, is climbing up ladders and acquiring power.
- ivanleoncz 2y ago
  "climbing up ladders and acquiring power" He urgently came to the previous administration along with a committee, presenting a plan for the construction of Nuclear Power Plants, focused on serving datacenters for AI, with the excuse that, if the US don't do this, China will do, and he or his team not even consulted the IAEA for this topic. He might have a point but, still looks like the Salesperson of a Insurance company. The idea is not absurd, but the approach and the speech, seems quite cheap. I see nothing on his talks that are genuine about solving crucial problems of the humanity... Clear to me that he's very into keeping the costumer (investors) satisfied.

dom96 2y ago

The sad thing is that this really does solve a problem that GenAI is creating. Sam Altman is selling the poison as well as the cure. I think we will eventually all need to join social networks that are guaranteed to be composed of real humans, and for that we'll need a way to prove someone is a real human. I think passports/government IDs are a good enough solution for this and we don't need to be scanning people's irises.

nostradumbasp 2y ago
I think it's important to remark that this "could" help solve part of the problems associated with Generative AI. It could also, without many new laws and regulations, be used to create many new problems unique to generative AI.
CTDOCodebases 2y ago
> I think we will eventually all need to join social networks that are guaranteed to be composed of real humans, and for that we'll need a way to prove someone is a real human. Why discriminate?
- malfist 2y ago
  Because ai slop is not meaningful content
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    And it can easily outnumber. I think ip blocks are good enough to identify a million ai accounts, no need to do eyeballs
franktankbank 2y ago
How does scanning someone's eyeballs help anyway? It's not unique if its stolen. Then what?
- theptip 2y ago

ivanleoncz 2y ago

Sometimes I think we are in a kind of civilization downgrade, but no one wants to talk about it. This initiative by Sam, proves my (not so wacky) theory. Funny though is that if you share this kind of stuff on Linkedin, people just look away. Indeed, it's not a place to say what you think: it's all about look nice and please anyone who's capable of giving you a job, even if it's some Big Tech dictator.

bogdan 2y ago
I imagine, most people as myself, would rather avoid such controversial conversations on what's essentially their CV.
- ivanleoncz 2y ago
  I understand. There might be great reasons to not step up and say what is wrong, even when the truth is obvious... Not the objective of the post but, it still creeps me out that, we don't have on Linkedin, a space to say what what it's (undoubtly) wrong. It's part of our daily lives as workers, to say that we have an elephant in the room, even if it's with a company and it's eerie intentions towards the humanity, just to please shareholders and keep its value in the stock market.
- therealpygon 2y ago
  Fear is a great motivator to stay silent, which should be bothering people…especially people claiming to want government to stay out of their personal lives. Sadly, in the end, people are generally more selfish than righteous.

tim333 2y ago

>... The ban, effective from Saturday, aims to ensure individuals' free will remains uninfluenced... As a happy worldcoiner I'd much rather be able to use my free will to sign up with who I like rather than having ill informed government officials try to ban transactions between informed, otherwise happy adults because why not stick your foot in other people's business?

bookaway 2y ago
And as a happy coinless worlder I'd much rather use my free will to prevent you from enabling systems being built that could endanger my free will and that of my progenies' in the future, and will exercise said free will to encourage government officials--on a case-by-case basis when necessary-- to ban said trash.