Why don't you ask Twitter, Tesla, or SpaceX employees how they feel about the situation.

I mean, there are far more nefarious things happening in big tech, so if the author feels they were somehow being "used" in an immoral sense, I think they should feel ok about themselves based on the types of knowingly wrong but technically legal things happening in large companies.

I bet those henchmen in Bond movies thought that the volcano base was merely a government-funded secret research facility.

sometimes fraud leads to positive outcomes.

imagine a world where SBF didn’t defraud the crypto world.

in that world anthropic may have not existed.

YES

No Genie finally out of the bottle joke?

Big tech companies are a scam in themselves. Doing something useful (that would pay itself by definition) while the main revenue is advertising? really?

I wonder what's even wrong about it. This is how funds normally operate: motivation for investors is upside, motivation for coders is to be able to code and get paid for it, motivation for people who run this circus, is fees.

And yes i can relate to that. In 26 years of career, about half of the money i made and all of the money i saved, came from 3 clients (over the course of less than 5 years), all 3 of them being scams - one swindled investors for a thing he knew can't work, another one did a legit thing but when he realised it failed, exited to a dumb megacorp and ran away (literally vanished) when they started to realise they've been duped, and one more was in crypto field and whole project - which to me, all the way until past release, looked like a legit porn site - had a goal of imitating activity/interest to boost value of a crypto token.

Even before i picked up coding - and i did it when i was in early teens around the fall of Communism - i knew coding as a separate field and a business was invented exactly for that purpose: it's a lot easier to steal money that way because it's a lot easier to inflate costs vs buying physical products.

No surprise the party is over. People can't be duped for too long.

honestly, what's the difference?

if you don't own the capital and have full autonomy, what's the difference on fraud (that you know nothing about), some imoral thing like flock/advertising/surveillance, or some inane thing like animating characters for ads, or mailing spam letters for a small business, etc, etc, etc?