Anti-Corporate Movement

Got an update on a privacy policy that stated they were doing batch arbitration now. Sounds like it's trying to thwart the idea that if a bunch of users agree to go to arbitration you can drain a company's bank accounts.

(h) Batch Arbitration. To increase the efficiency of administration and resolution of arbitrations, you and ElevenLabs agree that in the event that there are 100 or more individual Requests of a substantially similar nature filed against ElevenLabs by or with the assistance of the same law firm, group of law firms, or organizations, within a 30 day period (or as soon as possible thereafter), JAMS shall: (i) administer the arbitration demands in batches of 100 Requests per batch (plus, to the extent there are less than 100 Requests left over after the batching described above, a final batch consisting of the remaining Requests); (ii) appoint one arbitrator for each batch; and (iii) provide for the resolution of each batch as a single consolidated arbitration with one set of filing and administrative fees due per side per batch, one procedural calendar, one hearing (if any) in a place to be determined by the arbitrator, and one final award (“Batch Arbitration”).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1153465

In the second finding of the 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer survey, we found that the more maintainers are paid, the more improvements they make to their projects.

...

In the previous finding, we reported that 60% of maintainers describe themselves as unpaid hobbyists, and 36% of maintainers describe themselves as paid (professional or semi-professional) maintainers, earning some or all of their income from their open source work.

...

When you break down the paid maintainers into professional (earning most or all of their income from their maintenance work) and semi-professional (earning some of their income from maintaining projects), it becomes clear that the amount of money a maintainer is making for their work has a large impact on the types of improvements they are able to make. Across nearly all major categories, professional maintainers are on average over 20 percentage points more likely to make key improvements to their projects than semi-professional maintainers.

...

In the previous study, 81% percent of professional maintainers earning most or all of their income from maintaining projects spend more than 20 hours a week maintaining their projects. This year, the percentage was nearly identical (82%).

Conversely, in last year’s survey, we found that the vast majority of unpaid hobbyists spend ten hours or less per week on their maintenance work (81%). This percentage also stayed consistent in this year’s survey, with 78% of unpaid hobbyist maintainers working ten hours or less per week.

...

We’ve heard from many maintainers that how they are paid for their work also matters. For many maintainers there is a huge difference between getting a one-time “airdrop” of money, perhaps right after a high profile incident where people are paying attention to their projects, compared to ongoing recurring income that they can count on. So this year for the first time we asked maintainers to tell us whether they would prefer to get predictable monthly income or a one-time lump payment.

An overwhelming majority of maintainers prefer to receive predictable monthly income, with 81% choosing that option.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20072658

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/10771034

Personal review:

A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he's managed to condense explaining "enshittification" from 45+ minutes down to around 15.

As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it's not exactly clear where he's going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don't want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won't directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways.

I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we're "in" on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up.

I've become very biased towards Cory Doctorow's ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20429091

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20410864

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2776160

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19624344

Ex-Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president Chris Deering does not believe recent layoffs across the games industry have been a result of corporate greed. Instead, workers who have lost their jobs should "drive an Uber" or "go to the beach for a year" until employment settles.

Deering was a guest on games writer Simon Parkin's podcast My Perfect Console, where the pair discussed games industry layoffs.

"I don't think it's fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed," said Deering. "I always tried to minimise the speed with which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle and I didn't want to end up having the same problems that Sony did in Electronics."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19519945

Taux the rich: Petition (EU)

Hi there, if you are from one of the EU countries that didn't reach the threshold (see on the page), please sign this petition. ECI (European Citizen Initiatives) are petitions that forces the EU to take a decision on the matter if they reach 1 000 000 signatures.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/41690098

"workers remain on strike on Friday morning and have taken the keys to hundreds of vehicles".

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/22351831

geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/2628925

Stop Killing Games is an European Citizens Initiative aiming to keep games playable even after their developers and publishers have stopped supporting it.

Only two days ago Denmark passed its respective threshold (I reported) and just last night the Netherlands joined the club. Both countries did so after two weeks of virtually no movement in their numbers.

To get the initiative onto the EUs agenda so it has the chance to become EU law, it has to both reach 1 million signatures total and minimum thresholds in at least 7 countries. The Netherlands is the 6th country to pass the threshold. So who will be the 7th? Currently it looks like Ireland (69%) followed by Belgium (66%), France (64%) and Austria (62%). But as Poland has shown, things can change quickly.

All that has happened already, happened in only just over one month since the initiative started accepting signatures showing a remarkable momentum. So let's keep the momentum going. If you haven't already signed and are a citizen of the EU (even one abroad) consider signing the initiative.

Even if you are from a country that already reached the threshold you can still sign. Your signature counts to the 1 million goal.

Relevant links:

• Sign the initiative here
• Initiative homepage
• Video FAQ by the initiator on YouTube
  • The same video on invidious

PS: Hi LTT crew. I'm honoured to be your source when reporting on the initiative. But maybe consider also citing the primary sources. The link "Sign the initiative here" leads directly to the page of the European Commission, which has even more up to date numbers than my screenshot.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13094630

Link to sign EU initiative: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

Guides on how to sign EU initiative: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/21533341

You wouldn't pirate a medicine, would you?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12806999

cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/30373519

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/24295859

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19015980

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16483931

Google has to face a class action lawsuit over Chrome’s data collection

"Google will have to face a class action lawsuit that accuses it of collecting users’ data through Chrome without their consent. In a decision on Tuesday, a federal appeals court reversed a December 2022 ruling that dismissed the case, saying the lower court should’ve reviewed Google’s disclosures and determined “whether a reasonable user reading them would think that he or she was consenting to the data collection.”...

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/23949437