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[...] Although Gregor volunteered at a community garden, gave millions of each year to humanitarian crisis organizations, and voted only for socialists, he did like to cause a bit of microsuffering now and then. He felt it kept the engineers on their toes.
i hate this so much lol it's trying so desperately to be funny but too unspecific to have any actual critique
If the garish exterior of Gregor's palace had thrown Niels' preconceptions, the interior only reaffirmed them. Once inside, Niels could see nothing in the house beyond white walls and a single overhead light in each room. The few windows in existence were so high up from the floor that they reminded Niels of a cathedral ... or a prison. There was no artwork, no photographs, no sign of a woman, pet, plant, or any possible sign of life.
"You're not one for decorating, are you?" said Niels, turning to Gregor with a smile designed to communicate friendliness.
"I like simplicity," Gregor said. "I don't really like ... things." The word lingered in the air between them.
"Except for an enormous house," Niels smirked.
i hate how this is written but this isn't a bad idea for a character. it just could be written in a much more matter-of-fact (and therefore darkly funny) way
He grabbed the bottle of wine from the wooden table and passed it to Niels, who let out a low whistle of appreciation. It was a Chateau Margaux -- the holy grail of red wine. Niels couldn't help but grin. He was going to crush his enemy at the negotiating table while trying one of the world's most highly regarded wines.
Niels believed that learning to appreciate wine was an apprenticeship akin to golf -- at first difficult to acquire, but then indispensable for business and generally agreeable as a pastime. And he had, in fact, come to love the taste of it. Chateau Margaux was a real bragging right, and he had never held its deep ruby on his tongue.
THIS IS SO BAD i wanna cry
"[...] I also asked that they teach him Spanish."
"Spanish?"
"In case we ever want to bring him back. We really need a more diverse workforce."
Bobby was always one step ahead.
actually pretty funny but would be so much funnier without the last line which just hits you over the head
"So if we divert them to Poodlekek, that town in the Philippines dies," Bobby said.
"Well, it's more like that town doesn't get computers for its schools."
"That town dies," Bobby said. "So, the question is: Is an Anahata engineer's life worth more than thousands of Filipinos?"
the dramatic repetition is pretty funny. really chimes with the character
"Gregor, didn't we discuss you building an army just a few weeks ago?"
"It will take some time," Gregor said. "And as I understood it, it was an army of engineering evangelists you were asking for, not an army of real soldiers."
"Clearly our army should be multipurpose," Bobby said. [...]
bobby gets the best lines
Finally, in the darkest hours of the morning, taurine and glucose dripping from their pores, they reached the last, dramatic step. The team typed in the final line of code. The cursor blinked back at them, pulsing like an explosive light. They turned to Gregor, who gave them the nod. The team lead put his index finger atop a single "enter" key, closed his eyes, and on the count of three, pushed.
??????????????
The challenge of the “knowledge problem” is just one example of a general truth: What we do and don’t know about the social (as opposed to the natural) world is not inherent in its nature, but is itself a function of social constructs. Much of what we can find out about companies, governments, or even one another, is governed by law. Laws of privacy, trade secrecy, the so-called Freedom of Information Act— all set limits to inquiry. They rule certain investigations out of the question before they can even begin. We need to ask: To whose benefit?
More benignly, perhaps, these companies influence the choices we make ourselves. Recommendation engines at Amazon and YouTube affect an automated familiarity, gently suggesting offerings they think we’ll like. But don’t discount the significance of that “perhaps.” The economic, political, and cultural agendas behind their suggestions are hard to unravel. As middlemen, they specialize in shifting alliances, sometimes advancing the interests of customers, sometimes suppliers: all to orchestrate an online world that maximizes their own profits.
So why does this all matter? It matters because authority is increasingly expressed algorithmically. Decisions that used to be based on human reflection are now made automatically. [...]
[...] In their race for the most profitable methods of mapping social reality, the data scientists of Silicon Valley and Wall Street tend to treat recommendations as purely technical problems. The values and prerogatives that the encoded rules enact are hidden within black boxes.