Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Just don't be an ass to people who you have locker room talk with and they won't have shit to say later.

Sure, there's always those lizard-brained people who will smile then stab you in the back, but they could also just as easily poison your dog or cut your brake lines vs. ruin your life on social media.

These are the choices we make. Or we can live as a hermits Ted Kaczynski-style.

Well, poisoning my dog or vandalizing my car is illegal. Whipping up a twitter mob is legal and highly encouraged by an enormous number of people.

I try not to be an ass to anyone, but jealousy and envy exists. It's now impossible for me to relax around some acquaintances who are unemployed while I pull in a big tech salary.

All in all, I really made my mind up on this issue back during the BLM protests. This cancel culture is orwellian, evil, and directly contrary to what made the US a technological powerhouse. And more and more people are being radicalized by it, and the alarming number of apologists, every day.

The real scary truth is that people probably don't care as much about you as you might think they do. The way you frame the problem, assigning envy of your success to acquaintances by default, worrying about negative attention, reiterating how hard you've worked, leads me to believe that self-importance might be the underlying issue that saps your enjoyment of life. I say this not as a personal attack, but as a cautionary observation.

I know it's hard to deal with a fear just with rational discourse. But if you have a good salary and work in tech, you are probably getting more out of the dystopia than the dystopia is getting out of you. So just learn to enjoy life without worrying about hypothetical events that remain statistically unlikely even by the most conservative estimation in a world of billions. Anything else is self-indulgent.

I appreciate the comment, and you're right. It doesn't make any sense for me to worry about this type of stuff, and it does likely spring from my own self-centeredness. It's certainly easy to get caught up in the negative headlines these days, which is why I try to stick to HN - every once in a while, an article like this slips through and triggers me, I guess. Maybe step one towards changing my outlook would be changing my HN username...

I've unfortunately have discovered that the people who I thought to be friends (smart, funny, kind) have completely changed their attitude once they found out my employer. Now I have to watch out everything I say around them because it's all assumed to come from a place of evil intent and interpreted in the worst case possible.

Lesson learned: do not share your work place with anyone you want to keep being friends with, at least not people that aren't similarly employed/earn similarly.

Do you work at Palantir or the GOPs social media department or something? Because that sounds extreme and can’t be just about income levels

BTW it’s freeing coming from a country where discussing income and money is taboo. I don’t even know what my parents earn. It has its downsides as well, but it’s nice not even being able to judge.

It happens on HN as well, if you work for Google or FB.

Never seen that. Lots of skepticism and animosity to the companies themselves, which is at it should given their position. Never seen it directed at individuals just for being employed at either of those, though.

Don’t be surprised if no one appreciates or even cares about your work besides your employer. It’s part of the package.

Deep fakes are coming and with it a tsunami of outrageous videos that have no connection to reality.

People will learn to distrust video evidence.

I think this could extend to major public figures, but offers no recourse to the average joe who doesn't have 100 hours of talking footage online. Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce. Anyone who doesn't have this much data, you could reliably assume the content is real.

"Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce."

I wonder if this is going to hold, especially as 4K video is becoming the norm.

It won't, as with everything in DL the models are becoming much better at training on a large amount of data and fine-tuning on very little. I am pretty sure in 1-2 years we will have semi-convincing one-shot learning deepfakes models with 5-10 pictures you could get on the person's Facebook profile.

"Deepfakes require a lot of data to produce."

Are you sure? https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia

The result is not perfect but it could be with a few more photos.

And realistic synthetic voice generation is not so far away in the future.

> 100 hours of talking video

You mean like zoom recordings? Yeah nobody has those.

Haha, good point. I didn't even really think of that.

If this continues for another 10 years I’m buying a farm far away from anyone with a Twitter account.