(e: apologies, this turned into more of a wall-of-text sneer than I meant to, but I’ll leave it for flavour and detail)

superglue the internet and thereby somehow make it available to people in the global south

as someone from (and living in) the global south (fairly familiar with but not myself at worse end of the resources spectrum), I cannot tell you how fucking ridiculous it sounds each time I see some North American Fuckwit post shit like that. whether it was the coiners going “banking the unbanked!!!” or the llm trash “can help you write professional!!!”, it’s always some Extremely Resourced thinking that just does. not. apply. this side of the world

I probably should make this a long detailed post sometime somewhere, demonstrating just how utterly fucking wrong some of these presumptions are, because oh god they’re many:

the amount of data it takes to communicate with this trash (in a number of markets, you get people buying data bundles in 10/50/100MB increments in day or hour units because that’s what they can afford at that point (there is another rant here to be had about exploitative behaviour on the part of telcos but separate rant))

just reaching the servers for this shit requires a good network connection, nevermind the interaction latency (higher base latencies = much longer cumulative = much slower “experience”… and this shit was already slow from US networks)

hell, just having the hardware that’s capable is sometimes a big blocker - so-called “feature phones” are somewhat common (how much depends on where you are). sideline mention: locally in some areas they’re called “trililis”, after the way they ring, which I fucking love. and even when you have users with smartphones, the devices are not necessarily good. sometimes it’s low resourced (because cost), sometimes it’s buggy as fuck (vendors, cost), sometimes it’s just plain fucked (because hard knocks life)

and don’t even get me goddamn started on the language. the phenomenon of nigerian english being Too Florid For USA has already featured here previously, but it goes so much beyond that. show me one of these fucking prompts working even half-well in Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsongo, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu, or Afrikaans. and those are just the other national (spoken/textual) languages here (in ZA). one single border away there’s 25+ more that I know of

and that’s to just look at the resource/technical/implementation side of it, and saying nothing about the Northern Saviour dynamic - so many of these fucking people advertise working for a non-profit, wearing it like a badge. wandering around DC a few years back, running into many of these, with so-called focuses on places in africa I’ve been to and worked in… it was surreal how wide the gap was between reality and what they had in their heads

So many techbros have decided to scrape the fediverse that they all blur together now… I was able to dig up this:

“I hear I’m supposed to experiment with tech not people, and must not use data for unintended purposes without explicit consent. That all sounds great. But what does it mean?” He whined.