Uriel238 [all pronouns]

The problem is the top is captured and has been for a very lobg time. The difference now is it’s mask-off and has lost the capacity to pretend to be public serving.

As the history of labor has shown us, it is very hard to organize bottom-up without leadership getting compromised or killed.

The left-leaning part of Silicon Valley is the countless technicians, programmers and developers employed there, not the upper management.

Even in San Francisco and Berkeley, the C-Suite are strictly FOX News Republicans.

It sounds like the EU courts are captured.

It turns out immense consolidated economic and political power are not just a US problem, but a whole world problem.

Wait until the EU learns one trillionaire has enough wealth to control all governments, and wreck not just the US.

Currently, the technology still needs human beings to filter out the unusable examples. And generating the content takes far more resources than hiring a human being to do the same thing.

An industrial revolution historian on Wired noted that when we invented the power loom, it produced better textiles than workers weaving it by hand. When Ford created the assembly line, it commonly produced better material goods (like cars) than a single person. The massive steel factories produced higher quality steel.

We’re not seeing the same increase of quality yet, and it appears we’re a long ways away from being able to scale up AI use for its implementation in most of the economy. It’s the difference between a aeolipile and a 19th century steam locomotive. Or between a manned mission to the moon, and an occupied Mars colony.

From what I’ve heard, even expert computer scientists point out that vibe code isn’t actually better code than human code. It’s not faster or more efficient or more elegant. It just looks better.

As for visual art, the process is still to describe in exact detail what you want (using LORAs and quantifiers to indicate how much you want of a feature) then generate dozens of examples, and have a human being curate the desired results…

…often picking those out from among numerous cosmic horrors that the human curator then cannot unsee.

Einstein had it right. The way to teach people is to get them to want to learn.

We had this coming once a college education became a necessary credential in order to earn a living (and since then, not actually earn a living). Once it became a necessity for survival, people went to college not to learn but as an additional bureaucratic hoop.

AI cheating is only the most recent iteration in a long line of tried and true methods, including providing sexual favors for your professor, having your fraternity / sorority vouch for your character and heritage, or having wealthy parental units make a sizeable donation to your university’s science department.

Once the university system survives the shock (which it might not, since civilization is mid-collapse), then academia can get back to teaching and developing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and not because it is a means to make people richer.

The one I heard was a fleet of Tesla self-driving taxis across the US by 2025.

Instead we have news reports of Teslas on autopilot killing people while the driver is distracted.

And yet the IPO of SpaceX was justified with the presumed future success of its space-based data center program.

In the days of Friendster and Myspace, I created a page on one of the other sites, whose name I can no longer remember. Then Facebook dominated and I just didn’t want to go through the effort again to create a new one.

Then Facebook started getting creepy. I remember for a while it had the social games (I only remember Cow Clicker by Ian Bogost, which was a parody of other social mutual-clicking games.

At other times there were tie-ins to other franchises. Coupons you could only get through your Facebook account. Since I wasn’t allowed to see anyone’s pages without an account of my own, I was never enticed to track my friends that way.

Eventually, Facebook went more and more full evil, and I just watched from afar.

All of his pardons so far have been political, that is to loyalists or those who were willing to pay him a bribe campaign contributions. If he were to make pardons of mercy, the public would suspect they were political merely based on the precedent he’s already set.

However, I can’t even imagine Trump willing to make mercy pardons at all. Trump really is that stuck in a transactional mindset, and cannot do a positive thing even as a publicity stunt. Every step he takes has to enrich him.

Ah, I see the confusion and misplaced a decimal point. Corrected.

In the aughts, I had accumulated about $30 $30K in debt, but managed it through consolidation programs, and got it down to about 3%.

Then the subprime mortgage crisis happened, and my creditors said sorry, but we’re fucking you over no matter what the contract says. Your interest rate is 12% and feel lucky we don’t raise it again.

Apparently companies will do that. I didn’t pay them at all and just waited seven years to wait out statute of limitations.

Zuckerberg doesn’t really want ruthless efficiency. He wants ruthless control.

One gets productivity from happy, well-cared-for workers. Like Bezos, he tries to micromanage them instead.

While there are a lot of war hawks in the GOP that wanted a war with Iran for Christmas, I’d hope that the sponsors of AIPAC came from a brighter sort, or at least were advised by think tanks enough to know how bad an idea war with Iran is.

The GOP hawks want a full-on invasion and regime change (more puppet-dictator than democracy, still, but certainly not the Islamic republic that is in place right now.) But that would involve a level of commitment akin to the what we saw with the Vietnam war, including conscription (id est the Draft), and that would be super unpopular in the states and would poison the US armed forces from within.

Prior presidents, including Republican ones didn’t push into Iran because all down the line our intelligence sector has been iterating how really-really bad an idea it is.

So when Trump did it, we quickly learned it was a bad idea. Who knew!? ( Narrator: Everybody. Everybody knew.)

But since Trump is in office, our government is currently immune to the advice of its intelligence officers. We may invade Iran with full boots on the ground, and we may invade Cuba. We may do both together and then watch in horror as China invades Taiwan, and the US is too overextended to do a thing.

As per the George W. Bush years, anything can happen.

It would be like the Onion to mock Trump for yet another promise in two weeks.

It’s not a strong like-the-Onion, but it is like the Onion.

This is the Star Trek episode What Are Little Girls Made Of. and Peter Thiel is an android from the future trying to make sure his timeline comes to pass.

I became a true believer in the pathway to a communist society. At very least I now understand how capitalism is so often doomed from within.

Trump totally wanted Greenland. It appears he was also super-eager to invade Iran, and needed just a little nudge from MBS and Netanyahu (though mostly from Jared Kushner).

The question is whether the far-right propaganda machine is effective, and can mask the affordability crisis, the disastrous elective war, the blatant corruption with hatred and male grievance. The machine has really drilled home that you’re a communist and effeminate if you dare vote against the godhead, even if doing so is in your own best interest or in the interest of accountability.

A lot more people are going to have to suffer and die before the revolution turns violent. And yet, if a non-violent revolution gains any ground, the ownership class will be happy to resort to violence to defend their wealth and power.

Bribeable officials appears to be the key ingredient for ideal sites for data centers.