ozmodiar

I think China has too much to gain by looking like the word's stable alternative to America. What really gets me depressed is their current trajectory towards cultural homogeneity, even internally. There seems to be a real push to calcify the Han identity. I don't know why dictators are so drawn to homogenizing their own cultures when nature itself seems to point to diversity as strength. It leaves me still kind of hoping America is somehow able to pull its head out of its ass, but they'll have to overcome their own oligarchy and entrenched structures - Trump was a symptom.

I've certainly noticed a seismic shift in how bad support and updates have gotten with some 3rd party vendors we use, and the answer they come back with is always that they're experimenting with AI. Not saying AI isn't part of the job now, but it is getting seriously over hyped and over extended.

I'm having trouble thinking of groups of people who are even able to change members outside of modern capitalism. Through most of human history we've been stuck with our group or tribe. Heck, I see people stick with groups that are toxic to them just out of the sense of connection it gives.

I am both shocked and not shocked at how many people support incel garbage reasoning here.

I think the tragic thing is that not everyone has a price, just the vast majority.

It doesn't need to be most, it just needs to be enough. I dont think it's close to a majority, but at the same time its more than enough.

"Glorified" is underselling it. Thier ability to microtarget anyone based on any trait is basically the death of democratic discourse. Now, if you're saying the data is just there for anyone to do this, you're correct, and society needs to understand that and what it means.

So we should just do whatever unethical thing we want, as long as it isn't strictly illegal/we won't get caught? Actually that does seem to be the Silicon Valley mantra. I dont know how people think this is going to play out well, particularly when the entities in question are often powerful enough to change the laws themselves.

A lot of that turned out to be pushed by Epstein and his associates. It's not hard to figure out why they would enjoy a world with lots of racism, sexism and general inequity. Its really disturbing when you consider how much power this network still has.

The US bullying other countries to follow its interests has also existed before a year ago. People are just waking up to the idea that it's going to get worse and not better.

Don't worry, China is coming out pretty far ahead so I'm sure we'll still be in a unipolar world when this is all over, and you can sleep safe at night. I imagine you didn't know.

I've been thinking of this too. I think Steam is, and I'll even throw in Mozilla, despite a few missteps. Gog seems okay, but that's much smaller. If we can expand to large tech organizations then Wikipedia has remained pretty consistent. Even Steam doesn't have a corporate structure in the traditional sense, and I couldn't think of a single publicly traded company I'd trust.

It does concern me, and it should have concerned them enough to fall on their sword for their principals. They have FU money, if they're not willing to, who is?

17. Top members of government, education and business (particularly tech) part of pedophile kidnapping and rape cult that has been shaping reactionary culture for decades now. I seriously don't even know how to process the world I live in anymore.

If they don't support any principles then it isn't a side worth supporting. If my choice is between China 1 and China 2 then idgaf.

AI's approach: * User has history of anti AI rhetoric, increasingly agitated and unstable. * User has removed all phones and cellular connections from their car. Increase monitoring through surveillance cameras and monitoring of their social groups. * User has been spotted making unusual travel choices moving towards key infrastructure - deploy interception measures.

We already have the tech to do all of that. A rifle isn't going to help against AI. Or for the linesman:

* Employee required for critical infrastructure has been identified to hold unaligned political beliefs. Replace with more pliable individual and move to low impact location.

No one who wants to bring down an AI like this would ever be able to get close to it, even if it lived in only one data center. You could try hiding all your communications, but then it will just consider you a likely agitator anyway. That's the risk of unaccountable mass surveillance (the only kind that's ever existed). Doesn't really matter if there's a person on top or not.

It's so much worse than that. The government actively encourages a lack of business ethics. Heck, it started the term with a crypto rug pull. Money continues to funnel upward to all the worst players, and watchdogs are being targeted and destroyed. Even if you get new people in power, you're going to find the upper echelons completely full of outlandishly wealthy, morally bankrupt individuals that are very politically active. And now they have access to all of our communications and an AI to sift through it looking for dissent (or to spark its own). I guess this is the end game of "move fast and break things." The situation was never good, but it continues to get worse at an alarming rate.

Not to mention that he and his cohorts had such close ties to Epstein that I find it impossible to imagine he didn't know exactly what was going on. This is someone who's known for building profiles of anyone who mentions him online, not some ambivalent rich guy.

Don't worry, I'm sure that trusting these systems to a group of ghouls from the Epstein files won't have any negative consequences.

Elon just needs a wild party to blow off steam.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there are no heroes to cheer for.

What's the deal with the settlers? That's really where I lose all faith Isreal has good intentions.

And given his penchant for information control, I dont doubt he knew everything that was going on.

Part of it is also that when we look back we think of people's suffering as sacrifices that needed to be made. Now that it's us being sacrificed it really shifts a lot of people's perspective. I think we need a better solution than letting a bunch of people get fucked so that some other set of people in the right place can have shinier toys in the future. Society needs to handle these transitions better, especially as technology raises the stakes with mass servailance and nuclear weapons.

I see this so much with regard to Chinese/Russians and increasingly Americans (I know people in each camp). The point of the propaganda is just that, to make them distrust all information and fall in line by default. It makes it impossible to argue against the main narrative being broadcast because "who's to say what's true?" And frankly I'm getting real sick of it. It's not the same thing as being media literate.

Why stop at international law? It's no different than a lot of civil, financial, criminal law. You just get big enough and now there's nothing the system can do about you. It's become increasingly apparent that having the right friends and enough money is the only 'law' that matters at any level of society, and people will be too disengaged or selfish to do anything about it besides reap the rewards if they're in the right place. Laws only work on the disempowered, and in that sense international law is exactly as powerful as the law of the land in whatever country you live in.

The troubling thing here is: what is a "better" society? As you said, it's just the one that outcompetes the other societies on the globe. We'd like to believe such a thing is an egalitarian "healthy" liberal society, but it's just as likely to be some form of enslaved/boot stomping on face society. Some think people won't accept this, but given human history I'm pretty sure they will. I think these sorts of societies are more of a local minima, but they only need to grant enough of a short term boost to unseat the other major powers. Once competition is out of the way they'll probably survive as a bloated mess for quite some time. The price of entry is so high they won't have to worry about being unseated by competition unless they really screw the pooch. I think this is the troubling conclusion a lot of people, including those in power, are reaching.

I'm open to the idea that companies need much larger barriers to functioning internationally. Not just because of their ability to pump money overseas, but also because they are often used to blatantly further the security goals of their parent countries (looking at you two USA and China, but everyone able to, seems to do it).

Maybe the current system would've worked if it was built on many more small companies. These monolithic corporations funneling power upward are the death of civilization, and leadership are clearly high on their own farts. Or just want to be on top in a new feudal age.

Looking back at the degrading lives commoners have suffered throughout a lot of human history, I'm pretty split. And that was before rulers had AI and autonomous defenses to keep everyone in line. Frankly, I think this exact line of thought is what's pushing a lot of AI investment right now.

"Source of truth." Right, that reminds me of the other issue exacerbated by AI: widespread media illiteracy. (Apologies if that was the joke, can't tell anymore).