Elon turned Grok into Mecha-Hitler.

Trump is telling the Smithsonian museum to ignore slavery, or to cover slavery as a positive.

The domestic appetite for propaganda is huge. Prager U is American.

Let’s not center foreign countries when we have so much work to do at home.

I have seen some people talk like that, and it strikes me as a religion. There’s euphoria, zeal, hope. To them AGI is coming to usher in heaven on earth. Singularity is like rupture.

Sam Altman is one of the preachers of this religion.

How indeed. It’s probably a multi-factor phenomenon which requires an anthropological study for a serious answer. (Good luck trying to get the necessary access to study them.) My guess for one factor in this, is that they have more money than they know what to do with.

As an assist to an actual oncologist, only.

I can see AI as a tool in some contexts, doing some specific tasks better than an unassisted person.

But as a replacement for people, AI is a dud. I would rather be alone than have a gf AI. And yes I am taking trauma and personal+cultural baggage into account. LLM is also a product of our culture for the most part, so will have our baggage anyway. But at least in principle it could be trained to not have certain kinds of baggage, and still, I would rather deal with a person save for the simplest and lowest stake interactions.

If we want better people, we need to enfranchise them and remove most paywalls from the world. Right now the world instead of being inviting is bristling with physical, cultural, and virtual fences, saying to us, “you don’t belong and aren’t welcome in 99.99% of the space, and the other 0.01% will cost you.” Housing for now is only a privelege. In a world like that it’s a miracle the people are as decent as they are. If we want better people we have to delibarately, on purpose, choose broadbased human flourishing as a policy objective, and be ruthless to any enemies of said objective. No amnesty for the billionaires and wannabe billionaires. Instead they are trying to shove down our throats AI/LLMs and virtual worlds as replacements for an actually decent and inviting world.

A narrow purpose AI trained to recognize tumor growths early is the kind of AI that makes sense to me.

The “owners” of our world want us to be passengers, not drivers. They own the carusel, and we rent our rides.

They say we have no skin in the game. Truth is, SKIN is ALL we have in this game. We must have assets in the game as a birthright to make it worth playing in good faith. If most are landless and assetless, sorry, the game sucks. That means untill we get the rules that protect all of our interests, as opposed to protecting massive wealth accumulations at everyone’s expense, we will ignore the rules, the norms, decorum, civility, etc.

If the hoarders break the social contract repeatedly, like they have since 2008, it takes people some time to internalize and digest the fact of what it means for none of us to be bound by a social contract. Once people catch on, there will be hell to pay.

Of course the power dynamics cannot ever be eliminated (either by breeding or enculturation) from the interpersonal relationships.

Instead, power can be regulated and managed, to maximize distributed decisionmaking, and to protect those decisionmakers who could not or would not protect themselves.

In a free for all, feudalism will always result. The strong and the willing will rule over the weak and the unwilling.

There have to be limits to the power dynamics. Those limits will have to be enforced to protect the vulnerable, the gullible, and the unwilling (those who have the capability to exercise power, but refuse by choice), etc. This requires advanced democratic governance with a very strong government.

Doing away with the government is just a speedrun toward technofeudalism.

Working to create a protected space that selects for distributed decisionmaking is the actual project. That’s an actually sane, worthwhile and achievable goal.

When democratic governance withers what fills the power vacuum is feudalism.

Technofeudalism is feudalism with computers.

Ironically, to create a space that selects for and protects distributed decisionmaking (the desire of most sane anarchists), you need a strong government!

My use case for AI is to get it to tell me water to cereal ratios, like for rice, oatmal, corn meal. If there is a mistake, I can easily control for it, and it’s a decent enough starting point.

That said, I am just being lazy by avoiding taking my own notes. I can easily make my own list of water to cereal ratios to hang on the fridge.

I was fine before the AI.

The biggest customer of AI are the billionaires who can’t hire enough people for their technofeudalist/surveillance capitalism agenda. The billionaires (wannabe aristocrats) know that machines have no morals, no bottom lines, no scruples, don’t leak info to the press, don’t complain, don’t demand to take time off or to work from home, etc.

AI makes the perfect fascist.

They sell AI like it’s a benefit to us all, but it ain’t that. It’s a benefit to the billionaires who think they own our world.

AI is used for censorship, surveillance pricing, activism/protest analysis, making firing decisions, making kill decisions in battle, etc. It’s a nightmare fuel under our system of absurd wealth concentration.

Fuck AI.

Try asking AI for a complete list of the recently deceased CEOs and billionaires based on the publicly available search results.

When I tried, I got only the natural deaths of just some of the publicly available results. All the other deaths were omitted. I brought up the omitted names, one by one. The AI said it was sorry for the omission, and it had all the right details of their passings. With each new name the AI said it was sorry, it omitted it by accident. I said no, once is an accident, but this was a deliberate pattern. The AI waffled and talked like a politician.

The AI in my experience is absolutely controlled on a number of topics. It’s still useful for cooking recipies and such. I will not trust it on any topic that is sensitive to its owners.

Tecnowashing is also fraud.

Take a failed concept like the gold standard, technowash it, and you get crypto scamcoins.

Greenwashing, sportswashing (saudi arabia), sanewashing (presenting insane ideas as debatable ideas, like debating human rights with someone who is against human rights ends up sanewashing the anti-rights position), small business washing (using ostensibly a pro small business argument to push a fortune 100 agenda), worker washing (treat workers like shit in private but make pro worker noises in public), gender washing (the politician with an anti-woman agenda is a woman so it’s OK), minority washing (a fascist pundit is a minority that fascism often targets, so fascism is OK now). Now we can add tecnowashing to the list.

Another example of technowashing is when a real estate company presents itself as a tech startup to inflate its valuation.

All this washing has exploded in recent years.

I use IronFox all the time. For me almost nothing is broken.

Once a year I find one low value site that I have to load in Cromite to see what it is, and then I never use that trash site again.

In other words, IronFox fulfills 100% of all my browsing needs excellently.

I used Mull before IronFox, and my experience there was excellent as well.

There is no good reason to use Chrome today or even some years back when Mull was the thing.

New people enter the market all the time.

That update is for those that don’t already have a Fairphone, presumably.

That said, I agree with your overall point. They should offer tablets and watches if they can.

Consumer activism, by itself, has rarely, if ever, accomplished anything.

The best recent examble was Tesla, but that wasn’t a mere non-buying action. Tesla action involved vandalism and a massive word of mouth campaign.

Basically if we want to fight for a future we believe in, we must stop playing patty cakes and fight like it’s a life and death struggle.

Symbolic resistance is not enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I still avoid buying Nestle products, and have for years, but I know this is not the way to real change.

I want us to stop suggesting consumer activism as a valid pathway to change.

They will if the cost/benefit equation changes. I don’t only mean economics here, but I am using “cost/benefit” as a wide spectrum metaphor. In other words, once it’s not worth doing, they won’t do it anymore.

Don’t forget that legally we count corporations as people, and corporations can live on indefinitely.

Originally copyright provided a monopoly for 14 years, plus one optional 14 year extension.

Copyright infringement was never stealing to begin with. If I steal your pencil, you are no longer in posession of it. If I copy or download your pencil, we both have a copy, and you are not deprived of your property.