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ignirtoq

@ ignirtoq @feddit.online

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Joined
10 mo. ago

  • Nobody Asked for AI

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  • We assume that the AI boom is the result of market demand. In reality, it is the result of investment decisions made by concentrated capital, which is reshaping the economy on its own terms.

    But that's always been true under capitalism. It's just that in the past generally large capital expenditures have gone towards things the wealthy think will get them more wealth. There have always been capitalists who spend their money directing the economy to do what they want, rather than what the "market" wants. They just haven't had the majority of the capital being spent.

    The last 50 years has seen an unprecedented concentration of wealth. The wealthy are literally a thousand times proportionately wealthier than poor people than they've been at any other point in human history. There's not much wealth to squeeze out of everyone else, so the economy is even more at the vain whims of those with all the capital as they look for things to spend it on.

    Tech news has been reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on. Well, they've found something they want to spend it on, so they're emptying 20 years of profits in 5. They've now completely blown through those stores, and don't want to slow down, so now they're taking on unprecedented levels of debt. Something is going to give out and things are going to get bad within the next 5 years.

  • All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

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  • Flock Safety cameras are automated license plate readers that capture images of plates along with a vehicle’s make, model and color. Police use the technology to investigate crimes such as hit-and-runs and to locate missing persons. Camera data is owned by the police department and permanently deleted after 30 days.

    That's straight up misinformation, right? They capture way more than just license plates and vehicle details, police do way more than "investigate crimes" with them, and the data is absolutely not owned by the police department and deleted after 30 days.

  • take their money and arrest those responsible

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  • It's worth stating that this is showing just the private company contributions (private as in not owned by national governments). State-owned oil companies of various nations contribute massively as well, so beyond the bribes lobbying problem there's a direct conflict of interest for many nations that get a substantial amount of revenue from those state-owned oil companies.

  • Selling the Sun [Jen Sorensen]

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  • You're right. The FCC approved their requested use of radio spectrum for communication with the satellite. They were very clear they were giving approval for this one mission, and for the communication spectrum, not the visible spectrum.

  • OpenAI's Codex app has 70% GPU usage while it is “thinking” due to tiny useless animation

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  • It's a web app and you just showed we can do it in text with Unicode and a modern browser. This bug is a level of self-inflicted, shouldn't-be-in-the-realm-of-possible problem I struggle to comprehend. It's the software version of not even wrong.

  • Feeling Corny

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  • The average SpaceX buyer post-IPO is almost under water after two-day slide

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  • After briefly pushing SpaceX’s market value close to $3 trillion, investors have begun reassessing whether the stock’s rapid advance can be justified by fundamentals.

    Nothing in the stock market has been about fundamentals for a very long time. Especially regarding Musk companies.

  • TIL that full automation of subway systems is illegal in the United States

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  • Originally enacted in 1964 to protect workers during the transition from private to public ownership of mass transit, the provision now blocks the modernization of transit operations: no legacy US heavy-rail system has automated its operations to permit trains to run without onboard crew. In contrast, countries like France and Canada, each with robust labor protections, automate without conflict.

    Okay, can we get those robust labor protections first, and then fully automate public transit?

  • ‘You Will Not Speak on Flock Tonight’: County Commissioner Refuses to Let Residents Opposing Flock Speak at Meeting

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  • Ok so when a dozen people all go to say the same thing, when do the other people get to speak? 36 minutes later. They get 3 minutes each. These elected officials can spend a half fucking hour listening to their citizens.

  • Can't believe I have to RP with the computer whenever I want something smdh

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  • No I think they mean the linked webpages in the results are websites entirely generated by AI that Bing search has indexed. I've noticed this, too, especially looking for guides or help with very niche topics. It's incredibly frustrating that not just the search engines but the web itself is filling up with AI slop.

  • New York to tax luxury second homes in NYC

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  • Critics, including prominent business leaders, Republicans, and some moderate Democrats, have warned that slapping new taxes on rich people who maintain apartments and townhouses in New York, but don’t consider it their primary home, will just lead the very wealthy to abandon the city.

    Prove it. Show me data where this has ever happened. People talk about the wealthy taking their ball and leaving when taxes like this are suggested, but places like NYC have way more to offer than just low taxes that keep the wealthy there. There's a lot of room in that cost-benefit analysis for the city to raise taxes.

  • Motherboard sales are now collapsing amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

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  • No, sales are going down because prices are going up. If you have a fixed inventory and sales go down, you lower prices to increase demand and move the product and keep your revenue stream. But in this case, they're moving supply away from this market (consumer hardware) to a different market (AI data centers). So the supply is going down with (previously) fixed demand, driving prices up. The "motherboard sales are collapsing" headline comes from looking at the consumer hardware slice of the computing hardware market. If you look at total sales from each manufacturer, so include the AI data center sales in the analysis, they're not having any trouble moving inventory nor keeping up their revenue stream overall.

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    Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps

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  • Wholeheartedly agree. The point I'm more trying to make is that they can survive much longer without popular support than other kinds of movements. So Palantir can be very successful for a long time aligning with the regime, even if it will ultimately fall. They can (and probably plan to) jump ship before that fall, like German companies that aided the Nazis did after WWII.

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    Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps

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  • Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

    I keep seeing this logic that:

    1. If a movement is unpopular it will fail in short order
    2. In the US, the current fascist movement is unpopular
    3. Therefore it will fail soon

    That may be true of a lot of movements, but fascism doesn't work like that. They don't need popularity, they just need control over the levers of power. The Heritage Foundation and many, many other conservative groups have been working for decades, some since the 1950s, to seize control of those levers of power.

    Palantir aligning with this fascism is not nearly the clearly failing strategy the author believes it to be. There's a very real chance they are successful for years or even decades aligning with the current fascist regime. It has a lot of momentum, and I haven't seen good evidence that that momentum is reliably ebbing. It's seeing speed bumps, but I haven't seen any kind of turning point. I really hope the midterm elections are that turning point. Either conservatives lose Congress or the public realizes they can't stop it by working within the system anymore.

  • Thousands of Pentagon Civilian Workers Will Be Fired Next Week as Purge Begins

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  • This article is dated Feb 22, 2025. I know posts generally should use the same title as the article to avoid added bias, but in this case it's rather misleading.

  • What are some words where the "opposite" one means the same thing?

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  • To bone and to debone both mean to remove bones from something, typically food.

  • AI can cost more than human workers now

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  • https://archive.ph/2PsPD

    There's really not much to the article. It honestly reads like the journalist spotted a few disjoint statements/events in other publications with a common theme going slightly against the current narrative and wrote them down, but without doing any follow-up themselves. It's just those snippets. If you keep up with AI news even tangentially, you probably have read 75% of the snippets already and saw this coming.

  • The AI Revolution Could Usher In a New Age of Stagnation

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  • For enthusiasts, AI promises to usher in something that socialists have long dreamed of: a world without scarcity in which human beings can move finally from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

    Like many problems techbros try to solve, this is a problem of politics and social organization, not technology. We have had the technology to free the entire human population from several fundamental scarcities for decades (food and housing most prominently, but also many diseases), but the groups with the resources to do so actively choose not to solve those problems. Mostly because they are antisocial psychopathic billionaires.

  • Donald Trump showcases custom Sharpie during Cabinet meeting

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  • He's a bit early for hurricane season.

  • "A good word"

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  • My first question would have been "is the fifth grader boss the entire fifth wave, so after 40 first graders, or the end of the fifth wave, so after 50 first graders?" Followed by "how much time do I get to prepare?"