uriel238

Right now AI is looking a lot like a bubble. Wealthy people keep investing in it, but all the AI companies are losing money way faster than their profits. They're selling compute at a vast loss, and if they charged full price, no-one would buy it.

With tin-foil hat firmly in place, this is what the owner class hopes to get out of AI:

1. Automate everything. As Corey Doctorow surmises, they want to automate as much as possible, until the working class just isn't needed anymore, so they can build their Ayn Rand private city utopias (Peter Thiel has plans) and let the rest of us starve somewhere, displaced by the quarries, data centers and automated factories.

2. Create armies of swarming killer drones that are commanded by AI, as Randall Munroe predicted, not only to annex any territory that they can't buy, but to garrison all the working class they've confined to reservations to die of thirst and hunger. And...

3. In the meantime, process all the mass surveillance information in order to predict who is a dissident or a troublemaker or is capable of organizing resistance, so that they can be dispatched early. Also to micromanage their dwindling workforce and make sure women can't go to an abortion provider.

Curiously SCOTUS isn't even trying. I expect them to be Cardinal fucking Richelieu in their arguments, capable of explaining logically how they reached their findings so that any reasonable person (e.g. me) would be able to understand their conclusion.

But no. Dobbs, for instance, is word salad, and there are numerous legal scholars who have dissected Alito's opinion, and concluded not only that it doesn't make sense but reached consensus as to how. When you're the captured US Supreme Court and beholden to absolutely no ethical or professional obligations, you can opine obvious bullshit, and that counts.

Maybe, once we can get AI to stop from hallucinating, we can get it to overhaul court opinions from appeals courts up, and highlight which ones are sound and which are folly. But for now, everyone knows SCOTUS is captured and beholden to a specific agenda and ideology in defiance of logic or the good of the public. And there's nothing (legal) that we can do about it.

Maybe a plumber's brother might help, but that's a different topic.

1

I agree with you, AI should not be used in legal cases, but good luck with that.

1

Without paywall

Elon Musk lies.

That is, like Trump he deliberately and wittingly deceives. Compare Cybertruck will be much safer per mile than other trucks, both for occupants and pedestrians. with I am the most transparent president in history.

Those lies extend to his outrageous space and industry goals like mars colonies and space-based data centers. Or the hyperloop.

He probably sees it as salesmanship the way Trump sees his own lies as the art of the deal.

And when Musk denies the death toll of DOGE ending USAID, he's lying to himself.

This isn't the first time police have followed up on a license plate without confirming the make and model to assure it's the same vehicle.

It's a preventable problem.

The real problem is that law enforcement don't care, any more than they do when they SWAT the wrong house.

I was agnostic but was pretty sure that none of the popular religions were near the truth.

In the 1990s I dabbled with personal faith.

Since the 2010s, I am naturalist. I don't know the world is entirely material as it appears to be, but I'm sure spirit and supernatural effects are very, very unlikely. I also know a lot more about biological evolution, quantum mechanics, and cosmology, so I understand how they are improbable.

While I can appreciate that it's not a good thing to let AI do your work for you (not just laziness but hallucinations), I can see this is only going to encourage cheaters to use competitors to Claude.

Like Deepseek.

Sans paywall and registration wall

Pain compliance is not de-escalation. Pain compliance is assault.

We've been through this conversation before with Tasers, which are meant to be used as an alternative to lethal force,¹ but are routinely used by law enforcement and state paramilitaries before they would draw a firearm. While commonplace in the United States, that is deliberate misuse.

If ICE were following actual policing protocol, they'd stick to shock wands, which look like what they do. Electric gloves have the same purpose as sap gloves (gloves loaded with shot), which is to give the illusion that less force is being applied than actually is. They are intended to make violence caught on video less evident.

¹ Tasers are technically less lethal and victims are killed by them uncommonly.

7

I can totally understand the reason to capture video and conversation during a medical consultation. As someone who has to see a dermatologist from time to time, I've had pictures taken.

The proper protocol is to get consent first, before donning the glasses or pulling out the camera.

And I bet that the perv glasses are not the best option for capturing data for medical analysis.

At that point, yeah, piracy is not merely action against subverted intellectual property laws but action against government restrictions on civil liberties.

It also means consuming restricted content is an act of political resistance.

3

For me, hopescolling (doomscrolling but looking for any reason to have hope) is a full time job regarding the political situation in the US. To that end, my regular resources are:

Ashley B: Ashley discuses US history, mostly black history, but not always, covering other issues such as J. Edgar Hoover, the scandals of past presidents, and black culture. She doesn't hold back regarding the brutal details of slave history and post-bellum racial violence, and those videos can be tough to listen to.

Belle of the Ranch: The successor to Beau of the Fifth Column, Belle discusses particulars of current issues, explaining details of the economy, of the US war on Iran, and Trump telling on himself in his social media posts. While left leaning, answers a lot of comments from MAGA.

Climate Town Rollie Williams is a very watchable climatologist who covers issues of climate and government gone wrong, such as why Americans eat so much cheese, how the US doesn't drive cars anymore (we drive Non-Passenger Work Vehicles, aka SUVs) and how the methane industry (natural gas) is the climate-killing dark horse.

Heather Cox Richardson: Richardson is a professor of American History at Boston college and does a lot of videos discussing current events and how they rhyme with past events in US history, which can be reassuring that we might actually get through this. I listen to her Letters From An American daily.

How Business Worked aka How History Works: This is the sister project to How Money Works (below). Which discusses history with a business slant. Recent topics of interest (to me) include No one wants to work anymore is a recurring theme and The Powell Memorandum and The myth of Hitler fixing the German economy. HBW is slightly longer form than HMW.

How Money Works: A (former?) finance bro talks about business and economic issues, breaking them down so that I (not a money guy) can understand them. Recent videos that are particularly edifying include why big tech now is hiring back its layoffs and how entrenched money is in US politics.

Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie: Jamelle Bouie is a NYT columnist who reads a lot of books, knows a lot about US government and has good insights into the thought processes of MAGA figures.

I don't know! If it only applies to the California State Assembly (and maybe the California State Senate) then that would be an egregious loophole.

For your edification Climate Town's video on Methane (Natural Gas) (on YouTube).

TLDW: Methane was sold to the US as a transition fuel for government subsidies while we invested in renewables. It turns out we weren't intending to transition after all.

Natural gas infrastructure is notoriously leaky, though difficult to monitor. (And the NG industry has gone to great lengths to discourage actual oversight, of course.) And methane is an exceptionally nasty greenhouse gas, considerably worse than CO2.

It also includes a bit about LNG, in which methane is liquified so it can be shipped abroad and other nations can transition to more methane use.