No, that’s the rationalization. They admin wants to use palantir to collect data on American citizens, including giving ICE mobile camera installations to do face tracking. They want to do a 1984, and they don’t want any speed bumps from the states

Also, AI companies gave Trump money and there’s talk of restricting their power/water access to data centers to prioritize the people living nearby

The other thing that he doesn’t understand (and most “AI” advocates don’t either) is that LLMs have nothing to do with facts or information. They’re just probabilistic models that pick the next word(s) based on context.

That’s a massive oversimplification, it’s like saying humans don’t remember things, we just have neurons that fire based on context

LLMs do actually “know” things. They work based on tokens and weights, which are the nodes and edges of a high dimensional graph. The llm traverses this graph as it processes inputs and generates new tokens

You can do brain surgery on an llm and change what it knows, we have a very good understanding of how this works. You can change a single link and the model will believe the Eiffel tower is in Rome, and it’ll describe how you have a great view of the colosseum from the top

The problem is that it’s very complicated and complex, researchers are currently developing new math to let us do this in a useful way

Well… Yeah, that’s just how empires collapse. Anti intellectualism isn’t normal, but it comes up historically

Hey, friend, take a breath. Listen… This isn’t how we all die. Unless you live in Iran I guess, and then maybe, depending how it plays out - but even that is not at all a sure thing. I know this is pretty bad, but you can’t burn yourself out on this one

This isn’t world war III. It’s just another bad thing. China has signaled nothing on this and Russia is in no position to do anything. Europe has been quiet, the other Gulf states have been quiet… This could turn into another forever war, but this isn’t going to spark a powder keg.

But yeah, Iran has clearly been trying to return to the fold for years now, and netanyahu has started a second conflict to hold into power. It’s very obvious who the aggressors are

And yes, if you use targeted means to hit civilians and their family, obviously that’s a war crime.

But war crimes don’t cancel out. There’s no place for whataboutism when real human lives are being snuffed out in their homes. We make a list, and hopefully soon the fascists will fall and all the war criminals will stand trial

But that’s it exactly - cluster bombs just fling granades all over a city block at random. It’s basically just collateral damage in the hopes of hitting a soft target

I mean, fuck palantir and I really don’t like this tech in general, but blowing up a room or a house is way more precise. You’re hitting just what you mean to hit

And that’s what a lot of war crimes come down to - certain weapons are unacceptably imprecise. Which gets into the first rule of war crimes - you’re not supposed to attack noncombatants

Let’s not defend cluster bombs just because Israel is going to use this for justification…

Because of course they will, this whole thing started by blowing up the Iranian negotiator, they’re obviously not going to start acting in good faith now

The argument being cluster bombs are a dirty move, but using simultaneous AI powered assassin drones to strike while people are sleeping makes you the good guys?

I mean… That is how this works. Cluster bombs are bad because they’re less precise and cause more collateral damage. So weapons that target individuals with high precision are better

But like… Presumably, you’re not just individually killing a bunch of civilians precisely

Sorry to disappoint, I meant I learned the story behind the myth of vaccines causing autism. They seemed to be pretty good parents, before they moved away their kid was often outside on his bike… He seemed happy and healthy to me.

We had a significant age gap so we never interacted, but he was on the sidewalk frequently and never in the street when I was driving… Take from that what you will

Oh, that would fit in my model perfectly. Because it’s another world… Obviously. My model isn’t disproven if I wake up in another world, my model is just physically removed from my new world. Universal things still apply until they don’t, but there’s no conflict

If global warming hits 2.5C then flips around to an ice age…I don’t understand it, but it’s happened. My old observations aren’t disproven, new ones disprove the theories around them

Squaring that circle would take effort, but if it’s true it’s true, and truth sometimes takes time to understand

Sure. If it fills a gap in my model, I don’t need any proof at all. Why would I? It just makes sense. Of course I’m going to tentatively fit it in

And if a study convincingly disproves it, I’ll just as quickly discard the tentative idea. Why wouldn’t I? It made sense, but it didn’t math out.

But this is all in the context of my model. It’s a big web of corroboration

You can’t convince me global warming isn’t happening, because I’m watching it in real time. No amount of studies are doing to do more than inform the facts of my lived experience… I’m the primary source, I was there

No? I don’t care if the whole world is wrong, some evidence is strong enough to convince me forever, even if it’s subjective

Quality is all that matters. One incontrovertible fact I can poke and prod myself means more than millions of subjective accounts. Or even all of science - I’ll rearrange my entire model around a new fact if it’s compelling enough

I have a model of everything. Everything I am, my understanding of the world, it all fits together like a web. New ideas fit by their relationship to what I already know - maybe I’m missing nodes to fit it in and I can’t accept it

If it fits the model well, I’ll tentatively accept it without any evidence. If it conflicts with my model, I’ll need enough proof to outweigh the parts it conflicts with. It has to be enough to displace the past evidence

In practice, this usually works pretty well. I handle new concepts well. But if you feed me something that fits… Well, I’ll believe it until there’s a contradiction

Like my neighbors (as a teen) told me their kid had a predisposition for autism, and the load on his immune system from too many vaccines as once caused him to be nonverbal. That made sense, that’s a coherent interaction of processes I knew a bit about. My parents were there and didn’t challenge it at the time

Then, someone scoffing and walking away at bringing it up made me look it up. It made sense, but the evidence didn’t support it at all. So my mind was changed with seconds of research, because a story is less evidence than a study (it wasn’t until years later that I learned the full story behind that)

On the other hand, today someone with decades more experience on a system was adamant I was wrong about an intermittent bug. I’m still convinced I’m right, but I have no evidence… We spent an hour doing experiments, I realized the experiments couldn’t prove it one way or the other, I explained that and by the end he was convinced.

It’s not the amount of evidence, it’s the quality of it.

How about: they’re a major factor in the rise of post truth and in ruining the Internet. And in hacking democracy itself

Their control is endangering the human race. They’ve crushed countless innovations to keep a stranglehold on technology. They proactively helped fascists get into power

They don’t deserve to make ever increasing money off us. They’re not content creators - they’re bad stewards of a public forum they bought and expanded through monopolistic practices.

I’d say it’s not only moral to deny them ad revenue, I think watching their ads is a danger to society

No, they do. They don’t die, but they lose their current life

I mean, some of them knew it was coming and lost their phones, but I don’t find it too surprising. Are you really going to risk serious consequences because you got activated when you shouldn’t have been?

Report for duty and let your chain of command fight it out. It’s not up to the guard members to work out the legality of their deployment

Now, if they start telling you to perform violence on civilians, that’s when you can take a stand and refuse orders. And so far, that hasn’t happened

I think they’re doing well. I haven’t seen them raise a finger to the protesters, they just stand there in a line calmly. The protesters are great with them too, they just keep yelling “you should be over here with us”. And with any luck, the courts will give them back to the governor so they can go home before they have to make a hard choice

I never said white genocide. That’s the problem here - you’re talking just like a fascist, but from a position of the oppressed. Which is to say, you’re talking just like a fascist

You’re talking about taking the land (soil) back for the indigenous people (blood). You’re not talking about benefiting people. You’re not talking about fixing problems and making life better.

Just taking. Take our county back. Take our land back. Drive out the invaders. Sound familiar?

The thought “white genocide” genuinely never crossed my mind in all of this. Because I’m not a fascist. I just know when you combine racial lines and fascism, you’re talking ethno-state, which always means genocide. In this case, who gets genocided? Everyone but the in-group, starting with the most disadvantaged and physically identifiable and working inwards from there.

Instead I think of just people, all living in an oppressive system. I don’t care that some are less oppressed, I don’t care about what was taken from people generations ago or who “deserves” the land. I care about reducing the oppression. Human dignity.

Not what we can take, what we can give and what must be taken to give that to the people. All the people.

You’re framing this just like the Nazis do, it doesn’t matter if you flip the “in group” to be a minority or more oppressed group. You’re still using the same framework, which there is a descriptive term for: Fascism

A reverse Nazi is still a Nazi.

You want to talk about freedom and autonomy? You want to talk about resistance, breaking chains, freeing people from exploitation? You want to talk about the West and the oppression of uncontrolled capitalism? I’m all for that.

You want to bring race into it, talk about the true owners of the land and the invaders? That sounds a lot like blood and soil to me.

People live where they live. Trying to build an ethno-state is always going to eventually lead to genocide. And you’re really dancing around that idea hard, just like the far right did before they went full mask off… You’re not saying it, just asking questions, right?

Don’t frame this by race. If you can’t frame this in the context of human dignity, you’re just pushing another flavor of sparkling fascism

An iPod nano can’t play over USB, you need to use the aux port

Well I was probably streaming from my friend’s Plex server (pre enshitification), which was running on a NAS probably running some flavor of Linux under the hood, and it very well could have been TNG…

So maybe the scar on my thumb is the mark of a royal lemming?

I cut a good part of the way through my thumb opening a can of beans

Yeah, it takes longer