Not at all! China isn’t trying to do the same buildout. In fact, they’re turning towards the AI-as-software model, in which AI is run locally and sold as software rather than being sold as compute from large supercomputers.

It turns out that most of the things common folk and common businesses do with AI are managed pretty well with open source AI software run locally with a dozen terabytes of training data.

And if the US companies sold tokens at their actual rate (not at a loss) then it would be cheaper for even small businesses to put together a high-powered PC and set it up to do AI tasks. So for everything that isn’t the stuff I listed, the AI-as-service model is already obsolete.

Because he’s the richest man in the world and because his reckless shenanigans have caused massive loss of life.

It’s a situation that really warrants help from a plumber’s brother.

Wow. I bet he said that specifically because the assailant was white and the victim was black.

This reminds me very much of Donald Trump taking out an ad calling for capital punishment for the Central Park Five.

Too much power is bad for you, man.

I betcha a nickle that the fines paid to the canteen would be more than offset by the increase in profits due to worker productivity.

It’s like the time theft myth, the belief that workers will intrinsically slack unless you micromanage them. In fact the opposite is true, when workforces are allowed to chat with loved ones and surf the internet their productivity improves.

Curiously, when a company mandates that 15-minute breaks are taken and lunch is eaten during lunch break (even when workers are obsessive and want to work through breaks) then their productivity improves even more.

But the upper management of companies don’t actually want to manage in a way that data shows maximizes profits.

It was everyone’s golden era. And then the owner class pressured the political class to memory hole the period so we forgot all the lessons we learned.

It’s why we need to bring unions back to forcibly make sure those lessons are applied.

Can confirm. How Money Works talks about it (Here on YouTube) regarding the recent mass layoffs by big tech, first, by pressure through RTO mandates, then blaming layoffs on AI, only they got rid of too many people and their businesses couldn’t run.

So why did they do it? Vindictiveness. Because of the great resignation during which workers had some negotiating power, and the C-suite resented that and wanted to show everyone who’s boss.

I’ve been following the trend since the early 2010s when we realized that crunching development teams is useless for meeting deadlines, but dev companies crunch anyway, traumatizing the team.

I’m pretty sure billionaires aren’t especially bright, rather started with generational wealth and then got richer through luck and ruthlessness, to the point that they only failed upwards. (There are a few exceptions who understand the social contract, but they really are exceptions.)

And they surround themselves with sycophants so that their psyches are completely comfortable. They stop actually considering data or news that might hurt their feelings, which means they make bad decisions that cost their companies money.

Aw man, you guys are my best friends ever, I ever tell ya that?

This is your periodic reminder that Flock Safety is only the tip of the problem.

Some districts are de-Flocking only to install an Axon ALPR network service. Keep fighting until your community outlaws all ALPRs and ALPR lookups are inadmissable in court.

There are other technologies that are already in use and widely abused by law enforcement such as IMSI catchers, geofence warrants and Drones as First Responder. Learn what your district allows and be a civil nuisance untill that shit is blocked.

Judges have long ceased tightly constraining judicial warrants, and most courts accept the good faith exception, so US and state courts cannot be trusted with any overreaching surveillance technology or forensic tools. This includes chromatic field drug tests and detection dogs.

This is how the kids know they are not in an institution of learning, but a prison for the crime of being juvenile.

What we’re also not going to hear is how often devices are misplaced, confiscated without return or just dissappear like socks in a dryer.

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.

That would either be Driller in DRG (pretty fucked) or any of the survivors in L4D2 (also pretty fucked.)

The billionaires run a massive far-right propaganda machine. The messaging isn’t at see what your Republican officials are doing for you! it’s at if you don’t vote R, you’re effeminate and a traitor. You have to vote R to own the libs, kick out the immigrants and stop the transgender menace.

The people who respond to that kind of messaging don’t actually care that they’re suffering so long as marginalized people are suffering more than they are.

Only because the Reagan campaign secretly conferred with Iran and surrendered (agreed to capitulate to their terms) in advance.

Kinda the way that Trump gave Afghanistan to the Taliban. How history rhymes.

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.

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

Without paywall

I’d take the risk.

One of the factors that has contributed to the sorry state of American voters is the distaste among conservatives for teaching critical thinking skills, because that fosters questioning authority, ergo disobedience.

But when we don’t have it, then the most confident, loudest-voiced narcissist has an instant army of conditioned followers.

See also the tendency in fundamentalist religions to discourage serious questions about the dogma.

Sidenote: I understand that google has become generic for websearch, except the Google service is no longer that. Now it’s an AI answer / summary service. And websearch is not that more complicated to type / say.

It’s a tiny thing, but see if you can change your habit.

It turns out socialism was a scare word even through the 19th century, then meaning government provided for the public good, such as roads, schools and libraries.

Features like social safety nets and disaster relief came after the US went through a few ordeals and got traumatized by all the mass suffering and death.

And from the cotton plantation owners to the industrialists to the tech bros, the owner class hated the notion, and continued to organize and plot against it.

Young kids are attracted to actiony state roles (e.g. police, firefighter, astronaut) because they’re visible early on. As teens they develop a better sense of what their interests are and what roles would be a good fit.

And then capitalism throws that all away, gives the cool jobs to cronies, and forces them to be grocery baggers, office clerks and customer service agents that work phones.