They’re not the ones in the White House flipping switches

The only way to stop a Nazi is to bash them.

There’s another, more effective and less violent and non-solipsistic way. A great deal of the power of fascism stems from their economic position. Guys like Zuck and Elon are dangerous because of their enormous wealth, not merely because of their toxic political views.

And since you can’t just Luigi Mangione the problem of economic elitism, you need collective action at an economic level to starve out the beast.

Incidentally, the “starve the beast” strategy is a conservative approach historically espoused and employed by Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, and now (via the guise of DEI) Bill Ackman, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump. Its incredibly effective, because it eliminates the ability of the opposition to effectively organize and administer large groups of professionals.

I can dislike two things at once.

Do you normally shoot everyone you dislike?

Fuck tankies, fuck fascists.

Yes, yes. We know who you are.

The Radical Centrist that goes to war with every other corner of the political spectrum and ends up turning on itself. Ur-Liberalism. The snake eating its own tail of political thought.

Calling someone a tankie != anticommunist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.

The term has extended to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the actions of communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. In recent times, the term has been used across the political spectrum and in a geopolitical context to describe those who have a bias in favour of anti-Western states, authoritarian states, or states with a socialist legacy, such as Belarus, Cuba, China, Syria, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.

We’re converging towards Lemmy doing the Matt Christman 2016 election night “Kill yourself and everyone around you!” line, but entirely unironically.

Point of order. How many applications of cure has Alfred Hitchcock personally administered?

Y’all want a trade war with us

We really don’t. Even by America-is-racist standards, we’ve historically only been pissy about Mexico. Tariffing Canada used to be a punchline to political jokes.

Linux Fans maldin

Nothing that Trump administration does is going to make life more difficult for me currently.

Woof. I remember saying that back in 2017. Four years later…

No one is doing anything

Plenty of not-terminally-online people are organizing to resist mass arrests and deportations. Reach out to your local DSA. My Houston chapter’s been great about pulling together legal resources, just for starters.

I think maybe it’s naive to think that if the cost goes down, shrimp jesus won’t just be in higher demand.

Not that demand will go down but that economic cost of generating this nonsense will go down. The number of people shipping this back and forth to each other isn’t going to meaningfully change, because Facebook has saturated the social media market.

If you make it more efficient to flood cyberspace with bullshit, cyberspace will just be flooded with more bullshit.

The efficiency is in the real cost of running the model, not in how it is applied. The real bottleneck for AI right now is human adoption. Guys like Altman keep insisting a new iteration (that requires a few hundred miles of nuclear power plants to power) will finally get us a model that people want to use. And speculators in the financial sector seemed willing to cut him a check to go through with it.

Knocking down the real physical cost of this boondoggle is going to de-monopolize this awful idea, which means Altman won’t have a trillion dollar line of credit to fuck around with exclusively. We’ll still do it, but Wall Street won’t have Sam leading them around by the nose when they can get the same thing for 1/100th of the price.

What DeepSeek has done is to eliminate the threat of “exclusive” AI tools - ones that only a handful of mega-corps can dictate terms of use for.

Now you can have a Wikipedia-style AI (or a Wookiepedia AI, for that matter) that’s divorced from the C-levels looking to monopolize sectors of the service economy.

And now people exchange one American Junk-spitting Spyware for a Chinese junk-spitting spyware.

LLMs aren’t spyware, they’re graphs that organize large bodies of data for quick and user-friendly retrieval. The Wikipedia schema accomplishes a similar, abet more primitive, role. There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.

If you no longer need to boil down half a Great Lake to create the next iteration of Shrimp Jesus, that’s good whether or not you think Meta should be dedicating millions of hours of compute to this mind-eroding activity.

Not really a question of national intentions. This is just a piece of technology open-sourced by a private tech company working overseas. If a Chinese company releases a better mousetrap, there’s no reason to evaluate it based on the politics of the host nation.

Throwing a wrench in the American proposal to build out $500B in tech centers is just collateral damage created by a bad American software schema. If the Americans had invested more time in software engineers and less in raw data-center horsepower, they might have come up with this on their own years earlier.

TSMC just finished building out a foundry in Arizona, so there’s a nativist argument that we don’t need the island’s original facilities anymore.

Democrats and Republicans have been shoveling truckload after truckload of cash into a Potemkin Village of a technology stack for the last five years. A Chinese tech company just came in with a dirt cheap open-sourced alternative and I guarantee you the American firms will pile on to crib off the work.

Far from fucking them over, China just did the Americans’ homework for them. They just did it in a way that undercuts all the “Sam Altman is the Tech Messiah! He will bring about AI God!” holy roller nonsense that was propping up a handful of mega-firm inflated stock valuations.

Small and Mid-cap tech firms will flourish with these innovations. Microsoft will have to write the last $13B it sunk into OpenAI as a lose.

Reddit has been on this trend for a long while. It might be because you posted in a sub that’s gotten scoured. It might be because you said a word or set of words that tripped their algorithm. You might have been reported by someone for some reason.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that Reddit actively does not want real users anymore. They just want lurkers and bots. You might have genuinely been banned for no reason whatsoever.

Biden did more for college debtors than any president, ever.

Screaming this over and over again, but college debtors still won’t vote for me.

Typo. Yes.