• 2 Posts
  • 63 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2024

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  • You’re so optimistic! I wish my fellow Americans actually had even one data point. America invented most of the techniques of oppression and tyranny that we exported abroad and renamed fascism. But Foucault and his boomerang have always been correct, it’s just colonialism brought home to recolonize the imperial core.

    Americans haven’t read a single history book if they can help it, and proudly so, while the only progress made on oppression has been finding new and ever more complex ways to dissipate and disguise it.


  • You’re understanding of “gig work” is comically outdated. You sound naive or trollish. “Jobs for teens” like fast food work, grocery clerking, and working at movie theaters have always been taken by people who need “real jobs” and not just teens looking for extra money. So you’re wrong that these careers exclusively for kids to get pocket money ever existed, certainly not in living memory.

    Secondly, OP isn’t talking about working the carwash for the summer. He’s talking about Uber and AirBNB. Maybe you heard of them? Over the last decade, they’ve caused massive disruption of the hotel and taxi industries by allowing thousands of unlicensed and unregulated “micro entrepreneurs” 🤮 to create a new economy of pay-per-task workers who end up owning all the physical assets (which rapidly deprecate in value) but none of the infrastructure or investments (which do not, or do so on much different schedules).

    Houses being bought up for short term rentals has contributed to the housing crisis. Its caused economic harm to inner cities. It’s a looking part of the polycrisis destroying the practical economy and the planet’s livability. But yeah man, the real problem is lazy people just don’t want real adult jobs, give me a fucking break.


  • Rich people always threaten this and never do it, because it’s a John Galt problem. Rich people need poor people to trickle money to for services and goods. If they all move to “Rich Asshole Island” where there’s no laws or taxes, they quickly discover there’s also no workers.

    Fuck all of them, I dare every millionaire to leave NYC. They almost certainly cannot. All their wealth is actually tied up in business and assets. In NYC. They could sell them, but to whom? All the rich are fleeing right? If the city or collectives of workers buy them, thats more socialism and proof the rich aren’t necessary.

    So no, they won’t leave. They’ll whine and cry and then fund police and paramilitaries and lobbiest to try and force their view. They’ll spend millions propping up friendly candidates like Coumo and running smear campaigns.

    In other words, they’ll do what they’ve historically always done when threatened.


  • I agree with the analysis of the east coast, and will add that the South (“Silicon Bayou” is such a sad joke) is in basically the same place.

    But I don’t think the West coast actually has all those advantages either, not anymore. What passes for “innovation” is all some variation on crypto, ai, or “being the Uber of $NICHE.” Throw in some buzzwords like IoT, quantum, blockchain, or “smart” and you’re all set to race with the other founders to get a piece of that sweet sweet VC dollar.

    The financiers have taken over everything and are going to drive the economy off a cliff so they can scavenge and sell the parts. They’ve taken over film, gaming, tech, all traditional media, journalism, and they’re using the banner of “privatization” to finish off healthcare, education, postal services, and anything else they can convince idiots to sell them. The bankers are winning.



  • I don’t necessarily think the MM is intentionality going against AI, they’re just following what drives engagement and the mainstream tide is turning against AI (again, AI winter 3.0, here we go).

    However, I did see that “AI causes delusions” article in the NYT together with the very hilarious conflict of interest notice: “The NYT is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement.”

    So who knows? It is entirely in the MM’s interests to both write about AI (hot topic, much engagement) and also to make the AI companies look incompetent, reckless, and dangerous because that bolsters their cases against them.




  • You’re correct that it’s actually a non-issue: trans people are a ridiculously small minority, most Americans who don’t live in a city have probably never met a trans person, yet the entire nation has been whipped into frenzied “debate” about fairness in sports, bathroom needs, and other very unserious issues.

    The answers are also very obvious. No trans person has ever dominated a sport, otherwise you’d have heard about this. The actual problem with hormones in sports is rampant steroid abuse, trans issues distract from that. Likewise, just have unisex private bathrooms. Treating humans like indistinguishable cattle is already a problem.

    None of this, however, relates to the issue of Mayor Pete. Politicians don’t really “raise issues” from their constituents, not primarily anyway. They raise issues from their donors, and they shape public discourse with what they draw attention to. Buttigieg could support trans people with a word and move on to real issues. He could ignore trans people and call out Republicans for distracting people. He could do so many things, but he chooses to focus on this. It can’t be ignored that he’s a gay man also. The intent here is to further wedge between LGB and T.

    The ruler class has been working overtime on this for years, because breaking the solidarity of LGBTQ+ people destroys an important progressive bloc held together by shared oppression. If you convince male gays that lesbians and trans people are making too much noise and drawing bad attention, you can split them up and push the whole lot of us back into the closets.

    These issues aren’t isolated concerns that operate as pure distractions. They’re various fronts in the class war; you can’t ignore a flanking maneuver as a “distraction” while the cavalry runs rampant over you.


  • There are other privacy issues with having an indelible marker as to the origin and chain of custody of every digital artifact. And other non-privacy issues.

    So the idea here is that my phone camera attaches a crypro token to the metadata of every photo it takes? (Or worse, embeds it into the image steganographically like printer dots.) Then if I send that photo to a friend in signal, that app attaches a token indicating the transfer? And so on?

    If that’s a video of say, police murdering someone, maybe I don’t want a perfect trail pointing back to me just to prove I didnt deep fake it. And if that’s where we are, then every video of power being abused is going to “be fake” because no sane person would sacrifice their privacy, possibly their life, to “prove” a video isnt AI generated.

    And those in power, the mainstream media say, aren’t going to demonstrate the crypto chain of custody on every video they show on the news. They’re going to show whatever they want, then say “its legit, trust us!” and most people will.

    These are the fundamental issues with crypto that people actually don’t understand: too much of it is actually opt-in, it’s unclear to most people what’s actually proved or protected, and it doesn’t actually address or understsnd where trust, authority, and power actually come from.


  • It sounds like this guy was also relying on the AI to self-report status. Did any of this happen? Like is the replit AI really hooked up to a CLI, did it even make a DB to start with, was there anything useful in it, and did it actually delete it?

    Or is this all just a long roleplaying session where this guy pretends to run a business and the AI pretends to do employee stuff for him?

    Because 90% of this article is “I asked the AI and it said:” which is not a reliable source for information.



  • This is a good idea, but also working remote frees up time to meet new affinity groups.

    Not to dump on people’s relaxation strategies, but even the most introverted person can’t survive on video games and gooning alone.

    If you don’t want or like hanging with coworkers, find a local bar to hang out at and meet some folks, go to a community board game night, join a choir, attend an anime viewing night, just do something to take initiative and meet some folks that like what you like.




  • Oh so like the music industry where every artist retains full rights to their work and the only 3 big publishers definitely don’t force them to sell all their rights leaving musicians with basically nothing but touring revenue? Protecting the little guy like that you mean?

    Or maybe protecting the little guy like how 5 tech companies own all the key patents required for networking, 3d graphics, and digital audio? And how those same companies control social media so if you are any kind of artist you are forced to hustle nonstop on their platforms for any hope if reaching an audience with your work? I’m sure all those YouTube creators feel very protected.