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

Because of the way they our political system is set up, and the laws and regulations that surround political spending, money is everything to a party politician even if it isn’t.

As a politician, your party controls everything. They control what committees you sit on, whether or not the rest of the party will vote for something you work on, whether or not you will receive any financial assistance (or opposition) in your primary or general campaign.

What determines your status in the party? How much money you contribute to them via fundraisers. What’s a great, efficient way to raise funds for your party? Fucking over the population by catering to the rich.

That’s what I’m saying. This is why campaign finance laws and regulations need to change. It’s extremely difficult to do anything, even if you get elected, when you don’t have any power.

I know Google/Gemini gets used because it provides a lot for free. Also, more important than many people likely realize, “Google for Education” claims to adhere to all of the many privacy concerns and requirements that come into play when looking for solutions in a public school district.

Can you point me to a model, capable of writing useful code, where the 100% of the codebase used to train the model came from people who explicitly consented to their code being used to train a model? Or was it all scraped from anywhere any everywhere they could find it regardless of consent?

My comment is from the perspective of politicians, not the average person.

As i recall, the claim for the entire suite was that it was “clean-room”. No code stolen… unless you are concerned that the entire model is the result of stolen code… in which case we are in agreement.

Because everything is about money.

Demonizing the Chinese is silly. Their move for so much control is, in large part, a response to constant sabotage my capitalist interests.

I’m not saying terrible things haven’t been done or won’t be done by them. I’m just stating the fact that you can’t be polite or play nice in a room full of violent fascists looking to make you fail. This is what China learned by watching the cold war with the USSR.

Design is absolutely thriving. Things are made, with great care and precision, to more easily manipulate and mislead buyers and to more easily misinform the population. Most importantly, things are made to more easily extract wealth from everyone else.

What you are assuming, incorrectly, is that the general population is the customer. The general population is, in fact, just another resource for the wealthy and powerful (the real customers).

They only respect the consent of landholders.

To be fair, those who took part in Occupy are also part of many modern movements. It didn’t solve the problems but it started a lot of movements that are still alive today that, hopefully, will make some real changes.

They’d also get access to those sweet AI doctors.

Or consider “the school staff didn’t immediately notify a parent that they should start beating the trans out of their kid” to be sexual abuse.

I’ve never known that there were terms already in use - like “capitalist encirclement” and “siege socialism” - for these concepts I’d had. It is interesting to explore the need for what works in the environment we’re stuck in vs. what should theoretically be possible were our efforts not constantly being sabotaged and undermined in every possible way by forces vastly larger than our own.

I also hadn’t thought as much about the starting point for all of these movements in the global South - severely handicapped by their history of being exploited and suppressed by colonialism. Add to that the fact that those powers looking to sabotage socialist efforts are directly empowered by the cheap labor and precious resources they are extracting via that same colonialism.

Thanks for the link.

The older I get the more I realize that, with capitalists holding so much power all over the world, it’s extremely difficult for a socialist/communist state to exist without it being pushed to become an authoritarian state.

I can see how the absolute onslaught of pressure from those capitalist powers on all sides - propaganda, sanctions, trade wars, blockades, posturing, funding opposition parties, funding rebel groups, sabotage, proxy wars, etc. - could turn any well-intentioned leaders to paranoia and state violence.

That’s not to say existing and/or historic communist/socialist states have/had pure, innocent leaders, or that I blindly give any of them a pass. It’s just an extremely difficult environment in which to demonstrate the potential of such governments.

yeah, most slop content already existed before chatgpt and was written by humans.

Sure, I’d say most topics already had slop content. However, LLMs can generate entire websites of slop content in minutes if not less. It’s pointlessly inefficient to employ people to generate slop by hand. Entire news sites are now just LLM generated slop because it was determined to be cheaper than human generated slop. Most slop content is now, and will going forward be, LLM generated.

I was recently introduced to the detrimental affects of poorly thought out EPA regulations for vehicle mileage and the consumer assumption that bigger cars should cost more than smaller cars. Simplified, the required MPG goes up over time. However, it goes up far less the heavier your vehicle is. So, car manufacturers making bigger, heavier vehicles (for an only slightly higher cost) means less research on efficiency and no fine for low MPG AND consumers are willing to pay more for larger vehicles. For manufacturers its a win-win to keep selling bigger, less efficient vehicles for high prices.

There are very few people I can convince to switch just because its too hard for them to switch apps depending on who you are talking to.

I rarely interact in chats with these folks and one friend that I’m closest to in that group had basically been acting a repeater for important messages. I didn’t want to, just months after finally having them stop using a group Facebook chat switch to group SMS that included me, bail on them again for an even less common method of communication and make him do that again.

I’ll bring it up in person in a month or two. One of them literally works for Google - not a massive fanboy but prone to occasional defensiveness - so I’m not super hopeful it’ll happen anytime soon.

I thought that might have been the setting that did it. Unfortunately, a prompt to change that setting occurred only after about 16 hours of multiple rounds of switching, uninstalling, resetting permissions for, adding permissions to, and clearing data from the Messages app, multiple rounds of turning off RCS through Google, etc. I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere in support posts or the extremely long release notes pages until after that prompt.

Admittedly, my ability to find anything useful through DDG or Google seems to get worse every week.

the idea was that making electricity and phone service universal would benefit the country as a whole and bring everybody on board with the idea of government doing things for people.

Well, a certain type of folk refuse to rely on the gubmint for anything, but they’ll get mad as hell when the gubmint tries to take away something it was already giving them. That didn’t count, you see.