politics

My feelings on AI are also complicated, but I'm glad we all agree this is radioactive trash.

I love to play around with local AI; random github releases, local-hosted-and-use LLMs, and free code seem genuinely interesting, even if I don't plan to do anything public. And when it doesn't feed back to a corporation, and the benefits go only to the user, I'm usually for it.

Like...My local-hosted Immich server has AI image recognition, fully locally hosted, no corporate parasitic training use, just the ability to use language to search. Like, I can immediately find that one picture from 15 years ago that I know has a dog in it by searching for "dog" and scrolling a tiny bit.

But AI platforms use that seeks to reinforce power (corporations like Google and Meta, politicians like Trump and Cuomo, billionaires like Musk) or startups obviously staking claims to try to capture and monetize users (OpenAI, and the fifty thousand other techbro VC simp startups) are physically repulsive to me.

ML tech isn’t bad, just like blockchain isn’t bad. It’s the gross capitalist opportunism happening around it that makes it overpromise (to the detriment of quality), overbuild (to the detriment of the environment), overuse (to the detriment of the economy), and overstimulate (to the detriment of mental health) while stealing the hard work of basically all of humanity up to this point (like then or not, the material reality is that these companies should be compensating artists and authors alike for their work being used for training).

And with all that power, they do THIS fucking shit with it.

I’m all for local LLMs to be assistants, autocompletes, and reference librarians; but just like the web, they were better when you had to be a fucking turbo-nerd to get them working.

So first off, this isn’t actually the ad described in the article. Which means this has happened more than once.

But even with the ad you linked, I went into it thinking “eh, how bad can it be?” It’s worse than I could have imagined. It’s like they went out of their way to make the worst “train wreck in slow motion” political ad possible.

Holy cow that’s some deep hurting

In our first-past-the-post voting system, politicians who address policy don't get enough votes to win elections. After consistent losses, evolution of election consultants and candidate recruitment has made the "address policy" meme near-extinct.

I believe ranked choice voting could help, but it would take multiple election evolution cycles (at least a decade) foe the now-rare political memes to rebreed up to significant population levels.

Crazy how being against fascism is also terroristic in America. Like hating Hitler and thinking the things he did was wrong is just one example that can get your rights stripped and thrown into Guantanamo.

Because it was really really really stupid

Buuuuuuurrrrrrnnnnn