If this is how you see the Democratic Party, I don’t see how you have any right to call yourself a moderate and not a radical.

This is sort of hilarious, because I’d think you have a duty to call yourself a radical. If you’re not a radical by now, then you’re just a collaborator. It’s not about black and white, it’s about black and blacker.

Of course one has to act and vote in a sane manner and play politics, but if your rhetoric and our demands aren’t seen as radical by the mainstream, that’s a problem. Like e.g. universal healthcare.

Modern Liberalism claims to be for individual equality but that’s kind of a lie. It has the same mechanisms to distribute economic and political power than Classic Liberalism, Libertarianism or Neoliberalism. Capital rules everything.

MAGAts understand that the Democrats believe in inequality just like the fascists do, just inequality based on class instead of on identity. So for them it’s perfectly logical to choose identity instead. They are not wrong about the hypocrisy of liberals, pretending to care about equality for some specific group but ignoring the inequality for all. It was fine until prosperity started to plummet.

That’d be blaming the one bad egg, not the the institutions. Neoliberals will ally themselves with fascists to fight socialists. But I guess it’s possible. Also good strategy, blame the rogue politician instead of their moral bankruptcy.

The real issue is that Cuomo isn’t a right-wing Nazi

He’s trying to split the vote as a spoiler candidate to allow the NAZI party win. Which makes him a NAZI collaborator.

Haha I wondered how they would try to stop Mamdani becoming mayor.

You’re projecting. Every accusation is a confession.

Emotion > Facts. Most people have been trained to blindly accept things and cheer on what fits with their agenda. Like technbro’s exaggerating LLMs, or people like you misrepresenting LLMs as mere statistical word generators without intelligence. That’s like saying a computer is just wires and switches, or missing the forest for the trees. Both is equally false.

Yet if it fits with the emotional needs or with dogma, then other will agree. It’s a convenient and comforting “A vs B” worldview we’ve been trained to accept. And so the satisfying notion and misinformation keeps spreading.

LLMs tell us more about human intelligence and the human slop we’ve been generating. It tells us that most people are not that much more than statistical word generators.

Victim blaming has arrived for gun violence. This marks an historic achievement in the development of propaganda!´

Thousands of cops and fascists are smacking themselves in the forehead right now and saying: Wow! Actually I invented this! I’ve been saying years ago “Hey, why are you hitting yourself?”

Evil, Scary China Refuses To Passively Let Us Encircle It: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix – Caitlin Johnstone

That’s a pretty good article explaining it. The funny thing is that the US media is always framing China as the aggressor. But one look at that map, like with your real eyes, not the crazy eyes, should show you the US is way out there on someone else’s doorstep and who the aggressor is. That’s just geography.

Personally I don’t think China is going to invade Taiwan unless things escalate further. For example, the Russian perspective on the Ukraine is that the US supported the regime change through the NED, helped far right elements overthrow the democratically elected regime and then supported their stance to ban Russian language, oppress Russian speaking populations in Ukraine and supplied them with massive amounts of arms and intelligence. All of this is true historical fact. And in that situation even the chief of NATO Stoltenberg publicly said that Russia launched a “preemptive war” in response to this quasi-NATO membership right on their doorstep. If the US does the same with Taiwan, China might invade. That particular gabit is rather unlikely to succeed in Taiwan though, and Taiwan is far less dangerous to China than a hostile well supplied Ukraine is to Russia (only like 500 miles from Moskow). The smart play for China if that happens is to play rope-a-dope until the US gets tired. Kinda what Iran is doing about the numerous provocations and acts of war against them.

Sounds like it would make a good wedge issue for the next election.

PS: And yeah I get it, it’s weird that you KNOW someone breathed that out lol. I’d even support it if it was based on annoying someone with vaping at a buss stop or in a park. Like it’s a misdemeanor if someone complains, and only then. That should be enough so people police themselves to be more courteous.

Ahh, now I’ve instructed my bot army to downvote you :D But seriously, I’ve read proper research papers about electronic cigarettes. Not the fake ones put out by big tobacco or the puritans where they deliberately measure dry hits, which are sill orders of magnitude better than cigarettes. Ultimately it’s just vegetable glycerin, polypropylen glycol and nicotine, with optional flavor. It’s not like you’d get addicted just by smelling a vape in a park. There is also no gateway to go from vaping to smoking.

There is simply no valid legal argument you could give why it should be banned. Well, unless it’s massively annoying to a majority of people. But then they should really go after those kids with ghetto blasters and skateboards first.

“Vaguely annoy”? :D I mean vaping isn’t really harmful, so what would be the legal basis to ban something like this?

Ban everything that mildly annoys us!

I was thinking of the Gemini (protocol) - Wikipedia but a bit more elaborate, and yeah I’m not sure how far text compression can be pushed. But I think LLMs could be useful and help reach a critical mass of being able to download and store tons of articles.

Torrent V2 and other official extensions Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items allow some ways to do this. Like hosting a youtube channel and updating it with new videos, without any new network protocol. Well theoretically since this isn’t yet supported well in torrent clients or lib.

I’ve been thinking how this would work for a while but it’s kind of frying my brain haha. Like a “P2P version control database” that is truly open source. For articles and blog posts, but also for metadata for manhwa, movies, tv, anime, books etc. Like anybody can download and use it and share, edit, fork it without needing to set up some complex server. Something that can’t be taken down, sold or if abandoned someone else can just pick it up and you can merge different curated versions and additions easily.

You’d basically want a “most popular items of the past X time” that almost everybody downloads, and then the whole database split into more and more exotic or obscure items. So everybody has the popular stuff but also has to host some exotic items so they don’t get lost. And it has to be easy to use and install.

But the whole database has to be small and compact and compressed enough that you can still easily host it on a normal HDD. It the current times with economic and political dangers lurking this would be a crucial bit of IT infrastructure.

That is just stupid. How about a slighly more complex markdown.

What I really want is a P2P archive of all the relevant news articles of the last decades in markdown like in firefox “reader view”. And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.

Much of the information on the internet could vanish within months if we face some global economic crisis.

I bought an oled phone for 200€ a few years back. What I’d really want is that every smartphone sold in the EU is open, with open drivers and OS with root access if you want to. And some investments by the EU to support open smartphone OS.

What a shithole civilization.

I couldn’t remember it either. I described it to deepseek in order to find it. Ironically it mistakenly thought

the short story you’re thinking of is almost certainly “Nanny” by Cory Doctorow. It’s part of his collection Radicalized (published in 2019)".

If you find it, let me know. I think I might have been conned by deepseek.

Throughout history, every village had one idiot, two max. And maybe one psycho.

Today thanks to the power of the internet these idiots and those psychos can unite and create big communities and represent a strong unified force in the world.

They would generate strategies that maximize their objective function based on the training data. Obviously garbage in garbage out, but my point is they would not be prone to certain irrationalities like humans.

It might be possible to regulate how AI CEOs are optimized and trained though. You can tell a human CEO a thousand times “we only have one earth, if you all externalize your cost we will all die and have zero profits” but an AI might actually get it. AI might also be connected to a kind of crowdsourced democratic economic global forum, where people can discuss, complain and make suggestions.

AI also has a much higher bandwidth and might catch institutional problems much easier because it doesn’t have to rely on summaries of subordinates to understand how things are going.

More broadly, it might be theoretically impossible for humans to act according to our shared values - no matter what rules, institutions, education or culture we create. Like “theoretically impossible, the system always degenerates” because individual humans will always follow their own greed and lust for power while pretending to comply, and then using that power to slowly pervert the system and it’s rules. I believe that is the root of our current malaise. But even non-sentient AI might be able to help us just enough to make it work. It’s much more likely that those in power will use it for the opposite, but that shouldn’t stop us from thinking about if it can be used for good.

People are a resource that keeps regenerating after all.

That’s what the AI would call “sustainable business practices”?