“How will we get by without all our financialized monopolies?!”

Idk, bro. Just keep doing what you’re doing, minus the extraordinary rents to your bloated bourgeois landlords, maybe?

The way to build third parties is by reforming the democratic system state by state to have a ranked choice system

Spending decades to tinker with the mechanics of an election system that excludes 40% of the population via its baseline construction? Seems like you’re going to keep getting the same results.

What good is Ranked Choice Voting in a state like Florida, where 1.7M people are excluded through the state’s Felony Disenfrachisement system? FFS, the state voted on an amendment to reform Felony Disenfrachisement and the legislature just cancelled it out. Gerrymandering means you’ll never see a non-conservative state senate and you’re unlikely to see more than a moderate conservative occupy the Governor’s mansion.

That’s not a FPTP problem, its a problem of targeted state-wide ethnic disenfranchisement.

glances at the current state of the UK Labour party

It’s been known to work for a bit, but its also been known to collapse right back into the old two-party dichotomy. I think the hysteria around third parties baked into every election since the Bush Era SCOTUS-powered election theft in Florida is overblown, particularly when so much of the electorate lives in one-party dominant states. But I’ve also noticed successful outsider parties - the German Greens, France’s En March, the UK Liberal Dems - seem to embrace Corporationism as quickly as any of their German Christian Democrat / French Socialist / UK Tory peers.

And then there’s always this specter of fascism floating on the edge of the political establishment. Your Alternative for Germany, your National Front, and your UKIP create this existential crisis for liberal voters, such that they’re persistently terrorized into voting the “safe” centrist candidates in while ostracizing any candidate actually running on the things they say they want.

The Ruling Elite have the effective roadmap to keep the proles in line. Continuously finance a paper tiger on the right-flank of the election cycle. Make immigration a boogeyman issue that mobilizes the reactionaries within the state to turn out in droves. Then dangle a weak liberal as a release valve - a Starmer or Biden or Macron or Olaf Schultz - that nobody particularly likes, but the liberal-leaning base are told is “electable” because they can win the support of the conservative national media.

People are bombarded with this false choice - weak liberal or strongman conservative - decade after decade, all the way around the edge of the Atlantic, until the institutions these weak liberals are supposed to support are falling apart and the strongman conservatives can easily take over.

Its a doomed system.

Lexcorp was never portrayed as anything but an industrial powerhouse whose existence was ultimately good.

The largest international arms dealing firm that did Captain Planet Villain tier pollution, corruption, and financial scams was “ultimately good”?

Didn’t Lexcorp literally clone an army of Doomsdays?

I don’t remember this at all.

AI has looked like a scam since the Metaverse days when Facebook realized it couldn’t push those shitty headsets on people and decided to pivot.

The entire training set isn’t used in each permutation. Your keywords are building the samples based on metadata tags tied back to the original images.

If you ask for “Iron Man in a cowboy hat”, the toolset will reach for some catalog of Iron Man images and some catalog of cowboy hat images and some catalog of person-in-cowboy-hat images, when looking for a basis of comparison as it renders the image.

These would be the images attributed to the output.

This is why we can’t relent

What are “we” doing? Not uninstalling our ad blockers? Its not as though people are boycotting the site. Just use Piped, ffs. No ads whatsoever. It’s a late-00s YouTube experience.

Harris is married to the brother of an Uber executive. If you were hoping for a trust-buster, you picked the wrong candidate. Those $500k/plate fundraising dinners she hosts are coming entirely out of the Silicon Valley mega-millionaire bracket.

Speaking of which, anyone notice the hellishly annoying full-screen shitty mobile games Netflix keeps front-paging?

Seriously considering just giving up on the service and going entirely to piracy.

I’m not sure what people think AI was ever going to be…

The heavy investment in AI is coming under the assumption that these advanced processes will replace huge portions of the human workforce.

So we don’t need lawyers, because we just put prompts into a Law AI and it gives us a verdict. We don’t need doctors, because we just put symptoms into a Medical AI and it gives us a diagnosis and treatment plan. We don’t need salespeople, because we just put the product into a Marketing AI and it spits out a bunch of comvincing ad copy.

the concept of what a brain is will probably be questioned as well.

We already connect our brains to our computers. We just use screens and keyboards as our interface.

I suppose you could argue that a guy with a calculator or a camera or a chat app is mentally different than one without it. But I think the goal with AI is supplementing human minds, not complementing then.

Vampires will even admit they suck.

So much of the drift has just been marketing. Rebranding a Markov Chain stapled onto a particularly large graph as Master Computer from Tron.

Super computers have been doing this sort of stuff for decades without much problem

Idk if I’d point at a supercomputer system and suggest it was constructed “without much problem”. Cray has significantly lagged the computer market as a whole.

the main issue is on training for LLMs inference is pretty computationally cheap

Again, I would not consider anything in the LLM marketplace particularly cheap. Seems like they’re losing money rapidly.

there are loads of white papers detailing applications of AI in various industries

And loads more of its ineffectual nature and wastefulness.

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link

You don’t need the whole image, just the route to your machine to retrieve the data. Glorified Bit.ly.

One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine

Definitely a perk of a bulk centralized system. But the pricing model is still messed up. If Teamspeak sold you gems to buy widgets to mask your IP, I still wouldn’t pay for the service.

Google Whiteboard could have been better. Hell, I can think of a dozen apps in the Google graveyard that could have been better.

But Discord still exists and they don’t, so…

The NSA agent assigned to monitor me has a character on my Foundry instance.

Or let you host from your own machine, rather than paying Discord for the privilege of using their wildly overpriced services.

crypto is very niche in real world applications at the moment whereas AI does have real world usages.

Crypto has a very real niche use for money laundering that it does exceptionally well.

AI does not appear to do anything significantly more effectively than a Google search circa 2018.

But neither can justify a multi billion dollar market cap on these terms.

The game and media industry are very much trialling for voice and image synthesis for improving environmental design (texture synthesis) and providing dynamic voice synthesis based off actors likenesses. We have had peoples likenesses in movies for decades via cgi but it’s only really now we can do the same but for voices and this isn’t getting into logistics and/or financial where it is also seeing a lot of application.

Voice actors simply don’t cost that much money. Procedural world building has existed for decades, but it’s generally recognized as lackluster beside bespoke design and development.

These tools let you build bad digital experiences quickly.

For logistics and finance, a lot of what you’re exploring is solved with the technology that underpins AI (modern graph theory). But LLMs don’t get you that. They’re an extraneous layer that takes enormous resources to compile and offers very little new value.

would rather go to local retailers that are increasing Chinese goods for a 150% profit, than Amazon and pay 300%

A lot of the local retailors are going out of business in my area. And those that exist are impossible to get into and out of, due to the fixation on car culture. The Galleria is just a traffic jam that spans multiple city blocks.

The thing that keeps me at Amazon, rather than Target, is purely the time visit of shopping versus shipping.