I'm not expecting that from domestic opponents; both because the penalties are high and because people are, historically, shockingly bad at shooting for targets that actually matter. I'm thinking more internationally.

If 'AI' is half so interesting as its proponents claim one would expect being a machine learning researcher worth offering a fat signing bonus to be about as dangerous as being an Iranian nuclear physicist or a Russian oligarch who has fallen off Putin's friends list. If Zuck thinks that you are worth $100 million it seems like someone who takes the idea that 'AI' is the next frontier in state power would consider it worth the trouble to hire some local criminal to kill you in a botched robbery or have their clandestine services attempt to throw you a little tea party. So far no reports of even foiled attempts.

Boosters are risking their freedom and even their lives. If it was easier for them to find work then they'd do legitimate work instead of boosting. Selling at flea markets is a job itself, so they're clearly willing to work.

Because the website helpfully provides structured data with tags which make it clear what it is, it's very easy to just use old fashioned and cheap filters to exclude content like that from the training set without losing anything else.

Protesting something that doesn't happen is better PR for you than protesting something that does...

Anyone who thinks that the bots are going to wipe us out is overestimating the bots; but it seems like there is a disconcertingly large supply of people who are just chomping at the bit to replace people regardless of whether the bots are up to the job or not.

Honestly, the weirdest thing about the 'hard line activists' and the 'war with AI' is how much there isn't to it.

This is an industry that puts out a 'tehehe, we're an existential threat!' press release every time they need another VC round; and whose c-levels openly discuss how they will annihilate all human jobs and maybe someone should think about what we should do about that; and who routinely trample local interests to get their infrastructure builds rammed through; and what's the 'war with AI'? One idiot who tossed a molotov and a disgruntled constituent? That's it?

The same oddity is true for 'AI' companies and nation states, also very puzzlingly. To go by the rhetoric of 'AI' being an existential struggle for the future of industry and whether the AGI omnimind will speak english or mandarin you'd think that we'd see at least a bit of skullduggery. Prominent 'AI' hires occasionally dying under mysterious circumstances; sabotage of expensive GPU farms, maybe a Rosenberg-style show trial or two. But no. There's some lightweight hacking and ToS-violating 'distillation'; and a few export shenanigans; but aside from that it's basically the same as any other SaaS nonsense but with bigger numbers. Weirdly unserious.

There's also the issue of cost/scope. I'm not sure that Id is atypical for a studio of its age and size in terms of how its games have gotten more costly over time; but it's still very much the case that Quake was about a dozen guys crunching and Trent Reznor making creepy industrial noises; while Doom: The Dark Ages was closer to feature film level budget.

More potential players now than there were in 1996; but the production cost increase has still, on the balance, likely done bad things to your ability to turn a profit on the basis of a relatively small slice of the market thinking that your game fucking rules; rather than making a major seller more or less mandatory.

In Id's case specifically I'd also be curious if they are somewhat victims of their own legend. Basically every "boomer shooter" going is absolutely mainlining some combination of doom and quake nostalgia(often doom aesthetics but with quake's actually-3d to better render how you remember them rather than how the weird 2.5d stuff actually behaved); and a lot of those actually have dev teams closer in size to Quake; presumably with the expected effect on how many units they have to sell to remain viable.

Are we really just going to sit and take the fact that Cuba has already achieved the sort of electrical grid reliability that demented AI bros are setting billions of dollars on fire to try to bring to the US? This is an outrage!

Wasn't there a scene in Minority Report where the star was trying to run away from the authorities he kept getting his iris scanned by electronic billboards and signs as he ran through the crowded shopping plaza?

IIRC the advertisements and announcements that played started customizing themselves indicating they'd identified a criminal and showing is face and profile?

If you've got 1 bad cop, and 9 "good" cops who are covering for him, what you've actually got there is 10 bad cops.

You have it exactly right. I can see why you didn't post with an identity, you'd get punished by the reich wingers. Wage theft exceeds all other theft combined but maggots are still crying about shoplifters

"No, you don’t get to simply dismiss the oppression of Communism with a “I understand”. As if the death toll demanded by that ideology is dismissible with some shitty retort given on the ass-end of a customer support line."

Empirically, we do. You can feel however you want about it; but it's a trivial matter of historical record that, say, Vietnam, had trade relations pick up from the 1990s on; and full PNTR status in late 2006 leading in to WTO membership in 2007(both under noted woke liberal commie George W. Bush); and that's a nominally communist state directly continuous with the one we lost an unpleasant war to whose human rights record continues to be pretty tepid at best.

We do enjoy decrying the horrors of communism; but we'll 100% pick up an abjectly shit foreign policy pal if we think that they will be useful. During the cold war that normally meant any right wing dictatorship that liked us more than Moscow; now that Soviets aren't a huge deal you can still have "socialist republic" in your nation's full name so long as your resources are cool or your labor force is cheap and docile.

Cuba is really something of a weird outlier. Militarily unthreatening, not huge on strategic resources but some agricultural products we enjoy and by all accounts a pleasant vacation spot that (like a lot of pleasant vacation spots with dubious local governments) generally keeps things civil with tourists, even from unfriendly nations, so long as the tourists keep things apolitical and do tourist stuff. Normally that's the sort of place we'd absolutely do some business with.

A lot of it comes down to Cuban immigrants to the US skewing pretty sharply anti-present-government and being a voting bloc very much worth picking up. Basically mandatory in Florida; and helpful if less vital in a fair number of other states. They aren't necessarily rabidly single issue and trivial to pick up (especially for the purposes of primaries where there's generally more than one candidate promising disproportionate hostility to Cuba); but they do make being weirdly hostile to Cuba specifically more electorally rewarding than it would otherwise be.

This is not to imply any particular support for their administration on my part; but it's patently obvious that we are far chummier with rather worse people all the time without much caring about it; and we have no general policy against dealing with states that style themselves communist but make themselves useful market participants(even ones like Vietnam, where the history is rather less pleasant than with Cuba, we treat as totally normal manufacturing locations). It's hard to see much incentive beyond internal voter signaling for our rigid adherence to cold war freakout rather than just trying to shuffle Cuba into the same box as other Caribbean tourism-and-a-bit-of-agriculture-and-fisheries locations that we view as more or less powerless playground locations but don't put lots of time into actively fucking with.

It's not really a catch-22, since there's no need for it to be the same people regulating how much lying you can do about prices and producing goods and services.

It's also not really a catch-22 since, if it weren't for the tolerance of grotesque levels of regulatory capture, any 'capitalist' regulator would take ensuring high quality price signals really seriously.

The part that should upset people is that the 'capitalists' are so far into bed with actively anti-market rent seekers that you can't rely on them to stand up for honest price signals, contract law that isn't so lopsided as to be basically a joke, and so on.

You're such a sad little man