Billionaires in the Epstein class already control the media. They own 90% of it. There is no reason for them to bother attacking their own infrastructure.

The tactics used in America for maintaining control are really simple. Control the media. Undermine education so that people do not learn critical thinking, used generic moral panics to keep people from voting in their economic interests, disrupt left wing and progressive get out the vote campaigns and actual effective political organization, and finally lots of lots of voter suppression done at the county level. New Hampshire just made it so that you can't use a student ID to vote and naturally the supreme Court said that's a-ok. And of course our entire drug policy was set up by Richard Nixon in order to attack progressives and the left wing.

So with all that already in place there's absolutely no need to do fancy shit disrupting the left wing like that. It's like the old comic about the guy with the 1024-bit encryption getting hit with a $2 wrench until he gives them the password.

When I ask the models that my company makes available to me to write something it will kind of sort of do it. But about half the time it will generate something that is completely wrong. I then have to debug it and then well I could have just written it myself.

It also takes a tremendous amount of effort to learn how to correctly prompt and again well, at that point why don't I just write it myself?

The programming isn't what takes forever it's getting all the business logic in place and explaining it to people. I spent hours explaining to management why something they wanted to do wouldn't work, implemented it, it didn't work, and I will have to reimplement a bunch of stuff now.

One thing AI will do it will let everyone be a code monkey. But those jobs were already in India so as an American I'm not that concerned.

On the other hand AI has convinced leadership that a shitload of things that can be automated that they for some reason didn't believe could be automated can now in fact be automated. So AI is devouring jobs indirectly. A bunch of jobs that could be automated or now in the process of automation and are just disappearing. It's why America is pushing 25% functional unemployment. We are basically in a 2008 style recession and just not talking about it

From what I understand they're not exactly a nice company. Apparently they have a habit of stealing images and using their size to bully the photographers into silence.

But either way it sucks because it means more AI slop. We're already seeing these absolutely ridiculous and hideous restaurant menus all over the place. One thing I learned years ago good enough is always good enough.

That it can be mistaken for AI then well, shit man I'm sorry.

That said AI is fundamentally plagiarism on demand. This means that the same tools that have been developed for a long long time for detecting plagiarism will work just fine. The real problem is people are assholes and they will accuse people of using AI to write stuff and people will join in because people are assholes.

The solution is to start discouraging people from being assholes. But that is a big lift because behind every asshole is our competitive culture. We really like to turn absolutely fucking everything into a goddamn competition. Nobody can have any fun unless they are either making a shitload of money from it or they are the absolute best at it. It's especially bad here in America where puritanical bullshit means that anything you do that isn't inherently valuable is a moral failing on your part.

Basically fix the actual problems in society and dumb little problems like this go away. But that requires change that I don't think anyone wants to make. A cooperative society would be better for everyone except a handful of assholes but well here we are

But I saw something that only about 7% of data centers are failing to go through due to moratoriums and most of that 7% is a single project.

They're just ignoring us. If we tell them no they just keep building the data center.

American spent 50 years undermining democracy and dismantling our institutions. We can't expect them to save us or protect us now. We need to rebuild them and it's going to take decades. And we need to learn what a moral panic is and why we should ignore it

And is sure enough it's linked with Trump. It's just another way for Trump to funnel money to his buddies who will then funnel some of it back to him.

66% of Americans believe Trump is openly criminal and corrupt but of them at least 10% are still going to vote for him and the Republican party while they're at it also what the hell is wrong with the remaining 44%?

Nobody gives a rat's ass about kids except their own. This is because of Trump. Also Russia.

This is an effective way to kick American social media companies out of your country. Like most socially destructive and unpleasant things you kind of have to get em young. If you don't hook kids early on they don't become terribly interested in social media.

What they tend to do is they tend to find a platform their friends are on and just communicate with their friends. They don't engage in the Doom scrolling that you need to manipulate political outcomes and control a population and gather shitloads of highly confidential and valuable information. Just a little IMing back and forth and that's no good if you're a Russian propagandist or a billionaire psychopath.

Facebook has had that problem for ages and they stay ahead of it by buying up every tiny little potential competitor or small Network and then forcing kids into their main platform where they can be monetized and propagandized.

Since Trump threatened to invade Greenland Europe sees America as a existential threat, which much as I hate to admit it is correct. My country literally made a pedophile president of the United States twice we can no longer be trusted.

If you're up just banned Facebook and Twitter there would be legal challenges and they would probably lose but by cutting off the kids in 5 or 10 years Facebook and Twitter will be dead in Europe.

The funny thing is I'm sure that both Facebook and Twitter know this well I mean Facebook Twitter is run by an imbecile. So I do wonder how they are going to counter this or if they even can

To avoid purchasing a $50 mini PC. Maybe $100 since everything keeps going up in price since 2024 but still...

I mean if you're a hobbyist more power to you. I'm going to spend some time tomorrow tinkering with a small form factor computer case to get The thermals right. I happen to like this particular case because I've had it for a long time but it's not terribly good and I could and probably should just replace it but screw that I'm going to keep tinkering with it.

Russia does not have the resources to occupy Ukraine. They can invade it they can't occupy it. The amount of troops and resources needed to occupy a hostile nation is extremely well researched and well understood. And Russia with its population of 120 million can't even come close. They don't have the troops they don't have the money and they don't even have the population for it.

If they tried they would get bogged down in insurgency that makes Afghanistan look like a Sunday picnic. Never mind the fact that the rest of the world would be flooding Ukraine with weapons to keep Russia busy.

That means Russia will go straight to genocide. Every single person in Ukraine will be killed or sent to death camps to be worked until they die. The only exception will be people who flee.

That is the only thing Putin can do with the country. Kill everyone there and put his own people in.

Incidentally every single world leader knows that this is going to happen if Russia wins and they are letting Russia continue this war instead of properly arming Ukraine because it's beneficial to them to do so so long as Russia doesn't completely take the region. If Russia takes the region it'll kind of suck for Europe because Europe wants access to Ukraine's bread basket. But it's worth the risk to do this much damage to Russia. At least as far as European leadership is concerned. American too Frankly and I'm not happy about that

So it's not that easy to get your hands on something that valuable. If Ukraine had the dirt on Trump then it would already be out there. Putin is completely incompetent at virtually everything. He can't run a country and he can't run a war.

But he is good at two things. First he's good at feudalism. Which is basically the technique of playing all the other people who are trying to replace you as King rat against each other so you stay on top. And the second thing he's really good at is information warfare. It's literally what he did at the the kgb.

Because they could charge more. Once the initial setup is done the cost of maintaining internet access for somebody is negligible. If we were a functioning civilization it would be like electricity you would just have it. But on the other hand if we were a functioning civilization anymore we would have built out wind and solar to the point where electricity was free at least for regular citizens.

Speaking of which is a funny thought. If I wrote consumers instead of citizens above I bet it pretty drastically changes the meaning of that sentence to a lot of folks.

But if you're charging 40 bucks a month you're going to make that back in about 3 and 1/2 years and it's pure profit after that. That's pretty damn good return on investment. So the only irrational thing here is that they could probably be soaking their customers a little bit more like Comcast does.

What I find weird is how the Russian bots are just everywhere. This is a dead forum with a handful of tech nerds left over from the 80s and 90s hanging out. But for some reason they keep posting here. I know some of it is llms there's one that follows me around. But I think some of them are actual people.

This used to be a big deal website though so I guess I'm not surprised we're still on somebody's list and we just

It's kind of a pity we can't apply those blocks to people on social media...

So far reports are that the bot traffic isn't down but if they keep hitting Russian it infrastructure it will crash.

Honestly if Ukraine really wants to win this war they need to stop Russia from interfering in American elections. It's pretty obvious Putin has dirt on Trump. I'm sure that he's just got the Epstein files unredacted. We know for a fact that the Russians were all over Epstein island with their girls. I suspect that's the real reason America and Europe are hesitant to fully back Ukraine. Good old compromat.

It's not like there would be any real consequences. Everybody knows Mr orange pedophile is well a pedophile. It's just like the Panama papers when we found out that the rich didn't pay taxes but we already knew that. Still I guess they don't want to be embarrassed. Bill Gates for example has spent hundreds of millions of dollars making people think he's a nice guy while buying up patents or medical technology people need to live...

Banks are highly regulated for the rich. Lots of laws to protect them and they are highly enforced.

There are substantially fewer laws to protect you and me. And they are barely enforced. When Republicans are in charge they aren't enforced at all and when Democrats are in charge the banks will drag out the enforcement action until voters inevitably put Republicans back in charge so they can get a slap on the wrist.

You may have noticed a lot of fines against Banks and financial institutions and might be wondering why since the guy in charge of the department of Justice is corrupt as fuck and the supreme Court is even more corrupt. Okay maybe not more corrupt but I mean that's a high bar.

This is the game we play. Voters go back and forth from Democrats to Republicans never actually learning a damn thing. And as I mentioned above Republicans do not enforce laws against anyone who goes after regular people. Democrats do but the court cases take so long to complete that they can just hold out until a republican is in charge of the punishment.

The most famous example is Microsoft antitrust. They just waited till Bush Jr was in charge and settled everything then and they didn't even get a slap on the wrist they got a reward. They gave out tens of millions of dollars of software that cost them nothing because well it's software to schools. Schools who they have been trying to force their software on for decades...

You cannot separate your economic well-being and future from politics but for some reason Americans try to. They try to make trade offs for nonsensical social issues. And I'm not talking about civil rights that's something else.