SpaceX did the same thing. Basically you take a massively overvalued company with no path to profitability at the levels required for the evaluation or in the case of anthropic or it all and then you use your status as a member of the Epstein class to get put into one of the major indexes like NASDAQ so we are all forced to buy it with our 401ks unless we want to manually take over stock selection which if we were going to do that we wouldn't be employees or workers would be day traders...

What's frustrating is how many people do not realize they're about to lose everything. The Epstein class has had enough with you having nice things. They're going to take everything from you.

honestly I could give a rat's ass if morons want to sell their possessions and give them to psychopathic tech bro and finance bro imbeciles but they're dragging me into it too and I can't stop them.

It's like How at Jones Town it turned out a lot of people didn't want to commit suicide and they used guns and violence to force them to drink the Kool-Aid or just lied to them about the Kool-Aid being poisoned.

And yeah I know it was flavor aid. You're still drinking it you fucking morons... And you're still making me drink it at the barrel of a gun.

Seriously that's a level of creepy weirdo that I can't even begin to imagine. I think that might be what keeps some of the nerds around here on the Elon Musk train. They think he's like them because well this is a website for nerds and some of us, myself included, are kind of weird and creepy. But they don't understand the difference between being harmless weird and creepy and Elon Musk or JD Vance weird and creepy.

It's the difference between awkwardly hitting on girls and actively using abuser tactics...

But most of the people around here haven't figured that out yet. Fuck some of them still think Elon Musk is on their side. You have to speak to people where they're at and not where you need them to be.

Who refused to date him and then turn that into a multi-billion dollar empire. Yeah he was always a psychopath.

By the Epstein class and they rather like social media so they're not going to allow a movie that criticizes it to get all that much promotion or legs.

On the other hand I heard Ukraine hit Russia's data centers taking their bot networks offline. So at least for the next few days this website should be slightly less stupid.

Would have been a better FP than the AI thing. Yeah, I know I tend to tangents, but there's such a thing as too tangential...

Your brevity makes your intention unclear, so I better start by explaining how I'm reading it. I think you're saying the movie was too anticlimactic because we already knew this. Also you are indicating that you believe this is the main theme of the movie. Does that mean you've actually seen it?

My take is different, though I'm actually going to bring AI back into it, but hopefully with better justification. I'm coming from the perspective of marketing based on applied psychology. I think the same techniques that they use to persuade you to buy scented soaps and watch movies they recommend can be applied in reverse to deter you from buying scented soaps or from watching movies they prefer you don't see. I actually saw bits of an interview with Sorkin where he was asked about advertising the movie on Facebook, but I think whatever advertising he purchased could easily be countered by (AI-empowered) algorithmic counter-advertising. I actually believe Facebook has the capability to do it on a personalized basis, with two obvious angles of attack.

On the first angle, if someone has just seen an ad for the movie, then Facebook can respond by following that with some kind of diversionary content. I doubt they want to be so direct and clumsy as to attack the movie directly, so it would be something that is calculated to be of higher "engagement" to that particular person. This is a retail level of manipulation. The second angle is wholesale, but for now I've decided to leave that as an exercise for the interested reader. On today's Slashdot?

Disclaimer needed: Though I was an old user of Facebook with one of the original university-linked accounts, my feelings for the website went monotonically downhill over time. At some point, probably before 2020, I decided it was a waste of time and I deliberately limited my Facebook usage to five minutes per day, which was quite sufficient. Then in 2022 my Facebook account was targeted for destruction. Facebook declined to say why, though I still suspect that it was somehow politically motivated. Perhaps even a political assassination?

That was the angle I was looking for in the discussion. Whenever I think about Patel in charge, this ol' classic video comes to mind: https://youtu.be/MdnH6m054as?s... So now I'm wondering about whether this guy had the right political connections separate from the connections he may have had to the criminals...

On the other hand, it is true that the weakest link in any chain of security is likely to be a human being... However the way the FBI works now, I'm back to wondering if perhaps he was just the easiest human target for the blame? Without regard to his own politics.

Solving the problems? Perish such thoughts! It's just my twisted imagination that going after the spammers could reduce the volume of phishing garbage and make it easier to find and arrest the residual bad guys. Follow the money and stop it from reaching the crooks, and I still believe most of the professional crooks are rational enough to move along. No, I don't think any spammer is capable of becoming a decent human being, but at least they may become motivated to move under less visible rocks...

He has made a career of taking what other smarter people say and repackaging it and selling it to people.

That said this is just wrong and he's probably getting paid to say it.

Police in Europe are completely different. They're trained differently and they are treated differently. They are also used for different purposes. Policing in America is primarily a way for us to enforce social order. Not legal order social order. That is much less of a thing in Europe. They don't have that massive underclass that used to be slaves and that many people are trying to turn back into slaves. After decades and decades of wars they kind of seem to have given up on that.

So in America we heavily militarize our police and we do things like use them to shut down occupy Wall Street. If you're going to do stuff like that with your cops they need to be kind of dumb because at the end of the day the police are members of the working class too. Also we turned training police into a racket where well connected political insiders get paid a ton of money to do pseudo-military training. Fun fact Motorola doesn't make processors anymore really or much of anything they're just sucking down massive government contracts for training cops. Go look into cop City.

It's not a question of manpower we spend billions on police. It's a question of what the purpose of police are in a country. It's the difference between well-educated and well-treated employees who exist to de-escalate situations and violent thugs that exist to beat the shit out of protesters. It's just a question of who the police are for. Are they for you? Or are they for the Epstein class.

Ask yourself what happens if your house gets broken into or if your car gets stolen and how useful the police are to you. I think you'll know the answer when it comes to who the police are really for

I do hate imbeciles that put massive high power lights on their vehicles and then angled them up right into my eyes. Or they spend 10 grand on a shitty lift kit to do the same... It is definitely not safe.

But this probably means more police interactions and more excuses for the cops to pull people over and every single time police interact with the public that's an opportunity for somebody to get murdered. So I get nervous when I see changes to stuff like this.

I mean the correct solution to the problem is to stop letting cops murder people and get away with it but we ain't going to do that and I'm not going to pretend that we are.

America is good coming up to solutions to problems that shouldn't exist in the first place though so let's see...

We had a variety of reasons for it but for most of the people allowing it it came down to the fact that they thought that they would be able to have democracy and a say in government and the country but people they disagree with would not.

It turns out democracy is All or nothing. You don't get to allow voter suppression and gerrymandering and all sorts of other nasty stuff just to get what you want. And we know who's been allowing all of that we don't need to pretend.

So yeah you're going to have 24/7 surveillance of everything, you are going to lose VPN access and you are gradually going to become unable to afford your hobbies but you might die before the worst of that

I think folks could turn it around still but I don't think a nation of 12-year-olds has the emotional fortitude to pull that off. Nobody likes being told what they're doing is wrong especially after 50 or 60 years of doing it.

Anthropic's entire executive team thinks this and has been lobbying religions leaders on the subject. They've also started banning people from being abusive to Claude.

These are the same people who think their software is sentient right?

It doesn't matter what your hobby is they fuck it up. These are the same fuckers we have to thank for video game prices shooting through the roof thanks to ram.

I suppose your question is rhetorical, but the obvious answer is "Since Congress became incapable of making any 'meaningful' laws." Insofar as the legislature is supposed to regulate and control the executive branch, you could even describe it as a form of regulatory capture.

But it's worse for the judiciary these years. If you look at the history of nominations and confirmations, that transition has been shockingly rapid. There are still two living (but retired) nonpartisan Justices who were confirmed by a majority of the Senators from both parties, which used to be the norm, but on the actual Court there are no nonpartisan Justices. So my hilarious solution approach would be to boost the value of nonpartisan Justices with a funny little recusal rule: "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves." (I can even imagine how the change could be pushed. The key step is to get one or more nonpartisan Justices onto the Court...)

Mostly the ACK, but thanks for clarifying. If I understand correctly, your original joke was based on the word "metaphors", not "phosphors" or something else. I didn't understand the linkage between your secondary joke and the joke your were replying to.

If you like SF, then I recommend Ancillary Justice fairly strongly. I don't read that much SF these years, but it seemed to be one of the best I've read, with many atmospheric elements that reminded me of the great Iain Banks. Another recent one with some interesting AI themes was Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen, but the story wasn't engaging.

As regards the sig fork, I concur with the duration of the national disease. With the latest proposal for the online live execution it has reached the stage of national disgrace, and if that webcast actually happens, I think it should be taken as a terminal symptom. I knew the country was headed in a bad direction decades ago, but I had no idea how bad it could get, how far it would go, nor how fast.