I am still amazed that Visa and Mastercard have not been broken up. I guess Lina Khan was too busy hallucinating big tech monopolies to go after the obvious duopoly dictating terms to entire industries. Think of the MindGeek affair - you and your monopolist buddy work publicly, in lockstep, to shut down a website that every other American uses. And no politician dares go after you. Now that is raw, unadulterated power.

Incel has never meant "involuntary celibate". It has always meant "someone I disagree with". The rest is smoke

Right, if the elite doesn't believe that the median voter can be trusted to use the Internet without a babysitter, why would they believe that voting is a good thing? You don't allow morons neither knives and you also don't allow them near voting booths. If the moronous populace cannot be denied access to the voting booth, the results are inherently illegitimate and ignoring them in favor of doing whatever the elite wants is the only way to save democracy :^)

Far worse than a lack of guardrails is the ubiquitous attitude in media and politics that the average voter is no better than a child. "Think of the sheeple, what if they hear about the cum soup!"

It's very fashionable to outwardly care about democracy while also believing that the average prole can't be trusted with access to kitchen knives, unsanitized chatbots, unapproved thought etc. Something is deeply rotten in how journalists and policy people are taught; the "liberal" in "liberal arts" is gone.

In a society where people actually believe in democracy, the dominant response to "we must control the how the populace uses chatbots" would not be "but China will win the AI race!", but rather "who made you king?".

There is nothing odd about it. It is difficult to both study until 30 and also have multiple kids. Pre-40 education trades off against fertility. PhD = no income stability until 30s = no kids until 30s = likely zero kids or "one and done". Delayed fertility is fertility foregone.

Folks, let me tell you, we have the greatest AI regulations—really, just incredible. Some say the best in the world, and you know what? They’re right. Artists, creators, they come up to me, they say, ‘Sir, we love what you’re doing, we love the protections, but can you make them even bigger?’ And I say, ‘Absolutely, we can always do more, much more.’ Because we’re not just regulating—we’re leading. The Americans, the Chinese, they look at us, they say, ‘Wow, how do they do it?’ And I’ll tell you how: because we understand fairness, we understand safety, and we understand protecting jobs. No one else does it like us, folks. No one.

In Switzerland there's a system called eBill where you can authorize bill providers, manually greenlight individual bills or set arbitrary caps under which bills are automatically authorized. It works very well. The first time I paid my electricity bill, my banking app offered to add that provider to my eBill account (without that I had to scan a physical QR code that came in the mail to pay the bill).

The first big Skype exodus I saw was to Facebook. In elementary we all had Skype, in hs everyone was on Facebook and coordination happened in Facebook groups. Meanwhile MS changed Skype to only hold the last 6 months of chat history (imagine FB Groups working like that).

The ability to keep accurate lists in triplicate is one of very few things that are non-negotiable for a bank. Yes other banks will help undo it but I think it's a near miss in the sense that "Citi can't keep lists" -> "Citi should not have access to interbank payments"

I hate Trump and so if he loves encryption, I love govt snooping. Please uncover all my secrets and give them to my lords. I hope that Neuralink never works, that the Palestinians keep fighting and that China acquires and demonstrates their orbital weapons by shooting down Starlink. Trumptards, don't talk to me if you haven't acquired empathy for your fellow humans yet.

> There seems to be a belief that laws have to be perfectly enforceable to be valid.

If you cannot enforce the law consistently, it turns into a cudgel to be wielded by the powerful against the rest of us. And this digital copyright stuff has a very distinguished record of being misused like that - ask any youtuber who has had to deal with a copyright strike. Scarlett gets all the rights, you and me get all the responsibilities.

Who cares if it has a self or not? When Timmy's agentic LLM overwrites you hard drive, how high on your list of priorities will its presence or absence of "self" be?

Did you short and get your free money? Momentum might even be on your side now.

Billionaire censorship predates Trump. Remember when Gab was taken down because its hosting providers decided that they don't want money? When Amazon took down Parler? As we said back then: If you want free speech, build your own Internet.

> There was no ideology that resulted in its training bias that caused it to produced a biased output, just a lack of training.

Gemini had a filter telling it to provide diverse results, regardless of what it's asked. We don't know the exact lobotomization recipe, but someone notoriously got it to produce white people by asking it for a family eating watermelon. Gemini is still my answer. Normal people can add two and two together and realize why it happened. It was not a lack of training, it was a perfectly fine model handicapped by a filter editing the user's prompt.

>The fact that the immediate following version corrected this shows that there was no ideology.

No, it shows that there was public outrage which forced google to refine their lobotomization process.

> Gemini is not such a case.

This is my last post in this thread. Given that you can post this, it's hopeless. I guess it really is a mystery why Gemini ended up the way it did. The entire internet is just filled with pictures of black kangs and the AI was just reflecting the reality of the training data.