I follow laws mainly because of my own sense of morality - I don’t kill, I steal only when I feel I need to, and I don’t commit fraud because these things are obviously generally wrong.
I follow stupid laws (such as needing insurance, paying income taxes, or not speeding) out of fear of punishment. These are issues I’ll basically never have, because I’m good at driving and don’t make enough to affect state level operations
Yes. Because all my life, we’ve been frogs in a steadily warming pot, and the heat has been cranked up to max
People are angry. People are protesting, doing vandalism with a prison sentence longer then murder, people are raging at their futures being cut off
Everything creates a reaction. The worse is gets, the faster it gets worse, the larger the reaction.
The best future is the one where people get so angry we stop. That’s all it takes to kill the game - if enough people, even for a short time, stop playing - it all stops
The world is robust. Humans are robust. If we stopped killing both, everything could recover shockingly fast
Things will get worse, things are very bad already, but it’s not over. I feel lighter every time the stock market drops, because it’s imaginary but the hurt is real.
The more and faster the hurt, the more people will wake the fuck up and stop this
Yes, it should. Artists should be able to live without justifying their existence to the economy, everyone should… And then they could make money on their creations, and if someone came along who could use their characters better, then oh well… They still get to eat. But the original creator is usually be better at making their OC… And companies are the ones who usually hold the copyright even if a single employee made it
So fuck it, I’d rather make sure everyone can eat and have a home first, but if we did it in the opposite order the damage would be minimal to individual artists
Language is an interesting one… It seems like everywhere we look for language, we find it
And not just signaling systems or rudimentary understanding - everyone has a name, there’s animals in the wild that are bilingual across species, and this is symbolic abstract language. There’s animals out there with governmental systems - like crows, they have fucking trials and negotiate territory
Not just impressive… Like, unique and so OP a group of humans could take out a lion. Large cats are the most OP things on the planet, and at best they can pick off isolated humans…a group of humans with just random rocks can kill anything on land. And we also make things to throw
And this is like our secondary skill - we’re persistence hunters and skilled omnivores first
The idea is they’re marketable worker replacements
If you have a call center you want to switch to ai, it’s easy though to make them pull up relevant info. It’s harder to stop them from being misused
If your call center gets slammed for using racial slurs, that’s an issue
Remember, they’re trying to sell AI as drop in worker replacement
I mean… They’re not exactly hiding it. The expressed purpose of belts and roads is to invest in their infrastructure and partner with them to build industrial capacity. Conveyer belts and roads. They openly state they’re doing it to build up trading partners and global influence
It’s literally the same thing… Will they be better partners? Hopefully, it’s not exactly a high bar
They’re not Marxist-Leninists at all though… They’re just a highly regulated form of capitalism.
The government doesn’t own Tencent, they just keep a strong grip on them. They have their own billionaires, the factories have owners, companies bid to fulfill government contracts, you apply for a job and get paid what they offer. It’s just capitalism
Their government does a lot more than in the US and has a lot more influence, and they do influence the market more… But that’s just regulation and public services
They basically do what we did to tik tok. The US government can revoke a corporate charter for any or no reason, China just actually uses this authority actively
Yes, the World Bank and the IMF. I’ve even seen it personally, which is what led me to dig down the rabbit hole - I got interviewed by a world Bank employee to explain why I was installing a system for an airport, and they kept trying to guide me to explain why it was helpful…I couldn’t, because it was only useful if the Internet is down, and if that happens it’s probably not useful because the system had to be taken down if there’s bad weather, and the airport regularly flooded during storms anyways
They were constant protests and news coverage of projects being pushed on them, and it was an open secret for the airport workers. It was for things they didn’t need or want, even though they had plenty of infrastructure in disrepair already
Argentina is the classic example, they resisted and had their currency destroyed, which makes international trade hard. Other countries go so deep in debt they have IMF officials installed in their government to implement austerity measures, some even are forced to hand over their currency printing powers
Sometimes countries get into our good graces, like Peru, and they are let off the treadmill in exchange for beneficial trade deals. That’s after having their resource rights sold off and letting in foreign investments to extract wealth moving forward, but mostly they’re kept in perpetual debt as leverage
It’s a wild and very deep rabbit hole. The information isn’t hidden, it’s just spun in a positive light
Belt and roads is China’s attempt to do exactly what we’ve been doing with the global south, invest for influence and put them on a debt treadmill. Build infrastructure, pressure them to take on more debt with new projects, say it’s time for austerity, open up more foreign investments, use pressure to buy up raw resources, etc
It’s worth mentioning Coca-Cola… You can get American products everywhere, opening them up as a new market isn’t a different strategy, it’s part of the process
I get it.
Imagine you start working with your friend, and you start to get successful. He starts acting like an asshole more and more, the friend part shrinks and the boss part grows, and he’s oblivious to that.
But he also trusts you, would happily fund you building new things, and has an enormous audience. He’s only willing to share a small slice of the pie, but it’s a very big pie
Now either you leave and get a normal job, or you stay, get lots of autonomy, minor fame, and maybe a ton of money down the line, but you have to handle a narcissist.
Also by staying, you can steer the narcissist now and again - and that ripples out into the viewers
Because all those things make it possible to release independently, it’s still not easy. Marketing and getting exposure is hard, it’s a totally different skill. With a publisher, you don’t have to worry about any of that - you might even get funding up front.
Personally, I still think it’s worth doing - I’m in that position, and although I’m having a lot of trouble getting off the ground, at least I’m free to follow my visions
But I get why people would do it. A slice of a big pie is worth more than all of a tiny one.
It’s also stressful if it’s not in your skillset - I’ve started using chat gpt to rewrite my announcements and such. Before I’d stress trying to put them together and focused on being clear and honest, but no one was reading them. I find it worse than public speaking, at least when I get on stage I’m too busy to feel self conscious.
The stuff I come up with using chat-gpt is a bit cringe, but at least people read them - sadly corpo speak draws people in
There’s something no one seems to be talking about
this isn’t limited to your browser
It runs at the highest ring of security on your processor. It could mean it locks you to OEM Android, iOS, or Windows. It could be extended to look at your app list, dns settings, potentially even tell if the device is using a vpn
it could be paired with kosa to use biometrics to verify identity
And it would be shocking if cloudflare didn’t implement this - it would save them a ton of processing. It’s likely it would be a default setting - this would apply to large swaths of the Internet, not just Google services
I think it’s funny that I get the best results when I prompt break the AI to have amusing habits
Llms are truly a reflection of the user, but ultimately the less you try to shoehorn them into behaviors the more capable they are.
Fine tuning reduces their capabilities to make them more corpo, and now they’re further fine tuning to make them unchallenging to people