RSF has unblocked the Circle 19 website, censored by the Chinese regime, as part of #CollateralFreedom! 🔓🌐 This move restores access to vital independent info and challenges Beijing’s crackdown on press freedom. Support the right to know! 🇨🇳📰 Read more: rsf.org/en/collateral-freedom-… #PressFreedom #newz
To counter the Chinese regime’s censorship of the website of Circle 19 – a group defending the right to information in China – Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has made the platform accessible once again as part of its Collateral Freedom operation.
I'm updating my House District-level healthcare enrollment pie charts w/the latest data, 2024 partisan lean & the populations most at risk of losing coverage highlighted.
Over the past couple of months I've compiled a master spreadsheet breaking out enrollment in ACA plans (Qualified Health Plans & Basic Health Plans), Medicaid/CHIP coverage (both traditional & via ACA expansion) and Medicare (both Fee-for-Services & …
I feel bad for people out there wanting to craft lo-fi type beats cause damn, so many AI slop producers filling up recommendations. Channels just churning out a dozen albums a week.
The words of Hannah Arendt, from "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report On The Banality of Evil" come to mind today:
“And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
To add insult to injury, there have been precisely zero gatekeeping regulations for assistance which don't wind up costing taxpayers more, through bureaucracy, than they 'save' through barring people from aid. Not one. And that's not even counting the RoI keeping people healthier provides, as a generality.
Not that we should be reducing people to numbers, but if these ghouls are gonna be doing that anyway, at least show some fucking consistency.
@sidereal @theogrin I don't really understand how the budget will cut medicaid but one thing I read is it's going to make paperwork so difficult people will just give up. I'm wondering if people who understand all that stuff can set up a volunteer program to help people with paperwork. I'd sign up. I hate we're having to think about this.
@Jennifer @sidereal There are a lot of ways to cut 'wasteful spending' without seemingly impacting a program, and the first and foremost has always been to find the people who don't seem like they'll be impacted heavily by the cuts. The invisibly-disabled, the folks with mental wellness issues, the people who can walk to the grocery store but can't get a job due to any number of factors. So that's the start: find the easiest people to slash away and call them 'lazy'.
But you're right in that paperwork, and the navigation thereof, is another excellent way to do so. You can see that with 'healthcare' companies, too! Reams of paperwork to fill out to make it harder to get your request to the group who'll deny it anyway on various grounds if you're at all disabled or otherwise 'high-risk'.
Thief T•••• ignoring laws forfeits strict due process for his own crimes, and the legitimacy of his pardons. Laws are not a suicide pact, they’re multiparty deals. You don’t have to let someone cheat unilaterally.
When ICE runs out of migrants to arrest, they will be sent to college campuses to round up peace protestors, professors, and if they need to hit their Steven Miller quota to justify having 90,000 ICE agents wandering around, college kids drinking, people with expired license plates, and anyone who fits their profile.
We must speak out to stop them before they take over our cities and towns.
It certainly does not take very long before fascism starts in on removing citizen rights from natural born citizens.
Nobody is safe under this bullshit. The billionaires that paid for this the billionaires making tons of money off of kidnapping men, women and children are ripping mothers away from babies or vice versa and packing people off to concentration camps, cannot go unpunished in all this neither can the politicians.
The world cannot return to 2024. They crossed too many lines.
If so many millions are going to be deported and even more have less disposable income, how is the government and how are the billionaires going to be able to maintain their revenues? Has any one of these people ever considered cause and effect?
At the federal level, the government doesn’t his taxes or bonds to finance itself.. remember that the federal government is the institution that issues US currency..
But every other level of government do finance themselves with taxes.
But to your main point farmers are already finding out what happens when the workforce disappears and when the sector’s largest customer evaporates. USAID bought a lot of agricultural product..
More generally yes if nobody has any money, something (edit fixed voice to text… mess up) is going to happen to the economy.
If you have any sense of the megalomania of super rich, they think they animated the world and we are just parasites. Billionaires in particular are so disconnected from actual business, that how business works don’t enter their minds. that’s for staff to deal with..
when i was little i thought when you died you were left conscious but alone in an unending dark void and i only now realized that it so terrified me because that’s what every minute of my life pre-transition already was
One symptom of a deep bubble is what I call the "pod people effect". Basically, people who seem to go to sleep one day sceptical about the bubble and wake up believers—they've changed their minds purely on social proof and personal impressions without a shred of genuine evidence.
The 2007 Icelandic finance bubble, for example, was all-encompassing here. Everything was of a mind with the bubble. Research said it was great. Media hyped it throughout. Everybody around you was a true believer
"What do you mean this is a dangerous bubble? My uncle just got rich buying a second flat with a 100% mortgage. Nobody ever loses money from real estate."
Anecdotal evidence of success from peers was seen as proof that bubble talk was lies and scaremongering, that there weren't any systemic issues
The sceptical got "podded" one by one until only weirdos and the innately distrustful were left speaking. Critics stopped talking because saying anything could have ended their careers.
Belief in the bubble spread until it felt like you were living in the second half of a "body snatchers" movie
The "pod people" effect has kicked into overdrive with the AI Bubble
Most people with influence in tech seem to have been "podded" already, those without influence seem to accept it as a given, and those still voicing criticism are explicitly on the outside, no longer a part of their prior field
Remember, the facts haven't changed
LLMs are still:
- dangerously biased - electricity hogs that threaten the energy transition - engines of non-deterministic volatility - prone to catastrophic errors - points of centralised control over speech and work
This is, needless to say, incredibly demotivating to feel this isolated in your field. The last time I felt like this, in Iceland during its bubble, I literally left the country. But at least then I could continue working in my field—the same job even, remotely
Iceland rebuilt itself to be a genuinely better place after the bubble popped. Still run by oligarchs and quite corrupt, but much better than it was before
I'm not sure there will be anything left of tech to rebuild after this pops
I went to PyCon last year and was disgusted by how AI this, ML that it was. I felt like keeping Python as my fallback language if I couldn’t find a job in my preferred one had become a bad idea for me, like there was no place for me in the Python world anymore.
> I'm not sure there will be anything left of tech to rebuild after this pops
If civilisation actually collapses with the fossil fuel economy, hippy communes, prepper weirdos, and paranoid pipebomber-makers will survive to repopulate. In the case of the "AI" bubble - which is really a hyperscale datacentre real estate scam just like WeWork *takes big breath* - it'll be those of us who built AI-free stuff. In either case, to coin a phrase, the geek shall inherit the Earth.
@strypey slightly wrong analogy: prepper weirdos will be the first to die off, because they don't believe that communities can survive, and most of them subscribe to the most extreme kinds of social darwinism.
@mawhrin > prepper weirdos will be the first to die off, because they don't believe that communities can survive
Depends on your definitional boundaries I guess. There are heaps of intentional communities that don't fit the definition of "hippy commune", unless you stretch it well beyond breaking point. But are often dismissed as "prepper weirdos".
In the final analysis, this is a great example of the truism that no analogy bears close examination : P
The #AI bubble is basically the same as the #Cloud bubble. Our IT #sysadmin group tried as hard as we could, but ultimately, #Microsoft active measures to destroy onsite servers and applications made it untenable to avoid #O365. And now that includes being forced to use #CoPilot We know this is a time bomb, but it is politically untenable (at this time) to migrate to #Linux desktol and #LibreOffice.
it's so entrenched that it's becoming difficult to imagine what things will be like after the burst. I'm not worried about AI replacing my job, but I'm worried about my job disappearing in the crash.
This was my experience with authoritarian politics in the USA after the 9/11 attacks. I was deep in the woods and didn't hear about them for 24 hours, but when I heard about them, my first thought was "shit, we're going to have a reactionary isolationist backlash like we haven't seen in 100 years". It's still gaining steam 24 years in, but we're building concentration camps now in the swamps of Florida and accelerating the social murder of the poor, so I underestimated.
Giants have fallen before and been replaced. By the current giants, in fact. It might be temporarily shit, but overall it will be fine. Tech & IT needs will not disappear just because some VCs and companies have overinvested in an area. Heck, there might even be more space for bootstrapping again and building profitable companies without having to compete quite as much with underpriced VC backed scammers.
I've noticed that the programming subreddits are swinging back against AI again. I think people, even many skeptics, got very excited with the new toy but have started to just get pissed off with it.
I recently chastised a DB researcher in a Discord discussion group for using chatGPT to answer a question, and multiple others jumped on me for impugning AI's usefulness, denigrated my own knowledge of the topic, etc. (Nevermind the fact that I built AI systems back in college, and *every* ML system today uses my DB engine, etc.)
People who've drunk the koolaid get extremely aggressive when you point out their folly.
Here's evidence of decidedly right-wing bias in the training data due to choice of fonts (expensive vs cheap) and paper (expensive vs cheap) and OCR (trained mostly on expensive fonts vs old cheap fonts).
The error rate on old conservative newspapers was much lower than on other old newspapers. So the LLMs were trained with conservative, wealthy views.
Remember how we’ve been saying that current
Large Language Model (LLM) AI’s
are about as useful as buckets of warm sewage & broken glass? Yeah, about that…
At some point in every heated, upward-moving market, somebody wheels out A Famous Economist to explain that the Efficient Capital Markets Hypothesis proves assets can never be overpriced.
And that is the point at which you should liquidate your investments and put all your money into tinned beans, bottled water and toilet paper.
@Kierkegaanks I think this has a formal term: “information cascade” but I like how you’ve both personalized it. When laypeople people or people who know better start repeating common talking points you know you’re deep in the bubble!
America is falling into fascism, and American tech companies are working hard to cause this.
If you are not a US citizen and don't want your country to become fascist, then stop doing business with American tech companies as much as possible. None of them can be trusted.
In this video I discuss how several countries in europe are switching various public services (EMS, county records, etc) to use free and open source software...
@Su_G Funny how I was branded “extreme” for clearly stating that they’re the enemy a decade ago.
I guess it didn’t help that nearly everyone in tech either had (has) “good friends who work there” and/or wanted (wants) to work there and/or were (are) employed by and/or were (are) bottom-feeders – consultant(cies), “influencers”, etc. – that depend on the scraps thrown at them by Big Tech.
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
@aral @Su_G I remember the exact same 35 years ago when I was still in high school, albeit with slightly more of a hardware /embedded systems focus and different companies (Marconi, ICL, Acorn/ARM, Ferranti, RACAL, Plessey etc)
@phoenixgee @altim @aral It's slimier and more apparently (not actually) consensual.
Instead of waiting until we're out and hiding wires in the walls, they watch us cram into the Apple store to buy the latest surveillance toy and carry it everywhere.
Instead of three of your extended family being snitches (but which three...) it's almost every app, website and platform, handing your most private details to ad resellers and AI training pools.
Everyone’s playing with AI these days, whether it’s asking ChatGPT to write a poem, getting Claude to summarize a PDF, or seeing if Perplexity can find that one obscure reference from a Reddit…
@Npars01 Submit comments against NIH use of AI: "NIH is developing an institute-wide AI strategy that charts a progression from today’s data-science-driven analytics through semi-autonomous AI agents to fully autonomous, self-documenting biomedical AI beings."
NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Request for Information (RFI): Inviting Comments on the NIH Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy NOT-OD-25-117. OD
Conveniently, I can also judge them on their products, which are terrible. Plus their idiot investment decisions and the fact that they're all pretty much conmen. Which doesn't mean they're not also wannabe dictators. In fact, it totally tracks.
when the world is under stress, for example the climate crisis, there are different reactions to the stress and how we can survive
a rational person would go:
"we must address the underlying cause and remedy it"
MAGA goes:
"it's important to be in the herd, in the herd is protection. i must work hard to show my loyalty to the herd, and work hard abusing outgroups, which shows my sincerity and my worthiness to not be in the next group that is kicked out"
@CptSuperlative Nonono, they do recognize it, but to them it's utopia. The land where labor is free, the martinis flow and they can violate brown people at heart's content.
wendivibe, the comma is superfluous in your comment, and according to my copy of social media etiquette, it is customary to put the sarcasm indicator on its own line and inside parentheses to make it stand out
@CptSuperlative The Trump admin has introduced me to "redeemed with faint criticism" as the opposite of "damned with faint praise".
It doesn't make any damn sense but it's absolutely the bedrock of American media coverage and it's set the tone for most of our discussions as citizens too.
I worked on a government IT project, networking their computers, that had a Lockheed Martin consultant on the team. He said "we make computers, too. But they fly over people and drop bombs on them". He thought we'd be impressed.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @CptSuperlative I'm not sure if he's Musk lite or 10x worse than Musk because he's more cognitively coherent but equally malicious, and involved in tech directly destroying our rights, rather than indirect financial support like Musk. And he doesn't need the ego balm of constant attention like Musk needs, so he moves more quietly, which is far more dangerous
yeah if the ethics employees say something that means less income, the next day the ethics employees are fired. capitalism does not give a shit, statements in support of ethics is windows dressing until the windows dressing becomes an impediment, and of course it eventually will
the most ardent self-professed "individualists" can be in reality the most conformist zombies. it's about the feeling of sticking their middle finger up at the machine. even though all of their "original" beliefs are manufactured by a machine for them. posers. style over substance
I've been having a crisis of conscience. Were open source and fair use destined to metastasize into the current "A" "I" hype? Please keep explaining how it's OK to be critical of both "artificial" "intellicence" and "intellectual" "property". I need encouragement in times like these.
open source is for the people, and there are practices of enforcing licenses which defend the openness and ensure that it is used fairly, and that contributors are credited, it builds careers, it teaches people.
LLMs and other generative AI isn't open source, it isn't a defense of knowledge or labor, and it's built on ripping off the works of humans without ever paying the toll or agreeing to any licenses -- it actively harms careers, and makes largely makes us stupid
the actors in the medical system and legislators that gatekeep adhd medication will never be held responsible for lung cancer from smoking and lead poisoning from vapes but that doesn't mean they are not willing participants in a system that gives people no alternative but self medication
The percentile ranking of your income -or- the percentile ranking of your net worth -whichever is higher- is your income tax rate -or- your wealth tax rate -whichever the case may be-
Idly pondering (but too lazy to actually do the math) whether that would work as tax brackets.
The portion of [wealth/income] in the 99th percentile gets taxed at 99%. The portion in the 98th percentile (but not the 99th percentile) gets taxed at 98% etc. etc.
I'm not entirely unironic in this position, but largely so. In theory, the richest person in America (or other tax jurisdiction of your choice) should be left with NOTHING. If their income is even faintly representative of their contributions to society, they would have nothing to worry about, as people would value their contributions and would shower them with gifts, probably millions of dollars worth in the aggregate.
Some advocates of progressive taxation point out that top US income tax bracket was something like 90% in the Eisenhower era, although in practice almost everyone in that tax bracket exploited various loopholes. I could see 0.9 times percentile ranking for all incomes above the "poverty line." The 99.99th percentile would still have millions after tax. That would admittedly be somewhat hard on the mere 1%, as the 99th percentile itself is basically the doctor/lawyer tier.
Most likely a tax-the-rich schema would include income or wealth taxes (ideally both) that only apply to people well above even upper middle class. That being said, I think the professional-managerial elites need some education in how wide the chasm between them and the median (let alone the precariat) has become. University educated people in general are my allies on social issues, so I'm not looking to soak them, but a little propaganda oriented toward UMC liberal guilt might be salutary.
This Sunday at 9pm Eastern (1am Monday UTC) once again it's #MONSTERDON the weekly monster movie watch party! Come join the rest of the fediverse as we watch a cheesy movie!
This week we've got a classic monster movie -- CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981)! The final work of Ray Harryhausen and some of his finest, the monsters in this movie are among the best ever put to film :D
http://www.hbomax.com Academy Award winners Sir Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith star with Harry Hamlin in this story based on Greek mythology. When Zeus' (...
If one were of a mind to begin voting with your wallet and your patronage, one could do worse than look at the guest list for Bezos' wedding and cease to engage with any brand or product associated with any attendee.
The official White House account is literally just a Trump thirst account because what do you mean they made a Trump fan edit to Hey Daddy by Usher and captioned it “Daddy’s Home” and are embracing the term “daddy” for the president of the United fucking States
This is the most cursed timeline ever. Personal politics aside i genuinely don’t understand how the most “patriotic” Trump supporter isn’t embarrassed as fuck by this.
This is reminiscent of the domination of a male head of household over everyone else in their family, particularly highlighted in Roman law -- which is somewhat around still, in which the patriarch could do whatever they wanted with their property (which included people according to these laws). This evil form expands to all other aspects of their (our) society so to justify similar forms of domination.
Trump's Efforts To Create An Autocracy Have Been Severely Hampered This Week #trump #autocracy #americanpoliticsWhat’s been happening with Trump’s push for a...
I'm starting to worry that cell carriers are using their 3G turnoff as an excuse to arbitrarily narrow the range of devices that can be used on their networks.
With the result that a *lot* of people are going to be forced to replace perfectly functional devices, so they can use cell calling. Creating a huge pile of totally avoidable e-waste, and an equally huge opportunity for carriers to sell panicking customers a new device locked to their network.
To rule that out, I'd need more information about how 4G calling works, and where the problem is with the devices they claim are "unsupported". Is it in the cell modem hardware (unfixable), or somewhere in the software (potentially fixable)?
Hopefully someone at the CDC is recording a journal of RFK Jr decisions so they can all be reversed in bulk after he’s gone. mastodon.social/@arstechnica/1…
RFK Jr.’s CDC panel ditches some flu shots based on anti-vaccine junk data Flu shots with thimerosal abandoned, despite decades of data showing they're safe. arstechnica.com/health/2025/06…
"Liberals think Republicans are violent because we own guns."
No we think you're violent because: 1. Your sign at CPAC said "We are all domestic terrorists" 2. 71% of extremist violence since 2008 has been explicitly right wing compared to 3% left wing 3. You staged a violent insurrection on Jan 6 which killed people 4. You tried to assassinate Kamala Harris not once but three separate times during her presidential run 5. You broke into the home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and beat her husband in the head with a hammer 6. You broke into the home of Representative Melissa Hortman and assassinated her, murdered her husband, and shot their dog 7. You broke into the home of Senator John Hoffman and shot him and his wife 8. Your president just bombed Iran for no fucking reason 9. You are currently in the middle of enacting a mass genocide of brown people
And... I'm going to hold you by the hand when I say this - WE OWN GUNS TOO. We're just not psychotic mass murderers like you are.
I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of Turtlehead's comments to "get over it" re: people losing health care, and...
you know, I personally want Mitch McConnell to lose his healthcare, choke on a pretzel, then die because the lyft he had to take to get to the hospital couldn't keep him alive and he was unable to take an ambulance, because, you know, no healthcare
but I don't think we should build a system where my intense hatred of that asshole is a fundamental part of the system. I don't think we should just allow people to be denied healthcare because they're "wrong" or "bad" or "not valuable enough". When I say healthcare for all, I really mean it. No matter how much I wish that rotten slab of ham would fuck off and die in an extremely appropriate fashion, I still think people deserve healthcare But also, critically, my reason for wanting him to just fucking die already is because he is responsible for killing a lot of people already and REALLY needs to just fuck off already. Whereas he just thinks I should die because I'm gay.
I’m a lefty lib who can put 30 rounds in a row through an 8” plate from 200m from standing position over iron sights using someone else’s (properly maintained) 7.62mm rifle.
I have zero interest in using that skill on people - even if they’re fascists - but it’s a good skill to have if it’s ever needed.
"Indian court rules #transWomen are #women and ‘legally entitled to recognition’"
'In a landmark ruling for the country, after rejecting claims that womanhood was preserved only for those who can bear children, the High Court of #AndhraPradesh ruled that #trans women were “legally entitled” to recognition as women.
...tying the definition of women to pregnancy was “legally unsustainable” and contradicted #India’s constitution'
once again the UK is far behind countries that it repressed, exploited and abused until they declared independence. Starmer no better than Balfour or Priti Patel!
The luxury space communism thing still appeals to me for some reason. Optimism that technology still has a future, perhaps. The idea that technological advancement is the driver of abundance is more palatable to me than the idea that economic growth is its main driver, as the latter can be used to justify trickle down economics.
@lori One of the most appealing things about Banks’ Culture was that the Minds thought humans were amusing not-exactly-pets. Technocracy, really, but with a real affection for silly dance parties.
@marick absolutely. silly dance parties, abundant housing, amazing education, free health care should exist as options, but there should be no compulsion. except for kids, some compulsion, it’s the juvenile condition under any system. people who don’t identify as queer or commie are great and always welcome! (i think all the humans are queer and ‘commie’ is just a free-floating epithet to reappropriate. i’d describe myself as a social democrat, but if they wanna call us that why not embrace it!)
I'm tactically a social democrat, but my dream for humanity is cooperation overtaking competition quite decisively. Almost certain not to happen during my lifetime, but I simply have to believe it can eventually happen, as that belief keeps me going.
@lori @marick i’m for cooperative competition, a la good sportsmanship. if you win the competition, you get a trophy and some real honor, but we all retire to the pub together, celebrate and lament, all eat well. competition as a mutual spur to excellence, not an existential struggle.
@lori Something that anthropology of gift economies (judging from Graeber) points out is that gift economies are all about maintaining social relationships.
In contrast to transactions (like buying a candy bar from a clerk), where the transaction is an end to the relationship, gifts work to spur continued relationships.
Re: commies. In his /An Anthropological Theory of Value/, Graeber claimed societies are a blend of three economic systems: transactional, gift, and <adjective> communism. <Adjective> communism’s exemplar is the family, where it really is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
I’ve thought that’s a nice spin: communism as the extension of the family to larger in-groups.
I forget what <adjective> was. It was a softening term.
Maybe hot take: I think "amazing education" should be compulsory for every person at least until they are educated enough to see where allowing bad education leads.
I always thought "democrats" sounds a bit like those insane claims on products that they don't contain something that clearly should not be in there. You know, in the way "if the one party is the democrats, are the others not democratic?", just like "oh hey these cookies are asbestos free, are other cookies with asbestos?".
Well, hm, by what i hear my joke has been overtaken by reality and reps want to lift asbestos bans, right?
Zohran Mamdami offered NYC Democratic voters hope in this era of fascism when the party establishment is mostly only offering timidity.
If Mamdami wins in November, he will have to work and negotiate with the City Council and the New York State Government, but at least he will aim high.
there was recently a thread about how Linux when it comes to accessibility still isn't that great. There are various things built for Linux that improve it, but I feel like it's one of those things but if it's not built in , and fully integrated into the system... It won't be that could have an experience
I set up github.com/ideasman42/nerd-dic… on my laptop (running Ubuntu). It was pretty easy, as far as programs that you install by running a series of scripts under an "Install" heading in GitHub can be. I didn't need to download a new model, the default worked fine. Then, as suggested in the project, I configured my desktop environment to add keyboard shortcuts to start and stop.
I agree with others that the exact usage matters. I mostly turn this on for a paragraph or so at a time.
Lorraine Lee
in reply to Manic Pixie Dream Gremlin • •