They aren’t winning in Iran. Why is that?

Recession.

We don’t understand the brain enough to control it with chips either. In the near-term the biggest danger would be a bad actor using the chip to torture people for ransom money or a hacker just bricking it. Anything more sophisticated is still scifi.

A seig heil is an open declaration. That was a clear, mask-off moment and denying it is a joke. You’re moving the goal posts.

And sure, they’ll deny it, but that’s because they’re lying liars who love to lie. They don’t lie because they think anyone will believe them, they lie because they think it’s funny. They love to make people mad by lying to their faces. It’s like the Sartre quote:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play."

The denial is literally a joke. The joke is serious too, of course, because that’s how Nazis always are. They’re always joking and serious at the same time, and they can freely switch between being serious and joking around as it pleases them. They take the mask off and put it back on for fun.

But they aren’t being censored. Wasn’t that your original point? That censorship makes them stronger? But, they aren’t censored.

Elon Musk did a seig heil on stage to a roaring crowd for Trump’s inauguration. He did it twice. His punishment? They appointed him the head of a government task force and then he wrecked a bunch of agencies in the name of “”“efficiency”“”

Did you forget? It’s only been a year.

Nazism is a stupid ideology that would not stand its ground were its mask to fall.

Explain the US, where there is no censorship of pro-Nazi opinions and yet mask-off pro-Nazi ideology made it into the government.

Your thesis, that censorship just makes ideology stronger, isn’t borne out by how Nazis are coming to power in the real world.

Do you think Japan should have continued to attack the US after the H bomb?

Categorically different situation, that was before the US empire was firmly established as the hegemon.

The US isn’t specifically just an evil bad guy country, it’s the imperial core in the current world system.

And sacrificing sovereignty to let the empire win is always bad, 100% of the time, no question.

This is not what I was contesting, even the most authoritative and controlling state can “do fine” and get 90% approval. But by principle, controlling and manipulating the working class is against the idea of letting the working class be the ones, in community, who decide their own destiny.

Right, you’re an idealist. You prefer the idea of not having censorship, and are not confronting the consequences of this idea.

I’m not an idealist, my politics are not based in ideas but on history and my understanding of the current historical moment. I understand that, without censorship, you get counterrevolution and imperial domination and slavery and death. If Cuba falls to US aggression, things will get much worse. My hope is that Cuba can survive long enough for us on the outside to provide a more global / international solution. They need censorship for that.

Is it better for the working class to starve/defend against the outside factor or to capitulate to the outside invader?

I think history can conclusively answer this for us - it’s always better to repel the US. No one benefits when the US comes bringing “”“freedom”“”. All levels of society must be mobilized to repel the invasion or risk being enslaved to the empire.

Anyone who sides with the US in their invasion is the enemy, and I’d prefer my enemies to be censored.

Yes, I explicitly said “undercover” because the minute the censorship is exposed then it becomes counterproductive. China has made censorship “business as usual”, you have a whole system of public officials doing the work without it being at all something that is “undercover”.

And China is doing fine, what are you talking about? It’s certainly effective to keep the censorship hidden, but it’s hardly necessary. I think you’re wish-casting, you wish that open censorship would make people rise up. It doesn’t. Censorship is an effective tool whether it is hidden or blatant. If censorship didn’t work, no one would do it.

This is exactly the problem. Fascism can only rise in situations where people have a need that has enough importance to silence reason.

But this can be imposed from the outside by factors outside of the system’s control, such as if there’s a global hegemon that can blockade the economy and make people suffer. There’s no populist answer for the oil blockade against Cuba, all the “anti-system” speech can do there is help the US siege war. I, for one, don’t want the US to win in Cuba.

If you silence them they will recruit in the shadows and now with an extra argument, since them being silenced is gonna reaffirm their position about the state being open to taking people’s points seriously

You’re contradicting yourself. By your logic the “undercover censorship the existing system is exerting” should actually make anti-system reforms from a left-wing perspective easier to push for, because by your logic the censorship should be helping. It should be easier to recruit from the shadows with an extra argument, we should celebrate being censored!

Except, that’s not how it works in the real world is it? In the real world, censorship works.

The other reason they get power is because millions of people listen to them. Do you think they could take over without being heard? It’s not that their speech is flawless and logical, is that people are hungry for answers that reaction pretends to provide.

If you don’t silence them they can recruit.

Fascists love to cloak themselves in the banners of kings and shit, and they’re kind of a problem.

Also you’re saying this in the context of reactionaries calling for reinstalling the Shah in Iran.

Reactionary, feudal-revivalist speech in a capitalist system is “anti-system” speech too.

We have no interest in defending their right to speak.

The government killed rioters that were armed by Mossad and gunning down cops and burning down military installations.

They chose not to change their tools to comply with the new Pentagon demands. It’s the Pentagon that then decided to cancel contracts and declare them a “supply chain risk” in retaliation. Claude is still integrated into their systems and it’ll take time to switch.

They said “China doesn’t have problems with homeless or unemployment” and that was correct, 5.1% unemployment is full employment. You’re just too up your own ass to communicate with, you just want to “win” instead of talk like a reasonable person. You see me as something inhuman, just another mindless hivemind NPC to crush with your incredible intellect.

This wasn’t a contest and you didn’t win anything, you just ruined a discussion for no reason.

… you’re really proving my point. You don’t care about anything I have to say or any of the facts or data that I quote or link to, you just want to pick and win fights.

It doesn’t matter that I find the LLM bubble stupid and I don’t think we’re even close to AI replacing human labor, because I dared correct you about China. It doesn’t matter that I think China isn’t far enough along the path of socialist development for it to actually be a good thing when AI does replace human labor. It doesn’t matter that my support for China has a lot of caveats and criticisms, some of which do surround queer rights. None of that nuance matters, nothing I say matters, and nothing I believe matters.

All that matters is that I’m in the way and that you need to tear me down so you can win the posting RPG.

There will be a point where it can take our jobs, though. The question is if the AI be privately or collectively owned. If its privately owned, we’re fucked and we’re all going to be turned into paperclips. If its collectively owned then we can decide which jobs are eliminated and the people who have had their jobs eliminated can help decide what they get to do next, now that they’re free.

Do you want to work for a wage for the rest of your life simply to survive? I certainly don’t.

We have to be careful, because if the AI which automates our labor is owned privately then it will be used to eliminate our jobs and then eliminate the surplus population left behind. AI which is owned collectively, however, will liberate us from work.

We just have to get to that stage of collective ownership. China hasn’t reached that stage of socialist development but they’re closer than anyone else and seem to be progressing in that direction. Not that you care, you just want to pick fights.

Anything between 4-6% is generally considered full employment by most countries, including the US. At that level the unemployment mostly consists of people between jobs, rather than people in long-term unemployment where they have no hope of finding work.

The homelessness number you’re referencing is misleading. They’re not unhoused, they’re living outside of their registered address. A day laborer that moves from city to city and stays in group homes is considered “homeless” but they’re not actually living on the street. Much of rural China has yet to be developed to a level that can sustain employment, so they have to migrate.

Not that you care.

It’s 5.1%

That’s considered pretty good in most countries.

That’s another benefit of the TikTok takeover, it frees up other social media sites to crack down even harder because now they don’t need to worry about bleeding their user base.

I’ve spent six years building an AI startup

We should trust this AI huckster that the AI is good now.

Do you think the US acquisition has zero impact on Tiktok globally?

Because the sale of Tiktok was done to suppress Palestinian voices?

How do you think a child would feel after having a pornographic image generated of them and then published on the internet?

Looks like sexual abuse to me.

The people pushing AI don’t like like hearing, seeing, and reading about how other humans experience the world. They actually do just want flashing colors and sounds poured into their face holes. They’re basically incapable of understanding art.

Well yeah they’re haunted.

I heard about that! Heat from data centers is harder, unfortunately, because the amount of waste heat generated by a nuclear reactor is far higher than the amount generated by a data center. With smaller quantities of heat come greater costs to recuperate it, at least until they link all the waste-heat sources up into a single network that can collect from multiple data centers.

China is moving fast, though. I bet we’ll see some kind of project like this before the bubble pops in the US.

I feel like dumping “waste” heat is the same as burning off “waste” gas from pumping oil.

It’s not really just a waste byproduct, there just isn’t a profitable way to utilize it. That heat could be used, but we just dump it into the ocean or the atmosphere because it’s cheaper than building municipal heating or recycling it for industrial uses.

I’m looking forward to the podcasts that’ll make fun of it.

Kessler Syndrome here we come!

For me it was Microsoft’s support for genocide in Palestine.

You want to support that?

They are planning to round people up by the millions and are doing it based on skin color and language. They’re putting them in concentration camps, with plans to build many many more camps to house all the detainees.

It’s an ethnic cleansing campaign.

It is, in fact, illegal for undocumented immigrants to own guns.

ICE is ethnically cleansing the country literally right now.

The secret to increasing profit is to cut costs, always, no matter what. Research? Workforce development? Safety? Just keep cutting costs, shareholders love it!

What do you mean we’re falling behind? We’ve cut so many costs, growth is infinite!

The math is 62% accurate? Is that what that’s saying?

I don’t think they’re trying to get in on the ground floor of the new paradigm, I think they have to make AI work or the whole economy blows up and so they’re going all in.

Beijing is right to see exporting AI hardware and models as leverage. Each Nvidia chip sent abroad is a new point on the board for American software and values. Every U.S.-branded LLM shapes AI norms globally.

Who was it that said you need read business press if you want to know what’s really going on in the world?

This just gives the game away. Imperialism is invisible in the rest of the media, but wsj just come out and say it.

METR measured the speed of 16 developers working on complex software projects, both with and without AI assistance. After finishing their tasks, the developers estimated that access to AI had accelerated their work by 20% on average. In fact, the measurements showed that AI had slowed them down by about 20%.

You have to check it every single time, though, erasing any time savings. You’re saving effort, maybe, but not time.