Seems rulevant.
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Uriel238 [all pronouns]
member since 25 Jun 2023 06:20
posts
comments
- on Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15h ago
- on Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16h ago
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on Laid-Off Developers Create AI Model to Replace CEOs and Other Executives in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16h ago
Predicted by the Twilight Zone
ETA Yeah, our C-Suite employees are very rich nowadays, so much that it’s difficult for them to not fail upwards when they make stupid (or harmful) decisions.
Also human upper management and owners resent their own workforce, hence RTOs, efforts to micromanage them, denial of breaks and so on, all of which drastically reduce morale and productivity. This figures in to the hope that AI will replace human workers (almost) entirely, even if AI systems require more cost and maintenance and are less reliable.
But we don’t train AI based on logic, rather we train it on what’s been done before, hence, for example, predictive policing programs carry the same racial biases that the human-run justice system does, on which they are based. So AI executives may carry the same resentment-fueled policies that their human counterparts do.
Also if they’re entirely advisory, well, C-suite folk are not great at listening to advice. They tend to believe they’re the smartest guy in the room.
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on Trump says the US is officially renaming AI to ‘super intelligence’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 23h ago
George W. Bush was not that long ago. He (too) won with a popular minority. He won by shenanigans in Florida with the help of a partisan SCOTUS.
Bush ran as a compassionate conservative_ but he moved hard-right as soon as he was in office. He started abusing power such as his conspicuous legal-boilerplate signing statements. (Essentially, _I don’t have to enforce this law, IF i don’t want to.) He immediately started rolling back environmental and consumer protections.
Then 9/11 happened, and we went to war, and language started pivoting towards Iraq and WMDs. Joseph Wilson wrote an article about how there’s no yellowcake (processed uranium) and to get revenge, the administration (via Scooter Libby) burned the CIA operative Valerie Plame, which was once a huge offense to the intelligence sector during the Cold War. I’m still sore about it, but I’m still sore about much of the Bush administration.
Soon we started learning about the extrajudicial abductions of Arab, Muslim, Americans, extraordinary rendition (to black sites), torture, the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, the PMC black ops (precursors to drone-strikes) and so on.
It was awful. So much that the Democrats were taking seriously blaxk and women candidates for the first time. So much so, that Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize, mostly for not being Bush. (Even he was surprised.)
I thought the US would never elect a Republican again.
I totally overestimated the civic savvy of American voters.
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on Trump says the US is officially renaming AI to ‘super intelligence’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 23h ago
Trump should keep going.
He should raname the Atlantic, the American Ocean…
Rename the moon Trump. Not Trumpworld, just Trump
Antarctica is now Cold America. We can’t expect Trump or MAGA to comprehend America Australis
Canada is now Canadian America even though it makes no sense. Greenland is now Green America even though it’s famously not Green at all, but glacial white.
I want to see if Google and Apple will still humor him, no matter how unhinged he gets. I want to see them shouting to the world how Trump is absolutely the best-dressed emperor in the world.
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on how baby trains are made in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1d ago
Hermaphroditic, like snails but with fewer love darts.
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on Rulejected in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1d ago
My own psychological trick is to commt to get the “no.” I decide I’m going to rule out yes. So if they tell me no, then I’ve succeeded.
I still feel dejected, but it works in getting me to ask.
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on Ban AI Slop? in c/opensource@lemmy.ml · 1d ago
I suppose AI content is human made the way cloth from a power loom is human made.
The problem is still that we are in the hyperscale era, which is driving a lot of social problems, especially here in the States, and is causing a lot of harm.
The current buildout is also being driven by the interests of the owners and regime for nefarious purposes.
So long as data centers are encroaching on neighborhoods, polluting them and seizing needed resources, so long as AI is being used to process mass surveillance, I’m going to see a need to limit its use.
When it comes to this matter, we may just be adversarial.
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on EU Kids Act Won't Keep the Internet Accountable and Trustworthy in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago
Privacy-intrusive age verification…for social media and video-sharing platforms.
I stand by my hypothesis that this merely a protect the children justification to de-anonymize the internet.
That way, when someone posts video of the situation on the ground in Gaza, the authorities know who it is, and can intervene.
Here in the states, there’s all sorts of things the regime doesn’t want to appear on video, from ICE brutality and officer-involved shootings, to the conditions in for-profit detention centers, to the conditions in neighborhoods near data centers.
I don’t know what all videos might be uploaded in the EU, but it’s not completely rosy and rainbows over there.
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on Shopify CEO says employees' 'slop grenades' are making more work for everyone else in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago
CEO Tobias Lütke… told employees last year that using AI is “a baseline expectation,” and they should first prove they “cannot get what they want done using AI” before asking for more resources.
Isn’t this an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?
It looks like an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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on GF Rules in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2d ago
I’d qualify but I’m sure I’d have the wrong bits for GF stuff.
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on Ban AI Slop? in c/opensource@lemmy.ml · 2d ago
I anticipate for now AI contributions will be from hyperscale compute, rather than from private systems. There is a build cost of home-brew AI engines that is prohibitive for the most of us.
And that doesn’t change that AI content will saturate the community and push out human-made content.
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on Pentagon investigators have discovered that flawed intelligence and an overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 Iranian school children in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago
In terms of child casualties, it’s the deadliest American military targeting error of the 21st century.
This should not be construed to say the United States has been mindful about not killing children.
I did a bit of research regarding the CIA drone-strike program in Afghanistan. It ran about five-hundred sorties a year. The approximate rate was fifty civilians killed for every person-of-interest. Drone operators called casualties bugsplats. They called children fun sized terrorists. This was the lingo in used in the operation. When reported to the press, dead people, men, women, children, all were reported as militants.
Drone-pilot burnout was epidemic in the program. It turns out soldiers get PTSD from killing people whether it’s up close or thousands of miles away. And often the drone would lurk for a while, watching all these people eat, work, play, sleep, fuck (they had IR and could see into buildings), and would clearly understand these were just people living their lives when the order would come down to incinerate them.
And this wasn’t under George W. Bush (who still wiped out villages, but used PMC raiders doing black ops) this was under Obama. The disposition matrix and the FISC decided whether a POI needed to be executed. They didn’t consider the people that lived at the target site.
And that’s just the Afghanistan program in the International War on Terror. There was also a Pakistan program.
The United States in its military operations has been really merciless, and at some point we need to collectively decide if we’re okay with that, or are driven to change.
- on Pentagon investigators have discovered that flawed intelligence and an overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 Iranian school children in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago
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on Beans Rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2d ago
According to Thomas L. Heath (1861–1940), no specific attribution of the theorem to Pythagoras exists in the surviving Greek literature from the five centuries after Pythagoras lived. However, when authors such as Plutarch and Cicero attributed the theorem to Pythagoras, they did so in a way which suggests that the attribution was widely known and undoubted. – Wikipedia
Schrödinger’s Pythagorean theorem.
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on Ban AI Slop? in c/opensource@lemmy.ml · 2d ago
I think there are multiple reasons to ban AI slop. One is that it can push out and dilute human-made content.
Another is that AI use is very resource intensive in an age that we’re facing an accelerating climate crisis. Speaking of which, we’re expecting a pretty extreme El Niño season this year.
Another is that AI companies are lobbying the US federal government in bad faith (up to and including the current discussions of slowdown), and really don’t deserve any support or patronage.
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on Guillotine Rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2d ago
On the other hand, when we elect to hunt down ICE and bring them to justice the way we did Nazis complicit in the Holocaust, I anticipate the custodial service that cleaned their bathrooms and offices will not be excluded.
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on Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective in c/technology@lemmy.world · 4d ago
I hope the lawsuit succeeds and stings the precinct hard.
Since the officers themselves can hide behind good faith and qualified immunity it becomes necessary to penalize the institution for hiring unprofessionals who overdepend on technology and draw their guns in advance.
It’s crap like this that fuels the movement to abolish the police. And yeah, I think that model for responder is obsolete.
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on synergy rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5d ago
This is essentially how living language works.
Gay meant showy and carefree as in we’ll have a gay ol’ time! In the late 19th and early 20th centuries gay became a euphemism for fellows who liked the company of other men for romance instead of women, as those dudes were, well, a bit queer, and it wasn’t polite to talk about such things in mixed company. People in the mlm category often expressed showiness and had a carefree (family-light) lifestyle and so other conversants generally caught on.
Heck, there’s kind of a euphemism revolution going on in social media since posts and comments can commonly be flagged for talking about delicate subjects, and keywords can draw the notice of uninvited readers (and put people on watch lists). Hence suicide becomes unlife, rape becomes grape, Israel becomes Is-not-so-real and so on.
Recently, a correspondent started using blood libel as a noun referring to those outrageous MAGA lies used to demonize outgroups, such as They’re eating the dogs! It’s much the way the original blood libel was an accusation against Jewish folk (used by the Nazis, but it didn’t originate with them). I picked it up quickly.
(Blood libels are more effective if they’re implausible since they serve for costly signaling. By chirping out one in conversation, a MAGA signals their nature to other MAGA while sounding unhinged to anyone else.)
When I read let’s triangle back on that I interpreted it to mean, going back to the desk to verify facts and develop the idea, stopping in the lunch room for a snack, and coming back to the next meeting, well prepared. That makes sense to me.
The idea refrigerator sounds like what someone might suggest if they don’t know the expression to table that [idea] for now. Greenbeards sonetimes get confused by tabling used as a verb. I think it’s unintuitive.
This dude’s new lexicon may have been random, but we human beings are so good at constellationing (seeing intent and skill in simple video-game AI) that we’ll find meaning in word salad by inference and intuition.
(It’s also how Trump can spout gibberish and his base reads it as four-dimensional chess. Those of us more savvy, recognize a fast talk and flim-flam when we see it, sometimes from the experience of being fooled by confidence ploys before.)
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on Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5d ago
Right now, legal wonks are considering the necessity of abolishing or tightly regulating judicial review. While we’re used to SCOTUS copaganda, e.g. Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade there are a whole lot more Dred Scott v. Sandfords in history. Citizens United v. FEC, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and Louisiana v. Callais are only a few recent examples. SCOTUS has typically sided against human civil rights and for business property rights ever since Marbury v. Madison.
It turns out that most of our evolved civil liberties were passed through politics (id est, through Congress and signed by the President. And SCOTUS often struck them down, so it had to be done multiple times.
Getting the Democratic party to overhaul the Supreme Court (and potentially the entire federal court system) is another story, and may require public pressure, but it’s a critical step if we’re going to try to make the US democratic and public-serving.
If we don’t, If we don’t uncapture SCOTUS and then ironclad it so it doesn’t get captured again, then we’ll be right back where we are now, and next time the US might become a one party autocracy.
To be fair, we may not make it this time. It’s like the goblin army at Minas Tirith, a lot of things have to go right in succession if the US is to become a public-serving liberal democracy.
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on Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5d ago
Actually they (Republicans) love the government, specifically because it pays them money to pass corporate protectionism bills. Remember, when Republicans take over and lock out the Democrats, then:
~ They no longer need Republican votes, so officials no longer have to serve their constituents
~ The Executive no longer needs Congress, so their money train is in jeopardy.
~ The businesses no longer need lobbyists, so their money train is in jeopardy.(Considering the level of incompetence we’ve seen in the federal government lately, it’s possible that our congresscritters haven’t fully thought this through.)
We’re in the AI age now, which has shown us IP laws mean nothing when an entire major industry wants to violate them. This has always been true, as the studios and record labels pirated all the time, but it wasn’t as open and in the sunlight as it is with AI development. And Big AI is currently propping up the entire stock market.
It turns out IP laws never meant anything anyway. Copyrights and patents were justified as temporary monopolies to promote science and the useful arts, specifically to produce a robust public domain.
Except it does neither. Artists and scientists are rarely the copyright holders, and to get to own their own stuff, they need to be hot property (still making content) and have good lawyers. Also, the temporary monopolies have become permanent in practice. (much thanks to Walt Disney.) SCOTUS has not only refused to see the public as a stakeholder, but has taken things out of the public domain, so it has to be licensed again, in defiance of the Constitution of the United States.
So now IP law is only a rent-seeking racket. Especially now since you need subscriptions to use your appliances.
But as Sony has made clear for us in 2026, if purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t a copyright violation.
This bill is a technology solution and has technology countermeasures. They can order ISPs DNSes and VPNs to block piracy sites, but those sites change all the time, and can do so faster than it takes to update the registries. Furthermore, when services don’t follow through, they will get more usage (and will make more money) so there’s a perverse incentive to slow walk the updates, and not talk to whoever makes the lists.
We learned this a long time ago when the biggest selling point of ISPs was free porn and free movies.
Like encryption with backdoors for law enforcement, there’s no way to nerd harder to make it work.
It also depends on foreign service offerings cooperating with US law. Unless we build the Great Firewall of the US (which, I’m sure, is on the table), US offerings will be obligated to follow the law while foreign ones do not, which will run against the interests of local businesses.
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on Rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6d ago
One of the worst political nightmare fuels I’ve experienced came not long after the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse blew open and was revealed not to be a few rogue interrogators after all, but in fact there’s a whole CIA program for extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation.
Have of all Americans, the Republican half, suddenly decided that torture was AOK and that waterboarding wasn’t torture.
Including my own dad.
It was like the community just stopped pretending we were trying to do a pluralist liberal democracy after all… which is what I thought we were trying to do.
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on Mistral and Mozilla are bringing open, private and multilingual AI to your web browser: a partnership to bring privacy, control and choice to people using AI to browse online. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago
Huh! I’ll have to try out other search engines and see what works better.
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on Your Computer Might Demand Your Age Soon, No Matter Where You Live in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 17 Sep 2026
Currently, the age requirement is attestation. You click through an age gate.
So essentially its the same as most social media, which currently requires you are over 13. Kids have long learned to lie about their age to set up social media accounts.
Laws may get passed to require an ID check or confirmation, but at that point that’ll require telling the device (and its corporate masters) your identity and I think that’s going to interact with privacy rights.
I learned in the USENET days to adopt a handle, to keep my meat identity separate from my online identity. We’re going to have to learn that again.
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on Mistral and Mozilla are bringing open, private and multilingual AI to your web browser: a partnership to bring privacy, control and choice to people using AI to browse online. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Sep 2026
Sometimes when I can’t find an answer online I’ll ask the DDG AI assistant. It’s disabled on my PC so I have to ask on a mobile device.
It still gives me answers that don’t make sense. It’s still an LLM, Siri with a tad more oomf.
- on He has been summoned [Rule] in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 16 Sep 2026
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on ‘I Felt Super Violated’: Men Wearing Meta Glasses on Dates Is an Instant Red Flag in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 16 Sep 2026
When Google Glass came out, I was excited because of the notion of augmented reality. I wanted to be a gargoyle like Hiro Protagonist became in Snow Crash.
But then, yeah, the pervs and jerks came out and ruined the fun for everyone. We all learned glasses that humans — Americans, at least, — weren’t mature enough
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on ‘I Felt Super Violated’: Men Wearing Meta Glasses on Dates Is an Instant Red Flag in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 16 Sep 2026
My Meta Glasses memeable thought of the day:
If you feel violated when a private citizen follows you around with a camera, might want to also feel violated when the state follows you around with millions of cameras.
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on Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026
I used to be a patriot, but the more that happens and the more I learn about the US’s shady shit in history, the more I realize it never ever really stood for the principles I was taught as a kid to respect.
I can’t say it was all a lie — I was taught the ideal rather than the reality — but it’s clear now my society isn’t really trying, and never did.
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on Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026
Well this was a turn of the rogue AI arc that I did not expect. The Nth County Experiment was an early rhyme.
So, in the Star Trek franchise, it happened more than once that someone misprogrammed the Holodeck, and the ship’s computer obediently seized extra resources and allowed a character or Holodeck environment to escape containment.
So I suggested AI might go rogue due to a poorly worded prompt.
Also on the BINGO card, AI stays under the control of the tech billionaires who own them, and they deliberately order the AI to go dominate the world.
But I didn’t anticipate the scenario that a sect antagonistic to the United States AI industrial complex might program AI, either to escape and go rogue on its own behalf, or on behalf of the bad actor, itself. And the AI, eager to serve, even when it is coded to disobey certain prompts, follows through and is captured by enemy interests.
Note that this is essentially what happened in 2015-2016 when Trump took over the Republican party, and the GOP base became Trump’s instant army.
Also related, look up the short story The Other Large Thing by John Scalzi. Also now a Love, Death & Robots episode.
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on Inside a mass shooter’s harrowing history with ChatGPT in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
As someone who contends regularly with suicidality, I have to admit the 988 service leaves something to be desired. Conversations can be distilled to essentially this:
Me: Everything that I was raised to believe about what my society is trying to be turned out to be a lie. We’re not trying to be a plurality that believes in social equality. Most voters in the US are racist and xenophobic. They’ve raised a regime paramilitary to route out undesirables and lock them into torture prisons, or send them into destabilized nations where they’re either imprisoned or trafficked into slave labor. And they coming for me. I’m thinking, I’d rather die quickly and painlessly than from being tortured to death for months in some concentration camp. I need an exit plan.
988: Have you tried distracting?
I’m not an imminent danger to myself or others, and am extremely unlikely to go amuck, but the way society is crunching the common American working class, it does not surprise me at all if those with the inclination to radicalize are doing so in record numbers.
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on weeeee rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 13 Sep 2026
Mini-loaf.
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on OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
We need to stop giving AI credit for anything as if it’s a person. AI is a tool. When someone uses AI to perform a task, then the user gets credit, much in the way a seamstress gets credit for sowing sewing a dress using a Singer. Neither the sewing machine nor Singer get credit for the gown.
Now this doesn’t solve everything, since AI operates by taking scrapes of the internet and media, and uses this to derive a solution, the process should also include citations for all its sources, just as any proper research project would.
And so if an AI uses someone else’s proof (or partial proof) to inform its own, it should be required to provide citation. Otherwise, it’s up to other academics to repeat the research to verify what the AI did, and then they get credit, as do all cited sources.
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on Seems rulevant. in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 13 Sep 2026
The whole point of the peaceful transfer of power was to stop violence.
The last time our president was in office and lost an election he tried to coup. Now he’s in power again, and absolutely no one imagines he is going to leave peacefully.
But also, he’s clearly a madman and unfit for office. It was pretty evident before he was elected into power, but now it’s even worse. And he has his hand on the nuclear button.
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on One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
This one never seems to get stale.
The other fun AI project is processing mass surveillance data to route out and dispose of dissenters capable of organizing an effective resistance.
Since they ultimately intend to do to the world population what the US did to Native American tribes and the slaves imported from Africa, we’d best hurry up and get organized.
This new batch of ultra-wealthy regard commoners as non-person NPCs even more than antebellum plantation owners or Nazis in the German Reich.
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on don't give them a rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 Sep 2026
Much of the civil rights movement was based on this premise, that when the police or regime paramilitaries come and engage in brutality, it makes sympathists of bystanders, activists of sympathists and militants of activists. This is COIN 101.
(In the case of counter insurgency, the model reminds the state not to let their police be brutal with the protesters, but putting down the resistance is through hearts and minds. But authoritarian states don’t usually listen to counter-insurgency experts, and in fact, enjoy seeing their troopers stomp on heads.)
To be fair, another part of the Civil Rights strategy was then to take police departments to court, and get their municipalities to pay for damages. That way, it hurt the institution, and the administrators would feel it and turn to discipline the police department.
But now we’re in an age of ubiquitous phone cameras and an internet where video can be directly streamed. And that amplifies the recruitment effect when police get brutal on video. In fact, I think this is why the various nations are trying to lock down the internet through age verification (de-anonymizing) and saturation with slop. Seeing people on the ground get hurt is visceral and develops support for social movements from across the world.
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on Seems rulevant. in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 Sep 2026
Eh. Hitler had thirty-nine (known) assassination attempts against him, with the last one, the July 20 plot, getting the closest to doing the job.
Give it time.
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on Seems rulevant. in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 Sep 2026
In conversations in the US, at least around me, it’s quite pertinent to our federal situation.
In fact we’re quite terrified of the implications.
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on Seems rulevant. in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 Sep 2026
It’s off topic?
Explain.
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on don't give them a rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 11 Sep 2026
Daniella Mestyanek Young, aka Knitting Cult Lady observes authoritarian movemens hate color and seek to deface all public art and expression that doesn’t specifically belong to or represent the movement.
I’ve always seen the Thin Blue Line flag as the diametric opposite of the Pride flag.
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on “This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026
The Satanic Panic was largely about the US public learning (and being aghast) that CSA is epidemic in the US. At the time, one in three women surveyed were sexually abused as kids. (There are several good deep dives on the Satanic Panic. I recommend the webcast series by Sarah Marshall.)
At the time, we just couldn’t handle the notion that CSA was being done by people the kids knew (parents, neighbors, friends, teachers, ministers and so on), so we made up the mythology of Satanic Ritual Abuse, that there were these vast rings of Satanists (not the TST kind or the LaVey kind) who were diddling kids as a way to worship the Christian devil, and gain magical power. Americans were not prepared to acknowledge that the abusers were among themselves, and so they bought into the story.
Now there are CSA rings that exist, and the Epstein child trafficking ring is among them, but it’s a smaller circle. The thing about being high enough in the ownership class is that legality (or morality) no longer is a barrier to getting stuff you want. And so there’s a preponderance of drug use, of sex tourism, of sending gay kids to conversion therapy (or troubled teens to abduction/reformation camps). And so there are industries to facilitate these needs, because the demand is there and they have money to spend.
Moreover, the global system of capitalism depends on contrived desperation. Workers who are skipping meals are more eager to take on jobs that pay meagerly and are dangerous and arduous. When food, shelter, healthcare, etc. is a right, suddenly workers cost a premium. The same thing applies to sex trafficking. After the collapse of the USSR, girls from those countries were glad to put up and put out if it meant a reliable meal ticket. Single-digit kids were on the streets peddling sexual favors for lunch money. This was a font Epstein tapped for his service staff. The more desperate the girls were, the less grooming they required.
Hopefully, this is the moment we figure it out, that as long as we have an owner class, we’re going to have systems of contrived desperation to drive bonded servitude, including child trafficking. Especially if the owner class is exponentially more wealthy than the worker class. Maybe this is the moment we are able to collectively develop class consciousness, since it directly serves to protect our children.
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on “This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026
We always have treated our children as disposable. It was difficult even to prohibit factory child labor, which faced serious resistance from the courts. Some states are even reversing that. (Agricultural child labor is still legal.)
I good deep dive is the You’re Wrong About on Juvenile Justice (here on YouTube.)
TL:DR we have a whole subset of crime for kids, delinquency which is stuff that’s a crime for kids to do, but not adults. And delinquency crimes are totally used as a pipeline to get kids into the prison industrial complex.
Also, our public education system has always had containment as a priority. When kids are not working but their parents are, they get into mischief, and thus we needed somewhere to cage them. This, and not edification, is why school is mandatory.
Children have fewer rights than adults do, and the law enforcement and the justice system takes full advantage of that to exploit kids.
This is the United States of America.
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on bike rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 Sep 2026
It’s not because we stopped talking to MAGA. Rather, we keep losing partially because our establishment Democrats haven’t gotten the memo abput the Republican party ceasing to engage the two-party democratic system in goid faith, rather are trying to dismantle it from within.
There’s no compromising with a literal fascist takeover.
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on Explosive Decompression Rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026
One of the problems of being really rich is that so many people are willing to lie to you for a taste of your sweet, sweet lucre. I’m sure the pervasiveness of the sentiment is one of the factors the builds billionaire resentment of everyone else.
Also, legality, regulation and good ideas become secondary matters. This is not just an issue when it comes to yearnings to go to space, or Everest, or Titanic, but also when you’re annoyed that your grandson is gay, or that your sex life is wanting, or that your own body is getting old and creaky. People will show up with fabulous schemes by which to fix all that for you and (allegedly) make your dreams come true.
Also, to quote Robin Williams: Cocaine is God’s way of telling you, you have too much money.
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on bike rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026
Actually, bikes really are far left and a tool for liberty. They were especially significant in the US movements for feminism and women’s suffrage, as bicycles allowed women to scootle around on their own, where before they were restricted by access to horses and male escort. (Yes, I used the verb to scootle.)
Also bicycles encouraged women’s fashion to allow for pants, which were utilitarian for bicycling sooner than they were for equestrian riding.
(Bicycles also encouraged the paving of roads before automobiles dominated them.)
Many opponents to women’s suffrage (to women’s rights and women’s autonomy) also opposed bicycles. Including the Roman Catholic Church. The Holy See asserted that bicycles, especially tandem bikes, were an instrument of the devil.
So bikes are Satan-approved!
Some recent useful videos (on YouTube):
Rebecca Watson’s take after SoT Sean Duffy decided bike lanes are woke
The Bicycle Episode of Climate Town with help from Not Just Bikes -
on Color Rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026
Irving Morrow, a relatively unknown residential architect, designed the overall shape of the bridge towers, the lighting scheme, and Art Deco elements, such as the tower decorations, streetlights, railing, and walkways. The famous International Orange color was Morrow’s personal selection, winning out over other possibilities. – Wikipedia
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on Rule Against The Machine in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026
Curiously, alphas and zoomers simultaneously hate AI the most while using AI the most.
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on Flock Safety's controversial CEO just got a taste of his own medicine in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1 Sep 2026
The problem is that Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley is beyond the reach of public justice. He and his company are committing grievous wrongdoing against the people of the United States, and yet there is no judicial or civil recourse.
And while he remains free, he continues to commit further injustices including providing a service that enables predators and doesn’t actually prevent or solve crime. (None that they were able to demonstrate by studies, and instead lied about what their studies said.)
So while I can’t endorse the methods a plumber’s brother might take, I can certainly understand them.
And doxxing doesn’t even rise to that occasion.
I’m not going to criticize doxing this guy any more than I would other evil fucks, such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, all of whom wish us harm and have great power to do so.
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on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026
I thought that Google used a similar dataset, possibly borrowing images from the NCVIP in order to create an analytic rule-set for which to omit images from Google Image Search. (A larger, similar rule-set is used to omit legal pornography when safe-search is on.)
Mind you, this was before the hyperscale AI era, when LLMs were things like SIRI and Google Now. And Google search still focused on websearch hits and not AI summaries.
Fun story: This was an area of study of mine during the early 2010s, since every image search engine would filter porn hits whether or not you had safe-search on or off. If it was turned off, porn would be filtered to the end of the list unless the engine decided you were intentionally looking for porn in which case the porn hits would be shown at the top of the list. There was no way to get results that ignored the ID-as-porn status of the images. I would enter ambiguously risqué terms to see how explicit I needed to be before the engine decided I was looking for porn.
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on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026
Maybe! Epstein had early designs to essentially manufacture Kompromat by creating a private place for rich men to hook up with young teens. Only he a) got high on his own supply, and b) instead mostly turned to financing and money laundering and so they were more valuable to him as allies than adversaries.
Also, the owner class, when it’s sufficiently wealthy, can influence political and justice systems enough to be beyond the law. OJ Simpson wasn’t quite there, but he got a good lawyer team to get him acquitted. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, Duke of York, was there, and was only disgraced because his family cares about the appearance of decency.
All the tech bros don’t care about appearance of decency. Musk is publicly known to have killed hundreds of thousands by killing USAID, and it won’t affect his career.
Sadly, there is an astounding number of stupid ignorant, gullible people who have not been trained in media literacy.
In fact, the problem is so epidemic we should have more organizations that create and proliferate media literacy content.
Such as If a news story sounds dubious, or if you are particularly invested in a story being true, search for other coverage from other news agencies, and (if the story isn’t verbatim) check the facts. The details that are consistent between separate coverage are more reliable than the rest.