yawpitch

Especially amongst those who think of taxes as a form of stealing.

Some of that 30% has both directly and indirectly empowered war crimes and has pushed on the accelerator of an unspeakable [and, sadly, irreversible] descent into the kind of mad fascistic experiment that always ends up driving many more. The seizure of means that you turn around and use for rent-seeking is morally indefensible in its own right, but it’s the unintended (yet obvious) consequences of that same self-serving and short-sighted impulse where the real moral trap lies.

Elon. Jeff. Donald. Honestly just randomly select a billionaire.

Since we’re playing this game, prove to me there exists a default framework. Further, prove to me that said default framework is one that includes billionaires, the concept having been utterly alien throughout the vast majority of human history.

Any system that allows more wealth than is necessary to accumulate into one pair of hands while another pair hasn’t enough food is inherently immoral.

Also you’ve never, not once, been operating within a free economy… the only people I’ve met in life who have witnessed such an economy have gone to extreme lengths to escape it. Or they’ve died.

They’d also have to not give a flying fuck about a healthy diet or medical issues, but even if we assume you’re correct, is that somehow worse than the only people who take the job being wealthy and obviously very intent on earning money from it directly?

As a first pass, you’ve accumulated all that money, thus you’ve actively or passively, knowingly or unknowingly, taken advantage of a perverse systemic bug that allows that sort of money to accumulate in any one person’s hands to begin with.

But point me at any given billionaire and I can provide more context-specific examples, sure.

Absent circumstances of four digit inflation rates, one cannot earn a billion dollars… one can only accumulate a billion dollars.

If one ever does so, one has definitely done something morally indefensible.

One hopes there’s simply enough scientists left to do something useful in the (very) brief window between the compute time cost dropping below the threshold of accessible and the ambient temperature rising above the threshold of thermodynamic ally feasible.

The kind of person who would take the job might actually be well-suited to it.

Our current methodology is basically a form of natural selection towards who can promise the most while delivering the least, at the same time they extract maximum reward in exchange for some minimum appearance of competence.

How about they have to live off the lowest provided level of food assistance, with the lowest level of provided health insurance, and they don’t get paid until after they’ve left office and their pay is determined by a public plebiscite?

My guess is what it looks like is an enormous glut of HPC compute suddenly becoming available to science at virtually no cost at precisely the moment we’ve gutted the entire concept of science.

Interesting intercessory use of artificial interlocutors, and it feels quite appropriate to have a prayer-issuing daemon standing between you and an artificial godlike intellect.

That said I’ve opened one obvious issue. Someone else can open a pull request on Cthulhu’s behalf.

Well that’s sinister.

So, in other words, they rationalized their playing god in order to justify their profit-seeking.

Unnatural selection, AKA eugenics, doesn’t usually work out well in the long run.

Who knew LLMs would one day start shilling for Big NaCl?

In all of history no animal has ever needed to be culled, except in the minds of those who want to kill for fun or profit (or, usually, both).

tl;dr: grotesquely stupid child appointed by a grotesquely stupid man elected by the grotesquely stupid says grotesquely stupid things.

The hardest part of the gift of mortality is accepting it.

Ahh, interesting… what skill would I want to fundamentally, absolutely, and forever, devalue to absolute zero future economic value, while simultaneously maximizing positive societal impact and transformation? Allowing everyone to do skillfully what no one would ever again be willing to pay for?

I don’t suppose advertising is considered a technical skill? Or whatever a CEO actually does?

If only I had cause to be embarrassed.

We’re all terminally online, the question is once we’re no longer online at all, who will be to blame? Hint: it’s the rich.

Sure. The better question can it produce writing that we should want to read?

Funny, you seem to have [mis]read the thread as somehow being about computing being better in the past, when it’s actually about the trend being worse in the present and foreseeable future. Computers aren’t getting faster or cheaper today not because we’ve passed peak computer, but because we’ve collectively decided to let billionaires chase the next AI winter. An economic bubble that represents a colossal societal self-own — the actual effect of which is to generate enormous environmental and economic hardship in exchange for a very small real productivity gain, nothing even vaguely resembling AGI, and an unbelievably large amount of misogynistic wank material — coupled with the geo-political instability and violence required to stoke that fever is the actual reason compute isn’t following the trajectory of the past.

Could I have used a less sarcastic way of voicing the basic point that allowing the capitalists to capture and secure all the means of production drives up the cost of those means while simultaneously pushing down the quality of the capital, the product, and the lived conditions of the capitalist’s feed stock, sure… but then I’d really be spending too much time and energy on this throwaway thread (and, ironically, on producing more waste energy for less valuable compute time).

Out of the blue usually means “unexpected”… when asked for a list of rich people with interests in the intersection between generative AI and inappropriate sexualization of the underaged, can the good doctor’s name possibly be anything but expected?

For the non-Americans, a semi is an HGV and an interstate is a motorway.

In either case I feel for the bees.

Elon (definitely), Sam (albeit obliquely), Donald (nepotistically), Jeffrey (previously), Peter (apocalyptically)… really it’s take your pick, or propose one who isn’t.

In the old days, the rich didn’t think it was a good idea to burn the atmosphere to produce plausibly deniable child porn.

Honestly they’re much more similar to male smegma-removal services.

That’s not the title of the PR, plus “malicious” is pretty debatable, when the intent is apparently to protect human agency from inhuman agency.

Every year the government refunds taxes overpaid by people who didn’t owe as much as the government imagined they did. Arguably one of the main functions of the IRS is to ensure the government doesn’t have a huge and increasing liability for taxes that were never correctly collected in the first place.

Then you add on the fact that this government never had the legal right to make the “mistake” in the first place.