yawpitch

Remember when this was all supposed to end on day one of his presidency?

Oh that sweet summer child.

Nope, still doesn’t work. The palantir — and yes, there were more than one, there had to be, they were each nodes in a kind of closed-circuit communication network; the current user of one stone could see what the current user of any another stone could see, but if one of the two current users was sufficiently powerful of mind they could deceive the other current user — weren’t surveillance devices until they’d been employed by a bad actor to that end, and that bad actor was turn the presence of the palantir untrustworthy. The analogy doesn’t work because it was trivially easy to know a palantir was present (at least one was several feet in diameter) and just as easy to know if one was actively being used (if you could see anything through one then someone was present on the other end)… the problem was you didn’t know if it was being used for good or evil once one was in the hands of Sauron precisely because the being on the other end could always be the Lidless Eye.

All you had to do to curtail the use of a palantir was throw a sheet over it… the problem was the temptation to use one was too great.

It’s actually a kakistocracy; if they were reasonable people who could work together and take criticism they wouldn’t be the worst kind of people.

Of course the modern company (legal nonsense withstanding) exists specifically to limit that ability to hold any people accountable for the actions of their company.

Does it though? The Eye of Sauron represents the being so sufficiently single-minded that it corrupted the Palantir and weaponized them for evil ends.

AKA, you know, Peter Thiel.

Ahh, so you’re saying we’ve reached the worst of both worlds?

Whelp, looks like I’m THE ENEMY.

That said, from his position I’m absolutely certain it looks super-intelligent… come to think of it, I’m kind of surprised the shibboleth isn’t “mega-hyper-giga-plaid-intelligence”.

Or, and I’m just tossing this out here, or he’s an actual idiot and democracy was always a race to the bottom?

The grid we’re talking about is only, definitionally, the electrical grid, ie constantly paying capital to some company to have an always-available electrical connection that continues cooking the planet even if you’re not using it.

The solar panels on my boat have more than paid back their capital costs and their environmental impact in just the diesel my engine doesn’t need to burn to provide power, and my life is dramatically less expensive because I don’t have to pay tax/rent to a middleman corporation for copper cabling they barely maintain and towers and transmission cables and such that I don’t use at any rate.

Keep stretching your definition like that and the North Sentinelese are on the grid of industrial civilization because their sky is still polluted by the Starlink swarm they’ve no conception of.

I didn’t… the people who dismiss and discredit her work being exclusively male just made it appear that way.

Living off grid has nothing to do with abandoning society, it’s all about abandoning the grid. Pretty much everyone I know that lives off grid is extremely orientated towards social good and community, they’re just orientated towards doing both without wasting energy.

Apparently they’ve announced an agreement whereby Y. Pestis will police itself.

And yet, even at the price of free, isn’t worth reading.

Please pull the little orange mushroom cap out of your mouth before re-posting.

You don’t appear to have read the article, which explains the name was taken from a character in Wolfenstein, apparently in response to an alignment towards (rather pathetic) irreverence.

It doesn’t call itself anything, it doesn’t have any conception of identity, nor fur that matter the semantic meaning of either part of the portmanteau it found in its training corpus… what it does have is a bias towards the bias of its trainers, in this case paid for by someone who would find it really (if pathetically) funny if their personal LLM was automatically fascist.

It’s also got a marked bias towards generative CSAM, according to investigations and filings in multiple jurisdictions… which also implies it’s best for voters not to ask it questions.

To be fair, Americans have previously asked ouija boards, psychics, and the Magic 8-Ball the same question in the past… at least they’re not asking Grok.

Yet.

My dog could reliably beat that idiot 4 games out of 5 at bog standard 2D tic-tac-toe.

Not nearly as hard as selling one covered in human faeces.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a better argument for Communism than Peter Thiel.

Ahh, good… another sign of interesting times.

Doesn’t everyone tend to prefer leaders they can relate to?

I’m not mocking the scientists, I’m mocking the society that needs those scientists to quantify the only possible outcome of unconstrained economic disparity, and especially the paywalled media that allows the rich to see what they will not read while keeping the poor from reading what they already implicitly know.

Of course being isolated from the experience of lack by a buffer of wealth inhibits your capacity for empathy. I’m glad we can point to evidence for that, I’m just concerned that it’s not already a basic component of the socialization education of every citizen.

“Studies have shown that the rich are less empathetic than the poor.”

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a man? No! It’s Captain Obvious!!

Paperclips. Many paperclips. So many paperclips.

Narf!

AI is not going to kill you… but a Westinghouse M-25 40-watt Phased Plasma Pulse-Gun held by an AI just might.

Reading this thread is like watching the Irish start roasting and eating their excess children immediately after Swift modestly proposed the idea.

Not this one, or, come to think of it, any that I know of.

Now, hobby entrepreneurs, that’s different.

Anything that takes money away from narcoleptic, right wing [self]-abusers of the COA^1 is a net good for humanity.

^1: Concept of Acronyms

I mean what’s another $1.3 trillion on the national debt?

I’m not sure that qualifies as unpopular, but I am sure both quality and trust have already collapsed, at least for me.