1000%

I have a 2020 Mini Cooper, and we took it in for service and got a loaner 2026 Mini, and it has this massive, ugly touchscreen.

Look at these gorgeous physical toggles! And even more overhead! All gone! FFS!

He had a duress password, and told it to a border agent (who had no warrant, but that is no longer legally required for border checks), which then wiped his phone.

He was targeted for being part of the Stop Cop City protest movement (and they were likely looking for contacts), and now the feds are claiming that because he could have had anything, he should be allowed to be charged with possession of whatever they can think of (I.e. they already tried to claim in a press conference that he may have had CSAM, because they couldn’t search it to prove he didn’t).

Which they, as the governments, can choose to legally treat as the same thing. “You are guilty of whatever someone does with your account” is not a new concept, it’s just one that most places have chosen to reject. It can always be overridden, such as for the Palestine Exception.

Luckily, revolutions have never required the majority of a populace to actively participate in to succeed, just a majority going “meh, sure”.

But yes, I am personally also very worried that we’re reaching a point with technology that state surveillance and violence will both be too easily applied and too pervasive for the revolution to overcome.

I think this is actually advantageous to us in a way, because clearly AI is something of a system shock to many people right now, whereas in a hundred years it may have not been nearly as apparent as the danger it is (and I don’t mean LLMs, I mean AI in general, especially for surveillance and weapons).

I don’t think it’s a doomer comment at all, I think the last paragraph is trying to tell you without saying the word “datacenter” to go look up the addresses of data centers.

EgAd

That’s true, but the reasons they did it are not their fault.

There’s a name for the thing that demands minimal spending on public services and national spending on private business, even at the expense of human life…

People in power knew, but it served their interests to pretend otherwise.

In other countries than the US that distinction actually means a lot more. For instance, some countries will not allow a bank to repossess cars or houses once a simple majority of the loan has been repaid. In the US, you could be on the final 1 cent payment and the bank, from a legal standpoint, can foreclose on the whole thing if you fail to pay it. In realistic terms, it’s theirs until the loan is entirely repaid.

I don’t know, I think that a “hobby” should be linked to use or an activity, specifically, not simply ownership. Consumerism for the endorphins isn’t really a ‘hobby’, it’s an addiction at best (and I have some personal experience in this area).

If you’re renting or leasing cars for a specific use, like racing or camping, I think that’s completely defensible; I even think certain vehicles like RVs should probably mainly be rented or leased, to make sense.

But “having the newest car for my ego” isn’t a ‘hobby’ without diluting the meaning to nothingness.

No one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Tom.

Valve isn’t public. That’s the healthy business model.

Any time you attempt to convert it into a usable asset, including using it as collateral or citing it as an asset for loans or investment capital solicitation, it should be taxed. Once someone accepts its value in exchange for something, it’s no longer speculative.

He just wanted to make sure Cortana has image-gen training data.

I was heading to reply to your comment when I discovered my previous one has been deleted. Didn’t seem worth continuing to debate the topic if mod tools would be used to excise the bits of my arguments that you didn’t like.

I certainly haven’t revised Marxism any more than Lenin did by your own argument (since advancements are literally revisions anyways).

“Political class” was me attempting to avoid getting into what I assumed would be an unproductive debate about how the politburo and other central committee members were clearly not of the working class based on their power and lifestyles; I was not asserting it as an actual part of Marxist class hierarchy.

And using “we’re collectivist not horizontalist” is a great euphemism for saying “we’ll recreate the vertical structures of class stratification, but claim the collective Will as we do so”.

Look, I think you and I probably agree at the root about Communism vs Capitalism. I think where we diverge is that I don’t think Marxism needs to be “advanced” to function within the confines of a State-dominated Capitalist world and operate as peer-states, which is what Lenin was trying to do.

I think the beauty of Marxism (as well as many other forms of Socialism, including ones Marx considered Utopian) is partially that it rejects the instinct to play using the rules and language that Capitalists and Statists use to order the world (and the language absolutely controls the mental and therefore social models).

If you start trying to alter it so that you can just have a peer-state operating under a Socialist model of labor organization, you’re still going to fall prey to the inherent re-structuring that States as structures naturally undergo due to how inter-national power works.

Why did the USSR collapse? I think you and I both agree it’s not due to it failing on it’s own, nor due to it being somehow destroyed by the US and their cronies (though they certainly did everything they could to harm it, they couldn’t ever destroy it without military action, which is capitalism’s go-to method of “competition”). In my view, it’s because its Statist governing* model was intrinsically incompatible with its Socialist social and labor model in the long run.

Yes, absolutely. Laziness (on anyone’s part) isn’t the result of or unique to AI use. That includes laziness on the part of schools in not doing their job in staffing properly, and pushing professors and teachers to pick up the slack.

Calling my comment where I’m arguing for Marxism “anti-Socialist” is hilarious. Guess only the one form of Socialism that the mod likes is real Socialism, huh?

The article is really discussing bachelor degrees, and this is mostly true for those. Masters and doctorate degrees (or med school or law school, etc) are where specialized learning that actually sets you up for specialized roles happens.

The pre-med student who stopped after getting their bachelor’s is not meaningfully better prepared to be your doctor or psychologist than someone with no degree. You wouldn’t trust either one.

It’s not just posers, it’s also an issue of just being easy, so even a seasoned, experienced professor can use it to avoid hours of prep for materials that would then be above the cut of the LLM content. Still lowers the standard, but without even changing the professors.