or device pin

It doesn’t sound like you would have to.

I guess she really didn’t understand…

Iran has promised to let ships through from countries that sanction the US, so it would be a good way to get oil, actually. I’m sure the EU can give Venezuela air defense against US invasion in exchange for a good deal on their oil too.

We have the liberties we have because average people in the past knew otherwise. Union workers, revolutionaries, mass political movements, terrorists, soldiers, and civil servants. If the system steers society towards collapse, we all have to change the system by the least violent means available, which is sometimes a violent civil war.

Except LLMs aren’t profitable. They’re propped up by venture capital on the one hand and desperately integrated into systems with no case study on the effects on profit on the other. Video game CEOs are surprised and appalled when gamers turn against AI, implying they did literally no market research before investing billions.

When venture capital dries up and companies have to bear the full cost of LLMs themselves - or worse: if LLM companies go bankrupt and their API goes dead - any company that adopted LLMs into their workflow is going to suffer tremendously. Imagine if they fired half their employees because the LLM does that work and then the LLM stops working. So even if you could lose some money this quarter to invest in it and maybe gain some back by the end of this year, several years from now the company could be under existential threat.

And again, it can be acceptable to take this sort of risk if the technology is one you might at some point not be able to serve customers and business partners without. But LLMs and genAI are not that sort of technology. Maybe business partners will hate you if you don’t go along with the buzzword mania, but then you should fake it and allow it to cause as little damage as it can.

It is all part of the enshittification of the company

A company that adopts LLMs is not enshittifying, it is setting itself up to be a victim of LLM enshittification.

and for the enrichment of the shareholders.

Shareholders would be richer in the short term if they didn’t waste money investing in LLM adoption, and much richer in the long term if they were one of the few companies that doesn’t go bankrupt when the LLM bubble pops.

The purpose of LLM adoption is to weaken the social-political position of workers, to create an extra rival to break their collective bargaining power even if it costs capital unfathomable amounts of money. Like when capitalists oppose universal basic income despite it massively increasing their profit margins if it were adopted because workers wouldn’t get sick as often, capitalists are fully capable of acting in solidarity with each other for purposes of class warfare, even if it comes at a personal loss.

Crises don’t pass, they are either resolved or they get worse. Your passivity is not a measure of the labor of those who have resolved previous crises. You are free to stick your head back in the sand, but do not blame us when we can no longer protect you.

It’s a natural pendulum moment. We are flooded with anticommunist propaganda, so when you start lifting up the curtain and seeing more and more of the lies, you can start wondering what else was a lie.

That’s the moment all sorts of ideologies jump out of the woodwork to recruit you, and given most of your education was a subjugating lie you probably don’t have the tools to distinguish them that well.

And that’s how you end up with people denying the holocaust or thinking covid is fake or saying Stalin wasn’t so bad actually.

So as we’re dismantling capitalism we’re going to have to constantly help people find their footing in reality, including helping them reaffirm the parts of capitalist propaganda that were true enough.

I switched to Linux because I hate Windows. I also dislike Microsoft, but I would have tolerated them like I tolerate my health insurance company if they didn’t make the UX increasingly terrible.

I could have installed iOS but Linux is more reliable for gaming afaik, and iOS may start enshittifying at any moment.

Removed by mod

I seem to recall the fascists losing in Germany.

This sort of sabotage is for resisting a tyrannical government where resisting more openly means death. Its goal is to hasten a tyranny’s collapse, not prevent its formation.

If you want to prevent a tyranny from consolidating its power, what you’re looking for is revolution. Use your freedom of movement to organize into local militias/guerillas and make plans to take or destroy nearby key infrastructure. Optionally make contact with other cells to track their progress and coordinate. Then at either some broadly communicated time or at a watershed moment, execute your plans. If you succeed at your objectives, help ones that failed.

It’s just correct, isn’t it? I don’t see how it could be interpreted as incorrect, unless you’re one of those weirdos who likes eating cow meat but can’t stand the idea of eating dog meat.

Revolutions typically only involve a small part of the population. January 6th only involved a couple thousand people and the fact they didn’t massacre congress and have a successful coup as a fait accompli was more down to the lack of dedication of the coup attempt than to the successful defensive efforts of the US government.

In a more hard-fought revolution, the people that take to the front lines are typically the ones who feel physically and strategically capable of doing so. Other people can handle the logistics, planning, and propaganda.

What tactics the rebels would use is kind of unanswerable because there isn’t a revolution happening tomorrow. The tactic current rebels use is to hide, train, recruit quietly, and propagandize. They choose this tactic because they know they aren’t in a position to win a revolution that starts tomorrow. If we imagine a world where a revolution would happen tomorrow, we have to imagine the world being different from ours in certain ways that cause the rebels to adopt different tactics that constitute “starting a revolution”.

Depending on the specific ways we imagine the world to be different, the rebels would adapt different tactics. The US military could stage a coup and arrest Trump as quickly as they kidnapped Maduro, then install an interim government to organize fair elections. There could be a surge of popular outrage resulting in swarm tactics that overwhelm key government buildings before adequate defense is raised. There could be a protracted civil war as rebels destroy military-industrial infrastructure while accepting aid from the US’ many enemies, with rebels having trained in secret militias and learning more on the go.

I don’t think it’s ludicrous on the face of it. That’s basically what happens when an uninsured person dies from something that would have taken $10k to fix and an insured person gets their organs.

Doctors only get in trouble for letting someone die when that person has a medical right to the care that would have saved them. Even then there is leeway because whether someone has a medical right to that care is often something that depends on a doctor’s estimation of the situation, which means other doctors would have to testify against them for them to get in trouble. Which of course they’ll only do if they are sympathetic to the victim or unsympathetic towards the doctor and they know it won’t affect their career prospects too poorly.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if in Austria, ethnically MENA organ donors tended to die more often than ethnically MENA non-organ donors and this gap would be bigger than with ethnically European donors/non-donors (if that gap exists). Not even as some kind of conspiracy or malice aforethought, but as just a little bit of laziness here and there. Hell, not even laziness, just setting your boundaries for once and going home after only 2 hours of overtime instead of 2 hours and 15 minutes while ordering an extra test for that one patient who probably doesn’t even need it.

There is still the question whether you want to deprive someone of your organs for that small statistical increase in risk, if you’re even the sort of demographic that risks being dehumanized. And if you’re worried about malpractice, it’s much better to buddy up with a friend and agree to supervise the doctors and nurses whenever either of you is in the hospital. Most malpractice and medical mistakes are the sort of thing a lay person can catch with some attentiveness and internet searches.

I think that’s called a cargo cult. Just because something is a tech gadget doesn’t mean it’s going to change the world.

Basically, the question is this: If you were to adopt it late and it became a hit, could you emulate the technology with what you have in the brief window between when your business partners and customers start expecting it and when you have adapted your workflow to include it?

For computers, the answer was no. You had to get ahead of it so companies with computers could communicate with your computer faster than with any comptetitors.

But e-mail is just a cheaper fax machine. And for office work, mobile phones are just digital secretaries+desk phones. Mobile phones were critical on the move, though.

Even if LLMs were profitable, it’s not going to be better at talking to LLMs than humans are. Put two LLMs together and they tend to enter hallucinatory death spirals, lose their sense of identity, and other failure modes. Computers could rely on a communicable standards, but LLMs fundamentally don’t have standards. There is no API, no consistent internal data structure.

If you put in the labor to make a LLM play nice with another LLM, you just end up with a standard API. And yes, it’s possible that this ends up being cheaper than humans, but it does mean you lose out on nothing by adapting late when all the kinks have been worked out and protocols have been established. Just hire some LLM experts to do the transfer right the first time.

Peer pressure is the sensation of psychological pressure when deviating from peers. It doesn’t have to be caused intentionally or through active action, and it’s a basic fact of life that at least 95% of humanity experiences. (I can’t speak for all forms of neurodiversity).

There’s no such thing as bad publicity. “Naming and shaming” leads to brand recognition leads to availability heuristic leads to more profits for the company being shamed. Many ads are intentionally grating to bait people into complaining about them.

If you think the wasn’t wrong you support terrorism

Yes. That is what we’ve been talking about. Terrorism was right when the suffragettes did it, it was right when John Brown did it, it was right when the French Resistance did it, and it’s right when Hamas does it. Terrorism has a long history of being on the right side of history and of occasionally being the reason for history progressing in the right direction.

and aren’t any better than the terrorists themselves

So terrorism is at most as bad as a random keyboard warrior with bad opinions?

or the Israeli government.

So orchestrating genocide is at most as bad as a random keyboard warrior with bad opinions?

I wonder if kids in the concentration camp could hear the festival outside the prison they were born into. I wonder how many could hear or see life outside their prison as their family died from starvation, bombings, or other crimes against humanity. Of course most of them are dead now.

It isn’t wrong when someone plays a wrong note when learning how to play the piano. It isn’t wrong when a bullied kid punches back. It wasn’t wrong when a Jew beat a former camp guard to death when walking out of a liberated Nazi concentration camp. It wasn’t wrong when Hamas killed children in the attack on the festival when resisting genocide.

It’s a bad thing that the children at that festival died. In a better world Hamas wouldn’t have killed them when doing the attack, and in a better world still Hamas wouldn’t have cause for the attack. But Hamas was right for trying to resist genocide even when their judgment was poor enough that they killed kids when doing so.

Mullvad is good, but it’s not enough to make piracy safe.

An adblocker like ublock is essential, not just for blocking ads but for blocking malware.

Streaming piracy is about as safe as sketchy websites always are, which is pretty okay these days.

If you download anything, check the file type before opening and whether the type is safe. For example, .exe is extremely unsafe, .pdf is somewhat unsafe, and .mp3 is safe. Generally audio and video file formats are pretty safe because they’re very locked down in what they can do, while interactive formats are dangerous. Someone might call audio by a misleading name to troll, but it shouldn’t put your device at risk.

If you download .exe s, do not run them unless you are very confident the source is trustworthy. This means a trusted account posting on a trusted website claiming that a trusted person made the exe. I haven’t caught this guide in a lie yet, but when it comes to exes double- and triple-check everything.

The more tech savvy solution would be to run .exes (or all pirated files if you’re being paranoid) in a virtual machine so even if the virtual machine is pwned the rest of your computer wouldn’t be.

You are providing them with free advertisment. If you dislike them, maybe it would be an idea to excise the company name from the story.