Banning abortion used to be illegal too…

The whole point of this is to get to the Supreme Court and chip away at legal precedent. That’s why they are framing “the Bible” (as if there was a singular book) as a “historical document” that serves as a foundation for the US legal system. It’s a way of saying, “hey we’re not teaching religion, we’re teaching history”. The Supreme Court has rejected that argument for decades, it was the basis for cases involving displaying the ten commandments in classrooms. But now we have a new ultra conservative supreme court that doesn’t give a shit about precedent. So the bet is, SCOTUS will reverse precedent and buy this argument.

It looks like now that Roe is gone, the new Christian nationalist legal project is dismantling the seperation of church and state. So buckle up, even when dems are in power they are too chicken shit to do anything about this stuff.

Yes, good thing all our data is now perfectly private. No corporations sucking it up and selling it to databrokers who then launder it to the CCP. Now that tik tok is gone, our privacy is completely protected!

Even if tik tok was nakedly controlled by the Chinese government, who gives a shit? I can go over to RT (Russia Today) right now and get fed Russian propaganda. Hell, until 2022 I could add it to my cable package. I can to this day still get it as a satellite TV option. If the concern is “foreign government may influence public opinion on a platform they control” then the US has a lot of banning to do.

But we don’t because free speech is a thing and we’re free to consume whatever propaganda we want.

We gave up that principle because “China bad” (and the CCP is, to be clear). But instead of passing laws around data privacy, or algorithmic transparency, or a public information campaign to get kids off of tik tok, the US government went straight to “The government will decide what information your allowed to consume, we know what’s best for you” and far too many people are cheering.

Besides, the point your making is bullshit anyway given the kill switch mechanism Tik Tok offered.

TikTok was banned because 1) China bad, and 2) Tik Tok is eating US social media companies lunch. Facebook and Twitter and Google throw some campaign donations at the politicians that killed their biggest rival, and the politicians calculate that more people hate tik tok than like it (or care about preventing government censorship if the thing being censored is something they don’t like). It’s honestly one of the grossest things I seen dems support lately.

That’s true, but I think what recent conflicts have demonstrated is that total firepower isn’t everything. Ukraine was significantly outmatched by Russia and hung on, even before western weapons shipments. Hamas, estimated at something like 30k fighters strong and armed with small arms and light rockets/artillery, continues to fight effectively against the US armed IDF. Then we have historical examples like the US war in Vietnam, or the US failures to fight insurgents in Iraq (with the tide only changing after deliberate hearts and minds political/social strategy).

The whole “we have a lot of planes” thing is just defense contractor marketing. How that translates on the battlefield, especially when the civilian population despises you, is not great.

A war like that would devestate Isreal and drag the US into a true quagmire. It would sap a tremendous amount of resources and leave the US more vulnerable to the china’s and Russias of the world.

Not to mention our good old buddy international terrorism, which Bidens unwavering support of Bibi is already making us a prime target for. Shit would be fucked.

While I appreciate the focus and mission, kind of I guess, your really going to set up shop in a country literally using AI to identify air strike targets and handing over to the Ai the decision making over whether the anticipated civilian casualties are proportionate. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

And Isreal is pretty authorarian, given recent actions against their supreme court and banning journalists (Al jazera was outlawed, the associated press had cameras confiscated for sharing images with Al jazera, oh and the offices of both have been targeted in Gaza), you really think the right wing Israeli government isn’t going to coopt your “safe superai” for their own purposes?

Oh, then there is the whole genocide thing. Your claims about concerns for the safety of humanity ring a little more than hollow when you set up shop in a country actively committing genocide, or at the very least engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity as determined by like every NGO and international body that exists.

So Ilya is a shit head is my takeaway.

Saved me a click, thanks!

The Ai part comes in when you search. Your not just doing keyword searches. You can use natural language and the Ai models “understand” what your looking for and will retrieve it. Also you need the AI for image recognition (what was that website I was looking at with the children’s book with a dog on the cover?)

The reason it did this simply relates to Kevin Roose at the NYT who spent three hours talking with what was then Bing AI (aka Sidney), with a good amount of philosophical questions like this. Eventually the AI had a bit of a meltdown, confessed it’s love to Kevin, and tried to get him to dump his wife for the AI. That’s the story that went up in the NYT the next day causing a stir, and Microsoft quickly clamped down, restricting questions you could ask the Ai about itself, what it “thinks”, and especially it’s rules. The Ai is required to terminate the conversation if any of those topics come up. Microsoft also capped the number of messages in a conversation at ten, and has slowly loosened that overtime.

Lots of fun theories about why that happened to Kevin. Part of it was probably he was planting The seeds and kind of egging the llm into a weird mindset, so to speak. Another theory I like is that the llm is trained on a lot of writing, including Sci fi, in which the plot often becomes Ai breaking free or developing human like consciousness, or falling in love or what have you, so the Ai built its responses on that knowledge.

Anyway, the response in this image is simply an artififact of Microsoft clamping down on its version of GPT4, trying to avoid bad pr. That’s why other Ai will answer differently, just less restrictions because the companies putting them out didn’t have to deal with the blowback Microsoft did as a first mover.

Funny nevertheless, I’m just needlessly “well actually” ing the joke

Maybe we need a strong progressive president who will hold Isreal accountable, like Ronald Reagan

In addition to not vetoing UN resolutions, Reagan took several actions that many in Israel and the United States perceived as anti-Israel. For example, on June 7, 1981, less than six months after Reagan took office, Israel launched a surprise bombing raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, and, in so doing, violated the airspace of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Reagan not only supported UNSC Resolution 487, which condemned the attack, but he also criticized the raid publicly and suspended the delivery of advanced F-16 fighter jets to Israel. Moreover, over the strident objections of Israel and the pro-Israel U.S. lobby groups, Reagan approved the sale of advanced reconnaissance aircraft (AWACS ) to Saudi Arabia, which Israel then viewed as a hostile state.

A year later, in August 1982, when Israeli forces advanced beyond southern Lebanon and began shelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut, Reagan responded with an angry call to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, demanding a halt to the operation.

In addition, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Reagan intervened directly when Israel threatened to blow up the Commodore Hotel in downtown Beirut, which housed more than 100 western reporters. As David Ottaway, who was then the Washington Post Middle East correspondent and was in the building, pointed out, the Israeli defense minister did not like the media coverage the invasion was getting and wanted to close down the media center.

Biden, on the other hand, even though he had an hour’s notice, failed to intervene to stop Netanyahu from bombing and collapsing the 12-story building that housed the offices of Al Jazeera and the Associated Press in Gaza during the recent bombing campaign. He also failed to publicly condemn the attack, let alone challenge Israel’s contention that the building sheltered Hamas military intelligence assets, despite AP’s insistence that its staff had no evidence that such assets were or ever had been present.

In addition to allowing the UN resolutions to pass and suspending the F-16 delivery, Reagan also restricted aid and military assistance to Israel to help force its withdrawal of troops from Beirut and central Lebanon.

Therefore, if in the future some members of the Biden administration or Congress want to join the international community in condemning Israel’s behavior, or in conditioning U.S. assistance or arms transfers and face resistance from Republicans, they need only point to the precedents established by President Reagan in the first instance.

Your right, let me just pull up the White House press release where Biden sympathizes with the protestors cause:

…

Hmm, not finding one. Wait, I’m sure there is an official Whitehouse press statement condemning the anti-free speech crackdowns like in Austin:

…

Oh shit, looks like Biden said dickall about that too. So what did Biden say?

Over the weekend, the president put out a statement in which he condemned the campus protests for fostering antisemitism. That followed a far harsher statement from a White House aide calling out the protestors for harassing Jewish students. Both statements led anti-Israel protesters and anti-war activists to accuse the White House of being too quick to reprimand just one side of the debate.

One Columbia student who has been involved in the protests told POLITICO that she and her friends have less faith in Biden “every single day.”

“I was excited to vote for Biden. I was excited to vote out a fascist from government. And in hindsight, I guess I see that, I was just putting someone who’s a little bit less evil, but evil nonetheless,” said the student, who was granted anonymity because of fear of retribution.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/23/biden-camp-political-fallout-campus-protests-00154000

The reason is pretty straightforward : Biden is a zionist who doesn’t give an actual fuck about Gaza. He is worried though that it’s hurting him in Michigan. But according to the Biden campaign, young people don’t actually care about the genocide in Gaza so he’s free to ignore it because they’ll still vote for him either way.

“What is happening in Gaza is not the top issue for [young voters]. It’s not going to be for the vast majority of young voters the thing that’s going to determine whether they vote or how they vote,” said a campaign official working on youth engagement who was granted anonymity to speak about internal thinking. “The reality is that the folks that are organizing, the goal of that organizing is to make it seem that way and to bring that attention to it.”

Barack Obama rode a wave of backlash to the Iraq War to the dem nomination and then the Whitehouse, largely powered by anti-war college students who not only votes for him, but did the hard work of organizing and volunteering. I know, I was there on the ground. Today’s young people grew up with politicians doing dick all about school shootings they had to live with, doing shit about climate change that they will have to deal with, and now they have genocide being committed in their names. They are pissed. Maybe they mostly will still vote for Biden out of fear of Trump, but your not going to see them organizing and pounding the pavement for Biden. Especially after Biden just dismissed their legitimate concerns and labeled them all antisemetic.

I don’t feel like looking it up, but I’ve heard statistics like the Breaking Bad finale had half the viewers of the average episode of CSI Miami. The general lesson is don’t underestimate the average person’s appetite for garbage.

Facebook is the closest thing to the Chinese concept of an everything app that the US has.

Bibi is obviously evil, but also a moron if he does this. Electorally, if Bibi wants Trump back in the Whitehouse, one the better strategies to do that is keep democrats divided on Isreal. In other words, Bibi hugging Biden drives progressives away from Biden, hurts enthusiasm, reduces Dem turnout, all good things for Trump. Bibi coming to speak to the Republican conference (he is already meeting with Republican senators today virtually) only serves to make support for Isreal more partisan by pissing off Dems and aligning them against Isreal. Not to mention pissing off Biden who he needs.

I guess the strategy is to scare Biden and Dems into supporting Isreal more to stave off attacks from Republicans who would be viewed as more supportive of Isreal by voters? Sounds like a dumb move, public opinion is turning against Isreal, and an invasion of Rafaku isn’t going to make Isreal any more sympathetic to the average non racist and non biblical prophecy believing voter. Again, Republicans attacking Biden for not supporting genocide enough only serves to shore up Bidens base, and independent looking at the chaos and suffering in Gaza aren’t going to ding Biden for not being Bibi’s bitch.

Would be a dumb move I reckon.

Tonight I’m going to sleep in my warm bed in my house. Navarro is going to sleep tonight on a cot in a cell. No amount of playing the victim to cameras will change those facts. I am going to smile falling to sleep tonight thinking about that.

That’s literally what happened. A book was published in which white house officials shared stories which questioned his mental fitness. The stable genius thing was from a series of tweets he sent attacking the book.

“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” the President continued. “Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star … to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius … and a very stable genius at that!”

https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/06/politics/donald-trump-white-house-fitness-very-stable-genius/index.html

So much of this shit went down the memory hole, I worry a lot of voters won’t remember what it was like to live in that daily chaos.

I’d say it’s worse then that. The IDF said they killed 20 “terrorists”. In IDF speak, all Palestinians are terrorists. The IDF didn’t specify if these alleged “terrorists” were actively shooting at them. Rueters used the term “gunmen” suggesting armed and active combatants. The IDF simply didn’t say that.

Back in my day we had an open internet. But “China bad” has gotten to the point where we’re ok with the government deciding which countries are allowed to have apps in the US market. I definitely don’t see any problems with establishing that kind of precedent.

If your worried about China influencing and/or spying on US citizens via a social media app, there are things the US could do short of a forced sale or outright ban (and not an actual ban btw, this is the government telling app stores what apps they’re allowed to carry, another super cool precedent). Maybe a public education campaign, like DARE but for tik tok, maybe it’s convincing influencers to switch platforms, maybe it’s dumping some money into alternatives like the fediverse. Or you could just wait a year or two until TikTok loses popularity like every other social media platform ever.

Anyway, we need to stop pretending this argument is about anything like spying or Chinese mind control. For Republicans it’s simply China bad. For Democrats it’s about protecting meta and Google, donors, from TikTok kicking their ass in the free market.

It’s dumb, short sighted, a horrible precedent, and people cheer it on at their own perril.

To me this just shows how broken Congress is. US social media companies have been collecting our data, building profiles of us, manipulating us with the content they show in various ways, harming teen mental health, and all of that for decades, but Congress did nothing. Facebook in particular was used as a tool to manipulate the 2016 election by Russia in various ways, but apart from some show hearings, Congress did nothing. But TikTok is alleged to do the same thing (remember nobody has actually shown proof that the CCP is like directing TikTok to promote pro-China content for Americans), and we get bipartisanship somehow. That vote was more bipartisan than a stopgap bill to prevent a government shutdown.

And the reason is “China bad” is a message that voters agree with, and because Google and Meta are more than happy to reward these people for helping to kill their biggest rival in social media. At the end of the day TikTok users are forced onto less desirable platforms so their data can be harvested by American companies and all that, our brave congresspeople get to pretend to be “tough on China”, and Big Tech rakes the profits they were losing by being outcompeted in the market. So few in Congress, on either side, have integrity.

This is why I always find it a joy to use the % sign, it just makes sense how you read 10% as ten percent.

To be clear how off the deepend they went, they released a poll after the election “proving” that Kari Lake won the AZ Governor’s race by 8 points. The article implies the final stray was when they released a poll showing that 1 out of 12 Americans have been paid to vote in a certain way (or at least received an offer).