I think that is a reasonable take. It is s huge jump, in many ways, so I believe it is much more dangerous than other capitalist “innovations”.

Yeah, there has been a movement in recent decades to redefine racism, sexism, etc. As only applying to stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination by a person from a dominant group toward people from a marginalized group. To some extent I get that–that is why anyone ever started caring about racism etc.–and language evolves. If we as a society decide that is the only set of valid definitions, I’ll go with it, because I care more about the struggle for equality than about the words used in that process.

That said, my issue with this usage is that it is imprecise and bundles some extra judgments. This use of racism requires an extra assessment of the power dynamics between the groups each of the parties belongs to (and sometimes identifying that is a quagmire itself). I’d prefer keeping those judgments separate. For example, maybe responding to this racist troll by saying that some kind of racism cause and deepen harm a lot more than others, and he is ignoring that fact due to his own racism.

There are lots of things going on at once and all of them are valid. I struggle, too. My life is pretty good, from a global standard, while many, many others’ lives are much worse. Happiness is wildly unevenly distributed.

Well, I guess I was warned.

Thanks for responding. I also feel sorry for this frog, and I am happy to see others in the thread saying that when frogs are randomly born like this they seem to do OK.

Reasonable take, but the last part (“faster-growing”) is huge here. The sheer scale and multipliers on the bad things caused by AI are far beyond most (all?) previous technologies used by capitalists.

For the non-German speakers (via online translation because me neither)

The sign says “energy plants” (or crops)

The text: A schematic representation (?) of my social skills

I think it’s only 3 of the 4

I don’t think I was ever really a part of either of these trends, but my memory is that it started out as the game, then some white supremacists started to use it as their symbol. My hope is that the second association has broken down a bit for most people; I haven’t seen any pics on social media etc. of white supremacists doing this for a couple of years, so maybe the kids can have their game back.

I say this not as an insult (I promise) but as a genuine question: Were you sober when you made this comment?

I vaguely remember these specific things. I more clearly remember a bunch of stuff in this vein, at secretaries’ desks, on office walls, in guidance counselors’ offices, in feel-good TV programs that only aired on community UHF TV, etc. I found them sweet and meaningful until about age 12, and since then, yes, the urge to slap.

As a sightly drunk person I very much appreciate the people explaining the analogy.

Lived near the US-Mexico border for a while. License plates stolen twice. Apparently it’s a big thing there: slap them on a stolen car and drive into Mexico before anyone realizes.

When this was posted on twitter the first time I got more upvotes than ever before (i.e., like 20) for saying something like “But it’s a massive stadium full of car-sized treadmills with a car on each one. Each car has a 1% chance of solving a sudoku every day, so there are a few thousand constantly running, pouring exhaust into the sky.”

Or something like that.

And now AI makes it look almost quaint. Fuck.

As one billion fangirls (and some bois) have pointed out: he was more fuckable as a beast.

I heard a variant of this joke in 1999 and have repeated it to moderate mirth several times. It is a solid joke.

IDK if any of this is what it looks like, but it’s in the context of complete diplomatic incompetence for a decade. None of these people know what they are doing on the international stage. They made their careers as US mob bosses and bullies pretending to be politicians, and don’t understand anything beyond that scope. When Trump could no longer pull world leaders off balance with stupid handshake tricks, he looked like an idiot for a while. Whenever he or his lackeys encounter someone who can’t be bribed, intimidated, or extorted they sputter like Elmer Fudd because they have no other tools.

Your explanation makes sense to me (a very non-physicist), but I remember more than one journalism piece from a decade or so ago about uncharacteristically high rates of cancer in areas in Afghanistan or Iraq that were basically carpeted with US depleted-uranium bullets. Do you think that’s a fluke? Is it possible there is poor quality control in manufacturing the bullets, resulting in some stuff with shorter half-life in there? Could the cancer rates be due to the heavy-metal properties?

(Of course it’s a correlation/causation thing, so there could be other causes, too, but I’m interested in what you think of this)

This, plus if we had any kind of political will or intelligence (as a nation; meaning the USA) we’d force AI companies to pay their extenalities: treat and sanitize every drop of water they use, and build the infrastructure to bring it back to communities; pay for their electrical infrastructure in advance and pay their electricity bills to the tune of “nobody else’s bill goes up”; some kind of massive carbon capture tax for their use (this one might not be possible to actually do; it’s too much); and of course paying royalties and copyright violation fines.

As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business. let’s say they didn’t: The cost per token would be quite high, and very few people would use it.

It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.

You call it “boxing,” probably. It’s where two people get into a “ring” (which is a square) and “sock” (i.e., hit) each other a lot.