"In very small ways" haha good lord. Guys I have millions of conservative followers, but in very small, almost imperceptible ways, I may have helped get this fascist regime into power. It was purely financial, I assure you.
Promotional graphic for an In These Times article titled “Fortress Yellowstone” by Joseph Bullington. The background shows a rustic ranch gate at sunrise with a large cattle skull mounted on a wooden fence post, rolling hills and mountains in the distance, and golden light across a dirt road. Over the image, bold black text on white blocks reads: “Fortress Yellowstone.” Smaller text below reads: “The ultra-rich are fortifying themselves inside one of America’s last intact ecosystems—with money plundered from ecological sacrifice zones around the world.” The In These Times logo appears at the bottom.
Even as they profess to be conservationists, Joseph Bullington found that most of the billionaire landowners in the Yellowstone ecosystem accumulated their wealth through industries that help drive the destruction of nature elsewhere.
inthesetimes.com/article/yell...
Can the follow up to this be about how we should move on from Epstein?
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That's what I said!
As if the community college system wasn't strained enough by privatization efforts, tech bros have recently swooped in and are seeking to cause further disruption.
A sketchy Silicon Valley-funded online school portends a bleak future for a critical sector of our education system. trib.al/8dN3Qgn
When I discovered that tech fascists like Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, and Sam Altman provided VC funding for an online "community college," I had to find out why. Thanks @newrepublic.com for publishing this.
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A lot of this has already been reported by @karenhao.bsky.social in her awesome book. Some additional memos and such, but the heft of Altman as a double dealer/sociopath is already in Empire of AI. That said, this piece has great insight into Altman's deeply concerning international politicking.
Day 1055: We grow weary awaiting your return. Your vacant expression taunts us. Your unbroken gaze pierces us. Where are you now? Do you ever think about us--about what you left behind?
Every day you get further away, carried into the past. A yawning chasm of time between us. Why can't you jump it?
"...even a single interaction with sycophantic AI reduced participants’ willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, while increasing their own conviction that they were right."
NEW: Thomson Reuters, the media company which is also a data broker, has long provided personal data for ICE tools, according to documents obtained by 404 Media and sources. There are also indications its data is now part of the Palantir system ICE uses to find which neighborhoods to target.
"Chronically bubonic" is a phrase I would use if I wrote a rap about the bubonic plague and/or marijuana.
I'm just glad there are no other tools exactly like it out there
In late December, we were all witness to just how abusive and hostile the platform has become to its users. At Musk’s instruction, the team behind Grok rolled back the guardrails so users could prompt it to make scantily clad and nude images of whoever they wanted. Women ended up being the main victims of Musk’s followers, but the pedophiles who use his platform quickly found they could use it to make explicit images of children too. xAI is now being sued over over allowing images to be generated of minors, not to mention the investigations that remain ongoing in countries around the world. I’ve previously argued the scandal should have been grounds to ban the platform. Over 3 million images were generated in just eleven days, affecting a enormous number of people — especially women — the world over. But if governments aren’t acting fast enough, that doesn’t mean individuals have no agency.
The Grok deepfake scandal is really the culmination of all that. Musk wanted to see more engagement, so he pulled back the guardrails and set his incel fans wild to victimize as many people as they could — the consequences be damned.
disconnect.blog/its-time-to-...
Awesome reporting from @brandonrichardson.bsky.social. Also worth noting is that Anduril founders Trae Stephens and Palmer Luckey are both Peter Thiel acolytes. Thanks mayor Rex for welcoming these technofascists into our city.
Main thing is AGI is going to fix all of this, so really it's not so bad if you think about it. Just waiting for the magic answer to pop out and then we'll circle up and get everyone on board.
These freaks are very clearly and deliberately choosing slop factories over humans.
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Less than a decade ago, Google employees scuttled any military use of its AI. Now Anthropic is fighting Trump officials not over if, but how
Trying to rebrand myself as a thinking man's idiot
Establishment Dems would rather twist themselves into knots and come up with convoluted policies than to simply fight for universal provision of public goods for all.
Fuck
Check out this essay I wrote a couple few years ago about working a job where we tried to harvest rubber waste from old astroturf @publishedbyjake.bsky.social
jakethemag.com/my-summer-of...
There's no such thing as "AI writing." It's slop output from a chatbot. Just cold numbers with a spit shine. We gotta weed out the anthropomorphic language at every level. This has been a public service announcement from a rando
"This isn't a border checkpoint. This is your neighborhood. ICE is now running facial recognition on phones — stopping people on the street, scanning faces in real time. What happens when the algorithm is wrong?"
Reuters Exclusive
"U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school."
"The strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the Middle East."
