Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Trump is doing to the US what every abusive spouse does to their partner, isolate them entirely so they have no friends, no recourse.

Soon Trump and his billionaire cronies will have plundered the US treasury, its credit and will leave it a wasteland in shambles with not a soul outside willing to help us.

And then those same plutocrats will do the same thing to the rest of the developed world.

The ideology that offers easy (poor) answers to complex problems?

The ideology that tells them they’re the good guys by fiat so long is they obey the leaders that tell them they’re special?

I suppose AI content is human made the way cloth from a power loom is human made.

The problem is still that we are in the hyperscale era, which is driving a lot of social problems, especially here in the States, and is causing a lot of harm.

The current buildout is also being driven by the interests of the owners and regime for nefarious purposes.

So long as data centers are encroaching on neighborhoods, polluting them and seizing needed resources, so long as AI is being used to process mass surveillance, I’m going to see a need to limit its use.

When it comes to this matter, we may just be adversarial.

I anticipate for now AI contributions will be from hyperscale compute, rather than from private systems. There is a build cost of home-brew AI engines that is prohibitive for the most of us.

And that doesn’t change that AI content will saturate the community and push out human-made content.

I think there are multiple reasons to ban AI slop. One is that it can push out and dilute human-made content.

Another is that AI use is very resource intensive in an age that we’re facing an accelerating climate crisis. Speaking of which, we’re expecting a pretty extreme El Niño season this year.

Another is that AI companies are lobbying the US federal government in bad faith (up to and including the current discussions of slowdown), and really don’t deserve any support or patronage.

I expect more efficient LLMs to come out of China, who has turned to the AI-as-software model (contrast the AI-as-service model in the US).

I’ve never had a Facebook account, and decided never to have one after FarmVille and the rest of the social networking game trend made Zynga and a handful of other companies very very rich at by making people very addicted.

Zuckerberg is a merciless evil bastard even as billionaires go.

This is entirely about blocking political speech. Child safety is an excuse, and a poor one.

Wait, this sounds so familiar…

Around the time a 14-year-old Arab kid brought a clock to class and was arrested as a suspected terrorist, I wrote about this. At the time muckrakers were being called FOIA terrorists for daring to engage in public oversight of the government. Things were already getting pretty fashy, just in time for Trump to take his escalator ride.

At the time I observed that terrorist had turned into a generic derisive, the way gay was used in the early aughts or communist during the McCarthy red scare… which Trump and the Republican party seem to be trying to resurrect.

So yeah, it really doesn’t surprise me that the State Department is defining Antifa as a terrorist group and an enemy of the state. In this context, Antifa and terrorist don’t actually relate to their original meanings, but serve as a catch all to lend legitimacy when the regime wants to persecute its political enemies.

Much the way that anyone who opposed McCarthy could be investigated and tried as a communist, anyone who opposes Trump or MAGA or ICE can be investigated and tried as Antifa.

Some of that nonsense should get halted at the courts – ICE and the DoJ have already lost the presumption of regularity – but we’ve seen already protestors get disproportionately long sentences for alleged and minor crimes based on alleged association to terror groups. And Trump is still getting awful people confirmed to federal benches.

For most Americans, it would take a lawyer present just to know what is safe to do while under arrest.

The problem is, SCOTUS has already ruled on this in 1985, via the good faith exception. If a police officer mistakenly violates your fourth-amendment rights, but did so in good faith, then evidence of any crime found is inadmissible. It’s very difficult to prove bad faith, and officers have learned to lie to cover up, say, that they knew they were crossing a line, or were motivated by corruption, bigotry or ideology to fish for evidence beyond the scope of a reasonable search.

Besides which, I wouldn’t trust an officer to turn off data before combing though my phone, and the difference between what is on the phone and what is cloud data is transparent. They would absolutely have access to my entire email history of decades, and law enforcement has intrinsic personal cause to fish for criminal activity.

For one thing, collars is how police officers get accolades and promotions. And for another, there’s the matter of asset forfeiture. Police routinely will declare any open cash or valuable property as criminal in order to confiscate it. And it’s very difficult to get it back. In the 2010s some precincts already had the capability to empty pre-loaded credit cards, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they could do something similar with mobile payment services.

In the US since the aughts, law enforcement departments have regarded the public as enemy, and this shows up countless times in uncovered intra-department memorandums. It also shows up in precinct suspicious activity guidelines that are contradictory and include all possible forms of behavior (including inaction). It also shows up in police tools like poorly-trained detection dogs who signal at a 90%+ false positive rate, or the two-dollar roadside drug test that false positives on dozens of inert chemicals, such as donut sugar glaze.

In the twentieth century, I would hypothesize over 50% of our incarcerated are innocent, or are serving a sentence disproportionate to the alleged crime they committed. Of course we’re now in the era of random abductions and detention centers run by private prison companies.

Meanwhile, if they seized his phone and tried to unlock it without a warrant signed by a judge, that is a violation of his rights as per the fourth amendment of the Constitution of the United States. However, in the US presently, such violations are routine by law enforcement.

Some agencies insist suspects do not have access to those rights if certain conditions apply, such as being within one hundred miles of a US border (such as a coast), or being on a terror watchlist.

…Federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

Terrorism watch lists, no fly lists and government lists of cults and sects should not be legal in the US, as they violate the right to due process. Often there’s no reasonable way to challenge having your name on a list. It’s put there arbitrarily by a law enforcement officer without any oversight or process, meaning your name can be added again without restriction. And being on those lists often affects the civil rights to which you have access.

But then, the new regime is trying to strip ordinary citizens of their rights until we are all bonded serfs again.

This isn’t about justice, this is about billionaires paying enough to make an example out of him.

MEGAUpload cooperated with law enforcement when they asked. The charges were trumped up by the record labels. And it’s likely they were less afraid of the piracy and more afraid of the new free music launch featuring a bunch of migrating artists.

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Due to its mode of operation, the court considered the software to be “specifically intended for criminals”

Crime is an action a state doesn’t like, not necessarily wrong or evil, but serves interests other than the state. If the state has to authorize everything, then the state is favoring dominance over governance.

When the state has to monitor all transactions it is tyranny.