I don’t believe you could really meaningfully deter their operations through casual poor performance. I think either you’d have to directly sabotage them or you’d have to be complicit.

I do think everyone should flood their applications systems with time-wasting fake applications, but actually interviewing and getting hired is unlikely to be productive.

I want to set aside my skepticism that this philosophy can be separated from misogyny.

Even if it could, it hurts the practitioner. This is a philosophy of nihilistic abandon and self-harm. If someone has adopted a radical belief in their own hopelessness and worthlessness, and the associated beliefs that life for them can hold nothing but suffering, that person is in crisis and needs help. There isn’t a healthy version of that, and we should consider those people at great risk and in need of assistance.

It does hurt someone. It hurts the person who is adopting these views.

Also, not only do they rely on “just vision”, crucially they rely on real-time processing without any memory or persistent mapping.

This, more than anything else is what bewilders me most.

They could map an area, and when observing a construction hazard save that data and share it with other vehicles so they know when route setting or anticipate the object. Not they don’t. If it drives past a hazard and goes around the block it has to figure out how to navigate the hazard again with no familiarity. That’s so foolish.

This is a genuine concern that we should recognize.

I’m about 99% confident it isn’t, but considering it is the kind of caution we should all be exercising these days.

I love LA.

Respectfully, this title gets under my skin.

Why so doomer? He might veto it. It wouldn’t be surprising. But why are you declaring a loss prematurely?

Don’t hope for things there’s no chance of. Fight to change the chances of things, and if you fail try and fight again and again until you win.

This headline reads like 2025 news Mad-Libs:

“[Proper noun] is using [Latest fad] to [Verb] [Ideological alignment adjective] [Conceptual noun]”

Try it:

“OpenAI is using Hydroflasks to destroy Catholic exceptionalism”

“Mark Cuban is using cryptocurrency to monetize white supremacist hope”

Good times./s

Yeah, anyone looking for more info should check out Luckey’s blog:

https://palmerluckey.com/if-you-die-in-the-game-you-die-in-real-life/

The guy is a little nuts. This military tech bullshit is no surprise.

Thanks, I think so too.

I’m trying to expand on it a bit, because I think what’s still missing is a sense of stakes and grandeur.

What if the backdrop is that Croft (or similar protagonist) is working with a team that is uncovering new and valuable discoveries that reveal the art and culture of ancient people that were largely absent from history. It’s showing that some earlier group had settled an ancient valley prior to the arrival of a group that is culturally significant to a current regime. And as they’re making these discoveries, it’s becoming increasingly contentious politically among some faschy nationalist government (a la Orban, Erdogan, etc.)

Over time, they begin to face mounting pressure to secure the sites quickly before a rival team is sent in specifically with the goal of damaging them and stealing artifacts so that these finds aren’t able to be studied. And the protagonist, as the first person who the team relies on to safely document and preserve the site, is soon persued by a goon squad, allowing us some urban platforming levels as you work towards a final confrontation.

I wonder what it would look like to try and resolve some of these problems in a way that still provides a satisfying platformer experience.

Like, what if instead of these ruins being a bunch of traps with some key magical artifact that she heavily disturbs while passing through, what if the game was a platformer where you had to essentially erect scaffolding and lay down tarps in advance of a larger team? And the goal is to basically use climbing and athleticism to navigate the environment without disturbing an incredibly fragile environment?

Can you demonstrate how you would have composed the question?

I think people overthink spending money on things they don’t support. I think stealing it is justified, but If you’re doing academic studies or learning how to deprogram people, go ahead and buy a Nazi’s book if you have to.

That said, if you’re looking to argue with Holocaust deniers, trying to defeat them by studying their arguments is a classic blunder.

Conspiratorial thinking is rooted in social maladies, and attachment to a theory is a downstream effect. You can no more talk a Holocaust denier out of their belief with evidence than you can fix a broken water main by sand-bagging the street. If you’re trying to deprogram someone, you’ve got to learn how to get them to open up about the background experiences that led them to look for these answers and then usually find ways to help them find alternate communities that obviate their need for the conspiracy in a way that at least feels self-directed.

It’s a much slower process, but if that’s what you want to do, read up on that and don’t bother wasting money on Irving’s book.

I want to second this, and go further with a hot take: I liked Graber’s answers a lot.

I think skepticism of her and the entire artifice of VC and big tech is totally warranted. But a lot of people in this section seem to basically say, ‘no matter what she says I don’t trust her and I’m certain that BlueSky will be another bad actor.’ And I think that’s an overly simplistic take.

It’s true that there are no trustworthy CEOs. You shouldn’t trust Graber. It will always be a mistake to pin hopes of good management of a platform on the magnanimity of any business leader. However if we want to see a new era of decentralization but are honest about the fact that most users are more likely to join big, corporate-styled platforms (in the short term, at least) then the ideal platform is one that attempts to build their business model around portability.

It’s totally true that BlueSky isn’t there yet. But they’re basically building a set of escape hatches for users. Cory Doctorow talks a lot about how restricting users from leaving a platform is a key requirement to enshitify. So if BlueSky uses a protocol that at least has the potential for this, they’re creating an incentive structure that really does serve a purpose. They may later on try to reverse course. But at least for now, they’re doing the thing that gives users and the third party developers the best chance of escape if things go bad. And that is exactly what I want to see from a big tech platform.

I thought it was built on activity pub.

I’m gonna go over to my Mastodon account and try to reply to you. One sec.

Overall, I like the options today a lot better than what we had 10 or even 5 years ago.

I am glad that both Mastodon and Blue Sky exist. I would like both to be successful.

Oy. I really don’t want to see what happens when we’re faced with an actual challenge. This is… yikes.

Yeah, seems like a pretty big oversight for the author… [Checks byline]… no author credited.

Great. Very real. Much news.

Yeah, I came to say this same thing.

Also: this article omits serious context about what the IDF does with the information Microsoft is describing!

Over a year ago, 972 wrote an explosive expose on IDF ai targeting. It’s all pretty blunt. A general name Yossi Sariel wrote a book describing how AI could automate industrialized killing, and these plans were put into practice to deliberately target civilian infrastructure when entire families were sitting down to meals. The tools included Lavender, which composed target lists that pretty much included any male over 14 and Daddy’s Home, which tracked targets generated by Lavender and generated strike plans when it determined that the target was at their home.

There’s no good reason why the Independent left this out. A general literally wrote a book about this, and it’s been a year since this information came out.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Agreed. It’s so wildly incongruent with who he is. All bark, no bite.

Also: wishing violence against Trump is to me the greatest evidence of hopeless neoliberal confusion.

Don’t like him? Offer an alternative. I don’t want Trump dead, I want Medicare for all, a child tax credit, and a 30 hour work week. That’s what gets rid of fascism: a new democratic social contract. Folks who focus on Trump have lost the plot.