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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Quantum computing. It might be a real thing but it’ll go through a grift phase first.

    Another one will be environmental carbon capture, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This one would be easier to fake but might not get traction for longer since the ideological superstructure in our society is already built up so that it is hard for a political crisis to emerge due to global climate concerns. Even though climate change is worsening, and whole cities are being destroyed by hurricanes, the debate is still pretty stabilized. However since this grift will end up being sold as a commercial solution to a political problem, the grift will probably come from a larger player like Lockheed or Boeing, which would necessitate investing in the most evil companies in existence. Still you never know, Tesla stayed afloat for years without making a working product by selling carbon credits issued by the government to other car companies, so you might be able to bootstrap this one


  • This is the wrong question in my opinion. What is being corrupted? One’s morals and ethics? The purity of the human soul? What is the nature of the corruption? Any time we start thinking about “purity” and “corruption” we are moving in dangerous ontological territory.

    What is money? Well, it is a stand in for value. Then what is value? Where does it come from? Value comes from exchanging commodities in the marketplace. These commodities are created with human labor power, in other words, value is the crystalized time+energy that it takes on average to produce commodities. New value is created when a commodity costs less to produce than it can be sold for in the market.

    In our current historical mode of production, capitalism, the labor that is used to mass produce a commodity is socialized, which means instead of a single craftsperson creating a commodity from start to finish, the production process is broken down and simplified so that it takes many workers to mass produce commodities, each worker specializing in their part of the production process, with the assistance of machines to speed up or simplify this process in order to be more productive.

    In contrast, even though the production process has been socialized for the first time in human history, which was in it’s time a progressive if cruel human advancement, the fruits of that production are privatized meaning that goods become the private property of the legal “owner” of the productive apparatus, who can sell those commodities to market for more than they paid to produce them, producing profit from the perspective of the capitalist, or surplus value from the perspective of the workers.

    This creates distinct classes which is where we will interrogate the effect of money on the human spirit. There are the owners of capital, who have commodities to sell at the market and workers who have little or nothing to sell but their labor to the capitalist in a labor market. This can be taken even further: there are large capitalists who own a great deal of capital and exploit many workers, small capitalists who own a small among of capital and exploit a few workers (or maybe they even self-exploit,) intellectual or specialized labor that is able to demand higher value in the labor market, and simple or unspecialized labor who’s labor can be easily replaced. A side effect of this creates another class: the unemployed or marginally employed reserve surplus population which can be used to threaten simple laborers with replacement hence driving down the cost of labor and increasing profits for the capitalist. The larger this reserve population, the lower wages can be made, and vice-versa.

    Every atomized member of society is then thrown into competition with each other, with a very real threat of losing their class position, with the possibility of being thrown into the reserve population unable to find meaningful work that can support themselves and their family. A large firm can be gobbled up by a larger firm, and its specialized workers eliminated due to “redundancies”. A specializrd worker can be replaced by another unspecialized worker who has the qualifications to do their job or some technological advancement transforms that role into unspecialized or less-specialized labor.

    This competitive drive forces individuals to do whatever they can to maintain or increase their class position. If company A refuses to pollute the rivers for increased profit, but company B is willing to, this makes company B more profitable, forcing company A out of business, or acquired by company B; unless the board of directors of company A (pressured by gains-seeking investors) replaces the individual demurring eco-conscious executives with people who are willing to pollute for profit; unless some outside political force steps in to regulate the entire market, creating the necessity of a governing state to manage the market and resources, lest the whole system collapse into complete anarchy. Individual workers must remain “productive” such that they continue to create profit for their capitalists or risk replacement themselves, although they can always be replaced by technological advancements or monopolizing forces as discussed above. The reserve surplus population competes for their very survival or risks starvation, homelessness and death.

    So now we have uncovered the forces that cause the “corruption” of money. There is a whole other thread we could pursue here that shows how this system abstracts things like “polluting a river” into numbers on a balance sheet, hiding these forces from anyone who might observe them, and lending a plausible deniability to anyone who would be responsible and hide the real lives of anyone who would be affected. I’ll call this process objectification, which is a huge topic unto itself.

    But in my opinion, what this system corrupts is the natural inclination for most people to cooperate with one another, and work creatively. When i recognizes that another person has subjective experience like me, I’ll become more likely to identify and then help them if they need it, as I can relate my own experience to theirs. Our system creates cooperation through competition, since the drive of all productive relations is to pursue profit, the mechanisms of which I’ve already described. There is a constant objectification of the outside world as a function of this pursuit for profit and others which dehumanizes and keeps us in our little competitive consuming silos.

    Tldr: does money corrupt? Yes, but it doesn’t corrupt the individual so much as it corrupts the entire social superstructure that is inherent to a functioning society in which people can thrive and self actualize.

    Edit: just one note on “objective fact”. Object/subject duality is only one way to look at things, and in fact separating them out like this is a form of “corruption” in that it hides certain truths and leads to certain conclusions. While this has contributed to the development of many kinds of human scientific and technological advancement, we must also understand that all things concerning humans and their experiences need to be understood by unifying subject and object. Pure objectivity is as incomplete as pure subjectivity and while both are useful to increase our understanding we have to put the pieces back together to see the whole picture.




  • This is actually kind of a dogshit analysis of US political climate. What is this used for? Is it just like training materials for supposed Russian bots? Its interesting to speculate why an org producing these materials would represent specifically these views. How and why the analysis is skewed is interesting to look into. The racism and otherizing is like bubbling underneath every statement, while it accuses the US system of being otherizing (which it is) and racist (which it is but in some different ways.)

    Another thing I want to mention is like, so the Russians have all these keyboard warriors who they pay to boost certain views, and react to various positions in different ways, but what happens when these people stop getting paid? When they go home, etc., do they just stop believing these things? Its not just influencing elections or whatever, its also conditioning like hundreds or thousands of people through online encounters and real life salaries. Like I bet they have a supervisor that approves their responses and maybe pays a bonus if they are “in compliance” with the standard or whatever, very common among call center work, I imagine bot-net work would be almost identical.






  • I think so. I’m kind and caring, I have really great friends who wouldn’t be if I wasn’t also a genuinely good person.

    I haven’t always been but I always tried to be. For a long time I was really chaotic and had some personal issues that made it hard for me to like actually follow through with it. But I worked on myself a lot and I continue to. I still fuck up and I’m sure there’s people who think I’m a dick. But for the most part I’m a nice, kind person




  • The difference between gpt-3 and gpt-4 is number of parameters, I.e. processing power. I don’t know what the difference between 2 and 4 is, maybe there were some algorithmic improvements. At this point, I don’t know what algorithmic improvements are going to net efficiencies in the “orders of magnitude” that would be necessary to yield the kind of results to see noticeable improvement in the technology. Like the difference between 3 and 4 is millions of parameters vs billions of parameters. Is a chatgpt 5 going to have trillions of parameters? No.

    Tech literate people are apparently just as susceptible to this grift, maybe more susceptible from what little I understand about behavioral economics. You can poke holes in my argument all you want, this isn’t a research paper.


  • I wasn’t debating you. I have debates all day with people who actually know what they’re talking about, I don’t come to the internet for that. I was just looking out for you, and anyone else who might fall for this. There is a hard physical limit. I’m not saying the things you’re describing are technically impossible, I’m saying they are technically impossible with this version of the tech. Slapping a predictive text generator on a giant database , its too expensive, and it doesn’t work. Its not a debate, its science. And not the fake shit run by corporate interests, the real thing based on math.

    There’s gonna be a heatwave this week in the Western US, and there are almost constant deadly heatwaves in many parts of the world from burning fossil fuels. But we can’t stop producing electricity to run these scam machines because someone might lose money.


  • Ai doesn’t get better. Its completely dependent on computing power. They are dumping all the power into it they can, and it sucks ass. The larger the dataset the more power it takes to search it all. Your imagination is infinite, computing power is not. you can’t keep throwing electricity at a problem. It was pushed out because there was a bunch of excess computing power after crypto crashed, or semi stabilized. Its an excuse to lay off a bunch of workers after covid who were gonna get laid off anyway. Managers were like sweet I’ll trim some excess employees and replace them with ai! Wrong. Its a grift. It might hang on for a while but policy experts are already looking at the amount of resources being thrown at it and getting weary. The technological ignorance you are responding to, that’s you. You don’t know how the economy works and you don’t know how ai works so you’re just believing all this roku’s basilisk nonsense out of an overactive imagination. Its not an insult lots of people are falling for it, ai companies are straight up lying, the media is stretching the truth of it to the point of breaking. But I’m telling you, don’t be a sucker. Until there’s a breakthrough that fixes the resource consumption issue by like orders of magnitude, I wouldn’t worry too much about Ellison’s AM becoming a reality