Yeah, I know. Just leaving room for miracles I guess.

On paper there’s plenty that could. The Supreme Court could have stepped in to stop a lot of this. Executive orders only stand in places where a full fledged law from congress doesn’t cover the issue. The military is theoretically as obligated to disobey an unlawful order as they are to obey a lawful one and states are theoretically pretty insulated from federal interference except in a few explicit areas.

But, we don’t live on paper and none of those protections exist unless there are people out there who are ready, willing, and able, to act on them. What happens if the Supreme Court somehow manages to rule against the administration and they just flagrantly disregard the order? What happens if Trump orders the military to start attacking US citizens openly or starts an illegal war without congressional approval? What happens if Trump runs for president again in 2028? Or just says he’s president for life and we’re not doing elections anymore?

The answer is nothing, unless people stand up against him. And… so far… we haven’t seen much of that. Not from people in government at any rate. We’ve seen a bit from normal folks on the ground in places like LA, but our government’s been working to neuter the power of popular protest since the civil rights protests, perhaps even earlier. So reasonable people can disagree on the efficacy of that.

I really don’t want to echo the doomer line I’ve seen written here a lot, but yeah, we’re probably fucked. Like maybe if something was done like… a decade ago? Two? Maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation. But… as things stand? I don’t even know if the damage from the first Trump presidency can ever truly be repaired and more damage is being done on a weekly, almost a daily basis. Personally? I think it’s only a matter of time before this man breaks the global economy irreparably. In a way that simply can’t be swept under the rug again. Domestically? Who the fuck knows at this point? I have to resist the urge to laugh out loud whenever people ask where I see myself in five years because at this point I’ve got no idea what the next two weeks are gonna hold.

So… yeah. Fun times in the ol US of A.

I mean, we kinda already ended up there with the Ashley Madison hack in 2015. Problems with that site aside, I feel like it’s kinda the blueprint for everything wrong with companies that retain personally identifable info on folks. If a company collects details like your driver’s license, it’s not a question of if it gets out but when. There’s just no way to collect that sort of data and truly keep it safe.

But, it seems like we’ve kinda forgotten how to learn lessons in the modern day, so I’m sure this was an isolated issue and we’ll never see it’s like again.

(/s on that last part, just in case that wasn’t blindingly obvious.)

Every day we get closer to teaching the robots how to feel pain.

I’m gonna be honest, I did not think this was staged when I first read it…

…Because why on earth would that be what you want to stage? Like sure, they say in the article it was to “prove Putin isn’t hiding behind others” or some such shit. The message it sends to me is “our air defense is so shit we can’t even lock it down when the guy in charge comes to visit”. What a bizarre choice of propaganda.

“Lettuce Speak”.

I think… there was a kernel of a decent instinct there. At the point that John Oliver bit came out I feel like we were all kinda just marveling at how far stupid playground insults managed to get Trump. “Well, ok, maybe he’s onto something. Let’s try it and see what happens.” Was a fine reaction for the time, but I think it was best abandoned quickly.

In 2025, not useful in the slightest. I don’t know what is precisely, but I don’t think it’s petty name calling.

Obviously this is all stupid and you’ll find problems anywhere you choose to look.

The problem I’m finding is this, if Facebook truly is betting on AI becoming better as a way to encourage growth then why are they further poisoning their own datasets? Like ok, even if you exclude everything your own bots say from your training data, which you could probably do since you know who they are, this is still encouraging more AI slop on the platform. You don’t know how much of the “engagement” your driving (which they are likely just turning around and feeding back into the AI training set) is actually human, AI grifter, or someone poisoning the well by making your AIs talk to themselves. If you actually cared to make your AI better, then you can’t use any of the responses to your bots as most of them will be of dubious providence at best.

Personally I’m rooting on the coming Hapsburg-AI issue so I don’t really have that much of a problem with Facebook deciding more poison is a brilliant business move. But uh… seems real dumb if your actually interested in having an actually functional LLM.

Yeah, fucked up though it might be, I think that within the moral framework she’s chosen to operate in she’s “doing the right thing”. That framework is monstrous and should be disqualifying for a position on the judiciary. But I think she’s got no moral qualms and would treat the morality that most of us have with a mixture of confusion and hostility.

God, I was just breathing a sigh of relief till this poped up a moment later.

The South Korean military says it will maintain martial law until it is lifted by President Yoon Suk Yeol, despite the nation’s parliament voting to block its enforcement, according to the country’s national broadcaster.

Hope that’s just postureing.

So, the following is a genuine question and not a snide remark.

Does that matter? Is the military going to respect that? I’d heard prior to this that the military had forbade parliament from gathering. What’s to say they don’t just side with Yoon?Certainly wouldn’t be the first time in history that a nation’s military has dictated the corse of the nation’s civil future. I really hate asking questions like this but I’m just not familiar enough with the politics of South Korea to know if this a done and dusted thing or if the military is likely to go for a coup if Yoon pitches it.

I can’t remember when I came to the realization, but for years now I thought that if (and I would love to hold on to the naive hope that it is an “if”) WW3 breaks out then the battle lines would be drawn between the forces of autocracy and democracy. Those would be our sides.

Now, I’m not even sure democracy is gonna make it out the gate… America’s elected a dictator who’s aligned with Russia who is itself a major factor of this unholy autocratic alliance with China, North Korea, and Iran… Now this?

There were no “good guys” in world war 1. It was the result of squabbleing European powers not realizing the destructive potential modern military technology had and how much that changed the game. It needed to happen in the sense that countries couldn’t continue to act the way they had prior to the great war, but that doesn’t mean anyone was in the right.

It’s hard to imagine “good guys” in world war 3 either. Increasingly, it kinda just seems like it’s a choice between “what shit flavor of authoritarianism do you hate less?”. Assuming that question even matters considered all the nuclear weapons that could fly in a third world war.

I dunno man, shit’s just looking pretty fucking bleak.

I’ll confess I’ve had the same thought… but I feel like the problem is deeper than that. If people don’t have basic awareness of the devices they rely on then they in danger of becoming victims of those who do. I’d point to your average boomer on Facebook to illustrate that point.

Is it the tech? Or is it media literacy?

I’ve messed around with AI on a lark, but would never dream of using it on anything important. I feel like it’s pretty common knowledge that AI will just make shit up if it wants to, so even when I’m just playing around with it I take everything it says with a heavy grain of salt.

I think ease of use is definitely a component of it, but in reading your message I can’t help but wonder if the problem instead lies in critical engagement. Can they read something and actively discern whether the source is to be trusted? Or are they simply reading what is put in front of them then turning around to you and saying “well, this is what the magic box says. I don’t know what to tell you.”.

It’s kinda wild to me. I used to think that as a millennial the next generation would be more technically savvy than mine for similar reasons to why my generation was more technically savvy than the last. That doesn’t quite seem to have panned out and I’m not sure if I’m just not seeing things right or if technical literacy is really that much on the decline.

…But how can I click on it? All of the hyperlinks are gone.

I was simply telling a joke, but point well taken.

To be fair, considering the right wing hellscape our (US) Overton window overlooks the bias bot might actually have a point.

What a brilliant way to put it, “theft from the public domain”. I’m gonna have to remember that one.

I’m not against nuclear power, but could they have concocted a worse set of motivations? Restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft’s AI ambitions? Shit reads like something a super villan would cook up.