@failedLyndonLaRouchite Sometimes the CIA does illegal stuff. But a lot of what the CIA does is legal in target countries, or would be if it were a domestic actor doing the same. The CIA covertly funded much of European arts and letters during the Cold War, encouraging an optimistic, liberal, anticommunist editorial spin. Why is that worse than if domestic actors had done the same?
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Is the claim that foreign actors evade laws and regulations that domestic actors obey? Did Russia's IRA do anything that it would have been illegal for American astroturfers to do?
why is domestic influence — beyond the act of voting itself, and perhaps very widely direct and decentralized forms of discourse — less problematic than foreign influence?
(to be clear, my intention here is not to exonerate foreign influence ops, but to condemn our tolerance of domestic ones.)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite sounds chiller than it usually is…
[New Post] Drafts (meta) https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9807.html
already "e-mail" customer service is formulaic (ends up copying and pasting from some support article you've already read) and nonresponsive. has it been botified for a while?
i think going forward the presumption will have to be you are interacting with an LLM, though one should be polite and kind as a form of risk management.
i want to see the web come to life again. instead of faves or mentions, when i write i want to see links. i used to see links. i used to link.
"And don’t say the revolution will bring them down + restore balance. Seriously, please shut up abt the revolution. Revolution shld be nightmare fuel, not visions of post-scarcity sugar-plums. There won’t be a revolution in the west any time soon, and if there was it wouldn’t restore shit except polio and feudalism. We actually have to work and solve our problems here and now, not hope the world burns down and somehow all that blood and horror comes up roses and utopia." https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-great-replacement-not-that-one
[new draft post] Higher education is shockingly right-wing https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/01/higher-education-is-shockingly-right-wing/index.html
most claims about current affairs are insufficiently well defined to be either true or false. they are by their nature bullshit. if they cannot be true or false they can be designed to create an impression in recipients supportive of one side of a controversy.
was it a black lab or a golden one that’s supposed to have marked China as its territory?
with large language models, we can directly psychoanalyze the collective unconscious.
[new draft post] New College https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/02/27/new-college/index.html
it’s ridiculous that trade-secret law prevents industrial buyers from even knowing what hazardous materials their employees are being exposed to. it’s hard to design a safe workplace if you don’t even know what’s in it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-15/american-chipmakers-had-a-toxic-problem-so-they-outsourced-it // an older piece, via @ashleygjovik
A good piece on YIMBYism by #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-yimby-movement-demonstrates-social
the AI hypesters tend to be anti-cancel-culture types, but when people start requiring evidence that their interlocutors are human watch how fast they’ll pick up “woke” language to insist on inclusion of and nondiscrimination against their products.
if they can’t get away with calling the LLMs themselves a vulnerable class, watch them promote uses by more conventional protected classes so they can claim resistance is whateverist.
definitely the cookies for me.
photograph of cookies in packaging, called “torticas de moron, shortbread cookies”
@jbminn @timbray @ben i hope not! but as @xurble reminds us, remember mail? remember, deja news was convenient, usenet in a web page! then Google buys it and look, Google groups. Microsoft bought GitHub. Venture-like returns for them? There's a business there, but not some next big thing from what it was when they bought it. They gained influence, tremendous access to data, whatever options come from creating and owning a single point of failure for the FOSS ecosystem.
We are told by large firms that if only we choose to be virtuous consumers we can save the world. They claim if we recycle, what we painstakingly wash and sort won’t be burned or dumped.
That’s a lie, of course, but when they are caught out, they claim it was mere “puffery”, despite the hours and guilt we burn on it.
We cannot buy our way to a better world, or even build one by refraining from buying. We must use govt to build and insist upon one.
see @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/
Day 6 of resyncing to try to recover about 300GB of data from #Dropbox. I am so looking forward to never again having anything to do with that firm. But they sure are drawing out the goodbye.