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Aquileo | cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • This fight between two tribes over ancient mythology will never stop and should take place back in their respective shit holes, not in places trying to reduce ignorance in human society.

    That’s not what the student demonstrators are doing though. They’re drawing attention to an ongoing genocide supported by their governments and their universities. They’re working to reduce ignorance in human society by making sure we don’t forget an ongoing crime against humanity, and highlighting how governments and universities in Canada collaborate with those perpetrating genocide. This is not a tribal matter. It’s not taking sides for the sake of one “tribe” or another. This is basic concern for fellow human beings who are being tortured, starved and massacred.

    To look at that and say “take it elsewhere; universities are for reducing ignorance but not about that” is to demand the ivory tower lock its doors to whatever goes on in wider society. It’s unrealistic. Universities exist and operate in wider society and can influence society’s ethical and intellectual standards. Students should demand better from their universities precisely because universities can set an example of rejecting comfortable ignorance for uncomfortable awareness. When they don’t do that they end up co-opted by, and doing the bidding of, political power.




  • Ah, but would an absolute dipshit say something like this, on the occasion of winning a US military contact?

    For Luckey, the contract transition is his own watershed moment. In his blog on Tuesday, he wrote that the announcement is “deeply personal.”

    “Everything I’ve done in my career — building Oculus out of a camper trailer, shipping VR to millions of consumers, getting run out of Silicon Valley by backstabbing snakes, betting that Anduril could tear people out of the bigtech megacorp matrix and put them to work on our nation’s most important problems — has led to this moment,” he wrote.



  • floofloof@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldAI companies are now destroying warehouses full of rare books
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    6 days ago

    There’s no legitimate purpose for destroying these books.

    There are non-invasive ways scan books. But the destruction is an added bonus. These companies make a copy of these public domain books and then pulp the remains. They’re rare, so that means they’re hard to find (that’s what rare means, after all).

    Then, they can turn around and sell their dataset to AI companies.

    The destruction is the point.

    Capitalism always creates perverse incentives. The most profitable thing you can do is seize something readily available and make it impossible to get without paying you.

    But which companies are doing this? It sounds like these are companies that supply training data to AI companies. I think we need names.