floofloof, floofloof@lemmy.ca

In ISBNdb’s now-removed marketing materials, it admitted that getting caught destroying printed books during the scanning process would not be a good look. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site said. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

So their solution was to do the evil thing secretly?

Any other country would employ people with basic knowledge who would spot this at once. But Trump (with the help of Musk and a handful of fratboys) fired anyone like that. Knowledge, expertise and competence are a negative in their eyes. They want ignorant sycophants only.

No Nambia either. And where’s the Democratic Republic of the Covfefe?

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 coopted 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.

Sends like we have that anyway. Let’s replace them with AI then switch the AI off.

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.

The problem he sees is that the rest of us still have some.

LLMs are bullshit machines. I dont see how there’s any question.

We all need to communicate better. Yeah the pedophiles!

Hmm

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It’s the Telegraph. The whole thing is a pile of half-assed right-wing nonsense. It’s what happens when a middlebrow Tory propaganda broadsheet dumbs itself right down for the internet in the age of MAGA.

Behind it is the belief that everyone gets what they deserve, so if you’re wealthy it’s because you’re more deserving of wealth, and if you’re poor, unemployed and hungry it’s because you deserve poverty and hunger. American right-wingers will seldom admit that you can be unemployed or poor through no fault of your own. They don’t seem to allow themselves the concept of a systematic injustice, or even of economic forces causing people to become unemployed. Deep down perhaps they know it happens, but you won’t often catch them admitting it out loud.

This belief that the world rewards people according to their merits and deserts ties in nicely with evangelical Christianity, and the idea that God administers this global rewards system. Why help the poor if God put them there because they deserve to suffer? Might as well buy yourself some luxuries and enjoy your God-given wealth.

It’s not really a philosophy, of course. It’s basic selfishness and greed dressed up as a political philosophy. As a philosophy it obviously doesn’t hold up for five minutes: you can only fail to see the injustice in the world if your eyes are very firmly and resolutely shut. And you can’t believe in investing in the stock market unless you believe there’s an economy with booms and busts and people winding up unemployed due to forces beyond their control. But they won’t admit it.

Their behaviour proves that they don’t really hold principled beliefs, but are just improvising to make peace with their own selfishness. As soon as they themselves fall on hard times, their professed beliefs no longer apply and it’s everyone’s fault but theirs. As soon as they get a sniff of power, their professed love of guns to fight tyranny turns into an eagerness to use guns to impose tyranny. They live by no principle except craven selfishness.

President Donald Trump’s former international energy adviser has a new, counterintuitive pitch to sell Republicans on one set of technologies to reduce global warming: They could help keep the world hooked on oil, gas and coal, at least for a while.

“If I were in this current White House, I’d say, ‘Well, we should support SRM because it’s a good insurance policy for continued fossil fuel use,’” said George David Banks, referring to solar radiation management, a largely theoretical response to global warming that involves spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere.

That’s the very concern that puts responsible people off this type of geoengineering: it will enable us to continue damaging the planet without seeing the full consequences, until our children and grandchildren find themselves in an even worse uninhabitable mess than we’re currently heading for. The fact that this downside is a selling point to Republicans suggests that they are sociopaths, and/or deluded rich people who think money and bunkers will protect them from the collapse of civilization.

Maybe he was born in 1969 and started coding at 6 months old.

Me too. I wonder what I said to earn my place there.

Once again, the cruelty is the point. They’re not even trying to solve an immigration problem; they just want to hurt people who aren’t white enough.