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The richest man on earth owns X.
The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok.
The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post.
See the problem here?
That’s the entire point of Palantir.
And of LLM’s.
what do LLMs have to do with this? /genq
They can (and will) be used to subtly manipulate facts and feelings, and to rewrite history if left unchallenged. We’re moving towards a future where access to information will be limited, not unlike ingsoc.
Make offline copies of Wikipedia and distribute them everywhere you can
Thats my weekend project and it takes a lot less space than you think (at least to me).
We’re moving towards a future where access to information will be limited, not unlike ingsoc.
If you were born before the 90s, this is kind of how it was. The rich controlled tv, newspapers, magazines, etc. The only people who had access were the people who had access to great libraries for the old stuff. If you wanted breaking news, that was controlled.
Except it was a lot more rich people, most nowhere near as wealthy as those today. The consolidation which has been allowed since then is absurd.
True, there was a lot more diversity in what the greeds wanted said.
ohhhh okay yes i understand
that is why we need more open source LLMs!
Open source LLMs are mostly just open weights, so you still don’t know how biased the data was that they were trained on.
I suppose you could distribute the source code for a model and then distribute it with a whole bunch of training data that the end user can ingest on their own. But then that training data would have to be public domain.
Yes yes i do know my comment was talking about actually open sourcing LLMs, not about open weight LLMs
However, open weight LLMs are still infinitely better than using something like ChatGPT on OpenAI’s servers
I live paycheck to paycheck and run thelemmy.club so basically Bezos tbh
No one man should have all that power.
You’re a visionary
That’s great! The poors are running things like Lemmy which means they’re more susceptible to bribery. Only the rich can protect us from corruption!!1!! ONE!
Been a while since I saw the typed out “one” in the exclamation mark string.
It was a typo because I was so excited.
I get it sometimes you just slip on the keyboard, it happens!
You jest, but I have heard that argument a number of times in the defense of the rich, including one time from a fucking judge when he pardoned some company owner from bribery charges, “He has money, it does not make sense that he would ask for more money”. It’s also a common argument among judges and elected deputies to justify their sky high salaries. Yay, Brazil
Here in America that’s what they initially said about Trump in 2016. Anyhow now he’s got a jet from Qatar.
Oh I’m well aware. I’ve heard it so many times. I believe it when I was a kid but I laugh at it now.
And worst, all of them have surveillance fetishes
Only because they can’t legally own slaves, so they settle for the “next best thing”, which is total control over their workers
The problem has been obvious for decades.
The solution is what’s missing.
There was a solution once upon a time.
Yeah, but
I think that essay completely misinterprets the imagery of the guillotine.
Why the guillotine is a popular image is:
- It’s strongly associated with a time of revolution when the ultra-rich oppressors were executed. This has happened many times throughout history and in many ways, but a gun, a firing squad, a noose, a spear, etc. all have other connotations. The guillotine is remembered primarily for the French Revolution and for how it was used to execute the oppressors.
- It represents judgment, not chaos. That isn’t to say that there wasn’t a lot of chaos in the French Revolution, and it doesn’t mean the judgment was fair. But, it’s the kind of execution apparatus that you basically need an organized group to run. It’s big and clunky. So, if you’re in a position to use a guillotine on people, it means that you’ve already taken power, and probably have some kind of process of a trial before executing someone, even if it is just a show trial.
- It’s very final. Look what happened when the French didn’t use the guillotine on Louis XVIII or Napoleon. Louis XVIII went into exile during the French Revolution. After the revolution, Napoleon reigned as emperor for a decade, was exiled (not guillotined) then Louis XVIII took over for almost a year, then Napoleon escaped exile and took over again for 100 days, then Louis XVIII was back in charge for 10 years. Say what you will about the guillotine, but one guy who never took power again was Louis XVI.
Do people think that a literal guillotine will solve all the problems? I doubt it. But, it makes for a powerful symbol. It’s saying “deal with the ultra rich / ruling class, in a state-sanctioned way, and permanently”. It’s not a symbol of compromising, but it’s also not a symbol of mob violence like a noose hanging from a tree would be.
Good read, apparently murdering people creates more problems. Who would have thunk?
Interesting read, thank you for sharing!
I might have paid more attention in history class if the revolutionaries in our textbook were that thicc
Really it’s been like that in America for well over a century. They’re all following the playbook laid out by Hearse who bought into journalism with his mining fortune, and then utilized the press to protect his mining fortune.
Government intervention to force the companies to be put into cooperative ownership. Every user and employee becomes an equal shareholder.
Government intervention
Never gonna happen.
Might as well pin your hopes on unicorns and fairies.
I’m bloody broke and own quokk.au
Thanks for you service Quokka, you are worth more than any of these billionares
No, they do not as thats the stuff they use. The level of education ist just bad and it is only getting worse. People do not read books at all and i would be hard pressed to find someone who likes to challenge mainstream narratives.
So how i can expect from the people that are propagandized 24/7 to care about a single issue like billionaires owning the media outlets? In fact we can not, because most people are so overwhelmed by the amount of superficial information that they consume, there js no space to think about action.
In fact most comfort themselves with the idea that there is nothing one possibly can do against all the decline being clearly visible. And that is exactly where you want your population. Downtrodden and compliant. People taking action will be at best prortrayed as idealists that won’t change anything and at worst as somehow affiliated with hate or even terror(for example Palestine Action).
taking action will be at best portrayed as idealists that won’t change anything
People love viewing my activism that way even on the fediverse.
Let those not diminish you or your actions. They are simply telling themselves why it is ok to not take action (it isn’t). So kudos to you.
Whenever I try to sit down and explain some of these nuances to family members/coworkers/… they almost all default to “yeah, but what about all those foreigners though”. It’s a fucking record stuck on repeat. All pretense of logical thought has left these people, and I’ve given up on trying to kindle that spark in anyone else.
Hell yeah it’s the foreigners! A billionaire South African owns Twitter and a billionaire Australian owns Fox News!
It’s all a distraction from what the richest women own.
Waiting for this guy that see the problem to switch to a truly decentralized platform like mastodon.
deleted by creator
Don’t forget the TV networks
Eat them
Don’t. You don’t know where they’ve been. Compost them instead.
Who owns Fox these days?
The company is controlled by Lachlan Murdoch via a family trust with 36% voting shares.[12][13] Rupert Murdoch is chairman emeritus, while his son Lachlan Murdoch is chairman and CEO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Corporation
Murdoch is the 31st richest person in the United States and the 71st richest in the world according to Forbes magazine.[5] Due to his extensive wealth and influence over media and politics, Murdoch has been described as an oligarch.[6][7][8]
A holding company owned by the devil and the infinite void
I see a bunch of crap I don’t use, never have used and never will use.
The problem is that everyone is dumb enough to use these things. I’m not absolutely convinced that Lemmy is significantly better.
The internet used to be an amazing way to share information. Rich people bought it to shut that down.
Nope, not rich people, not exclusively.
Russia and China. They are the ones who made it a cynical instrument of manipulation.
