I suppose they could up with a scheme where a portion of the $$ from BTC sales to the Treasury get used to buy TrumpCoin or whatever. But that requires him to trust BitCoin bros. Is that plausible?

Depends if he sees BTC bros as easy marks - and by my guess, he probably does.

Shit’s so diseased its a sequel to Tuskegee. They cooked this cack with CIA-grade crack.

(I have no rational way to respond to this - I’m just trying some Dracula Flow-type shit and hoping it lands.)

To paraphrase one of South Park’s more infamous jokes (because I’m not giving this shit any dignity):

Looks like we’re getting a lotta sneer material here! The topic is “People Who Annoy Scoot”.

Man wrote nearly 5k words of pure unfiltered cap:

I’m not sure how someone can read all this without capping themselves. We could sneer this all fucking day.

Far as I can tell, the only real benefit here is significant energy savings, which would take LLMs from “useless waste of a shitload of power” to “useless waste of power”.

Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI

Personally, my money’s on them being thoroughly lost in the AI safety sauce - the idea of AI going rogue has been a staple in pop culture for quite a long time (TV Tropes lists a lot of examples), and the relentless anthropomorphisation of LLMs makes it pretty easy to frame whatever fuck-ups they make as a sentient AI pulling malicious shit.

And given man’s long and storied history of manipulating and misleading their fellow man, I can see plenty of opportunity for fuck-ups baked directly into your average LLM’s training data.

But Apple Intelligence has its good points. “I find the best thing about Apple intelligence is that since I haven’t enabled it, my phone optimized for onboard AI has incredible battery life,” responded another Bluesky user. [Bluesky]

Y’know, if Apple had simply removed the AI altogether and went with that as a marketing point, people would probably buy more iPhones.

At the bare minimum, AI wouldn’t be actively driving people away from buying them.

On the one hand, that spectacular failure could potentially dissuade the military from buying in and prolonging this bubble. On the other hand, having an accountability sink for war crimes would be a tempting offer to your average army.

Starting things off with a fresh post from Brian Merchant: Tech under Trump, part 1

You just know Netflix’s inbox is getting flooded with the absolute worst shit League of Legends players can come up with right now

I don’t run any websites, what are you coming at me for

If H5N1 does turn into a full-blown outbreak, part of me expects it’ll rack up a heavier deathtoll than COVID.

If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.

wat

This entire fucking shrimp paragraph is what failing philosophy does to a mf

Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom Users Who Say They’re Underage

Three billion dollars and its going into Character AI AutoGroomer 4000s. Fuck this timeline.

Wired tried to put out a defence of tech and the result is incoherent drivel. See for yourself.

This is pure gut instinct, but I suspect Twitter’s probably gonna die sometime during Trump’s term - the banks which funded Musk’s takeover consider it their worst deal since the Great Recession, and the rapid exodus of users is gonna further cripple Twitter’s ability to attract advertising revenue.

Part of me suspects we’re gonna see Twitter getting banned somewhere during Trump’s term as well, a la Musk’s tangle with Brazil.

Dorsey jumping ship’s about as good a reason as any to jump to Bluesky, especially considering Twitter’s currently haemorrhaging users from the one-two-three punch of the AI training, the crippled blocking and THE ELECTION^tm.

By my guess, the AI training is probably doing the most damage - that one’s prompting artists to bolt for the exits, and if Tumblr’s NSFW ban taught me anything, its that if the artists start leaving, they’re gonna start taking their fans with them.

2. following on from 1, it’s kind of funny that the EAs, who you could pattern match to a “high school nerd” stereotype, are intellectually beaten out by an analog of the “jock” stereotype of sports fans: fantasy league participants who understand the concept of “intangibles” that EAs apparently cannot grasp.

On a wider note, it feels the “geek/nerd” moniker’s lost a whole lot of cultural cachet since its peak in the mid-'10s. It is a topic Sarah Z has touched on, but I could probably make a full goodpost about it.

Got recommended a video from a friend, and its a damn good sneer at the state of YouTube sponsorships:

Why YouTube Sponsors Are (Almost) Always Terrible