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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • I never realized until now why they use the “45” so much. Just move one of the black bars and it’s a fucking swastika… And Haitians are really a stand-in for black people.

    The real problem is that we allowed the plutocrats to control both the news and social media and the government. Basically the US doesn’t have a free press any more but a quasi-government controlled oligarch media. As long as these neoliberal policies continue the degradation of institutions and politics continues.

    Something drastic would need to happen to purge this incredibly power imbalance from the captured state. A kind of reformation or practically a coup.


  • Peaceful contact with aliens would tell us something fundamental about the nature of ethics and the universe.

    Advanced aliens do not need any material resources or real estate from humanity. We can already interpolate that from existing science. So that is not the reason why there are here. And we know they haven’t exterminated us already centuries ago.

    Instead it would tell that we share some fundamental values like curiosity and diversity with alien species - as long as they evolved through natural selection and had to raise and teach and love their children. As long as they had to find productive ways to work together as a people.

    We would realize that we are not alone and that we are being judged. That we can’t just endlessly bulldoze the galaxy and that there are limits to acceptable behavior. Because there is always someone more powerful that could smash us, but they already didn’t. That certain ethical ideals are fundamental properties emerging from the universe itself.

    It would be a powerful counter to the current nihilistic materialism, that we need to start working to improve our culture.



  • The way I would classify it is if you could somehow extract the “creative writing center” from a human brain, you’d have something comparable to to a LLM. But they lack all the other bits, and reason and learning and memory, or badly imitate them.

    If you were to combine multiple AI algorithms similar in power to LLM but designed to do math, logic and reason, and then add some kind of memory, you probably get much further towards AGI. I do not believe we’re as far from this as people want to believe, and think that sentience is on a scale.

    But it would still not be anchored to reality without some control over a camera and the ability to see and experience reality for itself. Even then it wouldn’t understand empathy as anything but an abstract concept.

    My guess is that eventually we’ll create a kind of “AGI compiler” with a prompt to describe what kind of mind you want to create, and the AI compiler generates it. A kind of “nursing AI”. Hopefully it’s not about profit, but a prompt about it learning to be friends with humans and genuinely enjoy their company and love us.



  • Neither is ok of course. The thing is that Israel had an overwhelming military and economic advantage for decades. The strategy should have been to aid in democratization, education and prosperity of the occupied Palestinian territories and neighboring countries. Propaganda is an incredibly powerful tool and they could have used it to de-radicalize Palestinians and create a peaceful 1 or 2 state solution. They’ve had decades to do this. But they did the opposite.

    Part of it is I believe the US geopolitical strategy. The USA does NOT like democracy in countries it wants to exploit. This isn’t ideology it’s just a result of playing imperialist games. Imagine countries with oil and resources were democratic and educated, they’d want to own and control their own resources instead of accepting all this despotism and corruption. See Saudi Arabia.

    And of course, see Iran. They had a democratic society and when they wanted to “renegotiate” the oil deals in 1953 the UK and USA created a coup and put a dictator in charge (the shah) to continue to exploit cheap oil. You sometimes see this propaganda of how modern Iran was in the 1960 under the Shah, but there was also repression and torture in prisons. Iran’s theocracy today has a guardian council that is I believe partially structure the way it is to prevent foreign influence or NGOs (the modern tool to create color revolutions). Of course Iran and other groups fight back, and one of their tools is Hezbollah.

    Israel serves as a client state of the US to help control the middle east, and partially their strategy is to keep them unstable, to have the right amount of extremism and repression and poverty and suffering so they can be ruled through force alone.

    Socialists call the USA fascist long before Trump because they do not see people in other countries as equal or “worthy” of democracy or prosperity. So from that viewpoint Israel’s policy was fascist long before Netanyahu. At some point they killed of most of their Kibbuzihm which was their socialist base.

    And all this is the reason why propaganda is presenting this as a pure “good vs evil” conflict instead of the brutal and cruel calculus of power or imperialism using very sophisticated strategies and tools.







  • No just free association. But having no alternatives to legitimate needs, like participating in our civilization’s free speech discourse through the internet, free association doesn’t help. So before the fediverse you were “forced” to associate with reddit/facebook/twitter or have little association at all.

    I’m not sure how anarchism would work for a social media platform. Everyone is a mod? Everyone can post anything and can delete anything? 😀

    I believe generally as a philosophy anarchism only makes sense as all authority should be challenged and needs to be justified or be abolished. The amount of authority justified and needed might be relative to the level of “enlightenment” of the participants.


  • Fascism.

    People have been lied to for decades and we all know it’s going to get worse in the future. The democrats are neoliberals who will continue to exploit people. The news media and social media are all owned by oligarchs. Wealth inequality is getting worse. Climate change won’t be solved and will make all things worse. Why should people vote for the status quo? Work hard, get fucked? No solidarity, no rational action, no plan. And nuclear war when?

    Fascism and nationalism is not just something to break this but also has the better story. Something the stupid masses can believe in again. Trump is telling them everything they want to hear.