If I had to guess, they probably did a shit job labeling training data or used pre labeled images, now where in the world could they have found huge amounts of pictures of women on the internet with the specific label of “Asian”?
Almost like, most of what determines the quality of the output is not “prompt engineering” but actually the back end work of labeling the training data properly, and you’re not actually saving much labor over more traditional methods, just making the labor more anonymous, easier to hide, and thus easier to exploit and devalue.
Almost like this shit is a massive farce just like the “meta verse” and crypto that will fail to be market viable and waist a shit ton of money that could have been spent on actually useful things.
See, the problem is that if they did that, then there would be far less incentive to work at the soul sapping companies they own.
After all, who would choose to take a job at a company where you push heroin pain killers on economically distraught communities, if you were not also threatened with being relegated to the same desperate conditions? Who would willing make purposefully addictive Skinner box games and social media sights, if they were not threatened with homelessness and depersoning for failing to pay their 2000 dollar a month rent?
How could they possibly ever get people to do these kinds of absolutely necessary jobs if there wasn’t an unspoken threat of starvation, death and violence hanging over everyone’s head. I mean they’d not be able to make all the money that they then hoard.
So little of our modern internet is realistically profitable in the long term. Same with other big segments of tech.
They exist do to this notion of “ if we just get the user base and replace this old thing with our new thing, we can then monetize later.” They think they are successful because their new services is more innovative or better than existing services, some times they are, but people don’t use them because of that. People use these services because they are cheap, free, or convenient.
If you try and charge for the real cost of operations, or monetize in some other way (basically all options here make it less convenient or hurt UX), people wouldn’t use them. Ether they have to keep operating at a loss or lose their dominant market position and survive on captive audiences.
Modern tech is an oroborous of investors subsidizing the new guy to dethrone the old guy. But this only works so long as there is investor cash available to subsidize all this stuff, and that’s starting to dry up because of shifts in the world market. Labor shortages forcing industry to substitute capital for labor, meaning they’re competing for capital with tech, for example.
The biggest for profit platforms are getting worse and more hostile to users/content-creators in an attempt to turn a profit, nothing new there, but now there is way less money to fund cheap convenient new start ups to replace them as they die off. If I had to wager a guess, much more basic, less feature rich, and cheaper to operate alternatives are going to start eating the lunch of these platforms.
Some of it maybe new start ups that just don’t have the funding to develop their platforms beyond the bare minimum people will accept, some might be community organized projects that are run by volunteers and donations, see Wikipedia. Maybe decentralized interoperable systems where the capital and labor can be distributed over a larger number of willing parties.
Ether way we’re going to see a lot of blood in the water over the next few years.
The funny thing about all this, is that people keep acting like Putin is some rational actor who can be bargained with.
But he’s not, listen to his speeches, listen to what he says he believes and wants. Some of it may be propaganda for internal consumption, but a lot of it seems consistent with his actions.
He sees the existence of an independent Ukraine as an existential threat, he ether wants it gone or under a puppet regime that he has throughly locked down. He doesn’t believe that Europe and the United States want peace, he is convinced that there is a shadowy deep state in Europe and the US that holds a consistent foreign policy across multiple administrations across multiple countries, and he see that foreign policy being to subjugate or destroy Russia.
The man has surrounded him self with conspiracy theorists, from disciples of Lyndon LaRouche to advocates of Eurasianism. He is detached from reality, swirling about a toilet bowl of yes men. He is not someone who can be compromised with or offered off ramps, he’s been repeatedly given off ramps and rejected them every time, thinking them to be traps.
The only end of this conflict is when internal power structures in Russia shift away from conspiracy theorists, or Russia’s ability to commit aggressive action is less than the defensive capabilities of its neighbors.
That’s not about the social credit system though, that’s about the general censorship and surveillance apparatus. Which although robust and invasive is quite fragmented, there is no central database. local branches of law enforcement or internal intelligence or a million other parts of china’s own alphabet soup, manage, collect and use surveillance data, some terrifyingly effectively, some pathetically. Some not at all.
China is a big country with a lot of tasks being delegated to lower authorities, (and delegated from them to even lower authorities). Anytime I see someone talk as if the Chinese government is a monolithic entity it makes me want to pull
my hair out. 90% of the time when someone talks about some new law in Beijing being created, they’re misrepresenting the reality, which is generally that the central government has directed provincial and local governments to pass their own laws and implement their own policies to address what ever Beijing has talked about.
For references about social credit in particular here you go:
So, it’s worth clarifying the nature of the this kind of “law” passed in Beijing. Which this article fails to do and comes across to me partially as fear mongering because of it.
Generally speaking when Beijing passes a law like this, they are not passing a law as we know it, it is a set of guide lines for the leaders of local provinces to implement their own policies and laws based on what they think will accomplish the goals set out from Beijing. Then Beijing observes what they come up with and if they like the outcomes of one, they implement it country wide.
For instance when everyone was hyper ventilating about “ ALL OF CHINA IS LITERALLY 1984 BECAUSE OF THE NEW SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM” in reality, Beijing had just essentially just asked the provinces to create their own systems that fallowed a vague guideline. And the provinces did, some provinces set up systems that would give people fines for saying mean things, some just set up an American style credit score system. In the end Beijing didn’t really find that any of them lived up to what they were asking for and all of the programs were quietly spun down.
I remember a while back stumbling arose a forum or web page or something that was just a list of web cams that had ip’s anyone could connect to through a browser, part of it was people playing a sort of geo guesser game and figuring out out exactly where the camera was.
Always felt super weird and surreal, like, I remember two in particular, one was probably a cam in some officer building in Japan. I sat there and watched this guy work on his computer for a like a minute and realized this dude probably had no idea he was being watched by some random weirdo.
Another was a camera on what was probably a Venezuela oil rig, this one had little in built servos so it could pan left right up and down, the inputs for this were open along with the video feed. I wiggled it up and down a bunch out of fascination for like a minute, then a guy I. A hard had and a high vis fest was walking by, he froze and looked at the camera. I stoped moving it and then slowly nodded it up and down. He just started and I closed the page, feeling a little freaked out.
To this day I refuse to have a web connected camera uncovered in my home, I put post its or tape over anything I can’t physically get rid of.
I forgot to mention what I was split with and that’s probably Light Bringer by Pierce Brown, the 6th book in the red rising series. A quintessential space opera with all the grand scale and melodrama that brings with it, while also defying many of the cliches of that genera with less one dimensional villains and more moral grey area, (and a heaping helping of edge). Not for everyone but I thoroughly enjoy it.
Well, the government is currently run by the ANC, and the statement was made by them.
Like, yah the ANC is supper corrupt and serving as a mouth piece for those business interests that benefited for apartheid, plenty of criticism to be levied at how they’ve failed to address inequality in the country and let important infrastructure fall apart while rich funks loot the country blind.
But they’re the party who cut their teeth on opposing apartheid and settler colonialism? Like, that’s their whole thing? They’re literally Nelson mandala’s party? If anyone is qualified to be criticizing Israel for their apartheid system and settler colonialism it is them.
I can both hold them in contempt for being shit heads and recognize that they might know what they’re talking about when is comes to criticizing apartheid?
For non fiction I’d probably say Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen R. Platt.
A history of the taiping rebellion, it takes a very close eye to some of the more prominent people of the conflict and examines the whole thing in much more detail than you can usually get from English language sources.
For fiction I’m split between The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern. A tragedy focusing on a fictional protest encampment in an alternate present where Al gore won in 2000 rather than bush, and instead of declaring war of terror declared war on climate change. ‘Green tech’ and carbon credits stand ascendent yet the oil refineries are still going strong, and the real cost being put on those least capable of handling it.
Frankly, I think we should take this kind of stuff as a moment to consider where we could rebuild public infrastructure to prevent people having to own cars in the first place.
If any country in the world has a leg to stand on about criticizing an apartheid state like Israel…
South Africa’s government is a mess but most of the people in it lived through apartheid. Regardless of other issues, this is something that they are absolutely qualified to speak on.
he’s being really shrewd here I think, he’s kind of closing the door on the most insane of the transphobe crowd and forcing them to justify their most outrageous and absurd claims if they want to criticize him for blocking this.
I imagine he’s also telling all his colleague in the party “ What the fuck are you thinking, in what world do you think this is an election winning issue to hang our hats on. We’re going to look like a bunch of freaks if we try and make this the next culture war issue!”
What a garbage article, like, start to finish manipulative attempt to build a stupid narrative. Like, antisemitism is a real thing but this kind of nonsense discredits real attempts to call it out.
If I had to guess, they probably did a shit job labeling training data or used pre labeled images, now where in the world could they have found huge amounts of pictures of women on the internet with the specific label of “Asian”?
Almost like, most of what determines the quality of the output is not “prompt engineering” but actually the back end work of labeling the training data properly, and you’re not actually saving much labor over more traditional methods, just making the labor more anonymous, easier to hide, and thus easier to exploit and devalue.
Almost like this shit is a massive farce just like the “meta verse” and crypto that will fail to be market viable and waist a shit ton of money that could have been spent on actually useful things.