Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman


Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!

  • 33 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • We need a world that recognizes this reality and does everything possible to ensure that there is a very low limit to the amount of power that a single person can accumulate.

    And how do you achieve that in a flat structure? That’s basically relying on local communities to all be self-correcting which feels to me like that hippie shit “why can’t we all just hold hands and get along.” Oh I don’t know because some people are going to grow up into Nazis and I am not sure that in itself is a solvable problem about humanity.

    Small communities are more likely to make exceptions for people they know closely. Like church groups absolving abusive men in the clergy and grouping around them to pray for them. Groups allowed to self police rarely police themselves successfully.

    So to me it sounds like you need power structures to help control the populace and stop them from doing that, and power structures invite corruption.





  • I am pro-decentralization but the problem I always come to is education: education is inherently a power discrepancy where on person must teach another something. Some people are just bad at teaching, so leaving education in the hands of just anyone means you end up with less educated population, and a less educated population can’t be counted on to be independent enough to be a reliable citizen that can contribute competently, which perpetuates the cycle even further if the uneducated are expected to teach the uneducated. Flat structure is a noble goal, but I’m not sure we’ll ever truly be able to escape power discrepancies existing at all. Children are simply at mercy of the people educating them. Like you said, power corrupts, and plenty of people use that power over children toward selfish and controlling ends.




  • They’re learning the hard way that it’s a big club, and we ain’t in it. Rooting out corruption is hard because you basically have to have people to replace literally every person in government literally immediately. Also, you have to make sure those new people can’t be bribed or threatened into complicity. Trying to rely on people who seem to have good credentials isn’t a solution if they’re still surrounded by corruption at every level. How are the small number of trustworthy people going to handle an endless stream of corruption running interference and doing their damnedest to make sure no one is held accountable.

    Maybe the old battle cry “don’t trust anyone over 30” wasn’t so wrong at all. Anyone who is already invested in the system as it exists probably can’t be truly trusted to get the job done.

    Anyway, quite tragic and I feel for them.







  • We don’t have small scale LLMs running on personal machines (even if we could, that’s not how it is now)

    Uhhh, it’s pretty trivial to set them up. I have a local Ollama instance set up on my PC with several different open source models available right now. Just because not everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I don’t even have an especially fancy computer, either. Ryzen 7 3700X, 32gb RAM, Radeon 6600XT 8gb video RAM, not exactly top of the line. I struggle with programming logic sometimes, so I use it to help me figure out if I’m doing something right or not when I can’t find an answer online, an activity I wouldn’t exactly classify as “evil.”

    I also wouldn’t consider a shrapnel bomb a tool, it’s strictly a weapon just like a gun is strictly a weapon.



  • It always horrifies me a little bit how much open source has been exploited by large corporations for profit while much of the open source tech they rely on they do not invest in. Meaning by and large it often feels like open source has been unintentionally the largest transfer of the wealth created by labor to the corporate class in human history because labor had lofty ideals and capitalists are happy to exploit that.

    Linux has the majority share of corporate servers and has for a long time, and yet is barely cracking 3% of the desktop (consumer, laborer) market. Corporations profit wildly from open source while the general public has not.


  • I mean really they despise anyone with skills because the reality is they have hardly any themselves as they’ve spent their lives paying for everyone else to do everything for them. They can’t make a meal, they can’t drive a car, they can’t do basic appliance repair, they don’t know how to actually use a computer other than social media, they can’t wash their own clothes, they can’t do anything for themselves. They despise every skilled person because it betrays their egotistical view that they are simply born better than everyone else and deserve to never have to know how to do anything at all. It reveals they know nothing and are useless to society at large, just a drain on the rest of us.

    Secondly, I did say “knowledge workers” and I personally think authors and artists are a type of “knowledge work” as they require knowledge coupled with skill to do the work, just as people managing servers and databases also require a combination of knowledge and skill. Poetaetoe pohtahtoh.

    Thus it’s also why they are all pushing hard for humanoid robots because they want to automate the human body after they have automated the human mind.




  • I mean… it seems painfully obvious and doesn’t need much of a thesis behind it.

    The wealthy want their slaves back, but they want slaves that don’t push back, never ask for more, never need a day off, don’t need sleep, don’t need breaks, and are needlessly sycophantic to stroke the egos of the wealthy. It’s no more complex than that: the promise of LLMs was that they could have deeply exploitable knowledge workers without any of the fuss or mess of humans who want a life outside of their fucking jobs.

    Like what else has this ever been? It’s been transparent since day one that this is why every business pushes AI adoption so hard, for them it has to work, they’re willing to bet the future on it because they think their sheer belief in it and throwing money at it will eventually “make it work.”

    On the plus side, anyone who understands LLMs understands their limitations and the problems that are baked in to how they work and how those issues can’t be “fixed.” So this dipshit ass all-in plan that the wealthy have is doomed to crumble because it’s never going to work the way they want it to. So we’ve got that going for us.

    Anyway I hate tools being described as “tools of the ruling class” because it often misses the point of how such tools can be useful to the proletariat as well. Class solidarity is a tool of the ruling class, but class solidarity would be golden in the hands of the proletariat, who vastly outnumber the wealthy class and ruling class. All tools are useful, what makes a tool dangerous is who wields it and what they choose to use it for. A hammer can be used to build and it can also be used to smash in someone’s skull. Tools aren’t the problem: specific dangerous humans are. I don’t actually have huge problems with AI LLMs providing they are open source and rolled out small scale on home PCs, I just have an issue with their industrial applications at scale and the attempt to use them to consolidate power and control. They don’t have to be used that way.


  • I’m not sure the exact age, but anywhere between 2 and 3, because I spent a lot of time in hospitals at that age, I had some serious issues when I was young. I remember being in the hospital and hating it, and it feeling dark and foreboding. I never understood what was going on and I was scared. I remember my mom giving me a Hot Wheels-sized toy helicopter and truck. I have panic attacks being hooked up to medical machines as an adult, and I hate having my blood drawn or having an IV.