It's Schrödinger's bullshit. It's all blustering bullshit but the people around him understand that to curry favor, they are supposed to make him look brilliant by making it happen for real.

"Remember all those conspiracy theories about the trilateral commission and free masons and everyone? How we imagined they were smart enough and powerful enough and secret enough to control the world? What if we just pretended that shit worked and did it for real? Also pay me."

I'm a man of simple taste.

this is a minor issue, relatively speaking...

Jesus Christ! Pedophilia and incest?

Romans 16:B8F

It's reader mode. Turn it off and the article works. I think it's a big fuck you and I don't follow links to that site any more.

Lemmy doesn't have an algorithm that feeds me just the things I want to see. I have to shape it. I have to block people and subscribe to boards. And I have largely deterministic control over what I see.

But look at Facebook. Look at Twitter. Look at YouTube. Look at ... gestures at everything. It's obvious that personalized services manipulate people to their detriment. They make people hate one another. They make people hate themselves.

But that's not even my personal objection, really I'm an AI enthusiast. I'll have entire conversations just to see how it will react. I've jailbroken them. I've run identical scenarios over and over for countless hours just to tweak prompts to be slightly better. And I want a blank slate when I talk to AI. I want to tell it exactly what it needs to know about me to answer a given question, and no more.

Because as we can see, an algorithm that really understands what we want to see and tweaks every single response to match — is manipulating us. And I don't want to be manipulated. I want my thoughts, such as they are, to be my own.

I do appreciate

I don't want

I can't prove you wrong. If you are happy with a machine picking what you get exposed to, then you'll do that and be happy. But I know how thoughts can be manipulated, and I know I'm not immune, so yeah, I don't want AI that I don't strictly control the context of. I don't want my thoughts shaped by how the AI believes someone like me could most effectively be steered in a desired direction. Because I look around me and I know it can. If not to me then to thousands of others

But you do you. I wouldn't presume to tell anyone my opinion is the only correct one.

If I pick up my phone, I'm up. The question is how long I lay there before I do that or fall back asleep.

I can't say. It's true that lots of us have guns, but the people who've been itching to use them are largely happy with the government. On the other hand, I was just seeing that Black Panthers are chilling in Philadelphia, heavily armed with serious firepower.

The thing is, if we get into a shootout with the military or ice, that will certainly lead to invocation of the insurgency act and that will effectively end democracy here. Most of us understand Trump would love a shooting war because essentially any opposition to him or his stormtroopers would be sedition.

He's testing the waters even now. How much abuse and violence will protestors endure before they do fight back? We're hanging on by a thread here. Clinging to the faint hope that somehow we will make it to the elections, and that they will result in curbing his power.

Those are some big ifs. And if we fail in November, most of us will look to 2028. I always wondered why the Germans let Hitler continue to do what he did. But now I it see it. If they moved too fast there would be resistance. But as long as they move slowly, people think it's not much worse today than yesterday — that fighting against it would be terrible and we'd probably die because there aren't enough of us.

No, I don't think there will be a moment when we throw down Trump. His presidency will end in 2028 because Democrats win big this year, or he will be a wartime president and that will end only with his natural death and what happens next will be up to... I guess Vance.

But you should know, I'm not very good at predictions. I never thought Trump had a chance in either election. So take all of that with a huge grain of salt.

Mates, I'm positively effusive about AI compared to your average Lemmster. But I can't for the life of me figure out why I would want personalized AI any more than I want personalized ads. Which is zero — that's the amount of corporate-personalized shit I want in my life.

I don't think we are anywhere near civil war. I believe we might be on the verge of state violence against protestors.

You'll know we're on the brink of civil war when there is open combat between militia or national guard and the military and the military doesn't instantly put them down.

A military coup might be slightly more likely or at least doable. But I'm not sure there is anyone left in charge who might lead that. Plus, it is by definition treason, and no soldier takes that lightly. And the resultant government might not be what one might want.

I hate to say this, but the US isn't going to pull the rest of the world out of this mess. The way forward is through. Or wait for cholesterol to do its job and hold your breath for real elections this fall.