The media is mostly MAGA owned. Here's a short list:
- TikTok is controlled by Larry Ellison
- CBS news is controlled by Ellison's son
- The Ellisons will soon own CNN as well
- Twitter is controlled by Musk
- Facebook, Instagram and Threads are under Zuck
- WaPo and Amazon Prime by Bezos
- Old time favourites like Fox and WSJ owned by Murdoch
The owners of this media are also very explicitly involved in pro-Trump editorial content. In short, the playing field is wildly lopsided and unreliable and no tech (decentralized social media, lol) solution will work. Ultimately people will have to elect politicians to explicitly break up and clamp down on this hive of scum and villainy, but people aren't there yet, mentally. Such a solution seems wildly inappropriate today, but my guess is that another 10 years of the last two years will change a lot of minds.
These individuals are all sucking up to the president, but to call them "MAGA owned" is a stretch. They'll kiss whichever ass - democrat or republican - next fills the president's chair, it's just with this emperor-magpie it's very straightforward and easy: shiny & bright == good.
A fun idea I've been playing around with and testing on folks: We need a neo-temperance movement.
The first reaction is a scoff and a laugh of course - wasn't the original temperance movement an utter failure, prohibition didn't work etc. But no, the movement was far wider and successful in a multitude of ways. And a new temperance movement isn't about blindly copying something old, but situating yourself around the turn of the 20th century, understanding the multitude of interconnected problems people faced, the solutions they came up with and which ones worked and didn't.
America at the turn of the 20th century was a nasty place - there was wild corruption, politics was run by mafia-like patronage networks, wealth was extremely concentrated, rich people were unaccountable, working people suffered under low-paying, dangerous jobs, women were excluded from public life, and alcohol was merely the symptom of a very sick society, and yes indeed it was a massive problem, the way alcoholism is a massive problem in Russia today.
The original temperance movement was bound up tightly with the Suffarage movement (giving women a voice), with Taylorism (running organizations rationally), with income tax (a fairer less corruptible source of income for the federal government than tariffs and excise taxes).
Today's problems are thematically the same - massive concentration of wealth is making an unaccountable elite wielding power against the wishes of the public, creating dangerously addictive digital products, massive increase in gambling, restricting the rights of poeple to own and repair products, working to disenfranchise people, working to roll back women's participation in public life, etc etc. So sex, alcohol and drugs are not an issue today, but gambling, addiction, disenfranchisement, exploitative business practices, mind-boggling amounts of corruption - they're all back in the same form and for the same reasons, and we'll need the same type of movement to fight against them.
What the progressives of the early 20th century did was not abolish capitalism, but tame it. We don't need to go on a jihad against AI, but we do need to yoke it and disempower the current slate of people who own it and direct it.
> So sex, alcohol and drugs are not an issue today, but gambling, addiction, disenfranchisement, exploitative business practices, mind-boggling amounts of corruption - they're all back in the same form and for the same reasons
what is sex referring to in this context? is this talking about societal attitudes toward sex, sex as in gender, or something else?
Do this exercise: Take your company's market cap and divide it by the total number of lines of code in the company's repo. You'll discover that don't need that much code to create value. For Google (somewhat publicly somewhat known), this is something like $2000 per line of code. Your company is probably not too different, certainly within an order of magnitude.
So let's assume 1 line of correct code is approximately 10 tokens and $1000 of value. If you could theoretically write the correct code, $10 per 1M output tokens should get you $100K worth of value, or 10000x return! Obviously, thought experiment, very theoretical limit no one can achieve, doesn't include thinking tokens, etc, but it's worth thinking about how much your code is actually moving the needle.
Maybe I'm doing things wrong, but I don't need that much code and I don't spend that much time producing code (maybe 1000 lines in a productive day), because the bulk of my time is spent researching, testing, evaluating, thinking, etc to find out how to write only very valuable code. 1000 lines is laughable compared to what tokenmaxxers do, but over the course of a month that's a 200-300K codebase and anyone who has worked on something of that size knows it can support a sizeable business.
I'm a robotics noob currently building a prototype of a snow sweeping robot (www.frost-e.com) using my own design and I'm encouraged to see similar work coming from real places. Namely:
- Zero shot control using a visual harness and action primitives. I've seen this from a few other places as well (https://tml.stanford.edu/homebody/) and it's essentially having a generalist LLM command a robot via a set of predefined actions. Many robots and many tasks can probably be done with this approach, since not everything needs super intricate 6DoF arms or dexterity
- simulation bring-ups: I have a pipeline that takes in satellite imagery and reconstructs the lots and houses in a 3D environment and snows on it so that my virtual robot can learn to clean. With these latest models, you can probably create a higher fidelity digital twin more directly.
- self-improvement: These models (Argon, Astra, etc) can't operate the robot itself, but would be able to create data to distill into smaller models you can actually utilize.
Of course (the watermark is in the lower right), it's just a visualization. I'm spending my money buying parts for the prototype instead of professional renders.
You need to disclose that more clearly, at first glance I thought your actual prototype was pictured in the video until I noticed the snow just magically disappeared. I didn't even notice the watermark, and even if I had I wouldn't know that the random 4-pointed star meant "AI Generated Video".
I'd much rather see videos of a prototype than a fictional video that has no bearing on how the thing actually works. Especially since you list pricing on your website, making visitors think it's a currently-operating business.
Assuming the expected thing happens and Trump gets shellacked in the midterms, do Americans think this will have some impact (ie reverse or accelerate) the current trend of cuts to science, cracking down on foreign students, cuts to NIH, HHS etc? Those being big recent change in this area.
I'm not American, but since those things are being done by the executive branch, with the approval of the Supreme Court, I'm not sure changes in congress will make much of a difference.
Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.
Oiy you people are boring. The US will remain a world power just due to its geographical position. It owns the Americas economically and militarily. This is something no other country in the world is close to capable of doing.
Even in the worst case scenario for Trump, the Democrats won't have a veto-proof majority. Trump will need to negotiate much harder and make concessions, but will largely keep doing what he was elected to do.
Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).
Democrats winning the midterms would moderately accelerate this. They won't have a veto-proof majority so they won't be able to enact any of their policies; however, they will be able to prevent Trump from making any improvements. They have shown countless times that harming Trump is more important to them than the good of the country (ex: they're openly cheering for Iran), so you can bet they will have no interest in advancing any sort of new research that has Republican support.
I wouldn't say I support Iran, but I'm not happy that we attacked them in an illegal war of aggression (Congress approves legal wars).
I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.
I disapprove of the Iran war, but to play devils advocate: there's a major shift occurring right now in the way wars are fought. The Ukraine-Russia war has made it clear that conventional militaries will find themselves in a meat grinder in the next war.. that includes the US.
Iran is one of the largest drone producers... and the US military is doing live testing of anti-drone weapons and energy directed weapons in the straight of hormuz against Iranian drones.
A lot of Americans are going to die in the next war if we don't figure out the right way to maintain our dominance against these new tactics.
Trump hasn’t proposed any improvements except maybe year round DST, so we wouldn’t miss it much. Trump has tried to brand the democrats as pro-Iran for not supporting his war, and it has worked on some people like you, but most of us don’t see it his way. You can be against a war and not for the country the war is with.
Sure there is, many countries have successfully thrown off personalist authoritarian regimes and transitioned to being inclusive democracies with a strong rule of law. The problem is that Americans are very far from realizing that they have a problem, the magnitude of their problem, and the time and effort it'll take to fix this problem. It's a generational project that starts with throwing most of the current cabinet in jail, however this view is very far from the mainstream and things will keep getting worse before more people come to the same conclusion.
For real? You still have feudal titles and a monarch. In your land some humans are literally created as more human than others. Your government literally asks the monarch for permission to do democracy. But you'll lecture Americans on throwing off the strong man.
Totes for reals, yes, because I understand the difference between de jure and de facto.
The failure mode you're observing in the US is that one partisan hack can write a memo in the correct linguistic style, submit it to a council with a majority of other partisan hacks, and like magic anything can become legal or illegal, because everything was done in the correct linguistic style. Actual practice does not matter. There are lots of examples of this over the last two years, perhaps the case against the 14th amendment is a good starting point to see how this works.
> There are lots of examples of this over the last two years
And an equal number in your country. Do not lecture Americans on freedom and virtue. Your country has its share of shortcomings, your economy structured to a higher degree to benefit a class of oligarchs. Your politicians are liars and thieves like any other. Wait your turn.
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