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  • retrospectology@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldNeo-Nazis Are All-In on AI
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    7 days ago

    AI has a bad name because it is being pursued incredibly recklessly and any and all criticism is being waved away by its cult-like supporters.

    Fascists taking up use of AI is one of the biggest threats it presents and people are even trying to shrugg that off. It’s insanity the way people simply will not acknowledge the massive pitfalls that AI represents.


  • Yup, American manufacturers are still treating EVs as if they’re this exotic new toy for upper-middle class people or silicon valley douche bros, rather than getting onboard with the concept of them just being a utilitarian thing that needs to be marketed to normal people.

    Give me the EV equivalent of the Geo Metro and I’ll buy it in a heart beat. I’m not taking out a second mortgage for a car that tries to drive itself and whatever dumb gimmicks they come up with, but I will 100% buy an affordable, practical EV designed with efficiency and economy in mind.


  • Totalitarianism is always when the other guy does it

    No…totalitarianism is an actual distinct system of governance when the state controls every aspect of daily life, communication and economic activity. It’s an actual word with meaning.

    It’s got an anti-war infestation that’s regularly accused of being tankies for failing to clap for the correct set of tanks.

    Ok, I’m not sure if we’re talking through a translator app or something, but I didn’t get banned from lemmy.ml for being “pro-war” I got banned for mentioning a historical fact about the Great Leap Forward and acknowledging other atrocities like the genocide occurring in Xinjiang.

    If someone is anti-war they would be against those types of things as well. Tankies instead deny that those events occurred/are occurring, that’s why they’re so easy to spot and how people know they’re on Lemmy – they literally can’t condemn the CCP for any of the things they purport to be against when it comes to other countries, since it’s counter-productive to their true goals to criticize the CCP.

    By contrast an honestly anti-war progressive type of person would be just as clear-eyed about their own government as they are the CCP. That’s being anti-war, you can’t be selective or try to ignore degrees of difference just because it’s politically uncomfortable, that’s just being a mouth-piece for a specific flavor of authoritarianism.

    Calmly explaining this to my US Postal Service and my Tennessee Valley Authority

    Again, running public services is not the same as the state owning and controlling all businness and industry. If the Post Office was used to control speech, that would be totalitarian use of a public service.

    I think you’re just being obtuse at this point. You might be down for totalitarianism and the abolishment of individual freedoms, most people are not. Since, you know, having no rights kind of suck ass.


  • I know some Irish Republicans, Spanish Catalonians, German anti-Zionist political prisoners, and … waves hand at Poland, Hungary, and Russia

    Quite a few native Europeans who would tell you differently.

    Europe has some authoritarian governments, not totalitarian dictatorships that approach anywhere near the all-encompassing control of the CCP. Hungary maybe I guess, which isn’t a country I’d recommend taking tech from either.

    Ireland is not comparable to China though, that’s an extreme reach. We’re not talking about right-wing groups seeking power within democracies, we’re talking about uni-party state control.

    I don’t think the folks on Lemmy are at any risk of that.

    Lemmy definitely has a tankie infestation already. I got banned from lemmy.ml for discussing Tiananmen and Hong Kong. Pointing out that the Great Leap Forward resulted in millions of deaths was labeled “cia misinformation” by the mods. It’s a throughly compromised instance.

    Lemmy users are not immune to tankie and Rusdian trolls, and thinking that they are is actually a weakness that gets exploited by those bad actors.

    Imagine thinking government should dictate the terms of business and not the other way around.

    Normal regulatory duties of a government are a far cry from the state having total ownership and control of business and using that control as part of a coercive campaign to suppress human rights, dissent and individual freedoms.

    Whatever authoritarianism is festering in other countries, China is still on an entirely different level, it’s not really a question.


  • European countries aren’t totalitarian states. This isn’t a question of culture, it’s an issue regarding the one and only state power that’s making decisions.

    This is the danger of being lulled into thinking China is a normal country. Yes, there are long histories in China and are (vanishing) diverse cultures in China but that’s irrelevant when talking about the actions of the state, which is all encompassing and overrules culture and diversity every time.

    It’s the state that owns and controls these companies, it’s the state that dictates their policy and usage, and since the state is fascist and actively seeking to undermine democracy across the global, it is wise to treat the products of that state as a threat.


  • I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.

    It’s not that Youtube creators don’t deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let’s remember) it’s that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.

    I’d be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I’m betting the ratio is not as slim as they make it sound.


  • It’s theft of labor without any compensation, aimed at cheapening the very value of that labor.

    A human artist can, and often does, train simply by looking at the real world. The art they then produce is a result of that knowledge being interpreted and stylized by their own brain and perception. The decision making on how to represent a given subject, what details to add and leave out to achieve an effect, is done by the artist themselves. It’s a product of their internal mental laboring.

    By contrast, if you trained an AI on photos alone it would never, ever produce anything that looks like a drawing or a piece of art, it would never create a stylized piece of art or make a creative decision of its own.

    In order to produce art the AI must be fueled with human created art, that humans labored to produce. The human artists are not being compensated for the use of that labor, and even worse the AI is leveraging that to make the human labor worth less. And what’s more, that AI’s ability will stagnate without further theft of newer, more novel art and concepts.

    Without that keystone of human labor the AI simply can’t function.

    Ripping off so many people at once and so chaotically that you can’t distinguish exactly how any given individual is being exploited doesn’t mean those people aren’t still being ripped off. The machine that the tech bros created could not exist without the stolen labor of the artists.




  • I don’t think it’s really that simple from many trans peoples’ perspective, as it places an obligation on them to out themselves before they even talk to a person. Many trans people’s goal with transition is not to live as “trans” it’s to live as their target gender, not some “other”. Being trans is not a sexuality.

    A better solution would be to have people who don’t want to have the possibility of ever dating any trans person put that as part of their profile.

    If people have an issue with doing that then it kind of reveals the truth of the issue for what it is.




  • I do understand how the brigades can be annoying for sure, but I don’t mind arguing with tankies, – I think it’s actually really useful for exposing their propaganda for what it is. It helps expose normal people to counter arguments so that they might become a little more aware, rather than just seeing propaganda go unaddressed and being morel likely to assume it must then be true.

    The only issue I have personally is if the mods are in on it too and delete your posts/comments because you start to make a bit too much sense.


  • I was actually banned for linking to the wiki about the Uyghur genocide and the death toll estimates from the Great Leap forward. It’s not about the gore, it’s about them trying to distance public understanding of the true horror and extreme violence that took place at Tiananmen etc.

    The CCP’s objective for at least the last decade or two has been trying to make the government in China apoear “normal”. Before this latest era people understood clearly that China was extremely authoritarian, but that understanding is being eroded as the CCP puts up a civilized facade, when that’s not the reality – they’re still brutalizing people it’s just so horrifyingly systematic and industrialized that you can’t even see it on the surface anymore due to how they doggedly chase information and dissidents.

    They achieve this by downplaying events like Tiananmen, invasion of Tibet, Uyghur genocide, brutalization of HK etc. They exercise the most extreme measures to silence dissidents even when they are in other countries, and they repeat over and over again how the west is “just as bad!” until it becomes background noise. Having tankies modding communities helps supercharge this effort by allowing them to remove anyone who confronts that narrative, leaving only what they want people to see.


  • Tankie mods don’t moderate in good faith though, to do so would entirely undermine their political objectives. That’s kind of the point of the thread here – to defederate so that the tankies aren’t deciding what people can or cannot see and say.

    I don’t see how the charter idea would actually help with that but maybe I’m not understanding the mechanics of how other mods “weigh in” on ban appeals from other instances.