I started rawdoging urls a while ago.

Works best when you’ve got a web ring or other friendly community of contributors to reference against one another.

But those are few and fair between in the modern day.

But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product.

That’s definitely one model for operating a public service, but its far from the only one.

Citations Needed is the antivenom to the cobra bite that is listening to cable news during your teens/twenties. God bless Molly White and her crusade to do real actual journalism.

Because their positions as executives is predicated on it. Literally how they got to these vaunted positions in the first place. The dispassionate cruelty and relentless self-aggrandizement is what enticed their predecessors and investor allies to promote them to the top of the Org Chart of one of the wealthiest companies in the world.

Employees are, after all, perfectly interchangeable and disposable. Finding new ways to squeeze them for their labor value is the best way to extract additional profit from them.

Except none of this shit works, so its work harder so we can throw all your code in the trash in another five years when we chase the Next Big Thing.

Did Trump send Ukraine weapons that Obama and Biden withheld?

“The weapons that Ukraine used in the early days of this war to fend off the Russian invasion are the weapons that Donald Trump sent, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden had refused to send,” Cotton said.

Cotton spokesperson Patrick McCann told PolitiFact that Cotton was referring to Javelins, antiarmor missiles provided by the Trump administration. In 2014, Obama rejected a request by Ukraine for those weapons. Biden was Obama’s vice president.

Trump reversed Obama’s policy; in 2018, the Trump administration approved a plan to sell Ukraine Javelin missiles for $47 million.

“As you can see, it is clear that this form of lethal aid was both important and provided by the Trump administration and not the Obama-Biden one,” McCann said.

That’s from Tom Cotton, one of Trump’s fiercest advocates.

They were for the Ukraine War before they were against it. Pure shills for the MIC. They’re only running away from Ukraine now that the conflict has gone south and they can’t preen in front of a Mission Accomplished banner on this one.

Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media

Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You’re still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You’re still securing the URL from a private DNS. You’re still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).

Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.

There’s not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.

If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting “Communities I’m interested in” on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth “Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!” reactionary in between instances, that’s an immediate turn off that I don’t think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.

Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we’re all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).

Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.

Putin himself is a CIA asset

That’s not exactly a new or particularly radical view. Going back to Yeltsin’s soft coup in the 90s, combined with Putin’s rapid adoption of Shock Doctrine economic policies in Saint Petersburg and then across the country through United Russia… I mean, when the son of your old arch rival’s CIA Director looks you in the eyes and says “This guy’s got a good soul”, come on. That’s gotta throw at least a couple of red flags.

So, if Putin owns Trump, and CIA owns Putin, and Trump owns CIA, then who’s controlling who in this crazy world?

The “X is a puppet of Y” line has always been the jangling keys of international policy. You don’t have to look that hard to find the hands of international finance behind both leaders. The Mercers and the Kochs and Thiel/Musk/Zuck Silicon Valley cartel on one end. The industrial billionaires who took over Russian heavy industry - Mikhelson and Mordashov and Prokhorov - on the other. But they’re the untouchables. Trump and Putin are the ones you’re supposed to take aim at.

What’s bleaker than that is the recognition that there isn’t some shadowy singular evil hand moving all the pieces on the board. Nobody is actually in control. Trump is lashing out at people purely out of a sense of petty revenge, and the conservative allies already in the federal government are willing to help him get it. Putin’s fumbling grasp at a revanchist Slavic Ethno-Superstate is the result of him drinking too much of his own koolaid. The techbros and the old oil money are all burnt out from cocaine and ketamine, chasing the ideological fantasies laid out by their parents and grandparents, most of whom are long dead.

A lot of this is purely opportunistic greed and petty backbiting. Trump hating “liberals in the media” for embarrassing him ten years ago. Putin resenting his country’s fall from grace and lashing out at every neighbor in shelling range. Both seeing a kindred spirit in the other, as they’re set on megalomaniac revenge sprees.

It’s crazy to even talk about the EU in the face the deep contradictions racking the continent since the '08 crash. Like, Italy’s already outright Fash. Macron is playing footsie with LePen on immigration to keep the demsuccs at bay. Hungary and Poland are reactionary wastelands. Greece is staring down the barrel of an increasingly militant Turkyie in between earthquakes and droughts rocking their domestic economy. Germany and the Nords are beating back their own fascist resurgence.

None of these states seem particularly aligned as the EU parliament just becomes a dumping ground for idiots and assholes. This isn’t a glorious Rebel Alliance, its a clown car with the Check Engine light burnt out.

The end-game for AI (and Crypto, increasingly) is to incorporate into federal systems and financial systems in such a way that they can’t be removed without gutting departments or upsetting major donors.

These are entirely parasitic organizations. They only exist to deplete the assets of the organizations they latch onto.

He’s at least an order of magnitude bigger than Holmes. She only squandered billions and injured thousands. Altman’s looking to squander trillions and (if his endless thirst for water and electricity is continuously sated) kill millions.

AI is only losing money because its too good at its job. If you invest another $1T, you can get in on the ground floor of the most transformative grift of the national security state since the dosing rod.

Will this ever happen for OpenAI, i have no idea, but that is the bet.

More than a bet. It’s an engineered outcome, as Microsoft tries to force people into their AI walled garden.

Only question is how many people go along for the ride.

Uber was running a deficit for a long time until it turned profitable.

Uber is a great example of negative externalities, as the average Uber driver doesn’t earn money once you depreciate the value of the car being used.

That said, if things improve both in terms of the quality of responses you can get from models as well as reduced costs to run them, then there is definitely huge economic potential.

The line I’ve seen on AI boils down to this. AI won’t meet human economic potential. But it will run cheaper, which means paper growth, which means the investment is “worth it” at an industry level.

But at a macro level? Economy wide? Big Number may go up, but real productivity is going to slide the more AI attempts to replace human labor.

How do you profit of a company that hemorrhages a few billion a year?

Even Amazon had AWS, which was the absurdly profitable core business at the center of a cost bleeding distribution center.

OpenAI is doing nothing to generate economic value.

I did not realize the distance between the US and Canada was so big.