fiat_lux 🆕 🏠

I’m going to assume you’re in the US for this.

Things you can check for general info:

• Local traditional media mentions to see if they do charity, or quotes about any topic
• https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup for political donations
• Industry-specific news sites for any media releases or interviews
• LinkedIn or one of the scrapers like RocketReach’s public listings to see what their key people’s backgrounds are
• SEC EDGAR database (if they’re a business which has to file reports) to see if their money is going to interesting places
• State gov site (if they have online public records) of business registration info. Look at what other businesses share the same address, or key people, or family shell companies
• Online court records
• local churches / halls / “pro life” or whatever activist groups social media posts for mentions of the business and key people

Things you can check for the far-right:

• The business listings for social media site but I don’t want to boost their SEO. Use the URL bag.com/businesses to access the list and bypass the sign up wall, but the domain name is backwards.
• Conservative business or job board lists. Same SEO issue here. One is this:🎈(the color and object). The other has a 6 letter word commonly seen on UI buttons which doubles as the type of “culture” conservatives blame for all the world’s problems, followed by the layer 3 in the OSI model.

And don’t stop sending out CVs and interviewing. If they are awful, just keep taking their money until you’ve got enough runway or an offer you can be more confident about. Make sure you don’t mention the words related to disability or health conditions in the CVs to prevent AI rejecting them.

Good luck.

This list is weird, aside from the length. They must be using a very greedy regexp for this many instances to have their names partially censored.

The text “buds” has been censored, all the instances using the TLD “university” have had “univer” removed, and the word “hangout” is also gone. “Shitpisscum” made it through, so it can’t just be about slightly naughty words. Also annihilation.social is listed 3 times for some reason.

Are these slurs in a culture I’m not familiar with? Does piefed do this everywhere?

I didn’t see red as risk-free at all. You’re setting yourself up for a post-button Mad Max world where you know all of your fellow survivors are willing to kill you and up to 49% of humanity.

When I was about 12, I got into a discussion about the environment with another kid at school. She told me that it didn’t matter if we ruined the environment of the countries we all live in now, because we could all just move to the Arctic or Antarctica.

I was so surprised by the absurdity of that statement that it stuck with me vividly. To her credit, some years later she asked if I remembered her saying that and then admitted that it was a dumb thing to say. I occasionally remember this as an amusing childhood experience.

Besides the credit part, I remembered it again today for a different reason, this time in a conversation about model collapse.

[Model collapse is] a solved problem. We can see that it’s solved by the fact that AI models continue to get better, despite an increasing amount of AI-generated data being present in the world that training data is being drawn from.
…
AI models are never going to get worse than they are now because if they did get worse we’d just throw them out and go back to the earlier ones that worked better, perhaps re-training with the same data but better training techniques or model architectures.

This is my fault for letting myself get into a discussion about model collapse on the fediverse.

I’m not sure why model collapse isn’t a big topic anymore, but maybe that’s just because the environmental catastrophes are a more pressing concern. To be clear, I’m not concerned about the models themselves, just our increasing inability to verify the authenticity or accuracy of any information we encounter, including search engines just not turning up any useful results.

On a slightly different topic, if anyone has suggestions for how a person could acquire money to live, which can’t involve physical labor, is probably remote-only, and possibly allows part-time flexibility, while unable to move from an expensive location for at least the next couple of years: I’m open to ideas. Because scamming people on Polymarket with a hairdryer sounded far more appealing than it ought.