In many countries it is legal to promise a tax rebate when you are in office. Many cons (oops, I mean conservatives) use this as voting bait for people with no critical thinking skills, and then turn around and give their corporate masters and billionaires huge tax cuts that make those same voters loose critical services that makw them pay out of pocket.

In other words, "Heres $200 to vote for me so i can make your life way more expensive on a yearly basis through medical care, less regulation, less infrastructure repair".

This is the same grift, but more blatant and obviously something that would never get fulfilled, which is why the number is so big. Bigger numbers make critical thinking fail harder, especially when times are economically tough. It tends to get cons reelected even when they are not doing well in polls, speaking from the Canadian experience in this.

Matrix is the proper space for a privacy focused community. Discord as an application is privacy invasive and requires ID to be provided. This has nothing to do with a public community not being private. It's the wrong technology choice for what they claim to be focused on and there is no getting around that.

I mean, see where you're going there. Bread may be a bad example because I can get sliced bread from a local or regional producer that is more conscientious. If any billionaire is pushing me to buy sliced bread its going to be some mass produced crap like Dempsters that I would never buy anyway because I do not support corporate food where I can avoid it as I've lived through enough mini crises in the last 30 years to have learned the hard way that when things get tough, its the local and regional creators that keep things on the shelf.

AI however, is only good in the older forms where models were made to do one thing and do it well with reasonable levels of compute. Those were sustanable. LLMs, no matter where you run them, cost disgusting amounts of compute to train and no matter how well you train them will only evey have a statistical chance of being right, and they will never have 100% accuracy without throwing even more power at them.

And, LLMs will never reach AGI. If we want something that really mimics humans, then what we need are many tiny, efficiently trained models for specific tasks with high accuracy, and then interface between all those skills with a very accurate task comprehension model, and then maybe we will get to AGI, because this is basically how humans work.

I still maintain that LLMs are the wrong tech, at the wrong time, and the only thing their proliferation is being pushed for is their questionable capability to enable ths surveillance state we were warned against for the last 40-50 years in scifi. And the CEOs want this because people are getting more and more fwd up with their shit.

All LLMs will bring the world is misery. There is no acceptable use for them and I am sticking to that line in every product decision these days. They were built on the backs of free content that the world created and a ton of copyrighted work that was just blatantly stolen.

My thought it was over blown until I saw them claiming that anyone on Mastodon is "not a user" and them saying that any real users are on their Discord and not complaining.

Uh, OK - Discord was semi-excusable up until 2025, but at this point anyone using it to communicate with their users is certainly not considering how bad that channel is for user privacy. Im a Graphene User, I will not use Discord, and I am not going to continue to use an OS thats supporting the rapid expansion of datacenters through the use of AI.

Using tech that billionaires push makes them richer and gives them control.

Tell me how does not using their crap give them control, exactly?

To drive this home, Trump tower is the 32nd highest building in New York

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_New_York_City

Don't forget the talk about sterilizing autistics and making them work on farms.

That one wasnt Trump, but someone in his or RFKs spheres.

EDIT: Ah yes, RFKs "wellness farms".

Or better, tax the fucking billionaires and get some better funding in the departments that actually help people and fund a proper free medicare program and save people more than $5000/year

Just what we needed, a little Minority Report salted into the dystopian salad of this fucking timeline.

You'll fall behind in the race to the lowest IQ as they all turn their thinking over to AI and get lazier while you continue to exercise your brain.

Fuck 'em.

Ah ok, so its not RCS support but rather working around the OS not suporting RCS. Did some reading yesterday and now understand that RCS needs some low level system support to work.