mountainriver

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I happened to come across an article mentioning the Robinson–Patman Act (from 1936) in relation with wage fixing by algorithm.

From Wikipedia: "a United States federal law that prohibits anticompetitive practices by producers, specifically price discrimination"

It might be relevant here. Obviously I am not a US lawyer specialised in monopoly law.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

We could have a whole discussion about geopolitics, but lets not. This is after all a thread about the AI bubble and what comes next.

The 2% target is a economic expenditure target, not a military readiness target. I think it is kind of obvious that the west is supply constrained in arms, so what happens if every state tries to increase expenditures is that arms become more expensive. Profits go up, stock price go up, and presto you have a possible foundation for a new bubble.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

On 1, I hope you are right that the AI bubble will burst soon.

I am less certain where the next bubble will be, but pretty certain there will be one. We have seen bubble after bubble during the neoliberal era where hot money inflates valuations in a sector, sells it as success and cash out, leaving the bag with banks, governments, pension funds or households. Then it crashes, causing more or less widespread devastation. But those that started the process are now richer and has more money to push into the next bubble, preferably something that is already growing.

So, apart from AI, what is growing now? Weapons manufacturers seem to be doing very well, and weapons and AI are also connected. So my prediction is that the next bubble will be weapons related, probably focused around AI powered drones. As the US is pressuring NATO governments to increase weapons spending, money will pour in directly from governments to the corporations. As long as the threat of on outbreak of peace can be averted, money will keep rolling in.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Crowdstrike offers 10 USD gift cards as apology.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/

Those that try to use them find out that Crowdstrike can't even buy gift cards at scale.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

LLMs just train on which words follow which, right?

So if the version of the text changes every other word, it should mess with them. And if you change every other word to "communism" it should learn that the word "communism" follows logically after most words.

Just spitballing here, but I would find making the robots they intend to replace workers with into communist agitators rather funny.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I must have missed the climate activist getting arrested because of protonmail. Any link or a name to search from?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Good piece.

I would add scammers to the list, and I don't mean fake AI as the public at large isn't aware about just how much "AI" is just off-shoring to someone in a country with lower wages. I mean scam email, posts, DM:s, what have you. Creating the bullshit text to lure the victim has never been easier.

I also think that unfortunately that is one sector where AI might very well be profitable even when it has to carry its real costs.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

To me, the most sneerable thing in that article is where they assume a mechanical brain will evolve from ChatGPT and then assume a sufficiently large quantum computer to run it on. And then start figuring out how to port the future mechanical brain to the quantum computer. All to be able to run an old thought experiment that at least I understood as highlighting the absurdity of focusing on the human brain part in the collapse of a wave function.

Once we build two trains that can run near the speed of light we will be able to test some of Einstein's thought experiments. Better get cracking on how we can get enough coal onboard to run the trains long enough to get the experiments done.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

On an old tablet I used Opera because it had a nifty function where you could zoom in and it made the text larger and enforced line breaks so that the text still fit the shown space.

I know Opera is horrible in many respects, but I kept that tablet for reading in the evening. Being able to zoom in and still just scroll down was very useful when tired.

Anyone happen to know any similar add ons for Firefox?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

Ah, but checking the actual grade gives a correct answer. Who wouldn't want to change that for a statistically likely answer?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Even if no one can use the wealth, wouldn't it be placed in some kind of trust in order to keep accruing wealth rather than be decimated by inflation?

And then, as the frozen rich wouldn't use any of their wealth, it would just keep accruing wealth. They would be perfect, frozen, capitalists. The control of that wealth would give power, and controllers of the trusts can gain even wealth and thus power more by coordinating. The power would only keep growing as more rich freeze themselves to keep up with and join the growing trust of trusts.

Living in a society where the frozen owners would own all the means of production, these frozen owners would naturally be hailed as sleeping kings in order to motivate me system. They may even be seen as something godlike.

Then one day, if one wakes up, it would cause immediate power struggles, as well as give a flash point for the discontent of the billions of impoverished serfs slaving away for the controllers. But the controllers would mobilise violence, and....

Oh, HG Wells already wrote this story. Typical!

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