Economic Shock Doctrine works great for the oligarchs. Less well for everyone else. So it's not strange that Milei wants to scam his supporters and hand oligarchs a direct way to show their gratitude.

It's scamming the true believers and creates an obfuscated channel for the oligarchs to deliver the carrots / bribes. When Trump launched his memecoin and got a question he waved at the tech billionaires and said "it's peanuts for these guys". Unfortunately nobody followed up with asking if that meant those guys were the ones transferring money to Trump through the memecoin.

This is a civil case, right? Are there any criminal cases ongoing (as far as you know)?

I was thinking the other day about when some twenty years ago EU and EU countries created pretty drastic criminal laws for copyright violations. And also about how they included both jail time and punitive damages, so that in EU countries that doesn't otherwise use punitive damages, only copyright crimes can be punished such.

These laws were of course ghost written by lobbyists from large corporations, often from the US. But you can't say that when pushing it through, so they were officially created to protect authors, artists, musicians and composers.

So it would be funny - and potentially very profitable - if for example some (or a lot) of authors reported for example Meta for their crime of creating local copies of books from LibGen before using it as training materials.

Now, I think the law is there to protect big corporations and if push comes to show relevant ministers and prosecutors might get invited to a trip to the US to understand how to interpret the law. But funny, and potentially very profitable.

"We can't get people to eat less meat and more vegetables, therefore we must invest billions so that we can get to the logical endpoint: million dollars steaks!"

"Or at least, that is what we told them. Now, feast on the most expensive meat yet as we now can literally eat up the planets resources!"

Evil laughter as the billionaires twirl their mustaches and salivates.

Having problems fitting enough GPT-3's under that trenchcoat?

I have not followed any current debate, so this is just my own thoughts. I expect any battle between Disney and Microsoft to end with a deal where consumers and independent producers are worse off.

Similar to how YouTube often hands out copyright strikes for musicians uploading their own music, in a possible future you might need an AI license to upload any work to any platform of size. I mean, you don't technically have to, it is just that that the AI driven filter will otherwise strike you faster than Tumblr hiding images of trans women. Oh, and when you fold and get the AI license, you notice that it includes signing away your rights to not have your uploaded work be part of the AI training materials.

Maybe I am just jaded. But until AI crashes and burns the in my opinion most likely outcome of legal proceedings is splitting the loot in proportion to the power of the interested parties. On the other hand I don't expect anything good to come out of letting AI companies run wild. So I dearly hope they destroy each other, but I expect them to embrace.

Did you remember to take relativity into account?

Is the AI lying? wonders the Guardian and turns to this guy:

“As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious,” said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research.

Who of course validates the sentient AI frame. They should have asked him if this means that we are closer to Terminator or Matrix.

I am not an expert, but I did take a couple of semesters of history, and I find him rather annoying.

Somebody who should have been infuriated was Manuel Eisner, who wrote the paper Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime. It's a really good paper, and I have seen Pinker misquote it, so he can't claim ignorance.

Eisner's argument, which I find persuasive, is that it was not the state power increase as such that decreased private violence. Because if that was the case, southern Europe wouldn't have lagged as much as it did. Rather it was the transformation of the nobility from personally very violent knights and lords, to officers and bosses who wields state violence. And that happened at different times, matching the decline in private violence. With the nobility no longer needing personal violence, it goes down. Quite different from Pinker's take.

And then there is the question of where that state capacity for violence was wielded. I don't think Pinker includes Queen Victoria in his rouge gallery, yet the famines in India killed about as many as the ones in the Soviet Union and Communist China, and those are usually counted as state violence.

On the rise and fall of violent crime in the west during the 70ies and 80ies, there has been many candidates, but most fall away because they can't explain it both in western Europe and the US. One good candidate is leaded gasoline leading to lead poisoned babies growing up and becoming more violent in the crucial young adult age. It matches, but I haven't seen any proper attempts to really test it, by for example comparing cities to the countryside.

And to add, admitting that Tumblr had an admin who charged for banning trans women: Important.

Explaining wtf that was all about: Not important.

He probably should be in rehab.

I think funding and repetition are the fundamental building blocs here, rather than the human psyche itself. I have talked with otherwise bright people who have read an article by some journalist (not necessarily a rationalist) who has interviewed AI researchers (probably cultists, was it 500 million USD that was pumped into the network?) who takes AI doom seriously.

So you have two steps of people who in theory are paid to evaluate and formulate the truth, to inform readers who don't know the subject matter. And then add repetition from various directions and people get convinced that there is definitely something there (propaganda and commercials work the same way). Claiming that it's all nonsense and cultists appears not to have much effect.

It looks like they combine the hubris of an anarchist or a communist group that talks about being the vanguard of the proletariat while being like five people (and Steve only comes for the snacks, and Mike is probably a fed) with the methods of an upper class philanthropy association that has gala dinners and discuss the problems of poverty (Upper class twit voice: is it that the poor are stupid, of bad stock or just lazy? Maybe all three!)

Somehow it's not beneficial to their mental health, or anything else really.