My opinions, worth every penny you paid me for them
Exclusive: Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google
The problem is that (if you live in the USA) your and my tax dollars are spent by national security agencies polluting Reddit with content from sock-puppet accounts to promote certain agendas.
This means, that by design, Google will be training its AI on untrustworthy sources.
Nothing about this plan is wise.
I know that Google does plenty of stupid things accidentally, but this seems willfully stupid.
Dear FutureMe,
Just saw this new video of a dystopian future: ROSE | Short Film by Omid Pakbin
It is well done. Omid says he got the entire film done for $8,000.
I’d like to post it in the politics channel of some of the Discord servers I’m on, where my Circle-Of-Friends-On-The-Internet hang out. Well, I’d like to, but being on OpenSuSE, the Discord app is broken because the publisher has a new version out, and they don’t publish to the OpenSuSE repositories. I have to wait until a community member packages it for me. I have a running list of when Discord is working versus not working here: Discord app update – hooray! 🙂
As of this writing, Discord has been down since the 12th, and today is the 17th.
Anyway, if I’m still alive in 2028, how close did Omid nail it?
We already know that China is implementing the social credit score system today.
Seven days after Biden was elected, a guy, Douglass Mackey, was charged and found guilty of a tweet in the 2016 Presidential Race. Yes, in 2023 he was sentenced to 7 months in prison for a 2016 joke tweet. “Social Media Influencer Douglass Mackey Sentenced after Conviction for Election Interference in 2016 Presidential Race“
Recently there was a hearing on weaponizations of the government, where testimony was provided that after the 2016 election, federal officials said “something had to be done”. In their view, an outsider presidential candidate was such a threat that they needed to implement some censorship regimes: and they did so. Both Facebook and Twitter (pre- Elon) censored the Hunter Biden laptop story so that it wouldn’t spread and change the 2020 election.
There have been several hearings about weaponizations of the federal government to implement a censorship industrial complex. The censorship industrial complex was proposed in 2018, and was in force at Facebook and Twitter for the 2020 election. We wouldn’t know about Google unless a whistleblower comes forward; but their deplatforming of certain people on YouTube is obvious censorship.
Google, for weeks, was scrubbing news about the biggest denier of Pizzagate being found to be a producer of child porn. Today, they no longer say “this story is developing therefore it is too new to report on”, but they don’t link to much that makes Slade Sohmer look bad. They (mostly) only link to news that it’s all conspiracy theory.
So Google is on board with the censorship industrial complex. Facebook is too. Twitter / X under Elon appears to be the only social media company against it. Rumble will gladly host people against it, but they aren’t gaining much traction.
Bruce Schneier also points out that spying on people will only get worse with AI.
So the question is: just how close to truth is Omid Pakbin’s video going to get? It’s a great movie short: less than twelve minutes long. Very high quality, and amazing that it was pulled together which such a low budget.
https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/where-have-all-the-liberals-gone
I think it is a valid question, but from my point of view the answer is sinister. Although this is a nice catchy headline, the question Matt is asking might better be stated “Why have Liberals switched to being against freedom of speech?”
My answer is that Liberals have a faith that the government solves problems; that the people in government are good folk doing good works.
Me, I’m a Libertarian, so from my point of view the more honest phrase is “… government are good folk doing good works (with other people’s money)”. Conservatives and Libertarians will donate to the charity of their choice, thank you very much. We trust charities to spend money wisely because their funding is optional, provided by their donors. If they waste money, the donors will leave. But I digress.
Back to the problem: Government has been “regulatory captured” (to use a contemporary phrase) by the deep state, who are more interested in control than good.
I’m sure it is not lost on the deep state that revolutionary forms of communication media cause tumultuous change. Hilter harnessed the power of radio; prior to radio somone wanting to be a leader could only talk at 500 – 1,000 people at a time (at most) in a beer hall or stadium. Slightly more with electricity and amplification. After radio, Hilter could talk at 100,000, then a million, then millions, every week.
So along comes Facebook and Twitter, and of course the deep state wants to control them. To control them is to control the future.
Were people allowed to converse freely, they might question the decision to cede any power to the deep state (which does not run on democratic representation).
Shouldn’t government be completely transparent about who is spending your (taxpayer) money? Who are these people, and why are we funding them? How do we stop them?
I can imagine this leads to a reaction: “Oof. These people are going to destroy everything. Quick! We need bread and circuses! Stat!” And when that isn’t enough, we get this:
From that point of view, Donald Trump was a masterful psy-op. It is still working today.
Although personally I don’t think the deep state is that smart. I think they blundered by thinking that there was zero chance that Donald Trump would actually win; but they misunderstood just how bad Hillary Clinton was as candidate. I could digress some more, but I’ll stop.
Matt Taibbi asks why are Liberals so on-board with suppressing free thought / free speech? My answer is it is because they are listening to the whispers in their ear from their deep state advisors: “If you let the rabble say their terrible things, everything will go to hell. You (we) will lose everything gained. You’ve got to control the narrative – no matter what! (First Ammendment be damned).”
Ultimately, the deep state has successfully convinced Liberals that they should not serve the public: the public should serve them. Only if they can do their work unfettered will they be successful in their good works – so don’t trust the public: rule them.
It’s the deep state way.
My stay at the Holiday Inn Express in Gridley (Oroville Lake) wasn’t particularly terrible. However, during the checkout process, something incredibly bothersome occurred: they adamantly refused to provide a printed receipt (folio). The counter agent simply refused, conveniently attributing it to management’s decision.
It’s possible that this nonsensical decision stemmed from misguided management. I don’t hold the agent responsible for following instructions. Nonetheless, two aspects make this situation particularly irksome:
Firstly, I understand why financial departments require receipts: scammers exist. Secondly, they lied about sending me an email receipt.
Anyone can make a reservation, receive the email confirmation, print it out, present it to the finance department for reimbursement, and then cancel the reservation. Financial departments are aware of this, which is why they rightfully demand proof of actual hotel stays. The receipt (folio) contains the final charges and the checkout date.
The Holiday Inn Express in Gridley, California, flat out refused to provide me with the receipt/folio: all because someone wanted to save a penny on a piece of paper.
This would have been less troublesome if they had actually sent me the email receipt as promised. However, they failed to do so. I highly doubt that the agent knew for sure—she was probably instructed to inform customers that they would receive an email.
To clarify, the email receipt did not end up in my junk mail folder. I’ve been an email administrator for twenty years. I ought to be able to figure that out, no?
This ordeal frustrated me to the point that I decided to leave a negative review on Expedia. That’s when I discovered that Expedia allows property owners to censor the reviews they display. Each time I submitted a review, I received a rejection message claiming it was unacceptable. I tried toning it down and making it friendlier, but it still didn’t meet their standards. Only after significantly revising it did they finally accept it.
The most valuable lesson I learned from this experience is that Expedia’s review system is untrustworthy. I have no intention of ever using their service again.
I got prompt to try out the New Outlook (preview release). Sure, why not? Probably some of our clients are going to upgrade, and it would be good to know ahead of time what they will encounter.
I chose the button to “switch” and got a prompt to import the old settings. Sure, go for it. I got a progress bar as it imported.
I don’t know if Microsoft invented the progress bar; probably it was on the Apple Lisa (and before that, the Xerox Alto). The first one I ever saw was on Windows, though. They are fundamentally a good idea, and a kindness to the user. “We know this is taking a while, so here’s an estimate of how long it’s going to take, with real time updates.”
And they can be tough to do, too. The amount of time it takes to project when a thing is done isn’t necessarily known ahead of time. Just figuring how long something might take could be as long as simply doing the thing. If you have to traverse a list to find out how long the list is, and the amount of time to work on each item in the list is small, you might have been better off just working the list in the first traversal, and not bothering with the progress bar.
Turns out, the “progress bar” in the new Outlook import settings dialog box is not a progress bar at all. It’s a flag wave. It does nothing except to waste your time and try to keep your attention.
Back in the 1990’s, there was a Spanish language television show, the Xuxa Show, which used to employ people to stand in the background and slowly wave flags. That’s all they did. You could tell the flag wavers were bored. They needed to keep the flags (slowly) waving, but they brought nothing to the show except (visual) background noise. It was known that people’s attention can be grabbed by seeing movement. Since the show was aimed at children, the audience was known to have short attention spans. How to increase attention? Wave a flag.
It’s stupid, but it works.
Someone at Microsoft decided that this import settings dialog box should have a flag wave; but wait – we’ll make it even better: we’ll disguise it as a progress bar!
The flag wave kind of an insult to the audience though. You aren’t worth actual content, but we want to keep you staring at the screen, so here’s a waving flag. I also see this in a lot of news type television shows, where the camera slowly slides around or gradually zooms in. It’s like the Ken Burn’s Effect, except they attempt to be so slow that you don’t notice it consciously. When I do notice it, I’m annoyed. It’s a cheap trick and an insult.
So I’m annoyed that someone at Microsoft proposed a flag wave instead of a progress bar, and, they disguised it as a progress bar, and no-one at Microsoft has enough respect for their end users to say “stop it!”
This happened Wednesday December 14, at 8:24 AM. I was wondering when Amazon was going to deliver this package, so I checked the order page, and they said they had delivered it already. I checked the Ring video doorbell history, and here is the thief.
h/t to one of Scott Adams Twitter followers, responding to a challenge to summarize 2022 in the snarkiest way possible.
The whole thing is a psy op run by incompetents at behest of elites inflicted upon the aimless. It came about through sixty years of indoctrination: “Buy this shit from our advertiser; that will make you happy.”
These past few years at work, we moved from Novell to Microsoft. It has definitely been a move for the worse.
| Novell | Feature -poor | High quality | Low expense | Security: low profile |
| Microsoft | Feature -rich | Low quality | High expense | Security: target rich environment |
I’m just going to say that I dearly love (not):
New-DistributionGroup -RoomList which cannot be seen in admin.exchange.microsoft.com. New feature? Microsoft says Yay! Actually making it available to end user administrators? Ain’t no-one got time for that. Certainly this has been vetted thoroughly for security, too.These were all in the last three days. I’ve seen nothing but this sort of low quality software for so many months now. Don’t even get me started on SharePoint.
Don’t forget – Microsoft will break your stuff if you do business with a competitor.
Dear Lord I wish I could retire tomorrow.
As I mentioned before, I intensely disliked Microsoft under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. That post was a record of six times that Microsoft shipped code to fuck over you and me, if you were a customer of particular Microsoft partners. I should have included IBM OS/2, which was another case way back when.
Actually, since then another one popped up. Microsoft shipped code to all their partners for quality assurance testing – everything worked fine – and then at the last minute, they made a change and shipped. The monthly updates then happened to “accidentally” wipe out the user’s ZENworks configuration, with less than one week’s notice.
But I want to go back and rehash the underlying problem.
Microsoft won.
It won by beating your daughter for looking at another guy.
What type of morality did Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer maintain, that it was acceptable to them to ship code that deliberately fucks over their customers who happen to also be customers of other companies?
Some of those companies were actual partners, too. I remember hearing management at Novell saying “When it comes down to it, we are a Windows software publisher.” The bulk of their products were MS Windows applications and the systems to wrangle them.
That Microsoft would backstab it’s partners was my point about LIM EMS. LIM = Lotus, Intel, Microsoft. EMS = Expanded Memory Specification. The original PC’s had very real memory limitations. There was a desperate need for machines to have more memory, and for programmers to be able to access it. So Lotus Development got together with Intel and Microsoft, and they hashed out a spec that programmers could use. They published the spec. Programmers (including the programmers at Lotus) started writing to the spec.
Suddenly, your spreadsheet could have more than 80 rows and 10 columns.
If you were doing a lot of “what if” calculations back then, the memory constraints that 640 KB imposed on you were huge. Everyone needed this problem solved, if the Personal Computer wasn’t going to remain an expensive toy.
The Personal Computer went from a toy to a useful tool. Everyone won. Intel sold more chips, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, PC’s Limited (later became Dell), Gateway 2000 – they all sold computers, and Microsoft sold a license to DOS with every one of them. Lotus sold a copy of 1-2-3 to 90% of the PC buyers, because that was the point.
Sure, the “what if” calculations had been done for decades: by hand. It was a miserable process. Suddenly, “what if?” was done in minutes, and then seconds, and then milliseconds!
Maybe I need a $5,000 loan, and the bank will let me borrow and pay it back over 60 months at a 10.5% interest. What if I can come up with $300 so I only need to borrow $4,700, and, pay it back over 63 months instead? Do I save money? What does the monthly payment look like?
What about paying $4,700 back over 60 months, but paying an 11% rate? Do I save money? What does the monthly payment look like?
By hand, the formula is Principle + Interest – Payment => Balance. The next row’s Principle is the previous row’s Balance. A five year loan is “only” 60 rows. A 30 year mortgage is 360 rows. How much did it cost you? Sum the Interest column. Yes, you can do it by hand. But it is drudge work.
Lotus 1-2-3 made number crunching magic happen. Microsoft benefited from vastly expanded PC sales.
And then Microsoft saw you spending money with Lotus. You’re looking at another guy, and, spending money with him.
Time to pick a fight, beat your face, and strangle your neck. Or in Microsoft’s case, change the rules by shipping changed code and (surprise!) crashing your program.
“But, baby, I wouldn’t have to beat you up if you didn’t spend with other guys! I love you so much! It’s your fault that I care so much.”
Or, cutting away the bullshit, Microsoft was evil. Harming it’s customers so that it could destroy it’s competing partners was always on the table.
And eventually, Microsoft won. Or are you still using Lotus 1-2-3 today? OS/2? WordPerfect? NetWare?
Important follow up to this post.
I had bought a ticket to Detroit back in September, and I did buy travel insurance. The insurance company, AIG, played me for a sucker. That is a lesson learned.
The event I was going to attend was cancelled due to the pandemic. This is pretty much the definition of unforeseen event I had no power over; or in other words, the reason one buys insurance.
AIG however, is saying that Delta has offered me a credit to use in the near future, therefore I have not suffered a loss, so go kick rocks, stupid.
The event was cancelled, and it is only held once every five years. The next one won’t be in Detroit, either.
I have zero plans to fly anywhere in the next, well, ever. I mean, it could happen. The last time I flew, it was to attend a funeral. So maybe if someone in my circle of friends gets deathly ill, I’ll need to fly. But those are anti-plans.
The deceit AIG and Delta are implementing here is that a flight to anywhere is as valuable as a flight to a specific place at specific dates – which I am now denied the opportunity to, because of things beyond my control. I cannot wave a magic wand and recreate this event some time in the future.
I’m just out the money. Salt in the wound is that I stupidly paid an additional fee for insurance for the flight.
It was a mistake to bail out “too big to fail AIG”. I hope when it comes time to bail out Delta, we refuse that. And if AIG can suffer some amazing losses, that would make me smile too. Certainly I will try to never be a customer of either of them, ever, in the future.