analognoise

Do we really want people to have no association with their city, and encourage them to be interchangeable cogs for whatever business deigns them worthy of a job in some remote part of America, so they can be ready to take whatever’s offered like that’s a good thing?

Most people like putting down roots, knowing the town and people, having a local community, would like to have family and friends nearby.

Remember how we were all going to “surf the information superhighway” and we’d all become smarter because we had access to all the worlds experts and books?

I remember!

There are a massive number of people who want the ends of programming and geekery but lacked the means. They are overjoyed that they can abrogate the means and enjoy the reflected light of achievement, especially if it cheapens the part they feel inferior about: namely, actually understanding and learning about the systems.

As such, to them, it’s a BENEFIT if the systems change at a rate no mortal would ever agree to. Why learn anything, after all?

Oh the Trump DOGE losers cut funding for the monitoring program, and it’s already showing up, despite being successfully managed for decades.

Basically shocking levels of incompetence; start an unpopular war, lowest approval ratings of any president ever, pardon J6 traitors, $6/gallon diesel levels of incompetence.

Our current government can't even monitor for screwworm, measles, and salads.

You think they can successfully track the smartest and most individually dangerous citizens, who have been previously vetted, and work inside the system already?

Let me know if it gets smart enough for Anthropic to fire all its researchers and replace them with it's own "intelligent agents".

Then I'll believe it. Maybe.

Didn’t Obama and Biden both deport more people than Trump has? It didn’t require ICE to become some kind of militarized police force, and there was no question they got a day in court, and nobody was exiled to a different country that than they were from.

The deportations aren’t the fascistic part, all that other stuff is?

Generally championing the removal of rights IS seen as fascistic - so removing gay marriage in 2026 would be a good example. That differs from 2008, before the right was universally won, however.

In both cases it seems like you’re minimizing some serious differences, or either not arguing in good faith or extremely confused about why people are calling things fascist these days.

I have examples to help: Starting a war without Congress? That’s fascist. Ignoring the courts? Also fascist. Pardoning J6 traitors? Fascist. Using the presidency to enrich yourself? Threatening the news, comedians, and artists you don’t like? Threatening your allies (Canada)? Putting your name and image all over things? Taking large gifts to swing favors, even whole jets? Minimizing and interrupting science and the arts, especially any that goes against your investments? Interfering with the courts and trying to use right wing weirdos to claim that we have a “unitary executive”? Interfering with the post office, closing polling places, and partisan redistricting?

Those things, especially taken holistically, are very indicative of fascism. But I can’t see how they wouldn’t have been considered the same in 2010?

What opinion, precisely, was anodyne in 2010 and is now far right/fascist/genocide?

Looking forward to some Chinese model kicking the shit out of it and being released for free.

Is this satire? Please, lord Jesus, let this be satire.

You pointed out correctly that house prices are bounded by incomes, then immediately made the same mistake with AI - someone has to want to pay for this stuff. It also has to compete against free models, which are not only almost as good, but they pull ahead sometimes.

Saying “the product increased in value” is only true if someone buys it!

I want the model running wherever electricity and infra is cheapest, which will likely be China; if that gets geopolitically hot, eh, suddenly a “nearby” data center will open run by “individuals” with “no connections”, magically - it will be very funny to watch.

There will be some “rising star” businessperson who somehow got an amazing deal on land and energy and just likes to spend 1/2 their time in Shenzhen or something, but the datacenter is in Vietnam or Singapore or Thailand or wherever. They might even have a US branch, to make everyone feel better!

It will collapse the market, and everyone will realize that data centers are actually worth LESS than Toyota - they’ll look more like Tulips, suddenly.

In my opinion, of course.

I’ve found the “freedom of speech” crowd understands freedom the least; notably, that rights come with responsibilities. They want the rights, none of the responsibilities, and to be arbiters of the rights of others (again, they really don’t understand freedom and rights).

A similarly daft group are those who believe in “states rights”, and they make the same mistake: they want states rights, unless it contradicts other things they want. It’s not a real position, they’re fascists.

It’s the genocide they’re committing that people take issue with, not their will to live.

Oh they absolutely are valid, though! We've seen them ignore permitting for generators, use incredible amounts of water and raise all our power bills, steal books and movies for training - and for what?

Subscription AI isn't going to pay for itself - it's pretty clear that they'll want a bailout in the name of "security"; which is why it's so great the Chinese are releasing models as-good-or-better for free: ironically because it drives an even bigger stake into the heart of US AI companies.

The sooner these AI companies are destroyed, the better.

Sure, NPR went over this:

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/10/nx-s1-5844328/us-china-data-c...

—- quote section below

Linvill said he can't rule out that the Chinese are quietly paying influencers or others to oppose data centers, but he pointed out there's no need.

"I think in this case, the people talking about data centers are real people with real passions and real perspectives and real opinions."

In Utah, those people appear to have forced Kevin O'Leary to scale back his plans. After the president of the Utah Senate raised concerns, he agreed to shrink his data center project to a quarter of its original size.

—— End NPR article quote

So yeah, no need to produce Chinese anti-datacenter propaganda - people have valid reasons, and they hate it. It’s already blocking and scaling back projects.

This sounds like ChatGPT.

I’m not buying the “AI security threat”, and I don’t really care if the best models are open source - and Chinese. If everyone can buy enough hardware to run the best models, what’s the threat? The same tired arguments as banning books on encryption or chemistry?

I see the crazed AI investment as worthless financial gambling, a house of cards that will eventually crumble, and the argument that “we need to fund AI” really is “your tax dollars should bail out our financial mistake, because security”.

It’s nonsense all the way down. Covid showed we didn’t even manufacture basic drugs in the country anymore, and were openly threatening our biggest/best/longest allies (Canada, Mexico, NATO). AI is so far down the security list as to make it noise, compared to our recent missteps.

I like how the “Chinese propaganda” against datacenters was found to be mostly a collection of facts.

While Russian propaganda is more clumsy and emotional, we’ve produced such an unequal society with such low regular education and outright corruption that people fall for it. That says something negative about US, not them.

If we admit our system cant even survive an open internet, it should be dismantled or reformed rather than free exchange closed.

China imports food and has stressed or extremely stressed fresh water reserves. You take out the method they keep alive hundreds of millions of citizens, you think they won’t launch a nuke?

Although for all the strategic thinking we’ve seen out of the “department of war” (that offers gender affirming testosterone shots and then runs out of missiles), I wouldn’t be shocked if you worked at the Pentagon, hahahaha.

I'd buy and run an open Chinese model before I ever paid for monthly access to any of these AI assholes.

Banning Chinese open source AI is “quick war with Iran” levels of strategic thinking.

The USA?

Even the "eco terrorist suburban Jihadi" grindset is trying to sell you a course.

As time progresses, I am increasingly convinced the internet was a mistake.

Remember: people used to say playing Chess was “AI”. There were dedicated Chess chips, and it was a massive AI undertaking.

We’re treating LLMs like we have every other tool. It’s going to become like spellcheck eventually, not something you think about, and certainly not worth hundreds of billions.

I think optimizing for the stock market is what's leading to political instability and making our country a worse place to live; I think it would be great if we threw a wrench into it (although admittedly, any thrown wrench would be smaller than the collective AI-psychosis it's currently undergoing).

This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. Which is why there's such a focus on youth - who else can you get to sacrifice themselves with the whisper promise that it will make them rich, who else is easily goaded with "You're so smart you should work more"?

We learn, but that's not what The Machine optimizes for, so when you realize it you leave. Other bodies throw themselves on the gears, the cycle repeats.

Counterpoint - this just indicates how screwed up things are. If you’re saying this as a positive thing, it isn’t.

Most people don’t want to compete with the global 1% - to import students from the Stanford of every country. Having policies your own population fails to thrive under does nothing but stoke division.

This is just ammo for the anti-immigration people, and they’re already at the “elect Trump, turn ICE into a military” point. How tone deaf do you have to be to see this as a positive thing?

Eh, this is our species first contact with that type of technology. A good number of voices see how deleterious these things are, and it’s all still very new. Future humans will tell parables about the evil tech bros and their silly obsessions, and the unequal accumulation of capital. This will be seen as a dark and stupid time, but I think we’ll persevere - the tech bro set is much weaker than they imagine, and certainly than they project.

If we believe the people selling AI, keeping up your skills at code is like keeping your expertise at wooden wheel making during the time of the automobile. We have to ask ourselves if they’re right or not.

I think they’re wrong, but also that even if they were right I wouldn’t give money to some assholes that stole every book, movie, piece of art, and published line of code. To me it seems clear that a company “forcing you to use AI because efficiency” is exactly the same as “welcome our new external team you’ll be interfacing with! They’ll write that pesky code.” Fuck that, I’d bail, I can read the writing on the wall.

Also these AI data center pricks want to drink up all the water and make us compete on our power bills with Google and Microsoft. That sucks. They suck.

You can watch your coworkers de-skill themselves in real time. Why would you not want that? Less competition - if you think it’s still a valuable skill.

I do.