I mean, after a lifetime of left/liberal infighting while conservatives lived by the phrase “no enemies to the Right”, I’m just happy to see Democrats finding a lever that divides the right and jumping up and down on it.

And if a bunch of high ranking Democratic Party members are on the list too, and they go down with the Republicans, so much the better.

Also, and more seriously - if there’s any hope of stopping fascism in the United States, it’s not going to be through the corporate Democrat establishment. It’s going to be through a left-wing populist movement taking over, or driving out, that establishment, the same way national socialists took over the Republican Party with the Tea Party movement and then memed Trump into office.

And ordinary liberals demanding the Epstein list, and continuing to demand it no matter how much Democratic Party leaders call it a conspiracy and a distraction, is a good sign that the American left is as sick of politics as usual as the Tea Party and MAGA movement were a decade ago.

When I was younger I really liked the idea of communes, but now I think intentional communities are more practical and avoid some of the worst aspects of communes.

The difference, to me, is communes typically collectivize all aspects of life - religion, culture, economy, working for a business owned by the commune and sharing property in common, and so on - and this not only isolates people from the surrounding community, but creates a dangerous power imbalance because of how much power the commune’s leaders hold over every aspect of its members’ lives.

Basically, I think a commune is what you get when you try to run a community like a family. And, unfortunately, there are a lot of abusive families out there.

But communes are only a subset of intentional communities.

In an IC, you don’t have to share in any particular religious or philosophical belief system, you don’t have to give everything you own to the group, you just have to want to live a lifestyle more sustainable and more closely connected to other community members than your average suburb or apartment building.

And you buy into the community and start contributing to common spaces and common meals and that’s that.

You don’t lose your home and family if you criticize the commune’s leader. You don’t have to hide your doubts about the commune’s philosophy for fear of punishment. The community has a bunch of different income sources and doesn’t fall apart if one communal business fails. There’s no charismatic leader who, to give one completely hypothetical example, preys on teenage girls and gaslights their parents into thinking his dick is God’s will. Power imbalances are limited because the power the community’s leaders have over its members is limited.

I suspect that’s why users are complaining about the new model. It’s like the article talks about - the parasocial relationship between users and their AI agents. We grew up in an era when computers were tools, but these users want computers that talk to you like a friend.

On the OpenAI community forums and Reddit, long-time chatters are expressing sorrow at losing access to models like GPT-4o. They explain the feeling as “mentally devastating,” and “like a buddy of mine has been replaced by a customer service representative.” These threads are full of people pledging to end their paid subscriptions. It’s worth noting, though, that many of these posts look to us like they have been composed partially or entirely with AI. So even when long-time chat users are complaining, they’re still engaged with generative artificial intelligence.

Lol. How sad is it that people are using LLMs to write their fucking Reddit posts?

They watched South Park as kids and thought Cartman was the hero.

That’s not a joke. That’s literally the problem. The kids that learned morality from South Park and 4chan are now running the US government.

Doomerism at its best. Because how much better off would we have been, if more people in 2008 had said “okay, let’s build renewable energy and circular economies to slow down climate change” instead of saying, like Lovelock, “climate collapse is inevitable and there’s nothing to do about it”?

The Republican and Democratic establishments are very much the same.

Trump - and his Heritage Foundation minders - isn’t business as usual.

The Rs and Ds both opposed tariffs and supported free market capitalism. Trump demanded tariffs because he’s a boomer, and he wants to go back to his childhood when the economy was based on manufacturing and coal mining.

The Rs and Ds both gave lip service to free speech. Trump has sued universities for allowing protests, deported students for writing op-eds, and is appointing political commissars to monitor major news networks and veto dissent.

The Rs and Ds both believed that unbiased economic data was important, even if they wanted different economic policies. Trump fires people for reporting data he doesn’t like.

The Rs and Ds both believed that soft power was as valuable as hard power, and that USAID and PEPFAR and so on were important, not just on humanitarian grounds, but in building support for the United States around the world. Trump and Musk think soft power is for wimps and are viscerally disgusted by helping black people.

Frankly, if there is any genuine distinction right now between the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment, it’s because Trump bullied the Republicans into it. And if this country survives it’ll be interesting - albeit horrifying - to see if the Rs go back to business as usual or continue their slide into an anarcho-capitalist theocracy.

AI in others fields, like medecine, automatic subtitles, engineering, is fine for me. It won’t give bad habits, it is well understood by its users, and it is truly benefical, as in being more efficient to save lifes than humans, or simply being helpful to disabled people.

I think the generative AI tech bros have deliberately contributed to a lot of confusion by calling all machine learning algorithms “AI”.

I mean, you have some software which both works and is socially beneficial, like translation and speech recognition software.

You have some software that works, and is incredibly dangerous because it works, like facial recognition and all the horrible ways authoritarian governments can exploit it.

And then you have some software that “works” to produce socially detrimental bullshit, like generative AI.

All three of these categories use machine learning algorithms, trained on data sets to recognize and produce patterns. But they aren’t the same in any other meaningful sense. Calling them all “AI” does nothing but confuse the issue.

Steven Pinker is a black box who occasionally spits out ideas, opinions, and arguments for you to evaluate. If some of them are arguments you wouldn’t have come up with on your own, then he’s doing you a service. If 50% of them are false, then the best-case scenario is that they’re moronically, obviously false, so that you can reject them quickly and get on with your life.

Yes. And. The worst-case scenario is: the black box is creating arguments deliberately designed to make you believe false things. 100% of the arguments coming out of it are false - either containing explicit falsehoods, or presenting true facts in such a way as to draw a false conclusion. If you, personally, cannot reject one of its arguments is false, it’s because you lack the knowledge rhetorical skill to see how it is false.

I’m sure you can think of individuals and groups whom this applies to.

(And there’s the opposite issue. An argument that is correct, but that looks incorrect to you, because your understanding of the issue is limited or incorrect already.)

The way to avoid this is to assess the trustworthiness and credibility of the black box - in other words, how much respect to give it - before assessing its arguments. Because if your black box is producing biased and manipulative arguments, assessing those arguments on their own merits, and assuming you’ll be able to spot any factual inaccuracies and illogical arguments, isn’t objectivity. It’s arrogance.

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ChatGPT is the ultimate ‘cultural product of the postmodern era,’ and very few of us have been inoculated with a theory of mind that distinguishes language from thought," Foster concluded in his newsletter.

The best description of this distinction I’ve encountered was in a science fiction novel - Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.

Naaah. That’s typical anarcho-capitalist/Republican crap - we have to do (insert bad thing here) because of those eeeeevil laws and those eeeeevil lawyers, and if we didn’t have laws and lawyers, we could just do the right thing without fear of lawsuits!

Bull fucking shit.

There is no more risk of food poisoning from these cookies at the end of the business day then there is at the beginning of the business day when they went out for sale.

Management isn’t throwing those cookies away from fear of food poisoning.

They’re throwing those cookies away because they would rather waste food than let people have free cookies.

then you’d be more principled than most people if you never gave in to the temptation (conscious or subconscious) to make too many.

I would love to see if there are studies about that. Because, frankly, I doubt it.

Capitalists believe that labor will steal from the company whenever possible, because they think labor is morally inferior to capital - after all, if they were good, hardworking, well-educated people, they wouldn’t be working minimum wage food service jobs, right?

American “Christians” believe that poor people are poor because they are more sinful than rich people, so fundie outfits like Jesus Chicken here believe that poor people will steal whenever given the opportunity.

But that’s not actually how human beings work.

The average human being does believe that wasting food is wrong. The average human being does believe that stealing is wrong. The average human being does follow explicit and implicit social norms (like being a good steward of their employer’s resources) without threats of punishment.

And frankly, when employees aren’t good stewards of their employer’s resources, it’s because the employer has been a bad steward of their employees first. Good companies earn the loyalty of their employees. Bad companies get the same treatment they give.

The only way I would be tempted to make more cookies than necessary as a Chick-fil-A worker is if I or my coworkers were paid so little that we were literally going hungry - because if Chick-fil-A pays so badly that it’s workers don’t have enough to eat, fuck em.

I mean, it sounds like you’re thinking “if I was an employee I would be tempted to make extra cookies for myself”. Which is sure, reasonable, cookies are yummy. But would you actually do it? Or would there be other considerations, like moral (stealing is wrong) or practical (this franchise isn’t making very much profit, and if it closes I lose my job) that would outweigh the desire for a short-term cookie benefit?

And if you were working at some place that wasn’t a shitty employee destroying fast food chain, someplace that you wanted to see do well - like a bakery where you knew and liked the owner, and where the owner treated you and the other employees fairly - how much stronger would those other considerations be?

The idea that I would be tempted to steal or waste resources just because I had the opportunity, so I might as well? No. That’s capitalist logic - if you see an opportunity for profit, you take it, whether you need it or not, whether it’s morally right or not. But actual human beings have values beyond profit maximization.

In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.

This search for new industries is a strategic one that plays on their unique characteristics. Their large families provide abundant labor that can be channeled towards certain enterprises. This allows the Amish to be particularly competitive in growing produce, a sector where much labor is still done by human hands.

Well, that’s a nice polite way to say “Amish farms rely on child labor”.

And as much as conservatives would love to see America’s kids working in the fields instead of woke liberal crap like (checks notes) graduating high school, I have to decline.

As much as I dislike modern industrial agriculture, pre-industrial agriculture was literally backbreaking work, brutal on both humans and their animal tools. I want to see solar powered farms, not muscle powered farms.

And while Amish communities have strong community bonds and support networks, which I wish more American communities had, those networks are facilitated by being a fucking cult a commitment to enforced ideological conformity that a functional multicultural society cannot and should not replicate.

You want the government to control all the means of production and the distribution of wealth, and be able to dictate the prices of goods and services and wages?

Bonus:

The thing is, I think, anybody who wants an answer from ChatGPT can ask ChatGPT themselves - or just Google it and get the AI answer there. People ask questions on social media because they want answers from real people.

Replying to a Lemmy post with a ChatGPT generated answer is like replying with a link to a Google search page. It implies the question isn’t worth discussing - that it’s so simple the user should have asked ChatGPT instead of posting it. I agree with the OP - it’s frankly a little insulting.

Yes, and that’s why, even in brutal hypercapitalist America, we fucking regulate the free market.

And why we should abolish the free market in the long run, for that matter.

Because having the “freedom” to buy poisonous adulterated foodstuffs, if you’re too poor to buy real good food, is like having the “freedom” to accept sub-minimum wages if you’re desperate enough for money. Not freedom, but exploitation.