Usually, when a society collapses, a bunch of warlords seize resources and then fight it out for a while, until everyone left knew people who died in the fighting.

During this period, it’s way easy for a stronger colonial empire to come in and take over, and if there are resources to be had (minerals, good farmland, oil, etc.) they totally will.

The US is an interesting case, since it still has a number of states that are strong self-sustaining economies all their own, and if the US fragmented, we might see those strong states lend aid to the dependent ones, making aid contingent on adopting the host states’ laws and values. Dunno if that will be a bloodless process, though.

Wasn’t Amontillado the cask of wine used as bait?

As carrion eaters will quickly demonstrate.

Did that pass the Byrd bath?

Blacks typically vote mostly for Democrats while whites typically vote for Republicans. So black neighborhoods are commonly not getting representation.

Mississippi is about as Jim Crow as it can possibly be, so it doesn’t surprise me if white supremacist elected officials are pushed into office via gerrymandering, voter suppression and election tampering.

A computer is a machine. It cannot deny consent.

This is my argument. Eventually, we’ll have computers capable of generating good art that moves its human audience as intended.

And in the meantime, there are artists who utilize generative AI as a tool, who learn to prompt exactly, and then curate the best results from the basilisks, much the way photographers determine what to shoot, and how to manipulate lenses, exposure and lighting in order to get the optimal effect.

Sadly, current LLMs consume a whole lot of resources, way more than the process of human beings doing art. So it’s a long, long road to us getting to where generative AI is actually economic.

I think the computer told me to can never be a viable excuse when determining responsibility for a poor decision.

A manager can assert they were advised by the computer, but in the end, the human being must be held responsible.

Case in point, Iran Air Flight 655

I’ve learned recently that I’m low-T and have had indicative symptoms all my life, and it may even have factored into my major depression.

And though my endocrinologist recommends replacement therapy, I’m genuinely afraid I’ll turn into Pete Hegseth.

One does not simply walk into Mordor.

Paywall bypass

Be sure to track data centers in your own area. Granted, they are likely to be better regulated than here in the states.

As Trump is learning with Iran, if you make enemies by the millions, you risk awakening a plumber.

I guess the main concern is about how this sort of content could coerce people to attempt their fantasies in real life.

This is the very same argument that has been made about gay persons in times and regions where LGBT+ topics and behavior were criminalized. The same argument was also used in the 21st century about kids playing violent video games.

It’s also the same argument used in the 19th century to raise a moral panic about women reading romance fiction.

Here’s the relevant Wikipedia excerpt:

Cultural anthropologist Patrick W. Galbraith based his research on Japan’s crime statistics, showing that sexual abuse of minors has decreased in Japan since the spread of lolicon media increased in the 1960s and 1970s, argued that cartoon pornographic images do not necessarily influence crime.

A 2012 report by the Sexologisk Klinik for the Danish government claimed that there is no evidence that individuals that view cartoons and drawings depicting fictitious child sexual abuse are more likely to engage in child sexual abuse in the real world.

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Are you Australian?

I’d recommend checking out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund when it comes to the dangers of restricting certain topics in fiction (including child abuse or child sexual abuse), and the dangers of censorship in general.

The US went over this before in the Aughts with Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition and the PROTECT act passed in 2003 (with certain parts of it later declared unconstitutional), and later with SESTA and FOSTA, which had a chilling effect, forcing closed online resources that sex workers used to protect themselves. The more recent bills like KOSA and the KIDS act are modeled similarly to close the internet as a vector of free speech under the premise of protecting kids from porn, with the intention to also silence subjects that are ideologically controversial, such as LGBT+ content, ( trans ideology ), sexual education material, women’s health information and political speech that criticizes the Trump administration.

I still submit that media should be restricted as little as possible. Yes, we should restrict CSAM that creates actual child victims (such as filmed CSA and deepfakes of real kids), in order to protect the victims. And yet, when we criminalize fictional depictions of CSA, it not only starts cutting into legitimate artistic content (such as A Game of Thrones, or The Sandman comic series, Superman 1978 is an edge case), but it then becomes very easy for conservative moral guardians to creep the mission and expand the list of restricted content.

I hope you’re right. Like Randall Munroe, I am terrified that they’re trying to fast-track their way to the swarms of killer robots phase.

This is how we know AI should be a collectivist project, one that isn’t owned by large corporations but is funded by taxes and developed in academies, and all IP derived from it falls into the public domain.

Besides which a lot of artists mind a lot less when their material is borrowed by a non-profit, or to serve a public works project. (There are exceptions. Disney is notoriously litigious about murals in nurseries.)

PS: Development of a robust public domain is the only reason that intellectual property should exist at all. Also it’s not property so much as a licensed temporary monopoly.

PSS: History has already shown us that people will invent stuff and do fabulous art simply by being allowed to live in a state other than desperation. Public welfare programs beget art booms. The most recent example of this was during the COVID-19 lockdown which came with extended unemployment and stimulus checks, resulting in the Great Resignation in which a lot of people turned their hobbies into something lucrative.

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

Hank Green actually explained something optimistic after the Blue Origin rocket explosion (here on Youtube), that yes, there are big companies and big billionaires being superfluously wasteful.

But there are a lot of us recycling our bottles and cans, and when we collectively do this, it makes more of a difference than rockets going boom, and jetsetting billionaires.

Granted, we need to drastically reduce our ultra-wealthy for a vast myriad of reasons, but we do collectively make a big difference.