This is exactly how voat died. There may have been an ounce of legitimacy early on. It veered into blatant far right accounts posting every top post. It’s obvious this kind of thing happens on lemmy too. Especially on certain instances. For now at least the federation model appears to be doing its thing.

Thiel funded reddit. He’s had his hands in it since 2014.

This whole era of AI has certainly pushed the brink to existential crisis territory. I think some are even frightened to entertain the prospect that we may not be all that much better than meat machines who on a basic level do pattern matching drawing from the sum total of individual life experience (aka the dataset).

Higher reasoning is taught to humans. We have the capability. That’s why we spend the first quarter of our lives in education. Sometimes not all of us are able.

I’m sure it would certainly make waves if researchers did studies based on whether dumber humans are any different than AI.

I believed they were doing such things against budding competitors long before the LLM era. My test is simple. Replace it with China. Would the replies be the opposite of what you’ve recieved so far? The answer is yes. Absolutely people would be frothing at the mouth about China being bad actors.

Western tech bros are just as paranoid, they copy off others, they steal ideas. When we do it it’s called “innovation”.

The music can come screeching to a halt for the US tech industry. They haven’t been innovating for a long time. Just relying on monopolization, rehashing old shit, or straight up VC baiting with useless garbage. The rest of the world needs to continue to realize they can do tech too. They can produce novel and actually useful things. Whereas the US industry has been strangling itself to death with anti-competition.

Especially with regards to AI. Once more others realize the milestone innovations in this field comes from academic research which is then taken by the private sector for profit. Others can realize and follow this path. They can spin up quicker than they think. With the education system being systematically dismantled in a pivot to identity politics protectionism over innovation, the future looks rather grim for the US. Bright for others though.

Attaching “tech” to everything makes it more palatable. Desirable even. It masks the fact that feudal lords are reinventing everything but with “tech”.

This is the one area where blockchain could have been useful instead of greater-fool money schemes. A system where people can verify provenance of images or videos pertaining to matters of importance such as news stories. All reputable journalism already attributes their photos anyways. Cryptographic signing is just taking it to a logical conclusion. But of course the scary word ‘china’ is involved here therefore we must contrarian post.

Make solutions in search of problems while collecting big tech premiums. If anyone accuses you of wasteful spending call them science illiterate to turn the public against them to divert the attention away from yourself.

Brave browser is a litmus test.

So capitalism.

It did happen before the IPO. It’s been happening for several years. They have not been doing mass bans all at once. They’ve been surreptitiously taking down subreddits over the years. Mostly smaller ones that woujldn’t draw much attetnion. Looks like they went for the bigger targets now.

This isn’t a sudden change to ideologically align with the current US administration either. They have been at this for a long time.

Yeah obviously we’ve completely lost the plot a long time ago. Nobody even remembers when tech was bands of ragtag nerds making something out of nothing. Now they are the rich whose only purpose to is extract more wealth. Tech what? Who even knows anymore.

That includes the average tech workers. If that angers you then you’re lost too.

Nobody has noticed that there’s more bragging about compensation than accomplishments. It used to be the other way around. Nerds eagerly showing off to anyone who will listen about whatever thing they cooked up. It’s been this way for the past long time long before this LLM AI era.

There’s a whole thing in sports psychology about what happens when you give kids millions of dollars. Not only that but they are the top in the world at what they do. They were raised to believe they are a special breed of human. It’s not just the top pros who get multi-million dollar contracts. It can happen to the kids who don’t even make it pro too. It mindfucks a person.

I’ve been saying for a long time this kind of thing happens in tech too. I grew up with a lot of guys who’ve made various levels of success in tech from average guy to multi-millionaires. It happens. They really do live in another reality. I don’t think it’s much different between the pro-sports bubble and the tech bubble. They live and breath tech. It’s their whole life. Replace tech with sport. Not much different.

One notable difference is that sports actually recognizes this phenomenon. It’s a known studied field of psychology. They make an effort to engage athletes in the community and stuff. Things that keep individuals grounded in reality.

I don’t think such things exists for tech. If anything they believe whatever latest antics they’re up to is what helps the community and helps themselves keep in touch with reality. Because what the world needs is one more world changing app, another bright idea for a startup that is totally making the world a better place and absolutely not strip mining human sanity for profit.

Just like 3D film and television. The VR stuff surfaces periodically with another iteration of the tech.