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  • 21 comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 23rd, 2025
  • It all makes sense when you realize that AI isn’t the product, control is.

    When everyone depends on cloud services, especially storage, because they can’t afford hard drives or RAM anymore. Do you think the average normie is going to “stand up for principles of privacy and freedom of computing” or are they gonna say “it is what it is” and buy a tablet with 8GB of RAM and an office suite in the cloud?

    Do you think these companies are above scanning everyone’s stuff to find out who is against them? Who is developing some great new idea? Who dissents the government?

    Do you think these companies are above editing all saved copies of a news article and replacing it with something AI generated that looks real enough to memory hole something? (Copies of things in the cloud are already de-duplicated)

    They don’t want us to be able to point out their flaws anymore. They want us to be submissive to them.

  • I dunno if this is a rhetorical game we play with ourselves in our heads but whether it’s or it isn’t, we know exactly why they are doing it and we have for many years.

    Your car has an active cellular connection whether you pay to rent time on it or not and it transmits your location, an ID number, usage habits including driving controls, music preferences, and possibly keywords spoken while in or near the vehicle, to the manufacturer. They relay that data to the government who uses it to learn who you associate with and when and where, and they sell it to your insurance company who monitors you for risky behavior, and they also sell it to advertisers who also profile you to device what the best things to try and sell you will be.

  • That can never work because the incentive to manipulate that system and then claim the results are fair because of it’s theoretical power of accountability, which it was sold on, cannot be broken and therefore we MUST accept the results is too great.

    The moment someone cracks it, they become the new lords. Same problems as the current system.

    Paper doesn’t have this problem, because you can see the paper. You can count paper with machines, but you can also verify with humans and - importantly - humans without PHDs.

    Voting is the literal keys to the empire. I’m not letting some billionaire vibecode his way into the white house…again

  • I actually don’t like this XKCD, this is a bad answer to why electronic voting is bad.

    Mostly because it is a largely obtuse process that most people can’t see or understand.

    “Trust the magic rock is counting fairly and that bad people who would want to manipulate it in order to obtain power and conquer you haven’t had a chance to do so.” You cannot code your way out of that.

    Everyone understands marks on paper. No one understands buffer overrun RCE, resistive touchscreen calibration, or database triggers and log sharding.

  • In case you weren’t aware, we’ve never had digital ownership. All software has been licensed since the dawn of software, including physical media you’ve bought

    Are you using a product that is no longer sold because you have the physical media? If the rights holder decides to go after you to compel you to stop or even try to collect damages, they fucking can.

    They historically haven’t because it’s a terrible PR move and they might not have a chance in court due to the physical nature of the transaction; but you’ve never “owned” software in the same way you’ve never owned a movie or music. The sale has always been a license and a physical copy.

    The problem has always been the pesky physical copy, which couldn’t be revoked. Since we’ve moved to digital, boomers don’t recognize that this is theft in the digital world they’d never stand for in the real world, and the elite take advantage.