Uriel238 [all pronouns]

We’ve had this conversation.

Ten years ago I wrote a blog piece about the notion of computers gaining sentience. One of the problems is we don’t actually know how to define or test for sentience (id est, consciousness or self awareness). For most of human history, it was so clear to us whether or not we were engaged with another human being, sentience seemed intuitively obvious.

I get a little into the bushes about qualia (such as the quality of the hue of red rather than it’s composition as #FF0000) but even that concept is functionally shallow, and only serves as a way to differentiate human intelligence from non-human intelligence.

We’ve seen bigots use this kind of notion to argue, say, that Chinese people don’t think the same as western folk, or more recently that neurodivergents don’t think the same way as normal people.

Oxford commas, people.

Also hyphens will work.

I thought that Google used a similar dataset, possibly borrowing images from the NCVIP in order to create an analytic rule-set for which to omit images from Google Image Search. (A larger, similar rule-set is used to omit legal pornography when safe-search is on.)

Mind you, this was before the hyperscale AI era, when LLMs were things like SIRI and Google Now. And Google search still focused on websearch hits and not AI summaries.

Fun story: This was an area of study of mine during the early 2010s, since every image search engine would filter porn hits whether or not you had safe-search on or off. If it was turned off, porn would be filtered to the end of the list unless the engine decided you were intentionally looking for porn in which case the porn hits would be shown at the top of the list. There was no way to get results that ignored the ID-as-porn status of the images. I would enter ambiguously risqué terms to see how explicit I needed to be before the engine decided I was looking for porn.

Maybe! Epstein had early designs to essentially manufacture Kompromat by creating a private place for rich men to hook up with young teens. Only he a) got high on his own supply, and b) instead mostly turned to financing and money laundering and so they were more valuable to him as allies than adversaries.

Also, the owner class, when it’s sufficiently wealthy, can influence political and justice systems enough to be beyond the law. OJ Simpson wasn’t quite there, but he got a good lawyer team to get him acquitted. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, Duke of York, was there, and was only disgraced because his family cares about the appearance of decency.

All the tech bros don’t care about appearance of decency. Musk is publicly known to have killed hundreds of thousands by killing USAID, and it won’t affect his career.

Billionaires usually start with a specific luck package that includes generational wealth and family connections. Then, a bunch of opportunity being at the right place at the right time.

If you don’t have one of the first two then the opportunity has to do a whole lot more heavy lifting. Also, if you have enough generational wealth, then you can fail upwards, as did George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.

Also plenty of people have the starting gen-wealth/family-connections package but not the luck of opportunity. And they will commonly end up with a solid career, but doesn’t move them towards ultra-wealthy status. So millions or even tens of millions rather than hundreds of millions or billions.

And then there’s the rare dude like Tom Anderson who made MySpace, sold it for about $500 million and has since spent the rest of his life traveling and going on fun adventures. But he would have been a musician or a philosophy professor if he didn’t luck into making MySpace.

This is a periodic reminder. I’m on mobile so I’m copying a previous comment.

Flock Safety is only the tip of the problem.

Some districts are de-Flocking only to install an Axon ALPR network service. Keep fighting until your community outlaws all ALPRs and ALPR lookups are inadmissable in court.

There are other technologies that are already in use and widely abused by law enforcement such as IMSI catchers, geofence warrants and Drones as First Responder. Learn what your district allows and be a civil nuisance untill that shit is blocked.

Judges have long ceased tightly constraining judicial warrants, and most courts accept the good faith exception, so US and state courts cannot be trusted with any overreaching surveillance technology or forensic tools. This includes chromatic field drug tests and detection dogs.

I can’t speak for all nations but the Democratic Republic of the Congo was an actual democratic republic when it was named.

But it was too socialist for the US, who intervened with military force, executed the elected leader and installed a puppet dictator that was loyal to US corporate interests.

Looking it up now, Congo has removed Democratic from its name but still calls itself a Republic. A unitary executive appoints ministers, and a prime minister leads parliament. It does have multi-party elections, but, to quote Wikipedia, opposition parties are allowed, but are widely considered to have no chance of gaining power.

The current leader, Sassou Nguesso, is trying to change constitutional law so he can run another term.

It wasn’t even Pythagoras, but his students, who named the proof after him.

A grand illustration of the If there’s a rule rule.

This isn’t new. Journalists coming into the US in the aughts would be harassed by CBT and DHS, forced to open and unlock their laptops (and then delete whatever the officers found unsavory.

So they’d come in with their computers fully encrypted and wouldn’t have the pass key, themselves, so it was impossible to unlock them. If they were detained unreasonably, that became a new story the next morning.

Once through customs, correspondents would call their office and get the key.

But it sucks if you don’t have a whole news agency to back your rights.

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Not so much in liberal democracies.

Sadly, the US is on its way toward becoming an autocratic religious state.

The treatment for this is not to outlaw the dress codes, rather to provide services that help people get away from abusive partners.

So the stuff that women have been fighting for since the late 20th century. Also the stuff white Christian nationalists want to eliminate:
~ DV Shelters
~ Property rights for women
~ Employment gender equity
~ No fault divorce
~ Crisis counseling

I know there are anti-gay people who are secretly gay, but I didn’t know the phenomenon extended to trans folk.

It makes sense it would.

Sadly, serious problems are not always easy to escape, especially when we have crises such as housing and affordability that make it difficult to escape. It was something that I had to talk about with my roommate during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 since it was clear that some of our dynamics were not healthy.

On occasion stuff got smashed. It wasn’t direct violence directly against each other, but it was violence.

In the end, we considered two factors. One, that things got that heated rarely, like maybe once a year. And two, that we were both proactively working on our respective shit. In therapy, changing our bad habits for better ones and so on. And so we decided to stay in place. It didn’t escape that we were in a rent-controlled flat in San Francisco, and if either of us moved, we’d likely have to move out of SF.

(Eventually, the neighborhood gentrified and the landlord became hostile, really wanting to swap us out for the high rent Google techs could afford, but that’s a different story.)

Anyway, serious problems often come with serious circumstances that need to be weighed. And yes, I think we should live in a society without social crises that force dysfunctional people to stay together when they need to separate. But that is not what we have here in the US in 2026.

By my understanding, harm reduction is a process. It’s a matter of steps, and the first one (switching from acting out to drinking) might not look like a great leap forward.

But you’re supposed to keep going.
~ If eating junk food and watching reality shows keeps you from needing to drink, you eat the snacks and watch the tube.
~When you can substitute the junk food with fruit, or something easier on your body, you do.
~When you can move away from reality shows, say Saturday morning cartoons, you do that too.

Essentially, you move away from harmful habits and towards healthier ones in small steps.

But that’s not represented in the first step, which is to what I was referring in the first place.

Fair enough, and there are certainly better habits. But booze has been a counter to working-class stress for a long time, hence vodka being the national spirit of Russia and the Soviet Union.

We learned in Trump 1.0 that he is extremely isolationist and wants to cut the US off from the world like it’s North Korea.

The way an abusive spouse cuts their partner off from all other social contacts.

The way FOX News encourages its viewership to stop watching all other media sources so they’re in an information silo.

And the US voted for him again, because we vote based on vibes and bigotry. Because we have forgotten our civic duty to vote responsibly. Because we are suckers for lying confidence men who make ridiculous promises.

So the US is due for more than a bit of harsh finding out. We should have learned after George W. Bush. We didn’t and FA’d. (Effed A?)

Anyhow a lot of Americans have cut off their MAGA relatives and neighbors. It is no surprise at all that Canada — and the entire international community — might do the same.

I’m skeptical the US is going to survive to the November election, much less the new Congress in January.

Harm reduction. If a shot of bourbon keeps a fellow from battering the wife and kids, or shooting up a school, then it’s doing its job.

Curiously, when I was drafted into jury duty here in California, we were shown a video that said something like The people are society’s last line of defense against bad law.

I took it personally, figuring it was my duty to not enforce any law that was unjust or protect any institution that was cruel. But I didn’t get selected.