2. The ruling party for over a decade is the VVD, a Republican Party with training wheels, with Tea Party like spinoffs in varying degrees over rabid idiocy. The VVD heavily depend on a small network of big donors and as such are strongly nudged to source the policy advice from those networks. The IT backbone of those government agencies are thus run by big corporate IT shops, which is also politically convenient as you can shrug of responsibility when it turns out there is some light between the theory and the practice of the neoliberal doctrine.
> much more compelling than those found in the various "manifestos" which come out of Silicon Valley.
Whenever I hear these "tech overlords", I am always baffled at the total lack of culture, the absence of taste, the empty visions and the implied complete subjugation of humans to ideals of "efficiency" or "quick and easy". Maybe they would have been more interesting people if they had been brought up in beautiful towns and cities, if they had lived in a rich cultural environment instead of being raised as consumer of cheap and flashy pop culture. Maybe we should tax bad architecture, it gives me headaches but others might incur heavier damage.
As an aside, at least Trump is drawn to the grandeur of high culture from historical times, but he also doesn't understand a jota about aesthetics, and so the White House gets turned into a tacky gypsy-style abomination with one dollar ornaments.
We lost the “liberal education” (not the political one, but the “freeing” classical one) and it’s starting to show.
When you compare the robber barons to Google and Meta it’s kind of embarrassing- they build massive empires of iron horses screaming across the world and covered cities in magnificent buildings (stations, libraries, etc). G&M built an empire of advertising and … not much else?
Indeed. The current crop doesn't have an idea for what they hoard their billions, it's just...emptiness. I propose we explain the tech's attachment to Accelerationism as a profound boredom and lack of purpose. "What does it mean to be human"--they don't value that question. Peter Thiel got interviewed a month or two ago, and he could not be brought to say that he sees value in preserving humanity. He would rather turn himself into a robotic contraption to extend his life.
When power fears death, some strange things happens.
I’m reminded (and apropos as the Pope quoted him) of Tolkien’s description of the “eternal life” the Ring gives to mortals, and how it’s … not so desirable in the end.
Indeed It's far more necessary that the utter dregs of humanity (e.g. Peter Thiel) eventually die of old age. Or put another way the damage of mortality killing good people is more than offset by the good of it killing the worst people with the most power. Because in the end it's probably not going to be your sweet mother who will get to live forever, it'll be people like Peter Thiel. No thanks, for the good of our species.
“Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their downfall. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron's. And they became forever invisible save to him that wore the Ruling Ring, and they entered into the realm of shadows. The Nazgûl were they, the Ringwraiths, the Úlairi, the Enemy's most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death.” - from the Silmarillion but it’s echoed in LotR also. And even Bilbo complains of being “butter spread over too much bread”.
This is why I like the term "Dragon Sickness." There's seemingly only innate compulsion and no real human thought behind the hoarding. It becomes its own end. I cynically lament that it's human nature for billionaires to exist but if that is true, couldn't they at least be more entertaining about it? Bezos and Musk could be bleeding each other dry to get to the next star system by now.
Google makes phones and phones are somewhat good. Better search had some value for humanity. Meta has no redeeming qualities or achievements, other than helping Trump get into office and defeat Iran.
People become tech-overloads because they are blind to these sorts of beauties - and that'd be fine if it wasn't for the fact that we have collectively allowed these people to come to power and have fallen for their empty promises of freedom and liberation.
> why not? i'm sure they can jump into the hustle.
Not so quick. Critical difference is the relationship between enterprises and the state. In China, the state owns the enterprise, in one way or another. High costs of memory is a threat to the established Chinese electronics manufacturers. The Chinese state can optimize returns at a higher level than the one some petty chip manufacturer operates at, especially if doing so means it could gain coercive geopolitical strength, aka blackmailing.
I mean kind of? Industry and politics are always cohorts. China has structural differences but new entrance to commodities and defensives are almost exclusively price sensitive offers. If say, Singapore or even a firm in Ohio tried to enter the market for global play, they'd undercut as a strategy
Except... Maybe they don't need to. Demand is outstripping supply right now. Competing on availability may be sufficient
You can easily see this on a mini-macro scale with popular restaurants. Often a restaurant with an equivalent menu and prices will open nearly adjacent to a very popular place and can sustain itself simply because you don't have to wait an unacceptable length of time to be seated
I am not the author, but he has been training/tuning? a model that produces text that mimics the source material in a more natural way. So getting the LLMs to produce less bland and boring LLMisms, according to the following up blog post.
FYI: I had tried this exploit with rootless podman containers to write to read-only mounts, but the exploit failed. I am not sure if the default container runtime in Podman is resistant against these attacks or if it assumes Docker running containers with higher privileges, but at least it was a pleasant observation. (kernel 6.18)
Are you not using OverlayFS? The exploit vector here relies on OverlayFS. What you want to reason about generally is (a) whether you have AF_ALG sockets exposed and (b) whether attackers have access to files (via inode) whose cached contents will affect other processes.
Do you say that from the perspective of compiled languages? I hear good things about .net core wrt SIMD, but that has the advantage it can decide at JIT.
I'm not the person you're asking, but I share that opinion for both compiled languages and JIT solutions, including .net core specifically. All but the most trivial use cases can't be autovectorized, by JIT or otherwise. One of the recent things I worked on (reed-solomon decoding) offers basically zero opportunities for autovectorization unless the compiler reinterprets certain scalar loops as dedicated galois instructions on AVX512F hardware, but that optimization isn't implemented, it wouldn't help other architectures anyway, and it's still 10x slower than a well thought out vectorized approach.
Disclaimer: I don't want to make people despair nor do I want to install fatalism. People should take action, no matter the bad chances.
> if allowed to run fairly.
> Trump’s response to that landslide will tell us whether there’s hope.
The fairly part is already out of the window, we have had the fake bomb threats at the polling stations. But as you have seen in Hungary, an autocrat has to fear a mass revolt. So an outsized signal can still make it through, despite the rigged elections.
But that isn't even the most important part. Imagine the Dems win next round. What then? I have the impression that the Americans do not fully grasp the structural damage that has been done. The Dems won't be able to clean up the mess that the conservatives had left them as they have been doing traditionally.
This time the US is highly isolated, the economy is under severe threat from the GOPs own doing; Iran, almost unlimited lawless access to European markets (contrary to popular belief) for the tech oligarchy, institutional knowledge gone, soft power gone.
Also imagine throwing the owners of fake news blasters like Fox News in jail, would you think that would be possible? When an outsized portion of the populace think this is Free Press, there is a cultural problem that prevents root causes to be dealt with. The commercial apparatus is necessary for "flooding the zone", but doesn't function as the Fourth Estate, a required function the general population would not even know about.
The Heritage Foundation at alii have a large time horizon, they have been working on overthrowing democracy for decades. The asymmetry of having no regards for the rule of the law versus having to follow it is another disadvantage for the Dems. It is a seduction to join the dark side, to let the Dems play the game the other party is good at.
The Dems are setup for failure; they need a bizarre effort to overcome the structural damage and the corporate occupation of culture. Notwithstanding the neoliberal factions inside, which are equivalent to the "GOP of older times sliding into autocracy but not there yet". The GOP is bad, but I don't want to portray the Dems as 100% good, on the contrary. The Democratic Party is a big tent, and should rather be broken up in different parties, so Americans have something to choose from actually.
In short: people should not hope that the other party will fix their problems; they should start to question themselves, the cultural beliefs they have been fed and most importantly, they need to understand their own and their peers role in this mess. The change should come from bottom up, grassroots style.
Please correct me if I'm wrong and I would hope to stand corrected, but my impression from across the pond is that the Dems in general would enjoy being in the same lead and would gladly use similar mechanisms - so they wouldn't change structurally that much even when they get to the levers. Many techbros and other personalities would also simply swear new allegiances, get celebrated for "their" win and continue to erode at everything because money is money in the end and the GOP lead demonstrated there's good money to be made this way. Of course there are and will be exceptions to this, but significantly many? Time will tell.
> would gladly use similar mechanisms - so they wouldn't change structurally that much even when they get to the levers.
To address the first part, «similar mechanisms», the Dems realize too late that the GOP had stopped playing the same 'game', as in: the rule of law, respecting institutions, not overstepping the boundaries. They would not gladly use similar mechanisms, because it would mean that no party in the USA would be a democratic rule-abiding party. You would end with a Russia governance style, where 'might makes right' rules instead of the law. In other words: maffia governance.
That is why rules alone wouldn't save a democracy. If you can get away with ignoring them, the rules are dead
The second part, «so they wouldn't change structurally», is a real problem. There is quite a bunch of senators and people clinging to their position and their networks, standing in the way of real chance. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the same problems.
The moneyed interests are a big problem too. From a distance I think AOC is the most clear-headed and general interest driven person, but she has to overcome established interests in the Democratic Party. That requires money and backing from influential people.
And frankly, the press might sometimes sound critical about current affairs (out of necessity, they have to maintain strata-specific degrees of credibility), but they don't raise the alarm (which has been several years overdue). For some politicians and power brokers, just facing up to the consequences of their (in)actions would be too unpleasant, let alone they would want to give up their interests. So they gladly let themselves be lulled to sleep. If the editorial boards would stop down-playing and bullshitting, those "all is more or less fine" people would start to face electoral heat, but you can safely bet the corporate incentives aren't aligned with that.
2. The ruling party for over a decade is the VVD, a Republican Party with training wheels, with Tea Party like spinoffs in varying degrees over rabid idiocy. The VVD heavily depend on a small network of big donors and as such are strongly nudged to source the policy advice from those networks. The IT backbone of those government agencies are thus run by big corporate IT shops, which is also politically convenient as you can shrug of responsibility when it turns out there is some light between the theory and the practice of the neoliberal doctrine.
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