leftism doesn’t idolize the capacity for violence

Agreed in the main, but there is a pro-gun left and some aggro anarchists (and lots of overlap), and some of them have as much bloodlust as any right-winger I’ve ran into. That is, assuming they’re a real person and not a bot or the persona of a Russian troll. Also, I seriously doubt any of them would bust a grape in a food fight, whereas I have solid evidence that right-wingers can and will get violent if given the opportunity.

Maybe, but whatever the main problem is, that’s up for debate. Somebody who is anti-authoritarian but is a bigot is still somebody I’m going to have a problem with.

It is a little weird. I’m a leftist and I don’t agree with tankies, but they aren’t something I think about very often. Actually, I only think about them when a thread like this one pops up. For something which is supposedly a huge problem on Lemmy, I’ve found them very easy to avoid. So easy, that I don’t even remember what I did. Probably blocked a couple of instances early on?

Sadly AI is here to stay in some way or form

Whenever somebody says something like this, there’s the implicit acceptance of the whole “AI is inevitable” trope (spoiler: it isn’t) and the unspoken assumption that AI will be used in the future the same way it’s used now. LLMs were around before the AI craze, and they’ll be around after it. Who knows what they’ll be used for?

Not “maybe”…more like obviously. Once you’ve become dependent on their product, they can jack up the price. You could move to a competitor, but how long before they jack up their prices, too? All of the AI companies are losing money, so it’s only a matter of time. Local models are a threat to their business, but they can’t regulate them out of existence. Maybe they can regulate them enough that they’re practical for home users, but impractical for business? Who knows. We’ll see.

Cory Doctorow has a really good quote about why AI is so appealing to managers:

If you know in your heart of hearts that if you don’t show up for work, everything’s fine, but if all the workers don’t show up for work, everything stops, you have to, like, confront the possibility that maybe you’re not in the driver’s seat, maybe you’re in the back seat with a toy Fisher-Price steering wheel. And AI is like the possibility of wiring that steering wheel directly into the drive train.

I’m feeling a mixture of hope and terror. I don’t know if there’s a name for this emotion.

No, you’re mistaken. There are clearly 5 of them.

Good ol’ Biting Pear of Salamanca.

Firefox marketing department checking in.

That term is tricky in the United States, because conservatives use it to mean anybody to the left of center while self-described “liberals” have a lot of smoke for the left but only make excuses for the right.

“As you can see, I have chosen unhappy pictures for the United States and happy ones for China, therefore China is better.” Flawless victory lmao

Both have issues with surveillance and free speech.

I remember Cory Doctorow saying something about how it sounds pretty impressive that you were working for the God Company and then you resigned in protest because it was wrong to create a god.

That’s what it could mean, but you’d be foolish to assume that.

It’s https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1

Imagine calling a Christian prayer a “curse”. And then having the mayor back you up. People would riot.

deleted by creator

“Authoritarianism works, as long as the authorities are competent.”

Why’re you being a cunt and pretending that’s what you said?

That IS what I said. Why don’t you slow down and edit your responses before you hit “Reply”?

Your opinion is you wanna lick boots and don’t really know why, okay, just be honest.

Nowhere did I say that authoritarianism is good or even that I desired it. I just said it worked. I noticed you didn’t answer my question, and I think I know why.

Democracy, like all systems of government, is a tradeoff. Nobody’s found a perfect system yet, and one probably doesn’t exist. This is because it’s hard to get people to agree. You may have noticed this.

So, people argue, and it’s harder to get things done, and it’s slow…but on the upside, you have more freedom and it’s more egalitarian. When life is good, it’s pretty easy to maintain democracy. You might get frustrated at the slowness of government, but it isn’t a big deal, because, again…life is good.

What about when life is bad, though? That’s when the slowness of democracy becomes really frustrating, and authoritarianism begins to look more and more attractive. Authoritarianism offers speed. It offers decisiveness. It offers easy answers. The democracies have all been bought off by big corporations, anyway, so why not go with authoritarianism? At least you know that they’re on your side. For now…

So, that’s why the right wing has become so popular in the last 10 years. I’m hopeful that democracy can rally, but things are really touch-and-go right now. It does bother me that I won’t live long enough to see how this turns out, but maybe you will. Sometimes things reach a breaking point and big changes happen very quickly, too, so who knows? Maybe I can at least help, in some small way, to keep things on a sane and stable path. I try to remain optimistic.

I know that I’m talking to somebody who’s maxxing out on the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and you probably didn’t even bother to read this far, but maybe you found somebody who could read this and explain it to you. Again, I try to remain optimistic.