Think of the children … or are your a chomo? Now hand over your papers for access to information and communications more that all the books have been fed into the AI shredder and paper and writing instruments were done away with to save the planet.
It’s rather astonishing to me how the vampire squid of world domination has apparently worked out just how to neutralize any sense of self-preservation, and manipulate and gaslight anything into place if they have enough time and are patient.
Everything from “freedom sticks” to get women to breath in smoke and ash like the foolish men, to going from “government IDs are just conspiracy theory” to “you have to show your papers to see information and communicate with other humans on the only method that is still widely possible; it’s all just been slowly salami sliced and microdosed into our societies. Worse yet, still a large chunk of society seem utterly oblivious as long as they can consume their particular customized and personalized opiate of the masses.
The rather interesting and revealing mistake YC and Flock made was to be so stupidly conspicuous. It’s a cascade of failure. You know why the secret police, “spies”, and agents of tyrants tend to keep as clandestine as possible; they’re all evil, vile, and are up to subversive infiltration, sabotage, control, abuse, manipulation, degradation, and harm in general. They don’t give themselves a catchy startup name adjacent to the abuse they are trying to achieve, treating humans like cattle to manage in a corral, they don’t try to stand out with a uniformly, evil-colored pole right where everyone sees it stand proudly, they don’t have a CEO named Langley.
It would all be comical if it weren’t clear signs of a decaying society that has betrayed the American Revolution, which is not actually a legitimate USA at all, and hasn’t been anything more than a facade for well over 100 years, merely keeping the banners and slogans to keep the populace on-board, cheering their own subjugation and management. “Why did they not just rebel and leave the capital-plantation since they outnumbered the ruling class capital-Plantation masters?”, someone in the future will ask.
I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet.
I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune.
If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire.
Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.
You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.
> You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model.
You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive.
But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
You do understand that was an example, right? Did you know there are other websites you can download? Anna has one that is pretty big and full of information. I’m pretty sure the AI labs know about it too.
> the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
The Internet Archive isn’t a single zip download. You understand you can pick and choose what you want to download, right? And also, that it was just another example of many?
But the Internet and IA aren't controlled by you. They may be censored or taken down without anyone going near you, but not the local model (as long as you have access to electricity and your hardware doesn't break before you have access to replacements).
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
But you cannot train an open weight model by yourself, and maybe there could some distributed training net ran by thousand of volunteers around the world in the future, but until we get there we will still be tied to BigCo (American, Chinese or wherever in the world) decisions.
You would need institutions to do this? What do we have besides global megacorps with the resources for this? Universities perhaps training models for their local catchment?
We'll probably see a few middle-tier countries like France or Japan training their own national LLMs that they can control. Even if it's expensive, this will eventually be just as critical to national sovereignty as having nuclear weapons. They don't want to be completely dependant on the USA or China.
This is exactly why I believe LLMs are fundamentally divergent from the trajectory of internet service path we have been on. It allows us to create space and disconnection from an otherwise tethered experience.
It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.
For decades, people ran word processors and graphics editors locally.
Now it’s in the cloud on a damn webpage.
With recent RAM and storage price disruptions, I feel like we’ll go to go back to an equivalent of everyone having a dumb Wyze terminal with the real “computer” in the cloud… Only difference is the dumb terminal will have color, be wireless, and portable.
I’d like to think that people will move back to native, but sadly there’s only one viable platform for native app dev, Apple. I base that statement on the highly fragmented Linux ecosystem and the fact that Microsoft are appear to be actively hostile to windows users. I leave Android out of the picture because of the continual and legally proven trust breaches of the owner.
It does suck. Though Android’s owner does appear to be afraid of Graphene OS so maybe there’s hope.
Yep, this is because for decades Apple has looked for ways strong local clients can add value in the form of bespoke hardware and software capabilities, while Microsoft has looked for ways commoditised generic clients can extract value.
Fragmented doesn't mean you can't make native apps.
GTK, QT, FLTK or TK apps coexist peacefully on linux the same way apps made with Cocoa, JUCE or whatever own internal proprietary toolkit apps run and coexist on MacOS.
Linux is not really fragmented anymore, there is a lot of distros but they're all compatible with each other. Flatpak solved app distribution and systemd standardized the lower levels. If you build something on Ubuntu it will almost definitely work on Fedora and Arch with no code changes. 10 years ago that was impossible.
I should hope you remember the Internet, it's still there. It may come as a surprise to you, but the whole reason the WWW works is because of the Internet, that's how you're able to see this web site!
Sigh. Web. Not Internet. Why is this distinction so hard to make on a WEB site dedicated to technology?
The reason I keep repeating this whenever I see this is because I've seen idiotic mislabeling and mischaracterization materialize as idiotic legislature or idiotic activism based on the former. Someone invented the term "AI datacenter", and now there's a swiping movement of idiots fighting... datacenters. Same as with 5G before it.
Please. Please. Don't blame the Internet for something it has absolutely nothing to do with. Your misattributed criticism is going to be amplified by thousands of automatic and semi-automatic morons and, who knows, maybe people will start cutting cables or attack ISP crew as a result.
The same thing would happen on any platform. Social media diverged from the web a while ago - accessing it through web is like accessing Usenet through Google Groups. Its native environment is the corresponding non-web phone apps.
Not on any platform. The platform needs to have certain characteristics that enable it.
The platform needs to be a monopoly or an oligopoly. A highly distributed platform would be a lot more resilient to the problems created by modern social media because it would be too hard for a single organization to manipulate the news reported by thousands of independent publishers.
The platform needs to financially sustain itself in such a way that the users don't directly contribute to it, otherwise it would be way too easy for users to "vote with their wallet".
The platform use should be allowed (or even encouraged) by state or other important service providers, thus making its use mandatory for the holdouts / those who would normally not use it on conscientious grounds.
Perhaps there are other aspects that I've overlooked.
Phone apps are, in general, an even worse alternative than the original Web because of being either completely closed-source, or even if not, not really allowing simple viewing and modification of the program behavior by the users. The way they are created and distributed amplifies the monopoly aspect and the government / service provider sanctioning aspect.
But, I think, that the problems we see now in Web can be partially addressed technologically and partially legislatively. It doesn't have to be this bad.
On technological level, if social media was available as an Internet application, i.e. as an additional service from your ISP, which would remove the need to sustain it with ads, it would make it less interesting for companies like those that run modern social media platforms to manipulate it.
On legislative level, there should be some form of anti information monopoly laws that would make it illegal to have such an outsized effect for social media platforms and would allow the court to require that a platform is split into multiple platforms. The laws that assign responsibility for the published content and its distribution should also address the problem of mis- and disinformation proliferation through such platforms. Even up to the point that they make it impossible for such platforms to exist (today it's common to blame the lack of moderation on the poor quality of content).
>Maybe not from the start, but definitely since the EU sunk its teeth into it. We can look forward to ID-controls for everything online, and monitoring of what we write.
Yes, they just made a big step in that direction by requiring age verification on social media for everyone :(
> Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three.
That is not happening though. But they are building the machinery to do things like this.
> requiring age verification on social media for everyone :(
This is not the end goal though.
The end goal is forcing this onto everyone. Show ID, show what
you visit, otherwise you will not be able to access the internet.
That is the real agenda. They just use salami steps, by trying
to convince people that this is about the kids. It was never about
the kids and never will be - kids are just the excuse, similar to
other laws claiming protection against terrorisms. These are all lies.
I don't think we'll ever see an EU law specifically mandating disconnection / imprisonment of individuals who disagree with the prevailing narrative.
An EU law that puts large fines on social media companies for doing entirely unrelated things, like, let's say, personalized advertising? A law that makes it almost impossible to operate profitably in the EU if enforced, but one that the government can enforce selectively? A law that lets the EU commission brand certain companies as "Gatekeepers" if it so wishes, while leaving others unbranded? A law that could, perhaps, be enforced far less strictly against companies which, due to their outstanding moral principles and care for humanity, choose to ban (or, better, algorithmically deboost) certain individuals, or maybe entirely voluntarily act as concerned citizens and report them to law enforcement, with no official duty to do so? Now that sounds a lot more believable.
> An EU law that puts large fines on social media companies for doing entirely unrelated things, like, let's say, personalized advertising?
But this is not about fines on companies. It is to force age sniffing onto people.
The state sniffs for ID here. That's the new part.
> care for humanity, choose to ban (or, better, algorithmically deboost) certain individuals
I think in France there is the three-strikes crap law. After that people are forbidden to access the www.
This is terrorism by a state. And censorship. Typical for a dictatorship. The label
democracy is just equally as fake here as Putin's Duma "elections" auto-awarding the genocidal dictator with "now I can mass-mobilize people and kill many thousand people more".
But sadly they are building the perfect infrastructure to support a genuinely totalitarian state. If, in a future election somebody gets elected who wants to put this structures to use, I guess then we'll be in trouble!
> Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three.
If there's one thing that distinguishes leftist regimes it corporate friendly property law policies to enable free markets.
> The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other).
That sounds better to me? Civil society spaces shouldn't be for making money and vice versa. Surely we can't look at what's happened to twitter where you basically get corporate sponsorship for rage baiting on the internet and think that's an improvement? The most effective political action recently has been hyperlocal neighbourhood groups getting mad and turning up to data centre meetings en-masse and letting local representatives know that they are all know where they live. Spouting off on the internet has been weaponised to force people into inaction and is easily corralled as there are so few of these mega platforms and they're easy to buy and manipulate centrally.
leftist != Liberal. And the EU leftists aren't liberal in any real way. That's why terms like left and right don't mean anything outside of a specific place and time and even then, its just shorthand. If they were liberal, none of this would be happening.
Being liberal is hard but saying you are liberal is a great way to hide socialist and authoritarian tendencies. And that's the problem. If they were actually liberal, they wouldn't be censoring the Internet. Liberals believe in free speech, socialists don't. Its a big tell as which kind of leftist you are.
I am from EU, leftist, socialist and liberal (the left parts), and I can assure you, (a) most leftists (90%) are as liberal and antiauthoritarian as it gets, and (b) we are as powerless to change these things as you are.
Possibly, if you choose to believe me, things can change, but it's on you.
Depends on country. Here in Czechia, Communist party is one of most socially conservative one, while conservative christian party is center-left economically. Social democratic party, when it was relevant, was also pretty socially conservative, which makes sense considering their working class demigraphics.
Liberal doesn't mean supporting liberty, it means some interpolation between supporting free markets (neoliberal means just this one), and pretending that as long as we just follow the established institutional norms everything is fine and there is no need for radical change. It's synonymous right now for "centrist" - note that political labels drift over time.
Liberalism has both economic (free market) roots and political roots. The first "leftists" were the French revolutionaries and they wanted (political) freedom as well. The reason liberalism is in the "center" is because both left and right tried to appropriate it. (Although I think liberalism, in the sense of individual freedom, is a distinct value from other values such as conservative/authoritarian or socialist/communal.)
This terminology change is mostly limited to anglosphere. Outside of that 'liberal' is still commonly used for economic-right low-intervention position.
In the EU the leftists have no significant powers so not sure why we even talk about them here. The EU right now is ran by mostly centrists and right-wingers.
The real things that kill the internet is tech bros who learned you can make money with the internet and ofcourse AI which will make sure the internet becomes bots who communicate with other bots.
ARPAnet definitely wasn't built "by" the military.
"For" the military is close enough, although "defense research" would probably be more accurate than "military" given that initial users were centered around large universities.
From the start the DoD had issues with the free and open culture from the userbase that skewed towards academic types, later splitting off into a restricted MILNET after a few years.
How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that.
And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.
The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.
Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess.
Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.
Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.
It would also end the AI. Not to say it couldn’t happen though, if it thought an apocalypse could somehow instrumentally help it fill its monthly paperclip quota.
A war wont happen because Americans are too lazy. Just look how the cities are built, the vast majority simply refuses to walk. To control the population one only has to deny them fuel, and everything else freezes. In older times, everyone was a really hard worker, look at the American civil war, millions in both armies walked thousands of kms. Theres no way a fraction of Americans could or would do that.
Ah, the classic con job is starting to close its cycle. Get who-knows-how-many-millions-of-dollars of free work and thought, and then when the free labor has finally elevated you above it and your power is overwhelming, you simply just crush the gullible peasants beneath you and act like they never existed.
People thought they were part of some collaborative, good of the world type effort, when the reality is that there were always ulterior and hidden motives to manipulate and exploit that gullible and rather foolish nature of Americans in particular; a foolishness that has long, if not always existed in the genuine American core character, but at the very least was cultivated and even selected for a long time ago.
How do you motivate people in modern times to do free labor for you as the parasitic ruling class without the threat or resort to violence? You of course trick them into believing that what they are doing or support makes them a good boy, regardless of all the evidence and proof to the contrary.
2017 was also the year Flock was funded and founded and went through the YConbinator cohort.
But you would have thought that by 2021 when Andreessen Horowitz funded them or at least by 2025 [1] when both further funded them, someone would have actually done some minor due diligence. Coincidentally too, 2025 was when the flock surveillance matrix went up all over the country almost immediately.
We constantly hear that the magic of tech funding lies in the people, not even the product/service. These types of things always seem to uncover that that is effectively just a lie to cover up the ulterior motives of setting up a tyrannical surveillance matrix all around you … to protect the children, of course.
In an ideal world they'd have people whose job it is to monitor upstream activity in the components used in the firmware and maintain this. Sounds like they did not have that.
I don’t think you are catching on. Why would tyrants do ethics vetting? You assume God intentions?
I’m not a fan of the sloppy use of fascism in lieu of the more suitable term, tyranny (which I believe is intentional distraction, because that’s what I would have done), however, if you understand the mechanism of a YC and its total reliance on the money printing fraud, you would understand that YC is the closest thing to “fascism” there actually is, the federal government’s money printing fraud fueling and life blood of the Monopoly money they print to defraud you of value, in order to run their own little con job of how impressive and futuristic and modern these companies are that rely on extracting of value and exploiting vulnerabilities, not actually creating value.
Flock by a guy named Langley is at the very best a rather poetic example of that. I doubt they’re sophisticated enough to have worked this out, but they’re exploiting the vulnerability of people wanting and needing to feel safe in a system that maintains deliberate danger as a social engineering mechanism to control and dominate and even up until recently, deliberately degrade the populace.
What better way to get to more “fascist” fraudulent Monopoly money than to promise the people who’s lives you’ve made insecure that you can protect them through 24/7 surveillance of all of their activities and thoughts.
It’s not really a new thing; the “Patriot” Act was the first major act that simply shoved the American Revolution aside, but Flock by Langley is just the first instance of it being apparent through its ham fisted swashbuckling YC “beak things fast” clown approach that has unfortunately made many people extremely rich, and thus we got more of it.
It’s unfortunate, but we have permanently lost way more stories and are losing them at catastrophic rates today as technology and globalism eradicate local and indigenous cultures and languages/dialects.
Where I am, a cultural shift in the 90's [television!], created a 'more common' language from one end of the country to another. Dialects are dying, accents are being smoothed out: a country with character is becoming very bland.
It's odd that you would jump to "Russian op" and hedging by _not_ asserting that it is "definitely" one; but it very well could also be and arguably even is far more likely an act by someone who would benefit form scaring the public and manipulating the affected governments. I'm not going to assert at all, one way or another who it may be because it could be several actors with interests in producing outcomes of fear among the public and animating and manipulating the respective governments and the clowns in the EU to take actions without thinking.
It is really a rather common playbook of stoking fear and even instigating war not for direct outcomes that has been used innumerable times over history. Only it seems that the majority of people are incapable of seeing, accepting, or maybe just internalizing when they are being played, lied to, and manipulated for the benefit of others at their own expense.
One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing by some minor event like this, are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions, and they could simply just send barrages of missiles to hit actually meaningful targets if they ever become sick and tired of all the CIA/MI6 clowns thinking they can salami slice their way into conquering Russia and once the Germans and Poles have been whipped up to be the battering ram of minced meat again.
It's why we have so many catastrophic and calamitous events in our history because people never ask themselves who may be benefitting from the act that is immediately used to manipulate people through fear. In spite of having been told and explained a long time ago and many times since, you should always ask you who benefits, cui bono. Russia does not benefit from scaring the populace into supporting the murderous and war mongering governments and the maniacal ruling parasites that control them in order to profit from war as they send your children in to the meat grinder.
> One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
Or one could choose not to take this in isolation from all the acts of brazen and identified sabotage Russia does, slashing deep-sea cables in international waters with their shadow fleets, organizing psyop campaigns throughout the entire continent that can be traced back right to their government units, and so on :-)
"brazen and identified" is doing a lot of work here. IIRC the cable thing was an anchor accident, and everyone is doing psyop campaigns (Western psyops being far more advanced and sophisticated than their enemies). Nord Stream was definitely not an accident and we know who did that.
Implying that Russia somehow invented or is the undisputed leader in "psyops" is a popular hallmark of a low-information civilian, a narrative promoted by arch-propagandists like Peter Pomerantsev and Anne Applebaum.
"Propagandist" is not a palatable job title, so propagandists often masquerade under different words. For example, the US government's official foreign propaganda agency is called "US Agency for Global Media".
If Anne "it's okay to kill journalists in wartime" Applebaum is not a prominent Western propagandist, then who is?
\One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
They are known for actions that negatively affect them and everyone around. That's kinda their whole thing.
Look, for me this shit is personal. I am the person whose life the |redacted| makes worse. I get that boring explaination is not exciting to you for the reasons of neurological kind, this is a good enough model with predictive properties that help me be alive and have all my body parts in the factory installed places
The ruling class in Europe needs this war for economic reasons. They're orchestrating and selling it to the public by constant fear mongering and provoking conflict.
Even in a relatively intelligent crowd like this forum, people are gullible and easily guided to hate the Other: red ("communists", Russia, China); brown (immigrants, Muslims, Iran); or green ("far left", environmental and civil rights activists). They hate us for our freedoms!
Be afraid, people, and keep funnelling billions of your tax money into the pockets of the rich who profit from literal conspiracy, mass murder and war crimes. No wonder we have endless conflict and fascism on the rise around the world. There's so much money to be made from war and hate, defrauding the public for generations.
How can we not see it, it's the same playbook again and again. One day we will have to face the true evil, the traitors of humanity, the enemy within.
The last thing ‘the ruling class in Europe needs’ is a pan European war! Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place. They actively don’t want outright war and Russia knows this, which is why Russia continually provokes and gets away with acts of sabotage.
>Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place.
The system is already unstable due to the rampart growth of wealth inequality, especially after covid, disproportionately affecting the purchasing power and CoL of the working class, while those with assets have seen their wealth ballon. All orchestrated by EU politicians and the ECB currency inflation policies and and allocation towards banks and corporations who spent it during covid on assets and stock buybacks and left the working class footing the bill with inflation and mass layoffs years later.
The EU elites are already worried about how they can manage this bottled anger of the working class, which is why you see more and more draconical EU "chat control" and "speech control" laws trying to get passed. Pointing the peasants to vent their anger towards Russia as the scapegoat, for the fiscal irresponsibility of the EU elites that lead to the current wealth disparity, is a good way for the EU elites to avoid the angry mob.
After all, most of the wealthy European elites and nobles didn't lose their wealth after WW1 and WW2 even though millions of peasants died.
> China responded on Tuesday by warning against an "arms race" in space.
> "We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
Next up; America cries rivers of victimhood when Russia and China put their far more advanced space based weapons systems into orbit and 100x as many in response because the narcissistic maniacs in the “American” educated idiot class ripped the lid off Pandora’s box because Hollywood taught them that the good guy Americans always win.
China and (maybe?) Russia are putting weapons up there no matter what.
People act like had the inventors of the powder explosive gun never used it, we would still be fighting with arrows and spears today. Completely not how it works.
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