Mormonism is America’s future. It’s the prosperity gospel attached to a powerful lobbying contingent that exists to perpetuate MLM schemes.

If you think things are bad now, wait until Mormons are fully in control of California.

They got the satisfaction of standing behind a staunch group of party donors and private sector hiring partners. AIPAC will continue to dump millions into the coffers of your Richie Torries and your Dean Phillips types. They’ll pick up recruits like Wesley Bell and George Latimer, thinning the ranks of progressives in The Squad. They’ll turn ex-Dems into private sector influence peddlers on their behalf. And they’ll continue to work hand-in-glove with the MIC to guarantee enormous sums of money flow into the Middle Eastern arms trade, which is good news for every Dem with a contracting firm hiring in their district (basically all of them).

This might seem like it sucks for the party in this cycle. But its the sort of position that guarantees careers in party leadership and future opportunities at higher office for each given individual party official’s life. Going against AIPAC is a career ender on both sides of the aisle. Going with the flow means you’ll be hanging out in the Senate cloak room getting sucked off with your friends well into your 90s.

Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media

Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You’re still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You’re still securing the URL from a private DNS. You’re still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).

Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.

There’s not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.

If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting “Communities I’m interested in” on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth “Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!” reactionary in between instances, that’s an immediate turn off that I don’t think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.

Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we’re all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).

Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.

I think @TranquilTurbulence pretty neatly established one big different - Americans produce far more waste than any actually impoverished country.

We just live poor in order to afford all those extra landfills.

Diamond Straws currently employs 15 people but is anticipating an uptick in business in the wake of President Trump’s executive order declaring that the US is “going back to plastic straws” and moving away from paper straws.

You could one day aspire to be the 16th factory worker in the plastic straw factory. Unless, of course, those jobs are automated away by AI.

Crazy that Village Idiot is one of the most coveted jobs in America.

Can’t believe a man who has dedicated himself to climbing on every popular trend and riding it into the dirt would do this.

I genuinely enjoyed the early game. It had a lot of promise, the build up of tension was engaging, the world they laid out was exactly the kind of FF7 techno-magical cyberpunk and sorcery mish mash Final Fantasy does well. I loved the characters as they were introduced and was curious to see whether the wanna-be boy band aesthetic would culminate in an FFX-2 style dance battle motif.

But its obvious they just ran out of gas after the first major arc. All that world building up front, but the game completely falls apart after you leave the main continent. By then of the game, you’re literally On Rails after giving you this rich open world to explore for a hundred hours upfront. Tons of buildup but very little payoff. Not what you want in an FF title. I was deeply disappointed in FF13’s Big Hallway style of storytelling, but at least the story paid out in the end.

Just a numbers game. More people will absorb the costs than cancel their subscriptions. So these streaming services can keep ratcheting until they hit a breaking point. There’s no disincentive to these behaviors, as long as net revenue increases quarter to quarter.

Piracy requires a certain degree of technical competence and internet savvy that the vast majority of end users don’t have.

Nothing that Trump administration does is going to make life more difficult for me currently.

Woof. I remember saying that back in 2017. Four years later…

No one is doing anything

Plenty of not-terminally-online people are organizing to resist mass arrests and deportations. Reach out to your local DSA. My Houston chapter’s been great about pulling together legal resources, just for starters.

ACABers suddenly becoming fans of police brutality

It’s just two fascists trying to kill one another.

I think maybe it’s naive to think that if the cost goes down, shrimp jesus won’t just be in higher demand.

Not that demand will go down but that economic cost of generating this nonsense will go down. The number of people shipping this back and forth to each other isn’t going to meaningfully change, because Facebook has saturated the social media market.

If you make it more efficient to flood cyberspace with bullshit, cyberspace will just be flooded with more bullshit.

The efficiency is in the real cost of running the model, not in how it is applied. The real bottleneck for AI right now is human adoption. Guys like Altman keep insisting a new iteration (that requires a few hundred miles of nuclear power plants to power) will finally get us a model that people want to use. And speculators in the financial sector seemed willing to cut him a check to go through with it.

Knocking down the real physical cost of this boondoggle is going to de-monopolize this awful idea, which means Altman won’t have a trillion dollar line of credit to fuck around with exclusively. We’ll still do it, but Wall Street won’t have Sam leading them around by the nose when they can get the same thing for 1/100th of the price.

What DeepSeek has done is to eliminate the threat of “exclusive” AI tools - ones that only a handful of mega-corps can dictate terms of use for.

Now you can have a Wikipedia-style AI (or a Wookiepedia AI, for that matter) that’s divorced from the C-levels looking to monopolize sectors of the service economy.

And now people exchange one American Junk-spitting Spyware for a Chinese junk-spitting spyware.

LLMs aren’t spyware, they’re graphs that organize large bodies of data for quick and user-friendly retrieval. The Wikipedia schema accomplishes a similar, abet more primitive, role. There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.

If you no longer need to boil down half a Great Lake to create the next iteration of Shrimp Jesus, that’s good whether or not you think Meta should be dedicating millions of hours of compute to this mind-eroding activity.

Not really a question of national intentions. This is just a piece of technology open-sourced by a private tech company working overseas. If a Chinese company releases a better mousetrap, there’s no reason to evaluate it based on the politics of the host nation.

Throwing a wrench in the American proposal to build out $500B in tech centers is just collateral damage created by a bad American software schema. If the Americans had invested more time in software engineers and less in raw data-center horsepower, they might have come up with this on their own years earlier.

TSMC just finished building out a foundry in Arizona, so there’s a nativist argument that we don’t need the island’s original facilities anymore.

Democrats and Republicans have been shoveling truckload after truckload of cash into a Potemkin Village of a technology stack for the last five years. A Chinese tech company just came in with a dirt cheap open-sourced alternative and I guarantee you the American firms will pile on to crib off the work.

Far from fucking them over, China just did the Americans’ homework for them. They just did it in a way that undercuts all the “Sam Altman is the Tech Messiah! He will bring about AI God!” holy roller nonsense that was propping up a handful of mega-firm inflated stock valuations.

Small and Mid-cap tech firms will flourish with these innovations. Microsoft will have to write the last $13B it sunk into OpenAI as a lose.

Reddit has been on this trend for a long while. It might be because you posted in a sub that’s gotten scoured. It might be because you said a word or set of words that tripped their algorithm. You might have been reported by someone for some reason.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that Reddit actively does not want real users anymore. They just want lurkers and bots. You might have genuinely been banned for no reason whatsoever.

Oh absolutely. Trump out, Vance in. I’m really excited to see what a younger, even more nakedly fascist corporate lickspittle will do with the unchecked powers of the executive branch.