josephc

There are a lot of options.

In fact, for most of American history, neither Zuck or Gates would give away any part of their company. They just need to pay their taxes to give back for the gains afforded them by society.

Do you think either of those folks made their companies on their own? Completely? In a vacuum? Sure, Zuckerberg did a lot of work, but the Internet was made with public funds. It runs on the national electric infrastructure. Employees get there on public roads. The protocols we use are standardized by the federal government. Their employees have public educations. The languages that they use are open source and community maintained.

It doesn’t have to be a cooperative. Even just going back to the way the US worked before Reagan when we had strong social safety nets, lots of public funding, and general social mindedness would be a step towards socialism.

I’m not opposed to some folks being wealthier than others; I’m opposed to people starving because we cannot sate the rich.

I don’t hate money as a tool. I hate systems that maximize it over humanity.

I’d have a canary token url so I could see where my photo ended up and who was looking at it. I’d redirect through to a grabify link, then to an intermediate link that looked like malware but was actually a Rickroll.

A US $1 weighs 1g according to a random website I found on the Internet. I tested and it’s close enough.

As of today 2026/06/02, a gram of gold is worth about $140 assuming it’s minted and the purity is known.

That honestly surprises me. It means that gold and bills (assuming c-bills) are within an order of magnitude of each other.

Worst case with bill denominations: half a million. Best case with bill denominations: 50 million dollars.

Worst case with gold: $140/g less 10% worst case for verification and bulk buy discounts. $120/g ballpark. $60 million. Best case with gold: ~$70 million dollars upper bound for known minted purity.

So gold has the highest potential return but also the highest overhead.

I’d probably go gold. Even if I lost 50% due to overhead, I’d be able to pay my mortgage and my brother’s student loans and for my mum to live in a nice place.

Honestly, any of them would be a life changing amount of money.

No. It’s not okay when China does it either.

EDIT:

And yet, you registered on .ml.

Thank you for pointing out the issue with, I think, the ML instance? I don’t particularly like how it was done and have some critiques, but those can wait and this can be a good teaching opportunity for both of us.

If you’ll note the age of my account you may realize that Mastodon Fed didn’t exist when it was created. In fact, when I signed up as part of the great Reddit Exodus there weren’t many other functional instances. The other alternative I tried didn’t send me an account activation email. It would seem the ML is the only one that would have me at the time.

After reading your post I found myself scratching my head thinking, “Why is this person talking about China? I didn’t even mention China?” Then I thought, wait, is the lemmy dev an advocate for genocide or something? I don’t see any articles on that and it’s an open source project. Perhaps the ML instance is mainly hosted in China? But I’m not giving them money?

Finally, I found someone mention that the ML domain was “Marxism-Lenninism” and not “machine learning”. I haven’t confirmed this so don’t take my word as gospel.

Now the question is, “do I move instances?”

That’s a longer conversation.

There’s no meeting in the middle with folks who are trying to make a white ethnostate.

I’ll debate with my friends about lots of things: is it worth adding a new tax? Is the needle exchange program appropriately measuring their numbers? Does it make more sense to build a homeless shelter next to the other one in the tenderloin to keep disadvantaged folks next to their peers or should we build it farther north so we balance people across care facilities.

These are the things we debate.

Things like, “do trans people deserve human rights?”, “are concentration camps okay?”, and, “are we cozy with state sanctioned extrajudicial murder?” are not up for debate. The answers are “yes”, “no”, and “no”, and if anyone disagrees with that fuck them. They are a waste of my time and emotional energy. They will never be convinced.

I’m triaging. My friends and family and community need my limited energy. They deserve it.

Most people here have been using AI in some form for their entire lives without knowing it. It just did its job quietly with nobody noticing. Then venture capital (or just capitalism itself) ruined everything and broke the contract: publicly acquired data must be given back to the public for free.

I could pontificate at length about the terminology and how it has gotten fucked. The blending of the terms itself is part of what makes it difficult to have a reasonable and nuanced discussion.

Let’s take a moment to separate out AI from machine learning from deep learning from LLMs.

AI is fucking old. It used to mean “any algorithms that create intelligent behavior”. Not a particularly useful definition these days, but it used to mean things like pathfinding and searching.

Machine learning is a more useful phrase: a set of algorithms to solve problem where we don’t know “how”, but we have examples of inputs and outputs. For example, I don’t know how I would define cute, but if someone showed me a bunch of photos I could probably say which ones were cute, not cute, and unsure.

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses a specific set of algorithms: neutral networks.

LLMs are a subset of deep learning that use “transformers”. Which is a specific architecture that does a lot of things quite well, like determine how proteins fold, how drugs interact, how words interact in a sentence, etc.

If you’ve used Google Maps at any point since it was created, you’ve used classical AI.

If you’ve used email, you’ve used machine learning.

If you’ve used a photos app that lets you search for similar pictures of people, you’ve used machine learning.

If you’ve had more than one prescription filled in the past five years, your pharmacist has used AI (even if they don’t know it) to check potential drug interactions.

Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate that the field I spent my whole life researching has been coopted into a way to siphon money from people into the coffers of the richest fucking parasites, but when people say “fuck AI” they have either lost the nuance or never had it. Everyone that hears the message experiences on the surface and it does them a disservice.

When the luddites broke the textile looms, did they hate the machines or did they hate the loss of their livelihoods?

When the early industialists broke into factories and smashed their equipment, did they hate the machines or did they hate the captains of industry that forced them to work inhumane hours in terrible conditions?

When people say “fuck AI” do they hate the math that, until this point, has led to a better world for us all, or do they hate the system that has enshittified it into one of pure exploitation?

This whole mess feels like a distraction to me. Tech should be a social good. It should be helping people. Not to say it’s without problems, but now when we say “fuck AI” it leads us to pushing back against technology itself rather than the system that’s using it to hurt people.

Unlike javascript, where at least it is an interpreted language people can audit, you would have to reverse engineer these binaries to figure out what they do.

If you cargo install something you get source code (unless the library packages a binary, but that’s the same as if it were JS or Python or C). Rust dependencies don’t become binary until the final product.

Auditing Rust binaries isn’t much worse than auditing minified and uglified JS. I’ve done both.

EDIT:

Rust

Rust is doing pretty poorly right now.

among the 999 most popular crates on crates.io, around 17% contained code that do not match their code repository.

https://kerkour.com/rust-supply-chain-nightmare

I just went through the article and I don’t think I agree with the assessment that “Rust is doing pretty poorly right now.” It feels disingenuous, given the content of the article you linked:

826 crates match their upstream repositories at the revision they were built at. 74 crates have revisions that cannot be found in their repositories, whether due to later squash merges, rebases or revisions simply not being pushed. 73 crates do not have VCS info, either because they were built with old Cargo versions, built with --allow-dirty, or not built from a repo clone at all. 77 crates do not declare a repository in their Cargo manifest. 7 crates would match their upstream repository but for one or more symlinks being incorrectly handled. 3 crates declare repositories that do not exist. 3 crates have submodules that do not exist. 3 crates cannot be found within their repositories. 3 crates cannot be built due to cargo package errors. … Only 8 crate versions straight up don’t match their upstream repositories. None of these were malicious: seven were updates from vendored upstreams (such as wrapped C libraries) that weren’t represented in their repository at the point the crate version was published, and the last was the inadvertent inclusion of .github files that hadn’t yet been pushed to the GitHub repository.