> Karp, who’s known as a provocateur, aggressively condoned violence, often peering into the audience with hungry eyes, palpably desperate for claps, boos or shock. > > He began by saying that the US has to “scare our adversaries to death” in war. Referring to Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, he said: “If what happened to them happened to us, there’d be a hole in the ground somewhere.”

> Members of the audience laughed when he mocked fresh graduates of Columbia University, which had some of the earliest encampment protests in the country. He said they’d have a hard time on the job market and described their views as a “pagan religion infecting our universities” and “an infection inside of our society”

!hitler-detector

> “The peace activists are war activists,” Karp insisted. “We are the peace activists.”

!19!84

> A huge aspect of war in a democracy, Karp went on to argue, is leaders successfully selling that war domestically.

!chomsky-yes-honey

> Cohen urged the room to see the 7 October attack as a “big warning” about tech in military settings. Although Israel had invested “very heavily” in defense and surveillance technology, it had failed to stop the attack, Cohen noted. “We do need to have a little bit of humility.”

!the-boys-are-back-in-town !the-boys-are-back-in-town !the-boys-are-back-in-town

> This didn’t seem to be a common view. The prevailing attitude of the conference was when systems fail, it just means you need newer technology, and more of it.

!so-true

> said hi to the person next to me, a man who appeared to be in his late 50s.

> “Have you seen Oppenheimer?” he asked.

> I thought he was going to talk about the hubris of people who build weapons of war. Instead, he told me he works in nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos laboratory

> “I just thought of something,” he said abruptly, laughing. “I am the new Oppenheimer!”

Oh you "just thought" of that did you? !doubt

> only other journalist covering the conference was my friend Jack Poulson, who said I should join him at a panel discussion about ethics and human rights.

> starting the Q&A. Jack stood up at the first opportunity. He talked about the “provocative remarks” made throughout the conference about “exporting AI into places like Gaza”. Voice shaking, he mentioned Karp “unabashedly supporting” the ongoing killings in Gaza, and said Karp’s comments about “winning the debate” were clearly a euphemism for crushing dissent. A couple of audience members laughed quietly as Jack asked: could the panel respond to any of this? > > The moderator decided to let everybody else ask their questions and let the panelists choose which to answer. Unsurprisingly, no one directly answered Jack’s question.

> Later, as I entered the main conference hall, I found myself right behind a group of kids with tiny backpacks. They appeared to be in first or second grade. I asked a teacher, a blond woman with glasses, if there was an exhibit for kids. She said no, but one of them had a dad working at the event. > > A slim man with dark hair approached the kids. He had a Special Competitive Studies Project pin on his suit. Beaming, he took a picture with them. About 30 minutes later, I found him taking the kids on a tour. He was squatting down to their height and pointing at something in a booth for a military vendor. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

!agony-wholesome

> a panel in Palantir’s booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two “privacy and civil liberties engineers” – a young man and woman who spoke exclusively in monotone.

!is-this ableism?

> on an interactive map, a targeted landmass lit up with bright blue blobs. These blobs, she said, were civilian areas like hospitals and schools. The civilian locations could also be described in text, she said, but it can take a long time to read. So, Gaia uses a large language model (something like ChatGPT) to sift through this information and simplify it.

!i-love-not-thinking !obama-drone

> The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain.

!brainworms

> When North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un released his latest song two weeks ago, surely he couldn’t have foreseen it becoming a hit on TikTok. > > But the propaganda tune has gone viral online with Gen Z users bopping around to the synthy-electro pop. > > Most are clearly quite oblivious to the Korean lyrics praising a man who’s vowed to “thoroughly annihilate the US” and launched dozens of ballistic missiles

!thought-side-r-1 !xi-plz !thought-side-r-2 !yea

> But the sunny pop hides something more sinister, experts say.

!nerd

> there’s more than just commercial considerations at play when writing a chart-topper in North Korea - authorities want an earworm that penetrates minds. > > There’s no space for abstract phrasing or timing that’s overly complicated , says Alexandra Leonzini, a Cambridge University scholar who researches North Korean music. > > Melodies have to be simple, accessible, something people can easily pick up. > > Tunes also need to be pitched at a vocal range where they can be sung by most people. The masses can’t keep up with vocal gymnastics, so forget about multi-octave riffs.

> the songbook also rarely contains any tracks with real emotion

Hive mind npc communists brainwashed by appealing simplicity of juche-pop hit

> Pyongyang keeps its pop tracks for those at home. The state has paraded its opera troupes and symphony orchestras on overseas missions – but its lighter ensembles are kept for a domestic audience only.

It's streaming. You are literally writing an article about it going viral

> The song sheet and lyrics of the latest songs - which only come out sparingly - are printed in newspapers and magazines;

> “A song is almost like the newspaper in North Korea.”

!morshupls they print the "songs" in these newspapers, but it's almost like the songs are the newspapers. What else is in the newspapers? Idk probably just more songs

> usually they also have to learn dances to go with it

> “By the time the song has sort of been taken into the body, it’s become part of the person,” he says

!dafoe-horror "I am currently hitting the griddy for Ukraine"

> Meanwhile on TikTok, users are just enjoying the music.

> For many American users, the irony’s not been lost on them that a Communist song has gone viral on the Chinese-owned app while US lawmakers are trying to ban it.

!thonk

This section is for the real big brains

> Mondragón’s approach has proved itself profitable and resilient, so could it become a realistic alternative to the modern corporation? > > It’s a moot point. Despite their worker-first philosophy, the movement’s leaders are reluctant to denounce the wealth-maximising nature of modern market capitalism. The reason is as simple as it is awkward: Mondragón must actively participate in that same capitalist system for its survival. > > This tactic of being “in, but not of” the world of mainstream business has seen the Basque-based movement face charges of double standards. In particular, critics highlight its outsourcing of some of its production to low-wage countries with weaker labour standards, such as China and Mexico. Mondragón argues that it has checks and balances in place to ensure that its foreign business partners uphold workers’ rights, and that keeping costs low is part and parcel of staying competitive. “For us, workers will always come before capital. But capital is still important because without it we cannot fulfil our mission of social transformation,” says Javier Marcos, Mondragón’s director of communications. > > Radical as that mission is, its focus is and always has been primarily on el territorio (the local Basque region); less about rewriting the global economic order and more about improving co-op members’ lives. That said, if others want to copy the Mondragón model, then its doors are always open, insists Etxeberria. In the past month alone, he has hosted large groups of policymakers and business students from the Philippines, Brazil and the US. “They come to see if our approach works in practice,” he says. “They all go back pleasantly surprised, I think.”

> Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute closed this week in what Swedish-born philosopher says was ‘death by bureaucracy’

> The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FIH in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence.

> The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers.

> The closure of Bostrom’s center is a further blow to the effective altruism and longtermism movements that the philosopher has spent decades championing, which in recent years have become mired in scandals related to racism, sexual harassment and financial fraud. Bostrom himself issued an apology last year after a decades-old email surfaced in which he claimed “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word.

> Bostrom – who popularized the theory that humanity may be living in a simulation,

> In one paper, Bostrom proposed the concept of a universally worn “freedom tag” that would constantly surveil individuals using AI and relate any suspicious activity to a police force that could arrest them for threatening humanity.

> his answers – “Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood” – led to further criticism from fellow academics that he was being evasive.

Big time brain genius this guy

> “It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.” > > Instead, she said the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – which led to the development of the UK constitution and solidified the role of parliament – should be credited for providing the kind of economic certainty that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution. > > Any other interpretation could derail efforts to increase growth at home and abroad, Badenoch said. > > “It matters, because if people genuinely believe that the UK only grew and developed into an advanced economy because of exploitation and oppression, then the solutions they will devise will make our growth and productivity problem even worse,” she said.

!wojak-nooo nooo all this talking about our practice of theiving is really going to derail ongoing theiving efforts

> “It matters in other countries too, because if developing nations do not understand how the west became rich, they cannot follow in its footsteps.

!fanon

> one of the main people invested in making it smarter is saying that soon, it might even become self-sustaining and self-replicating

> In a podcast interview with the New York Times' Ezra Klein, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei discussed "responsible scaling" of the technology — and how without governance, it may start to, well, breed.

!didnt-kill-himself

> Amodei explained to Klein, Anthropic uses virology lab biosafety levels as an analogy for AI. Currently, he says, the world is at ASL 2 — and ASL 4, which would include "autonomy" and "persuasion," may be just around the corner > > ASL 4 is going to be more about, on the misuse side, enabling state-level actors to greatly increase their capability, which is much harder than enabling random people," Amodei sai

!say-the-line-bart-1

> "So where we would worry that North Korea or China or Russia could greatly enhance their offensive capabilities in various military areas with AI in a way that would give them a substantial advantage at the geopolitical level

!say-the-line-bart-2

> "Various measures of these models," he continued, "are pretty close to being able to replicate and survive in the wild." > > When Klein asked how long it would take to get to these various threat levels, Amodei — who said he's wont to thinking "in exponentials" — said he thinks the "replicate and survive in the wild" level could be reached "anywhere from 2025 to 2028."

!sentient-ai

> DEAR MISS MANNERS: Lately at social events, I often find myself trapped by people who want to share, in excruciating detail, their genetic test results. > > Each person finds their own results deeply compelling, marveling at length over being 3% this and 15% that, with stunning reveals like, “I thought I we were Welsh, but it turns out we’re Scottish!” > > Meanwhile, the next person is on deck, barely half-listening, eagerly getting ready to launch into their own genetic saga. > > Monologuing about the minutiae of one’s DNA is self-absorption at, quite literally, the cellular level. Is there a polite way to shut this down?

> GENTLE READER: Oh, dear. Miss Manners would have thought that we had established the idea that bragging about one’s lineage is rude, and now it has started up again. > > Well, you could try expanding the scope of the conversation. Try, “What would your ancestors have thought of the state of America today?” Or, “I suppose you must want to travel there now. What are your vacation plans this year?” > > Or, “Excuse me, I need to freshen my drink.”

!so-true they tested my cum and it came back Probably Nordic, just like Opa always said!!

!hitler-detector !took-restraint

:matt

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/3/29/china-turns-to-ai-in-propaganda-mocking-the-american-dream

https://fadarecords.bandcamp.com/album/slime-patrol

Thanks to @Yuritopiaposadism@hexbear.net for posting a video about the recently released fan-made english translation patch (2022) for the Japanese PS1 point-and-click adventure Aconcagua (2000), I've been enjoying playing it on my handheld and thought I should make another post to highlight it since other hexbears might also enjoy some of its themes and retro gameplay

The game centers around the survivors of a plane crash trying to descend a mountain without being killed by commandos dispatched by the military dictatorship to assassinate one of the group, the leader of an anti-government democratic people's movement.

The gameplay is really simple scene-by-scene point-and-click, where you can toggle which survivor you are controlling at any given time and usually you just need to find the right character to interact with some environmental element to advance to the next scene.

If you do play it, make sure you also use each character to talk to every other character in the group every time you enter a new scene/area -- the dialogues add a lot of backstory for the characters while providing some hints too

Here's some screen caps

Lib moment:

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Coming to terms with the necessity of political violence

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Some of your sus companions:

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Here's a video from the translator, Hilltop, about the very difficult translation process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwh-b6AUY5I

Patch here https://www.patreon.com/posts/68930991