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#techbros

8 posts7 participants0 posts today

"A new report warns of 'profound risks' in American politics as cryptocurrency companies increase their political spending and Donald Trump oversees regulatory retreat while promising to create a 'crypto strategic reserve''."

~ Martin Pengelly

#Musk #Trump #TechBros #crypto #cryptocurrency #bitcoin #billionaires #EconomicElites
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theguardian.com/us-news/2025/m

The Guardian · US rise of cryptocurrency and fall of regulation pose ‘profound risks’ – reportBy Martin Pengelly
Replied in thread

Tech bros are living, breathing embodiments of the false authority fallacy; claiming that their professed understanding of basic logic qualifies them to reason expertly upon every conceivable topic while conveniently ignoring a fundamental maxim of their purported core area of expertise: garbage in, garbage out.

Had a very insightful conversation about the limitations on AI with a marketing copywriter.

Her comment was that actually writing marketing materials is a small part of her job.

If it was just about writing something that persuades a customer to buy a product, it would be a cakewalk.

What takes time is the stakeholder management.

It's navigating conflicting and contradictory demands of different departments.

Legal wants to say one thing. Sales something different. Legal something else entirely.

There's higher-up managers who need their egos soothed.

There's different managers with different views about what the customers want and what their needs are.

And there's a big difference in big bureaucratic organisations between writing marketing collateral, and writing something that gets signed off by everyone who needs to.

She's tried using AI for some tasks, and what that typically involves is getting multiple AI responses, and splicing them together into a cohesive whole.

Because it turns out there's a big difference in the real world between generating a statistically probable output, and having the emotional intelligence to navigate humans.

#AI#LLM#ChatGPT
Continued thread

“Musk and his team of tech bros at the Department of Government Efficiency are not actually promoting efficiency… Rather than looking for efficiency, they are simply working to zero out the government that works for ordinary people, turning it instead to enabling them to consolidate wealth and power.”
—Heather Cox Richardson, March 9, 2025
#trump #musk #oligarchy #broligarchy #techbros #doge #usa

❝ …some online material that was flagged didn't even relate to the military's recent DEI efforts.

It appeared that some historical photos were marked for deletion for just having the word "gay," the AP reported. They included photos of the B-29 named the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, as well as imagery of a dredging project by the Army Corps of Engineers because one of the engineers had the last name, Gay.

businessinsider.com/us-militar

Business Insider · The US military's diversity photos Trump doesn't want you to seeBy Lauren Frias

Curtis Yarvin. (See wiki link below, first three paras)
Hes the man behind Peter Thiel, Trump, Vance, Steve Bannon &co and the Trump/MAGA movement. Pure evil.

This is not fascism modelled on 1930s - its called the Dark Enlightenment/neo-feudalism.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis

The book 👇 summarising/critique-ing Yarvin's "philosophy" makes for very chilling reading. The screen shots below are just one small part.

I would put a Content Warning on this but we must MUST inform ourselves about what their agenda is.

#uspolitics #uspol #ukpolitics #ukpol #auspol #AusPolitics #canpol #canpolitics #eupol #eupolitics
#AustralianElection #AusGov #fascism #neofeudalism #darkenlightenment #maga #autocracy #oligarchy #techbros #racism #lgbtqplus #misogyny

I have what I think is a good example of how useless ‘AI’ is for understanding. I am tagging widely. I searched “how to identify mushrooms” on DuckDuckGo, which then so helpfully spammed my screen with this lovely advice (see image with alt text). The source of much of my knowledge is mushroomexpert.com, managed by Michael Kuo.

“A mushroom is identified by its characteristics”. I could get semantic here too about the definition of a mushroom, but talk about a pretty useless statement. Fine though. That’s well enough and good if you want an explanation that is super entry level. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though I don’t remember telling the ‘AI’ that I wanted only entry level information.

Then it talks about the danger in attempting to ID mushrooms because of the potential for poisoning. It tacitly assumes that my wanting to ID a mushroom means I want to eat it. I don’t. I just like mushrooms. I have a problem with the whole ‘some are poisonous’ throw-in, like its something their lawyers required them to include. How many are poisonous? 90%? 5%? We have no idea, and that’s OK. I didn’t tell the ‘AI’ that I wanted information on whether or not they were poisonous. But, as I’ll get to, the fact that this is included is not my problem. My problem is what they don’t include.

I think mushrooms are awesome. I think the fact that some of them are poisonous is relevant only based on the human-centric assumptions ‘AI’ is so obsessed with and what it’s dataset is built on. I don’t see the value in a mushroom based on whether or not I can eat it, and it chaffs me that they don’t also include any information about their ecological roles. You know what is a great way to identify a mushroom (including if I want to eat it)?!?!?! Their ecology (essentially, their ‘behavior’)!!! Let’s be sure to not mention that, #TechBros.

Ok let’s keep going, cause we’ve made it this far. It suggests talking to a #mycologist. It turns out that I don’t have any experienced mycologists on call. Mycologists are helpful but busy people. And I’m more likely than most of the population to know mycologists. You might as well say, ‘don’t bother trying to ID the mushroom’. Way to kill my interest immediately in something I’m trying to get into. If you really want to learn to ID mushrooms for foraging, there are sources you can look up to help you.

I’ll get to my main point. Identification of certain mushroom forming fungi to species is essentially impossible. Look up Amanitas or Russulas on mushroomexpert.com (phenomenal source, old school blogging). There is no clear delineating of what a mushroom forming species even is. Scientists argue over and reclassify bird subspecies all the time. Imagine the black box that is mushroom forming fungi, which most of the time is a web of single-cell wide threads hidden in the soil. Some mushrooms historically were ‘IDed’ (scientifically) by taste or color, which as you all know everyone experiences these things the same, all the time. And, darnit, I happened to leave my DNA sequencing kit at home (as if there aren’t issues with classifying mushroom forming fungi on their DNA alone).

If ‘AI’ were functional, to me, it would include the suggestion that one option is, instead of focusing on species, focus on species groupings (this also applies to foraging for mushrooms if done thoughtfully). Species groupings can be more useful, as is sometimes saying: “I don’t need to know exactly what this is. I’ll just focus on it’s ecology instead of obsessing over an arbitrary definition”. This nuance is not something that can be corrected with better algorithms or more training data (in fact, its going to get worse), because #LLM s are designed to spit out the lowest common denominator.

In the end, given all the questions I brought up, the biggest problems I have with ‘AI’ is that it falsely assumes something gigantic about the question I am asking and gives a simplified and highly misleading perception of how much we actually know. I think it makes a big mistake assuming that I am uncurious and want a bare-minimum answer. And when it comes to the grand total of all there is to know about mushroom forming fungi, we know next to nothing. Of course, 'AI' cannot say that because 'AI' doesn't know what it doesn't know.

You know who can identify and communicate all of these nuances? Humans.

Continued thread

"A well-funded propaganda machine that exploits people's cultural fears and spiritual yearnings, turning them away from their economic self-interests and toward an authoritarian movement to end democracy."

Important points that Stewart makes in this interview:
"The new right and Christian nationalists are a power couple of American authoritarianism. Both want to smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy."

#Musk #Trump #techbros #ChristianNationalism #democracy #authoritarianism
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Amanda Marcotte interviews Katherine Stewart, author of the just-published Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. Marcotte writes,

"Money, God and lies: These are the three pillars of the movement that led to Donald Trump's disturbing victory in November."

#Musk #Trump #techbros #ChristianNationalism #democracy #authoritarianism
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salon.com/2025/02/18/his-missi