America / Trump’s EO’s on AI basically say they need to tune their models to be as racist, or more racist, than Grok currently is.
At least with China’s approach they seem to be ‘saying’ the right thing with regards to open sourcing it and having a more collaborative approach internationally. The USA and Trump is just “NO DEI AT ALL!!! MAKE IT SUPPORT DEAR LEADERS RIGHT THINK OR NO GOVT CONTRACTS FOR YOU!!! THIS IS NOT BIAS, THIS IS US REMOVING BIAS!!!”
Outside of the crap going on in the US fascist resurgence, women are generally defined as a minority that requires equity / special benefits and protections. Making an app to “protect women” by crowdsourcing information about potentially predatory / negative men is viewed as ‘good’, and would likely be ‘ok’ by many western country standards.
Making an app about women, with similar ‘experiences’ reported by guys, would be considered predatory, and would get shut down.
We can already see plenty of related things out and about – like “women only” companies getting applauded by govt / media, while the same sources shame any business that doesn’t attempt to get 50%+ women on staff. We shut down gentlemen’s clubs for being discriminatory, but we cheer women’s only spaces. Genders are not treated equally in the public’s eye, and it generally skews in favour of benefiting women at this point, especially once it hits media/govt/courts.
I think this is the more realistic take on how it’d play out.
Yup. Lack of game support is a big roadblock – having just one or two friends on linux makes finding games your group can play together a real headache.
Another weird-ish hiccup, is the lack of good/cheap/trustworthy tax software. Installing windows once a year to do taxes is bonkers. Some solve it by having a VM that runs windows that they only use for taxes, but that isn’t really a fix. You’d still be a microbitch.
It’s hilarious in a way that Thiel, one of the billionaires who triggered a liquidity crisis that sunk SVB, is off proposing to fill the gap that he created. It’s also entirely fitting with the conspiracy theory of the tech bro fascists wanting complete autonomy to setup electronic fiefdoms.
I don’t really get how this would work though, in more practical terms – as a lot of the crypto stuff is just antithetical to the banking industry. Like even the whole schpiel the crypto bros often go on about how you can send money quick from wallet to wallet, with the old “OMG we did it! How can banks be so stupid and slow!”. It’s largely due to regulation. Like anti-money laundering regulation, where countries don’t want citizens funding things like foreign terrorist groups with untrackable/unblockable wallet to wallet money transfers, so they tell banks they gotta scrutinize every transaction quite a bit, under threat of hefty fines – and where the govt can overtly tell banks to block payments to unfriendly countries (eg. Iran).
Meh, it’s clear they won’t care about the fundamentals at all, nor do they care to understand how the industry works. They’ll likely use the bank to undercut existing players, while propping it up by manipulating the stock / piling in their billions. The regulation comment is a misdirect, alot like claims of wanting to be regulated were a misdirect back with FTX – these guys are far more likely to aggressively lobby for / pay the republicans to dismantle regulations in their favour, changing the landscape to their personal benefit. After the competition starts crumbling / they start moving towards a monopoly, they’ll either turn it into a regular bank in terms of service (but under their control of course), or they’ll intentionally tank it to gobble up whatever reserve/insurance funds exist, shifting that wealth into the billionaire’s pockets too, and leaving people with few options other than “under the mattress” for their savings. That’d make people almost entirely dependant on maintaining a regular working income, completing the tech bro fascist wet dream of having indentured slaves that can’t push back against any of their bullshit.
Personally, I don’t mind seeing when comments are heavily down voted. If an opinion is unpopular, that’s ok, especially in some areas where you generally know there’s a likely bias in the audience.
What annoys me is seeing comments removed / silenced by mods when the comments dont align. If the comments calling for explicit violence or using overt slurs, by all means censor. But many online spaces will eliminate even respectful / neutral comments simply because they aren’t in line with that narrative.
SVB was intentionally crashed by tech bros like Peter Thiel, likely as a strategic move to lobby for change in the banking sector / to gain more access for tech companies. The bank operated in a risky space, with too high a concentration of tech bro customers. This left them exposed to Thiel and crowd going “Hey, look at the balance sheet, if we all withdrew our money at once we can pop this bank and trigger a discussion about banking regulations / reform!”.
So, no one forgot, it’s all part of the same larger plan really.
Yeah, but that’s sort of the point I was making… it was a data repository used by “thousands and thousands” of security professionals and organizations. So people who were generating revenue off of the service. I mean, they’re professionals, not hobbyists / home users.
I’m not an American, but in terms of everything running like a company/for profit, I’d say that its best if things are sustainable / able to self-maintain. If the US cutting funding means this program can’t survive, that’s an issue. If it has value to a larger community, the larger community should be able to fund its operation. There’s clearly a cost to maintaining the program, and there are clearly people who haven’t contributed to paying that cost.
In terms of going back to whatever, the foundation involved is likely to sort out alternative funding, though potentially with decreased functionality (it sounds like they had agreements to pay for secondary vulnerability report reviews, which will likely need to get scaled back). Maybe they’ll need to add in a fee for frequent feed pulls, or something similar. I wouldn’t say it’s completely toast or anythin just yet.
I’m honestly not totally sure what to think about this one, though I recognise that it’s a big shift/likely a negative overall result.
Reason I’m humming and hawing, is that there are lots of expensive cybersecurity type ‘things’ that rely on the CVE system, without explicitly paying in to that system / supporting it directly, from what I recall / have seen. Take someone like Tenable security, who sell vulnerability scanners that extensively use/integrate with the CVE/NVD databases… companies pay Tenable huge amounts of money for those products. Has Tenable been paying anything into the ‘shared’ public resource pool? How about all those ‘audit’ companies, who charge like 10-30k per audit for doing ‘vulnerability / penetration tests’.
IT Security has been an expensive/profitable area for a long time, while also relying on generally public/shared resources to facilitate a lot of the work. Maybe an ‘industry’ funded consortium is the more appropriate way to go.
pot -> kettle
I can’t help but laugh at the note about small start ups lead by 19-20 YOs succeeding with millions of dollars by ‘partnering well’ and so on.
The success or failure of these AI companies seems almost entirely driven by the amount of Venture Capital thrown at them. A company like Perplexity, with practically zero product, having been formed less than 5 years ago, but being able to put up $35 billion in an offer to buy google chrome… I can’t help but suspect that a big part of it is google handing perplexity a pile of money via “Venture Capitalist” screens, to help offload Chrome to mitigate their regulatory monopoly problems. But whatever the details, them having that pile of money is sure as shit not a matter of having a good product / partnering with other industries well.