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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The same applies to the United States, which not only advocates openly for the abolition of international law but, together with the genocidal butchers in Israel, tramples on human rights and commits the most horrific war crimes. Russia is doing the same in Ukraine.

    While it is, of course, entirely true that China commits human rights violations on a daily basis, so do autocratic, unjust regimes such as Saudi Arabia - and not just since yesterday.

    Therefore, it seems entirely appropriate to me to point out that China, at least, is not bombing other countries - though if they were to decide to do so, it would likely be a war of aggression against Taiwan, in which case they could just as easily invoke the law of the jungle, as the unscrupulous monsters who rule Russia and the U.S. demonstrate.

    Their murderous acts make it all the more important to hold accountable those countries that not only commit human rights violations within their own borders but also, through their evil ambitions, undermine what little humanity remains in the form of international law - these countries are far more dangerous to a world even halfway worth living in.

    Nevertheless, China, too, commits serious human rights violations and should be held accountable for them - but it only becomes harder to hold them accountable when the despots who raze entire hospitals and schools to the ground are not even reprimanded for their atrocities.

    Edit: The same can be said about the erosion of civil liberties and privacy protections - in this context, too, the U.S. and Russia are leading the way, seeking to normalize unwarranted mass surveillance through their unscrupulousness or, quite practically, through malicious corporations like Palantir.


  • That sounds like very little, considering that anyone still working under this criminal regime at the DOJ is clearly making themselves liable to prosecution.

    Obstruction of justice, blatant corruption, and the resulting facilitation of the most serious crimes simply don’t look all too good if you don’t want to end up in prison or, as a lawyer, at least want to keep your license - but hey, the U.S. isn’t exactly a constitutional state tbh: Presumably, the remaining opportunists are speculating on a nice position in the emerging autocracy, which then won’t even need to keep up the pretense anymore.

    Who can blame them for trying, when we see every day that even blatant crimes in the U.S. have absolutely no legal consequences?







  • Here’s an outside perspective: Regardless of who is in the White House, the U.S. forces other countries under its thumb - using the tools of predatory capitalism, which is represented by the political parties in the U.S. no matter who’s in office. For the rest of the world, the only difference is whether this happens openly, as it does now, or is nicely disguised, as was the case with an eloquent president like Obama.

    So there is just as little of an alternative for the world as there is for US citizens. Of course, we would like to see someone in power in the US with whom one can at least somewhat reason, but in essence it makes hardly any difference.

    This is the reality for the world and also for US citizens.

    Naturally, in this system, the logical response is to vote for the Democrats because they are the lesser evil.

    However, that does not solve the fundamental problem for anyone. The problem lies in the fact that the US is by no means a democracy, as it is portrayed through Hollywood and all that.

    The US is an oligarchic system very similar to today’s Russia. These are simply facts.

    Posts like this don’t change the facts: If US citizens want a life worth living, there is simply no way around overthrowing the existing system.

    It’s that simple, because even the U.S. Constitution, which was drafted with slave-holding states in mind, stands in the way of democracy.

    What I’m saying here is simply reinforced by the fact that in the richest country in the world, there are no social benefits whatsoever, as are more than common in all democracies.

    Edit: Since this comment is once again being downvoted simply for stating the facts. The answer is not violence, but mass civil disobedience by U.S. citizens. Together, they would have the power to put a stop to their billionaire rulers. Tomorrow, there is even a symbolic one-day general strike planned - but unfortunately, that is not enough: there must be a general strike by the citizens that lasts until the oligarchy is overcome. This is not utopian, but feasible, if only enough people understand that the U.S. system logically leads only further and further toward what it is constitutionally designed to do.


  • This is an approach that could never succeed in the U.S., because there the focus is always on throwing as much money as possible at the defense contractors so that the billionaires can get even richer.

    A current example: the war of aggression against Iran that the U.S. is waging in violation of international law.

    To my knowledge, not even a halfway plausible reason has been given for this. And so it becomes quite clear that this is simply about shifting state resources into the pockets of the super-rich - and U.S. citizens just go along with it, even though it isn’t even them who are dying by the thousands, but rather, among others, Iranian schoolchildren, hundreds of whom were murdered simply by a bombing of a school…


  • Isn’t that the whole point of the matter anyway? It’s all about ensuring that the arms manufacturers rake in as much profit as possible. I mean, who’s going to buy the line from a pedophile and serious criminal that this is about anything other than enriching his degenerate billionaire clique?

    Edit: What, exactly, is the official justification being put forward in the U.S. for this mass murder that violates international law? Has one even been given by now, or is it still just the orange mob boss doing whatever he wants, and the citizens don’t even bother to ask anymore why the U.S., together with the butchers from Israel, is committing the most egregious war crimes, just so the richest can get even richer. You know, that’s how it looks to the rest of the world, I’d say - because that’s exactly what it is.





  • That is true, of course, but LLMs, image and video generation, and so on, will, in my view, lead to fewer and fewer people being willing to publish their creative works, because the staggering output of AI models will not only make it increasingly unlikely that they will receive compensation for their work, but also that they will receive recognition for it.

    As a result, I think, there will likely be fewer and fewer people willing to accept that their work is being used for free to train precisely those models from which only the people who steal their work benefit - without this theft, the business model of OpenAI and the like simply cannot function.

    In my view, this will sooner or later lead to a vicious cycle in which the models are trained predominantly only with content they have generated themselves. This will then lead to a stagnation of what we understand as culture - for these models are neither creative nor intelligent: they can merely combine existing content to create something that appears new; however, they cannot produce anything truly new. Nevertheless, given its ever-expanding reach, it will likely be this repetitive AI output that has a significant influence on popular culture, at the very least.


  • That sounds very interesting - please keep us posted.

    I think it’s very important to examine the effects of LLMs on society, how they influence discourse, their impact on the formation of public opinion, and the question of whether - and if so, to what extent - they shift the interpretation of words and narratives toward the few corporations that offer cloud models, and so on.

    This is a broad field, but one that strikes me as quite important from a wide variety of perspectives.

    It’s good to hear that there are people here who are looking into this from a scientific standpoint. I’d be very happy if you could update us on the state of research from time to time.

    The more perspectives there are on this topic, the better.