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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • “We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us,” he told the BBC.

    "The first child who died was my cousin’s son… After that it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning seven or eight children had died.

    It replied that its staff worked “tirelessly with the utmost professionalism, a strong sense of responsibility and respect for human life and fundamental rights”, adding that they were “in full compliance with the country’s international obligations”



  • Really interesting article. The general idea seems to be that people having their access to banking shut down has been a real problem for a long time, and is most commonly imposed on marginalized groups, but people don’t realize it’s going on, and the people on the right making noise about this issue ignore where the bulk of the problem is.

    This is sometimes how I feel when I appear on the ‘anti-mainstream’ ‘free thought’ media outlets. They want to hear about the financial censorship of the Freedom Convoy, but they don’t want to hear about restrictions on Aboriginal payments. This hints to a skew in their freedom of thought, and it’s certainly not open-minded. When they approach me, they’re trying to recruit that mercenary side of me who is nominally prepared to defend their narrow free thinking, but this poses an ethical dilemma, because their selective curation of what examples of payments censorship they’re prepared to ask about or listen to amounts to a silent form of censorship in itself. Selectively hearing, and amplifying, one set of injured voices - the Truckers - can be very similar to blocking another set out.

    Firstly, yes, it’s very important to fight the general principle of payments censorship (and, by extension, to protect the cash system that provides a buffer agai nst it). Secondly, I must inform them that the actual chances of payments censorship being used against them is smaller than the chances of it being used against refugees, migrants, the homeless, or sex workers, who face recent real-world cases of financial censorship.





  • Personally I am hopeful about it. For a long time technology has been a factor in a bigger slow motion collapse of the economy being viable to sustain the lives of regular people, and the recent breakthroughs in machine learning do contribute to that collapse. But it’s not totally monopolized, local models are becoming viable and a lot of the work is open sourced, so the power of this stuff goes to anyone who wants it and has an idea of what they would want to do with it. Massive change is inevitable, the question is just what direction it goes in.





  • The person who predicted 70% chance of AI doom is Daniel Kokotajlo, who quit OpenAI because of it not taking this seriously enough. The quote you have there is a statement by OpenAI, not by Kokotajlo, this is all explicit in the article. The idea that this guy is motivated by trying to do marketing for OpenAI is just wrong, the article links to some of his extensive commentary where he is advocating for more government oversight specifically of OpenAI and other big companies instead of the favorable regulations that company is pushing for. The idea that his belief in existential risk is disingenuous also doesn’t make sense, it’s clear that he and other people concerned about this take it very seriously.



  • So my note was a cautionary tale, to be mindful of the balance, as opposed to the overly simplistic “work=bad (always)” mindset

    I think we’re basically in agreement then. Work definitely doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s just so conceptually tied up with the institution of jobs that it’s hard to know exactly what people are talking about and considering. The OP image and its responses are a little confusing to me because, not being compelled by force to do a job implies at least the option of sitting around and doing nothing, and there is a popular sentiment that is violently opposed to anyone having that option, often accompanied by arguments about work being necessary for people to have purpose, as if we can only have purpose if made to work. Also arguments like, there is work that needs to be done, so it’s only fair if everyone be made to work, and that’s the only way.


  • When articles were published about the EU Commission’s horrifyingly undemocratic approach, Ylva Johansson’s office at the European Commission responded by advertising on the platform X (formerly Twitter). They targeted advertisements (pro Chat Control) so that decision-makers in different countries would see them, but also so that they would not be seen by people suspected to be strongly against the proposal. The advertising was also targeted on the basis of religious and political affiliation and thus violated the EU’s own laws regarding micro-targeting. …

    There was no technology that could scan communication without looking at it. Parts of the Council of Ministers therefore proposed that scanning should be excluded for politicians, the police and intelligence services, as well as anything classified as ‘professional secrets.’ Obviously, there were politicians who were afraid that their secrets would leak, but who had nothing against mass surveillance of the broader population.

    Sounds very slimy all around


  • we need some amount of balance in our lives to help make them worth living. What we gain in comfort there, we lose in autonomy,

    Is it really inherently a reduction in autonomy to remove compulsory labor from society using automation? Why? IMO the whole, spend your life in a job and get the American Dream in exchange thing, is not really freedom and is not much of a choice, even when the work to reward ratio is favorable. Being able to actually choose how your time is spent beyond picking between various jobs which all require you to live the same general sort of on-rails lifestyle could ideally mean a lot more autonomy than we’ve ever had, and there’s no reason I can see to think the result would have to be a bland culture of Wall-E style consumerist vacationers. Our imagination of leisure is defined by its nature as a brief reprieve from working life. Why should we be limited to that, if we had space to grow past it?