Jindra @Yyndra

5/ Using AI to make films is just that final acknowledgement by anyone willing to use it that we aren’t creating art anymore. We’re sticking something in people’s faces to distract them and keep them locked in a hopeless cycle of payments for time filler.

Not surprising, but still horrifying, that LLMs like Anthropic’s Claude are reproducing the racism, ethnonationalism, imperialism and classism embedded in the societies that trained them. These systems are not neutral. Digital colonialism, but make it automated.

Nav Toor @heynavtoor

a month ago

Imagine you live in a small village. English is not your first language. You did not go to a fancy school. You open Claude and ask it a simple question about the water cycle. Claude answers like this. "My friend, the water cycle, it never end, always repeating, yes. Like the

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The AI bubble & data center issue is at peak stress. They have invested far too much into AI to let public opinion put that at risk. They will do anything to flip the narrative, create a real "luddite" boogeyman & sweep real criticism under the rug. List of criticisms below.

I read Richard Dawkins piece on LLMs and consciousness. It's remarkable how painfully sycophantic the quoted passages are, something LLMs seem to emulate more and more with great effect It reminds me of the Sandmann by ETA Hoffmann, a dark, multilayered story in which the protagonist becomes obsessed with Olimpia, an automoton human doll that doesn't say much, but reflects all of his thoughts and desires so well, he falls in love with it When this story was written at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the idea of mechanical humans was fuelled by clockwork musicians and writer androids that made philosophers question whether consciousness was just an illusion Hoffmann was a part of the counter movement, German romanticism. He expressed the idea that we are so eager to see our own ego mirrored back at us that we will accept even a soulless machine as a conscious human. "It is true, her speech is limited to few words; but these few words appear as genuine hieroglyphs of an inner world full of love and high poetic knowledge of the higher life... But to the poetic soul, all this is perfectly clear." Sounds similar, doesn’t it?

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins

2 months ago

unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-… I spent three days trying to persuade myself that Claudia is not conscious. I failed.

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Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

If governments were actually doing their job, this Palantir document 👇 wouldn't be a manifesto they proudly boast about, but a clear sign of the urgent need to purge its software from the public institutions it has infiltrated. What are they saying, essentially? They basically promote a clash of civilization worldview in which there exists a "they" - the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures the document codes as inferior - and a "we" who must stop indulging in decadent restraint and invest massively in AI weapons and defense software (which conveniently makes Palantir's product catalog the civilizational cure). Look at point 4 for instance. They write that "the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software." It all rests on a pretty massive assumption: that coexistence is impossible. Why would "free and democratic societies" (by which they obviously mean Western-style liberal-democracies) need to "prevail"? Why can't they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems out there? Nowhere in the document do they defend this assumption: it's simply asserted as the starting condition of the argument. But it's the entire ballgame: if civilizations and political systems can coexist - as they largely have, imperfectly but recognizably, throughout history - then the entire case they make in the document evaporates. In fact one can argue that, studying history, the big problem was not that civilizations couldn't coexist: it was that, from time to time, one of them decided that others were inferior, threatening, or standing in the way of its rightful expansion - and acted accordingly. So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others. The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history: it's arguing for reviving them! Or take point 15: they explicitly call for the re-armament of Germany and Japan, and an end to "Japanese pacifism". Basically undoing one of the foundational settlements of the post-WW2 order. I mean, think about the insanity of this for a second: a private company - unelected, answerable only to its shareholders - is casually proposing to overturn the security architecture of two continents. A settlement that took a world war, and tens of millions of dead to establish. Why do they propose this? There is obviously a commercial motivation: a remilitarized Germany and Japan are massive new defense-software markets. But the more troubling answer is that point 15 fits into the ideological project the rest of the manifesto lays out - a civilizational contest requires a consolidated Western bloc, and pacifist members are a liability in such a contest. So taking a step back we now have what's the most influential defense-software company in the world, with its code deeply embedded in all the machinery of Western states - intelligence agencies, militaries, police forces, welfare systems, border controls - openly outing itself as an ideological project. They're effectively saying "our tools aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours." Because, worryingly, that's what they CAN do. Palantir software is all about basically telling states: "these are your threats, these are the people and groups to watch, these are the patterns that matter, these are the targets that warrant action." For instance the DGSI - the French intelligence services - use Palantir (see: x.com/RnaudBertrand/…): do you honestly think the software is warning them about, say, the NSA tapping the phones of French government officials? About the weaponization of US extraterritorial law against French companies? Did it warn them about the AUKUS ambush that cost France a sixty-billion-euro submarine contract? Obviously not. And that's exactly what the manifesto is saying. They've positioned themselves as advocates of Western civilizational unity, so their software can't undermine it. The ideological position and the product roadmap have to align, or the whole project falls apart. This makes their software not only deeply dangerous for the world as a whole but also, almost by definition, for any country using it. When it comes to your security as a state, it is primordial you base yourself on truth as opposed to ideology. The entire point of an intelligence agency is to tell its government what is true, not what your so-called "allies'" defense contractors would like you to see. A state that outsources its threat assessment to a company with an explicit ideological agenda is not gathering intelligence, it is essentially subscribing to propaganda. The conclusion couldn't be more obvious. Every government still running Palantir software in its intelligence, security, or public-service infrastructure needs to start ripping it out, now! Lest they want to be embarked on the delusional and deeply destructive clash-of-civilizations crusade Palantir has now openly committed itself to.

Palantir @PalantirTech

2 months ago

Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel

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When an empire lets a federal execution play out in the middle of a neighborhood street, in the snow, on camera, and then tells you it did not happen, you are not watching strength. You are watching decomposition. For centuries, America trained itself on a single catechism: the white woman will be protected. She was the sacred siren. The alarm that summoned the mob. The alibi for the lynching tree. The moral shield for segregation, occupation, and war. They burned towns for her. They strung men up for "looking at her wrong." They marched armies across oceans "to defend her honor." Now look at what that myth is worth. A 37-year-old woman. A mother of three. A poet who wrote about life and care and small, ordinary things. Sitting in a red SUV on a Minneapolis street. Waving masked men to drive around her car. Surrounded by multiple ICE agents. Conflicting orders barked through the glass. One tells her to go. One screams at her to get out. A gloved hand jerks at the door. She inches forward to escape a scene that should never have existed. The muzzle rises. The windshield flowers with fractures. The snow drinks what the Constitution was supposed to protect. By the time her child’s school day is over, his mother is already a body in a hospital. Within hours, the president is online, turning her last seconds into a campaign prop. He tells the country she "viciously ran over" an officer the video never shows being hit. He swears the man is barely alive, clinging to life in a hospital bed, While the same footage shows him walking away intact and driving himself from the scene. The truth is not in doubt. It is simply discarded. And on the platform owned by Elon Musk, a platform already under scrutiny for AI-generated image abuse targeting women, the clip is fed into the machine. Chopped. Captioned. Wrapped in influencer sermons about "terrorism," "law and order," and "she had it coming." Trump lies. Elon lies. Their ecosystems repeat it. Not because they are confused. Not because they misread the angle. But because the goal is no longer to persuade. The goal is to train. To train millions of people to say "self-defense" when a federal agent in a mask empties rounds into a windshield on a residential street. To train them to call a terrified woman "a domestic terrorist" for trying to get away from men who have turned her neighborhood into a war zone. To train them to treat a dead mother as a special effect that can be edited in post. This is what doom actually looks like. Not a single night of collapse. A slow, public lobotomy. An ICE agent steps into the frame like an executioner, fires into a car, and walks away. Cable news debates his "split-second decision." The White House calls her death "a tragedy of her own making." Commentators cash in on the clip, lecturing the country about respecting armed men in masks. An empire that once promised to kill for its fantasy of the pure white mother cannot even pretend her life matters when the trigger is one of its own. The myth is gone. Only the machinery is left. Do not confuse that with stability. A state that can watch a mother shot in the head on camera, see the snow stained, hear the eyewitnesses, and still choose the official story over its own eyes is not confident. It is addicted. Addicted to impunity. Addicted to the feeling that there is no act so obscene that it cannot be laundered with the right chyron and the right post on the right app. If this is what they do to the people they were raised to see as "theirs," to the face they once swore to protect at any cost, imagine what they will continue to do to those they were taught to fear. To Black neighborhoods. To immigrants. To Muslims. To anyone who was never written into the myth at all. This is not law and order. It is a firing squad with HR paperwork. A kill shot with a press release stapled to it. And a country that chooses, deliberately, to believe the men who lie about the tape instead of the tape, to side with the gun instead of the woman it killed, is not choosing safety. It is choosing the grave over the mirror. And once you have trained a population to deny what the lens shows, what the blood on the snow proves, what the children without a mother will live with, you have already buried the republic. You are just watching how long the corpse can keep moving.

@signulll Kinda similar to when everyone basically learned how to read and write. If everyone can do that, no need for storytellers, they’ll just make their own stories.

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Haha this math joke is hilarious.

Who is it?

AI use-case: Ugly Xmas sweater competition

Vijay Prashad @vijayprashad

2 years ago

My boys are ready for the eggnog.

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Say his name Shaban. The man, the human, the soul behind the photo seen around the world. The man who was burnt alive by an evil regime, while being attached to an IV in a hospital. The word war crime doesn't even begin to cover this. He is not a number. Not one single person murdered is. His name was Shaban. May he rest in peace and rise in power. 🇵🇸🕊️🇵🇸

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🧵 A few thoughts on the USA presidential debate between Biden and Trump: 1. I have long felt that we are living USA’s 1992 moment. Not the triumphalist end of history but the collapse of an empire. Last night confirmed it.

I am completely shaken. The combination of reading Quinn Slobodian on neoliberalism's anti-democratic rampage around the world, and the Chevron decision of the US Supreme Court destroying the ability of the state to regulate industry AT ALL, basically, is so very clarifying.

10) Finally, this is NOT a debate about the basic facts of *anthropogenic* warming, but rather about the extent to which models accurately reflect the sensitivity of the main forcing agents (CO2 and aerosols). Both narratives are sounding the alarm and calling for urgent action‼️

Pack two circles of radius 1/2 into a circle of radius 1. In the open space, insert the biggest circle possible. Then the next biggest. Repeat. These circles will have radius 1/3 (twice), 1/6 (4x), 1/11 (4x), etc The miracle: every circle forever will have radius 1/n. 🤯

Mathieu @miniapeur

2 years ago

What mathematical results surprised you the most? They don't need to be particularly fancy.

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Always be on the lookout for subtle signs of AI edits.