He absolutely believes in those things, and has shown multiple times he’s willing to light his money on fire to support his ideals. He’s idealistic (adjacent to the neo-fascist Dark Enlightenment movement), and not just simply motivated by wealth.

I think this is only a small part. Interest rates are kinda high. VCs only want to invest in companies with AI exposure because of all the hype. From companies I’ve interviewed with, offshoring seems to have accelerated dramatically (companies only had or wanted a few US devs to manage larger Indian teams). I’ve visited career pages of companies working in the business domain I have the most experience with, and all open software positions are exclusively in India.

I have over a decade of experience as well. Nobody in my small personal “network” knows anyone that’s hiring right now (I hate the fakeness of networking for networking sake, and am not very social, so I don’t have much of a network). I’ve applied to hundreds of job postings over 6 months, interviewed with maybe 6 companies, and rejected usually just because they were also interviewing 10-20 people for the same role, and another person had slightly more experience with a specific part of their stack, or they just liked another person more for whatever reason. I believe all remote job postings get 1000s of applicants, and every one local to me get 100s.

It all kind of reminds me of when I tried using online dating apps, lol.

https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/FEMA

Idk, the author of “Civil Disobedience” did it. It’s a valid resistance method, or just a way to keep yourself morally consistent. Every kind of resistance has a good chance of bringing harm to yourself.

I personally didn’t file one year; kinda just kept putting it off because I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay my taxes (was a 1099 worker, and suffered some major financial blows that year); nothing ever happened, but it definitely was a risk. I probably won’t do that as an “act of resistance” next year, but will probably try extending as long as possible.

We let the rich, who aren’t necessarily the smartest people, get too rich, so they gained too much power. Worldwide problem though, as their influence doesn’t stop at borders.

Kinda weird GPT4-Chan wasn’t referenced. A guy fine-tuned GPT-J on 4chan, then deployed bots to write posts. I guess it was more of a stunt than academic or scientific, but training on 4chan improved the model’s performance on a truthfulness benchmark.

Yeah, that’s how they sell it. Problem is, studies have shown the fraud in these programs isn’t much of an expense, in the broader context. And, Trump has granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, who stole $205M from Medicare, which tells you they don’t really care about that. These programs are actually pretty efficient, and spending funds to investigate small-time fraud would often cost more than just letting it happen. It’s not like tons of people wish to be on our shitty social programs that don’t even supply enough help for the people that absolutely need it.

Kinda depressing that all of big-tech seems to have given up “innovating” (finding applications for publicly-funded research), and have become rent-seeking dinosaurs.

From the people I know, who do depend on these programs and like Trump, they don’t believe they will have their benefits reduced. The think the other people, “taking advantage” of the system will be kicked off. It’s being sold as reducing fraud and abuse. The right-wing has been pushing this framing for decades, and many people have bought into it.

but it turns out all that cash was going toward a workforce of over 700 Indian engineers, rather than an AI.

I doubt much of that cash was going to their workforce. Should have though.

Montezuma’s revenge

A lot of the immigrant labor has been at least slave-like for decades too. Under constant threat of deportation on their “employer’s” whim. Fairly common for “employers” to take documented worker’s documentation to hold them hostage. Reports of some farmers housing and working workers fenced-in, having them working under gunpoint. Some farmers have been caught buying and selling immigrants amongst each-other. I remember a report of a meatpacking plant calling ICE on its own employees to have them deported after they started asking for better treatment, then just hiring more immigrants to replace them. Hell, I even remember near where I grew up, you could see the shed-like shacks from the road on one farm where they kept the migrant workers; no electricity, didn’t look like they had any running water either.

From the stuff I’ve looked at, it’s often nonsensical. Doing stuff in unconventional ways for little apparent reason. Like, in BMWs example, you have to use a lift or jack up the car level to just check the transmission fluid; or the mostly-plastic cooling system which fails and results in the engine being ruined often. I’ve seen other weird engineering choices in electronics too (have done contract work for a German company).

Haven’t used it yet, but venice.ai looks interesting; they have a good privacy policy. Right now, I just use ChatGPT with the “improve models” setting turned off, and use “temporary chat” mode. I don’t really trust OpenAI to be doing the right thing though. I’ve used 14B models locally, but they aren’t as good as 72B+ models.

Yeah, I was kind of hoping this fascist government would fail-fast so we could start rebuilding.

I like ranger (https://github.com/ranger/ranger).

In my limited experience of just living in bad neighborhoods, most gangs I’ve encountered are just small groups of kids that sell drugs, rob, burglarize, fight, and occasionally kill kids in other small groups. From talking to older people that were in gangs (well, they still consider themselves to be in a gang, but the gang doesn’t functionally exist or do anything), things were much different in the 80s and 90s. Guessing it differs depending on the city though (there aren’t really “territories” in my city; drugs are sold through apps/text).

They seem to be trying to emulate Russia, Hungary, or even Nazi Germany. So probably similar things. The US tech oligarchs seem to want something like Dark Enlightenment, while the other politically powerful sect seems to want christo-fascism; all seem to be white nationalist to varying degrees.

I think some people in the admin actually want that. A lot of them are heavily into crypto and other assets such as real-estate, and they won’t be able to balance trade as long as the USD is the world’s reserve currency.