I don’t think it’s hero worship to recognize the apparently amazing job Mamdani is doing, either. I’m just very wary of falling into the hero worship trap.

100%. The mechanism is (I think) this: legally, there’s nobody to prosecute or sue, now.

In the early 2000s some of us who were Way Too Online learned this lesson: A major pillar of internet security, a company whose entire reason for existing was to protect its customers’ personal information, went bankrupt and sold all its customer data to the highest (or possibly just first) bidder.

No matter how “trustworthy” the company, no matter what their Terms and Conditions say, no matter how “solid” their “values,” everyone sells your data when they go bankrupt.

(And most of them will do it long before then)

I don’t want to fall into the trap of hero worship but yeah, this seems like what mayors should always be doing.

Ah, we are in this stage, now.

Does this mean kernels will be less stable? Big changes all at once seem to imply that, generally.

This is going to seem judgmental…

*judgmental

I donated regularly to Wikipedia and will again when they pull their heads out of their asses.

Oh, has he had a change of heart? A few months ago he was being dragged on mastodon for telling everyone to stop complaining about AI.

This is a thing at my university (I work there). I talked to one of the library folks about it years ago. She explained that (a) they would like to keep way more of the books but there’s not enough funding to have the space or staff for it–our school is in constant and recently much more intense financial crisis, laying off all kinds of people (except deans and provosts); (b) a lot of this stuff literally nobody wants, like 4th and 5th and 10th copies of mediocre textbooks rehashing the content done much better by other texts, and © yes, if I wanted to fill my car with books and rescue them I was welcome to do so.

Oh, cool. Until now I thought “rough sleeping” was just the British term for homeless (TIL).

I think that is a reasonable take. It is s huge jump, in many ways, so I believe it is much more dangerous than other capitalist “innovations”.

Yeah, there has been a movement in recent decades to redefine racism, sexism, etc. As only applying to stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination by a person from a dominant group toward people from a marginalized group. To some extent I get that–that is why anyone ever started caring about racism etc.–and language evolves. If we as a society decide that is the only set of valid definitions, I’ll go with it, because I care more about the struggle for equality than about the words used in that process.

That said, my issue with this usage is that it is imprecise and bundles some extra judgments. This use of racism requires an extra assessment of the power dynamics between the groups each of the parties belongs to (and sometimes identifying that is a quagmire itself). I’d prefer keeping those judgments separate. For example, maybe responding to this racist troll by saying that some kind of racism cause and deepen harm a lot more than others, and he is ignoring that fact due to his own racism.

This, plus if we had any kind of political will or intelligence (as a nation; meaning the USA) we’d force AI companies to pay their extenalities: treat and sanitize every drop of water they use, and build the infrastructure to bring it back to communities; pay for their electrical infrastructure in advance and pay their electricity bills to the tune of “nobody else’s bill goes up”; some kind of massive carbon capture tax for their use (this one might not be possible to actually do; it’s too much); and of course paying royalties and copyright violation fines.

As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business. let’s say they didn’t: The cost per token would be quite high, and very few people would use it.

It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.