He’s enabled by some very wealthy people. And in the US wealth is more than just money, it’s often the most important factor in status, popularity, and social and political power.

Even some the people screaming for empathy, understanding, and improved social programs often look down upon the poor and homeless, they just hide it behind a veneer of doing good. They want to rid the nation of poverty not because it’s the right thing to do, but so that they aren’t confronted with the reality of what causes poverty and the guilt they feel when they pass by someone who’s panhandling.

Our nation’s version of original sin is productivity. If you’re alive, you must feed into the economic system, you must support yourself and not be a burden to others. If you’re successful and wealthy enough, it means all lesser sins (getting bailed out with tax money, wage theft and fraud, destroying the environment, prejudice, sexual predation, etc.) will be forgiven by at least half the nation. This effect is more profound for celebrity performers.

So, if you’re stable financially and not under a direct threat from the administration, you’re probably upset, but your focus is going to be on finding a way to get rid of Trump and get out of this mess without winding up POOR.

You want to know why so many federal workers are still doing their jobs despite being complicit in many of the awful things that are happening? Because they don’t have a way to pay the rent if they walk off the job. The job market is awful. The economy is in the shitter. Everything is super expensive, and they don’t want to let their families down. Want the military and federal agents to quit? Give them a guaranteed way to pay their mortgages. Find them another job.

It’s not just about luxuries and standards of living. It’s about social acceptance and beloning. People will go to insane lengths to feel like an accepted member of a group. So these workers may be unhappy, even deeply upset about the direction the country is headed in, but it’ll have to get worse before the sacrifice is worth it, because being in jail or being dead is only a little bit worse than being a poor person.

Same holds true for much of the rest of the nation. It’s hard to risk belonging, to risk being part of our society, when there’s no guarantee you won’t wind up homeless and a pariah because of it.

Not exactly sure what you missed or what your point is supposed to be.

The same would be true of any ad platform. I hate Facebook for all the ills it’s caused society and it pisses me off that my breakfast cereal is slightly more expensive because of Zuckerberg’s compensation package too.

But Facebook, et al. aren’t being discussed here. Reddit is.

Even if I stay off the internet completely, a portion of the money I spend STILL goes in their pocket, and the only way to prevent it is to spend hours exhaustively researching every product I buy to find the one or two alternatives out of hundreds of others that don’t feed into the system somehow. And even if product A doesn’t buy ads on these platforms, the place I shop for it probably does. If I can’t buy direct, as is the case with so many purchases, all that time and research are robbed of any real impact by the fact that my closest retail outlet spends millions on targeted Internet ads.

But it’s not really about the money though, it’s about where it’s going.

In an alternate timeline, Spez, Zuck, and the rest are decent human beings with a functioning conscience and use their platforms for the common good. I don’t mind those versions of them getting a piece of my alternate self’s dollar. But I don’t live in that universe.

So, because I’m stuck here, every single one of these modern-day Prometheus wannabe, god-complex, techbro shitheads can kiss my hairy ass.

Don’t they teach them anything before they let them out on the street.

Possibly not. If feel like that’s been brought up in the news before.

Or maybe it’s just a one time class or a video, and people do get complacent. Or maybe he’s just a fucking dumbass and a bully. There’s a clear pattern of highschool bully-style confrontation and escalation in many of the videos we’re seeing, and standing there is as good a way as any to do just that.

These goons want people to be afraid of them, and act as if they believe that intimidation is a forcefield of some sort, like if they’re enough of a threatening asshole that it’ll mean they never get hurt.

The whole “act like a scary hardass and people will comply” strategy relies on shock and the tendency for people to freeze up and get rattled when suddenly confronted with a threat from authority or power. They want people to go all deer in the headlights when they get in their face and comply without a fight, or if you fight you’re off guard and rattled and there’s less of risk to them so they just get to wail on you for a while. It’s gratifying for bullies when things are one-sided like that, it makes them feel powerful and righteous. In terms of getting what you want from people, it works well… up to the point that it doesn’t.

After that point it’s one type of catastrophe or another.

I gotta unpack this a little…

Reddit’s main source of revenue is advertising. Other companies pay Reddit to shove ads in your face. You probably buy products from at least some of those companies, and while market forces and consumer perceptions have large influence, operating costs are still a factor in setting those prices. Just like everyone else, Reddit sets the prices of its advertising services based in part on its operating costs, which includes Spez’s salary.

Even if you avoid Reddit, things you buy are more expensive because this fucking toolshed gets paid $193 million a year just to be a sociopathic jackoff with a popular website.

I quit Reddit years ago, but I’m still fucking pissed about this shit and I have every right to be.

Well, if you take good old-fashioned violence out of the picture, money. Or specifically a lack of it.

Sanctions, selling off US debt, more retaliatory tariffs, blacklisting US investors and companies, anything that pulls cash out of the US economy and puts it somewhere else. Turn off the money tap, make the mega-donors hurt bad enough and the dystopia machine will eventually grind to a halt. Don’t think for a moment that the current squad of high-functioning sociopaths that are enabling this are principled enough to stay the course after a few of their mega-yachts are repossessed. They’ll flip sides again and again just to try and keep that horde they’ve built up. Someone just has to prove to them that the threat is serious, because right now, they think everyone else is helpless against them.

Additionally, the majority of Trump voters cited the economy as a primary reason for voting for him. A good portion of them were probably lying to cover for being racist and just wanted to see POC and the LGBTQ+ community suffer, but if you crash the US economy hard enough, you can still hijack a big chunk of Trump’s public support. It’s the same as with mega-yachts, but here we’re talking pickup trucks, ATVs, and rent-to-own furniture.

Few problems with this. 1. It’s slow. 2. It’ll hurt everyone else economically because US businesses have hooks set real deep in a lot of places. 3. Other nations have a wealthy elite with similar sway who want Trump in power for various reasons and might not play along. & 4. Whoever replaces the US might turn out to be just as big as bully in a few years if we’re not careful.

Still, it needs to be done.

EDIT: It’s like the old saying goes, everything is about money, except money, which is about power.

As others have said, I use a client that doesn’t display them, so it never dawned on me. And in general, profile pics have never been a big deal for me. So if the app or site doesn’t make me do it as part of the account set up, my profile pic just stays as the default.

You can set profile pictures on Lemmy?

You’re when it comes to finding affection. Which is precisely why my approach fell flat.

While the environmental problems and the market bubble eventually bursting are bigger issues that will harm everyone, I see the beginnings of what could be a problem of equal significance concerning the exploitation of lonely and vulnerable people for profit with AI romance/sexbot apps. I don’t want to fully buy into the more sensationalist headlines surrounding AI safety without more information, but I strongly suspect that we’ll see a rise in isolated persons with aggravated mental health issues due to this kind of LLM use. Not necessarily hundreds of people with full-blown psychosis, but an overall increase in self-isolation coupled with depression and other more common mental health issues.

The way social media has shaped our public discourse has shown that like it or not, we’re all vulnerable to being emotionally manipulated by electronic platforms. AI is absolutely being used in the same way and while more tech savvy persons are likely to be less vulnerable, no one is going to be completely immune. When you consider AI powered romance and sex apps, ask yourself if there’s a better way to get under someone’s skin than by simulating the most intimate relationships in the human experience?

So, old fashioned or not, I’m not going to be supportive of lonely people turning to LLMs as a substitute for romance in the near future. It’s less about their individual freedoms, and more about not wanting to see them fed into the next Torment Nexus.

Edits: several words.

Well, that’s certainly not the direction I expected this conversation to go.

I apologize to the necro community for the hurtful and ignorant comments I’ve made in the past. They aren’t reflective of who I am as a person and I’ll strive to improve myself in the future.

For a while I was telling people “don’t fall in love with anything that doesn’t have a pulse.” Which I still believe is good advice concerning AI companion apps.

But someone reminded me of that humans will pack-bond with anything meme that featured a toaster or something like that, and I realized it was probably a futile effort and gave it up.

Yeah, no one would have even blinked at that from what I recall. Unless you tried to take it onto a plane or into someplace high security like a courtroom it was something so mundane that it wouldn’t have been brought up.

Making an issue out of it would have been akin to saying “Did you hear about Bob? He always has his car keys with him. Watch out for that guy…”

Honestly, after scrolling through this thread, I gotta wonder when carrying a pocket knife became something abnormal to a decent percentage of the population.

It was never universal, but as young lad in the late 1900’s it was unremarkable for most people to have at least a little pocket knife with a nail file on them most of the time and never anything sinister. There were places you couldn’t take them, but for the most part we lived our lives surrounded by people with concealed knives and never thought twice about it.

Never tied an onion to my belt though.

EDIT: If it’s mostly a backlash against the EDC crowd, I kinda get it, but still it seems pretty harmless in moderation.

It’s how my wife and I proposed!

Check out the Gerber Armbar.

I carry a skeletool from time to time. Same deal. It’s light, simple, and the pliers work well.

Same here. Growing up, you got a pocket knife for Christmas or your birthday some time around middle school (usually a Swiss Army or Boy Scout knife) and it was just a thing you carried like your wallet or house key.

Multitools changed the tradition a little, but didn’t end it. Largely it meant another round of all us kids getting a multitool for Christmas.

I’m not a big EDC guy, but I still habitually have a good penlight and one of these on me most of the time: https://www.gerbergear.com/en-us/shop/multi-tools/all-multi-tools/armbar-drive-onyx-30-001585

The scissors and screwdriver come in handy more often than the blade. So these days if I give knife/tool it tends to be something like that rather than a Jackhawk 9000 sort of thing.

That’s an absolutely crushing schedule.

When I think of “middle aged family man”, I think of a salaried employee or tradesman working a 40 hour work week, and supporting kids with the help of a spouse who’s either a homemaker or earns additional income. Which mostly describes me.

You’re comparing apples to oranges when it comes to lifestyles. I work occasional overtime and it always knocks my dick in the dirt for a week or so. All things considered, just surviving what you’re describing is an achievement.

You’re doing an amazing job and I hope you can find a situation that gives you more time off soon. You deserve it.

Why can’t we win the AI race and still not have a surveillance state? Those don’t seem like they have to be linked…

Yeah, journalistic integrity is important, and they shouldn’t slander Google, due diligence and what not.

But there wouldn’t even be a need for an article or any investigation if Google and other tech companies weren’t treating user data as something they have a god given right to.

That’s my point. It doesn’t matter what Google does or doesn’t do with the data. They shouldn’t collect it unless I tell them they can. It’s MY data. It’s MY right to keep it private or destroy it as I please. That’s the baseline all tech companies should adhere to.

Play Services does collect data it shouldn’t collect, by sending it back to Google.

Right. And my argument is that this shouldn’t happen without users opting in.

But the difference between “I am collecting your data” and “I wrote software you are running” is important and needs defending,

I don’t disagree. Not am I arguing the content of the article. I just disagree with your notion that we have to prove negligence or malfeasance to deserve privacy.

Your original post placed the burden on users to prove that Google mismanages the data they collect. That’s not how this should work. I should own that data, just as I own the text I write with a text editor. I shouldn’t have to prove that Google is mismanaging it in order to keep that data private. I shouldn’t need any other reason than “it’s my data and I don’t want to share it beyond what is necessary for this technology to operate.”