Curious about what time you were referring to when Democrats were better. I suppose they were OK during Obama (ACA was a corporate-friendly solution, there was a huge wealth transfer from the government to financial institutions and corporations, there were tons of drone strikes, and anti-immigration ramped up though). During Clinton they cut social programs significantly, and implemented the draconian three-strikes law.

Israel, Iran, or the US?

Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.

I think there’s a massive oversupply of software engineers world-wide, and investors and executives are heavily pushing offshoring to countries where there are even more engineers that are even more desperate to find work. The ideology or focus of the entire US investor/executive class seems to have shifted as soon as Musk gutted Twitter. I fear this may be another, “these jobs aren’t coming back,” kind of thing the manufacturing industry went through. Perhaps we’ll see a boom of bootstrapped start-ups ran by engineers (or preferably worker-cooperatives), but that’s extremely hard to do.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I think they could just print money to pay instead of defaulting because the debt is denominated in USD (still disastrous though).

There are multiple videos to corroborate.

I’d guess it’s mostly the AI autocomplete stuff. I.e. you keep on typing until the AI guesses it right then press tab to save keystrokes. LLMs are really bad at making test cases in my experience; they, ironically, can’t do the simple but nuanced computations needed to figure out what the output should be given the inputs, or to recognize and test the edge cases.

There was a story a couple weeks ago about another person getting deported on expunged charges. I’m guessing some agencies still keep records after expungement (I’ve heard they still show up when getting security clearance), and they’re using that data.

Probably because the article is from a business news outlet. I have heard a lawyer talk about the case, saying it was very unusually for her to be arrested for such charges (Leeja Miller I believe; not really a journalist, just a youtuber).

Trump and Bukele are ideologically alike. Bukele wants more funding for his prison, which the US is providing. The prison is basically a black-site with journalists given very limited and controlled access. For all I know, it could be a deathcamp; they do use forced labor, so it is at least a slave camp. Also, they never release anyone from there, which further raises the suspicion of it being a death camp.

They can require ID verification of all users, as is done in some states in the US to access pornography sites.