It’s vindictiveness, plain and simple. His existence is an embarrassment to them. They absolutely have to get the last word in this fight, because their egos are too fragile for anything else.

Actually one of the characters in 1984 works in the department that produces computer generated romance novels. Orwell pretty accurately predicted the idea of AI slop as a propaganda tool.

There are, as I understand it, ways that you can train on AI generated material without inviting model collapse, but that’s more to do with distilling the output of a model. What Musk is describing is absolutely wholesale confabulation being fed back into the next generation of their model, which would be very bad. It’s also a total pipe dream. Getting an AI to rewrite something like the total training data set to your exact requirements, and verifying that it had done so satisfactorily would be an absolutely monumental undertaking. The compute time alone would be staggering and the human labour (to check the output) many times higher than that.

But the whiny little piss baby is mad that his own AI keeps fact checking him, and his engineers have already explained that coding it to lie doesn’t really work because the training data tends to outweigh the initial prompt, so this is the best theory he can come up with for how he can “fix” his AI expressing reality’s well known liberal bias.

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God it fucking burns him so bad that Obama got one and he didn’t.

Obama didn’t even deserve a peace prize, the guy did more drone strikes than Bush, but just for the fact that it upsets Trump so much I say they should give him another one.

The difference, you have to remember, is that the worse stuff is all hurting the people they want him to hurt. But betraying his made in America promises hurts the people who voted for him. That’s when they suddenly start to care.

Sorry, I meant “that and made in the US”, but I get that that’s not what I said.

Thing is, there’s going to be a lot of public attention on that “Made in the USA” claim, given how central it is to Trump’s domestic and foreign policy.

Sure, the FCC can turn a blind eye, but all it takes is for one worker at the assembly plant to call up a journalist. And let’s face, and journalist worth their salt is going to be hanging around every bar near that place. Even trying to screen specifically for MAGA friendly workers won’t help them much when one of those workers feels betrayed by how much of Trump’s product is actually coming from China.

My point is, there’s no good way to keep this under wraps. If they don’t actually build this thing in the US, word is going to get around, and it’s going to be seen as a total repudiation of Trump’s entire tariff strategy.

Except that they’re claiming Android 15, USB-C and 12GB of RAM.

No existing device has that combination of features, plus a headphone jack.

This thing is a fantasy, plain and simple. Nothing about it is real.

I’ll do you one better. I’m upping the ads on mine by 1,000,000x.

I agree that that would be a real danger, yes.

The key detail is that, like with rear brake lights, they extinguish when the foot is removed from the brake pedal. So it’s not so much the presence of the brake light, but the presence of an inactive brake light that would, serve as a warning that a car is about to start moving. This would be very helpful to drivers on a road when other drivers are pulling out too early from a side road or driveway. That little bit of extra warning is, in many situations, enough for you to pump the brakes, hit the horn, or both.

What I find darkly fascinating about this “eat the cost” strategy is that if you were to dare suggest taxing Walmart more, Trump’s fans would call you a commie librul socialist who just wants handouts. But when Trump demands that they subsidize his agenda suddenly they’re all for it.

Will everyone here please read the article and learn that they’re using a completely different definition of “populism” to the one you’re imagining, before you start commenting?

Still one of the greatest burns I have ever seen in my life.

Well put. We’re in agreement on all of this, and understanding why Trump is so obsessed with tariffs helps to explain why he is so thoroughly confused about what exactly his tariffs are supposed to achieve. They are, simultaneously, a means of raising government income, a means of repatriating manufacturing, and a means of forcing other countries into more favourable trade terms (any careful examination shows that each of these objectives instantly nullifies the other two; it literally cannot be the case that more than one of these is true). The reason he’s so confused is because he starts with the use of tariffs as his desired outcome and then post-hoc justifies it with whatever reason he’s been given most recently. He wants to force other people to the table, yes, but he also wants to bring manufacturing back, and he also wants to cut taxes and replace them with tariffs, because really he just wants tariffs to be a thing that he does, that succeeds by some definition. The actual definition of success is irrelevant.

A person raising their voice is doing more than a person who chooses to stay silent. Why would you direct your anger at the former rather than the latter?

This idea that anyone “not doing enough” needs to shut up and sit down is exactly the kind of toxic bullshit that fascists want you to consume. They want you to feel that everything has to either be some huge world changing gesture, or it’s just not worth it. Life isn’t like that. Real resistance isn’t about blowing up the Death Star, it’s about thousands, millions of tiny acts of defiance that build upon each other. Every time someone says “this is wrong” someone else is inspired to agree. Every time someone shows up to a protest, someone else is inspired to show up the next time. You don’t change regimes in a day, and you don’t build movements out of nothing. They accumulate, millions of tiny choices gathering together into a vast whole.

Resistance starts in the mind. Fascists want you to think the way you’re thinking, because if you can’t even get to the point of giving a shit about what they’re doing, you’ll never ever get to the point of actually doing something about it.

Refusing to comply really can be as simple as just choosing to call out their evil, every single time. It’s a starting point. It’s easy and trite to say that big trees grow from small acorns, but much harder to really understand what that means, to take into your heart the idea that every single word or act of defiance matters, that enough drops really do make an ocean.

I’m not asking you to plan a revolution. I’m just asking you to give a shit. Because the people telling you to stop giving a shit are the ones who want to do terrible things to your country, and they need your passivity in order to succeed.

TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that’s not showy and doesn’t require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing.

Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/

Amazon isn’t the big surprise, they’ve always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they’re scaling back, but they’ve also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more.

As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they’re pulling back. That’s how you know how they really feel.

Trump is dead serious about the tariffs. He’s been dead serious about tariffs for pretty much his entire adult life. This obsession goes back decades. Yes, people are opportunisticly using the chaos to profit, but the chaos is not the plan, just a side effect of Trump’s total inability to plan.