The WEF supports leftist authoritarianism, not the Trump/MAGA flavored variety.

I think they are indirectly responsible for his rise, because he is a direct result of the growing backlash against globalist policies.

The article title is horribly misleading. The article is about how "AI"-driven DMCA notices are "ruining the Internet for everyone", by exacerbating abuse of the broken DMCA takedown dynamic.

Or, more fundamentally: DMCA is ruining the internet for everyone.

So you want 10,000 law firms run automated AI crawlers that churn through the server quota of mostly innocent people in the hope they can find something for a takedown?

I don't think so unless they pay my server costs. And even with "only" 1-5% false positives you will fry a lot of innocent people.

They also must be optional :) . DMCA is too outdated.

Corollary to that though: is it actual wealth inequality, or the perception of wealth inequality?

No, you're muddying the waters by conflating the terms as if they apply to the same dimension. Democracy does mean "rule of the people". But populism means those people being taken in by overly simplistic gut-appealing messages. Of course, it is generally hard to judge this objectively. But often the people end up choosing leaders that directly oppose what those same people claim to want, in which case the failure is clear.

For example look at the current dynamic in the US. Hefty and unpredictable import taxes are harming the domestic industries we still have left. But when you try to point this out to the average populist, they go right into the refrain about how we need to compete with China, like nobody else understands this goal or something. They're basically stuck on the simplistic gut-appealing mantra, and can't get past it to entertain criticism how the current policies are doing the exact opposite as being claimed.

The problem was that it mostly started being brought up for the purpose of political propaganda. Trump's only use for the pandemic was as fuel to rail against China in support of his predetermined agenda. So "lab leak" was used to focus attention on the external enemy to fight, instead of taking care of our own country or asking why Trump was so dead set against that.

The whole time, it was obviously wrong to reject the lab leak theory out of hand. Yet people are stupid herd animals, and instead of tri-state "it is irrelevant in the current context" they argued that the theory was definitely wrong. That same fallibility applies to people working for institutions (see also the early CDC lie implying that masks weren't effective, based on wanting to keep the supply for the healthcare industry).

Then after the dust settles, people stay dug in and the politically-colored battle lines never go away. I'd say this kind of establishment-clearly-wrong but dissent-with-nothing-productive underlies most of the energy fueling the destructionists.

Part of the problem is that sarcasm relies heavily on shared group values (common wisdom), to make it clear that a given statement is meant in the opposite sense. Our shared group values have been fragmented pretty hard (eg half the country has thrown away conservative American values in favor of open strong-man fascism). The icing on top is the tech-contrarianism that rejects common wisdom in favor of looking for an edge. It was innovative when done from the bottom up in a subculture, but it lands somewhere between tedious and horrific now that tech has taken over mainstream society.

> Part of the problem is that sarcasm relies heavily on shared group values (common wisdom), to make it clear that a given statement is meant in the opposite sense. Our shared group values have been fragmented pretty hard (eg half the country has thrown away conservative American values

Apart from that, it is also true that a lot of people here aren't Americans (hello from Australia). I know this is a US-hosted forum, but it is interesting to observe the divide between Americans who speak as if everyone else here is an American (e.g. "half the country") and those who realise many of us aren't

One has to wonder if one of the main innovations driving "AI" is the complete lack of accountability and even shame.

Twenty years ago, we wouldn't have had companies framing the raw output of a text generator as some kind of complete product, especially an all-encompassing general one. How do you know that these probabilistic text generators are performing valid synthesis, as opposed to word salad? You don't. So LLM technology would have used to do things like augment search/retrieval, pointing to concrete sources and excerpts. Or to analyze a problem using math, drive formal models that might miss the mark but at least wouldn't be blatantly incorrect with a convincing narrative. Some actual vision of an opinionated product that wasn't just dumping the output and calling it a day.

Also twenty years ago we also wouldn't have had a company placing a new beta-quality product (at best) front and center as a replacement for their already wildly successful product. But it feels like the real knack of these probabilistic word generators is convincing "product people" of their supreme utility. Of course they're worried - they found something that can bullshit better than themselves.

At any rate all of those discussions about whether humans are be capable of keeping a superintelligent AI "boxed" are laughable in retrospect. We're propping open the doors and chumming other humans' lives as chunks of raw meat, trying to coax it out.

(Definitely starting to feel like an old man here. But I've been yelling at Cloud for years so I guess that tracks)

Keep on hacking at basebands. In the US, changing a device's IMEI is only illegal when done with intent to obtain unauthorized service. Using a phone of your choice on your side of the radio wave demarc falls squarely under Carterphone.

(Never mind clunkier but more straightforward solutions like a libre device/OS using wifi from a mifi)

Ah, but once the baseband is hacked, the FCC may declare it out of compliance with its regulations and thus, illegal to transmit!

Sure, but that seems much harder to notice/enforce than blanket blocks. And while you could always get singled out for enforcement, that won't necessarily stop group momentum.

Chest thumping false bravado will mislead you every time.

If I go to a restaurant, wait an hour for a table, get very hungry, and then see on the menu that the restaurant has tripled prices, is the restaurant "negotiating from a position of power" ? Sure, once.

What exactly do you think happens to our power after Trump squanders it to extract one-time concessions that mostly flow into his own pockets?

At least it's possible to tease out some nuance between those topics. Unlike all the people still simping for the Manchurian candidate's immediately self-defeating policies - let's compete with China through stiff import taxes that directly hurt American businesses, let's be strong by alienating our allies, let's fix the market for manual labor by arresting individual illegal immigrants while giving passes to big businesses employing them at scale, let's fix inflation and government overreach by printing $5T of new money and spending it on unaccountable jackboots. It's perversely amazing how this whole movement continues to run on empty spectacles and identity politics. When it finally burns through its fervor, all of the existing problems are still going to be there, plus a whole host of new problems.