Sidenote: AFAIK, even with this pardon, Ulbricht still ended up spending more time in prison than if he took a plea deal he was reportedly offered:

He was offered a plea deal, which would have likely given him a decade-long sentence, with the ability to get out early on good behavior. Worst-case scenario, he would have spent five years in a medium-security prison and been freed.

Gotta say, this whole situation’s reminding me of SBF - both of them thought they could outsmart the Feds, and both received much harsher sentences than rich white collar criminals usually get as a result.

Somehow, Ross Ulbricht returned

If we did start apportioning political power to whoever can execute a basic strategy while clicking as fast as possible I think we’d all be bowing down to God-Emperor Flash or something.

Misread that and thought the joke was about bowing down to people who are good with Adobe Flash.

Admittedly, being good with Adobe Flash would be more impressive than being good at a video game - at the bare minimum, it implies you’ve got some art skills.

Also, a reminder that Musk was a junior programmer on two of the worst Sega CD games.

Which two? I already knew his accomplishments are pure garbage, I just wanna know which games he fouled with his programming “prowess”.

I suppose they could up with a scheme where a portion of the $$ from BTC sales to the Treasury get used to buy TrumpCoin or whatever. But that requires him to trust BitCoin bros. Is that plausible?

Depends if he sees BTC bros as easy marks - and by my guess, he probably does.

Shit’s so diseased its a sequel to Tuskegee. They cooked this cack with CIA-grade crack.

(I have no rational way to respond to this - I’m just trying some Dracula Flow-type shit and hoping it lands.)

To paraphrase one of South Park’s more infamous jokes (because I’m not giving this shit any dignity):

Looks like we’re getting a lotta sneer material here! The topic is “People Who Annoy Scoot”.

Man wrote nearly 5k words of pure unfiltered cap:

I’m not sure how someone can read all this without capping themselves. We could sneer this all fucking day.

Far as I can tell, the only real benefit here is significant energy savings, which would take LLMs from “useless waste of a shitload of power” to “useless waste of power”.

Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI

Personally, my money’s on them being thoroughly lost in the AI safety sauce - the idea of AI going rogue has been a staple in pop culture for quite a long time (TV Tropes lists a lot of examples), and the relentless anthropomorphisation of LLMs makes it pretty easy to frame whatever fuck-ups they make as a sentient AI pulling malicious shit.

And given man’s long and storied history of manipulating and misleading their fellow man, I can see plenty of opportunity for fuck-ups baked directly into your average LLM’s training data.

But Apple Intelligence has its good points. “I find the best thing about Apple intelligence is that since I haven’t enabled it, my phone optimized for onboard AI has incredible battery life,” responded another Bluesky user. [Bluesky]

Y’know, if Apple had simply removed the AI altogether and went with that as a marketing point, people would probably buy more iPhones.

At the bare minimum, AI wouldn’t be actively driving people away from buying them.

Four Passengers Die in Burning Tesla After Electronic Doors Seemingly Won’t Open

I always had a hunch Teslas were death traps but Jesus Christ

Elon Musk, Ramaswamy land Trump admin roles

President-elect Trump has tapped tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an advisory group focused on cutting federal spending and reducing the size of the government.

Trump announced Tuesday that Musk and Ramaswamy would lead his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), an initiative meant to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures” and restructure federal agencies.

We live in the dumbest timeline

Starting off this Stubsack with a solid essay I ran across: Don’t expect the tech platforms to help us this time.

Its times like these which make me happy I switched to Librewolf.

Fuck it, off-the-cuff prediction: I expect resistance to Silicon Valley is gonna turn violent during Trump’s term.

I’d say they did do some damage to tech’s wider image by becoming a pop-culture punchline and a mark of shame rolled into one.

Incidents like Seth Green’s Ape getting kidnapped, the public exploitation of George Floyd’s death and the legendary dumpster fire that was The Red Ape Family, plus the onslaught of dogshit NFT art and the nonstop scams and deception within the NFT/crypto sphere all led NFTs to become widely and rightfully panned, with NFTs getting unflatteringly compared to beanie babies and NFT profile pics getting either right-click saved to mock their supposed “ownership” or blocked on sight, depending on how people generally felt.

Judging by some stray articles from WIRED and The Atlantic, Merchant’s likely done plenty to rehabilitate the Luddites’ image.

I suspect Silicon Valley’s godawful reputation and widespread hatred of AI have likely helped as well - “machinery harmful to commonality” may be an unfamiliar concept to Joe Public, but “AI is ruining the Internet/taking your job/scamming your parents” is very fucking tangible to them.

Pulling out a previous post of mine, the NFT craze likely helped indirectly, by killing technological determinism’s hold on the public and badly wounding Silicon Valley’s public image.

Of those two, technological determinism’s death was probably the more important one - that idea’s demise meant the public was willing to entertain that new tech developments from Silicon Valley could be killed in their crib, that they wouldn’t inevitably become a part of public life, for worse or (potentially) for better.

Quick update - Brian Merchant’s list of “luddite horror” films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:

To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume “luddite horror” is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine we’re gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubble’s produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the public’s gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.