Let's examine one article to see whether or not this site is intellectually honest:
‘You’re the only one I can talk to,’ the girl told an AI chatbot; then she took her own life - baltimoresun.com
First paragraph:
"With the nation facing acute mental health provider shortages, Americans are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence chatbots not only for innocuous tasks such as writing resumes or social media posts, but for companionship and therapy."
"LLMDeathCount.com" willfully misrepresents the article and underlying issue. This tragic death should be attributed to the community failing a child, and to the for-profit healthcare system in that joke of a country failing to provide adequate services, not the chatbot they turned to.
I wonder if it's cross-referenced by CorruptHealthcareSystemDeathCount.com
Just like SEO ruined search, I expect companies to be running these deep researches, looking carefully at the sources, and ensuring they're poisoned. Hopefully with enough cross-referencing and intelligence models will be relatively immune to this and be able to judge the quality of sources, but they will certainly be targeted.
Or the LLM companies will offer "poison as a service", probably a viable business model - hopefully mitigated by open source, local inference, and competing models.
They're right. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and Enshittification have been the core experiences of digital life with corporations in charge of platforms.
My hope is that LLMs will help open source developers provide reasonable alternatives to the gatekeeping and spyware that corporations are now making their bread and butter. Example: Recent tried to use Unity LTS for a small project - the software is a joke now, basic functionality is broken out of the box. A couple of hours with an LLM and I had all the features I needed using a more lightweight library, monogame. Not an operating system, but I'm hoping the pattern will continue as LLMs get more proficient at code - the moat of "this is hard and laborious to do" will be drained.
There's been a lot of noise about China increasing their influence in the pacific, but now that I follow it up it's more limited than I thought.
China has approximately 250 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US. This infrastructure is integrated with military production. US-allied shipbuilding capacity in Japan and South Korea is within striking range of mainland China. I do not think it is reasonable to think that the US can win a sustained naval war against China, and how else would the US defend Taiwan?
Not as corrupt as other countries is true. My rhetoric gets a little passionate, but is rooted in fact. Relative to their extreme wealth and political messaging, will 'very' corrupt do? 'Increasingly' corrupt, certainly. It's not tied to the authoritarianism, the health care system has been an international punchline for decades. The everyday systemic corruption (plus the 2008 bailouts) is in my opinion the cause of authoritarianism, the people were pushed to a populist.
I think we're going to see a substantial continual decline in both health and education outcomes as the system continues to be sabotaged, for money.
The most shocking part is qualitative though. As a non-American, having a conversation with an American about their politics is often stepping into a minefield of cognitive dissonance, patriotism, and blindness, from people who are otherwise wealthy and well-intentioned. Truly the most propagandized people. Such is the course of empire.
The Malacca straits will certainly be important, but the US will have to reach past China and Chinese allies to the south to blockade it, and will be sitting ducks for drone and missile attacks (see the black sea fleet for a demonstration). China has heavily invested in submarines to avoid exactly this situation.
Authoritarianism in China has a significantly different flavor to US authoritarianism. The US is serving the goals of their dominant elite industries - finance and tech. China has an engineering culture amongst the elite, and is inclined to solve problems with productivity and megaprojects rather than handing money to purely extractive industries.
For an example of the difference between their flavors of authoritarianism and the outcomes they bring, compare their health care systems - the USA has one of the most expensive in the world at ~$14,500 per capita, and poor outcomes due to privatized corruption, while China's 14th 5-year plan has brought universal health care for approx ~$650 per person. China's average life expectancy is higher than the US's.
The US is, objectively, extremely corrupt, and is transitioning to authoritarianism to protect that corruption. China's authoritarianism achieves measurable goals, and has broad (though not universal) public support.
The USA will get curb stomped in a war. They just don't have anything but a massive military buildup from decades of pork barrelling unnecessary military contracts. Their population is sick and stupid. They have alienated their allies. They will lose.
Yes, productive capacity can be repurposed to support military goals - with organizations and technicians already in place.
Mexico has about 1/17th of the manufacturing capacity of the US - adds around 5.8%. America has a labor shortage in manufacturing, which is unlikely to be filled with foreign workers given the current crackdown on brown people. They're also annihilating their intellectual capacity by again cracking down on brown people, and defunding universities.
China is already leading the world in manufacturing and expanding rapidly, their universities are world class, and they have almost caught up in technology. Given their investments in education and strong culture of academic achievement, it's unreasonable to think they won't overtake the US in every domain in the next 3-5 years.
America has very little manufacturing capacity, has lost its edge in batteries and power generation, and is soon to be behind on computing. They're politically fractured, losing all their allies, and no longer have a sustainable military advantage. If they decide to flex their aging muscles against China, they will be outproduced, and can't win in a single decisive blow unless they want to initiate a surprise full nuclear war. They're done. Corruption ate the golden goose, and the people cheered.
American, please, wake up. The masked border police are on the streets arresting citizens, the military is being paid as a client of the president, corruption is legal, and a mass surveillance machine unfathomable to prior dictatorships is being/has been established. You're fucked. Listen to the soapbox. It is very, very relevant. Wake up.
I've also thought this for scam perpetration vs mitigation. An AI listening to grandma's call would surely detect most confidence or pig butchering scams (or suggest how to verify), and be able to cast doubt on the caller's intentions or inform a trusted relative before the scammer can build up rapport. Security and surveillance concerns notwithstanding.
That is literally not what genocide is, it's a legal definition not a creative writing exercise.
'The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. ' [1]
Israel is functionally commiting genocide, after being an apartheid state for decades. Arguably their goal is ethnic cleansing, and mass murder is a means to that end.
Congratulations on your work, but I think society needs to wake up to platforms.
Given the repeated destruction of public squares by corporations, there is zero reason to trust centralized social media. It's still a business, it exists in this psychopathic market system, and will still succumb to financialization. No matter who started it.
If a for-profit platform is providing value, it's because it's at the beginning of the enshittification cycle.
First paragraph: "With the nation facing acute mental health provider shortages, Americans are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence chatbots not only for innocuous tasks such as writing resumes or social media posts, but for companionship and therapy."
"LLMDeathCount.com" willfully misrepresents the article and underlying issue. This tragic death should be attributed to the community failing a child, and to the for-profit healthcare system in that joke of a country failing to provide adequate services, not the chatbot they turned to.
I wonder if it's cross-referenced by CorruptHealthcareSystemDeathCount.com