Hah! You think they actually put in place the infrastructure needed to support this asinine policy. If there aren’t enough people to get the affidavits signed then those kids can’t go expose themselves to dangerous ideas, presumably including “trans people exist” and “slavery was bad, actually”.

See also voter ID laws that just happen to come into effect as the DMV offices in poor and/or black neighborhoods close down. If they make it a sufficient pain in the ass they don’t have to take the legal or political flak for outright banning it.

It’s good that they’re offsetting their advantages in the marketplace of money by actively crippling themselves in the marketplace of ideas.

Crank magnetism?

They’re catching on that “big if true” is being recognized to mean “this is bullshit” so are trying to compensate by using more words.

I’m pretty sure US Army would designate it the M1.

I mean, the rationalist conception of God and the evangelical conception of AI are basically the same: hypothetically omnipotent and omnibenevolent forces that will nonetheless subject everyone to the most twisted tortures that their imaginations can invent unless appeased through a specific series of actions that just happen to involve a lot of money ending up with the leading figures of the church.

I mean yeah, it kind of is. Unfortunately when folks impersonate the clueless in bad faith the people who legitimately don’t know stuff tend to get caught in the crossfire, and I say this as someone who is frequently clueless.

Best advice I can offer is to develop a thick skin about it and be willing to put the work in if someone helps you find the keywords to look up. The more of the background you can find yourself the better equipped you’ll be to ask specific questions that are less likely to be suspected for JAQing us around.

I trust that at this point we’ve all heard about Elon’s bizarre sockpuppet accounts?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-defamation-lawsuit-fact-check-twitter-burner-accounts-1235000968/

Which is kind of funny to me because compared to games like CK2 that focus on a specific part of history Civ’s application of a single set of unified mechanics to the whole of human history ends up creating a kind of state realism that is not without political implications of its own. Like, Civilization is a series in which the entirety of human history is described in terms of a competition with explicit winners and losers between entities with strictly defined borders and policies enforced within them, i.e. nation-states. It’s not a very big leap into nationalism and it’s arguably a testament to the durability and strength of democratic and egalitarian cultural norms that the series has evolved the way it has instead of becoming something more actively right-wing.

I’m honestly okay with this one. This is a good AI project.

Everyone I know who works for/has worked for Amazon treated it like a deal with the devil. The money was good but they will push you into the ground for as long as you can take it. And then a bit longer.

I’ve just been staring off into space for the last half-hour trying to process this. This is legitimately a nightmare scenario. The ML and automation systems here are being used in conjunction with human policy decisions to turn a military intelligence function into an accountability sink. This is how you square the circle and turn a self-defense force into an agent of ethnic cleansing without needing to change the low-level organization to effect that goal. Everybody gets to maintain plausible deniability just enough that they can answer any uncomfortable questions and justify their actions to themselves, and by the time anyone starts to really question or investigate those justifications the job is largely done. I don’t know that I could construct a clearer example of how this technology can be used to the worst possible effect.

I don’t know when it was decided that all medical technologies will be placebo tested on a dead fish, but it is my new favorite thing.