Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five-dollar cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
[...]
The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car error" warning light.
New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
The airbag system would ask "Are You Sure?" before going off.
Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed a hold of the radio antenna.
30 years later, some of those jokes are finally becoming reality, thanks to Tesla.
Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!
I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I've read that people used to say things like "I'm not rich enough to vote Republican" or children shouting "last one in the house is a dirty Republican"). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick's "2010: The Year we Make Contact" (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).
This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:
Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.
Having a "hate object" worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of "proof" online of this thing existing).
For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the "hate object" over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, ...)
And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for "anti-conservative t-shirts" (if it's too tiny, try it yourself - they're all anti-liberal):
TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there's no tomorrow. They're installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).
I'm expecting a really nasty autumn this year. A big chunk of Russia's campaign against Europe is held up by Ukraine and they badly need a stooge US president again.
Musk also opened Twitter's doors wide for state-sponsored manipulation and agitation campaigns. All protections are offline and the teams are gone, under the guise of free speech.
Your example is just one of many I've seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.
I don't know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there's no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in "raids" on other instances.
Is this a case of "here, LLM trained on millions of lines of text from cold war novels, fictional alien invasions, nuclear apocalypses and the like, please assume there is a tense diplomatic situation and write the next actions taken by either party" ?
But it's good that the researchers made explicit what should be clear: these LLMs aren't thinking/reasoning "AI" that is being consulted, they just serve up a remix of likely sentences that might reasonably follow the gist of the provided prior text ("context"). A corrupted hive mind of fiction authors and actions that served their ends of telling a story.
That being said, I could imagine /some/ use if an LLM was trained/retrained on exclusively verified information describing real actions and outcomes in 20th century military history. It could serve as brainstorming aid, to point out possible actions or possible responses of the opponent which decision makers might not have thought of.
The problem I have with the "hypocrisy" argument is that, here, it's used as a cheap attack on the messenger.
As in the old meme:
(poor peasant doing labor: "we should improve society somewhat", grinning contemporary person: "yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent.")
I can accept it when influential people, even those that cause a whole lot of emissions themselves, advocate for climate programs. We won't get anywhere if, whoever wants to talk about the environment, first has to become a cave dweller and give up their reach before they're allowed to speak up.
On the other hand, when Fox News, a channel that generally panders to the coal lobby, car industry and oil barons, suddenly becomes concerned about someone's CO2 emissions just to serve up another smear, that is hypocrisy, plain and simple.
Ist irgendwie schon zum Standardargument geworden um solche Bewegungen zu diskreditieren. Ziemlich ausgenudelt und jedem drittklassigen Politiker schiesst es inzwischen aus dem Popo wenn es um Klimademonstranten oder Antifaschisten geht.
Abgesehen davon dass es Unfug ist, ist es auch noch ein klarer Fall von "Boten angreifen statt die Nachricht zu widerlegen."
...and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they'll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.
Tankie: "I convinced 20 Democratic Party voters to stay at home (and did the same for 0 Republican Party voters). Wait until Democratic politicians see that more voters favored the far right party. Then they're going to move left and fall on their knees and beg me to forgive them."
(Cue scene: swastika-adorned tanks rolling past the window)
"Stupid liberals, unwilling to fight the fascists like us true leftists." (Watches tanks and twiddles thumbs.) (Fetches keyboard.) "Let's tell everyone online that it's their own fault and they deserve this." (Sudden sound of harsh knocking on front door.)
At best, their actions will "only" cause another grid-locked presidency where progressives can't get their reforms to pass (which will then be used as the reason to abandon the likely last line of non-violent defense against fascists).
There was a (possibly unethical) experiment where scientists tried to induce stress symptoms (lack of appetite, depression, panic, etc.) in rats.
They found that sudden scares or bringing the rats face-to-face with predators had little long term effect. But placing them on a floor with a constant, slightly uncomfortable electric current (low-level stress over a longer period) did cause them to develop all the symptoms.
So perhaps we're just not naturally equipped to deal with permanent time pressure, upcoming appointments and deadlines in the way modern society gives them to us.
I love the "Let's finish setting up your device" popup that prevents me from using my VMs regularly.
Like some condescending peddler trying to slam-dunk your agreement as a foregone conclusion.
Come on, buddy, let's do those remaining tasks, let's have Microsoft scan your face, tell Microsoft about your phone, let's go and install those Microsoft apps missing from your phone, and your laptop, too, and then we go buy that Office subscription and have you store your important files on Microsoft's servers and we really need to get around to switching to Microsoft's web browser now.
And the only option you get is "Yes" or "Remind me later."
If you turn it off (and it needs to be turned off in two places), it'll be back on as soon as Microsoft publishes the tiniest update to any of its unwanted services. Harrghrrr! (artery popping noises)
Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: "Reds" welcome, "Blues" not, "Anti-Blue Propaganda" on public view screens)
Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone's lives completely
Claims current capitalism is only bad because it's "woke capitalism" which he claims the "ruling class" is pushing
Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism
.
In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.
When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: "yo, I'm sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come").
Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn't know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy's computer for the Minecraft game you're hosting?
So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a "port number", which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer's operating system: "if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me"). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.
If you dig deeper, you'll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer's port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request -- and more.
A subgroup of people on the left who believe in communism and mostly hold pro-Russia and pro-China views, while often having a "doomer" mentality in regard to the US.
Unfortunately, that has them made very susceptible to Russian propaganda, to the point where they're now doing the bidding of Russia and helping fascists rise to power.
The mechanisms are similar to MAGA. They've disconnected from classical media and their echo chambers censor posts that highlight positive developments in the US or posts critical of Russia/China. Once inside, their world view collides with the outside and it's hard to get out again. Similarly to Russians and Republicans, they vilify liberals ("liberals are complicit in xy", "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds", "Marx warned liberalism inevitably leads to fascism", etc.).
On here, they're largely the people dissuading US Democratic Party voters from turning out, via "both sides bad" and recently via claim-to-purity (I'm sure you've encountered one of those "genocide joe" posts, which are kinda awkward, since tankies commonly support/deny China's genocide on the Uyghurs and Russia's genocide on Ukrainians).
An amusing way people used to wake up early was by drinking extra water before going to sleep. Their full bladder would wake them in the early morning hours (unless they overdid it, in which case they had to use the potty in the middle of the night and then overslept).
Animal noises. Most people had animals or lived near other people with animals, so the morning hours had a bunch of typical animal noises (animals, like humans, have an inner clock, and some animals are programmed to wake up before dawn).
Logs near the stove. A seasonal thing, but in winter, if you know you usually refill the stove 3 or 4 times during the night, you can tell how much of the night has passed through your wood stack.
The bi-phasic sleep thing also helped (take a good nap around noon, but also wake up at midnight and drink a beer with the neighbors). The point of midnight may have been rather arbitrary, though.
As far as I'm aware, candles were affordable, but the average person still couldn't afford to burn down a candle every day to work or measure time, so once it got dark, normal work ceased and, at best, a family would meet in front of the stove and tell stories, knit or carve for a while.
I liked agile as it was practiced in the "Extreme Programming" days.
Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.
Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.
Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.
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But it's just a corporate buzzword now. "We're agile" often enough means "we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow" or "we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers."
Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the "project owner") are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.
Maybe we need a new term or an "agility index" to separate the cases of "incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning" from the cases of "project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team." :)
