I think I could give a very useful speech on how to slowly, comfortably, de-digitize your life.

Not his HOUSE, dammit! HIM!

I gave a presentation to prospective clients at work today.

They’re now clients.

This was considered a difficult sell.

Me too.

There are still people who believe in alien abductions, that humans never landed on the moon, that the Earth is flat, that Trump won the 2020 election, that lizard people rule the world, that the Olympic and the Titanic were swapped in some bizarrely incoherent insurance scam, that Paul McCartney died in 1966, that 9/11 was an inside job, that contrails are population control chemicals, …

And yet these people live on and on and on spewing this idiocy.

That’s me too.

I stopped watching Marvel flicks at about the time of Black Panther, so I know only the one GoftG flick, and had no idea who any of the characters are anyway. :D

I am always dubious of people who claim they have nothing against “the people of <country>” just the government. See it doesn’t fit with lived experience.

I get called upon to answer for every crime (real or imagined) of the Chinese government because I’m perceived as Chinese for these reasons:

• I’m half-Chinese and my appearance leans very much toward my mother’s side.
• I’m resident in China.
• I don’t instantly leap up and criticize everything Chinese, nor do I instantly agree with ever criticism of China.

So I’m basically accused of being a Communist Party of China shill (despite, ironically, my not even being permitted to join the Party if I wanted to … which I don’t), being a “brainwashed” Chinese citizen, despite holding a Canadian passport—and never another—for about half a century, and in general treated with contempt and suspicion.

Despite, you know, “nothing against any Chinese”.

So … perhaps you’re the exception to the observed rule? But I won’t be putting myself on the line to test it. I’ve got well over half a century of testing completed.

edited to add

I have the perfect parallel, actually. Fundamentalist Christians who babble about “love the sinner, hate the sin”. Their actions constantly belie their pretty words. Same for “love the <insert national citizen>, hate the <nation> government” crowd.

It’s from a white old Republican dude.

It’s the genocide one.

This one particularly bugs me when the woman is shown to be a capable, independent badass in her own right, but just as her story is getting going, as @Lumidaub@feddit.org put it, her story is cut short.

So that the “real hero” can start his.

It is so maddening when it happens, and while it is not exclusively the domain of American superhero comics, it is by far worst right there.

Nah, I can’t get a solid grip on short hair. It has to be reasonably long before I can pull it off people’s heads.

I would have to go with the '60s.

The 1260s, that is.

Song Dynasty fashion was the peak, for my tastes in Chinese clothing. The cuts were form-fitting, but modest. The colour palate was varied, but subtle and muted, not garish. A lot of the modern “hanfu revival” that’s going on quietly in fashion here is modernized renditions of the elegant Song style:

They have their own strategic needs to fill first. Ironically these are strategic needs brought about by Americans in the first place.

There is no way in which China is going to let American businesses destabilize China for a bit of money. China learned early, before the rest of the world did, how much damage the USA causes when they decide they don’t like losing to their competition. The Chinese will sell their solar panels for currency once they have sufficiently isolated themselves from the whims of American hegemony and dishonest trade practices. By then the degenerative AI bubble will have popped, the US economy will have tanked, and nobody in the USA (up to and including its government) will have the money to afford Chinese solar panels.

There are not enough solar panels in the world available to pay for the LLMbecile data centres that are planned. And even if there were, most of them are in China. You think the Chinese are going to hand over their solar cells for any reason?

It is hilarious to me the number of people, usually men but not always, who will practically dedicate their lives to incorrecting me about things I see daily. They simply will not admit that someone else knows things they don’t, even if they have absolutely no grounds for knowledge beyond “everybody knows”.

ASD?

Nah, he’s just a dude who’s already had a post removed for being a dude in a ladies’ only place before deciding rules are for chumps and not for his imagined-witty (he’s half right) responses that obviously everybody will love.

The whole approach the Chinese are taking to AI is entirely different from the way the feudal techlords of the USA are going at it.

The Chinese approach is one of pragmatism: AI projects have stated goals and desired ends. They do actual engineering, chief among of which’s approach is testing. If the AI project shows measurable (important word there!) progress toward the stated goal, it is permitted to continue. If it doesn’t, it is killed rather brutally. And it’s not (necessarily) the state that does the decision-making, though it often is.

For a solid example, my Honor (a one-time brand of Huawei, spun off into its own independent company now) phone has a baked-in translator that I’d become quite reliant upon for the more difficult aspects of some of my applications. Then, one update, it was replaced with an LLMbecile chatbot that was an utter fucking nightmare. The old system was “select text, copy it, press the little widget that showed up at the end of my screen” and I’d get a translation, plus some abilities to switch things like source and target language, specific dialects, etc. Then, one day, I pressed the little widget and I got a degenerative AI chatbot. One that was so stupidly configured that it would translate selected Chinese text into Chinese. Never mind that the phone was configured for English. So there was an added step each time: type out “now translate this to English” or some such.

I stopped using the translator after that, and apparently so did a lot of other people because two updates later, the old translator was back. The experiment had been done. The stated goals were not met. The project of using an LLM for the translation engine was abandoned. Compare and contrast to how AI is infiltrating every app made by the American techlord feudalists. AI is injected. People hate it and refuse to use it. The technofeudal assholes double down and force it even harder.

So while the ethical issues of LLMbeciles remain with Chinese AI engines (it’s all based on stolen input), and while the environmental (and fiscal) costs are much lower than equivalently capable western tech—something that may mitigate some people’s concerns—at the very least the Chinese approach to incorporating AI into things is very pragmatic and not jammed down your throat harder if it makes you gag.

I still avoid LLMbeciles, even those made here in China, but I think of the evils of degenerative AI, the Chinese ones are the least evil.

But still evil.

I only recently found out about Lucifer. I’m really enjoying that.

And public prisons.