- Officer at driver side window, reaches into vehicle while simultaneously trying to open the door (I cannot fathom why an officer would be reaching in the vehicle and attempting to open the door if he was giving the driver an order to move the vehicle, but perhaps there would be a reason for this). At this time the vehicle is moving backward, its tires turned to the left shifting the front of the vehicle to the right. The shooting officer comes into view but appears to be stationary. (This suggests that he was probably on the front right of the vehicle before the vehicle reversed). The reversing movement of the vehicle orients its front end to line up with him in front of the vehicle.
- Shooting officer is in front of the car just left of center of the hood when vehicle starts moving forward
- Vehicle tires spin before gaining traction and they are facing forward. The officer is directly in front of the vehicle at this moment
- Vehicle tires are straight towards the officer until after he unholsters his firearm, only at that point does the vehicle wheels start turning towards the right. Also at this point the vehicle begins moving towards the right and the officer begins moving towards his right (to avoid being hit).
- Officer is still at the front left corner of the vehicle when shooting but nearly clear. He is at an angle where it is possible for him to shoot through the windshield at the driver, his body dodges further to the right as he is firing his weapon. Additional shot appears to have been fired after he was cleared of the immediate danger.
There was a time when police were banned from putting a tracker on people's cars without a court order.
The argument was, yes it's legal to put a tail on a person when they're out in public because that's just a cop observing a person of interest out in public. But electronic trackers are something quantifiable different due to the ease of tracking many people without having to use manpower to do it. It's the thin-edge of mass, casual surveillance of the population.
In other words, putting a tail on someone should be manpower intensive because that's a check on police power, they have to really want to track someone to invest potentially several officers' time to it full time, whereas sticking a bug on a car is something they can do to dozens of cars per day per officer.
Of course now they don't even have to do that because our police state has normalized centralized cctv camera databases, license plate trackers that continuously track the movement of every vehicle in a city into a database. Now they're doing the same with facial recognition.
Now it's even a felony in Florida to do anything to block license plate trackers from tagging your vehicle (so you can't obscure your plate in a way that leaves it readable to humans but not to the automatic tracking software). No doubt we'll have such laws for facial recognition software soon as well.
Yup, the fight against American authoritarianism happened between 2015 and 2025. It's now over, authoritarianism won. All that's left now is for it to burn itself out as people bear the consequences they refused for a decade to entertain were possible.
We spent 10 years warning about him, pointing out his specific authoritarian tendencies, January 6 was predicted years before it happened, but when people said "he's not going to leave" they were met with mockery.
Who tf cares about databases when their plan was to just use their power to throw out entire states worth of votes? The entire J6 plot was that Pence was to reject the certification of the vote so that states could send "alternative electors" who voted for Trump, which would have disenfranchised millions of people at once. What is the law supposed to do against such anti-democratic "might makes right" depravity? At that point, the players have abandoned the game entirely, they're playing by different rules, your laws are meaningless.
Edit: to the dead comment below me:
> If you actually believed you were living under a dangerous, authoritarian government you wouldn't be posting about it on the internet. You'd be scared shitless trying to delete any trace of this connected to yourself.
Bro, I'm already labelled part of a terrorist organization by this government for my political beliefs. There's nothing I can say here or elsewhere that would change that, so at this point my fate is locked in because I'm not going to change what I believe.
There's not point in hiding anything, now is not a time for hiding, it's a time for speaking your mind. These people are authoritarians, but they are not all powerful. Yet. They have no consolidated power. Yet. They 100% want to, but that's not going to be possible as long as people continue to speak out. Read Timothy Snyder's, On Authoritarianism. He describes what you suggest is the rational response as "obeying in advance", which is the primary way in which the authoritarians seize power -- it's freely given by people who are too afraid to push back.
It is 1995. You get an unsolicited email with a dubious business offer. Upon reflection, you decide it's not worth consideration and delete it. No need to wonder how it was sent to you; that doesn't need to influence the way you handle it.
No. We need spam filters for this stuff. If it isn't obvious to you yet, it will be soon. (Or else you're one of the spammers.)
"Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump's deployment of federal troops to DC. 'Shock and awe. Force,' he wrote. 'We're taking our country back from these cockroaches.'"
Cockroaches! Literally language of the Rwandan genocide. And it's a Christian saying this about other human beings? The man never changed.
(Obviously, he should not have been shot. But his sanctification is repulsive.)
It is no surprise to me that AI images have become an aesthetic of ascendant fascism. AI contains the same distaste for the actual life and complexity of history and preference for a false memory of the past with vaseline smeared on the lens.
I wish we had machines that actually thought because they'd at least put an end to whatever this is. In the words of Schopenhauer, this is the worst of all possible worlds not because it couldn't be worse but because if it was a little bit worse it'd at least cease to exist. It's just bad enough so that we're stuck with the same dreck forever. This isn't the Dune future but the Wall-E future. The problem with the Terminator franchise and all those Eliezer Yudkowsky folks is that they are too optimistic.
There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty that went both ways. Those who famously violated those norms were looked down on, not admired. The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift, but it's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always about the availability of material goods. By that measure, we're doing better than ever!
This post is assuming that acts of violence, like Charlie Kirk's assassination, are promoted and committed by large groups of people who identify, benefit or agree with parts of a specific framework (wokeism). Which is not true on principle.
You're ascribing agency and belonging to a group based on, basically, vibes. On vague agreements or conclusions, mispoken points, incomplete framings. That is the culture war. You're doing it.
And wokeism was just a corporate strategy to appear more friendly to consumers of alternate identities/perspectives. It wasn't something that came from the masses, it was something that was done to generate more money by corporations.
You're participating in the misunderstanding of large masses of people to gain an in-group identity. Sure there are crazy people who believe its ok to be violent on "both sides". We all understand that these people are crazy, those who don't are themselves crazy.
You're aiding the normalization of extremism and polarization just like some rad-lib is doing right now by calling you a fascist. We're all ignorant, we don't know everything.
> when actual fascists start rising, we'll have taken all the meaning out of the language we rely on to identify them.
Isn't this a delightful Catch-22.
If you forewarn about a developing Fascist movement, you're simply taking away the meaning from the word until it's too late and the Fascists take power.
You cannot call anything Fascist, for there may be something more Fascist that may need the power of the word.
But ah! We couldn't call out their fledgling movement full of dog whistles and double speak so no one was aware enough to stop them as a fledgling movement!
The shocking thing isn't that fascism would come back. The shocking thing is that the people I thought were smart would allow it to normalize so fast and give up without a fight. And that even some people I know are apparently fascists at heart - they just needed "permission" to show themselves.
For most of my teens I wondered what side I would have been on in 1930s Germany. If I would have had the courage to stand up to fascists. Even when they emerge among your friends. I used to wonder what side other people would end up on. Who would recognize fascism for what it was. Who would have the guts to call people out.
I read extensively about fascism. About the war. About the camp. About where all this came from.
Almost everyone has disapponted me in the past year. Not only the shits who turned out to be closeted fascists, but the cowards who do not dare to speak up. Because this time there was no excuse. Our history should have warned about this. And we failed. Almost all of us. Almost everyone makes excuses for themselves. For why they can't stand up to this.
The excuses are worse than the stupidity.
I do not despise people for being stupid. I despise people for being having had every opportunity to not repeat past mistakes and still
This is similar to why I prefer LLM's to behave less human-like and more robotic and machine-like, because they're not humans or human-like, they are robotic and machine-like. The chatbot is not my friend and it can't be my friend, so it shouldn't behave like its trying to be my friend. It should answer my queries and requests with machine-like no-nonsense precision and accuracy, not try to make an emotional connection. Its a tool, not a person.
I do not like the word “my” anywhere in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Putting on my autistic , very factual, and methodologically empathetic hat on, I prefer a clear line of separation—machines should act as machines, not as personalized companions. I prefer “your” everywhere.
I wanted to do research in HCI a while back, but funding in this area is limited. To me, HCI research felt overly focused on making computer interaction more personable by adding layers of so-called "personalization." Let interaction with machines remain objective, straightforward, and friendly—especially for older people.
Only competition can provide a solution. We have lost sight of this principle even though all Western democracies are built on the idea of separation of powers, and making it hard for any one faction of elites to gain full control and ruin things for everyone else. Make them fight with each other, let them get a piece of the pie, but never all of it. That's why we have multiple branches of government, multiple parties etc. That's why we have markets with many firms instead of monopolies.
There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future. The past was riddled with despotism and many things that the average man or woman today would consider horrific. The basic principle of democratic society is to prevent those things from recurring by pitting elite factions against each other. Similarly business elites who wield high technology to gain their wealth must also compete and if there is any sign of them cooperating too closely for too long, we need to break them up or shut them down.
When Apple and Google agree, cooperate, and adopt the same policies - we are all doomed. It must never happen and we must furthermore break them up if they try, which they are now doing.
This is why we need actual regulation, and not the semi fascist monopolist corporatocracy we've evolved into now.
Its only utopian because it's become so incredibly bad.
We shouldn't expect less, we shouldn't push guilt or responsibility onto the consumer we should push for more, unless you actively want your neighbour, you mom, and 95% of the population to be in constant trouble with absolutely everything from tech to food safety, chemicals or healthcare - most people aren't rich engineers like on this forum and i don't want to research for 5 hours every time i buy something because some absolute psychopaths have removed all regulation and sensible defaults so someone can party on a yacht.
WHITELISTING. It's utterly infuriating the obvious, time tested strategy with all the technological pieces already in place and an easy slot-in for government isn't at the tip of everyone's tongue. Just setup a set of new TLDs, ".kids1", ".kids2", ".kids3" etc, with kids1 being appropriate for anyone ages 0-4 years old, kids2 ages 5-9, kids3 ages 10-14, etc. Or whatever permutation experts and the public say make the most sense. Governments can set the requirements for anyone or any organization who wants to register a domain there to ensure all content is controlled, no user submitted content (or only submissions from registered people/orgs like schools say), no algorithmic engagement usage allowed, no advertising or whatever else is desired. It's also trivial to add that in under country TLDs so every single nation that wants to regulate their own can do so to their own standards. An alternate similar approach would be to have a single ".[ccTLD].kids" domain and then legally required DNS txt info site-wide as well as standardized metadata tags at the top of every single page going into more granular detail about content by category (like if some parents though their kids were ready for a higher age bracket of world news before being ready for a higher bracket of something else).
With age-appropriate content under its own TLDs, all the other technical pieces are easy to slot in as well. It'd be absolutely trivial for OS makers to have parental control mode simply gate a given user into whatever TLDs match the age or content levels set by the parents. It's very easy to imagine a nice GUI at the router level combining TLD-restrictions with VLANs and PPSKs such that a parent can "add a child" and it spits out a separate WiFi password that gates the child into their own age appropriate stuff.
The general internet should be a free for all for adults (or adult level), period. Access at all should imply someone is ready to navigate it. Trying to restrict and sanitize it is evil, wrong, and also just plain fucking stupid since it'll never work well. We can easily make a child internet however.
>I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
I absolutely abhor the "Kids these days" sort of argument, but it does seem the case that we lowered the barrier of entry sufficiently in the tech sector that people who simply dont give a shit, or actively want to harm our values, now outnumber us greatly.
What has happened previously was we would rally around corporations and institutions that would generally work in our best interests. But the people driving those social goods in those entities are now the villains.
Not to mention all the mergers and acquisitions.
In Australia, during the internet filter debate, we had both a not for profit entity spending money on advertising, but also decently sized ISP's like iiNet working publicly against the problem. The not for profit was funded by industry, something that never happened again. And iiNet is now owned by TPG who also used to have a social conscience but have been hammered into the dust by the (completely non technical, and completely asinine bane of the internets existence and literal satan) ACCC and have no fight left in them for anything. When Teoh leaves or sells TPG, it will probably never fight a good fight ever again.
Its the same everywhere. We cant expect people to fight for freedom when the legislation just gets renamed and relaunched again after the next crisis comes out in the media. We lost internet filtration after christchurch, for absolutely no justifiable reason. And we lost the Access and Assistance fight despite having half the global tech industry tell our government to suck eggs.
The only real solution is to prep the next generation to fight back as best as possible, to help them ignore the doomsayers and help the right humans into the right places to deal with this shit.
The motivation does not matter. It is the effect that matters, and also, it is well documented [1] that fascist dictatorships rely (again not in any pre-planned way, simply in how they emerge) on incompetence, sloppiness to achieve their end result - both to allow for wanton destruction, as well as to actually continue making people think none of this is intentional, as we are seeing here. That is, the skepticism we see here is the fascist playbook working as designed.
Trump has no idea what a "fascist" is. He suffers from narcissism, and when you put narcissists in charge, you get fascist dictatorships as a result. That's why it's very easy to see that it's happening without having to psychoanalyze anyone. But because it happens in such a stupid way, people are constantly thrown off the trail as we see in this thread.
You cannot credibly claim a US gov website just accidentally loses a specific chunk of the Constitution that specifically refers to all the parts of it that Trump is currently trying to break. It might be an accident that some overzealous kid was put in charge of the website, and it might be an accident that the removal happened in the first place, but the actual removal is clearly intentional on someone's part. If it stays up and does not get restored, that's also "incompetence, laziness" but it's also the effect of increased fascism.
It has nothing to do with stupidity. Stop painting people as idiots because they exist in one of the most information hostile environments in human history.
This isn't some natural state that's unrecoverable. The people you describe have been given a highly addictive media environment tailor made to engender outrage and drive behavior. It shouldn't be a shock when most people cannot resist it. The first step to changing it is not writing them off or insulting them for being had.
I don't believe the current race to build AI is actually about any productivity gains (which are questionable at best).
I believe the true purpose of the outsized AI investments is to make sure the universal answer machine will give answers that conform to the ideology of the ruling class.
You can read hints of that in statements like the Trump AI Action Plan [0], but also things like the Llama 4 announcement. [1]
[1] "It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet." https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/
> The Jewish minority in that case would not accept living in a muslim arab state since they consider Israel to be the sole refuge for jews in the world, the only place in the world where they don't have to be a minority.
In the modern world, if you accept universal human rights, every minority in the world has to accept that it's a minority, and every majority in the world has to learn to accept the minority. In addition, everyone is a minority is some sense and somewhere - depends on your worldview.
What you're saying is a very condescending (and frankly antisemitic) claim - that Israelis (or Jews) are somehow "special" in being so stupid to never accept this. Of course they can accept it, just like everybody else in the world learns to accept there are other ethnicities and races. Americans, for example, learned to accept it. Likewise, all Jews outside Israel have accepted being a minority. It's not really a problem that racists make it out to be (at the end of the day, people individual differences and conflicts trump most group differences).
> When Israel was "a single biethnic country" this was the norm
That's why modern biethnic countries have laws and other systems that prevent that - see my comment above. A good example is Belgium. The point is, you can change the perception from 2-states to functioning 1-state without having to give up anything related to each ethnicity's cultural heritage. Has been done many times in history.
The point I am making is that everyone in the USA is somehow absolutely certain that Britain is a hell-hole of authoritarianism because of this law, and yet 25 US states have enacted laws which are in some cases basically lunatic porn censorship (whereas our OSA is not) and HN just ignores it because the Brits, eh?
The fabric of the USA is being ripped apart by a kleptocratic authoritarian fascist-at-least-wannabe government that makes the most extreme country in the EU (Hungary) look exactly like a trial run, and you guys are worried about the Brits implementing a relatively measured law that affects fewer people than all those US porn laws combined.
HN's weird little "no politics" bubble encourages you all to think that it is outrageous that US companies should be held accountable to the laws of the countries in which you trade [0], while your president is, for example, imposing actually illegal tariffs on Brazil, abusing a power you won't take away from him, because they insist on prosecuting Bolsonaro under their own laws for something he did within their country.
Yes: we made a law you don't like. It's a stupid law. It's still a fairly measured, stupid law compared to the ones your states are passing and your own supreme court thinks are A-OK, or the silly one in France, or whatever.
Collectively you should maybe stop fretting about the UK while your country is reverting to quasi-monarchy.
[0] and yes, you are trading here if you serve porn to UK customers. This is the same standard as the US Supreme Court-approved Texas anti-porn law applies.
People act like Trump is this outsider taking on the elites when he's just an actor fronting for various backroom fascists that have been working on this for decades.
We had the whole pantomime about project 2025 for example. A cabinet full of billionaires. Musk funding. Trump delivering on abortion even though he could clearly not care less about it. Fascist judges chosen by the Federalist society.
None of his shit would work if there weren't powerful forces making sure that it did, falling over themselves to excuse or distract from Trump's many blunders. Or viciously attacking his rivals over made up shit.
I like to start from the Powell memo personally but there is a vast right wing conspiracy. It's not one amoral psychopath you're dealing with but a whole well-funded ecosystem of them.
It's almost as if CEOs aren't really that smart or creative, got to their position through mostly politics, and look externally for clues about what to do.
> The economy can no longer subsidize low-value labor
Every year we get wealthier and wealthier as a society, so that means we are capable of less and labor has to take the haircut while capital keeps on as is.
We could subsidize 10s of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people to do literally nothing and not be any worse off than we were 15 years ago
The capitalist class has always conspired to keep labor down.
Meanwhile, a lot of laborers in our profession have fallen for their propaganda of markets and so-called meritocracy, not realizing they have more in common with the fruit picker than their common exploiter.
Class warfare is real. It's time tech workers wake up to that fact and start fighting back instead of letting oligarchs walk over them.
The top two comments here both suggest that the people using chatbots in place of social interaction were already a priori socially isolated and AI has no effect on it. It's merely a "symptom" or after the fact consequence.
I deeply, fundamentally disagree with that. Humans are one step mathematical operations that take in an input, transform to an output, and are done.
Human life is an endless continuous cascade of incentives, feedback loops, iterations, and modification. When you change anything in a person's environment, it will affect them. Perhaps the effect is small unless someone is primed by their prior environment in certain ways, but nonetheless nearly everything leaves its mark.
Can you eat healthy if your kitchen is full of free junk food? Yes, it's possible. Can you get out of the house and socialize even when endless media and parasocial relationships are just a screen away? Yes, it's possible.
Will you in practice? Evidence shows clearly over and over again that even tiny incentives have huge effects when compounded over time.
We all have a deep moral obligation to build an environment (physical, cultural, social) that is nourishing and incentivizes all of us to flourish. If you're building technology like AI chatbots that enables people to become more socially isolated, in my mind you are in the same category as junk food sellers, drug pushers, and polluting factory owners. You're making people sicker and the world worse.
https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/2008976092326203562
Here is what I see in this video…
- Officer at driver side window, reaches into vehicle while simultaneously trying to open the door (I cannot fathom why an officer would be reaching in the vehicle and attempting to open the door if he was giving the driver an order to move the vehicle, but perhaps there would be a reason for this). At this time the vehicle is moving backward, its tires turned to the left shifting the front of the vehicle to the right. The shooting officer comes into view but appears to be stationary. (This suggests that he was probably on the front right of the vehicle before the vehicle reversed). The reversing movement of the vehicle orients its front end to line up with him in front of the vehicle.
- Shooting officer is in front of the car just left of center of the hood when vehicle starts moving forward
- Vehicle tires spin before gaining traction and they are facing forward. The officer is directly in front of the vehicle at this moment
- Vehicle tires are straight towards the officer until after he unholsters his firearm, only at that point does the vehicle wheels start turning towards the right. Also at this point the vehicle begins moving towards the right and the officer begins moving towards his right (to avoid being hit).
- Officer is still at the front left corner of the vehicle when shooting but nearly clear. He is at an angle where it is possible for him to shoot through the windshield at the driver, his body dodges further to the right as he is firing his weapon. Additional shot appears to have been fired after he was cleared of the immediate danger.