Its almost like people realize a war is coming and don’t want to fight it.

That means the people who want to join the air force to get enough hours to qualify as a pilot likely are smart enough to realize what a bad idea that is. Same with the “free college” crowd (which is why marketing mostly pushes it more as “free trade school” these days).

So you have the people who are too dumb even for the infantry and need to go through special programs where they get told what to put on the entrance exams. Which ALSO means they are less likely to be smart enough to remember how to field strip their gun (without a negligent discharge or three in the process) or don’t realize the reason they keep getting told drug tests are a thing is that they should stop smoking for long enough to piss clean.

Just also understand that the idea that the military would refuse to attack Americans or Canadians (because they have a great track record of standing up to trump…) goes out the window. Because it is our dumbest and our most desperate who are “serving”.

Also, recruiters are more and more desperate and have no problem saying complete and utter bullshit during recruiting and relying on people to not read their contracts. So if your contract that “guaranteed you would become a navy seal if you join the army” isn’t giving you what you want… why wouldn’t you just flip the bird and leave?

Even those examples are the kinds of things that “fall apart” if you actually think things through.

Art? Actual human artists tend to use a ridiculous amount of “AI” these days and have been for well over a decade (probably closer to two, depending on how you define “AI”). Stuff like magic erasers/brushes are inherently looking at the picture around it (training data) and then extrapolating/magicking what it would look like if you didn’t have that logo on your shirt and so forth. Same with a lot of weathering techniques/algorithms and so forth.

Same with coding. People more or less understand that anyone who is working on something more complex than a coding exercise is going to be googling a lot (even if it is just that you will never ever remember how to do file i/o in python off the top of your head). So a tool that does exactly that is… bad?

Which gets back to the reality of things. Much like with writing a business email or organizing a calendar: If a computer program can do your entire job for you… maybe shut the fuck up about that program? Chatgpt et al aren’t meant to replace the senior or principle software engineer who is in lots of design meetings or optimizing the critical path of your corporate secret sauce.

It is replacing junior engineers and interns (which is gonna REALLY hurt in ten years but…). Chatgpt hallucinated a nonsense function? That is what CI testing and code review is for. Same as if that intern forgot to commit a file or that rockstar from facebook never ran the test suite.

Of course, the problem there is that the internet is chock full of “rock star coders” who just insist the world would be a better place if they never had to talk to anyone and were always given perfectly formed tickets so they could just put their headphones on and work and ignore Sophie’s birthday and never be bothered by someone asking them for help (because, trust me, you ALWAYS want to talk to That Guy about… anything). And they don’t realize that they were never actually hot shit and were mostly always doing entry level work.

Personally? I only trust AI to directly write my code for me if it is in an airgapped environment because I will never trust black box code I pulled off the internet to touch corporate data. But I will 100% use it in place of google to get an example of how to do something that I can use for a utility function or adapt to solving my real problem. And, regardless, I will review and test that just as thoroughly as the code Fred in accounting’s son wrote because I am the one staying late if we break production.

And just to add on, here is what I told a friend’s kid who is an undergrad comp sci:

LLMs are awesome tools. But if the only thing you bring to the table is that you can translate the tickets I assigned to you to a query to chatgpt? Why am I paying you? Why am I not expensing a prompt engineering course on udemy and doing it myself?

Right now? Finding a job is hard but there are a lot of people like me who understand we still need to hire entry level coders to make sure we have staff ready to replace attrition over the next decade (or even five years). But I can only hire so many people and we aren’t a charity: If you can’t do your job we will drop you the moment we get told to trim our budget.

So use LLMs because they are an incredibly useful tool. But also get involved in design and planning as quickly as possible. You don’t want to be the person writing the prompts. You want to be the person figuring out what prompts we need to write.

Again: What is the percent “accurate” of an SEO infested blog about why ivermectin will cure all your problems? What is the percent “accurate” of some kid on gamefaqs insisting that you totally can see Lara’s tatas if you do this 90 button command? Or even the people who insist that Jimi was talking about wanting to kiss some dude in Purple Haze.

Everyone is hellbent on insisting that AI hallucinates and… it does. You know who else hallucinates? Dumbfucks. And the internet is chock full of them. And guess what LLMs are training on? Its the same reason I always laugh when people talk about how AI can’t do feet or hands and ignore the existence of Rob Liefeld or WHY so many cartoon characters only have four fingers.

Like I said: I don’t like the AI Assistants that won’t tell me where they got information from and it is why I pay for Kagi (they are also AI infested but they put that at higher tiers so I get a better search experience at the tier I pay for). But I 100% use stuff like chatgpt to sift through the ninety bazillion blogs to find me a snippet of a helm chart that I can then deep dive on whether a given function even exists.

But the reality is that people are still benchmarking LLMs against a reality that has never existed. The question shouldn’t be “we need this to be 100% accurate and never hallucinate” and instead be “What web pages or resources were used to create this answer” and then doing what we should always be doing: Checking the sources to see if they at least seem trustworthy.

You are assuming a level of omniscience to our police and military that they only dream of actually having

They already have it. “AI powered surveillance” is already a thing offered by many companies. And anyone with a bit of python skills can rig up something similar using a laptop and publicly available traffic cameras (ten or so years back it took us an afternoon to hook a few packages together and “stalk” a friend’s Toyota Camry over the course of a week)

The only thing holding back these efforts is that, in the past, the government tended to care about overreach (or, more specifically, negative press during reelection campaigns…) and orgs like the ACLU fought tooth and nail to limit stuff like this. But Enemy Of The State and Person of Interest are both a lot more true than anyone wants to admit. And trivially easy to automate these days so you don’t even need Jack Black in a van to track someone carrying a green shopping bag to their car, look up the license plate registration, and guesstimate if that black guy is Big Willy Style.

And if you think the US population will put up with their own military, turning their own cities into Gaza, you would be very mistaken.

Oh, okay. Just so long as the US population says we don’t like it that will stop the rapist in chief and his armies that have, historically, “just followed orders”.

But, just to drill down on this

, turning their own cities into Gaza,

There is already a history of doing this. Not razed to the same degree as Gaza but the idea of using the media to push cities like Detroit or NYC/The Bronx as “dens of crime and danger”. Hell, we saw it with Katrina and New Orleans where there was a strong media push to argue that the reason rescue efforts were increasingly half assed is because of roving gangs (and ignore stuff like cops unloading on innocent families because they were bored…). There was an increasing push to do this with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle a few years back.

Hell, we had multiple people get away with murder because the BLM protests were clearly violent armies attacking our precious Targets.

This is why actual activists (as opposed to people who want to play real life Call of Duty) are so adamant about NOT bringing firearms to protests and focusing so heavily on defensive measures. Even something as simple as spraypainting a mountain bike helmet so it isn’t black goes a long way toward making it clear this is a peaceful protest. Because the moment They see you have a gun? Suddenly this protest is an armed militia and the cops have no hesitation in unloading with lethal ammunition (rather than just causing permanent blindness and life threatening injuries with indiscriminate use of “less than lethal” rubber bullets). Or the national guard gets called in because of “riots”. Oh, and don’t worry. By the time the press is allowed to investigate there will be plenty of guns and fentanyl on all the protesters.

Or… if you DO require razing to the level of Gaza, maybe educate yourself on a little place called Tulsa.

Also: Congrats on ignoring every single point about why your fantasy wouldn’t work anyway. Or are we back to needing the second amendment to get, still illegal, access to fertilizer bombs and having no resistance whatsoever to taking out every single bridge in the continental US AND attacking police garages so that you can safely run back to your house in the suburbs?

And then the US government will be so impressed by your chaditude that they will give up and send themselves into exile because it is just too hard to keep the national guard deployed.

People love to make these claims.

Nothing is “100% accurate” to begin with. Humans spew constant FUD and outright malicious misinformation. Just do some googling for anything medical, for example.

So either we acknowledge that everything is already “sewage” and this changes nothing or we acknowledge that people already can find value from searching for answers to questions and they just need to apply critical thought toward whether I_Fucked_your_mom_416 on gamefaqs is a valid source or not.

Which gets to my big issue with most of the “AI Assistant” features. They don’t source their information. I am all for not needing to remember the magic incantations to restrict my searches to a single site or use boolean operators when I can instead “ask jeeves” as it were. But I still want the citation of where information was pulled from so I can at least skim it.

Tanks need fuel, drivers, and ways to cross rivers,

So, in your heroic Call of Duty wet dream you are also going to use the AR-15 you bought at Walmart to destroy every single bridge in the continental US?

drones have limited range and don’t see inside buildings.

“We received reports that there were insurgents hiding inside of that hospital posing as doctors so we bombed the fuck out of them.”

Roads, power, and water are pressure points

Transformers are definitely a thing that can be taken out by a few stray bullets… and increasingly have those microphone set ups to track who shot at them.

See above regarding how you are apparently going to engage in a mass bombing effort to take out all of the infrastructure and the implied mockery.

you make it too expensive to operate,

So… just to check. Your genius plan is that you will make it too expensive for the US government to operate in the United States and then expect said US government to pull out of the… US?

I am not familiar enough with Canadian surveillance to have an opinion there which is why I specifically did not mention that side. I also fully agree they will have a lot more civilian support (again, the part people forget about when masturbating over the idea of shooting someone with a gun) which would mean any actions would be closer to “wipe out the neighborhood” than rolling up because some white lady submitted a tip.

But once even the Canadian special forces (who are god damned terrifying) cross over to the US side? All the same surveillance is against them. Quick border strikes will likely work as they’ll be back on the Canadian side fairly quickly. Any deeper attack involves navigating US streets which involves navigating US camera systems. And it is pretty trivial to automate the tracking of the group who shot up a military base until they “disappear” into the forest on the side of the interstate… and then wait with cameras in any place they are likely to return (while sending drones to sweep the area).

With a LOT of time spent evading? Yeah, people who are sufficiently trained (so not the weekend warriors on the gun range… which is also much less of a thing in Canada because of sane-ish gun control laws) can spend significant amounts of time evading and even bivvying. But that then means the “reign of terror” operations become few and far between.

I mean, our government’s track record fighting guerrilla insurgencies isnt spotless.

Ah. I see. So you and your militia buddies are going to escape to the mountain caves of… Chicago?

Also, we hunted and murdered many terrorist cells based on something as simple as a magazine on a desk. There is an entire genre of Influencer built around playing “geo guesser” to track things to within a 5 meter radius based off a single picture.

And that all ignores just how many cameras there are in this country. They won’t need to wait until a satelite is overhead to have Abby and McGee hack your location. They’ll just run a simple algorithm that will track you via all the traffic cameras and then tell Ubiquiti and Google to give them doorbell cameras to track you back to your house in the suburbs. This is why basically anyone with half a brain is strongly opposed to police chases. All it does is escalate the situation and increase risk to civilians. Instead? Just track them and roll up on them when they go to sleep that night.

At which point, we are back to what the “right to bear arms” actually gets you. Time for a bit of a history lesson!

Back when the Constitution was written, muskets were the name of the game with the new hotness being rifled barrels that gave a bit more precision to those. And, as America learned first hand, a well trained military could borderline handle an order of magnitude more poorly trained farmers (the opening battles of the US Revolutionary War are actually really fascinating for how unstoppable the Redcoats were). So if a group got too uppety? Send in the military and they would break.

Fast forward to The Wild West where people had revolvers, lever actions, and even some semi auto weaponry. That was incredibly useful for letting law enforcement ignore large swathes of the country (“You have the right to bear arms. You defend yourself”) and had the added benefit of giving Pinkertons and the like legal justification. And, again, when people got too uppety: Heavily armed “US Marshalls” and the military were called in to put them down.

There WAS a brief window where small groups of (generally military trained) individuals with Thompsons and BARs were a significant threat. But shortly thereafter the modern AR-15 style assault rifles were “invented” and trained military (and snipers) once again could dominate any actual clash.

Because people think this is going to be Die Hard where they walk up to the leader of the fascists and exchange quips before quick drawing, killing one guy, and winning the war. The reality is that we are looking at police tanks ramming through walls, buildings getting riddled with machine gun fire, and explosives raining down if things get too “risky”.

People think of when those rednecks took over Malheur a few years back and think that is how it will play out. That only worked because it was white people that the cops like. What they SHOULD look at is things like Waco where the government decided “Fuck it, we ball” and unloaded and massacred dozens of children while showing just how little the second amendment matters.

And just another thing that REALLY pisses me off:

Everyone loves to talk about how The Black Panthers were heavily armed and heroes and are WHY we have gun control laws. And parts of that are true. But it also drastically undersells the various militant groups involved in the Civil Rights struggle and the Black Panthers in particular.

Because it wasn’t guns that held off the government. It was genuine outreach programs like the People’s Free Food Program. Their efforts weren’t “Let’s all live on a ranch with guns”. It was about organizing the people so that any force coming after them would have to wipe out entire cities in the process. AND it was about making sure those cities would side with (among others) The Black Panthers.

The revisionist history about how it is all guns, at best, ignores the actual genius organizing that went on. And, tinfoil hat, it is a great narrative to play to the Call of Duty generation and to alienate those activist groups.

Again, if the second amendment was ANY threat to the govenrment, it would have been repealed.

Again, what are your assault rifles, your NRA training, and your screaming of “WILDCATS” going to do against drones? Or a police force that literally have tanks?

That can defend themselves.

How?

I understand this is a “guns are the answer because MURICA” dogwhistle but even if you do brutality matches every single weekend and train with nothing but a tricked out ar-15 with green tip bullets constantly AND have 20 other people who do the exact same thing and spend your weekdays training like SAS?

America has drones and missiles. And if you actually are the kind of threat the FBI can’t stop they won’t hesitate to tell every news network in the country to villify you worse than Barack Saddam Bin Laden himself.

This is the real problem once you get past the larpers who play call of duty and think that makes them an activist. Increasingly, by protesting you are making yourself the enemy of a state with the largest military on the planet whose entire country is already mostly covered by surveillance equipment (and even twitter tech is sufficient for analyzing the gaps to figure out where you are hiding).

So the issue is that small groups are vulnerable. We need large movements. And we need those movements to get a foothold before they get mowed down by a fat white kid who wants to shoot some n****rs.

But the second amendment? That shit is worthless. If it ever had ANY utility in posing a threat to a government (rather than being a backdoor way to speed up drafts) it would have been repealed instantly. Rather than being the rallying cry of the fascists themselves.

Meh.

We’ve known elon was a shitbird for years. The case where he accused a straight up hero British Diver of being a pedophile for rescuing 12 children without using a musk branded product was 2018. And the sex pest shit has been pretty consistent since. And I will always argue that tesla emphasizing battery size so much actively hurt EV adoption throughout the country (you don’t need a giant battery. You just need to realize that you were going to stop for lunch at some point anyway).

But also? The people buying teslas, generally, weren’t people living paycheck to paycheck. They were status symbols for tech workers an so forth. Their asses can do a trade in or, at the absolute least, put on a bumper sticker to say they hate him too.

So no. I am not going to lose any sleep over people needing to make insurance claims because they drive around in a car that is branded around a nazi who is destroying the fucking country and destabilizing the world.

And I like swiss cheese on my ham sandwiches. Oh, sorry, I thought we were just saying non sequitors.

In all seriousness, that is not an answer to the question. Yes, some (often older) people will always use a search engine to find the same website they browse all the time. But search engines are also incredibly valuable for finding new things or verifying claims. I have a bookmark for the Warframe wiki but that doesn’t help me when I want to research different monitor energy efficiencies or find a repair guide for my toaster oven.

And while people CAN collect a set of (searchable) websites for different topics they are interested in… that is how we got into (one of) our current mess(es). How many people just use reddit for everything and thus make themselves vulnerable to corporate shittery and misinformation campaigns.

He did not say “the” evidence was planted. He said “that” evidence was planted. As in a subset.

And, as I pointed out above, said evidence makes sense. The “faraday bag” is just an intentional misinterpretation. As for the foreign currency? People very much underestimate how much loose cash cops have due to civil forfeiture and it is a really easy way to argue that someone is a flight risk and should not be granted bail.

Considerably less than that.

“The 1%” is, ironically, a way to protect the elites and keep us divided amongst ourselves. But that ignores the wealth inequality issues and how many people aren’t even “middle class”.

In plenty of states? Making low six figures is already enough to put you as a “one percenter” for your demographic. Especially if you have a partner who makes a similar amount of money. And that scales with cost of living. A couple years ago (during the pandemic) I saw a really good breakdown that basically showed “if you can afford to live on your own, you are probably at least a top 5% earner”

And those people are just as vulnerable to an illness that insurance doesn’t cover.

No. The people benefiting aren’t even the “1%”. It is a ridiculously small percentage of the population.

Because the population of the US is 346.3 million people. One percent of that is about 3.5 million people. You are almost guaranteed to know some “one percenters” and they are probably actually great people who are having a lot of the same struggles as you. Maybe they can afford to buy fast food but they are still only one or two bad days away from being destitute. Which tempers anger and rage and protects the people who actually have the vast majority of the wealth in this country.

Because, as many of us pointed out, he was never some super meticulous hitman. He exhibited basic knowledge of firearms and got his stalker on like the ceo what got got was a pretty girl who asked to borrow a pencil that one time in biology class. The rest was taking a bus and wearing a face mask most of the time. It was inevitable that he would be caught unless he fled the country.

Mostly this just highlighted how incompetent cops are. And… might be used to further efforts to just use computer vision and rudimentary “AI” to process security camera footage in the future.

As for why he would keep his gun on him? The manifesto kind of says it all (and, to my knowledge, Luigi has not disputed THAT aspect of it). He wanted to get caught. Probably after making it clear he could have escaped if he wanted to (because getting on a flight out of the US would have been trivial).

To be clear. If he were to have disputed the gun and manifesto I would VERY rapidly be on the side of "cops are planting shit yet again’. But the fact that he hasn’t (to my knowledge) while disputing other potentially planted or misinterpreted evidence puts the kibosh on that.

A LOT of yesterday’s arrest is REALLY suspicious. Dude who could easily have fled the country (for a lot of reasons) and had done such a great job of covering his tracks is sitting in a mickey d’s with his murder weapon and a manifesto.

But… a lot of his social media history (which is not impossible to fake but…) kind of suggests he was very mentally unwell. Which… uh doy? And he is mostly focused on the money (super easy to plant) and the “faraday bag”.

As for the faraday bag? A LOT of dry bags (an internal bag you put electronics and valuables into if you are going to hike in the rain or go rafting/boating) have a metal mesh. Because they need to withstand abrasians either from being near other gear (you would be shocked how much jagged metal is in a backpack when you go on a proper alpine overnight) or just being able to survive falling overboard and bouncing on the end of a rope in rapids. And guess what a metal mesh does?

So he presumably got a dry bag of some form to stash his personal shit in while he stashed the second backpack. And I know plenty of hikers and climbers who learn the fun way that the phone they carried “in case someone needs to get a hold of me” had zero signal the entire time it was protected from the rain.