Best reply I got here tbh.

Strikes do a lot more damage to companies. I think a lot of people mix the two ideas up.

The last most successful boycotts were mostly ones you never heard of, and at least one you rather not hear of. We managed to get tuna companies to pretend to harm fewer dolphins in 1988. Before that is was things like the 1965 Delano Grape Strike and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The most recent boycott that actually got a company to change its marketing and outreach was the Bud Lite/Dylan Mulvaney boycott by the anti-trans right.

If you think you can get enough people as worked up about an issue as the chuds were about a single commercial featuring someone they were scared of, then by all means let’s fire up all the engines and get boycotting. Otherwise, I would encourage people who work at these tech companies to start talking about unions and making change from the inside. But none of that does as much damage to a company as getting politicians installed who are already taking bribes from other companies. Yes this is a dark perspective, you’re welcome to disagree but in my nearly five decades on Earth this is just what I’ve seen over and over.

Boycotts are performative stunts that feel good but don’t have impact on companies and even gets more attention ON those companies.

No really, this is a phenomenon that’s known. When people were protesting Blizzard, I swear to fucking god, people I knew for years who hadn’t played WoW since they were kids suddenly decided to reactivate their accounts because all the talk about blizzard “made them nostalgic” and despite being sympathetic to the people hurt by the company, they simply didn’t have the mental value-system to draw lines between those two things. Their own desires to escape and recapture youth was far, far stronger than the social messaging they honestly just felt was finger-wagging and parental scolding, so they rejected the idea of protesting without conscious thought.

And there are far, FAR more people like this than there are people with steadfast principles and discipline to stick to them. The depressing majority of people are not really thinking, they’re just going with the flow, agreeing with popular sentiment when it’s convenient, doing whatever they want when nobody is looking because capitalism has bled our axioms out.

If we put that much energy into volunteering with groups raising funds for primaries, getting to know our neighbors and forming communities, actually talking to people in our communities, we would abolish this fascist empire in a single election cycle. (Assuming we have elections again.)

edit: I firmly stand by my claim that you can change the world a lot better by being a good, active, social person who organizes your community. If we all kinda, embraced this as a passion and cared about people who aren’t in our discord servers, we wouldn’t need to try to boycott companies who won’t give two shits about you giving them more press.

Welcome to how the world has always worked and always will. There’s gin to help wash the black pill down.

8-chan was a “less moderated” version of 4-chan where the founders of Q-anon got started, it was a notorious forum for trading child abuse material.

Really good point and in cases like this we should all be a lot more concerned with people who seem obsessive about a given subject. It’s not a coincidence that so many crackpot Q-anon “save the children from the demon vampires” nutcases were actually themselves pedos who were caught, or that Q-anon STARTED on a pedophile message board.

Also, the almost universal knee-jerk response that we have as a society broadly to child predation makes a helluva mask for trampling on the rights of others and making a scapegoat that will be condemned in the public court long before any charges are brought up. The absolute ease and temptation of creative editing and a thirst for views can make the producers of this content work harder to portray events out-of-context.

I’m sure there are plenty of actual predators who are worried about being hit with a sting, but I have seen more than a handful clips of these rogue pedo-hunters going after like, 21-year-old boys and their 17-year-old girlfriends, and people who looked genuinely confused and seemed railroaded into meeting someone.

I know this message will never stick with the wildly reactionary and emotional viewership who needs to hear it, but we make vigilantism illegal for a damn good reason, and just because Dateline managed to stay above the waterline for the most part, that doesn’t mean some operation of randos you know nothing about on youtube have both the best intentions and the legal acumen to actually make a difference. They may well be making the problem worse by setting up situations where stings against child predators could become outlawed.

100%.

There is an old trope about arsonists, they either become criminals or they become firefighters.

At least with firefighters, we don’t have to worry about if the firefighter is going to get the fire in a room alone later.

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Which is the answer they will get right before sending the AI back for “repairs.”

As we saw with Grock already several times.

They absolutely adore AI, it makes them feel in-touch with the world and able to feel validated, since all it is is a validation machine. They don’t care if it’s right or accurate or even remotely neutral, they want a biased fantasy crafting system that paints terrible pictures of Donald Trump all ripped and oiled riding on a tank and they want the AI to say “Look what you made! What a good boy! You did SO good!”

most LLM’s for chat, pictures and clips are magical and amazing. For about 4 - 8 hours of fiddling then they lose all entertainment value.

As for practical use, the things can’t do math so they’re useless at work. I write better Emails on my own so I can’t imagine being so lazy and socially inept that I need help writing an email asking for tech support or outlining an audit report. Sometimes the web summaries save me from clicking a result, but I usually do anyway because the things are so prone to very convincing halucinations, so yeah, utterly useless in their current state.

I usually get some angsty reply when I say this by some techbro-AI-cultist-singularity-head who starts whinging how it’s reshaped their entire lives, but in some deep niche way that is completely irrelevant to the average working adult.

I have also talked to way too many delusional maniacs who are literally planning for the day an Artificial Super Intelligence is created and the whole world becomes like Star Trek and they personally will become wealthy and have all their needs met. They think this is going to happen within the next 5 years.