Today has been sort of a wild ride. We had the Zuckerborg Congressional hearing, and I have some opinions about that. I’m going to start with getting the bad joke out of the way. The whole thing watched like watching a bizarro version of TNG’s Measure of a Man, except in this, Data is actually Lore but with Data’s uncanny valley, and you knew in the end Data/Lore was going to be disassembled for SCIENCE!!!

One of the things that was interesting was Zuck’s constant blame of the algorithm, and claims that AI will one day save the day. These things are programmed by people and contain their biases. This is 100% why I was creeped out about the article where researchers could tell if you were gay or not by a picture. This was disturbing for so many reasons. What if you were in a country that actively persecuted LGBT citizens? Are you supposed to just trust the algorithm and hope it doesn’t target you for having “‘gender-atypical’ features, expressions and ‘grooming styles’”. Whatever the fuck that means. I’m pretty openly bi, and this is something I really do not want. I am also not really traditionally female. So there is that aspect as well. But ya know “TRUST THE ALGORITHM!!!” But yes, Zuckerberg wants you to trust the algorithm. Trust that his platform will protect you from propaganda (while also blatantly selling it…). And trust that Facebook has your best interests, and privacy safety concerns in mind. The advents of the past few months have proven most people in tech right that Facebook, is in fact, lawful evil. Everything they did, including the psyops, were legal. This company is the very definition of lawful evil. I have been saying it for years, however, my family chained me to the platform until January 2018. That was when I gave the ultimatum. “Find an alternate means to contact me (pm me for info) or get out of my life”. I will say, I have never been happier since deleting that evil skinner machine.

What got me about the insistence of “trust the algorithm” is that ignores the inherent bias of the algorithm. I have written AIs, and I know that researcher bias is in fact a thing. I didn’t realize I was giving an unfair bias to what could be an alpha predator of Arcanine in my sims, but I was. I was also doing this with Flareon, inadvertantly, with how I simplified the game of Pokemon to run on a desktop and test teams. I, as the human observer, know that Flareon is useless because it has like 2 ATK moves total, and everything else is SpATK. Flareon has the highest ATK of any eeveelution, and it is a goddamn wonder it does not know Earthquake. This mystery is compounded by it being the largest eeveelution, and yet, not knowing how to jump up and punch the ground with it’s forepaws. This has bothered me for years, but hey, here we are, almost at gen 8. All algorithms written by humans are biased. If you are racist, you will write a racist algorithm. This stands true for LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE. I even wrote my own bias towards eeveelutions into my own pokemon sim. This is not an excuse. This is an admission of guilt overall in my opinion. Zuckerberg should be held accountable for the AI and algorithms deployed to manipulate people, their emotions, and their timelines. If you can manipulate what people see, you have a good control over them too.

Enough with Facebook. My biggest problems are them selling themselves as a “data platflorm” and never actually admitting to be the 2nd biggest adveriser in the world, and their reliance on “TRUST THE ALGORTHrIM!!! AI WILL SAVE US ALL.” This reminds me of a famous Dune Quote from before the Butlerian Jihad…“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” This is a commandment to be obeyed. The Butlerian Jihad was basically started by connecting a “Thinking Machine” up to the internet. It is of note that we have done this in recent times, and Watson decided to download Urban Dictionary, and called a researcher’s query bullshit, and then made a dick joke. We also have self driving cars that can’t solve the “hey there’s a girl with a bike in the street” problem. This would actually lread to a lot of deaths on my street, as it is a high foot/bike traffic area and a one-way street. If your self-driving vehicle can’t solve Downtown Lake Worth, you don’t deserve to be a self driving vehicle.

Now onto blockain bullshit…

In the past twenty four hours, it has been brought to my attention that there is a househodl.com with the most informative website ever!!! However, what they are trying to link to is likely snake oil..

There is also this which somehow is not the stupidest use, but still pretty stupid. Do we really need an immutable ledger of when da_redux said “have wood need sheep?!” oh god no. This is the the shitty cyberpunk future we are getting though. This is also the least useful instance of the blockchain since bitcar.io, However, this is still less stupid. This is not a pyramid scheme ontop of a timeshare scheme on the blockchain. This has that going for it, though. An immutable ledger of whenever one of our SR characters have done something shitty.

I also found out [THERE IS A TOKEN JUST FOR COSPLAYERS] (https://ico.curecos.com/?lang=en). CONGRATS. IF YOU EVER WANTED PATREON, BUT HARDER AND MORE OBSCURE TO USE, BOY DO I HAVE THE ICO FOR YOU, AND IT IS THIS. This is literally Patreon, but 100% harder to use. One, you gotta have eth, then convert it to their token, then you pay the cosplayer in their specifically named token. So, if you are a popular cosplayer, I guess your token is worth more because high school politics?? I really don’t get this. Congrats though. You guys made a shittier Patreon. You should be happy with that…I guess. Idk. I am not a financial expert, just a cryptocurrency skeptic. You do you.

I haven’t touched on SpankCoin, but there’s not much more to say than LITERALLY CP ON THE BLOCKCHAIN. GO READ THEIR WHITE PAPER AND CHANGE MY MIND. These fucks are gross, and really need out of the tech space in general. Their ICO might as well be “HUMAN TRAFFICKING….ON THE BLOCKCHAIN”. No seriously, fuck these guys. They only registered “wtfosta.com” to cover their asses. I read their whitepaper, they encourage this shit, and don’t care about sexworkers. I thought that ICO with Consent on the Blockchain was bad…until I read this. Holy shit. Please. Stop this before it gets worse.

Next up on the list, we got a phone that promises to be blockchain compatible. Well, that statement right there is a lot of unpacking. It promises to be “grandma friendly” and all. But yes, how does grandma actually cash out when $cryptocurrencyoftheweek moons?! NO ONE ACTUALLY KNOWS. But this device promises to make it easy, and sell at least 100k to 1million devices. I remain skeptical. Hauwei might scam some cryptocurrency nerds, but I highly doubt this phone will lead to mass adoption. However, I also doubt that anything will lead to mass adoption. And I did save IOTA today, by making them aware of is-13.js…which is a library they needed since 13 is an unlucky number with undefined behavior in IOTA. I got that going for me!!

Alright! That’s it from thoughts from Comrade tonight! Tune in next time….whenever that is…