I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy's public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I've been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!

So in the past week or so a lot of pedestrian crossings in Silicon Valley were "hacked" (probably never changed the default password lol) to make them talk like tech figures.

Here are a few. Note that these voices are most likely AI generated.

1. A crosswalk with the voice of Elon Musk
2. A crosswalk with the voice of Zuck
3. Elon Musk crosswalk just wants to be friends (second video) also Zuck crosswalk is proud of his work (third video).

I didn't get to hear any of them in person, however the crosswalk near my place has recently stopped saying "change password" constantly, which I'm happy about.

In this case ドドドド or ゴゴゴゴ are both meme sound effects from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure used in dangerous or unnerving scenes. The meaning here would be something like indicating what a menacing aura that hardcore mofo Yud is giving off.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/menacing-%E3%82%B4%E3%82%B4%E3%82%B4%E3%82%B4

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oh-youre-approaching-me-jojo-approach

https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2018/10/dodododo.html

Of course the AI doesn't know this so combined the two to produce ゴゴドゴ which just looks kind of stupid.

My go to source for the fact that LLM chatbots suck at writing reasoned replies is https://chatgpt.com/

Oh gosh I looked up the post and that was a mistake. Actually Mr. Yarvin there is quote tweeting someone who dared, on twitter, to say that the Holocaust was real. The replies (including Yarvin's incorrect & off topic nonsense) being about what you'd expect from twitter nowadays. So much Holocaust denial.

At this point cryptocurrency has a bad enough reputation that they have to try and ease readers into it.

(insert clown getting dressed meme image here)

1. It's new digg!
2. AI is bad (but also sexy and all powerful)
3. so captchas are hard :(
4. let's make a real fancy captcha!
5. With... Zero-Knowledge Proofs :D :D :D :D :D (all non cryptocurrency people flee at this point)
6. Also like NFTs for products you buy so when you shill them people know you're at least a real person doing so (maybe, kinda, sorta)
7. So anyway I was thinking if only there was something else as ~~dystopian~~ cool as Sam Altman 様's orb thing and we smeared it across the entire internet

Yeah it's called "autopilot"; named after the Tesla technology!

Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/

"We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off."

This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off

Holy smokes

Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism I'm supposed to fill in the blank or something.

To be fair their calculation also involves multiplying by the carefully chosen factors of 4 and 0.25. It's a macroeconomics thing you probably wouldn't understand. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

This "Cavallo" reference isn't actually listed in their citations (gee I wonder why) but appears to be Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy (link).

Meanwhile Cavallo et al 2021:

Chinese exporters did not lower their dollar prices by much, despite the recent appreciation of the dollar. By contrast, US exporters significantly lowered prices affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs. In US stores, the price impact is more limited, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. [...] Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.

Amazing. The government's official position is that tariffs are OK because both US exporters and importers get less money.

Hey wait a minute we already made that (obvious) joke here on Awful Systems!

I've been browsing bluesky a fair amount recently and it's chock full of artists making non-AI Ghibli inspired art in response to the AI trend. Which is neat.