The party of Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz, CDU, is projected to win the NRW municipal vote, with the far-right AfD making major gains.

@alex_p_roe some call it the culture wars... quote from the same man that said that the only "mistake" from Orwell's "1984" was placing in the future a reality that was already here (the book was launched around (1948-1949)....

@alex_p_roe
The American Dream, 21st century style.
A dream for billionaires, a living nightmare for others.

@brouhaha That appears to be where we are headed but they may well be killing the geese that lay their golden eggs

@alex_p_roe
The billionaires believe that by investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI research, that they will get AGI that eliminates their dependence on human labor. They want the science fiction post-scarcity economy, but only for themselves. Once the billionaires have AGI, they have no interest in the rest of us, and would gladly eliminate us if we get uppity.

@alex_p_roe
The billionaires believe that by investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI research, that they will get AGI that eliminates their dependence on human labor. They want the science fiction post-scarcity economy, but only for themselves. Once the billionaires have AGI, they have no interest in the rest of us, and would gladly eliminate us if we get uppity.

@alex_p_roe
The fly in their ointment is that they're not going to get AGI for a very long time, if ever. Most of the money is going to LLMs, which are not on a path that leads to any intelligence, let alone AGI. Sam Altman promises otherwise, so they keep throwing money at it, and accelerating the destruction of the ecosphere in the process.

@brouhaha Ha! It appears that quite a few billionaires believe LLMs are #AI! They are not (but I will admit to thinking they were initially). Machine learning is AI tech that helps build LLMs but there’s that #hallucination issue!

@alex_p_roe
Yes, AI companies keep claiming that they will remove the "hallucinations" from their LLMs, but it's bullshit. An LLM is, by definition and by construction, a hallucination machine. If you could remove the hallucinations, there would be nothing left.
People are fooled easily into thinking there is intelligence in an LLM because the hallucinations often seem quite plausible on the surface, and they are stated in such a seemingly authoritative way, as if they were solid facts.

@brouhaha Spot on - the hallucinations are extremely convincing and it can be extremely difficult to tell truth from invention. It’s probably only a matter of time before expensive litigation is brought over the reliability of LLM output.

@alex_p_roe
Like the Air Canada incident, but bigger.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

List update: Public transport quality has been eroded. National companies have been offshored thus reducing their benefit to local economies.
Trans people are being persecuted for no reason, as are #LGBTQ and others, for colour or whatever.
The media has become little more than a propaganda arm for the right and the rich.
- This list is not applicable to all nations yet but, please, keep voting for the right #politics (3/3) #FarRight