Bloomberg reports that “Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms,” per an HP executive.

congrats to HP on the launch of their new “you thought inkjet printers were shitty now? hold my aquifer and watch this” division.

but also:

HP is buying Humane’s CosmOS, bringing on Humane technical staff, and will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, Humane says in its press release.

this is a relatively cheap way for HP to set itself up as an AI patent troll and extract rent from other companies that are trying to do AI-related bullshit. (from 2017: Stupid Patent of the Month: HP Patents Reminder Messages)

What’s the relevance of either of those questions for an election that happened three months ago? I don’t like relitigating unspooled events.

my brother in Cthulhu, you started this post by saying:

this is where thinking Biden wasn’t doing enough has led.

you should decide if you’re for or against re-litigating things

Projecting your political beliefs and rationales on others is not Beeing Nice.

meanwhile, one paragraph above, you’re projecting an opinion onto me that I don’t have:

You’re welcome to your opinion that Biden or Harris would have been worse

I just find it almost comical that anyone thought Trump would be an improvement if not for the drastic outcomes we’re going to see.

OK…just to make sure I understand you correctly - the people you’re mad at, are people who either voted for Trump, or didn’t vote at all, because of their opinions about Biden’s response to the genocide in Gaza.

if that’s accurate, two questions:

a) what is your estimate for the size of that group of people?

b) how many actual individual people in that group can you identify by name? how many do you know personally? (vs having read a news story quoting them)

Explicit calls for ethnic cleansing were at least not on the table with the last administration.

Trump: we should ethnically cleanse Gaza

Democrats: 👏 HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 FEMALE 👏 GENOCIDE 👏 DENYING 👏 PRESS 👏 SECRETARIES 👏

I fear I’ve become something of an accelerationist in the past few days…

yeah, go ahead and pass this, you tech-illiterate xenophobic fucks.

we need to divide and conquer the fascist coalition. make them hate each other. make them consumed by infighting. give them more “oh I didn’t realize there would be negative consequences that affected me personally” moments.

there’s a whole lot of Silicon Valley techbro types who are on board with Musk and Trump because they think it’s all lower taxes, less regulations for their startups, and less “wokeness”. go ahead, pass a law that makes it a federal crime for them to click a GitHub download link. make it so that every Hacker News thread about AI is filled with American engineers bemoaning that they’re legally prohibited from keeping up with the state-of-the-art. make their startups uncompetitive because they’re required by law to pay inflated prices to subsidize OpenAI and other “American-made” plagiarism machines.

if anything Trump’s isolationist tendencies work in Palestinians’ favor, and otherwise he’s neutral compared to Biden/Harris.

I don’t even know where to begin peeling the onion of how incredibly stupid this statement is.

the genocide is (for now) over

“for now” is really doing some heavy lifting there

Netanyahu says Israel ‘reserves right to resume war’ and calls first phase a ‘temporary ceasefire’

but also, even if the ceasefire was permanent, that doesn’t mean the genocide stops.

if you bomb a bunch of hospitals, and then agree to a ceasefire, the hospitals don’t magically come back into existence.

ditto water treatment plants and similar infrastructure. Diseases spread in Gaza as sewage contaminates camps and coast

a ceasefire means that the “dropped a bomb on a refugee camp” aspect of the genocide stops. the “there’s a refugee camp with a never-ending stream of needless and preventable deaths” aspect of the genocide will continue unabated.

cheers to the NZ Herald for calling a spade a spade

the cowards at the “paper of record” NY Times went with “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture”

BBC: Elon Musk’s gesture at Trump rally draws scrutiny

The Guardian: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally

if Trump shot someone on 5th Ave these fucking lickspittles would probably give it a “President-involved shooting ignites debate over the limits of executive power” headline

there seems to be a pretty strong sentiment that TikTok users are all idiots (especially compared to us incredibly smart, sophisticated, and attractive Fediverse users) and therefore they deserve whatever happens to them.

it reminds me of the predictable response every time Florida gets hit by a hurricane, or Texas by a snowstorm, or whatever, and a bunch of liberals come out of the woodwork with the same tired old “they live in a red state, fuck em, I don’t care what happens to them”.

Its pure speculation but

you know you can just…stop typing after that, right?

i suspect china may have purposely pushed for the tiktok is spyware narrative and fueled the china bad bandwagon themselves.

you’re making the same racist assumption that underlies the TikTok ban itself - that Chinese people are inherently nefarious, untrustworthy, always hatching schemes and plots and subterfuge.

the US does not need to be “tricked” into passing laws that are rooted in anti-Chinese bigotry. it’s basically a national pastime.

both the DMCA in the US as well as that Japanese law are implementations of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. that is why they can be discussed in a fairly interchangeable way.

Which law exactly?

the paragraph after the one you quoted answers this question:

Note that this discussion was based on Japanese law, but the same language is found in the DMCA Section 1201(a)(1)(A): “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” That law is more than 26 years old, going into effect a month after Google was founded, but the language remains in place.

It’s like they made their stores as hostile as possible to shop in.

I saw a tweet that called it a “weird deodorant museum” and that phrase is now permanently etched into my brain. it’s such a perfect description, similar to “private taxi for your burrito” for Doordash etc.

the only place that consistently has my medication

is there a Costco near where you live? if so, you might give their pharmacy a try (you don’t need to pay for a Costco membership if all you’re doing is getting a prescription)

I had similar challenges finding a pharmacy that consistently has my ADHD medication in stock. a few months ago I tried Costco based on a recommendation from my doctor, so far they’ve been able to fill my prescription every month no problem.

me sowing (signing a bill into law and bragging about its bipartisan support): haha fuck yeah!

me reaping (hearing that the Supreme Court has ruled 9-0 to uphold the law that I signed): well this fucking sucks. what the fuck.

there’s always fierce competition in the category of Dumbest Own-Goal by a Democrat…but here comes President “only mostly dead…still slightly alive” Biden with a last-minute buzzerbeater and…MUH GAWD HE’S DONE IT!

tapping the “there are no good billionaires” sign

remember when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, slapped “Democracy dies in darkness” on the masthead, and a bunch of MSNBC-brained liberals thought it was going to be the newspaper that led the resistance against Trump?

I just woke up from a years-long coma. could someone tell me how that worked out?

And you think Xiaohongshu is run by the Chinese workers?

oh yes daddy, harder. shove those words right into my mouth.

And I’m pretty sure that’s the approach that lawmakers have taken with this

well, sometimes…I linked in this comment to some statements made by the Republican congressman who sponsored the original bill. he was pretty clear that he wanted the ban because he thinks TikTok is pushing propaganda, not just from the Chinese, but the Chinese Communist Party (which has been a long-standing right-wing bogeyman - that congressman was even the chair of the “House Select Committee on the CCP”)

I believe that’s the primary angle they’ve taken to get around First Amendment concerns.

this is true, in the same way that Trump in his first campaign promised a “Muslim ban” and then when they tried to actually implement it they realized they needed to frame it as a “travel ban…applying to countries that happen to have a lot of Muslims…oh and also North Korea because look at us, we’re definitely not discriminating against people based solely on religion”

everyone (except the right-wing hacks on the Supreme Court) saw through the “travel ban” facade pretty easily. it’s been disappointing to see how many people uncritically repeat “well, there’s a data privacy angle to it too…” as if it’s a legitimate justification and not just another facade.

Removed by mod

I’ve been very cynical about the TikTok ban, and assumed people would work around it by sideloading the APK on Android phones, after it was removed from the app stores (which, as I detailed in this comment, could theoretically get random users who share the APK with friends prosecuted by the federal government and charged with a $5000 per user fine)

but this is exceeding my wildest expectations

“oh, but it’s full of Chinese propaganda!!!” people will whine. cool. don’t care. Twitter and Facebook are full of American propaganda, no one seems to be falling over themselves to ban those apps from app stores.

if propaganda is the concern, have schools teach critical thinking and how to recognize propaganda techniques. they won’t do that, of course, because they want people to be susceptible to American propaganda.

haha class solidarity go brrr. the average American worker has more in common with the average Chinese worker than they do with an American oligarch. all of the American propaganda about how Chinese people are inherently untrustworthy and nefarious is gonna fall apart as people interact with actual Chinese people and realize “oh they’re pretty much just like me, other than the language barrier”.

and TikTok-style shortform video is very nearly the ideal medium for surmounting that language barrier. it was already commonplace to have captions in TikTok videos. start captioning videos on RedNote in both English and Chinese and bang, language differences don’t matter nearly as much anymore.