Yes, it was easy. Just because AI is "easier" doesn't mean that photoshopping a dog into a picture was ever particularly hard.

Making it convincing certainly was. Being able to generate an image in 30 seconds is completely different from having to dedicate an hour of your day to it.

In the gun debate, there's something called "Weapon Instrumentality Effect"

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1088767907306507

I work at a non-defense tech company, and it's basically a running joke that no matter how bad the job market is, none of us are soulless enough to go looking for work at Palantir, even if the pay is good.

I would have trouble trusting the kind of person who would work at Palantir. It seems like it could be career-limiting in the long run.

That is strange. I work at Cisco and nobody has mentioned the slightest political aside about anything, ever. No one would ever say something like that about Palantir or its opposite.

I would have trouble working at the kind of place with those running jokes in the office.

I suspect the difference is working in continental Europe...?

I don't understand this logic. If people with information advantage get to cheat and win, then everyone without that advantage gets screwed. I struggle to see how this is even remotely "fair". It's like playing poker, but some players get to see what everyone's cards are.

Even humoring your logic begs the question: Why is monetizing an "information advantage" valuable to society?

Don't trust it too much. I got it to generate a datacenter filled with brains in jars, and it went with it.

you gave me the idea of using it to explore weird random scifi ideas, ended up spending way too much time clicking through details about the role of astrophage in the development of intelligence in deep sea life. Fun!

Look, I get that you are approaching this in good faith, assuming that they cut these specialists because it was redundant and inefficient.

If this were 10 years ago, this would be an understandable assumption, but today there is absolutely zero reason to reach this conclusion.

The words of our own elected representatives make it very clear why these specialists were cut: because of hatred for the LGBTQ+ community.

My only actual use of image or video AI tools is self-entertainment. I like to give it prompts and see the results it gives me.

That's it. I can't think of a single actual use case outside of this that isn't deliberately manipulative and harmful.

That's probably because:

A. Our tactics would constitute an invasion B. We would try to seize oil or other natural resources while we were there. C. The president would literally say something like this on national television.

There's a world of difference between software dependencies going out of date between many releases and a company deliberately disabling older devices from downloading static ebook files instead of maintaining some sort of basic backward compatibility.

> maintaining some sort of basic backward compatibility

Sounds easy for you to type that out on a forum without having to maintain a two decade old stack, which probably has tons of "software dependencies going out of date"

It's more a matter that managing an X account reads as an endorsement of the platform, and endorsing X is a major brand risk for the EFF. Those 100k people aren't worth it.

> Yes, it denies simple P2P connectivity. World doesn't need it.

Worth pointing out that this article was written by the now-CEO of Tailscale. I don't know if "The world doesn't need P2P connectivity" is a compelling take.

With the obligatory caveat that I am but a single datapoint, I use various P2P apps through multiple levels of NAT without issue and I very intentionally prevent devices on my local LAN from being publicly reachable. So it rings true to me.

I do wish ISPs would refrain from intentionally breaking things though. It ought to be illegal for them to block specific ports or filter specific sorts of traffic absent a pressing and active security concern.