It would be funny if Arora and other oligarchs eventually find out that they may be building out their own Darwinian moment. Arora and others like him would really benefit from reading a little bit of history.

Phones cheaper than USD$400 tend to have 6-8year old chipsets

What area of the world are you from? Just curious where there is such a state of affairs.

This is definitely not true for Asia and Europe. It been a while since I was living in North America, but this didn’t seem true back then. Although I lived in a city and didn’t buy through carriers and never dealt with carrier blocking independently bought phones.

Perhaps North American carrier requirements have changed since then.

I recognise that Pinterest is a pretty big player in social media and seems to have relatively broad reach (first heard about it in my country maybe in 2011?).

It just seems Pinterest (as a product) is really subpar compared to say Insta, TikTok or even Twitter. I am not talking about their commitment against the interests of the user/public (they all suck on that front), it’s the UI/UX and subpar features.

One big one is slow loading and display of images. It’s always slow and they didn’t even try to design it in a way that would perhaps move attention away from this.

Their image categorization algorithm and source/context provision is a joke.

While I hate Google Lens with a passion, it does seem to have the most powerful source identification feature and it can come up rare variants/sources that are not available though other such systems.

My focus is on research though, not commercial activity so my use case is probably not important to Pinterest.

Their leadership actually made substantial contribution to enabling the Rohingya genocide.

Sure they weren’t the ones burning families alive in their houses.

But IMO knowingly focusing on avoiding and limiting responsibility instead of immediately working on resolving the role of FB in the Rohingya genocide, has a level of equivalency.

This is just one example. There are many others spanning a range of areas in including fraud enablement, user harm

Btw, I am not saying I would judge everyone who works at FB. Although I feel there would be few exceptions for anyone in a somewhat senior position or above (be it an a technical or business type position).

That makes sense. Both in terms of their market and how you could integrate it with your work.

That being said, its not a very a good visual search engine, I am thinking more in terms research type work and I understand that’s not how people use Pinterest and their needs maybe be focused on more general tasks and Pinterest features are good enough for the mass market.

For some reason, whenever I encounter Pinterest the first thing that comes to mind is a Potemkin village. The internal contractions of their platform are just jarring. Their whole business works on images of others, yet the have the most annoying system for limiting easy access to the source image and nagging for nagging to register.

Never understood why people would care about how did an invite on pseudo anonymous underground forum.

Curious what you use Pinterest for in a business sense, selling art?

My association with Pinterest is trash tier website that does everything an image focused community is not supposed to do.

Their performance and general UI/UX is comically bad, you would have to put in effort to make something so slow and bloated feeling and with no good features to speak of (not even one).

For some reason this reminds me of the “effective altruism” movement (if you can call it a movement).

Should a program like that be initiated, they will admit that they are edgelords / demagogues and they don’t actually believe in any of this (the NK stuff in particular is strong evidence that this is all online roleplay).

A democratic society? Since when does a democratic society have a leader for life and organises mass killings and torture of citizens?

Iran is aiding russia in its genocidal imperialist invasion of Ukraine, or does that not count?

Is this a satirical comedy account? A parody of “Lemmy leftists”?

If you read the article, it wasn’t because of torrents, but sanctions on Russians.

I am referring to the use and marketing of Grok for making nude deepfakes and CSAM.

Further in this thread you claim that people are allegedly detached from reality. The reality of the matter is that Apple’s app store policy is not consistent and there are special rules for certain entities.

Surely CSAM generation and involuntary nude deepfakes are a bigger deal than piracy, I think an average person on the street (in any country, doesn’t have to be the US) would agree with me.

I also don’t see where judges come into play? Has Rave been sued in court?

This reads almost like a parody.

I see. Agreed, the root cause for the rise of oligarchy is arguably a much bigger issue than any given individual oligarch.

Did Apple remove Grok? A quick web search suggests they did not…

I will quote your post since it’s worth sharing with other people (this was news to me, but I am not surprised at all)

Are we supposed to bring back the whole history every time Rimu comments anywhere?

• an anarchist.nexus admin calls for murder of Zionists in their username
• a LW admin and Rimu gets qualified as Zionists in dbzer0 community modlogs
• LW defederates anarchist.nexus
• Rimu bans that admin
• that anarchist.nexus admin changes their username and steps down as admin
• LW refederates anarchist.nexus
• Rimu asks the dbzer0 staff to act on the modlog calling him a Zionist, no action is taken, the dbzer0 staff advices him to ignore that
• Rimu discovers that a dbzer0 mod has been using a LLM for moderation. That mod has been somehow pretending to use OpenAI to upset the !fuckai crowd, actually it was a local freeware model. He posts about it.
• a dbzer0 admin reverts the ban calling Rimu a Zionist after I asked
• Rimu is still upset, doesn’t take the previous action into account and keeps the post about LLM moderation up
• You bring it up here

Really goes to show how “leftists” on the Threadiverse are committed to acting in good faith.

anarchist/pro-trans stance

This sounds like you are fishing for sympathy. Do you have anything to back up the claim about opposition to a pro-trans stance?

I am curious what do you see as being disease? What’s going on in the US seems like a pretty typical oligarch takeover of political parties, judiciary and media (this is not even something unique to the US, can and does happen in many places).

Solving the disease of course depends on the given local context, but more often than not you will have to prosecute oligarchs in addition to a broader package of anti-corruption and judicial reforms.

No need to shoot him, we just need an independent court to put him on trial for enablement of the Rohingya genocide and knowingly gaining $14 B in commissions from fraud (while developing a “playbook” to claim that this was legal).

Don’t even need to shoot him, it would be much better to give him 50 year community service as a junior janitor on the Rohingya refugee camp on the island of Bhasan Char should he be found responsible. If he is too good for that, than he can do 50 years in prison instead.

This should also apply to any other senior executives involved in these two cases.

And these are just two cases, there are definitely other, less well known, “regional” cases involving Meta goons and Zuckerberg.

Was just going to say that…