Depends. If people keep showing up for work, even though they’re functionally serfs again, because they’re too scared of losing their job or getting the shit kicked out of them for trying to organize a union, then they will get to make us serfs again.

You are completely right about social democracy, and I also hope and believe that your outcome is the alternative. But it’s not the only alternative.

Wanting a better world, and holding up a light to the current one to show the differences between what could be and what is, is not at all what “cynical” means. “Cynical” is the opposite of what you mean. “Pessimistic” or “negative” is definitely more apt, yes.

Also:

Now, you’ve likely seen or heard that DeepSeek “trained its latest model for $5.6 million,” and I want to be clear that any and all mentions of this number are estimates. In fact, the provenance of the “$5.58 million” number appears to be a citation of a post made by NVIDIA engineer Jim Fan in an article from the South China Morning Post, which links to another article from the South China Morning Post, which simply states that “DeepSeek V3 comes with 671 billion parameters and was trained in around two months at a cost of US$5.58 million” with no additional citations of any kind. As such, take them with a pinch of salt.

While there are some that have estimated the cost (DeepSeek’s V3 model was allegedly trained using 2048 NVIDIA h800 GPUs, according to its paper), as Ben Thompson of Stratechery made clear, the “$5.5 million” number only covers the literal training costs of the official training run (and this is made fairly clear in the paper!) of V3, meaning that any costs related to prior research or experiments on how to build the model were left out.

While it’s safe to say that DeepSeek’s models are cheaper to train, the actual costs — especially as DeepSeek doesn’t share its training data, which some might argue means its models are not really open source — are a little harder to guess at. Nevertheless, Thompson (who I, and a great deal of people in the tech industry, deeply respect) lays out in detail how the specific way that DeepSeek describes training its models suggests that it was working around the constrained memory of the NVIDIA GPUs sold to China (where NVIDIA is prevented by US export controls from selling its most capable hardware over fears they’ll help advance the country’s military development):

Here’s the thing: a huge number of the innovations I explained above are about overcoming the lack of memory bandwidth implied in using H800s instead of H100s. Moreover, if you actually did the math on the previous question, you would realize that DeepSeek actually had an excess of computing; that’s because DeepSeek actually programmed 20 of the 132 processing units on each H800 specifically to manage cross-chip communications. This is actually impossible to do in CUDA. DeepSeek engineers had to drop down to PTX, a low-level instruction set for Nvidia GPUs that is basically like assembly language. This is an insane level of optimization that only makes sense using H800s.

Tell me: What should I be reading, instead, if I want to understand the details of this sort of thing, instead of that type of unhinged, pointless, totally uninformative rant about the tech industry?

No good endings, I think, no. And the level of suffering among his supporters will probably be a tiny fraction of what gets visited on some of the real real victims.

One can only hope that those 70 odd million that voted for him get affected in a very negative way somehow.

Oh, don’t worry. They will.

I wonder why you are so brave in explaining yourself, when the non-anonymous accounts are so silent. You’d think everyone would be coming out of the woodwork to explain how reality has proven their strategy to be a good one, and themselves so forward thinking.

To be fair, a week in Trump presidency years, is like eight months in human time. We just weren’t accustomed to the time dilation because we got a break from it for a while.

Update: I’ve done two, and I have to stop. I honestly just can’t stand it. For one, it’s kind of mean-spirited. Even if it is deserved and I do think it’s productive to do the retrospective, I don’t feel good about it. For two, I’m genuinely just getting too angry, looking back on myself warning these people of exactly what would happen, and them blathering at me about what a good idea they had, not voting for Democrats, and how much it would help.

Last one:

Hi @mambabasa@slrpnk.net!

Remember this?

https://slrpnk.net/comment/11760640

You said, “What are you even voting for? The election is Trump versus Trump-lite-but-female” and heavily encouraged people not to vote, because that would help.

Do you still feel like refusing to vote for Harris was helpful, when you did it? How do you see it?

Hi @FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world! Remember this?

https://ponder.cat/comment/510019

You said:

If Harris wants my vote, tell me you’re going to cut the military budget, not increase it.

And yet, you expect me to believe that voting for the party that just wasted four years not fighting fascism nor strengthening elections is somehow going to prompt different behavior?

Well, we have some different behavior now! How do you feel about your decision?

I also got genuinely angry, when I found in my list of predictions for what might happen if Trump wins:

Wait until legal immigrants are being deported by federal troops.

Now that that prediction is happening, a week after Trump got power, how do you feel about some of the others I made?

You were already living under fascism, you said. Do you feel that what’s happening now is different? Or it still feels the same?

I was just looking back in some of my comment replies, looking for people who’d told me how proud they were not to vote for Harris, because of Gaza, so I could tag them and ask what’s up with that.

I’m not sure if I’m petty enough to do it, but I feel like doing it. I think I am petty to that level, TBH.

There’s also https://ponder.cat/post/1451400 for anyone who told me Biden hadn’t done enough to protect trans people. Actually! It might be better to tag the story about transferring trans women to be housed with men in federal prison. I feel like they might want to tell me more about how glad they were they didn’t vote for Biden, and about how it’s all Biden’s fault, and mine, that they didn’t feel right enough to vote not to have that happen.

Yeah. That’s one of like 5 fatal problems with it.

Another one being that our whole approach is deterrence. No one is making continuous Israel-style rocket attacks on the continental US because their government, and possibly their country, would be no more after a week had passed after they’d done it. Although, give it a few years, and they might learn that it’s okay.

Trump inhabits a world where people can take shots at you all the time, because no one respects you, and it hurts you, because you’re fragile, and so you have to put up these absurd over-the-top defenses to it all the time or else you’ll get crushed by the wailing, painful weight of it all. I suspect that somewhere in his affinity for this solution is that he projects that kind of model even onto geopolitics, when the US military has an infinitely better model for dealing with the threatening actors it has to contend with.

And he’ll think he invented it.

Also, when people make the obvious connection, he’ll do an interview with Sean Hannity, where Hannity asks him whether he really was the one that blew up the Washington Monument, because he obviously wasn’t. And he’ll say, “Of course I did, and I had every right to do it, too. And then I blamed it on Antifa. See? Smart.”

We also have some unbelievably fancy and unbelievably expensive ship-launched antiballistic missiles. Every time you pull the trigger, it costs the American taxpayer anywhere between two million to thirty-eight million dollars. The Heavy would be so happy.

I guess I am relieved to think that Trump doesn’t have enough of a grasp of geopolitics that this means anything about what he wants to do, that he thinks might get the rest of the world shooting rockets at us nonstop like happens to Israel periodically. I think he just wants an “Iron Dome” because having an Iron Dome over your country makes it sound like a cool supervillain fortress, and he wants to feel like a cool supervillain with all this cool tech. He doesn’t actually care whether we need it or what it does.

It could be, but I actually think it’s unlikely. I think with Trump’s team’s type of morality, a Reichstag Fire type of event would probably involve some actual violence against somebody, not just some person wandering up and saying he’s with the terrorism. That would be much more effective. I think this is so mild, that anything it’s likely to lead to, they were already planning on doing.

Yeah. If Trump had talked to Nixon about colluding with the Russians to overthrow American democracy so he and his friends could steal a bunch of the wreckage, even Nixon would have clocked him and hauled him down to the Justice Department to sit in the dock for treason.

Of course, the germ was there even in Nixon. Just like Mr. Mayer’s system, it could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself, it was compelled to go all the way.

Depression? Trump could cause a civil war and the collapse of the American empire, in a way it will probably never recover from.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying these sober fiscal conservatives you mention have their heads up their asses so far that it’s coming back out between their front teeth, even as far as their own self-interest. Of course, there is nothing new there.

This country is pretty friendly to fascists.

Actually… maybe that’s not true. Back in Nixon’s day I think it was. The media was pretty honest about Nixon, and most of the country liked what they saw. Nixon and Reagan managed to have enough success putting all this Republican stuff into practice, though, that enough of the country realized they hated the fuck out of it when it was happening to them in real-life reality, that they had to start telling wild professionally-concocted lies about what they were up to.

They invested money into it like the space program. That was the whole genesis of Fox News, that started the whole misery of modern industrial scale weapons-grade-lies media. Roger Ailes with quite a bit of foresight realized that the American public really needed to not be able to understand reality if he and his friends were going to be able to get anywhere.

And then, much later, the Russian government said, “Check this shit out. You guys are amateurs.”

I think pretty much any media which depends for its existence on FCC licenses, board of directors, profit margins and shareholders, and so on, is likely to fall into line behind Trump like good little soldiers within somewhere from 3-12 months from now. A lot of the journalists are probably pretty honorable, so they’ll leave, but that will not impede the process one iota.

I wouldn’t be so sure. China is at the world’s forefront of automated techniques to be able to spy on and manipulate people through their own devices at massive scale. If they had some semi-workable technology to fingerprint individuals through their typing patterns, in conjunction with fingerprinting the devices they were using through other means, that would make perfect sense to me.

I don’t think it is especially a concern for Deepseek specifically, for reasons discussed elsewhere in the comments. That one particular aspect of the privacy issue is probably being overblown, when there are other adjacent privacy and security concerns that are a lot more pressing. Honestly, that one particular detail isn’t really proven simply because it’s in the privacy policy, and even if they are doing something like that, its inclusion or not in this particular privacy policy or this app isn’t the particularly notable part about it.

No, but they can manipulate the public’s perception of political reality to the point that someone gets elected who will bust your door down and kill you, because a bunch of people who don’t have time to make figuring out the news into a part-time job decided that that person would be able to make eggs cheaper and the other guy’s son was really into hookers or something, and also he was old and wasn’t “fixing the border.”

Just as a random example.

(To be clear, I don’t have any reason to think specifically that TikTok or China was involved in getting Trump elected. I’m just saying that allowing any adversary, whether that’s China or that’s the GOP’s social media psyop department, to have control over American’s social media landscape, will absolutely have an impact on you personally, and already has.)

Got it. Yeah, fair enough. What I was aiming to do, more or less, was ask for clarification, but I definitely see how it could come across as me trying to continue the argument when he was saying that he already agreed with me. I think you hopping into it with a big italic and bold wall of text on the thing that apparently all three of us already agree on only confused the issue further.

Anyway, sounds like we’re all on the same page. Cool.