Sorry again for the misunderstanding.

I'm not really convinced there's people who don't like AI "because of what it is". I mean, because of what it is, beyond any social/political considerations.

The only case i know of that is when there was an open letter with Sam Altman and other AI investors calling out the existential danger of AI, which in my view was a way to divert the debate from political questions to hypothetical Matrix/Terminator questions about consciousness and singularity.

But current AI is actively destroying our breathable/livable planet by drawing unmatched quantities of resources (see also DRAM shortage, etc), all the while exploiting millions of non-union workers across the world (for classification/transcription/review), and all this for two goals:

1) try to replace human labor: problem is we know any extracted value (if at all) will benefit the bourgeoisie and will never be redistributed to the masses, because that's exactly what happened with the previous industrial revolutions (Asimov-style socialism is not exactly around the corner)

2) try to surveil everyone with cameras and microphones everywhere, and build armed (semi-)autonomous robots to guard our bourgeois masters and their data centers

There is nothing in this entire project that can be interpreted to benefit the workers. People opposing AI are just lucid about who that's benefiting, and in that sense the luddite comparison is very appropriate.

Most of the world never tolerated it. Even when western governments tolerated it, the population did not; see also the huge worldwide demonstrations against the Iraq war.

I think the difference in perception is because the european oligarchy is now being effectively treated as was previously the rest of the world, so they're now taking a stance because they feel threatened, whereas they previously saw themselves as aligned with the US government no matter what.

Much of the government including Macron himself are involved in corruption scandals. Others are involved in rape scandals. Others in fiscal fraud. But you're correct they're not as open about it as Trump is.

I remember reports at the time on the Intercept and other media about the entire kill chain. If i remember correctly, the policy was to count anyone who was not proved to be a civilian as an active enemy in the body count. There was this DOD/CIA press conference announcing they made a targeted killing and that their target assessment was mostly based on the individual's height.

Then there's of course Obama famously and publicly joking about his children's lovers suggesting they should behave or would get killed by « predator drones ». [2] Let me know if you dig interesting links on the topic!

[1] https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

[2] https://abcnews.com/WN/president-obama-tells-joke-jonas-brot...

Not defending Trump, to be clear, just saying US imperialism and fascism has much deeper roots and that removing Trump is not going to fix any issues the rest of the world has with the USA.

Why not? I don't understand how it's legal for manufacturers to produce absolute trash that can't be replaced and will just end up in a landfill. I think 7 years is far from enough, but because computers evolve quickly maybe 15 years is ok. For the rest of electro-mechanical goods, 50 years should be the baseline.

If a car or fridge from 50 years ago is still working with proper maintenance, that should be the minimum to be expected from products released today.

Anti-tech primitivists [1] exist, though a minority on the political spectrum. I don't agree with your argument, but it may be more convincing without making a strawman of the original blogpost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism

Whether abolishing the police, or defunding the police (to deescalate the militarization), both are proposals formulated by serious academics and politicians, whether you agree or not. It's not virtue signalling. If anything, "defund the police" is still very badly regarded outside very small circles and there's no credit to be gained by holding such positions.

The government and courts are currently arguing whether Uber is legally the employer of the drivers [2], but that's not very debatable to be honest given the very clear subordination of drivers to Uber (one of the many criteria for a contractor to be legally reclassified as an employee).

They have taken all the power and benefits, and discarded all of the responsibilities and risks associated with employment. That's a strategy that only pays off through political corruption, and not a clear example that their profits are somehow unavoidable and that investing in Uber 10 years ago was wise.

Otherwise, investing in the mafia's drug trades might also be a lucrative opportunity. Which does not make it moral, nor a safe bet.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62057321

[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/02/02/france-d...

- it's technically illegal for me to do that here in France, even if i'm the legal owner of the woods

- it could be a choice to live low-tech alternative lifestyles, if there was not active attacks by the State and corporations to destroy any kind of alternative means of survival, such as the very violent processes over the past few centuries to destroy subsistance farming and non-monetary exchanges (laws & regulations, expropriations, imprisonment and murder of political opposition such as during the Paris Commune)

- it doesn't matter what we personally and individually do: this is a problem at scale that can only be addressed at scale, and pretending otherwise is a bad faith argument on either side ("recycle your plastic bottles to save the planet")

- there's a wide range of possibilities for durable/repairable goods and sustainable lifestyles in between primitivism and our current ecocidal nightmare: to frame political choices as a binary is very limited or dishonest from an intellectual perspective

I think Khomenei and Trump are two sides of the same coin: bloody authoritarianism and religious zealotry. They're both pretty bad, but one side in this conflict was clearly the aggressor, and denying that is in itself picking sides. One can both sympathize with a victim of unjust aggression, and at the same time thinking they're a profound piece of shit.

One could even point out that just a few years ago, Trump was very insistent about "no more wars", and that he regularly mockingly predicted that Obama would attack Iran to avoid talking about domestic policy. Turns out the hypocrisy level is high and he really is beyond a doubt the bad guy in this story, even if that does not make the iranian ayatollahs good guys by any measure.

It's already a problem when researching a law proposal that dozens of news outlets will just copy-paste a bland summary of arguments from both sides, neither being explored fully.

I would recommend giving direct links to actually partisan information so people can situate the bill's intent and consequences in a broader context.

Where it helps:

- sometimes a bill's proponent is just an industry puppet whose talking points will be repeated in the media, but aren't solid enough to warrant a proper article… unlike opponents criticizing specific (for example deregulation) points

- sometimes, there are strong feelings and arguments on both sides of a bill and it makes sense to view them in their entirety; seeing one's side unhinged logic sometimes reveals more about the bill than the bill's text itself

- "same-side" opposition: sometimes a bill is perceived as "left-wing" or "right-wing" but receives opposition from the same side; for example, the democrat party is very divided on helping the rich vs taxing the rich, while the republican party is (less than 20 years ago) divided between hardcore authoritarian trumpists and libertarians defending civil liberties

All in all, i believe AI is a plight for society. We are only starting to understand the ecological and psychological costs. There are areas where machine learning can be useful (translation), but i strongly believe politics is not one of them. Please don't try to apply it to anything serious. Don't take it from me, take it from James Mickens in a talk where he explains both how ML works and how it related to the field of computer security:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...

US & Israel illegally assassinate Iranian leader in bombing campaign, calling agression "necessity".

Now, if you'd like to lean to one side or the other, you can either:

- remove information about legality and the fact that they are the authors of the agression, add something about Iran being a threat to its neighbors

- or insist that any excuses provided by USA or Israel about nuclear weapons is 100% bogus as they have been claiming this for over 20 years

"We have no choice to do this horrible thing, but it may have slightly bad consequences for us" does not take the second side into consideration at all. It's very biased, and it's a very strong opinion in itself.

In my (arguably not very representative) circles, unlike the big Facebook->Instagram migration, which was motivated by "i don't like that it's run by a Silicon Valley tech-bro neofascist, but that's where everyone's at", the Twitter->Bluesky migration was motivated by "finally an alternative that's not centralized so it can't be bought and controlled by american neonazis".

> Can you clarify this?

Well Bluesky's number 1 selling point was always decentralization. Just looking at a few past articles from the wikipedia page's sources:

"Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announces a new research team, called Bluesky, to create a set of open and decentralized technical standards for social media platforms" (CNBC)

"Bluesky now operates as a “decentralized” social media platform, which means users can create their own servers on which they can store data and set their own rules" (Forbes)

To be fair, they did fit some of the bill which is now why we're complained that Bluesky is not 100% federated/decentralized. And they did improve compared to AP in terms of nomadic identity and letting users know everything on the platform is public (unlike Mastodon where people had a false sense of security).

In environmental circles, Greenpeace is very well-known to be traitors working with big corporations to launder their image. They're opposed to sabotage and revolutionary tactics. Their activities are mostly fundraising and legal proceedings, and on the rare instance they perform so-called civil disobedience (such as deploying banners on nuclear plants), it is in very orderly fashion that doesn't provide much economic harm.

As a left-wing environmentalist, i wish such a strong voice as Greenpeace was capable to incite people to rise against the greedy corporations destroying our planet. I just don't see that happening, neither here in France nor in the USA.