YouTuber EmpLemon has a great video on why The Simpsons is not good anymore and the answer essentially boils down to the recuperation of the series by corporate interests. Losing its subversive edge, it has become infected with the same corporate propaganda that eventually spoils every remade franchise over enough time.
I find that it’s a common and useful tool for understanding why a piece of media feels “off”.
In the words of my forefathers, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” 🖕
Whether it’s actually the concentrated evil turning them ugly, or the evil they do that makes the money they use to pay for the plastic surgery, does it matter?
Spiritually, aren’t those the same thing anyways?
“The past is a puzzle, like a broken mirror. As you piece it together, you cut yourself, your image keeps shifting. And you change with it. It could destroy you, drive you mad. It could set you free.”
Set us free, R*/Remedy
Oh good, while they’re there maybe they can help build housing or provide food for the homeless people Trump wants to get rid of.
Can’t be homeless if you got a home!
Once, I nihilistically mentioned to my friend that “I welcome the coming inevitable nuclear holocaust.” His reply was something that I will never forget: “I don’t think you realize what nuclear war entails.”
I haven’t wished for the end of the world since.
Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all quietly integrating NPUs into their devices, and implementing the software infrastructure in their operating systems to do on-device classification of content: Windows Recall, Google SafetyCore, and Apple Intelligence. These services are obsequiously marketed as being for your benefit, while all are privacy and surveillance nightmares. When the security breaking features of these systems are mentioned, each company touts convoluted workarounds to justify the tech.
Why would these companies risk rabidly forcing these unwanted, unpopular, insecure, expensive, and unnecessary features on their collective user bases? The real reason is to capture everything you do and store on your device, use the tensor hardware you may or may not even know that you purchased to analyze the data locally, then export and sell that “anonymized” information to advertisers and the government. All while cryptographically tying the data to your device, and the device to you, for “security”. This enables mass surveillance, digital rights management, and targeted advertising on a scale and depth previously unseen. Who needs a backdoor or a quantum computer to break consumer-grade encryption when you can just locally record everything everyone does and analyze it automatically at the hardware level?
Each of these providers is already desperate to scan, analyze, and classify your content:
Microsoft has been caught using your stored passwords to decrypt archives uploaded to OneDrive.
Apple developed forced client side scanning for CSAM before backlash shut it down. They already locally scan your photos with a machine learning classification algorithm whether you like it or not. You can’t turn it off.
Google recently implemented local content scanning with SafetyCore to “protect you from unwanted content like spam”. Then why is it scanning your photo library?
I would rather saw off my own nuts with a rusty spork before willfully purchasing a device with an integrated NPU. I fear that in the next 5-10 years, you won’t be able to avoid them. We are paying for the edge hardware being used for our own unwilling surveillance. Then, our tax dollars are paid to these tech companies to purchase the data!
Do you trust the rising fascist regimes and their tech lackeys in America and the UK to use this power morally and responsibly?
Do you really believe that these features that you didn’t ask for, that you cannot disable, and are baked directly into the hardware, are for your benefit?
I can hear every sound referenced in this thread in my head.
Same here - I was on Reddit for close to 20 years. After the purge, I had to stop because it literally became unbearable. Reddit is now fake dead pet pity posts, brain dead relationship outrage baiting, unintelligible post titles and comments, and barely obfuscated advertising.
Apparently, it’s more profitable than ever; a monument to enshitification.
In general, authoritarian power structures reclaim sexuality in order to “sell” it back to you as a reward for supporting the system: Capitalism literally sells it to you, Religion grants it to you for creating more adherents, and the State allows it when beneficial to its interests.
If you want to understand a social system, look to the ways in which it seeks to inhibit or control sexuality.
The sad part is Trump could single handedly end homelessness in Washington DC and still be one of the richest and most powerful people in the world, but he is literally and physically incapable of even having that thought.
Malignant narcissists are literally insane.
You’re right, it appears that NPU hardware was introduced in the iPhone 8, in 2017, and I say this typing away from an Apple device. Sounds like I’ll be busy this weekend with that rusty spork.
However, it’s the recent generation of NPUs that provide the processing power needed to run the expanded scanning services implemented by these OS’s. That’s why Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15, and Microsoft is hawking Recall laptops.
While I admit the pins-and-string-on-a-corkboard tone, I don’t think we actually disagree on anything here. Eventually, an open source platform will become the only way to avoid this kind of hardware enabled surveillance.