Tim Chevalier

i am fully aware of the overwhelming power of brute force but i do think it's worth stepping back and taking a look at where the fist is aimed and who it is heading for rather than tell me about how firm and muscular the hand is and how many things you'd like to see punched for low low prices

i guess the closest i have to a glib position is "you shouldn't have to pay a defence contractor to use a computer" plus "subsidizing tools that enable widespread fraud is bad" plus "you should not be surprise if people are judgemental about software that has killed several people"

The elections are on next Tuesday, and so much is at stake, including the soul of the Democratic Party when it comes to transgender people. I am asking you to leave a very small number of races blank in which a Democrat has embraced extreme anti-trans hate. I make my case here.

3. We therefore need those who feel that they cannot engage in frontline militant antifascism for whatever reason to STOP CRITICISING AND POLICING THE PEOPLE WHO DO. The reason you can attend "nonviolent" counterprotests is because there are people who will use violence to protect you.

2. We therefore need people at all levels of organising to recognise that community self-defence is an existential necessity. If someone tries to stab you, and you punch them in the face, that is violence, but it is legitimate violence. This applies to communities as well as individuals.

Seeing as I got tagged in the next post (and these are only my opinions): 1. We need people at all levels of organising to accept that antifascism inherently involves risk. Fascism is an ideology with violence built into it ideologically. Fascists will do violence, whether you choose it or not.

Lula winning is great for the planet, great for Brazil, and great for people who aren't revanchist assholes everywhere in the world, but let's not forget that it's also going to make some of the worst people on Earth extremely sad and mad. We should enjoy that, as a little treat.

and the open bigotry reveals itself. this is the disdain and contempt at the heart of all democrats haranguing trans folks to vote for anti-trans democrats - they simply don’t believe our rights matter, and are infuriated we’d risk something they do care about to fight for those rights.

I see AI boosters in the games industry have realized “it’s so over for you you’ll be left behind” isn’t working so now they’re trying “AI disclosure requirements are harassment”

It always comes back to this for me; if AI was so good, such a disclosure would be a selling point. If AI was everything these slop jockeys said it was, they should be proud to let people know their game was AI made. But the proof is in the pudding, and they can't stand that people don't want it.

The idea of the AI developer as someone burgeoning with wonderful, never before seen ideas who just needed the tools to realize them is by and large a fantasy. The reality of the AI developer is someone producing spam at volume who has no ideas of their own, so just clone something popular.

Stop pretending like Sam Altman somehow fucking forced you to create, share or enable AI slop and trying to imagine your life fucking like, what, 40 months ago? You're not being BP-marketing mind-tricked into being a slopper. You chose to do it, and stop lying about it, you cowards 🥂 JFC

Generative AI is presented as "I have to drive an ICE car to work bc there's no public transport" but it EXTREMELY IS NOT It's way more like "I have to drive a hummer to buy shopping" / "I'm paying with Bitcoin" / "Private jet for 15min trip" / "I only drink bottled water". Cheating is tempting!!

And now there's shit like this out there, and it really reminds me of how much the "BP carbon footprint" thing has been overblown, specifically as a way for ppl with already-high-consumption lifestyles to rationalise an even worse step-change in consumption with generative AI

TWO god damn years ago, this software just did not exist and WE WERE FINNNNNEE Like: we did jobs. We wrote reports. We posted things on social media! We wrote articles!! We made images!!! Society existed before 2023, holy fucking shit people!

Related - something that drives me up the wall (and this is more a thing on Insta / Threads) is this idea that cajoling individuals for using AI is either fruitless / unjust, or worse, part of an industry narrative to displace responsibility like BP's 'personal carbon footprint' thing - WHATTTT

If you didn't have any other reason to resist AI, though to be clear there are many good ones, the fact that AI's biggest promoters promise that it will usher in a more racist, misogynistic, and oligarchical world order would be enough.

📢 Emergency rally at Highland Hospitol in #Oakland at 5:00am on Thursday, as the patient is expected to be released. He was "violently tackled by ICE and then had six of his ribs fractured by a 280-pound agent who sat on his chest"

just so we're all clear, this is literally just one step away from "anything that isn't purely reproductive is immoral" and that's exactly what it will turn into in a short while

we cannot co-exist with people like this. we either find a way to excise them, or we let them choke us with their ignorance.

well that seals it; I'm voting for Prop 40

because it is relevant to my work, I have tried very hard to educate myself on how AI works, be fair and measured in how I evaluate it, and regularly test new tools to confirm or debunk my priors and tbh AI haters are just nailing it with less work like 99% of the time. keep at it folks

I just can't stress enough that it's not a coincidence, and it's not even just a personality type. It is an active agenda and an ideological imperative. The physical and sexual abuse of women and children is as much a plank in the right's platform as tax cuts for billionaires. They work hard at it.

Not to be a broken record here, but he's doing this because the the sexual abuse of children is a policy goal of the Republican Party. They do it themselves, their elected officials use their powers of office to ensure it continues, their primary electorate punishes dissidents on the issue.

#Oakland anti-Gestapo folks: Show up NOW for Highland Hospital ICE detainee! Please spread the word!

I'll be honest, there is nothing more demoralizing to me than devs saying "I know AI is built on theft, and anti-labour, and harms the environment, but I'm going to use it anyway bc I don't believe individual choices matter". This is how a movement fails. www.molleindustria.org/blog/future-...

this is another facet of the "it's illegal not to date me" thing that college republicans do

For that matter, a free society is the product of a series of decisions not to exploit each other or let ourselves be exploited. There is always material advantage to be gained benefiting from the exploitation available more easily to some than others.

Don't mistake legitimate critiques of liberal individualism into a full dematerialisation of your own choices in life. Movements are just gatherings of people making choices.

Personal choice is genuinely a limited means of engaging with massive established social hierarchies and economic architectures we had no choice in inheriting and it is also the quantum of leverage each of us holds within these systems to engage with and dismantle social violence.

"there's no ethical consumption under capitalism" really serves more as an excusatory framework for some people than it does as an explanatory framework for the limitations of personal choice.

I'm glad we've finally worked out that we only need two kinds of company for a functioning economy A: don't you wish you could have a computer do the fun parts of your life? B: wanna bet on when the next mass shooting planned by company A is?

This is alway why our culture has a profound cognitive dissonance about sexual violence, wherein every institution will abhor and condemn it in the abstract—“We take sexual violence extremely seriously”—but will begin equivocating and making excuses as soon as they’re confronted with an actual case.

That’s why well-intentioned calls for, say, more consent education often strike me as misguided. Rape is not an accident or a misunderstanding; the rapist knows full well that he rapes. The issue is that rape provides benefits for the rapist and for his community that they don’t want to give up.