Sandgropper

Contrarian humanist and seeker of truth, a passionate loather of hypocrisies and an enthusiastic advocate of home bread baking.

[🧡Lulu🌾; @ItsLulu_7]

Capitalism doesn't mean "free markets"

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@BladeoftheS It's a class war. It's not about reducing crime, it's about maintaining and reproducing the existing social order.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@For_Film_Fans Timeless. Works on so many levels And ultimately it doesn't cop-out. When we see Shane ride away into the hills right at the end of the film, immediately after this clip, one arm hanging limply at his side, we know he's riding away to die.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Gaza is not an aberration. It is fully in accord with an eight-decade-long Israeli military strategy. Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it.

If western publics knew what has really been happening to Palestinians for 80-plus years – first, from the Zionist movement and then from the Israeli state – they might swell further the ranks of the protest marches, making these demonstrations politically impossible to ignore.

If westerners knew what has really been happening to Palestinians, they might join activists who have been trying to incapacitate Israeli weapons factories, like Elbit Systems, operating quite openly in western countries such as Britain. They might, as a result, manage to smash the supply of drones and other weapons being used to massacre the people of Palestine and Lebanon.

Instead of thousands, there might be tens or hundreds of thousands of people willing to hold up a placard in the UK opposing genocide, and be arrested as a “terrorism supporter”, overwhelming the prison system and making a mockery of Britain’s supposed “justice” system.

Armed with knowledge rather dulled by ignorance, more westerners might board boats, amassing an armada that it would be impossible for the western media to disregard.

But most critically of all, were the real context understood – were Israel’s decades-long pattern of murdering, raping, and expelling Palestinians known – western publics might wake up to the fact that their political and media class are not moral actors. They are not upholding the values of a superior civilisation. They are not the guardians of international law and a democratic liberal order.

They are imposters. Or more accurately, they are working within political and financial structures that make it impossible to tell truths that would rock a system of power in the West that enriches a tiny elite through a lucrative war machine used to protect the gargantuan profits of the fossil fuel industries.

That system of power drives some Palestinians into an early grave, and others into concentration camps, or exile, or penury.

Meanwhile, it drives us in the West into prisons without physical walls – prisons either of ignorance and complicity, or of knowledge and impotence.

Either way, we find our humanity deadened. Our hearts are hardened or broken. The challenge we face is the same as the Palestinians: to find a path out of our confinement.

This is an extract from my latest article How Israel planned the Gaza genocide decades ago. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@JamesMelville "Irony" writ large.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

What could the UK do to Elon Musk?

Lots actually.

They could cutoff his website Twitter.

They could put a tax on the 20,000 Tesla cars he sells in the UK. £5,000 each would be £100m a year.

They could ban his AI or block his Data Centres.

There are loads of options.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@Danni79021355 @LabAgainstWar @Jane02822979 Given how events are playing-out in the ME, I'm persuaded to believe Australia would be much better off investing in missiles as its primary defence strategy. As an island, major threats have to approach by sea and could easily be targeted with barrages of hypersonic missiles.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@LabAgainstWar AUKUS is essentially a mechanism by which a tribute demanded by the US Empire of a supplicant vassal is dressed-up as a 'defence alliance' rather than the brazen shakedown for cash it actually is.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@ricwe123 All that gold braid and those shiny medals don't so much have the effect of making him look like a serious military man as they do a rather camp, cos-playing accountant.

[Peter Cronau @PeterCronau]

Australia, Anthony be like Jeremy.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@joecguinan As they say, the US is "agreement incapable". The decline and fall can only accelerate exponentially from here on.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Goated response.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@caitoz Cathy rocks! A true Australian - we need more people to step up like that! ✊

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

They did an experiment with monkeys, they gave one of them all the bananas.

The other monkeys didn't sit around worshipping the rich monkey.

No they pelted him with poo and stole all his bananas.

Proving that monkeys are cleverer than people.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

It's not complicated.

Think who is telling you to be angry about things that don't matter... the billionaires.

Then think about who is committing all the worst sins... the billionaires.

You are being played.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@heynavtoor Like recursively faxing a fax - ultimately you lose all sharpness and definition and end up with just a blurry, illegible mess.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."

The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.

This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@BygoneBritain Looks like a UK Frank Hopper painting!