I saw both of these stories on Lemmy today. They show two different facets to the topic of AI.

This first story is from the perspective of cynicism about AI and how it has been overhyped.
If AI is so good, where are the open source contributions

But if AI is so obviously superior … show us the code. Where’s the receipts? Let’s say, where’s the open source code contributions using AI?

The second story is about crony capitalism, deregulation, and politics around AI:

GOP sneaks decades long AI regulation ban into spending bill

On Sunday night, House Republicans added language to the Budget Reconciliation bill that would block all state and local governments from regulating AI for 10 years, 404 Media reports. The provision, introduced by Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, states that "no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act

I saw these stories minutes apart, and they really make me feel even more cynical and annoyed by AI than I was yesterday. Because:

• In the short term AI is largely a boondoggle, which won’t work as advertised but still humans will be replaced by it because the people who hire don’t understand it’s limitations but they fear missing out on a gold rush.
• The same shady people at the AI companies who are stealing your art and content, in order to sell a product that will replace you, are writing legislation to protect themselves from being held accountable
• They also are going to be protected from any skynet-style disasters caused by their recklessness

There used to be lively discussion about this topic.

For context: I find it fairly obvious that the Israeli government is deliberately attempting to wipe out the Palestinian people in a way that is slow/ambiguous enough to perhaps not officially qualify as genocide in a legal sense, but that is nevertheless effectively genocide from an emotionally aware human perspective.

I've mostly steered clear of the related conversation because many people seemed to have gotten tangled up in the legal definitions, as if Tildes were a branch of the International Court of Justice, which made me feel like the humanitarian view is getting dismissed or implied as being inferior. I wanted to see if this approach or its popularity on Tildes might have shifted with the new developments, such as Israel blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza and its recent plans to seize the area and hand aid distribution to private companies.

Am I somehow just not able to find the megathread? I believe I may have tried to filter it out earlier but it's not on my filters list and I'm unsure if there are other ways to hide content on Tildes that I may have forgotten about.

I was reminded this morning of the video in which a physical education teacher is performing a workout dance routine in Myanmar, not realizing that she captured the start of the 2021 coup d'état in the background.

She's wearing a covid mask, dancing to an incredibly upbeat and catchy song while the military vehicles roll in to crush their democracy. I can't recall where I saw this, but I will never forget the comment someone left online about the video which read, "This is decadently post-modern."

To make it even more interesting, the song itself is a parody of authority. It's essentially a song mocking weak men with big egos, and the song title translates roughly to, "Have Mercy, Mr. Tough Guy/Big Shot"

Link to video

What other insane things do we have in 2025 as a result of ubiquitous high-definition cameras?

I am genuinely sick of seeing all the US political news on Tildes, especially because of the sheer volume of it being submitted lately and how depressing it all is. The creation of ~society was a decent compromise since at least it keeps all the politics topics contained in one group, but it's still not ideal, IMO.

I don't want to totally unsubscribe from ~society since, for the most part, I do actually enjoy reading about societal level events/issues around the world. I don't want to have to click 'Ignore' on every single topic about US politics, since there are a lot of them being submitted. And I don't want to filter out absolutely all 'politics' from my front page either though, which is currently my only other option since we can't yet filter tags by multiple criteria (e.g. filtering topics that only contain 'politics' AND 'usa').

So I propose that we start using a 'politics.usa' tag, even though it's a bit redundant, so that US politics can be specifically filtered out by people like myself that want to avoid seeing such topics. Thoughts?