naevaTheRat

Haar says there is “almost zero” regulation globally of the industry that produces these weapons. In Australia, there are no nationally enforced standards for their use. In some states, police go to great lengths not to share what weapons they have or how they’re used.

• In Victoria, police have refused to publicly provide the make and model of their rubber bullets and other weapons even to the state’s parliamentarians due to “operational and community safety considerations”.

• Contracts worth millions for these weapons are often with third-party distributors rather than the manufacturers, obscuring what police have access to.

• During coronial inquests, after baton rounds and other weapons may have contributed to deaths, Victoria police have sought suppression orders that bar media from describing any details of weaponry.

• In some states, details about Tasers have been suppressed during inquests, including the training materials given to officers.

• Guardian Australia approached each force in the country for a list of the manufacturer and model of their less lethal weapons but all declined to provide one, with most citing operational safety.

title

Nfi why? It is literally blasted out into space for anyone with a receiver to hear but now unless I want to spend 2 gigs of ram and a CPU core I can't listen on a computer.

Why lock down public radio? What possible state interest does that serve?

And all that data does by definition exclude: “AI” is not built on “all of humankind’s knowledge” but based on whatever a mostly western view of the world and what is relevant looks like. Cultures who are not within that framework, who might even be based on more oral forms of keeping history and knowledge are not represented. Even if those groups are not actively excluded (which again they very often are) there are huge populations who just are not seen by the data do not get a say in how they are represented. Or if they are represented it’s just as problems: Think about unsheltered people for example.

The right loves those patterns because they confirm their prejudices: Ask an image generator for a picture of two people kissing and you most often get a heterosexual couple, often white. Because that’s what the training data looks like. That makes “AI” perfect for creating the form of idealized, fictional “past” that fascists love to allude to (“make America great again“), a past that never existed but that needs to be saved or restored (we’ll get back to that later).

....

we can pretty easily determine the short-term purpose of “AI”: The destruction of labor power.

This dismantling happens on multiple levels by attacking the foundation of what allows those forms of organization to take place.

The first level is very individualistic: By pointing at “the AI” that can replace a worker that worker is pressured into working harder, not asking for raises or any other improvements of their working conditions. Even though “AI” cannot do your job, the threat itself is useful to employers to undermine your individual power, your feeling of being valuable as a worker.

The second level is about attacking the idea of solidarity and connection: Because “AI” will not replace you (again, “AI” cannot replace the absolute majority of workers!) “but someone using AI will”. This sets up kind of a Thunderdome in which we all have to fight against each other for scraps/jobs. This framing implies that you should not unionize and connect with your fellow workers but that you should see them as your enemies, as the people who will take your job and your ability to provide for your family. We know this dynamic, it’s exactly how the right presents migration as “attack”. It also normalizes violence again turning all of existence into an endless fight against one another (unless you are one of the few people in power of course).

The third level is somewhat more devious. Because it makes us do that form of dissolving of social bonds ourselves. An example: If I use an “AI” to generate an illustration instead of asking a designer I am saying that while my skills and labor has value, that of the designer has not. This implicitly cuts my ability to form connections of solidarity with designers whose work and livelihood I have implicitly declared irrelevant. It makes me put myself over my fellow workers, workers who are facing the same struggles as me, who are my comrades. But no more.

Asked about the finding that social cohesion did not justify the law, Minns took aim at the Greens for supporting protesters charged after February’s anti-Herzog protest at Sydney’s town hall, when the law was in force. The rally is now subject of a police watchdog investigation into allegations of police misconduct and brutality.

🙃

Interesting I think is where Tom closes out, about how the cops used purity tests, gossip, and drama to undermine movements and create divisions.

Something to think about, amidst the endless purity wars on lemmy.

I basically manually exclude results after 2021 now because the internet sucks. I found this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-date-range/ but it is buggy and doesn't remember settings between sessions.

Willing to look at self hosting. It's tedious to always set a date range.