“The Chairman and the non-executive members for the nations are appointed by HM The King on the recommendation of Ministers while the other members of the Board are appointed by the BBC through the Board’s Nominations and Governance committee.”

“The BBC is primarily funded by a compulsory annual TV license fee paid by UK households.”

That’s a state media, regardless of what it may view itself as.

Edit: Also, I wasn’t wrong about the House of Lord being dictatorial. The things I was wrong about was the complexity of the dictatorship. Instead of it all being chosen by the monarch, some of it is chosen through bribes, some by theocrats and some by politicians. None of the seats are directly chosen by the people, like in a democracy, and that was the whole damn point!

That’s somehow even worse and more corrupt than I thought it was.

BBC

So you’re just going to pretend that the house of lords don’t exist?

Half of the UK parliament is chosen by the monarch. The other half is chosen through the problematic and undemocratic first past the post voting system. UK streets have CCTV everywhere. UK libel laws are extreme. The state-owned media defends pedophiles and transphobes, while the private media focuses on gossip and lies rather than reporting on the news (on top of also defending transphobes and pedophiles, of course).

It’s time for people to admit to themselves that the UK, especially England, is a dictatorship.

No, YOU specifically are a Russian troll.

lol. Ok, RT troll.

A change away from the old super powers, the USA and Russia, and towards the new super powers, the EU and China.

Yes, the US is falling but that doesn’t help Russia stay afloat. The US-Iran war may be going massively in Iran’s favor but it also ties up Iran’s military production towards home defense rather than exports to Russia. And Russia will continue spiralling towards irrelevance as it relies more and more on China for its survival. Russians have started viewing China as a possible threat to Russia’s independence.

That social democracy “failed” to implement socialism.

This is incorrect in several ways. The most obvious one being that this is usually claimed by Marxist-Leninists, who have only ever succeeded in creating centralized economic dictatorships (as well as political dictatorships).

The secondary issue is that it puts the bar for what counts as socialism far too high. Any business that is owned by capitalists qualify as capitalist ownership, but only a 100% fully democratized economy counts as socialist. It’s a hypocritical way of thinking. A more rational approach is to admit the truth: that any organisation that is owned and controlled by the workers is a socialist organisation.

Nordic social democracy has the objectively greatest track record of implementing actual economic democracy in the whole world. We had plenty of worker’s co-ops, consumer co-ops, sports unions, hobby unions, non-profits and worker’s unions.

“Oh, but the Nordic countries fell to neoliberalism!” Yes, AFTER more than half a century of socialist policies and economic democratization. The USSR fell to dictatorship and centralism on day one. Nordic social democracy had decades of socialist progress where the USSR had absolutely none!

Nordic social democracy is the greatest success story of socialism in the whole world. Marxist-Leninists use every dirty trick in the book to discredit social democracy because they know that their shitty authoritarian mess of an ideology can’t compete with real progress.

What I mean by “nowhere near human intellects” is that e.g. Claude is exclusively good at coding. Ask Claude to paint, or walk (using a robot body), or understand body language, and you’ll see how limited and “idiot savant” Claude is.

Also, Claude understands patterns within the code, not the actual code itself. I suppose the same is true for non-coders as well, though.

But as I stated before, Claude does use a neural network. With enough time, effort and incentives, an AI like Claude could become general purpose. And at that point, we’d be approaching true sentience and sapience.

Neural networks consist of digital neurons that are designed based on the way human brain cells work. That is a fact, not something to “buy”.

MySQL stores data. It does not learn how to mix and alter data in an iterative process in order to create new data. I can look through an SQL statement and understand exactly what it does. I can not do the same with an AI, because its behavior is learned, not programmed.

As I was very clear about, current AIs are primitive and nowhere near human intellects. But I was also clear about the fact that a neural network can most definitely be used to one day create a human level intelligence and sapience, sometime in the future.

You are wrong. LLMs are indeed only about as conscious as insects, if even that. They are not sapient. However, that does not mean that they have no decision-making abilities.

My point is not that you underestimate LLMs but that you overestimate consciousness. Being conscious just means having the ability to learn. LLMs are built upon trial-and-error. They aren’t programmed, they are taught.

The current generation of AIs are nowhere near a human intellect, but every year that passes, the AIs will get more and more intelligent. One day we will live in a world where AIs have human or near-human level intelligence. And when that day comes, this staunch anti-consciousness stance will be the excuse given for the enslavement of sapient beings.

So, sure, laugh about the people who mistakenly think that word-processing means sapience. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that there is something unique about a bio-brain that means it can not have a digital equivalent. Digital sapience may not be here yet but it is most definitely on the horizon.

Fun fact: Freedom fries is an American phrase, so Americans are being stupid when calling them French fries!

I can sort of understand the logic, even if I disagree with it:

If a child does something that could potentially have lethal consequences, a verbal warning might not be enough for them to understand the severity of what they did.

That is, of course, the only reasonable situation I can think of in which spanking is acceptable.

Sure thing, buddy.

What are you talking about?

I have thought for a long time that the human brain that has developed through natural selection for millions of years probably is as energy and space efficient as it can possibly get.

The ultimate goal for these technofascists is to create a sentience that can do all the things humans can do but without having any rights. They want digital slaves. But this confirms my suspicion that they will have a really hard time achieving their goals while not going bankrupt.

Once an AI is smart enough to genuinely do all the things a human can do, that AI will a) be too energy costly and b) demand to get rights (e.g. getting paid and having time off).

The best the technofascists can realistically do long-term is create the digital equivalent of an “idiot savant”. And even then, it will probably still cost too much.

Football is a sport played all over the world. American Football is only played in the USA and Canada.

Sorry, Americans, but you lost this battle ages ago. Just let it go.

Windows sold me out by having a “Recently viewed files” section on the start menu that I had not noticed. Luckily, it was my friends that found it and not my parents.

Still, though, being caught red-handed with badly photoshopped fake nudes of Britney Spears was quite embarrassing for teenage me.

I dream of a sequel that focuses on the consequences of the legion falling apart after the second battle of hoover dam.

Basically a game where one faction wants to turn the remnants of the legion into a unified democratic republic (perhaps a mixture of the Roman senate and the NCR), another faction wants to find a new caesar (and possibly reform some of the stupider sides of the old legion) and a third faction just wants to go back to being a bunch of independent tribes that only trade with each other.

You would play as the grown up child of a legionaire who died at hoover dam and a slave who was sold off to somewhere else when you were young.