Replace “paranoid” with “highly surveilled.” Just say what it is.

Easy swap out.

STOP CALLING IT PARANOIA! FFS, This stuff is being used to track people that go to protests.

404 needs to shove their paranoia and normalize using truth and real words and not hedging like CNN or something.

I’m only upvoting this in hopes of gaining exposure for MinTay Linux.

This probably isn’t what you wanted, but it’s what happened.

https://lemmy.world/post/37489432

The Mint desktop is 3 layers of screepcaps mashed together in GIMP. Do you really think an AI that can’t get a keyboard right managed to get the Mint desktop background right and add her face perfectly?

Yeah, because I added OC on top, like a jaunty hat.

Try and keep up, OK?

How are they not necessary?

Oh, I have plenty to spare. Just need a direction.

Name a celebrity we should idolize as a Linux distro.

Uh…yeah.

Not slop - it’s a picture I made on top of slop.

Not really. Do you really think I have Taylor Swift posters up around the house?

This was a joke in comments about Nicolas Cage Linux that I threw together in about 10 minutes while I was having coffee, and my phone was infinitely far away in another room, so it would have been a laptop screen customized to the point that you can’t tell what distro is in there, in front of a kitchen. Not quite the same as taking some AI Taylor Swift-themed setting and then adding an over the top Mint background violated by T-Swizz.

The superficiality is kind of the point I’m trying to make. Repackage Mint as “MinTay Linux” and that’s all it would take for the Swifties to pounce on something as “challenging” as switching from Windows to Linux. There, Peter explained the joke to you, are you happy?

Well, I was trying to get some bootleg free generator give me a pink Tay-Tay themed desktop and it was only giving me MBPs for a while.

And would the stock photo included Taylor Swift posters in the background?

Hey! Don’t insult ducks like that! This clownshow website would be about 20% better if ducks were involved.

That’s the bet-swap. They have both have a contractual obligation to exchange investments in each other. It’s a suicide pact OR it’s a bromance glow-up, depending on your point of view. AMD is giving them chips on the (accurate so far) bet that buying chips will inflate AMD’s stock value.

Again, this is not a thing a rational person would do because it’s both not sustainable and not realistic unless you expect the value of everything to got up for 10+ years. It’s a recursive bet on a bet on a bet. It’s like buying T-bills.

The issue here is this isn’t debt!

Debt would be SoftBank giving OpenAI $78 B in cash and then in a year or two asking for payments of cash back.

This investment/stock circular thing is like if you were building a house and lived next to a brick yard, and convinced the brick yard owner to give you bricks to build your house. Your house would be the demonstration of how lovely the bricks are, and in return you’ll give them 10% of the title of your property. If you sell that property in 2009 or 2024, the value will change, but that’s a risk and gamble you both take. And they can sell small parts of that 10% whenever they want, if they want.

None of that is debt. Debt would be a loan from the bank that requires payments over time.

Someone somewhere took debt

the simple answer is that the people buying AMD stock are the ones paying for those chips

In my eyes this deal is a speculative investment leveraging debt.

But so you have to pick one. Unless you’re suggesting that all the day traders and retirement funds and investment funds are buying or already holding AMD bought it all with credit cards. Which is not the case, which is why this isn’t debt.

Ask yourself - If it’s debt, then who is the creditor? Who holds the loan paperwork? What rate did they get? What’s the collateral? None of those things are true here.

Stock value isn’t real any more than the value of gold or silver or bitcoin, but it’s all relative to the value of the stock when sold. But it being sold is the point. The stocks are worth money. Real actual money. If the market hits a correction - as other more bubble-like parts of the AI industry and the current general economic shitpile are likely to afford us all in the next few years - then OpenAI and NVIDIA and AMD won’t be carved up and sold for parts after a bankruptcy by a bank because they’re still able to sell the stocks to fund payroll. As long as no one sells off a ton of stock quickly and the stock value doesn’t collapse, then it’s simply a risky circular a bet on themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is an innovation in stupidity and shortsightedness. But call it what it is, which is not debt.

This isn’t the way economic bubbles are typically structured. At all.

Typical economic bubbles are built on speculative investment leveraging debt until the whole thing reaches a point where the debt can’t realistically account for possible growth anymore. This would be OpenAI asking SoftBank for $78B to buy chips that have at most, a maximal 5 year life cycle, and then OpenAI not having cash on hand to pay down that $78B in 2 years.

Using this stock reacharound is actual money changing hands. Yes, stock dividends and sales are part of that, but it’s not debt. It’s certainly not sustainable, but it’s not something that will lead to bankruptcy for OpenAI or NVIDIA or AMD if they fail to turn profits. But the money is real at the time it’s moved around. Surprisingly, the LLM crowd has been fairly consistent in not running to highly leveraged debt for funding.

This is a pump and dump scheme if anything, and seems like a great way to find out later that people buying stock in AMD “invested” in shrinking their portfolio over the long term. IMO only a fool would buy stocks that funded this, but it’s a slow-mo bubble for those people, not the economy in general.

This is kind of useless fear-mongering suited to no one’s threat model.

Are messages truly E2EE and they don’t share meta data? Yes? Then you’re fine. It needs a phone number for registration? OK, well buy a burner SIM card (you of course have several, right?) to register it if you’re that worried. Because if you’re already at a level where you’re THAT concerned about your phone number pinging for using a widely popular messaging app, then you have lost the game by even having a phone or sending messages to other humans who are the weakest link in the security chain anyway.

Considering that the Feds tried to make some government-compliant front end for Signal for idiot Hegseth to use to talk about national security stuff with the Vice President, I’d say that it’s probably fine for you to buy weed or whatever.

This is how I feel with just my spouse. Spotify absorbs so much ADD energy and immediate new music whiplash that I can’t help but be OK with it.

The alternative is to be up at 4:00am on Oct 13 ripping T-Swizzle MP3s from YT.