#Indict Elon Musk

[originalleftist]

If I were just like you, I'd have both the ability and will to waste 44 billion dollars buying a social media site to troll fascist scum like you.

[godisarepublican]

[originalleftist]

WARNING: An Elon Musk PAC has created a fake voter registration site targeting voters in swing states. The site does not actually help them register to vote, but does collect their data for the Trump campaign to use in its door-to-door canvasing.

As noted in the article, this exploits a legal loophole re door to door canvasing to allow the PAC to coordinate with the Trump campaign.

Ironically, this might actually hurt Trump in a way, as its aimed at his supporters, and is collecting data from people in key swing states without actually registering them to vote. But it's still likely going to disenfranchise people but leading them to think they've registered when they have not, as well as deceiving them into handing over personal information to Musk and Trump.

Enough. Musk should be immediately indicted for fraud.

[ashadowofburnedoutstardust]

So lemme just "connect the dots" here:

So Russia pays for misinformation using bots created by Chinese tech companies creating fake accounts using user information collected from something like Zoom

Managed to help Trump and the GOP "fake news" their way to an election win

Chris ends up a target because he as well as others with a public platform who have spoken out against Trump, who have also been the victim of the same misinformation tactics in their fandoms to undermine their influence on public platforms, Christopher attempts to help debunk this by creating A Starting Point, which honestly seems to be the only thing still running that actually fact checks before publishing unlike mainstream media

His agency that has links to the GOP financially arrange for him to be linked to a racist Nazi (possibly also a scientologist) through the People Magazines sexiest man alive title and resulting PR

Meanwhile the WGA and SagAftra decide to strike and CAA take a massive hit because of the financial involvement and ends up having to sell a massive stake to Pinault to try and cover their losses and to enable the extension of the strike out until 2024 to try and bankrupt the strikers

Rumour spreads about Elon Musk, the guy that owns one of the public platforms secretly collecting info from Tesla vehicle owners to use as leverage and blackmail against famous people who have been filmed in their own vehicles using the tech installed in their cars

Meanwhile they send in the bigger stars like Clooney in with bad advice about what they can use to negotiate with and intentionally make them look like idiots to sow discord within Sag Aftra

(Get your fucking asses on the god damned picket line where they don't want you to be you fucking morons)

In the meantime the Georgia indictments continues while the GOP stalls electing a speaker to try and disable the US govt from being able to do anything meaningful as yet another distraction while possibly paying off a judge to mess things up for them

At this point yet another distraction breaks out in the form of Israel Vs Gaza being instigated by a terrorist group and no governments seem willing to enable a ceasefire agreement despite the continued loss of innocent civilians on both sides and takes over the main story in the media while the GOP continues to stall the speaker election to prevent the US govt from being able to do any more useful work

Meanwhile no one is looking into who is funding the Hamas, because no offence but I've never seen a terrorist group hold a fucking bake sale so somebody has to be funding them

In the meantime no one is looking at what China is trying to do in regards to Taiwan (yes it's called Taiwan, it's what the people who live there call it, it's why my country has two damn names) who also happened to get fucked over in regards to their tech in other countries with selling communication infrastructure

What the fuck am I supposed to do with this information?

I can't even fix my car right now ✌️

I need a new blender and a rice cooker, they both shat themselves last night

The rice cooker fell on the floor and won't cook anything anymore, and the cuff bit holding the blade in place broke on the blender

I like my small appliances

🤍🪽✨

[jarviskingston]

🌍🌎🌏

[scarletcarmensmith]

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A post shared by President Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump)

SOME THINGS ARE ETERNAL 📣📢

[slacktivist]

WHEN WAR CRIMES ARE NO LONGER ECONOMICALLY LUCRATIVE

[internettoday]

New episode of Internet Today Daily, this time coming

A seeming flacid end to the Zuck v Musk Saga

Ron Desantis backs down in Disney fight

Local newspaper gets its shit rocked by an overzealous police department, with a conspiracy

Trump gets indicted *again*

[timothysnyder]

Russia has kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. Putin was indicted for this crime. Yale has a unit searching for them. Musk eliminated the funding.

[originalleftist]

The fact that Muskrat still has government contracts AND A SECURITY CLEARANCE while being more or less openly an agent of the Russian government (sabotaging Starlink, letting Russia use it, constantly platforming the most vile Russian propaganda, pitching a Ukraine "peace plan" which is basically helping Putin and is potentially a violation of the Logan Act by conducting unauthorized diplomacy, and probably more) is obscene.

Hopefully this is a step toward his losing all of them.

musk was under invegested for pac

so I heard, his PAC has been pretending to offer help registering people to vote, but if you say you're from a key swing state it doesn't send you to your states' Sec of State website to get registered, it asks a bunch of demographic follow up questions and then doesn't help you get registered, no doubt valuable data.

but all that is illegal.

he's also in trouble because Twitter's little AI troll, grunk or whatever the fuck its called, has been telling people misinformation about the election, telling people Kamala Harris missed ballot deadlines in a lot of states, she didn't, she will be on ALL 50 state ballots. So a number of Senators sent Musk an angry letter. Now having an AI bot be a liar isn't illegal, but when your life blood is federal contracts its not great to have Senators pissed at you.

[godisarepublican]

Wait. So now these idiots think that the Ukraine never even needed American money, and that this makes Trump bad?

You can't make this idiocy up! The LeftTards are now claiming that Zelensky never needed American money!

Who wants to be the one to explain reality to this bed wetter?

The worst part about this? WokeTards lick this up like it was ice cream! They never even question it! If it sounds bad and it's about Trump, they rubber stamp it!

[jarviskingston]

🏀⛹🏿‍♂️⛹🏿

[originalleftist]

Yes.

And while we're at it, let's talk about how this piece of shit still has a security clearance and government contracts after its PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE that he deliberately and treacherously sabotaged Ukraine's communications, costing Ukrainian lives.

Letting this fucker control crucial national infrastructure-especially defense infrastructure-is like if the Jedi found out about Order 66 and just did nothing until it was activated.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI can’t do your job

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/amid-job-cuts-doge-accelerates-rollout-of-ai-tool-to-automate-government

If you pay attention to the hype, you'd think that all the action on "AI" (an incoherent grab-bag of only marginally related technologies) was in generating text and images. Man, is that ever wrong. The AI hype machine could put every commercial illustrator alive on the breadline and the savings wouldn't pay the kombucha budget for the million-dollar-a-year techies who oversaw Dall-E's training run. The commercial market for automated email summaries is likewise infinitesimal.

The fact that CEOs overestimate the size of this market is easy to understand, since "CEO" is the most laptop job of all laptop jobs. Having a chatbot summarize the boss's email is the 2025 equivalent of the 2000s gag about the boss whose secretary printed out the boss's email and put it in his in-tray so he could go over it with a red pen and then dictate his reply.

The smart AI money is long on "decision support," whereby a statistical inference engine suggests to a human being what decision they should make. There's bots that are supposed to diagnose tumors, bots that are supposed to make neutral bail and parole decisions, bots that are supposed to evaluate student essays, resumes and loan applications.

The narrative around these bots is that they are there to help humans. In this story, the hospital buys a radiology bot that offers a second opinion to the human radiologist. If they disagree, the human radiologist takes another look. In this tale, AI is a way for hospitals to make fewer mistakes by spending more money. An AI assisted radiologist is less productive (because they re-run some x-rays to resolve disagreements with the bot) but more accurate.

In automation theory jargon, this radiologist is a "centaur" – a human head grafted onto the tireless, ever-vigilant body of a robot

Of course, no one who invests in an AI company expects this to happen. Instead, they want reverse-centaurs: a human who acts as an assistant to a robot. The real pitch to hospital is, "Fire all but one of your radiologists and then put that poor bastard to work reviewing the judgments our robot makes at machine scale."

No one seriously thinks that the reverse-centaur radiologist will be able to maintain perfect vigilance over long shifts of supervising automated process that rarely go wrong, but when they do, the error must be caught:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

The role of this "human in the loop" isn't to prevent errors. That human's is there to be blamed for errors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/#is-also-a-human-in-the-loop

The human is there to be a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The human is there to be an "accountability sink":

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

But they're not there to be radiologists.

This is bad enough when we're talking about radiology, but it's even worse in government contexts, where the bots are deciding who gets Medicare, who gets food stamps, who gets VA benefits, who gets a visa, who gets indicted, who gets bail, and who gets parole.

That's because statistical inference is intrinsically conservative: an AI predicts the future by looking at its data about the past, and when that prediction is also an automated decision, fed to a Chaplinesque reverse-centaur trying to keep pace with a torrent of machine judgments, the prediction becomes a directive, and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

By firing skilled human workers and replacing them with spicy autocomplete, Musk is assuming his final form as both the kind of boss who can be conned into replacing you with a defective chatbot and as the fast-talking sales rep who cons your boss. Musk is transforming key government functions into high-speed error-generating machines whose human minders are only the payroll to take the fall for the coming tsunami of robot fuckups.

This is the equivalent to filling the American government's walls with asbestos, turning agencies into hazmat zones that we can't touch without causing thousands to sicken and die:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#dirty-data

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

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[internettoday]

New episode of Tech Newsday! This week covering:

The latest, all new trump indictment

China limits the screentime of Chinese youth

Elon gives an option to hide the blue checkmark of shame

Tesla wrapped up in scandal

Space X does a pollution

[azazelsazaleas]

Electrical engineer with experience in designing wiring systems for trucks (and similar applications) here.

Look, I loathe Elon Musk as much as the rest of y’all, and I think the Cybertruck is an ugly-ass shitshow with an assortment of other problems, but the information here is isn’t really accurate to how this system works. Which isn’t surprising, considering that cybrtrkguy seems to be completely misunderstanding the way this whole thing gets wired up.

A typical motor vehicle has a central controller. Everything else gets fed back to it through wires that are usually bundled into harnesses depending on what part of the vehicle it’s coming from. For example, your brake lights, backup camera, rear blinkers, and everything else on the back of your car will have its wiring sent back through a harness all the way to the front of the car, where the aforementioned controller is. (It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea.)

For the Cybertruck, Tesla replaced the main controller with a network of smaller, localized controllers; with a main harness to facilitate communication between the controllers (and, of course, send power to the local controllers/distribution boxes to distribute as needed).

As someone who’s had to design, work on, and troubleshoot electrical systems for vehicles and larger diesel engine-based power systems…this isn’t a terrible idea; in fact, I can see the appeal of it. In addition to the cost savings that comes from reducing the amount of wiring needed to make the truck work, they’ve also made it so that any problems that arise are localized - that is, if something goes wrong with the components in your passenger-side door, all of the reworking and rewiring will take place inside the door itself. There’s no need to have to trace wires all the way to the front of the truck, get under the hood, pull panels off the dashboard, etc.; all the work you’re doing is in one place. I would think that, for similar reasons, manufacturing would be simpler. (Ironically, the criticism of this system having a single point of failure is backwards - by spreading control of individual systems across multiple networked controllers, they’ve spread out the possible points of failure.)

Granted, I still think the Cybertruck is a dumpster fire, but not because of the wiring.