Sure, but I’d wager it goes beyond the singular manifestation of power as money. Plenty of other manifestations, and all lead to similar places.

At this point, anything remotely near bare-metal material reality triggers such a cognitive dissonance in a lot of folks, on account of all of the bs they have in their heads, that all of that bare-metal material reality is discarded as too painful.

This kind of stuff never happens overnight. It happens slowly, incrementally, and the people are never mad enough at too much sudden change to be motivated enough to do anything. People should feel good about the imposition of boundaries, and it helps that for the average user, the boundaries often result in a better user experience.

Fun speculation: we are CPUs for the information systems we inhabit, like scientific method, political ideologies, etc.

And then everybody in the office clapped.

Love the assumption that the elections aren’t already fixed.

A server isn’t necessarily all that meaningfully different from Joe’s laptop, it’s just that Joe’s laptop isn’t exactly practical for running big things. My website runs on a real server, but it doesn’t really act much different from a computer I have in my living room when I remotely log into it, I can access all the same files, run all the same software if I wanted to.

Federated is just jargon for “the posts and comments from here will display over there too because my computer knows yours exists and runs the same software and the software does the legwork of meshing all of that shit together with mine”

An instance is literally just someone’s computer with the software running. All your stuff lives on someone’s computer. Different computers can talk to one another to allow people who put their stuff on those computers to see each other’s stuff (federate) or they decide not to, like cutting off a computer with a lot of batshit insane people (defederate). They’re running the same software so the language is the same. Like your stuff lives on lemmy.today, I don’t know where and who owns that computer, while my stuff lives on sopuli.xyz, which is a computer that is owned by some random Finn, but those computers talk to one another, so we get to talk to one another.

It’s trivial to get LLMs to act against the instructions

There is a lot more that goes into it than just being correct. 18000 waters may have been the actual order, because somebody decided to screw with the machine. A human who isn’t terminally autistic would reliably interpret that as a joke and would simply refuse to punch that in. The LLM will likely do what a human tells it to do, since it has no contextual awareness, it only has the system prompt and whatever interaction with the user it had so far.

It’s all a theater play with them, they’re dumb but only in a very myopic understanding of intelligence. They’d managed not just to outwit, but to run circles around half the population of the US.