• 0 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 9th, 2025

help-circle
  • It’s hilarious in a way that Thiel, one of the billionaires who triggered a liquidity crisis that sunk SVB, is off proposing to fill the gap that he created. It’s also entirely fitting with the conspiracy theory of the tech bro fascists wanting complete autonomy to setup electronic fiefdoms.

    I don’t really get how this would work though, in more practical terms – as a lot of the crypto stuff is just antithetical to the banking industry. Like even the whole schpiel the crypto bros often go on about how you can send money quick from wallet to wallet, with the old “OMG we did it! How can banks be so stupid and slow!”. It’s largely due to regulation. Like anti-money laundering regulation, where countries don’t want citizens funding things like foreign terrorist groups with untrackable/unblockable wallet to wallet money transfers, so they tell banks they gotta scrutinize every transaction quite a bit, under threat of hefty fines – and where the govt can overtly tell banks to block payments to unfriendly countries (eg. Iran).

    Meh, it’s clear they won’t care about the fundamentals at all, nor do they care to understand how the industry works. They’ll likely use the bank to undercut existing players, while propping it up by manipulating the stock / piling in their billions. The regulation comment is a misdirect, alot like claims of wanting to be regulated were a misdirect back with FTX – these guys are far more likely to aggressively lobby for / pay the republicans to dismantle regulations in their favour, changing the landscape to their personal benefit. After the competition starts crumbling / they start moving towards a monopoly, they’ll either turn it into a regular bank in terms of service (but under their control of course), or they’ll intentionally tank it to gobble up whatever reserve/insurance funds exist, shifting that wealth into the billionaire’s pockets too, and leaving people with few options other than “under the mattress” for their savings. That’d make people almost entirely dependant on maintaining a regular working income, completing the tech bro fascist wet dream of having indentured slaves that can’t push back against any of their bullshit.


  • Personally, I don’t mind seeing when comments are heavily down voted. If an opinion is unpopular, that’s ok, especially in some areas where you generally know there’s a likely bias in the audience.

    What annoys me is seeing comments removed / silenced by mods when the comments dont align. If the comments calling for explicit violence or using overt slurs, by all means censor. But many online spaces will eliminate even respectful / neutral comments simply because they aren’t in line with that narrative.


  • I think it became inevitable that traditional ‘sites’ were going to be in trouble once AI bots gained ground. The user interface is much more organic / user friendly, given that it can be conversational.

    It’s why big corps were so quick to start building walls/moats around the technology. If end users had control over what sites their AI bots used to pull information from, that’d be a win for the consumer/end-user, and potentially legitimate news sites depending on how the payment structure is sorted out. Eg. Get a personalized bot that references news articles from a curated list of trusted / decent journalist sites across a broad political spectrum, and you’d likely have a really great “AI assistant” to keep you up to date on various current events. This sort of thing would also represent an existential threat to things like Googles core marketing business, as end users could replace many of their ‘searches’ with a curated personalized AI assistant trained on just reputable sources.

    Big tech wants to control that, so that they can advertise via those bots / prioritize their own agenda / paid content. So they want to control the AI sources, and restrict end users’ ability to filter garbage. If users end up primarily interacting with an AI avatar, and you can control the products / information that avatar presents, you have a huge amount of control over the individuals and their spending habits. Not much of a surprise.

    It’d be cool to see a user friendly local LLM that allowed users to point it at reference sites of their choosing. Pair that with a news-site data standard that streamlines the ability to pull pertinent data, and let news agencies charge a small fee for access to those APIs to fund it a bit. Shifting towards LLM based data delivery, they could even potentially save a bit in terms of print / online publications – don’t need a fancy expensive user-facing web app, if they’re all just talking to their LLM-based model-hot AI assistant anyway.


  • SVB was intentionally crashed by tech bros like Peter Thiel, likely as a strategic move to lobby for change in the banking sector / to gain more access for tech companies. The bank operated in a risky space, with too high a concentration of tech bro customers. This left them exposed to Thiel and crowd going “Hey, look at the balance sheet, if we all withdrew our money at once we can pop this bank and trigger a discussion about banking regulations / reform!”.

    So, no one forgot, it’s all part of the same larger plan really.