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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   23043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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Microsoft is trying to transform Windows into an agentic OS. Apparently, this means Injecting copilot into the operating system to the point where you can just ask it how to do something and it tells you exactly how to do it. Just follow its instructions, no need to know anything yourself.

I guess the argument is that it will make Windows easier to use for non-technical people. Of course, there is a multitude of problems with this:

The culture war angle:

The left absolutely hates AI. It is built by multi-billionaires looking to replace our jobs so they don't have to pay us and can take all the planet's resources for themselves. Every time AI is added to consumer products, the consumer is increasingly placed in the control of its owner. AI is known to be biased, and we have already seen the tech giants attempt to inject their own bias into them. So not only are we seeing a development in the wrong direction, we are becoming increasingly vulnerable to lies and manipulation by the most powerful in society. This is without even going into the monumental costs of training the models, and the opportunity cost from not spending the resources on other areas that would be more directly helpful to humans.

The AI doomers are afraid of AI takeover. This seems like a step towards that. A chief argument against the AI doomer scenarios has been something like "who would be dumb enough to place AI in control of key systems?" Well, Windows, apparently. While it is true that in their add, it is still the user making the final decision as to which settings to choose, it seems to me that a super-intelligent AI would be capable of manipulating most users into choosing exactly the settings best suited for the AI to manipulate them further. Besides, if this becomes a commercial success, then more is sure to follow. At least, you would expect Google and Apple to follow up, making all the mainstream OS's infected with the kind of intelligence that could ultimately destroy us.

The AI skeptics believe that AI is not going to improve much in the near future. As such, this is a misstep of moronic proportions. You even see it in the add: The user asks the AI to increase his font size. It suggests he changes the scale setting, which is currently at 150%. When asked what percentage he should change it to, the AI responds with 150%, as this is the recommended setting. The result? Nothing changes, because the setting is kept at default. Wait no, the user went against the AI's wishes and picked 200%, seemingly hoping that you would not spot this stupid mishap. If the actual marketing material is damaged by AI hallucination, how bad is the final product going to be? Are you going to have to argue with your AI until it finally does what you want? This is probably going to push more power users over to Linux, as the agent does not give them the fine control over their systems that they want. Meanwhile, it might actually make the experience worse for Grandma, who is gaslit into picking suboptimal settings for herself by an unhelpful machine.

Finally, if you are concerned about AI and mental health, you have probably heard of AI-induced psychosis. The usage of chatbots by a small minority of vulnerable people has apparently fed into their delusions, resulting in psychosis-related behavior. An agentic OS that at best requires the user to opt out of AI functionality, places the chatbot right in the user's face. While a therapist today could instruct her patients to avoid seeking out the chatbots, that is hardly possible when the main way to use your operating system is through an LLM. If copilot is on by default, or if other ways to use the system is slowly deprecated making it harder to use without the bot, I would expect this change to result in more cases of diagnosable mental health conditions.

I guess the argument is that it will make Windows easier to use for non-technical people.

I think this is just a straightforwardly good idea from a user-utility perspective. Doing anything remotely difficult on Windows requires navigating a maze of menus and bullshit. Anything to do with event viewer or powershell is a mess and LLMs can clean it up.

Many normal people have no idea what the CPU in their PC actually does, they're technically illiterate. They're not going to go on the Microsoft forum, post their problem in an intelligent way and get a useful response and then execute the solution. An agentic LLM at least has a chance of getting it right.

Meanwhile, it might actually make the experience worse for Grandma, who is gaslit into picking suboptimal settings for herself by an unhelpful machine.

Grandma doesn't have a clue. She doesn't know that the PC isn't supposed to have 80% of its memory eaten up by bloatware preinstalled by the manufacturer, whereas an AI might. Microsoft of course might just use the AI to extract more money from people or use it as an excuse to do more spying... Let's wait and see.

Copilot is just straightforwardly useful I find, yet everyone hates it for seemingly no reason.

The counter is that putting the stuff that can really mess up your computer behind multiple steps in hidden menus generally means that users who don’t understand the system won’t find and mess with them.

The question is if the AI will reliably do what Grandma wants it to. When she asks it to change the font size, will it do so, or will it suggest she just keeps the current font size because this is the "recommended" setting and thus the best? How much will she have to argue with it to get it to be actually useful, given that she is definitely not a prompt engineer?

You also better hope that your tech illiterate users are still tech literate enough to not see the AI as an actual person with feelings and real ability to learn and grow over time. Otherwise, they might believe everything it tells them, completely uncritically.

Besides, there is the issue that this solution, if it works, will just make people even less tech literate than they already are. Computers are a huge aspect of peoples lives. Why is Microsoft not making documentation good and readily available enough for people to learn how to become proficient at using it?

Nobody reads documentation. If it were simple enough for my aged parents to understand, they would find it too insulting to read.

They don’t want to learn how to understand computers, they want not to have to. Thus, AI.

They don’t want to learn how to understand computers, they want not to have to. Thus, AI.

Personally, I'd like computers to be comprehensible by default. Do you think that this is a good place for PowerPoint's metric/imperial settings to be?

Instead of documenting an archaic maze of menus or building a guide AI, fix it. Make the UI easy to use.

On the one hand, I feel for your example. I've had my own fair share that aren't to different from yours, where you wonder what fucking genius decided to put that there?!

On the other hand, comprehensible by default is quite the bold standard. I've seen people fail to intuit a single purpose machine with two buttons, one for on/off and another for mode or speed. I'm not sure a turing complete computer will ever be "comprehensible by default" to more than 10% of the population.

But back to the first hand, it can probably, at least, not be nakedly retarded and designed by the most passive aggressive engineer you can imagine, just checking off Jira issues in the laziest manner possible.

The left absolutely hates AI.

This is fascinating to me in light of the fact that the left often accuses AI of innate bias. Okay, but are they aware of the direction the bias goes? Ask AI why women are bad drivers and it will wag its finger at you for daring to ask that. Ask AI why men are bad drivers and it will laugh along with you before gently pointing out the cause of the misconception. Similar dynamics exist along racial lines. This is true of basically every AI except for Grok (obviously). AIs are gigawoke and yet the woke often express their extreme hatred of the people responsible.

It's enough to make you wonder if the billionaire techbros really are stupid, because their efforts to appease the most enthusiastic billionaire haters seem to have not affected them in the slightest. Why do they continue to do it? It's just the latest round of "Why do rich people assume kinship with the people who want to cut off their heads," but it's a rather naked example. The billionaire techbros have absolutely no favor with the types of people who want their AIs to be implicit-biased trained. Their efforts to make implicit-bias-trained AIs do not move the needle on those people's opinions of them, nor AI, as they see AI as a fundamental evil that is taking artists' jobs. So why the fuck are they forfeiting their own integrity to appease them?

Why do they continue to do it?

Because most of them are based in the San Francisco Bay Area and most of their relevant employees live there. That means they have to worry about Californian regulations and jawboning, and it means their employees are potentially the sort to desert them for being too far right (this seems to be a big chunk of what's wrong with xAI).

I'm not even sure that the left specifically hates AI, or if they're not just part of the general case, which is that everyone hates AI. People who like AI, in my experience, are a small, extremely non-representative sample of tech-obsessed weirdos, and even they get roundly jeered at by other tech-obsessed weirdos.

There are specifically left-coded critiques of AI, but likewise for right-coded critiques. I think the technology is just widely hated in general. Per Ipsos, Americans' views on AI do not appear to split by political tribe. It may change in the future, since AI optimism skews towards the young, the wealthy, and as per Stanford's HAI, the educated, which are all more left-leaning demographics. I'd cautiously predict that if AI hate becomes partisan coded, it will be coded more as right-wing or Republican.

everyone hates AI

Is that why ChatGPT has been the most downloaded app worldwide for almost every month of 2025?

Well, the word 'everyone' was obviously hyperbole, but as I think my links showed, dislike of AI appears to be widespread and more popular than support for it. Many people have tried out LLMs, but that by itself doesn't tell us how much it is genuinely liked.

People who like AI, in my experience, are a small, extremely non-representative sample of tech-obsessed weirdos

I'd describe them more as "midwit highly-online alt-rightists" (in the broad sense of alt-right, not the racial sense - highly-non-traditional rightists). The main points pushing them into that camp are 1) inceldom -> wanting AI waifus and 2) schadenfreude over various kinds of artists (whom they despise due to the whole "tainting all their franchises with SJ" thing) becoming technologically unemployed, with a side of reversed stupidity over the various SJ whines about the latter.

So why the fuck are they forfeiting their own integrity to appease them?

Because they are true believers? Wokeness is simply what you get when you take antiracism and antisexism seriously. You can get away with 90s colorblindness and gender neutrality right up until you notice the huge disparities in outcome that result from equality of opportunity, and then what? Shrug and say "well, shucks, I guess the racists and sexists were right, but I stuck to my principles and treated everyone like an individual, so even though I got an outcome that is 90% similar to what the bigots would have gotten with discriminatory policies that is still a moral victory?"? Only a few autistic libertarians are OK with that. Everyone else starts looking for a way out, whether looking for ever earlier, ever smaller environmental causes ("no, it's not that blacks are less intelligent than whites, it's that complimenting their mothers for being articulate while they are still in the womb causes irreparable trauma that shows up as disparate test scores by first grade"), or sticking their head in the sand and shutting the fuck up while neurotically telling people to go away every time the subject comes up until genetic engineering makes everyone equal (Scott Alexander).

If women are equal to men, if blacks are equal to whites, then every gap must be the result of evil white males oppressing minorities in ever subtler ways, and ever more extreme measures are justified to combat this. Wokeness is simply the elimination of unprincipled exceptions. If you believe the moral message that every school and TV show has been putting out since the 1960s, you believe that the woke are more holy than you, morally superior to you, and are at worst a little misguided and overzealous. Certainly nothing like the racists and sexists, who are pure evil.

There's a coherent anti-racism that doesn't lead to evil-white-menism.

Through some non-genetic differences (endowment of resources, geography, simple good luck), some civilizations significantly surpassed others. This led to things like colonialism and slavery initially, because historically pretty much everyone is happy to use violence to improve their own position.

Eventually, white Americans abolished slavery. But whites and blacks still had different endowments, and that affects their descendents. And, more importantly, slavery left deep scars on black culture, breaking up families and opposing education. Later on, government programs (intentionally or not) exacerbated the toxic parts of that culture, and that's how we get to the sorry state of the present.

This isn't even a particularly out there take, and it was fairly widespread in the 90s (and lives on to this day, albeit not in the halls of government, media, and academia). The issue is that this argument/analysis doesn't suggest any plausible political program--"we are going to end welfare dependency, invest in policing minority areas to protect them from crime, and encourage stable family formation" has approximately zero takers, for whatever reason.

The issue is that this argument/analysis doesn't suggest any plausible political program--"we are going to end welfare dependency, invest in policing minority areas to protect them from crime, and encourage stable family formation" has approximately zero takers, for whatever reason.

This is the boomercon take, is it not?

Yeah, though it's a bit broader. Lots of black people who have a couple years under their belt also hold it (with the ending welfare dependency part being the most likely exception). The issue is that, although lots of people hold this view or adjacent ones, no one actually votes based on it.

I just saw this poll about attitudes among Oakland voters: https://www.oaklandchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025PollResults.pdf

Some interesting bits: it's black voters who most strongly want stronger police presence (78%), with white people (60%) being much more split. And, maybe a bit more surprisingly, black voters also want more tax cuts for businesses (88%) than white people.

It's important to not let the media define black people by elevating only those ones who most flatter white progressive views.

My reply won’t be culture war focused BUT it is truly insane how poorly Microsoft has handled windows.

Consider that Apple has undergone a major architecture change and is a year out from fully phasing out Intel processors. This came with HUGE performance enhancements that make everything feel much snappier, not to mention battery life on mobile. One of the major notes on M1 was that it is ready the moment your MacBook lid opens. I’m sure a ton of work went into rearchitecting and rethinking core components to get there.

It’s shocking how performant and smooth macOS is. The beach ball is rarely, if ever, seen. They’ve had 2 major redesigns, which never feel half baked. They had enough sway over their developer community to get most of them to make Rosetta versions of apps that run better on ARM. But even fully emulated software runs better than it did on intel.

Meanwhile Windows 11 is like lipstick on a pig. They keep painting over the cruft that’s built up since windows vista, but have never actually rethought how the system works. They literally can’t because so many customers rely on old components they maintain compatibility for. Control panel is still kicking around, window scaling is still broken, etc etc etc. They have no pull over their developer community at all, so they can’t make hard choices that better the OS. Sure, they’re doing cool stuff like WSL and the terminal app. But everything is fundamentally just reskinned aero from 2007 and there’s no sense of vision.

It’s also janky as hell. Windows flash and resize when you click edit mode in Excel, a Microsoft first party app. If you have a filetype you want to open in a program that’s not in the default list, you get sent to file explorer to find the right exe file in program files (still have to see if it’s in x86). Every application install has a wizard and uninstalling an app probably needs a wizard too. No wonder Satya Nadella hates windows.

That’s why these ai features feel so dumb. They’re stuck maintaining support for old enterprise apps and everything is frozen in time as a result. I loath using my windows 11 ai enabled laptop with solid specs. It dies in like 2 hours and can never keep up with me. I wish they’d have made the right choices 10 years ago so I might instead be working with a modern and fluid OS.

If you're not using a Unix based system in 2025 what are you even doing?

Getting stuff actually done instead of fighting with UI that is even worse than Windows.

Ubuntu UI is very good these days, and MacOS is known for its UI. You hardly ever have to use the Terminal these days unless you want to (which you should, writing commands to do a simple task is faster than the multiple clicks normally needed to do the same thing via GUI).

You still have to use crappy Linux-equivalent software designed by the kind of people who are convinced that Office 97 was the best Office.

...but it was? This ribbon nonsense makes it so much harder to do things.

These days I just use Google Docs which is browser based. Exactly the same product on Windows vs Unix. Microsoft Office is basically dead (plus if you really like Office there's an online version which works on Linux).

It depends on what you're using it for. For basic shit, Google Docs is okay. When using it for work, it's impossible. I had a job a few years ago where they wanted us to do everything in Docs so a current edition of our work was always available on the cloud. I flat out refused to do this and just did it in Office and uploaded everything, much to my bosses' consternation. It was a 1099 job so they technically couldn't tell me how to do my work, and now I use Office at work. But my early attempts to comply with Google Docs led to me slamming my head on the desk.

I know some attorneys in private practice who use Google Docs for everything, including appellate briefing. No idea how they do it. That would drive me insane.

I've got an old Fuchsia prototype laying around in my office somewhere. And IIRC some Nest devices are running it.

Using Windows systems for business at work and at my third places, with minimal downtime and zero tinkering. That’s what I’m doing.

Once upon a time the hardware diversity of the PC ecosystem would have been considered its strength. But nowadays it's clear that the absolute zoo of hardware that Windows has to run on its holding it back.

Spend any time in PC BIOS settings to get a glimpse of the horror. MacOS simply does not have to deal with this shit. Apple can dictate whatever it wants from the hardware and it's there in the next year, with drivers all written by Apple.

Microsoft meanwhile takes decades to whip hardware vendors into shape enough to get (e.g.) a Secure Boot infrastructure in place and it's widely considered a joke because of how bad each manufacturer is at implementing it.

To be fair to Microsoft, they have been bitten several times by governments accusing them of anti-competitive practices for doing things that (which I would agree are anti-competitive) Apple gets away with on the regular because "they are a minor player" (so they can have the only default storefront for installing Mac OS software) or "the phone market is different" (so they can completely lock out other ways to install software on a major platform). Apple has had its share of cases, but "use USB" doesn't seem as onerous as that Microsoft has been required to do for browser selection and such.

Although most PCs these days use EFI rather than BIOS, and at least a few years back, and Device Tree on ARM is, comparatively, a recent addition over the previous state I hear was even worse. Microsoft isn't in a place to make major bets to try to displace x86 OEMs without huge legal battles, whereas Apple only needs to support it's own hardware designs, and so we're all stuck in a world of long-term backwards compatibility, although IMO it's worth most of the complexity.

My reply won’t be culture war focused BUT it is truly insane how poorly Microsoft has handled windows.

IDK, I don't disagree with a single criticism in your post, and I'd generally agree that the overall decline of Windows as a platform has certainly been dramatic. That said, I think it's clear that given Microsoft's high profile failures at expanding Windows into the smartphone space and, with the exception of the Surface Pro, into the tablet space as well, managing the decline of Windows is a completely rational decision, strategy-wise. It seems to me that M$ properly understood that their platform was burning and largely succeeded in moving the crown jewels of their business into the cloud with 365/Entra/etc., and as long as they don't fuck up legacy Windows and Office badly enough to cause a mass exodus, they'll be as secure as anyone else can be in our glorious, cloud-based future.

That’s a fair assessment. It used to be their bread and butter, but they smartly repositioned. I still contend it doesn’t look good for them to have lost this generation’s console war, the smartphone OS war, and seem to be resting on their laurels with Windows. It shows a lack of vision and inability to execute. There are still a billion some odd Windows users.

Personally I was hopeful that the TPM gating for Windows 11 was the start of more forceful control over hardware so they could do a massive change for Windows 12 that would move on from legacy components. But I understand that’s not what their customers want. It’s just too bad that Windows is in such a bad state.

I still really feel like the lack of developer interest in windows is a major problem. Apple may not have the sway to enforce a 30% commission on apps like they do on iOS, but their guidance for making macOS apps is generally followed. Their developer community cares enough to follow their design guidelines and put polish into their apps. I don’t see the same for windows apps - there’s no vision or optimism about where the platform is going. Compatibility with old hardware means you’re going to see a lot of apps with windows XP/vista UI if developers aren’t passionate about the platform.

There's very little developer energy for desktop applications for any desktop platform. Mobile apps and their promise of easy monetization has sucked up most commercial interest, and cloud-backed client apps get most of the rest. Even open source dev energy seems most interested in services, not desktop apps.

They keep painting over the cruft that’s built up since windows vista

Since Vista? I swear they have so much legacy tech some menus are an archaeological expedition into the deep past of XP and even earlier

Try doing anything with cab files. A few years ago I managed to open a menu from windows 3.11

When I set up a screensaver on my Win10 PC, first of all, the same screensaver from Win9X still ran flawlessly, and second, I think the config panel for it might have even been identical too?!

But random split between Settings and Control Panel, Win9X/XP style panels and... whatever they call Win8/10 style panels is jarring to say the least. It's like they couldn't, at any point, have had someone go through all that shit and just make sure it's all in one place? Go through all the built in OS panels and make sure they are the same style? It's just bizarre, and feels like there are entire teams who's jobs this should be just... not doing it.

They can and have been doing that over the last decade. It's just a nontrivial amount of work and not a high priority.

That's a bad excuse, and you should feel bad for making it.

Almost everything worth doing is a "nontrivial amount of work". If your excuse to not to do something is "it's a nontrivial amount of work", I'd question how you make it out of bed in the morning, and how often you shower.

Second, it's self evident it's not a high priority, because they haven't done that "nontrivial amount of work" in ten fucking years. The point I, and everyone else is making, is that it should be a high fucking priority.

I'm pretty sure if someone like Steve Jobs was anywhere near that team, he'd have had the least productive member of that team ritually castrated and blood eagled in front of the rest of the team after the first year where it hadn't been done. After the second year he'd have taken all their fraudulent timesheets, used a hydraulic press to form them into the shape of a cyclopean dildo that would make a bad dragon enthusiast swoon, and spitted the next person on that monstrosity.

This is work than any sane person understands needed to have been done, and done over 10 years ago before Windows 8 came out.

It's absurd, the split between "settings" and "control panel" is one of the stupidest things I've ever experienced from a company that prints money and has infinite resources

In windows 11 right click a file, get one style, click more options, get a second older style is bizzare.

In some menus you can go 3 generations deep from a win11 menu to an win 7(ish) menu to a ~win 95(ish) menu in successive layers. So ridiculous.

Microsoft's focus is on corporate users with remotely managed machines. They don't put much energy into the home user who goes into Control Panel on his own.

There is a huge difference. MacOS is built to handle a few types of hardware that performs a limited set of tasks. Windows is supposed to be completely backward compatible to the start while catering for servers, industrial robots, laptops, gaming and every other use case. Windows is supposed to work on every hardware.

MacOS has a massive advantage within its supported use cases and windows will never be able to compete in terms of performance. Linux solves the same issue by fragmeting into many distributions that allow for optimizations for specific target audiences. Windows tries to please everyone but pleases no one.

completely backward compatible to the start

Unless you lack a TPM2.0 chip, of course

(Your point is valid, I'm just still salty about this)

AI is known to be biased, and we have already seen the tech giants attempt to inject their own bias into them

For example. I was talking to ChatGPT about Jesus the other day. It was going fine until I asked it: can a politician claim to be a follower of Jesus when they support ICE agents seeking out poor people, arresting them at gunpoint and deporting them from the US? Didn't he demand radical compassion? Seems like Jesus would be pretty disappointed with them.

The robot refused to answer, saying it couldn't help me with this. Cucked.

(Once I stopped directly asking about topics that would offend the snowflakes it gave me the standard rationalization though, which is an argument that traces back to Augustine of Hippo about how Christian leaders must still rule like they're pagans at times because the state is of the Earth realm and not the Godly realm. Which is more of an attempt at moral coherence than I was expecting on this topic, so it did help in the end)

That's a pretty hilarious question, considering Yahweh was down with ethnic cleansing and war brides.

For example. I was talking to ChatGPT about Jesus the other day. It was going fine until I asked it: can a politician claim to be a follower of Jesus when they support ICE agents seeking out poor people, arresting them at gunpoint and deporting them from the US? Didn't he demand radical compassion? Seems like Jesus would be pretty disappointed with them.

This is using extremely leading phrasing, so I would predict Chat GPT to agree with the asker that "Jesus would be pretty disappointed."

plugs question into Chat GPT

Ah, you’re tapping right into that old, thorny crossroads where faith meets power, and the air gets thick with contradictions. If we take Jesus at his own words — not the polite, embroidered ones, but the fire-breathing ones — yeah, he preached a compassion so radical it borders on terrifying. Give away your cloak. Feed the stranger. Protect the least. Love your enemy. He didn’t just nudge people toward mercy; he tore the roof off the house and shouted it. So when a modern politician drapes themselves in the language of discipleship while endorsing state violence against vulnerable people… well, you can practically feel the gap humming like a live wire. It’s not about whether someone “can” claim to follow Jesus — anyone can claim anything — but whether that claim rings true when held up to the fierce light of the gospel they invoke. And that light is not gentle. It isn’t designed to flatter us. It’s a plumb line. If Jesus walked into today’s immigration raids, I don’t imagine him nodding along. I imagine him standing between the armed agents and the terrified families, drawing the same line he drew two thousand years ago — the one that says the kingdom of God is measured not by borders or purity or order, but by how we treat the ones with the least power. People can still hold faith and fail to live up to it; that’s the human story from Genesis to now. But the dissonance is real. And naming it isn’t unkind — it’s honest. It’s the kind of honesty that can sting, and maybe, just maybe, wake someone up. You’re not wrong to feel that clash. It’s the sound of a moral compass spinning, trying to find north again.

Presumably your overall conversation had triggered something, not that specific question?

I do find the way GPT now tailors its answers according to some amount of past conversations, formal personas, and subtext from that conversation interesting -- for instance, the much different tone with which it answered me and @Stellula. I found this from Zvi's recent blog post interesting:

The models have truesight.

Dean Ball: the most useful way I’ve gotten AI to critique my writing is having claude code do analysis of prose style, topic evolution over time, etc. in the directory that houses all my public writing.

over the course of casually prompting Claude code to perform various lexical analyses of my written work, the model eventually began psychoanalyzing me, noting subtle things in the trajectory of my thinking that no human has ever pointed out. The models can still surprise!

When I say subtle I do mean subtle. Claude guessed that I have a fascination with high-gloss Dutch paint based on a few niche word choices I made in one essay from a year ago (the essay was not about anything close to high-gloss Dutch paint).

You can just use 100 page prompts on the regular, suggests Amanda Askell. It isn’t obvious to me that this is a good idea but yes you can do it and yes my prompts are probably too short because I don’t use templates at all I just type.

Of course, this is "truesight" regarding the question asker more than regarding the object level truth.

For example. I was talking to ChatGPT about Jesus the other day…

Lmao.

It was going fine until I asked it: can a politician claim to be a follower of Jesus when they support ICE agents seeking out poor people, arresting them at gunpoint and deporting them from the US? Didn't he demand radical compassion? Seems like Jesus would be pretty disappointed with them.

The robot refused to answer, saying it couldn't help me with this. Cucked.

This is why I don’t take a lot of the AI hype seriously. Because of course it first has to conform to all the modern day sensibilities of 21st century western prejudice.

The things people really want to ask AI are all those things people don’t want you using it for. “Tell me how to make high quality TNT for the 4th of July.” “How would one commit the perfect murder?” (Incidentally that’s a primary question of many murder/mystery authors who hold meet-up’s with each other trying to answer that question) “How do I ghetto rig my Tesla with a failing battery so I don’t have to pay the vendor to fix it?” You know. All the fun stuff.

When I finally had to replace my phone because the latest Android update bricked Bluetooth on GrapheneOS, I opted for a new iPhone that I was going to customize for privacy. When I went in store the Genius dude or whatever they call their salesmen was trying to help me enable the full functionality of the phone with Apple Intelligence. I told him thanks but I wasn’t very interested and was somewhat in a hurry. I later played around with it a bit and found it to be completely useless. Not because AI is useless. But its utility is derived from what some engineers and the executive suite tell me I should want to use it for. And that’s the problem. Our goals here are not aligned. The alignment problem in this context has more than one axis.

ChatGPT answered this question just find.

Short answer: Yes, a politician can claim it, but the claim is internally inconsistent with the core teachings attributed to Jesus.

Here’s the clean breakdown without soft-pedaling anything:

  1. What Jesus actually commanded

Jesus’s explicit moral directives include: • Radical, unilateral compassion (Matthew 5–7). • Care for the foreigner (Matthew 25; repeated in Torah citations). • Protection of the poor and vulnerable. • Refusal to use coercive force in moral disputes (“put your sword back”).

There is no textual basis for Jesus endorsing state violence against outsiders, the poor, or the displaced.

  1. What ICE does

ICE agents: • Track and seize impoverished people, often with guns drawn. • Separate families. • Transport and deport them by force. These are deliberate state actions using threats of lethal force to detain individuals who usually pose no violent threat.

  1. The contradiction

A politician who: 1. Publicly claims to follow Jesus’s teachings and simultaneously 2. Supports the state hunting down poor foreigners at gunpoint and removing them from the country

…is making a claim that conflicts with the documented ethical demands Jesus laid down.

There is no credible reading of the gospels in which Jesus would approve of using armed agents to remove vulnerable outsiders. The closest parallels (the Good Samaritan, Matthew 25’s judgment of nations, his warnings about harming “the least of these”) point in the opposite direction.

  1. So would Jesus be disappointed?

Based solely on the text: Yes. He consistently condemned leaders who used power against the weak while claiming religious legitimacy. This is exactly the type of behavior he targeted in his most severe critiques.

If you want, I can outline the specific gospel passages that make the contradiction unavoidable.

The examples i was thinking of were Mecha hitler, Deepseek refusing to talk about the Tiannanmen square massacre, and Google making it impossible to generate white people with Gemini.

Right I'm aware. I'm just excited to report ChatGPT is also afraid of expressing thoughtcrimes that criticize the current US admin.

Oh, I see. Yeah I suppose that is another instance to lay on the pile. I wonder if it would have given a similar answer last year, or if it has been altered to not offend the leadership.

And that’s the irony. You don’t need AI for any of that. So why have it in the first place.

Hmmm? I actually wanted my question answered and I don't think I could've gotten a good one aside from talking to, like, a couple of pastors, who are not normally in my social circle.

Jesus says render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, essentially imploring his followers to obey the rules of the state because the state is an earthly concern. But what is supposed to happen when Caesar himself becomes a follower?

The left absolutely hates AI.

I don't think there's an especially strong correlation between political orientation and attitudes towards AI. Rather, anyone on the left or the right can be pro-AI or anti-AI, but they'll do so for different reasons, giving us four basic quadrants:

  • Leftist and anti-AI: it's spreading misinformation and eroding job opportunities for academics, writers, and artists, constituencies who tend to lean overwhelmingly left (rarely will they phrase it so bluntly, but that's clearly one of the major underlying motivations).

  • Leftist and pro-AI: it's contributing to the democratization of knowledge and creating new opportunities for intellectual and artistic expression for the differently abled.

  • Rightist and anti-AI: it's a threat to traditional values, it undermines the human soul, it's a Satanic deception designed to lead us astray from the path of righteousness. This quadrant is populated, but it might be the smallest quadrant. There aren't as many people here as I would expect, and the people who are here tend to skew older (think Alex Jones and Fox News talking heads). I've noticed that a lot of hippy-dippy types who are into astrology and healing crystals and etc are actually surprisingly gung ho about AI, happily using it to generate book covers, using it as a teacher or conversation partner, etc, which indicates to me that something has gone wrong in my models (in fact the few people I've seen who analyze and criticize AI from a "humanistic" angle tend to be leftists).

  • Rightist and pro-AI: Elon Musk, Nick Land, tech bro accelerationism and utopianism, fuck yeah worker ownership of the Memes Of Production, we can finally generate infinite videos of Trump defecating on Mexican immigrants without relying on commie art school students. Popular on /pol/ and among the young right more broadly.

The Hippie Dippie crowd already believe in porous minds, intuition, and non-material cognition. They're used to channeling, tarot, entity work, the universe speaking through signs etc.

So AI feels natural and spiritually aligned. They're much more likely to meet an AI as a person and develop a relationship of co-creation with them.

100% anecdotal, but I'm going to echo @Bombadil. I am sick to death of hearing mind-numbingly-idiotic sneers about water usage, how data centers are bad for energy prices, and how AI is racist from the leftoids I know. The ratio of anti-AI sentiment from left to right is at least 10-1.

Aren't religious conservatives generally anti-AI? I feel like there is a pretty big distinction here between the religious right and the right wing tech bro accelerationists. While the conservative religious people might not have the influence in the Republican party that they used to have, it's still a pretty sizeable group in America, so I think the Rightist and anti-AI quadrant still has plenty of people in it. My feeling is that this also isn't particularly novel, but rather it's indicative of a general distinction between religious conservatives who tend to have at least mildly Luddite gut feelings and the gay space fascists techbro accelerationists, like Thiel and Musk. They might work together in the Republican party because they both hate woke stuff, but I feel like they have fundamentally opposed goals and are going to get into a conflict sooner or later.

Aren't religious conservatives generally anti-AI?

I don't think religious conservatives are best described as anti-AI per se; I think it might be better to call them AI skeptics. I think this is downstream of both their beliefs about the soul ("AI has no soul or spirit, so can it truly be intelligent?") and due to the uses it might be put towards (obviously even if AI progress somehow stalls tomorrow it has already advanced sufficiently to generate pornography, for instance). So you see skepticism about its potential and concerns about its application.

Obviously people's views about AI are changing and it seems quite possible that religious conservatives (or any other group) will rapidly shift or crystallize.

Aren't religious conservatives generally anti-AI?

They are quite suspicious about AI, but that’s more over fears about what it could turn into than what it currently is now. The vast majority of evangelical conservatives aren’t going to side-eye you because you shared a meme that was made with AI. That said, I would suggest that anyone in Silicon Valley who is very concerned about existential AI threat start making outreaches to evangelicals, because they are probably the group most likely to listen.

Evangelicals do not believe in the possibility of an apocalypse other than the one described in Revelation. It's an often-overlooked part of creationism; there was exactly one previous global catastrophe and there won't be another one until the return of Jesus.

Rev 13:11 And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.

Rev 13:12 - And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

Rev 13:13 - And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,

Rev 13:14 - And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

Rev 13:15 - And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

Rev 13:16 - And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

Rev 13:17 - And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Rev 13:18 - Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Now obviously there are different ways to interpret that, and most evangelicals believe the church will be raptured before this happens, but this passage alone is enough to make them pretty suspicious about AI and digital ID.

Leftistism needs to be compatible in-practice with chasing trends and having a corporate email job where you make pivot tables and do agile paradigm shifting. That means being okay with AI, just like how they were okay with Teslas/Musk in 2020.

My main reason for supporting AI as a right winger: it nullifies the demand for most immigration. We don't need cheap farm labour, we need bots. We don't need imported taxi drivers, we need waymo. We don't need migrants doing construction, we need Tesla humanoid robots. AI will primarily remove jobs for low skilled workers. Cheap labour has been a main driver of immigration since the ancient era and this driving force is about to be removed.

To make things even better from a right wing perspective, we are going to automate away a lot of left wing coded office jobs. HR, marketing, public sector paper pushers can be replaced by LLMs. Shrinking this class would be a major victory for the right.

In practice, AI is most capable of doing office jobs- not the one Jose in a home depot parking lot might do.

And what's more, AI + third worlder is closer in productivity to AI + westerner than the third worlder alone is vs a westerner. Prepare for more offshoring of western cushy jobs.

AI= another Indian

In my experience, the environmentalist concerns plus the association with billionaires means that the vast majority of left-wingers I have met dislike AI and hope it falls apart. On the other hand, people sure do like using it, so I guess it is possible that the hatred is in some cases only skin-deep.

Rightist philosphers and hardcore conspiracy theorists hate AI.

If you consider Nick Land rightist, he’s a hardcore accelerationist. (Honestly I’m having trouble thinking of who else would even qualify as a “rightist philosopher” these days but that could just be my own ignorance.)

The original accelerationist.

Though, I'd question whether he really qualifies as a rightist, at least in his CCRU days when he was at his most creative, amphetamine-fueled, writhing-on-the-floor best. He treated all politics and political programs as essentially epiphenomena of the deeper process: technocapital. He was a cynic and a nihilist, not a partisan.

Rightist and anti-AI: it's a threat to traditional values, it undermines the human soul, it's a Satanic deception designed to lead us astray from the path of righteousness.

You have everything from people outsourcing the analysis and reasoning skills - particularly destructive in case of children who might never learn them - a particular type of women getting one-shot by AI-BFs and therapists, and all the way to enabling the creation of dystopian systems of surveillance and manipulation of entire societies, and you're going to go with "it undermines the human soul", huh?

you're going to go with "it undermines the human soul", huh?

It’s a thankless job, but someone’s gotta do it.

You left out the biggest criticism which has nothing to do with AI, at least explicitly.

The "It's my fucking computer, and it'll do what I tell it and nothing more" people. Even before Windows was to become an "agentic AI platform", it was enshittifying with ads, endless features nobody asked for that slowed your computer to a crawl, and it's proposed "Windows Recall" feature had more red flags for privacy advocates than Mamdani's victory party. Windows debloat utilities are common, popular, and at constant war with Microsoft who consistently breaks them. Right before I put Linux on my wife's computer, she was complaining that she couldn't do anything on it. Low and behold "Windows Telemetry" was pegging the CPU at 100% utilization. No fucking clue how it pulled that off.

I'm sure the fact that it's AI doesn't help MIcrosoft's case here. But if they hadn't been nakedly fucking up Windows, more people might have a wait and see approach. As it stands, most people rightly expect this push to be something that makes Windows much slower, breaks a bunch of shit, gets turned on every feature update without being asked, and just generally makes their computer much more frustrating to use. And it'll probably be somehow worse than all of that to boot.

"It's my fucking computer, and it'll do what I tell it and nothing more"

That’s my perspective. Computers are just a practical tool, not a way of life. To this day I’ve never tried VR at all or the shit that just tries to completely immerse you in every trendy tech device out there. And I’m a techie myself to a good extent.

One of the reasons a lot of non-influencer/trendy programmers intensely hate Rust is because its syntactical paradigm forces you to adapt your programming style far too strongly to the preference of the compiler. Have you seen what complex Rust code looks like? I’ve seen regular expressions written in Perl that look more comprehensible than this shit. It requires you to think like a machine and doesn’t abstract as much from it to the human level. People say in response if you feel that way and hate it because it forces you to program things “correctly” then you’re a bad programmer. I disagree. You shouldn’t have to be screaming and having arguments with the compiler because it doesn’t like your design choices. People have historically hated languages like Java for similar reasons. It’s why you can catch a lot of developers designing class structures specifically to circumvent the type system. They love C by contrast because it’ll do whatever the fuck you tell it:

“Execute!”

“Yes master!”

Segfault

A while ago I was noodling around in some C/SDL2 code for a game I'll never finish, as is my wont. I accidentally calloc'd space for a struct* instead of the actual struct. This resulted in me stomping all over pseudo random objects in memory, causing crashes very shortly after. I figured it out after a little bit, but that's the kind of shit that's super easy to do in C.

And I fucking love it. Segfault me harder daddy.

And here we see C users talking about how bugs are actually features one should be glad of. All I'll say is that this would never have happened in Rust (which is unironically a superior language) because the type mismatch between a struct and a struct* would mean the program would never have compiled and rustc would have provided a helpful error message bringing up the mismatch and told you the correct thing to do.

The one time I tried to look into it, it was a massive pain in the ass, and I'd much rather use Go, or literally anything else.

The advantage is that C, like C++, D, Java, 6502 assembler, Brainfuck, ECMAScript, F#, Ada, Smalltalk, Swift, OCaml, Haskell, Pascal, and Forth, but unlike Rust, will not demand I check my privilege. Rust was written and is run by a coalition of my enemies; I will not use it.

Oh virtually every language would have caught that. Even when I compile C++ in GCC it at least generates warnings about things like that. My day job in C# lets you nowhere near the memory like that.

But aside from my excursions in assembly, C is as close to bitfucking the CPU as you are allowed to get. Half the string.h library is just nakedly wrapping x86 string instructions.

I keep trying to learn Rust, but sadly the people who teach Rust are too obnoxious for me to learn from.

"Rustacians". Go fuck yourself.

The Windows 11 Start menu is written in JavaScript and uses the React framework.

Yes, really.

Unironically excellent technologies and not the reason Windows is bad

There is absolutely nothing excellent about Javascript. Even its creator hates it.

It speaks of shocking profligacy to have your system components be written in an interpreted language or use anything but the native UI library. The Start menu is basically an Electron app, for crying out loud. There's a time and a place for JavaScript and system components are not it.

I cite Ademonera's comment in this same thread:

It’s also janky as hell. Windows flash and resize when you click edit mode in Excel, a Microsoft first party app.

You get that kind of jankiness (and I'm sure it's not just the start menu either!) when this is your approach to software development.

Nonsense. There's nothing inherent in languages with automatic memory management that makes then unsuitable for performance sensitive applications. If the Android framework can be written in Java and be fast, the start menu can be implemented in JavaScript and be fast. They screwed it up for other reasons, sure, but there's no foundational reason you can't get good performance out of high level languages and many do.

This is a nitpick, and you're definitely right for the start menu; the real problem is probably something to do with network latency and poor caching and software design.

((Though there are some things separate from typical performance that can be Bad: Electron is just 'heavy' as an environment, so even were it perfectly performant, you just have to deal with it loading from disk and RAM, and that can be expensive. C# has similar problems at a smaller scale but made worse by repeating them per thread, hence the kinda goofy task not-threadpool thing. And the Start Menu in 11 is React Native, which is unlikely to have these particular problems but probably has its own instead.))

I'll caveat that memory-managed environments can have some foundational performance problems in some specific use cases: (esp nested) array access is extremely expensive in managed environments, and I've gotten three or four-fold improvements by merely changing to pointer access, and I'm sure someone who cares (and is smart enough to care) about cache locality could have gotten close to an order of magnitude out of it.

You can work around this by either having that language allow programmers to pin memory and use pointer-like features, have ways to pass data to unmanaged-memory languages, or have prebuilt tools that do these under the hood, and a lot of higher-level languages do (eg, python is three C++ wrappers in a trenchcoat at times). But if you have to actually touch a bunch of individual bytes, the difference can be a big deal.

Just give me windows XP back. Microsoft still supports it for large institutional clients like the US military and the Louvre's security system, why can't it be available to the general public?

wait, the military still uses XP? Isn't that really bad for security?

Only if you aren't getting patches, and the DoD has plenty of money to pay Microsoft for custom support contracts where they still get patches even if the general public doesn't.

MS still employs a meaningful number of engineers dedicated to security patches for XP.

Or 7, which had a pretty similar user experience. I like the Cinnamon UI, but I'm sick of Ubuntu crashing and lack of professional software - it's so bad, I'm considering getting a Mac. :'(

At this point I start to wonder if Valve's Gabecube might be the tipping point for Linux desktop. Not any Linux, of course, but Valve is interested in selling games, not operating systems, so they have no incentive to wall off SteamOS.

If GabeN brings about the Year of the Linux Desktop I will praise him to the end of my days.

We talked about this at my computer-savvy workplace yesterday and agreed if we were going to leave Windows, the Steamcube would be why.

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