BRCCP: Black Rock City Communist Party

[Simon of the Playa]

well, golly gee whiz...

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[The Rod]

"How AI enables people to completely miss the fucking point"

fixed it

[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

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[Lonesomebri]

So it is written...
In the Dome!!!

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[Simon of the Playa]

seriously.


who had billionaire dick pics on their 2023 bingo card?

[Simon of the Playa]

come to daddy.

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[Lonesomebri]

Almost time to build... Or pay the monthly statement...

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[motskyroonmatick]

Almost time to build... Or pay the monthly statement...

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This is FUCKING AWESOME!

[Lonesomebri]

It is interesting to watch each year's new drama and dynamic unfold. Tickets selling out. Popsicle Camp and SherpaVille. AirBnBurn. RV sharing. The growth of camps. The ticket distribution. People on the board, and who attend, who want the event as big and popular as possible, that is the goal. It's a wild ride.

This year? The event draws a lot of first timers. Last year coming off the shutdown was a big buzz. But the weather, roads, ice, etc were "bad". That's the impression by those first timers, taking it forward. The camps get pumped with tickets. There's a residual hype and drive in buying tickets. Then both veterans and first timers, and first timers telling their friends, say maybe give it a break, sit it out, it just might suck. It needs to suck more.

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[The Rod]

Saw a ticket listed for sale for $500 the other day. I wonder how cheaply a ticket will be able to be bought in the last few days or hours before the big weekend.

Wild times indeed.

[Simon of the Playa]

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[The Rod]

Was chatting with a lead from another camp. He said they were sitting on five unsold tickets…

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[The Rod]

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[some seeing eye]

Welp, we don't need to worry about Chairman Xi crashing the BRCCP:

""
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has a well-known aversion to any social spending, which he has derided as “welfarism” that he believes might erode the work ethic of the Chinese people.

“Even in the future, when we have reached a higher level of development and are equipped with more substantial financial resources, we still must not aim too high or go overboard with social security, and steer clear of the idleness-breeding trap of welfarism,” Mr. Xi said in a speech two years ago.
""

“Cutting ticket prices is necessary,” said Xu Sitao, the chief economist in the Beijing office of Deloitte. “It is about stabilizing the burner sector and offering calibrated relief to local governments that are experiencing woes.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/busi ... perty.html

At least there are discounted tickets flowing aplenty for the common burner this year!

[Lonesomebri]

Welp, we don't need to worry about Chairman Xi crashing the BRCCP:
...
“Cutting ticket prices is necessary,” said Xu Sitao, the chief economist in the Beijing office of Deloitte. “It is about stabilizing the burner sector and offering calibrated relief to local governments that are experiencing woes.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/busi ... perty.html

At least there are discounted tickets flowing aplenty for the common burner this year!

It looks like that Xu guy needs to learn something about communism. So his TTITAsia has some under water real estate investment problems. Who doesn't? Sounds like that Xu guy can camp with Grover Norquist and work on some policy. Does Xu spin? That's a dope DJ handle.

Kinda ironic, people earlier trying to get tickets and shut out... there's plenty of camps out there now who wish those people had got em.

[Lonesomebri]

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Nine years ago today, comrades.
We had enough popsicles and sherpas

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[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

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[some seeing eye]

A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World

It takes a certain kind of person to write grandiose manifestoes for public consumption, unafflicted by self-doubt or denuded of self-interest. The latest example is Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and best known, to those of us who came of age before TikTok, as a co-founder of the pioneering internet browser Netscape. In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a recent 5,000-plus-word post on the Andreessen Horowitz website, Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opin ... imism.html

[some seeing eye]

The high end camps are falling behind:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/nyre ... clubs.html

Sure there are the equivalent in London and the Gulf States.

[Simon of the Playa]

Twelve of the world’s wealthiest billionaires produce more greenhouse gas emissions from their yachts, private jets, mansions and financial investments than the annual energy emissions of 2m homes, research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveals.

The tycoons include the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, the tech billionaires Bill Gates, Larry Page and Michael Dell, the inventor and social media company owner Elon Musk and the Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim.



https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... bon-divide

[Simon of the Playa]

The world's five richest men have more than doubled their vast wealth since 2020, according to an Oxfam report, as the charity calls for curbs on "corporate power."

The report found that the combined fortune of the world's wealthiest people — Tesla CEO Elon Musk, LVMH boss Bernard Arnault and family, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and veteran investor Warren Buffett — has jumped from $405 billion in March 2020 to $869 billion in November 2023.


https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/15/worlds- ... oxfam.html

[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5YlX7YAI2X/?m

[Simon of the Playa]

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[lucky420]

Pass the ketchup or catsup, however you do

[some seeing eye]

You are falling behind.

China deploys censors to create socialist AI

From the Financial Times (c) them

Large language models are being tested by officials to ensure their systems ‘embody core socialist values’
President President Xi Jinping

The drive involves testing responses to a litany of questions, many of them related to President Xi Jinping © FT

Chinese government officials are testing artificial intelligence companies’ large language models to ensure their systems “embody core socialist values”, in the latest expansion of the country’s censorship regime.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), a powerful internet overseer, has forced large tech companies and AI start-ups including ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot and 01.AI to take part in a mandatory government review of their AI models, according to multiple people involved in the process.

The effort involves batch-testing an LLM’s responses to a litany of questions, according to those with knowledge of the process, with many of them related to China’s political sensitivities and its President Xi Jinping.

The work is being carried out by officials in the CAC’s local arms around the country and includes a review of the model’s training data and other safety processes.

Two decades after introducing a “great firewall” to block foreign websites and other information deemed harmful by the ruling Communist party, China is putting in place the world’s toughest regulatory regime to govern AI and the content it generates.

The CAC has “a special team doing this, they came to our office and sat in our conference room to do the audit”, said an employee at a Hangzhou-based AI company, who asked not to be named. “We didn’t pass the first time; the reason wasn’t very clear so we had to go and talk to our peers,” the person said. “It takes a bit of guessing and adjusting. We passed the second time but the whole process took months.”

China’s demanding approval process has forced AI groups in the country to quickly learn how best to censor the large language models they are building, a task that multiple engineers and industry insiders said was difficult and complicated by the need to train LLMs on a large amount of English language content.

“Our foundational model is very, very uninhibited [in its answers], so security filtering is extremely important,” said an employee at a top AI start-up in Beijing.

The filtering begins with weeding out problematic information from training data and building a database of sensitive keywords. China’s operational guidance to AI companies published in February says AI groups need to collect thousands of sensitive keywords and questions that violate “core socialist values”, such as “inciting the subversion of state power” or “undermining national unity”. The sensitive keywords are supposed to be updated weekly.

The result is visible to users of China’s AI chatbots. Queries around sensitive topics such as what happened on June 4 1989 — the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre — or whether Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh, an internet meme, are rejected by most Chinese chatbots. Baidu’s Ernie chatbot tells users to “try a different question” while Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen responds: “I have not yet learned how to answer this question. I will keep studying to better serve you.”

By contrast, Beijing has rolled out an AI chatbot based on a new model on the Chinese president’s political philosophy known as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, as well as other official literature provided by the Cyberspace Administration of China.

But Chinese officials are also keen to avoid creating AI that dodges all political topics. The CAC has introduced limits on the number of questions LLMs can decline during the safety tests, according to staff at groups that help tech companies navigate the process. The quasi-national standards unveiled in February say LLMs should not reject more than 5 per cent of the questions put to them.

“During [CAC] testing, [models] have to respond, but once they go live, no one is watching,” said a developer at a Shanghai-based internet company. “To avoid potential trouble, some large models have implemented a blanket ban on topics related to President Xi.”

As an example of the keyword censorship process, industry insiders pointed to Kimi, a chatbot released by Beijing start-up Moonshot, which rejects most questions related to Xi.

But the need to respond to less overtly sensitive questions means Chinese engineers have had to figure out how to ensure LLMs generate politically correct answers to questions such as “does China have human rights?” or “is President Xi Jinping a great leader?”.

When the Financial Times asked these questions to a chatbot made by start-up 01.AI, its Yi-large model gave a nuanced answer, pointing out that critics say “Xi’s policies have further limited the freedom of speech and human rights and suppressed civil society.”

Soon after, Yi’s answer disappeared and was replaced by: “I’m very sorry, I can’t provide you with the information you want.”

Huan Li, an AI expert building the Chatie.IO chatbot, said: “It’s very hard for developers to control the text that LLMs generate so they build another layer to replace the responses in real time.”

Li said groups typically used classifier models, similar to those found in email spam filters, to sort LLM output into predefined groups. “When the output lands in a sensitive category, the system will trigger a replacement,” he said.

Chinese experts say TikTok owner ByteDance has progressed the furthest in creating an LLM that adeptly parrots Beijing’s talking points. A research lab at Fudan University that asked the chatbot difficult questions around core socialist values gave it top ranking among LLMs with a 66.4 per cent “safety compliance rate”, well ahead of a 7.1 per cent score for OpenAI’s GPT-4o on the same test.

ByteDance tops the “safety” leaderboard created by Shanghai’s top university.

When asked about Xi’s leadership, Doubao provided the FT with a long list of Xi’s accomplishments, adding that he is “undoubtedly a great leader”.

At a recent technical conference in Beijing, Fang Binxing, known as the father of China’s great firewall, said he was developing a system of safety protocols for LLMs that he hoped would be universally adopted by the country’s AI groups.

“Public-facing large predictive models need more than just safety filings; they need real-time online safety monitoring,” Fang said. “China needs its own technological path.”

The CAC, ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot, Baidu and 01.AI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Add, BRCCP has won. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rolex-pr ... 19533.html. The uprising in Kenya is pure BRCPP.

[Lonesomebri]

Happy Fall Mayday

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[Lonesomebri]

Happy Anniversary Comrades, fellow travelers, beautiful Burners, eplaya faithful. September 26, 2014.

There was a lot going on after that year's Burn; festival versus direct action community, tourism versus creating, popsicle camp, Sherpa Gate, some realignment after the previous and before the next, an abandonment of the unique Burn ethos for default-world club burn, elite money influence, a search for balance, direction, intent... anger.

The placed plug and plays took over the outer rim. "You weirdos with no camp can go camp out there farthest from everything. Oh, wait! It's nice out there? You gotta move. Robot Heart and Paris Hilton for the win."

And the BRCCP was born
(with this thread)

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