Today's book haul.

#Bookstodon

Australia is currently doing a parliamentary inquiry into the thing the tech bros are calling Artificial Intelligence. Submissions have just closed. There are five hundred and eleven like it, but this one is mine.

https://ooze.net/submitting-to-ai/

#AI #Australia #auspol

Help me fediverse. I seek a replacement for this broken part. Do any of you know where to obtain this item?

#sewing #craft

https://haepetitions.parliament.tas.gov.au/haepet/Home/PetitionDetails/148?title=Petition%20Details

Please consider signing this petition about smoke pollution by forestry in Tasmania

#tasmania

https://gizmodo.com/pbs-station-sues-to-regain-access-to-70-years-of-archival-tv-history-2000798323

A reminder that cloud storage is just someone else's computer.

the unfortunate fact of the matter is that my students are likely way, way more open to this information than my bosses are

editing in a source link. orig seems to be paywalled FT:
https://futurism.com/future-society/college-critical-thinking-ai

Please consider signing this petition against Pauline Hanson. https://www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/pauline-hanson

#auspol

Why you should stop donating to wikipedia.

TLDR; They are loaded with cash. They took your donations and still sold wikipedia to AI companies. They are sacking workers who try to unionise. They fired the people who most know how wikipedia actually works.

"The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses. The Wikimedia Endowment, a separate fund, sits on $169.4 million in net assets, up $25 million in a single year. Wikimedia Enterprise, the team that provides high speed, high volume API access to AI labs, just turned profitable on $8.3 million in revenue, a 148% jump from the prior year... The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank. Revenue diversifying, not shrinking. They can afford six engineers. Whatever this fight is about, it is not about money."

As if wikipedia selling the work of volunteers to AI companies was not enough, now they are coming for the workers.

"In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications."

If you have a wikipedia account you can sign the solidarity petition here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_solidarity#Signatures

https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943

#wikipedia

Going to be putting Graphene on a Pixel 10 today. Wish me luck.

Stop Hiring Humans billboards reportedly being put up from San Francisco to New York City. The company behind the ads is a San Francisco based startup that builds glorified chatbot sales reps.

These employees aren't employees.

Let's use this shot for the next Tasmanian tourism promotion. Fun fact: Forestry and Tas Fire are exempted from air pollution laws in Tasmania.

#tasmania #forestry #Australia

#fabric If anyone knows a method to remove mould from fabric I will suddenly not be having a very bad day. Please say it is so.

Technology and Nature by @spanin

"This semester I taught Religion, Technology, and Magic at Rice – a course that explores how these connected and contested categories have been interplaying historically. A recurring theme of this course was the double position of technology as, at the same time, a reflection of our worldviews and the inspiration for the ways in which people perceive reality. Technologies mimic nature. However, what engineers try to reproduce is never nature itself but rather a specific understanding of nature at a given moment of time within given cultural constraints. At times, new technologies can cross this constraints inspiring a worldview shift."

Read the rest at: https://academia.fzrw.info/en/archives/2486

#technology #magic #religion #history

I had to euthanize my dear friend Black Betty today. Here are her first and last photos. She lived to be thirteen years and five months old and leaves behind a large family.

@shlee Are you guys still using Discord for your moderation? If so do you plan to continue using it?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-voice-assistant-lawsuit-settlement-68-million/ Oh, how surprising. (not) Google voice assistant is listening to more than they claimed and is serving you ads based on your conversations.

A wall of smoke working its way down and filling the entire Huon valley. Brought to you by the state sponsored environmental destruction and pollution machine.

Tasmania: Beautiful one day. On fire the next.

I am seeing a lot of tourism ads for the US at the moment. Never seen a single one ever before. I wonder what could be making their tourism industry desperate enough to make ads now? 🤔

Does anyone know why Mastodon might display a partial image as it downloads the image in a post but once fully downloaded the image will turn black?