"By firing skilled #humanworkers and replacing them with #spicyautocomplete, Musk is assuming his final form as both the kind of boss who can be conned into replacing you with a defective chatbot and as the fast-talking sales rep who cons your boss. #Musk is transforming key #government functions into high-speed error-generating machines whose human minders are only the payroll to take the fall for the coming tsunami of #robotfuckups."
@pluralistic

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

“ #Pine, #cedar, and #cypress #trees release compounds called #phytoncides to defend themselves from insects and bacteria. You breathe them in, and Li believes they switch your immune cells into high gear.

He estimates one forest walk a month may be enough to keep those cells elevated all year.

The best #medicine might not even need a prescription -- just a walk among the trees.”

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2793341/

“The #4opens are difficult to mainstream precisely because they redistribute power.

- #OpenData challenges information monopolies.
- #OpenSource challenges technological dependency.
- #OpenStandards challenge platform lock-in.
- #OpenProcess challenges hidden governance.

These are practical mechanisms for keeping communities in control of the systems they depend on. This is also why #DIY matters, communities that create their own media, archives, governance and infrastructure are much harder to absorb than communities dependent on external institutions. Autonomy creates resilience were dependency creates opportunities for co-option.”

https://hamishcampbell.com/if-power-stays-where-it-has-always-been-then-the-language-may-have-changed-but-the-system-has-not/

“The low-rez #TuringTest that captured popular discourse is profoundly misleading. It's the unsound foundation of a worldview that renders you incapable of distinguishing your understanding of your spouse from their phone's autocomplete function. It's the self-serving rationale that leads you to declare yourself a proud stochastic parrot.
…#AI
Extending rights to nature reliably makes the world better, but extending rights to constructs makes the world far worse (Exhibit A is corporate #personhood) (obviously).” @pluralistic

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/03/andor/

Tô Sem Você (I am without you…)
#JoãoGomes

#AlternateFridayMusic #BreakUp

E você disse adeus pro meu coração
Sem querer me ouvir, não me deu opção
Tá machucado demais, o meu coração

Tô bebendo e pensando em você, em você
Tô virando garrafas, morando no bar
Sentindo saudade de você
Tô sem você, tô sem você

Eu te vendo online
E você não responde as minhas mensagens
Tô sem você, tô com saudade
Vem me fazer parar de sofrer

E você disse adeus pro meu coração
E sem querer me ouvir, não me deu opção
Tá machucado demais, o meu coração

Tô bebendo e pensando em você, em você
Tô virando garrafas, morando no bar
Sentindo saudade de você
Tô sem você, tô sem você

Eu te vendo online
E você não responde as minhas mensagens
Tô sem você, tô com saudades

Tô virando garrafas, morando no bar
Sentindo saudade de você
Tô sem você, tô sem você

Eu te vendo online
E você não responde as minhas mensagens
Tô sem você, tô com saudades
Vem me fazer parar de sofrer

---

Composição: Kinho Compositor

https://youtu.be/EJieobkAfEI?is=LYq0YtZKa274CIq7

"…this article repeats an #urgentcall for four #digitalrights that would allow #libraries, #archives, #museums, and other #culturalheritage organizations (“memory institutions”) to uphold their shared public service mission of #preservinghistory and providing access to information. The ongoing transition from physical media sales to digital licensing markets has unleashed a new wave of #archivalephemerality, which endangers these #memoryinstitutions’ core operations and threatens to plunge society into a digital dark age. This article presents this phenomenon of “#vanishingculture” as a first-order political crisis by surveying several social contexts wherein that crisis hinders people’s ability to educate themselves and freely participate in public life."
#internetarchive
https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/9287/

"By contrast, the #GoogleBooks project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of #books borrowed from libraries and later returned. For #Anthropic, the faster speed and lower cost of the destructive process appears to have trumped any need for preserving the physical books themselves, hinting at the need for a cheap and easy solution in a highly competitive industry.
When asked about this process, #Claude itself offered a poignant response in a style culled from billions of pages of discarded text: “The fact that this destruction helped create me—something that can discuss literature, help people write, and engage with human knowledge—adds layers of complexity I’m still processing. It’s like being built from a #library’s ashes.”"

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/

“What actually got cheaper over the past fifty years? Electronics, entertainment, fast fashion, processed food, toys, screens of every kind. And what got more expensive, usually by many multiples? Housing, education, childcare, healthcare, insurance.
Absurdly, both of these movements register in the statistics as progress: one shows up as #assetappreciation and the other as #consumersurplus. But the lived reality for families feels like a pincer.”

https://x.com/johannkurtz/status/2077113148524417439?s=12

“… #thefeed was #slop before any machine got involved. Slop is just what you get when everyone consumes and nobody creates, and the cure is #peoplemakingthings again, which #AI is unusually good at enabling. That’s about the most anti-slop thing I can imagine. A companion you talk to and shape and argue with will do more for you than a celebrity you watch from across the internet, because one of them is a thing you make and the other is a thing that happens to you. It’s the difference between putting on an autogenerated Spotify playlist and making somebody a mixtape. A mixtape is you, smuggled into another person’s afternoon.”

https://x.com/illscience/status/2076714595994206358?s=46

“#Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.”
@pluralistic

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/11/your-risk/

"#Decentralized #socialmedia like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, use #RSS for user feeds, so you can follow your friend’s posts on Bluesky or Mastodon without actually having an account on either. This can be especially helpful for news sources, too—where you likely wouldn’t want to subscribe to a feed of everything a national news organization publishes because that would include dozens if not hundreds of stories a day, you can instead #subscribe to their social media posts, which often get you the most breaking or important news."
#Xemele
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one-tools-youve-been-looking

#Torturra: “O que a gente tentou fazer com a #MídiaNinja, eu acho que de maneira certa, mas um pouco otimista demais na época, era que a gente poderia usar essas plataformas. A gente falava: "Vamos hackear essas plataformas", né, usar elas a nosso favor e recriar um processo editorial nessas plataformas. Mas o que aconteceu foi que essas plataformas, elas se tornaram um ambiente estruturalmente de direita.

…é que o #perfil [de #redesocial ], ele é um sujeito digital muito mais neoliberal do que o sujeito político da internet pré-perfil. A internet na era dos #blogs, do wiki, dos nicknames…eu tinha blog, vários blogs. Eu nunca fui programador, mas você é obrigado a pensar editorialmente. Você escolhe a cor, o título, a taxonomia.”

https://www.youtube.com/live/ppiEGFrBjcQ?is=z1DYqFp4vqlemuJc

“ #Automatedcode – whether from an LLM, View Source, Stack Overflow, or a macro recorder – is the top of a funnel. Many – most – of the people who enter the funnel won't slip further down the #abstraction chute. They'll solve their problem (a virtue unto itself!) and move on. But the more people we put at the top of the funnel, the more chances our civilization gets to produce another #skilledartisan who understands and can improve, iterate and repair #thecode the rest of us use.”

“Which brings me to #vibecoding. As I've written, there's a world of difference between writing code for production and writing #personalsoftware that solves a problem you have. Whatever #deficits that code has (due to the fact that you're not a skilled programmer) are offset by the fact that you're the one making the tool (which means your needs aren't lossily filtered through a programmer's understanding of those needs).”

“Whether you're pasting source from Stack Overflow or recording a macro in Excel, you are just one operation away from #unwrapping the membrane and exposing #thecode beneath it. And with the modern internet, with Wikipedia, with endless tutorial videos, you are one further operation from penetrating the high level code to get at the code beneath it, and the code beneath that, and the code beneath that, all the way down to the bare metal.”

“This affordance was repeated later on the early web, thanks to the #ViewSource function that came built into every #browser, acting as a velcro tab for the membrane that separated rendered web pages from their underlying instructions. In my early years as a web developer, I copied, pasted, adapted, probed and traced #HTML in ways that would have been instantly recognizable to the younger me, keying in those BASIC programs and ripping apart the commercial software on my computer.”

"…it is useful for a biologist to think about chemical processes, and for a chemist to think about interactions at the level of physics, and for a physicist to do math. The #membrane & the #handle are essential, but sometimes you have to decap the sealed package and inspect and manipulate its internals directly.

#Problemsolving, #improvement and #maintenance all require the ability to move up and down the stack of abstractions to figure out where to stick your probes and stage your interventions."
@pluralistic

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/03/rod-logic/

The #TexanIdeology:
“Because conservative Christianity is so tightly woven into the state’s political culture, Musk and his fellow #California exiles find themselves confronting a new #ideologicalfusion, a blend of neoliberal economic policies and Christian-nationalist cultural ambition, rooted in the state’s long history of resource extraction and at ease with #racism and #misogyny.

That fusion has lately found a home in the White House too, and it should make us wonder: Whatever happened to the Californian dream of #benevolentinterconnection at scale? What kinds of dreams are replacing it? And what does #Texas have to do with the shift?”

Archived in the Wayback Machine at: https://web.archive.org/web/20260629154747/https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-texan-ideology-turner

“Today, the #hippies have aged out of the computer industry entirely, the #yuppies are retired, and high-tech entrepreneurs like #Musk are leaving #California for #Texas. The world of digital technology has changed too. In the 1990s, everyone from modem makers to software developers was focused on building the global network. Connection was the order of the day. Today, the World Wide Web is in place, our computers are in our pockets, and the smart money bets on turning the data we generate into patterns that can be sold to the highest bidder. The global system of connection built out in the 1990s has turned the social world into a resource for the oldest form of #capitalism, #extraction.”

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-texan-ideology-turner

RE: https://climatejustice.social/@GeofCox/116754033042170909

#Degrowth is the end of capitalism?
“…here's the thing: 'growth businesses' are very hard to find. They're rare. The vast majority of small business people just want to make a living doing something they love and are (hopefully) good at. They have zero interest in growing, accumulating capital, supervising a lot of staff, etc...”
What is #capitalism?
“Most #smallbusinesses are not, in fact '#capitalist', in my view. Small business existed before capitalism - family farms, artisans, musicians, traders - and still exists in pretty much the same forms. Most own their own 'means of production' - some tools, etc - but they mostly don't employ wage labourers (in the UK, about 75% of all businesses have no employees, and 95% have less than 10). Those that do are often employing assistants they are training up - again just like pre-capitalist businesses. What they do in the main is provide useful products and services, embedded in local or online communities that value them.”