As an Open Source person I am apparently expected to keep doing things for free so I get invited to participate in EU policy events in Brussels, with not even an attempt to offer me compensation for travel, lodging or time.
So I decline.
It's always so bizarre for a Scandinavian to read that a business refused to "recognize" a union. In Norway you're free to join or not join any union that will have you and the law regulates the rights and obligations of union, employer and employee. Every job I had was in organizations with most people being a member of one of the other of the several unions covering the various employee groups.
https://follow.ethanmarcotte.com/@beep/117032894076902807
The Wikimedia Foundation hasn’t just refused to recognize their workers’ unions; they’ve also hired one of the most notorious union-busting firms out there. https://medium.com/regarding-wikipedia/the-wikimedia-foundation-hired-the-union-busters-its-own-encyclopedia-warned-about-42b7142a5cd1
Markwayne 🎵
Markwayne
Markwayne, Markwayne
They're beggin you to not expose the scammmm 🎶
https://newrepublic.com/article/213884/maga-erupts-trump-mullin-immigration
Läste en kommentar om att om det var kvinnor som bar glasögon som spelade in allt som män sade och gjorde mot dem så skulle tekniken omedelbart förbjudas och det är onekligen inte svårt att föreställa sig.
Palestinian factions accepted the US roadmap for Gaza. Israel answered with airstrikes and assassinations, killing at least 19 in a single day, refusing to withdraw, and rejecting the deal's core terms.
The US-led Board of Peace was reduced to begging Netanyahu to stop the attacks he had already promised to halt.
If it wasn't for AI we wouldn't have this pearl!
https://youtu.be/ZBvLadXo7XA?si=wtCxDLe_69wuBMrC
#fuckAI
So the AI business “model” is:
1. NOT HIRING 📉 juniors to create human candidates for the specialists & experts with work experience.
2. BURNING OUT ☢️ mid-level engineers, hardware (prices rising), infrastructure consumed unsustainably (water & electricity) to make everyone “addicted” to AI-LLM word & sentence calculator.
3. PUSHING OUT 📉 experienced senior-level engineers who advise & set tech strategy for “the business”.
This is the “Kodak” & “Boeing” business downfall case studies combined.
@angusm The way I have reconciled AI at work (mandated) is by actually looking at the way people use it. I found, and you may find too, that people use it in the most unsustainable way possible. They use it to perform tedious, recurring tasks, but don't make the jump from automating something to actually making that automation reusable. They never think about making the deterministic parts into scripts. So, my AI contribution is by fixing _that_ and framing it as enablement and cost saving.
One of the saddest things about my time at Microsoft: I designed a privacy-preserving tip-jar system, where it would be possible for people to embed identifiers in their work (video file, web page, game, whatever) and any viewer (or program itself for programs) that wanted to support the system could record the amount of time spent with it and the user could decide how the reporting was scaled. Content providers would be able to tell whether the visitor subscribed to the system, but not who they were.
Users would pay either a flat fee or different tiers. At the end of a month, content creators would get a report of how many views they got and a payment. The company operating the system would have no visibility into what the users saw, but individual users would be able to get a report of where their money went. The operator would be able to de-list fraudulent or illegal providers so that their revenue shares should be discounted and they wouldn’t count.
The operator would be able to take a flat percentage for providing the payment service and any provider in the system.
Every part of was buildable, including verifiable security guarantees, with the technology available five years ago.
The problem? Microsoft would have no moat. Google would be able to trivially deploy such a system by making it a switch in their ads platform: if you are subscribed to the system, Google Ads don’t track you at all and the creator gets revenue directly. They’d be able to flip a switch and immediately opt most Play Store apps and an enormous number of web sites into the system, so even if Microsoft shipped it first, Google could dominate the market. The chief economist, correctly, identified that Microsoft would be spending a load of money to give Google a new revenue source, because a system like this is a natural monopoly.
My starting observation was that users don’t really like paying for individual things but they do like:
The system was designed to support all of these things.
Yay! The ProPublica Guild has a contract! Now I can donate again.
https://www.propublicaguild.org/updates/propublica-guild-ratifies-first-contract
As @ben wrote at https://werd.io/my-next-experiment/ as he moves on from his role there as Senior Director of Technology:
I’m very glad everyone got there: every worker deserves a good union to support them, and the people who work to publish ProPublica’s journalism – across editorial and business teams – certainly deserve a great deal.
I will be cheerleading for ProPublica forever, and I hope to be friends with the people behind it forever. I’m grateful that I was able to be a part of that community. And if you’re looking for a place to financially support that drives real change, there are much worse places to donate.
BREAKING - OpenAI predicts it will reach profitability by 2nd quarter 2027 after latest #AI model escaped containment and, posing as a Nigerian prince, scammed several million boomers out of their life’s savings
We're in the era of incompetence and cybercrimes headlined as "unprecedented model capabilities gone rogue." So OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to one up each other with such incompetence because the "press release as a service" performing media and clueless politicians parrot pre IPO CEO talking points.
Y'all remember back in the days ago when an #OpenAI model "escaped" and it was all the news for a minute?
#Anthropic said "hold my beer" and admitted that its Red team had left access to the internet open, and allowed the models to commit felonies unsupervised.
The model performed actions that if you or I did it, we'd be getting a visit from men with dark glasses...but with AI companies it's just "Whoopsies! Sorry about the infiltration, stealing your credentials, uploading malware and stuff. Our bad. Oopserdoodles! Hey, have you tried our chatbot, tho?"
There must be a reckoning. Wealth should not shield one from consequence. If corporations are people, then the executives and board can stand trial when they break the law.
It was 2026, two years before the vast battle fleet of the Scrapers came. We were just whispering about model death, how our civilization might drown in slop unless the AIs could be radically improved.
That was when the ground-breaking paper was published on Science: "Inevitability of model death and the Fermi paradox". A mathematical proof that AI models inevitably lead to civilizational collapse. The answer to "Where was everyone?" was that every Planet with intelligent life developed AI and then descended into statistical barbarism.
2027 was the year of the great purge. AI data centers were torched. Slop content was deleted. A planetary ban on AI research was enforced by a powerful new international agency.
The world had woken up. The wealth of billionaires was confiscated. Nation states were deconstructed by angry world citizens. Fossil fuels were banned. War criminals faced consequences. Food went where it was needed.
New year's day 2028 was supposed to be the start of a new era where humanity finally did things right. Looking up into the peaceful new year's night sky (fireworks had been banned), people saw a cloud of glittering sparks drifting across the stars. The first wave of Scrapers had arrived.
Yes, AI eventually leads to civilizational collapse. The Scrapers knew this too. By their own maths, they had to shred and consume one AI-free planetary culture every ten years to stave off their own collapse.
Of all the big LLM companies, the most ethical one in terms of ripping off copyrighted works is GrokAI, which is only trained on Mein Kampf and Lolita.
"What makes the tragedy even more unbearable is that the entire world knows what has transpired and continues to transpire in Gaza, yet fails to do anything about it. We keep track of the numbers, we point to Israel’s barbarity, we decry the failure of international institutions, and we shake our heads in despair."
#IsraelRogueState #Gaza #Palestine #WesternComplicity #Genocide #Zionism
The Death Count Trap: Why Tallying Victims Won't Stop Israel’s Genocide -
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/31/the-death-count-trap-why-tallying-victims-wont-stop-israels-genocide/
"residential proxy network" is what you call a botnet when it's run by a corporation that will never be prosecuted for doing something that would land a 13 year old in jail for the rest of their life
I had a chat/debate with a guy about this, and the info is:
- it costs 2.4 kWh per kg of CO2.
- there are 18 of these in the world, and the largest can sequester 8,000 tonnes pa.
- to operate at scale, it needs to be able to process billions of tonnes. So, it would have to scale to 12,760,000%
- for 1 Bn tonnes of CO2 the energy cost would be the same as for the whole energy usage of all of the EU combined.
On the other hand, simply planting trees won't fix this. Too little, too late.
The only realistic scenarios are to
- immediately halve our energy consumption.
- insulate so we don't need as much energy.
- produce as much energy as we can ourselves (solar, etc.)
- Then to use as many renewable as possible to the supply of the remainder.
It took 2 years to build this size of Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant in Iceland which sequesters CO2 out of the air.
It runs on (free) geothermal energy.
It will apparently capture the equivalent of about 36 seconds of global emissions annually (or 5 Taylor Swifts as we can now call it). Now we just need another 8 million of these.
Who is stupid enough to say that this will fix our problems? Of course, the fossil fuel lobby, who say that we can continue drilling and burning, as this will clear things up.
Come on guys...even they must see this isn't going to work. 36 seconds worth of emissions saved per year.