@darbo
Thanks for the follow! I got you back 🤓

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“What this office is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.”
https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/i-found-a-second-votegov-and-its

Fuq…
“The certificate is dated April 10. DOJ told a federal court the infrastructure does not exist. Both of those cannot be true. Either DOJ lied to a federal judge, or the studio is building a replacement for the country’s voter registration site without telling the agencies whose work it would replace. There is no third option.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/thedreydossier/p/i-found-a-second-votegov-and-its?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

This is solid gold! Common sense at last! Yippeee! #FUAI

“The Munich court found that this reasoning doesn't apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them."

The court also noted that the AI overview is "by no means absolutely necessary" for using the internet. Traditional search results already help users sort through information, the AI overview is just an extra feature.”

https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

#Museums as #protagonists of the #future
There is a vision worth taking seriously: #culturalinstitutions should not arrive at the #SocialWeb as latecomers, following a technological trend. They should arrive as protagonists.
This is what the priorities outlined by @_elena (“I have a dream”), point to: museums, archives, and libraries have a central role in the popularization of the Fediverse—not as trend-followers, but as anchors of trust and reference for the public.
https://brasiliana.museus.gov.br/cultural-heritage-digital-collections-unwelcome-guests-on-social-media-homeowners-on-the-social-web/

Touché

“Russian intelligence services “exploit third-country nationals, diaspora communities, and networks of intermediaries, thereby blurring operational responsibility and hindering counterintelligence responses”.
https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/russia-wants-to-hire-you-to-commit-a-crime

Trump's K-Shaped Economy #ABlueView 🧵1/3

This brilliant cartoon on how your feelings about the current economy depend on your wealth, is from @claybennett.bsky.social.

RE: https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/116694528297027978

Holy shit! You mean Elmo has to prove that his grift is actually making money!?
Hahahahaha!!!

Can you spot the difference?

RE: https://mas.to/@alternativeto/116677638376248172

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Bundists always rejected all forms of ethno-nationalism. As Jews, they had lived in the violence and oppression that always attended every ethno-nationalist program. They never imagined that Israel would escape this fate. As the Bundist leader Henryk Erlich wrote in 1933: "We are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful as the nationalisms of all the other nations."

42/

I’m with Camus on this:
“Albert Camus broke with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French left over the most concrete political question there is: can the people alive today be treated as acceptable casualties in the pursuit of a better future?

Sartre and the Marxists said yes. History has a direction. The revolution requires sacrifice. Camus said no. Any system of thought that subordinates living people to a hypothetical future has already committed the foundational moral error. Once you accept that logic, there is no limiting principle. Any atrocity becomes justifiable. Any amount of present suffering can be rationalized as a necessary input to the glorious output.

This is the structure of the AI acceleration argument.”
https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

“A democratic government that deploys AI to replace its workforce faces electoral consequences. An authoritarian government faces no such constraint and gains a surveillance and control dividend on top of the economic efficiencies. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Singapore: vast capital, centralized decision-making, no electorate to answer to, and an active interest in technologies of control. This is one of the motivating factors in the Valley’s latching on to Trump: he and his cronies can be bought, and as importantly, they have no loyalty to democracy. The economic incentives for AI companies point toward the entities with the fewest democratic accountability mechanisms.”
https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

RE: https://mastodon.social/@CdnCurmudgeon/116663410963609652

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“I see LLMs as a violation of everything that great computing stands for. The AI industry encourages its users to both accept and present low-quality work and demands that they constantly defend the industry from those who would demand better from it. It is inefficient, power-intensive, environmentally destructive, and inherently sold based on things that it might do, providing far more value to scam artists and con men than it does to its end users. “
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/

Ed is really good at ranting. I agree 🤓

“This is why being an AI booster requires you to debase yourself. You must accept becoming a dogshit dealer that loves accepting and receiving low quality goods. You must celebrate intentionless and decaying slop, and defend it and the machine that made it with your entire being. You must sully yourself — treat its unexceptional, sloppy and unreliable outputs as signs of sentience, or at least the proof that digital sentience is possible. You must defend horrible, abrasive, ugly, loud monoliths of steel full of $50,000 graphics cards. You must say they are necessary, and you must aggressively antagonize those who do not. “
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/

“Generative AI is catnip for hall monitors, snitches, toadies, and any other group that hates work and loves talking down to others. Put another way, it ingratiates losers who believe that learning to do or being good at something is a waste of time, because they deserve to just do what they want without any of that messy “effort.” “
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/

Most things people think are bad about AI are actually problems with unregulated capitalism, which naturally transitions into monopoly and feudalism.