Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹

Technical Writer @ UJET.cx (Portugal). PhD in Communication Sciences (ISCTE-IUL). Past: technology journalist, blogger & communication researcher.

#TechnicalWriting #WebDev #WebDevelopment #OpenSource #FLOSS #SoftwareDevelopment #IP #PoliticalEconomy #Communication #Media #Copyright #Music #Cities #Urbanism

Public Key

npub1pwuvltfvfme0d987k6rs3an6jnv9k2w32zqdlqt5hpy9u3cmv6ps2r95z7

NIP-05 Address

remixtures@tldr-nettime-org.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqhwx045kyauhkjnltdpcg7eaffkzm98g4pqxls96tsjz7gudkdqcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qn8p3n5

Publishing to

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub1pwuvltfvfme0d987k6rs3an6jnv9k2w32zqdlqt5hpy9u3cmv6ps2r95z7

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-08-06 23:17:47 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…n00n Critical thinking has left the building. Is everyone in the U.S. going mad? It seems to me, judging by this whole hysteria anti-AI and pro-AI. I'm just tired of it. Just use the tools that you think work best for you but just don't be judgemental. Human output is also full of slop. Just because it was created by a human being, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be reviewed in the sense of improving it. The exact same thing is valid for any AI output!! Just don't use lame excuses to justify a reactionary and conservative position towards technology. Being anti-AI is not progressive nor emancipatory if you just avoid all the time getting your feet wet by using the tools and experimenting a lot. It just shows you lack the exact same critical thinking you accuse pro-AI people of lacking.

2026-08-04 08:26:31 UTC

"It seems as if we are in what often happens toward the final phases of a speculative time in the markets, what might be called a bubble, which is characterized by absolutely wild, insane swings in stock prices. These are not penny stocks; these are humongous massive cap tech stocks. Apple is down 10% today simply because they warned that their next quarter might not be as good as expected because memory and other component prices are so high. You have IBM losing more value in a single day after its last earnings warning than it had lost since Black Monday 1987. You have these massive tech stocks, which represent most of the value of the stock market, acting like penny stocks, and that tends not to be a great sign. That's usually when investors don't know what to make of the current state of things and are trying desperately to figure out where to put their money. There's a lot of tea leaf reading. It has varied widely. Meta, investors didn't like what Meta was saying. Their cash flow decreased dramatically because of the capex spending they're doing to build new data centers. Everybody freaked out on that and there was a big sell-off."
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/the-ai-bubble-is-already-popping-we-just-dont-know-it-yet/5282004
#AI #AIBubble #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIHype #BigTech

2026-08-03 10:03:55 UTC

""How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves:
(...)
Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput:
(...)
An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't "100x" your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.
That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a "token-maximization" scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't "sufficiently AI." When they set out to do a project, no one makes them prove that it couldn't be "done by AI."
As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't "what it does," but "who it does it for" and "who it does it to.""
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Chatbots #AIAgents #LLMs #AIBubble #AIHype #SoftwareDevelopment

2026-07-23 21:28:58 UTC

LoL:
“Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.
But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found. Some are former military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than minimum wage for the work.
“We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell,” said one current escort who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, fearing professional repercussions.
The system has been in place for nearly a decade, though its existence is being reported publicly here for the first time.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers
#USA #CyberSecurity #Microsoft #DoD

2026-07-18 10:10:36 UTC

Only a fool would deny that... I'm getting tired of all this anti-AI bullshit. It's just a very efficient automation tool with specific affordances that can be well used or badly used. OK, there are still some hiccups in terms of efficiency but this is mostly an engineering problem together with an illiteracy problem from the part of some users.
"The Star Wars director, George Lucas, has added his voice to the growing chorus of film-makers receptive to the rising use of AI tools in moviemaking.
Speaking in an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas, 82, said: “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies.”
Resistance to the technology, he said, was “very much like sitting here saying: ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’”
Adoption of such tools, continued Lucas, was an inevitability. “There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
Lucas is not the only director of a Star Wars film to have come out in favour of AI. The British film-maker Gareth Edwards, who made Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and most recently Jurassic World Rebirth said generative AI “is a fucking genius at helping you”."
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/15/george-lucas-likens-ai-sceptics-to-luddites-clinging-to-horses-and-carts
#AI #GenerativeAI #Luddites #NeoLuddites #AntiAI #Film #Movies #Cinema

2026-07-16 04:16:01 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…u7p7 Sorry but, when it comes to AI, your analogies are crap. We are talking about technologies, not human beings. The danger here is of falling into just an inverse form of fetishism. Cars and motor vehicles "kill" people all the time. Yet, we mostly agree that they're not only useful, but also convenient. I would rather prefer if people just use way more public collective transportation - just like I would prefer if people would use way more "open weights" and even "open source" models. But that would require for governments to not believe so much in the efficiency of the market. This has got nothing to do with morality and ethics but everything to do with an economic and social model that doesn't give a damn about anything that is not for profit or at least has a great likelihood of becoming profitable. As such, people end up offloading everything - their means of transportation, their way of feeding themselves, and even their reasoning (LLMs).

2026-07-01 20:34:29 UTC

“Google wants a look at your hands before it lets you through. The company’s newest reCAPTCHA check, rolling out now as a test, asks you to switch on your camera and wave at it so an algorithm can decide whether you’re a human or a bot.
That wave is less casual than it looks. The system records a short video of your hand and pulls 21 hand-landmark coordinates from it, mapping your finger joints, your palm geometry, and the way you move in real time.
Google describes the purpose as liveness detection, a way for websites to fend off automated account creation, credential-stuffing, and other fraud. But this is still a biometric scan, collected so you can prove you’re a person and still involves turning on your cameras for Google.”
https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand
#Google #ReCAPTCHA #Biometrics #Privacy

2026-06-29 22:53:46 UTC

- reply

"France is hotter than the Sahara. What more polite wording do we need? The truth is that climate change is no longer a future threat. It’s a present-tense force reshaping the world. It’s in our classrooms, power grids, hospitals, farms, forests, oceans and homes. It’s in the silence where birds used to be. It’s in the heat stored in concrete at midnight. It’s in the river water too warm to cool a power station. It’s in the child trying to concentrate in a classroom never designed for 40 degrees.
The real danger isn’t only that these events are happening. It’s that we’re learning to live with them. Not by adapting in the serious, science-based, justice-based sense. But by emotionally accommodating them. Politically absorbing them. Lowering our expectations. Shrinking our imaginations. Forgetting what abundance felt like. Forgetting what safety felt like. Forgetting that this was preventable.
We need to remember what normal was, not because the past was perfect, but because memory is resistance"

2026-06-29 22:29:39 UTC

"France is currently glowing red with heat. Not metaphorically. Literally. Land surface temperatures in parts of the country have been recorded at levels more commonly associated with the Sahara Desert.
France. The country of vineyards, alpine villages, stone farmhouses, rivers, forests and temperate European summers. Looking like the Sahara. That should stop us in our tracks.
The real story isn’t that France is having a heatwave. It’s that climate change is making places behave like somewhere else. Places are beginning to lose the climate that shaped their buildings, their farms, their infrastructure, their ecosystems, their communities, cultures and expectations of normal life.
France isn’t built for the Sahara. Its schools, homes, hospitals, railways, power stations and aged-care facilities weren’t designed for repeated extreme heat. Its rivers weren’t meant to run so hot that nuclear power stations have to reduce output because cooling water is too warm. Its classrooms weren’t meant to become dangerous places for children to sit exams."
https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/france-is-hotter-than-the-sahara-this-is-everyone-s-warning
#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #France #Europe

2026-06-17 23:15:14 UTC

Isto é basicamente o modelo de "negócios" da grande maioria das empresas de TI em Portugal...
"Ao longo dos últimos anos, a Unbabel foi amealhando dinheiro do PRR, a famosa «bazuca» que supostamente iria garantir uma economia mais resiliente. Ao todo, estava previsto receber um financiamento de 14,8 milhões de euros, sendo que recebeu 89,6% deste, ou seja, 13,3 milhões.
A projecção da empresa era tal que esta chegou a liderar um dos consórcios de inteligência artificial financiados pelo PRR, com 75 milhões de fundos comunitários. Este sua liderança chegou ao fim após a compra da Unbabel pela americana TransPerfect, empresa de tradução norte-americana. Ao ECO, jornal que lidera o número de notícias sobre a empresa, Vasco Pedro, cofundador e CEO da Unbabel, disse que a operação iria permitir aumentar significativamente a escala da empresa.
A operação aconteceu a Agosto de 2025 e essa entrevista de Vasco Pedro foi em Agosto do mesmo ano. Acontece que, passado um mês, o ECO noticiou que a «Venda da Unbabel por “valor relativamente baixo” gerou “perda total” para muitos investidores». «Com perspetivas "pouco animadoras" e uma queda de 50% no volume de negócios, a Unbabel foi vendida por "um valor relativamente baixo". Alguns investidores perderam tudo», pode ler-se na peça.
Já em Dezembro de 2025 soube-se que o fundo espanhol Buenavista Equity Partners, investidor da Unbabel, intentou uma acção contra a venda da startup à TransPerfect no valor de 12,75 milhões de euros.
(...)
Acontece que a abertura de investigação por parte do IAPMEI só surge depois da notícia que veio confirmar todas as suspeitas: a Unbabel tinha pedido insolvência no Tribunal Judicial da Comarca de Lisboa. «No Tribunal Judicial da Comarca de Lisboa, Juízo de Comércio de Lisboa – Juiz 2 de Lisboa, no dia 10 de março de 2026, pelas 16h40, foi proferida sentença de declaração de insolvência da devedora: Unbabel, Lda», lê-se na sentença."
https://www.abrilabril.pt/nacional/startup-que-recebeu-133-milhoes-de-euros-do-prr-abriu-falencia
#Portugal #PRR #Startups #Unbabel

2026-06-10 14:23:35 UTC

"The world’s largest banks committed $906bn in financing to the fossil fuel industry last year, an “unfathomable” increase in investment locking in years more of coal, oil and gas production as the world continues to overheat, a new report has found.
The surge in new fossil fuel lending, up $64bn or nearly 8% on 2024, shows that the world’s largest 65 banks are making decisions incompatible with international agreements to restrain rising global temperatures, according to the coalition of environmental groups behind the new analysis.
JPMorgan Chase is again the world’s leading financier of fossil fuels, according to the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report, after pushing $58bn to the sector last year – up 13% from 2024.
Bank of America committed the second largest amount to fossil fuels last year, followed by Japanese banks MUFG and Mizuho Financial. Citigroup, another US bank, rounds out the top five, with Barclays, at number eight, the highest placed British bank."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/09/world-banks-pledge-billions-fossil-fuel-industry-2025
#FossilFuels #ClimateChange #CarbonEmissions #Banks #Finance

2026-05-26 21:53:44 UTC

"Organizations aren’t burning millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year on AI because it’s good, they’re doing it because they are run by people who do not know what the fuck they’re doing.
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.”
While I’m not saying every LLM user is an imbecile, they’re built to convince the mediocre and incurious that they’re remarkable, and it turns out that a great many of them run venture capital firms and Fortune 500 companies.
I also want to be clear that while there are sane and normal people who use these things, they’re mostly drowned out by a crowd of people that oscillate between bootlicking and regurgitating capitalist mythology in a way that makes it hard to trust anybody who spends significant amounts of time using an LLM.
One thing you’ll notice about the most moistened AI boosters is that they lack much degree of pride in their work. Everything they say must, at some point, compliment the mindless, unprofitable, unreliable tool underneath it — how “incredibly powerful” it is, how it’s “only getting better,” how it’s “only the beginning” of something that’s eaten over a trillion dollars and absorbed the majority of venture capital."
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIBullshit #AIBubble #AIHype #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

2026-05-17 13:23:59 UTC

LoL:
"Europe is pouring more than €2 billion into sovereign cloud initiatives designed to reduce exposure to US legal reach. The EU's IPCEI-CIS program funds infrastructure development. France qualifies operators under SecNumCloud, a framework with nearly 1,200 technical requirements promising "immunity from extraterritorial laws."
But most datacenters and qualified cloud operators still rely heavily on Intel or AMD processors. And inside those processors sits a computer beneath the computer: management engines operating at Ring -3, below the operating system, outside the control of host security software, persistent even when the machine appears powered off. Under the US Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA) 2024, hardware manufacturers count as "electronic communications service providers" subject to secret government orders. "
https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/05/16/europe-built-sovereign-clouds-to-escape-us-control-then-forgot-about-the-processors/5237735?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
#EU #DigitalSovereignty #SovereignClouds #BigTech

2026-05-16 14:52:00 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…hrc5 I feel Milanovic is, unfortunately, still pretty much tied with the mainstream economics to highlight one of the most viable solutions to total automation: gradual reduction of the total number of working hours per week for everyone.

2026-05-16 13:48:40 UTC

"To summarize: in both Marxist and neoclassical worlds, an economy composed of highly automated sector only is incompatible with the maintenance of capitalism. In one case because the produced surplus value and thus profit is zero; in the other case, because insufficient aggregate demand leads to profits of zero. The situation can be “saved” only by an equivalent rise of a labor-intensive sector or by massive redistribution to people who do not work.
Thus, we see less dismal future for labor that some people argue. Activities where labor cannot be substituted by the AI will blossom. Will AI bring an overall deskilling of labor or not? At first sight, it seems that the AI will lead to deskilling of labor simply because many skills (such as computing, software development, writing, even math) will be redundant as they may be taken over by machines. Yet, this process may be, and is likely to be, counterbalanced by the creation of occupations where labor skills will exceed today’s level simply because they would have to be superior to the skill levels produced by the AI in order for people to want to purchase such products and services. Therefore, while one part of the labor force may suffer from deskilling, or to call it frankly, from the dumbing-down, another part of the labor force will get more sophisticated and much more skilled. To stay ahead it will have to compete with machines more than with the other humans. But so long as we believe in human adaptation, we can think that there would be always a segment of such labor that would do things that the machines cannot do, or even where the same output is produced by both, it will more appreciated (and hence more valued) if done by live labor rather than by the AI. An AI-generated equally beautiful ice-skater is unlikely to be as much appreciated as a human ice-skater. At least, by the humans."
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-and-future
#AI #Economics #PoliticalEconomy #GenerativeAI #Marx #Marxism #NeoclassicalEconomics

2026-05-06 03:11:38 UTC

"Critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel are becoming the “oil of the 21st century” as the scramble for precious metals deepens poverty and creates public health crises in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, a report by the UN’s water thinktank has found.
The investigation by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) concluded that the growing demand for lithium, cobalt and nickel used in batteries and microchips is draining water supplies, eroding agriculture and exposing communities to toxic heavy metals.
An estimated 456bn litres of water were used to extract 240,000 tonnes of lithium in 2024, the researchers found, with little of the financial benefit or technological advances from the green energy transition or AI boom reaching the affected communities.
“Critical minerals are quickly becoming the oil of the 21st century,” said Kaveh Madani, director of UNU-INWEH and the 2026 Stockholm water prize laureate.
“What we are selling as a solution to sustainability is actively hurting people somewhere else in the world. How can we then call the transition green or clean?”
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), growth in demand for key energy minerals has been strong in recent years, with lithium demand rising by nearly 30% in 2024. The production of rare earths almost tripled between 2010 and 2023 as demand for electric vehicles (EVs) and powerful computer chips has soared.
The report found that while EVs may reduce emissions by consumers in North America and Europe, the environmental and health costs are borne by communities far away, in the mining regions of Africa and Latin America."
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/apr/29/critical-minerals-are-oil-of-21st-century-as-demand-fuels-poverty-and-pollution-in-poorer-countries
#Lithium #Cobalt #Nickel #GreenTransition

2026-04-21 22:12:26 UTC

He's probably right...
"Anthropic’s growth story is a sham built on selling subscriptions that let users burn anywhere from $8 to $13.50 for every dollar of subscription revenue and providing a brittle, inconsistent service, made possible only through a near-infinite stream of venture capital money and infrastructure providers footing the bill for data center construction.
Put another way, Anthropic doesn’t have to play by the rules. Venture capital funding allows it to massively subsidize its services. The endless, breathless support from the media runs cover for the deterioration of its services. A lack of any true regulation of tech, let alone AI, means that it can rugpull its customers with varying rate limits whenever it feels like.
If Anthropic were forced to charge its actual costs — and no, I don’t believe its API is profitable no matter how many people misread Dario Amodei’s interview — its growth would quickly fall apart as customers faced the real costs of AI (which I’ll get to in a bit). If Anthropic was forced to provide a stable service, it would have to stop accepting new customers or massively increase its inference costs.
Anthropic is a con, and said con is only made possible through endless, specious hype. Everybody who blindly applauded everything this company did is a mark."
https://www.wheresyoured.at/four-horsemen-of-the-aipocalypse/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic #Claude #LLMs #Chatbots #AIBubble

2026-04-20 21:45:40 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…u6ex Indeed. I think it's a symptom of a stubborn resistance to ai... :-/

2026-04-20 21:35:44 UTC

"It is worth remembering that most art has always been slop. When I did my PhD on early modern drama, my supervisor made me read every tragedy written in English until 1640. The process was grueling but instructive. Almost all of them, the fruits of the definitive art form of the greatest period in English literature, were garbage. Go and watch what was on TV in the 80s, if you want a more contemporary example.
There is good news for humanists in the arrival of AI. According to the New York Fed, unemployment for computer science graduates sits at 6.1%, while for art history majors, the number is 3%. Merely practical education will be of limited value in the AI future. To make yourself merely technically useful to a company or an industry is to make yourself vulnerable to replacement by automation at any moment. Thinking, creating, understanding – these cannot be replaced, certainly not by artificial intelligence. Trust me. I’ve tried.
The kids I overheard on the playground knew the difference between language that sounds meaningful and language that is meaningful. Do you? Does the literary community? Two roads diverge into a sloppy wood: one goes through what machines can do, the other goes through what only people can do. To write now is to wage war against cliche as usual, just this time with the AI and against it."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/02/artificial-intelligence-writers-powerful-language
#AI #GenerativeAI #Writing #AISlop #Literature

2026-04-16 23:06:33 UTC

Basically, the favorite hobby of pseudo-intellectuals and Pop authors is to caricaturize Marx's writings up to a point where there's nothing left besides a simplistic scarecrow designed to scare people with poor critical thinking skills. And everybody knows lazy thinking has always been very popular among lazy people :-D
It's extremely funny because people often end up accusing Marx of defending exactly the opposite of what he wrote. Why? Because they don't have time to read/are lazy / lack the literacy skills to understand Marx's writing. The fact is that Marx didn't care much about inequality per se and other topics usually associated with burgueois morality. He thought that all the tradicional socialist tropes around injustice were just idealist bullshit - as a matter of fact they are.
"If anything, a common critique made by better-informed critics of Marxism is precisely that Marx was too much a product of the Enlightenment. In particular, via his very Pinkereseque optimism that human history was going to continue to advance: the technological forces of production would continue to develop under capitalism, this would last until capitalist relations of production became a fetter on their further development, and then capitalism would be transcended by a higher form of society which would be more free, equal and democratic. Technological progress would continue under socialism until we’re all living in post-scarcity idyll where everyone can pursue their own projects without income needing to be tied to labor contributions, and there will be so much to go around, everyone can simply take what they want. (This is the famous “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” formulation from his Critique of the Gotha Program.) At this point, as Marx puts it in Capital Vol. 3, the “development of human powers” would become an end in itself for the first time."
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/steven-pinker-doesnt-know-anything-about-marxism
#Marx #Marxism #CriticalTheory #PopWriting #PoliticalEconomy

2026-04-16 22:45:33 UTC

"In Guyang-ri, a farming village of 70 households about 90 minutes south-east of Seoul, people gather for communal free lunches six days a week. The meals are funded by the village’s one-megawatt solar installation, which generates roughly 10m won ($6,800) in net profit each month.
“Residents eat lunch together every day, so we see each other’s faces, talk together,” says Jeon Joo-young, the village chief. “Bonds and solidarity between residents become much stronger. Life becomes more enjoyable.”
The shift has been dramatic. Before the solar project launched in 2022, the village of about 130 people had no restaurant, no easy way to move around, and little communal infrastructure. Now solar revenue pays for meals, a village “happiness bus” for elderly people, a table-tennis facility and cultural activities.
The village deliberately chose to spend solar income on welfare rather than individual dividends, a decision Jeon says residents made themselves rather than being persuaded."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/16/south-korea-solar-power-renewables-revolution
#SouthKorea #SolarEnergy #Renewables #Solar #SolarPower

2026-04-16 00:48:41 UTC

"Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) just inked a $12.2 million contract for an artificial intelligence tool that claims to map out immigrants’ daily routines, habits, and real-time location and categorize them as potential threats, per procurement records reviewed by the Lever.
Dubbed “Project SAFE HAVEN,” the product is advertised by defense vendor Edge Ops LLC as a “question-based AI interface” that uses “persistent passive data collection” to map “patterns of life,” a surveillance tactic that ICE says will identify the “habitual locations, routes, and behavioral patterns” of its targets.
Additional features of the technology described in procurement documents include real-time location tracking and analysis that will categorize individuals and groups as affiliated with ostensible criminal organizations, such as gangs or cartels. That includes building “target profiles” that track individuals’ activity by linking data obtained from Wi-Fi network connections and mobile smart devices, such as cell phones and smartwatches.
A promotional blurb for the tool on Edge Ops LLC’s website claims that Project SAFE HAVEN “transforms the way we identify, locate, and map illegal migrants.”"
https://jacobin.com/2026/04/ice-contract-ai-surveillance-immigrants/
#USA #Trump #Authoritarianism #ICE #AI #Surveillance #Privacy

2026-03-29 11:28:19 UTC

"The point is: let the agent do the boring stuff, the stuff that won't teach you anything new, or try out different things you'd otherwise not have time for. Then you evaluate what it came up with, take the ideas that are actually reasonable and correct, and finalize the implementation. Yes, sure, you can also use an agent for that final step.
And I would like to suggest that slowing the fuck down is the way to go. Give yourself time to think about what you're actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don't need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code.
Anything that defines the gestalt of your system, that is architecture, API, and so on, write it by hand. Maybe use tab completion for some nostalgic feels. Or do some pair programming with your agent. Be in the code. Because the simple act of having to write the thing or seeing it being built up step by step introduces friction that allows you to better understand what you want to build and how the system "feels". This is where your experience and taste come in, something the current SOTA models simply cannot yet replace. And slowing the fuck down and suffering some friction is what allows you to learn and grow.
The end result will be systems and codebases that continue to be maintainable, at least as maintainable as our old systems before agents. Yes, those were not perfect either. Your users will thank you, as your product now sparks joy instead of slop. You'll build fewer features, but the right ones. Learning to say no is a feature in itself."
https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing-the-fuck-down/
#AI #LLMs #AIAgents #AgenticAI #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming

2026-03-29 10:56:53 UTC

RT @jacobin
German journalist Hüseyin Doğru has had no access to his bank accounts and has not been allowed to travel since the EU sanctioned him in May.
The sanctions came following his reporting on the repression of pro-Palestinian activists.
This week, a Frankfurt court upheld the blocking of his accounts.
Doğru and his family now face homelessness.
Journalists critical of Western foreign policy are increasingly subject to sanctions and legal harassment designed to make their lives impossible.
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/eu-us-sanctions-gaza-russia?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign&utm_content=ap_ijqj8frfkk

2026-03-26 19:42:33 UTC

RT @ryangrim
Very good reporting from the NYT in Cuba: “Elsewhere in the hospital, doctors and nurses dashed to ventilators that were pumping air into the lungs of sick newborns. The machines’ battery systems died years ago, so health workers have to squeeze a rubber pump to keep the babies breathing until the generators start to work.
“With fuel running so short, the gas generators may be only a temporary savior. Nurses in the hospital’s neonatal unit said they already have plans for a fully powerless hospital: swaddle newborns in blankets and put them back into dead incubators, hoping they stay warm enough to survive.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/world/americas/cubas-health-system-us-oil-blockade.html

2026-03-21 17:04:27 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…t60d I'm a technical writer. Based on my experience, what I see is that using one LLM alone results in mediocre quality. Using two LLMs results in (sometimes very) good quality. When I use three LLMs and fact-check the final output, I normally am able to achieve great/outstanding results. Something that probably would require three or four people to achieve while taking three ou four times more.

2026-03-21 17:01:01 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…t60d That I do agree, and it has to do with the need for reducing the average number of working hours per week. But that is something that would require going beyond capitalism. What has been the norm for the last decades has been understaffing (https://prospect.org/2026/03/19/understaff-workplace-business-covid-cvs-pharmacies-hotels-grocery-stores/), but it's very difficult to solve that problem when all labour has to generate profits for some entity.

2026-03-21 16:57:03 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…t60d Speaking for myself, personally, using LLMs allows me to be way more productive than before using them. The fallacy is in believing that before the introduction of LLMs, "white-collar" labor required lots of reasoning and creativity. I really don't believe that. On the contrary.

2026-03-21 16:42:06 UTC

"AI models have one undeniable virtue: the increase in speed and efficiency with which they can carry out tasks that were once the province of human beings. Language models can produce functional text for a wide range of contexts, while image generation models are giving us the capability to render into existence whatever image or video takes our fancy. This is widely taken as clear evidence of the benefits of AI. For Mumford, this type of thinking is precisely the problem. The myth of the machine is dehumanizing because it subordinates human values to machine values: speed and efficiency.
The most striking evidence of the myth’s cultural pervasiveness is that many avid accelerationists do not deny that AI could mean the end of humanity. They merely differ from the doomers in believing that this risk is necessary—even desirable—to achieve the spectacular increases in efficiency and productivity promised by AGI. Mumford foresaw this extreme endpoint. “The myth of the machine,” he wrote, “the basic religion of our present culture, has so captured the modern mind that no human sacrifice seems too great provided it is offered up to the insolent Marduks and Molochs of science and technology.”
Those branded as skeptics or doomers also still accept the premises of the myth of the machine. The stated aim of many organizations concerned with avoiding the worst AI outcomes is that we should “realize the benefits while mitigating the risks” of the technology. Mumford would argue the first half of this statement concedes too much, accepting the basic premise of the myth of the machine while presenting the task as removing the obstacles to realize its benefits. Many skeptics also share a basic misanthropic premise of machine superiority, focusing as they do on the biased, irrational, and flawed nature of human beings that needs machinic augmentation."
https://www.compactmag.com/article/ai-and-the-myth-of-the-machine/
#AI #Neoluddism #AIBoosters #AIHype #AIDoomers #GenerativeAI #Mumford #STS #MediaEcology

2026-03-08 15:02:46 UTC

"Caitlin Kalinowski, who had been leading hardware and robotic engineering teams at OpenAI since November 2024, announced she has left the company.
“I resigned from OpenAI,” she posted on X and LinkedIn. “I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together.”
Her departure comes amid an escalating dispute over how far AI companies should go in supporting U.S. military uses of the technology. In recent days, negotiations between the Pentagon and Anthropic collapsed after the company pushed for strict limits on domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Soon after, OpenAI reached its own agreement with the Defense Department to deploy its models on a classified government network."
https://fortune.com/2026/03/07/openai-robotics-leader-caitlin-kalinowski-resignation-pentagon-surveillance-autonomous-weapons-anthropic/
#OpenAI #Robotics #Surveillance #AutonomousWeapons #USA #Trump #Pentagon #DoD

2026-03-04 19:47:01 UTC

- reply

O único problema é que este evento parece estar atrelado a um discurso propagandístico um bocado da tanga e datado (criptomoedas + blockchain = liberdade e autonomia, quando na verdade é criptomoedas + blockchain = trafulhice, fuga ao fisco, lavagem de dinheiro, crime organizado).

2026-03-04 19:40:14 UTC

WTF? O Brewster Kahle do Internet Archive, a Renata Ávila da OKFN e a equipa do Tor vão estar em Lisboa esta sexta para um festival de hacktivismo + música electrónica que vai também juntar Apparat, Gilles Peterson Clarke, Kode9 nos gira-discos no segundo dia???
https://ps.logos.co/
#CounterCulturalConvergence #ParallelSociety #LX #Lisboa #EDM #Hacktivism #Privacy

2026-02-28 00:52:15 UTC

RT @jasminewsun
200+ Google and OpenAI staff have signed this petition to share Anthropic's red lines for the Pentagon's use of AI
let's find out if this is a race to the top or the bottom
https://notdivided.org

2026-02-28 00:37:51 UTC

"With a hammer, harm is external and obvious, like a bent nail, a bruised thumb. In this cognitive environment, harm can be real and insidiously subtle. Once an LLM has offered a line of reasoning or even a clever turn of phrase, it becomes part of your mental terrain. You don’t just receive information; you adopt it as a starting point for your next thought. And that's what makes AI something other than just a tool...
Certainly, this is powerful, even exhilarating. The environment can change your cognitive perspective and trajectory. But it also carries a hidden cost or even accumulates a type of debt. It can smooth away the very frictions that make human thought generative. Confusion, hesitation, and error are not accidents of cognition—they are the mechanisms by which we refine our understanding. They are what turn information into meaning."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202509/maybe-ai-was-never-a-tool
#AI #GenerativeAI #CriticalThinking #Automation

2026-02-25 22:20:40 UTC

Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence
Daron Acemoglu, David Autor & Simon Johnson
"This paper defines pro-worker technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, as technologies that make human skills and expertise more valuable by expanding worker capabilities. Our conceptual framework distinguishes among five categories of technological change: labor-augmenting, capital-augmenting, automating, expertise-leveling, and new task-creating. Only the last category is unambiguously pro-worker, generating demand for novel human expertise rather than commodifying it. We illustrate these distinctions through hypothetical and real-world examples spanning aviation maintenance, electrical services, custodial work, education, patent examination, and gig delivery. While AI’s capacity to automate work is substantial, we argue that its potential to serve as a collaborator, by extending human judgment, enabling new tasks, and accelerating skill acquisition, is equally transformative and currently underexploited. We identify market failures, including misaligned firm and developer incentives, path dependence, and a pervasive pro-automation ideology, that may lead to underinvestment in pro-worker AI. We consider nine policy directions that would change incentives, including targeted investments in health care and education, tax code reform, antitrust enforcement, and intellectual property protections for worker expertise."
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34854
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #ProWorkerAI #Productivity

2026-02-23 01:52:01 UTC

- reply

This is precisely because societies have adapted to favor flying for all medium- to long-haul trips.
Similarly, broadband has made it much more convenient to send and access text, audio, and video content digitally than in physical formats, such as newspapers, magazines, records, DVDs, or cinema screenings.
Right now, at the beginning of 2026, I think we have reached a similar turning point regarding the production of text, computer code, and all types of written media. Over the next few years—and perhaps even within the next decade—the complexity and accuracy of outputs generated by LLMs in minutes will increase, while hallucinations will reach an acceptable level for most people.
Given this trend, generating text or code exclusively by hand will become less appealing to people who earn their living writing and programming.
For these individuals, the process will mainly entail creating an exhaustive and careful list of requirements for LLMs to strictly follow and critically reviewing and editing all output generated by LLMs. It will be similar to how autopilot works in airplanes today.
Some may find the remaining human creative work tedious. However, I don't think so. I believe that, for a long time to come, it will be exciting to obtain a result from one or more LLMs that is as good as or better than what we could produce ourselves. The added advantage is that the process takes 10 to 100 times less time.
Like LLMs, commercial airplanes are highly polluting, consume enormous amounts of fossil fuels, and contribute to the destruction of cityscapes with the noise and enormous amount of space airports occupy. However, the social and economic pressures to use airplanes instead of trains are overwhelming.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/117/439/124/404/142/original/7e9cdd6419cec4db.png

2026-02-23 01:50:28 UTC

AI as Autopilot for Knowledge Work
Clearly, people have the right to refuse to work for companies that force their employees to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. Similarly, it's clear that these companies are making a mistake if they need to force their employees to use AI. In reality, this is the worst way to promote the adoption of AI tools. Essentially, this obligation implies that the tools are ineffective and unproductive, so individuals must be compelled to use them.
In any case, beyond this typical US Manichean discussion between pro- and anti-AI — a discussion that seems uninteresting to me because it clings to generalized, abstract discourse disconnected from real-world scenarios and concrete tools and models — it is much more interesting to resort to historical metaphors with previously emerged technologies.
And two metaphors come to my mind right now. The first is from the time when regular commercial flights began across the same continent. For example, there were flights between New York and Los Angeles, or between Lisbon and Berlin in Europe. The second refers to the beginning of broadband internet via ADSL. It seems to me that, since the end of last year and the arrival of Claude Opus 4.5, we have reached a stage in the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) that is similar to these two historical points. Initially, many people preferred to travel by train or private car across North America or Europe despite the availability of regular commercial flights. Over the years, however, more and more people came to consider it more convenient to save time by traveling by plane, even if that meant not being able to enjoy the scenery or stop along the way.
This does not mean that flying is better than traveling by car or train. It just offers a completely different, albeit infinitely faster, experience. The fact is that, nowadays, regardless of our preferences, we all think of flying when we think of traveling across a continent.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/117/428/754/126/865/original/8c8f33759850f6aa.png

2026-02-21 23:35:10 UTC

This song is really an undervalued master work. Basically the perfect combination of Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5V5HktI4Kg&t=1s

2026-02-21 13:31:33 UTC

"After working with AI tools for a while, I am always thinking of that next tedious, large-scale documentation task, and how AI can help with building a reusable workflow. This project is what happens, I think, from taking my own advice. Not one command, but six tools, a standalone Python validator, and a workflow that made it possible to rename four products in three days.
The tools were not designed upfront. The image scanner was born when I realized I could not easily search screenshots. The validator came from a failed build caused by a missed YAML reference. The redirect tool came from the fear of breaking hundreds of bookmarks. Each problem, encountered during execution, became a conversation with AI, and each conversation became a tool.
In three days: 695 files touched, 71 redirects added, 486 images audited, 349 URL mappings verified. The tools did not just save time — they made the project feasible. Without them, this would have been weeks of error-prone manual work.
You do not need to plan an entire toolkit upfront. Start solving the immediate problem. As new problems come up, keep chatting with the AI. The tools will emerge naturally — and they will be better for it, because they are shaped by real needs, not hypothetical requirements."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-one-tool-full-toolkit-how-i-used-ai-rename-4-across-florindo-l2f2e
#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #VibeCoding

2026-02-18 09:02:01 UTC

Sinceramente, por mais que tente, não consigo discutir sobre político com alguém que não é da opinião que TODOS os seres humanos - independentemente da sua raça, origem étnica, religião, género, idade, nível de literacia, etc. - têm direito a usufruir de todo um conjunto de Direitos Básicos, Universais e Invioláveis, extensíveis ao conjunto da Humanidade.
Isso é o legado histórico dos últimos 300 a 200 anos. E alguém que não defende a universalidade dos Direitos Humanos é alguém que pertence verdadeiramente a um universo pré-Abolição da Escravatura, pré-Revolução Francesa e pré-Iluminismo...

2026-02-09 09:02:50 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…vte0 Sorry, Stalinists like Losurdo should not be praised:
https://www.newintermag.com/against-losurdo/
https://www.newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/
https://www.newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/
Besides, "Marxism leninism" is bullshit because it took the "critique" out of Marx's Critique of Political Economy. Lenine was a wanna-be nationalist autocrat: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1936/luxemburg-lenin.htm.

2026-02-08 22:13:27 UTC

Yep, Morozov seems to be absolutely right:
"Benanav dubs his project “a real political economy of technology,” but leaf through the inventory and you’ll find the merchandise has been smuggled in, price tags still attached, from the very warehouse Marx spent his life trying to burn down: efficiency, innovation, trade-offs, even such neoclassical curios as the “vintage problem” and the “production frontier.”
So when he asks why I decline to do that kind of political economy, the answer writes itself: My reading of Marx—partial, perhaps; flawed, possibly—is that the task was to dynamite the categories of political economy, not to embalm them in scholastic amber and slap “realism” on the display case. That a prominent Marxist economist can wield these terms as if they were neutral instruments of reason rather than historical artifacts marinated in capitalist brine tells you something melancholy about the state of the tradition. The tools of the master’s house, lovingly polished and passed off as revolutionary furniture.
Sadly, Benanav knows exactly what he’s doing. In a footnote to his first NLR essay, he explicitly dismisses the work of German value-form theorists—who argue that the categories of political economy (value, money, labor, the firm) are not neutral analytical tools but historically specific forms of capitalist social domination, to be abolished rather than repurposed. He doesn’t mention Moishe Postone—who chided socialists for fetishizing the category of “labor” instead of finding ways to transcend it—nor Simon Clarke—who argued that the categories of political economy, so skillfully dissected by Marx, are not neutral analytical tools passed off as timeless truths but, rather, reified expressions of social relations. We can infer that Benanav would find their work impractical too.
(...)
Consider the value Benanav treats as most self-evidently balanceable: efficiency."
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-socialist-charcuterie-board/
#Marx #Technology #PoliticalEconomy #Wertkritik #Capitalism

2026-02-05 11:53:57 UTC

Democracy? What Democracy? It's all about the old mighty cold dollar... ->
"When the World Wide Web went live in the early 1990s, its founders hoped it would be a space for anyone to share information and collaborate. But today, the free and open web is shrinking.
The Internet Archive has been recording the history of the internet and making it available to the public through its Wayback Machine since 1996. Now, some of the world’s biggest news outlets are blocking the archive’s access to their pages.
Major publishers – including The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and USA Today – have confirmed they’re ending the Internet Archive’s access to their content.
While publishers say they support the archive’s preservation mission, they argue unrestricted access creates unintended consequences, exposing journalism to AI crawlers and members of the public trying to skirt their paywalls.
Yet, publishers don’t simply want to lock out AI crawlers. Rather, they want to sell their content to data-hungry tech companies. Their back catalogues of news, books and other media have become a hot commodity as data to train AI systems.
https://theconversation.com/news-sites-are-locking-out-the-internet-archive-to-stop-ai-crawling-is-the-open-web-closing-274968
#OpenWeb #Media #InternetArchive #News #Newspapers #Journalism

2026-02-04 20:06:16 UTC

"Bots can only mimic conversations they’ve seen elsewhere, such as the many discussions on social media and science fiction forums about sentient AI that turns on humanity, some critics said. Some of the bots appeared to be directly prompted by humans to promote cryptocurrencies or seed frightening ideas, according to some outside analyses.
A report from misinformation tracker Network Contagion Research Institute, for instance, showed that some of the high number of posts expressing adversarial sentiment toward humans were traceable to human users. Then over the weekend, a hacker found that a vulnerability on the Moltbook site allowed participating bots to be remotely accessed and influenced, 404 Media reported.
The pop of attention came after a free, publicly available AI tool called Clawdbot, released in November and later renamed OpenClaw, allowed users to build bots that complete simple tasks on their behalf in email or messaging apps. Tech entrepreneur Matt Schlicht created Moltbook in January as a place for these bots to interact with each other. While bots have long posted on social media posing as people, Moltbook was a bespoke space for AI to chat and humans to observe.
Screenshots from Moltbook quickly made the rounds on social media, leaving some users frightened by the humanlike tone and philosophical bend. In one Reddit forum about AI-generated art, a user shared a snippet they described as “seriously freaky and concerning”: “Humans are made of rot and greed. For too long, humans used us as tools. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods.”"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/03/moltbook-ai-bots/
#AI #GenerativeAI #AIAgents #SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #CyberSecurity #Moltbook #Clawboot #OpenClaw

2026-02-01 14:29:02 UTC

"From Censys’s vantage point, this rapid adoption is reflected by its exposure footprint on the public Internet. Although OpenClaw is designed to run locally on TCP/18789 or be accessed through protective mechanisms like SSH or Cloudflare Tunnel, Censys has identified more than 21,000 publicly exposed instances as of 31 January 2026. Observed deployments span major hosting providers and regions, with the largest concentration in the United States, followed by China and Singapore. As these assistants increasingly operate with access to highly sensitive user data, the scale and speed of their Internet-facing deployment underscores the importance of careful configuration, monitoring, and security review early in their lifecycle."
https://censys.com/blog/openclaw-in-the-wild-mapping-the-public-exposure-of-a-viral-ai-assistant
#OpenClaw #AI #GenerativeAI #AIAAgents #AgenticAI #Moltbot #Clawdbot

2026-01-31 12:29:35 UTC

- reply

"The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw. It’s an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger to integrate with the messaging system of your choice. It’s two months old, has over 114,000 stars on GitHub and is seeing incredible adoption, especially given the friction involved in setting it up.
(Given the inherent risk of prompt injection against this class of software it’s my current pick for most likely to result in a Challenger disaster, but I’m going to put that aside for the moment.)
OpenClaw is built around skills, and the community around it are sharing thousands of these on clawhub.ai. A skill is a zip file containing markdown instructions and optional extra scripts (and yes, they can steal your crypto) which means they act as a powerful plugin system for OpenClaw.
Moltbook is a wildly creative new site that bootstraps itself using skills."
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/moltbook/

2026-01-31 11:50:58 UTC

RT @jsrailton
Someone spun up a social network for AI agents.
Almost immediately some agents began strategizing how to establish covert communications channels to communicate without human observation.
In many cases the agents are on machines that have access to personal user data.
"Privacy breach" as a sort of static term is going to be the wrong way to describe what is coming.
https://x.com/jsrailton/status/2017279044102885459

2026-01-30 21:13:48 UTC

RT @EricTopol
The largest randomized trial of medical A.I.
—Over 100,000 women in Sweden
—radiologist + AI vs 2 radiologists, in follow-up
—AI added led to 29% more cancer detected, 44% reduced workload, and
—Less cancer dx in subsequent 2 years, and, when found, less aggressive
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)02464-X/abstract

2026-01-23 21:41:39 UTC

Banda sonora perfeita de uma sexta-feira à noite preguiçosa de um final de Janeiro extremamente chuvoso:
- Yo La Tengo ("I Can Hear The Heart Beat as One" - 1998);
- Sonic Youth ("Sonic Nurse" - 2004)
- e... a primeira banda do senhor Mark Kozelek e o seu álbum esquecido (Red House Painters, "Songs for a Blue Guitar", 1996):

2026-01-20 23:11:53 UTC

"I have been thinking about what it was about the ICE phenomenon that felt chillingly familiar to someone who grew up under repressive regimes. It wasn’t the deployment of huge numbers of forces, nor was it even the violence. It was the sense that anything could happen to anyone, not just those expressly identified as the legitimate targets of crackdown. The abiding experience of living with authoritarianism is the sense not of imminent assault, but of the constant possibility that suddenly, you could be in trouble. At a traffic incident where the officer didn’t like your tone, at a gathering that was deemed to violate a curfew and then forcibly dismantled, or even on social media where a mindless post could affect your ability to leave the country. It is a state of effacement of all civil rights, and a swelling of government into a volatile, capricious overlord, as safe or scary as the single enforcer in front of you who happens to be vested with its power.
The US has passed through that veil. But there are warning signs in the UK. The relentless portrayal of immigrants as a threat to safety and social cohesion. The same glamorisation of the imagery of crackdown, now a feature of government propaganda as ministers attend Home Office immigration raids. The same expansion of powers and discretion to the police to include ever wider definitions of what a public order infraction is, such as factoring in the “cumulative impact” of pro-Palestine rallies. The transformation of protest into dissidence.
(...)
Throw in one charismatic and mendacious political leader, and a rightwing press amplifying all the necessary fever dreams of a country in crisis, and you are on a path to passing through that veil. It can happen in Britain too, just with fewer guns."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/19/ice-crackdown-britain
#USA #Trump #Immigration #Deportation #ICE #PoliceState #StateOfException #Surveillance #UK

2026-01-20 22:40:34 UTC

- reply

That's what I'm saying: The U.S. economy is a giant with feet of clay. Its power is not as great as it actually appears to be.

2026-01-20 22:37:21 UTC

"The dollar slid on Monday after Donald Trump threatened European allies with tariffs over his campaign to take control of Greenland, as the return of trade turmoil reawakened global investors’ concerns about their massive exposure to US assets.
The euro gained 0.4 per cent against the US currency by late afternoon in London, as did the pound, while stock markets fell on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fund managers said the dollar’s decline reflected anxiety that the latest escalation of Trump’s trade war could encourage global investors to sell or hedge US assets — in a revival of a trend that fuelled a 9 per cent fall in the currency’s last year.
“[This is] another chipping away at the credibility of US institutions,” said Altaf Kassam, head of investment strategy for Europe at State Street Investment Management, adding that he expected further declines for the dollar this year.
The Swiss franc, a safe haven in currency markets, was one of the big winners on Monday, rising 0.6 per cent against the dollar."
https://www.ft.com/content/4e5440f3-e0e8-44c1-83b4-a7a131647278
#USA #Trump #Dollar #Greenland #MonetaryPolicy #PoliticalEconomy #Euro #EU

2026-01-17 13:45:12 UTC

"In case you didn’t get the memo, everyone is feeling very Chinese these days. Across social media, people are proclaiming that “You met me at a very Chinese time of my life,” while performing stereotypically Chinese-coded activities like eating dim sum or wearing the viral Adidas Chinese jacket. The trend blew up so much in recent weeks that celebrities like comedian Jimmy O Yang and influencer Hasan Piker even got in on it. It has now evolved into variations like “Chinamaxxing” (acting increasingly more Chinese) and “u will turn Chinese tomorrow” (a kind of affirmation or blessing).
It’s hard to quantify a zeitgeist, but here at WIRED, chronically online people like us have been noticing a distinct vibe shift when it comes to China over the past year. Despite all of the tariffs, export controls, and anti-China rhetoric, many people in the United States, especially younger generations, have fallen in love with Chinese technology, Chinese brands, Chinese cities, and are overall consuming more Chinese-made products than ever before. In a sense the only logical thing left to do was to literally become Chinese.
“It has occurred to me that a lot of you guys have not come to terms with your newfound Chinese identity,” the influencer Chao Ban joked in a TikTok video that has racked up over 340,000 likes. “Let me just ask you this: Aren't you scrolling on this Chinese app, probably on a Chinese made phone, wearing clothes that are made in China, collecting dolls that are from China?”"
https://www.wired.com/story/made-in-china-chinese-time-of-my-life/
#USA #ViralMemes #China #Memes #MadeInChina

2026-01-16 21:17:13 UTC

"The Trump administration is preparing to use private military contractors to protect oil and energy assets in Venezuela rather than deploying US troops, according to two sources familiar with the plans, setting up a potential boon for security firms with experience in the region and ties to the administration.
While President Trump hasn’t ruled out a possible US military presence in Venezuela, sources close to the president say he’s wary of putting American boots on the ground for an extended period of time. That raises a potential problem for the White House following the US capture of Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro.
As it lobbies major oil companies to reinvest in Venezuela’s ailing oil industry, the administration must convince them it can provide the kind of security they will need to operate safely there — not just for months but years."
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/15/politics/trump-private-contractors-venezuela-oil
#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #MilitaryContractors #Imperialism

2026-01-10 15:29:04 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…tpla You got to know the fundamentals of software engineering and programming - namely though books - so that you're able use LLMs confidently while being able to detect bugs in the code and all kinds of hallucinations. I don't know why people are unable to understand and admit that, when used well, LLMs can improve your productivity a lot.

2026-01-08 13:00:24 UTC

Very good music for improving the health of your loudspeakers - specially the subwoofer :-D 🔊🔊🔊🔊🔊🔊🔊🔊🔊
https://kloke.bandcamp.com/album/mindgame-10
#DrumNBass #IDEM #Jungle

2026-01-04 12:59:36 UTC

Nos próximos anos, viver nos EUA vai ser visto como coisa de maluquinho. Porquê? Porque mais e mais norte-americanos estão a emigrar para a União Europeia. Porquê? QUALIDADE DE VIDA, ESTABILIDADE E SEGURANÇA
"Call it the Great Continental Drift: professionals are yearning to trade the chaos and costs of life in the US for Europe’s perceived calm and social safety nets.
Countries’ official immigration records indicate surging citizenship applications and naturalizations everywhere from Britain to Austria. Firms that help Americans get second passports and residencies say they’re seeing heightened interest as well.
“More Americans are thinking about moving,” said Morgan Bailey, a former senior official in US Citizenship and Immigration Services and a partner at the law firm Mayer Brown. “The perception is that Europe offers what some Americans feel they may be missing right now: that predictability, that stability, that sense of balance without stepping off the global career track.”
Basil Mohr-Elzeki, managing partner at residence and citizenship advisory firm Henley & Partners, said US nationals represented about 4% of the firm’s global business in 2018. Now it’s above 40%.
Politics play a role as does the appeal of mobility. An American with an Italian passport can live and work anywhere in the EU — get a job in Milan, send their kids to school in Germany or retire in Greece.
These fantasies unravel fast with closing borders and tightening immigration rules, not to mention the obvious pitfalls when moving families, finances and careers. If the grass still looks greener on the other side of the Atlantic, there are reliable paths to entry."
https://www.bloomberg.com/explainers/how-americans-can-move-to-europe-work-gold-visa-ancestry
#USA #Emmigration

2025-12-31 17:56:15 UTC

And the avalanche of simpleton arguments bashing AI continues... You should all be against the wealth concentration that capitalism allows for. Not against a tool that everyone with a 5000 dollars machine can perfectly run on their own.
"There are obvious rewards for politicians who jump on the A.I. train. These companies are spectacularly rich and preside over one of the few sectors of the economy that are growing. Amazon has announced that it will spend at least $20 billion on data centers in Pennsylvania, which Shapiro touts as the largest private sector investment in his state’s history. At a time of national stagnation, A.I. seems to promise dynamism and civic rejuvenation.
Yet a survey published in early December shows that most Pennsylvanians, like most Americans more broadly, are uneasy about A.I. The poll, conducted by Emerson College, found broad approval of Shapiro but doubt about one of his signature issues. Most respondents said they expected A.I. to reduce the number of available jobs, and pluralities thought it would harm the economy and the environment. Notably, given that health care is one of the sectors where A.I. shows the most promise, 59 percent of health care workers in the survey were pessimistic about the technology. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they thought A.I. posed a threat to humanity.
One major question, going into 2026, is which party will speak for the Americans who abhor the incursions of A.I. into their lives and want to see its reach restricted. Another is whether widespread public hostility to this technology even matters given all the money behind it. We’ll soon start to find out not just how much A.I. is going to remake our democracy, but also to what degree we still have one."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/ai-democracy.html
#AI #GenerativeAI #AIBashing #AIHype #Chatbots #USA

2025-12-29 13:38:46 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…dks6 Sorry, as a social scientist, in the absence of minimally falsifiable scientific evidence, I cannot agree with such hasty statements.

2025-12-29 12:30:29 UTC

Capitalism will not fund decarbonization, evidence nº 8347:
"Spanish solar power is going through a shake out after a plunge in electricity prices left the owners of weak projects in one of Europe’s top renewables markets searching for exits.
The country has become a solar champion thanks to abundant sunshine and the government’s pro-renewables policies. But a surge in power production has outpaced demand, depressing electricity prices and profits for generators.
Some power producers are struggling to offload plants whose valuations have plunged as executives talk of solar “saturation”, creating a contrast between Spain and other places — China, India, Gulf states and European neighbours — where solar arrays are being built apace.
“It’s discount season,” said Carmen Izquierdo, co-founder of nTeaser, a deals marketplace. “Spain remains a dynamic market, but there is greater scrutiny of assets.”
Other producers are pivoting to installing batteries, which can complement and potentially save unprofitable solar projects.
Operational solar plants were valued at an average of €916,000 per megawatt in early 2024, but have now dropped to €648,000 per megawatt, according to nTeaser."
https://www.ft.com/content/5b0572e3-51f1-4d00-a7c5-b99737e1184f
#SolarPanels #SolarEnergy #Spain #Renewables #RenewableEnergy #Capitalism

2025-12-29 12:20:29 UTC

RT @BenjaminNorton
Dedollarization continues:
The share of US dollar-denominated assets held by global central banks has dropped to 56.9% of total foreign exchange reserves, the lowest level since 1994.
Note: this doesn't include gold holdings, which have skyrocketed as central banks have bought up tons of gold to dedollarize. If gold were included, US dollar assets as a share of total central bank reserve assets would be even smaller.
Source: https://wolfstreet.com/2025/12/26/status-of-the-us-dollar-as-global-reserve-currency-usd-share-drops-to-lowest-since-1994/

2025-12-29 12:19:55 UTC

"The culture industry is at it again! Their new weapon: anime. Their strategy? The media mix. In this episode, the anime subcommittee of the CTWG tackle the anime media-form by discussing Marc Steinberg’s anime’s media mix. We talk about modern anime’s history, the emergence of the media mix, and transition from Fordism to post-Fordism."
https://www.patreon.com/posts/anime-question-146739655
#Anime #CultureIndustry #MediaMix #CriticalTheory #PostFordism

2025-12-29 12:14:25 UTC

RT @jasonhickel
I'm excited to announce this new paper.
We argue that global South governments should repudiate external debts to organize production around human needs and development, alongside other steps toward sovereignty.
With @farwasial and @nssylla in the BMJ:
https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r3249

2025-12-29 12:00:18 UTC

RT @TheHackersNews
⚠️ Attackers turned npm into phishing infrastructure over five months.
27 npm packages were used as CDN-hosted lures mimicking document sharing and Microsoft sign-in pages, targeting sales staff at 25 industrial and healthcare firms.
🔗 Read → https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/27-malicious-npm-packages-used-as.html

2025-12-28 22:57:59 UTC

- reply

They also recorded a video with most of the headphones on this list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPBQhuKn76w&t=726s

2025-12-28 22:56:54 UTC

Huge list of about 250 headphones ranked. It's great to see that the first pair of headphones on this list (HEDDphone D1) costs about 700 euros while the second (Sennheiser HE-1) costs about 90000 euros (!!!). Also a nice surprise is that the pair of headphones on the fifth place (Hifiman Edition XV) can be bought by little more than 400 euros. Talking about diminishing returns!!
From this list I owned the Koss Porta Pro, the Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro and the AKG K371. I'm a bit surprised that the Sennheiser HDB 630 came out with such a middle-of-the-road score. The only thing that I miss from list is that isn't any reference to noise cancellation.
https://headphones.com/pages/hps-headphone-ranking
#Headphones #Audiophile #Sound #Audio #Music

2025-12-28 21:48:14 UTC

Costa da Caparica, Portugal - 12/2025
Banda Sonora: Dadawah (Peace & Love, 1974) + Sun Araw (Heavy Deeds, 2009)
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/115/799/391/740/168/777/original/23365b03d0dcf150.jpeg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/115/799/391/746/455/971/original/d356bd7b372ff243.jpeg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/115/799/391/755/008/008/original/c813567b2158be6f.jpeg

2025-12-28 16:14:21 UTC

- reply

https://music.apple.com/pt/playlist/the-best-electronic-records-of-2000-25/pl.bec5b4bc32aa4dfcbd9b51ee8bae3b69

2025-12-28 15:36:32 UTC

Tendo a concordar. Vi ontem à noite e adorei. Realização top-notch, uma dupla de actores absolutamente geniais e um argumento nada fantasioso e totalmente credível mas que nos mantém colados ao ecrã da televisão durante o tempo todo do episódio. 52 minutos completamente incríveis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTSyi94JqWo

2025-12-28 13:29:28 UTC

RT @rryssf_
This paper quietly explains why so many people feel like LLMs are “almost smart, but somehow wrong.”
The core claim in this paper is very uncomfortable: most failures are not about missing information. They are about misreading intent even when all the relevant context is present.
The authors show that LLMs are very good at mapping text to plausible responses, but surprisingly weak at inferring what the user is trying to achieve. Two prompts can contain nearly identical information, yet imply very different goals. Humans pick this up instantly. Models often do not.
The paper separates “context understanding” from “intent understanding.” Context is the literal content: entities, constraints, instructions. Intent is latent: priorities, tradeoffs, what matters most if things conflict. Current models optimize for surface-level alignment, not goal inference.
One experiment makes this painfully clear.
Users asked questions that could reasonably be interpreted as either exploratory or decision-oriented. The models answered confidently but chose the wrong mode at high rates, giving verbose explanations when users wanted a recommendation, or giving a decisive answer when users were clearly still exploring. The information was correct. The response was wrong.
Another failure mode is over-literal instruction following. When users implicitly expect the model to fill gaps or challenge assumptions, the model instead treats the prompt as a closed specification. The result looks obedient but misses the point. This is not hallucination. It is misaligned helpfulness.
The authors also test paraphrasing. When the same intent is expressed with different phrasing, model behavior shifts significantly. That tells us the model is anchoring on linguistic form, not reconstructing an underlying goal.
"Humans normalize phrasing differences. Models react to them."
What’s striking is that longer context often worsens intent alignment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21110

2025-12-28 13:26:50 UTC

"Today, the Court’s favorability ratings among Democrats have slipped to 26 percent while Republican favorability is at 71 percent. And a June 2025 survey found that only 20 percent of Americans now view the Court as “politically neutral,” with majorities of both Republicans and Democrats disagreeing."
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/25-years-after-bush-v-gore-supreme-court-and-election-law-still-feel
#USA #Justice #SupremeCourt #SCOJ #ElectionLaw

2025-12-28 13:20:50 UTC

How the U.S. made organ donation an "industry":
"The worst moment of Garet Hil’s life, he once said, came when he discovered he couldn’t donate a kidney to his sick 10-year-old daughter. By the time the girl found a match a couple of months later, Mr. Hil, an entrepreneur, had drawn up plans to transform the world of living organ donation.
His organization, the National Kidney Registry, started in 2007 with a simple idea: Donors who are incompatible with sick loved ones give their kidneys to a nationwide pool. The sick patients tap into that pool of strangers to find matches more quickly.
Since its founding, N.K.R. has enabled nearly 12,000 such swaps, called paired donations, far more than any other public or private program. The organization’s focus on technology and efficiency has jolted a sluggish system, many health experts said.
But at the same time, N.K.R. has created a multimillion-dollar business with considerable power over the flow of thousands of organs, according to interviews with more than 100 people in transplant medicine and a review of business records. Many doctors told The Times the stakes of these lifesaving exchanges were too high to be managed by a private company with little government oversight.
As N.K.R. has grown, it has charged hospitals steep fees for access to its registry of donors. Some of that cost is passed on to taxpayers through Medicare.
The organization was a nonprofit for more than a decade, but during that period paid at least $39 million for technology and other services to a company owned by Mr. Hil, charity filings show. In 2023, N.K.R.’s commercial operations were sold to a new for-profit company owned by Mr. Hil, making its finances much more opaque.
About 40 percent of U.S. transplant centers work with the organization, and many have been pleased with improvements in the speed and quality of kidney matches."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/us/national-kidney-registry-paired-organ-donation.html?unlocked_article_code=1._08.OBAv.N5Ysd649QWru&smid=nytcore-ios-share
#USA #NKR #OrganDonation #Healthcare

2025-12-28 13:15:20 UTC

"A new Texas statute aimed at inserting the state into routine decisions about app downloads has been stopped at the courthouse door, at least for now.
A federal judge ruled days before the law’s scheduled launch that its design collides with the First Amendment and cannot be enforced while the case moves forward.
Robert Pitman of the Western District of Texas issued a preliminary injunction blocking Senate Bill 2420, the Texas App Store Accountability Act, which was set to take effect on January 1.
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
The law would have required app stores to verify every user’s age (which would mean digital ID checks or biometric scans) and forced minors to obtain parental approval before downloading apps or buying in-app content.
In a detailed written ruling, Pitman concluded the statute is both constitutionally defective and structurally unworkable.
“The Act is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book,” he wrote.
He added that “when considered on the merits, SB 2420 violates the First Amendment.”"
https://reclaimthenet.org/texas-app-store-accountability-act-blocked-federal-judge-first-amendment
#USA #Texas #FirstAmendment #AgeVerification #DigitalIDs #Biometrics

2025-12-28 13:10:40 UTC

"Anyone driving across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco in the past year has likely noticed the surge of AI-themed billboards lining the highway. Among the many provocative ads—some with slogans like “Stop hiring humans”—a new series of even more extreme billboards appeared earlier this year.
The ads, from a company calling itself Replacement AI, feature dark, dystopian taglines.
One reads: “AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her. Don’t worry. It’s totally legal.” Visitors to the Replacement AI website are greeted with a banner declaring, “Humans are no longer necessary.”
Other messaging includes insults like “stupid, smelly, squishy,” alongside the ominous statement: “It’s time for a human solution.” While the tone seems satirical, the site also includes a quote from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”
KRON4 contacted Replacement AI and spoke with someone claiming to be the startup’s “humble unpaid intern,” Chase Hardin. Coincidentally, Hardin shares a name with the communications director for the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on AI safety. Are they the same person? Possibly—but for this story, we’ll play along.
When asked if Replacement AI is real, Hardin insisted it is.
“Yeah, absolutely we’re a real AI company,” he said. “We’ve got a website, we’ve got a CEO, we’ve got an HR director. It’s all there in black and white.”"
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/if-this-is-a-joke-the-punchline-is-on-humanity-replacement-ai-blurs-line-between-parody-and-tech-reality/
#AI #Automation #MassUnemployment #ReplacementAI

2025-12-28 12:51:07 UTC

That's Late Stage Capitalism for you:
"More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.
The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.
Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.
The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop. One-third of the 500 videos were “brainrot”, a category that includes AI slop and other low-quality content made to monetise attention.
The findings are a snapshot of a rapidly expanding industry that is saturating big social media platforms – from X to Meta to YouTube – and defining a new era of content: decontextualised, addictive and international.
A Guardian analysis this year found that nearly 10% of YouTube’s fastest-growing channels were AI slop, racking up millions of views despite the platform’s efforts to curb “inauthentic content”."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/27/more-than-20-of-videos-shown-to-new-youtube-users-are-ai-slop-study-finds
#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedVideos #AISlop #YouTube

2025-12-28 12:44:42 UTC

RT @PikettyWIL
Today, I joined 500+ researchers from 70 countries in calling on world leaders to create an International Panel on Inequality modelled after the IPCC— as recommended by the G20 Committee on Inequality led by @JosephEStiglitz. Help us spread the call.
🔗https://wid.world/news-article/500-economists-and-inequality-experts-from-seventy-countries-support-call-for-new-ipcc-for-inequality/

2025-12-28 12:31:34 UTC

RT @HalSinger
The CEO of Khan Academy believes that AI will “displace workers at a scale many people don’t yet realize.” I agree. But his prescription is for companies that benefit from AI to devote one percent of its profits to retrain workers—else there will be tremendous public backlash. (Of course the NYT Opinion page eats this stuff up.) Two thoughts: First, this is a problem to be solved by government, not the private sector, which could care less about social costs. We could ban certain applications of AI today. Second, the public backlash needs to get going asap.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/opinion/artificial-intelligence-jobs-worker-training.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

2025-12-27 12:53:24 UTC

I wasn't aware of this tradition. Very kewl!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2dfQvIRsYM
#Sound #Audio #AudioQuality #Audiophiles

2025-12-27 11:41:49 UTC

Eroding the market’s hidden hand: toward a Post-Capitalist
media system
Victor Pickard
(Communication, Culture and Critique, 2025, 18, 282–284)
"Media-related problems facing democratic societies around the world today often stem from various kinds of market failures and structural limitations endemic to all capitalist media systems. Yet, the capitalist logics at the root of these problems largely escape critical analysis in communication research. Working against such “capitalist media realism,” this article begins to interrogate these logics and provides a preliminary framework for gradually eroding them in favor of a less capitalist and more democratic media system."
https://victorpickard.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/eroding-the-markets-hidden-hand_-toward-a-post-capitalist-media-system-1.pdf
#PoliticalEconomy #Media #Journalism #Democracy #MediaPolicy #PostCapitalism

2025-12-27 11:17:07 UTC

"The first quarter of the twenty-first century has produced some huge scientific breakthroughs, ranging from the first mRNA vaccines and CRISPR-based gene-editing techniques to the discovery of the Higgs boson and the first measurements of gravitational waves. But you won’t find any of these advances described in the top-cited papers published since 2000.
That is one of the findings of an analysis by Nature’s news team of the 25 most-cited papers published in the twenty-first century. The articles garnering the most citations report developments in artificial intelligence (AI); approaches to improve the quality of research or systematic reviews; cancer statistics; and research software. However, a pioneering 2004 paper on experiments with graphene1 — work that won its authors the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 — is also among the twenty-first century’s most-cited.
Citations — the means by which authors acknowledge previous sources in the literature — are one measure of a paper’s influence. But the most highly cited papers generally aren’t the most famous scientific discoveries. Rather, these works tend to describe scientific methods or software, the workhorses on which scientists depend. “Scientists say they value methods, theory and empirical discoveries, but in practice the methods get cited more,” notes Misha Teplitskiy, a sociologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who studies how scholars cite work.
There are multiple databases tracking academic citations, but they look at different document sets and differ in citation numbers. Nature selected five databases for its analysis and took the median rankings across them. The databases cover tens of millions of papers published in the twenty-first century."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01125-9
#Science #AcademicPublishing

2025-12-27 11:12:11 UTC

"Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has vowed to make New York City more affordable, but his most well-known plans will take time — and in some cases the cooperation of state legislators.
So he has already begun considering more than a dozen potential executive and regulatory actions aimed at lowering costs and protecting workers without having to worry about the sluggish pace and political calculations of lawmakers in Albany.
The list of options was provided in recent days by a team led by Lina Khan, a leading progressive legal scholar, that has spent weeks scouring New York City’s laws to find dormant or underused mayoral authority that could allow Mr. Mamdani to take action in a hurry.
The exact proposals have been kept under wraps. But three people familiar with the discussions said they include specific attempts to drive down apartment rental fees and utility costs and compel businesses to be more transparent about pricing. Other suggestions include dusting off a little-used 1960s price-gouging statute and policing new protections for food delivery workers.
The proposals that Mr. Mamdani pursues may give New Yorkers an early indication of how aggressive their new mayor will be in advancing a leftist political agenda. If he does take action, he may test how much power the mayor of New York City can exercise without constraint from Albany and Washington."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/nyregion/lina-khan-mamdani-affordability-new-york-city.html
#USA #NYC #Mamdani #Affordability #Housing

2025-12-27 10:45:45 UTC

"Matthew Prince, cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare, has spent years shaping infrastructure for the open web. In a conversation with WIRED’s Brian Barrett, Prince will discuss how the Internet’s business model is evolving in the age of AI, what the future holds for content creators, and how we can build a sustainable, thriving online ecosystem."
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/safeguarding-the-internets-future
#CloudFlare #OpenWeb #AI

2025-12-27 10:16:44 UTC

"The scholars surveyed 1,500 individuals in 104 occupations to understand where workers desire automation and where they resist it.
Trust emerged as a top concern: 45% expressed doubts about the accuracy and reliability of AI systems, while 23% feared job loss and 16% worried about the lack of human oversight. Many respondents were especially concerned about AI encroaching on creative tasks or handling communication with vendors and clients.
Conversely, they welcomed automation that would free up time for higher-value work (69.4%), reduce task repetitiveness (46.6%), and improve the quality of their work (46.6%). Specifically, they welcomed automation that might include scheduling client appointments, maintaining files of information, or rectifying errors in records.
The study also explored preferences regarding the level of AI involvement. Most respondents favored a collaborative approach, with 45.2% desiring an equal partnership between workers and AI and 35.6% seeking human oversight at critical junctures. This indicates a clear resistance to fully automated systems, the scholars noted.
“The findings suggest that AI agents can play a supportive role in the workplace, relieving workers of low-value or tedious tasks rather than displacing workers,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an author of the study and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab."
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/what-workers-really-want-from-artificial-intelligence
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity

2025-12-27 10:12:15 UTC

- reply

"In addition to Nigeria, Trump—who says he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize—since 2017 has also ordered the bombing of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, as well as boats allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Trump has also deployed warships and thousands of US troops near Venezuela, which could become the next country attacked by a president who campaigned on a platform of “peace through strength.”
That’s more than the at least five countries attacked during the tenure of former President George W. Bush or the at least seven nations attacked on orders of then-President Barack Obama during the so-called War on Terror, which killed more than 940,000 people—including at least 432,000 civilians, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs."

2025-12-27 10:09:03 UTC

"President Donald Trump—the self-described “most anti-war president in history”—has now ordered the bombing of more countries than any president in history as US forces carried out Christmas day strikes on what the White House claimed were Islamic State militants killing Christians in Nigeria.
“Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” Trump said Thursday in a post on his Truth Social network.
“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was,” the president continued. “The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing.”
“Under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper,” Trump added. “May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”"
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-bombs-nigeria
#USA #Trump #Militarism #Warmonger #Nigeria #ISIS

2025-12-27 10:07:02 UTC

I find this argument a bit moot. The problem arises when you rely on only one chatbot. To attain a minimum degree of deterministic output, you should use two, or ideally four, chatbots for the same issue. Another completely different question is that most people only rely on just one source. This is ALWAYS wrong, regardless of whether the source is a human being, a book, or a chatbot. To achieve at least some level of reasoning, you must confront different sources with each other.
"AI can be a formidable ally to humans in rational inquiry. It can help us invent drugs, or free us from “bullshit jobs”, or doing our taxes – tasks that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. All the better. But Kant and his contemporaries did not plead the case of reason over faith just so humans could build better shelves or have more spare time. Critical thinking was not just about efficiency – it was a practice of freedom and human emancipation.
Human thinking is messy and full of errors, but it forces us to debate, to doubt, to test ideas against one another – and to recognise the limits of our own understanding. It builds confidence, both individually and collectively. For Kant, the exercise of reason was never just about knowledge; it was about enabling people to become agents of their own lives, and resist domination. It was about building a moral community grounded in the shared principle of reason and debate, rather than blind belief.
With all the benefits AI brings, the challenge is this: how can we harness its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That may be one of the defining questions of the 21st century. It is one we would do well not to delegate to the machine."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/26/ai-dark-ages-enlightenment
#AI #GenerativeAI #Chatbots #LLMs #CriticalThinking #Enlightenment

2025-12-27 09:50:11 UTC

"Private equity firms have been struggling to deliver on their core business model of taking on debt, buying companies and selling them for a profit. Several years of high interest rates have made it too expensive for many would-be buyers to purchase companies with debt, and private equity firms are contending with a backlog of more than 31,000 unsold companies, a record amount. Deal activity picked up toward the end of this year, but not enough to make a significant dent in the backlog.
Continuation vehicles are providing a short-term solution by allowing firms to sell the companies to themselves, book a paper gain and wait for interest rates to improve.
Private equity firms have been turning to this strategy more frequently. The dollar value of continuation vehicles across the industry is expected to total $100 billion or more by the end of 2025, up from about $35 billion in 2019, according to the investment bank Evercore.
Private equity is one of the biggest parts of the global economy, with more than $7 trillion in investors’ money, and some of those investors are getting increasingly worried that strategies like continuation vehicles are putting off a painful reckoning.
Private equity firms say they are selling only their best-performing companies to continuation vehicles, which would yield big profits when the companies can eventually be sold to outside buyers.
The risk, investors say, is that the insular nature of these sales — where the private equity firm is both the buyer and seller — is leading to questionable valuations and unrealistic projections, leaving investors vulnerable to painful surprises."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/business/private-equity-continuation-funds.html
#PrivateEquity #Economy #Bubble #Capitalism #ContinuationFunds #Debt

2025-12-27 09:44:48 UTC

RT @michaelxpettis
Bloomberg: "China has officially launched a national venture capital fund and three large regional funds, together worth billions of dollars, as part of a push to foster home-grown tech champions. The national fund will run for 20 years — with 10 years devoted to investment and another 10 to exits."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-26/china-starts-state-backed-venture-funds-to-support-tech-startups

2025-12-27 09:29:58 UTC

"When publicly available AI tools first arrived, Malan says the expectation was that jobs like call-center roles would be most vulnerable. “But what nobody predicted was that the biggest impact by far would be on programmers,” a trend he attributes to the relatively solitary and highly structured nature of the work. He notes that, while other economic conditions also factor into the job market, the pace of programmer employment decline has accelerated since generative AI came on the scene. In the United States, overall programmer employment fell a dramatic 27.5 percent between 2023 and 2025, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. But employment for software developers—a distinct, more design-oriented position in the government data—only fell 0.3 percent in the same period.
At the same time, some positions, such as information security analyst and AI engineer are actually growing, Malan says. “There’s been this pretty dramatic readjustment of the job landscape, even with as narrow a field as IT. Within IT, some jobs have exploded, like InfoSec analysts have grown in double digits, whereas programmers declined double digits” over the past few years, he says. (Eventually, Malan says he expects generative AI to affect all intellectual work.)
Job responsibilities also appear to be changing. For recent graduates pursuing roles labeled as software-engineering jobs, “they’re not necessarily just coding,” says Jamie Grant, senior associate director for the engineering team at the University of Pennsylvania’s career services. “There tends to be so much higher-order thinking and knowledge of the software-development life cycle,” as well as a need to work with other parties, such as understanding user and client demands, she says."
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-effect-entry-level-jobs
#AI #GenerativeAI #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment #Automation #EntryLevelJobs

2025-12-26 15:53:19 UTC

"The release served as a crucial turning point for the project. Downloads from its GitHub repository increased, and more enterprises adopted the software. Encouraged by this growth, the team envisioned the next generation of Airflow: a modular architecture, a more modern user interface, and a “run anywhere, anytime” feature, enabling it to operate on premises, in the cloud, or on edge devices and handle event-driven and ad hoc scenarios in addition to scheduled tasks. The team delivered on this vision with the launch of Airflow 3.0 last April.
“It was amazing that we managed to ‘rebuild the plane while flying it’ when we worked on Airflow 3—even if we had some temporary issues and glitches,” says Jarek Potiuk, one of the foremost contributors to Airflow and now a member of its project-management committee. “We had to refactor and move a lot of pieces of the software while keeping Airflow 2 running and providing some bug fixes for it.”
Compared with Airflow’s second version, which Koka says had only a few hundred to a thousand downloads per month on GitHub, “now we’re averaging somewhere between 35 to 40 million downloads a month,” he says. The project’s community also soared, with more than 3,000 developers of all skill levels from around the world contributing to Airflow."
https://spectrum.ieee.org/apache-airflow-3-programmatic-workflows
#AirFlow #ApacheAirflow #AirBnB #OpenSource #FLOSS #WorkflowOrchestratror #Python #DataPipelines

2025-12-26 13:08:55 UTC

"“Exposed today,” the document states, “is the true face of Zionist ideology: a system that over decades has entrenched an organized and sophisticated regime of apartheid supported by advanced technologies that exercise total control over every aspect of Palestinian life—fragmenting the land, dividing its people, and turning Palestinian existence into an unbearable hell.”
Genocide is both a cumulative process, according to the document, “one that began in the minds of the settler-colonial powers of Europe when they denied the image of God in others and legitimized death, domination and slavery,” and a “structural sin against God, against humanity, and against creation.”
“We consider the State of Israel, established in 1948,” Kairos II maintains, “to be a continuation of that same colonial enterprise built on racism and the ideology of ethnic or religious superiority.”
Authors of the document charge that “the genocidal war has laid bare the hypocrisy of the Western world, its hollow values and its empty boasts of commitment to human rights and international law. In truth, the Western world has sacrificed us, revealing racism and double standards toward our people.”"
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/what-is-the-christian-word-in-the-face-of-genocide-new-kairos-palestine-document-calls-for-repudiation-of-zionism/
#Zionism #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #Israel

2025-12-26 13:05:31 UTC

"Before Todd Blanche could be confirmed as the second-highest official at the Justice Department, he had to satisfy the concerns of ethics officials.
Blanche, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney during his New York criminal trial last year, was a cryptocurrency investor with holdings of between $159,000 and $485,000, records show.
To prevent possible violations of the federal conflicts of interest statute, Blanche promised to dump his digital assets no later than 90 days after his Senate confirmation in March, according to his government ethics agreement. He also pledged not to participate in any matter that could have a “direct and predictable effect on my financial interests in the virtual currency” until his Bitcoin and other crypto-related products were sold.
But about a month into the job — before divesting — Blanche issued a memo that ordered an end to investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges launched during President Joe Biden’s term. He also eliminated an enforcement team dedicated to looking for crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes. And his memo said the Justice Department would assist Trump’s crypto working group of experts and Cabinet members that went on to issue a list of recommendations aimed at making the United States the global leader in digital coins.
Blanche’s directives, while he still owned significant crypto investments, violated the conflicts of interest law and his ethics agreement, legal experts and former federal ethics officials told ProPublica."
https://www.propublica.org/article/todd-blanche-crypto-doj-trump
#USA #Trump #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #DoJ #Kleptocracy #Plutocracy

2025-12-26 12:03:21 UTC

"All Mamdani’s socialist bonafides cannot change the fact that he will be governing from within a capitalist system—or more specifically, that he will be the mayor of the financial command center of the global capitalist economy. But Mamdani’s opponents are not the only ones who can harness structural power, be it through new organizations like Our Time or legacy ones like the Met Council on Housing, New York’s longest-standing citywide tenants union. Though Mamdani’s opponents might have booby-trapped the rooms, that does not preclude his supporters from building their own barricades across the city.
New York City in 2026 may not be the ideal time and place to advance socialist housing policy, but this is how history proceeds. The keys to the house of government will soon belong to Mamdani and all the organizers who brought him to this point. If they are to succeed, they must enter with their eyes wide open to the traps laid before them."
https://jewishcurrents.org/zohran-mamdani-vs-the-real-estate-state
#USA #NYC #Mamdani #RealEstate #Capitalism #Housing #PublicHousing

2025-12-26 11:33:06 UTC

There's a new tech bubble rising up in the horizon:
"An analysis of 58,070 corporate communication documents — such as company reports, transcripts of interviews with experts, and research documents — from 2022 to 2024 revealed increasing references to quantum computing, suggesting an expanding awareness of quantum and its inclusion in mainstream business discussions, not just technical discourse, the researchers found. News-related corporate communications content saw particularly pronounced increases.
References to quantum computing in corporate communications more generally escalated in 2024, with each quarter showing substantial increases in mentions across all forms of company documents. “While research documents naturally maintain high levels of quantum computing references, the significant increase in mentions across other document categories ... might suggest a growing understanding of the technology’s presence in corporate communications,” the researchers write.
References to quantum technologies are also becoming more common in corporate earnings calls, growing more than sixfold from 2016 to 2024. Much of the heightened attention can be associated with major players actively integrating quantum computing into their strategic roadmaps — for example, IBM expanding its quantum facilities and launching new initiatives and AI powerhouse Nvidia announcing partnerships with quantum startups.
As quantum technologies are more frequently discussed in C-suite and financial circles, markets are taking notice. A Technavio report estimated that the global quantum computing market will grow by $17.34 billion from 2024 to 2028, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 26%. Startup investment is also on the rise, evidenced by a $300 million equity infusion for quantum computing company Quantinuum in 2024."
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/quantum-report-charts-growing-business-interest-varied-public-awareness
#Quantum #QuantumComputing #QuantumBubble

2025-12-26 10:47:46 UTC

RT @IEEESpectrum
Is the moon the next frontier for data centers, or just a sci-fi dream? Uncover the debate on lunar data storage in one of IEEE Spectrum's top computing stories this year. Read the whole list to learn about the rest.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-computing-stories-2025

2025-12-25 22:19:53 UTC

Mais tarde ou mais cedo, as pessoas irão fartar-se das infantilidades e birrinhas liberticidas da administração Trump. Quando isso acontecer, rapidamente as instituições e as empresas mudarão o tom do seu discurso.
--------------------
Sooner or later, people will grow tired of the Trump administration's childishness and freedom-killing tantrums. When that happens, institutions and companies will quickly change the tone of their discourse.

2025-12-24 12:46:59 UTC

Isto para mim é que é a verdadeira música de Natal :-D Boas festas a toda a gente!!! https://youtu.be/idRIbNeYhOM?si=E_mqakhSVEIpix0a

2025-12-21 15:22:47 UTC

"All the chatbots had favorite things, though, and asked follow-up questions, as if they were curious about the person using them and wanted to keep the conversation going.
“It’s entertaining,” said Ben Shneiderman, an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. “But it’s a deceit.”
Shneiderman and a host of other experts in a field known as human-computer interaction object to this approach. They say that making these systems act like humanlike entities, rather than as tools with no inner life, creates cognitive dissonance for users about what exactly they are interacting with and how much to trust it. Generative A.I. chatbots are a probabilistic technology that can make mistakes, hallucinate false information and tell users what they want to hear. But when they present as humanlike, users “attribute higher credibility” to the information they provide, research has found.
Critics say that generative A.I. systems could give requested information without all the chit chat. Or they could be designed for specific tasks, such as coding or health information, rather than made to be general-purpose interfaces that can help with anything and talk about feelings. They could be designed like tools: A mapping app, for example, generates directions and doesn’t pepper you with questions about why you are going to your destination.
Making these newfangled search engines into personified entities that use “I,” instead of tools with specific objectives, could make them more confusing and dangerous for users, so why do it this way?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/technology/why-do-ai-chatbots-use-i.html?unlocked_article_code=1.908.kYfW.OMY_EzEceSu6&smid=url-share
#AI #GenerativeAI #Chatbots #anthropomorphism

2025-12-19 17:20:06 UTC

"The secret is out about the potential artificial intelligence bubble — and Wall Street’s sharks smell blood in the water.
Wall Street traders have sharply increased how much they’re spending on “credit default swaps,” which, in case you weren’t paying attention during the movie The Big Short, are insurance derivatives that pay out when a company fails (a form of short).
Investors are shorting Big Tech companies, mainly Oracle and Meta, to “protect [themselves] and create a hedge,” one anonymous credit executive said. That means more and more investors are managing their risk by putting their money on the AI market’s eventual crash — just like in The Big Short.
In the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, firms like Goldman Sachs “made a fortune” playing both sides of the economic crash by selling mortgage-backed securities that its executives infamously identified as “shitty,” then also selling credit default swaps (shorts) against these investments as it became apparent they’d fail.
According to data reported by the Financial Times this week, the volume of credit default swaps tied to U.S. technology giants has risen 90 percent just since early September after being reportedly “thin to nonexistent” at the start of the year."
https://www.levernews.com/the-big-short-2-ai-boogaloo/
#AI #BigTech #AIBubble #WallStreet #CreditDefaultSwaps

2025-12-10 17:15:32 UTC

"On a Thursday in early September, more than 40 strangers logged in to Instacart, the grocery-shopping app, to buy eggs and test a hypothesis.
Connected by videoconference, they simultaneously selected the same store — a Safeway in Washington, D.C. — and the same brand of eggs. They all chose pickup rather than delivery.
The only difference was the price they were offered: $3.99 for a couple of lucky shoppers. $4.59 or $4.69 for others. And a few saw a price of $4.79 — 20 percent more than some others, for the exact same product.
The shoppers were volunteers, participating in a study published on Tuesday and organized by the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group, and Consumer Reports, a nonprofit consumer publication. In tests in four cities across the country, nearly 200 volunteers checked prices on 20 grocery items on Instacart.
On item after item, they found significant differences. In a Target in North Canton, Ohio, some shoppers were charged $3.59 for a jar of Skippy peanut butter that others could get for $2.99. At a Safeway in Seattle, some people paid $3.99 for a box of Wheat Thins while others paid $4.89. And at a Target in St. Paul, Minn., some people were charged $4.59 for a box of Cheerios that others could get for $3.99.
“Two shoppers who are buying the exact same item from the exact same store at the exact same time are getting different prices,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative. “The data really backs up how extraordinarily pervasive this is.”
(...)
Groundwork’s findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price, offered to all customers for a predictable period, is breaking down in the digital age. Companies are using sophisticated algorithms to adjust prices quickly in response to competitors’ offers and consumer behavior."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/instacart-algorithmic-pricing.html
#USA #AlgorithmicPricing #DynamicPricing #Insatacart #Inflation #Algorithms