Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹

https://tldr.nettime.org/@remixtures

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/remixtures
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/remixtures
GitHub: https://github.com/remixtures
Academia.edu: https://iscte-iul.academia.edu/MiguelCaetano

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remixtures_at_tldr.nettime.org@momostr.pink

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Published at

2026-08-27T21:48:41Z

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Last Notes

2026-06-21 14:08:27 UTC

"Oodi, voted the world's best newly built library in 2019, is thriving – a striking contrast to the situation in many other countries where public libraries are slowly disappearing.
Between 2008 and 2019, 766 public libraries closed across the United States, while in the United Kingdom, between 2016 and 2023, more than 180 council-run libraries were either closed or handed over to volunteer groups. Finland, instead, is expanding its libraries and transforming them into publicly funded community service centres where people can borrow much more than just books.
Research emerging from these initiatives – not just in Finland, but also in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Canada – already suggests that libraries play a significant role in promoting social inclusion, making a poignant argument: what if the value of libraries is not in how many books they lend, but more in how they help societies function? And what can the world learn from this Finnish model?
Finland has more than 700 libraries for a population of 5.6 million, offering everything from podcast studios and 3D printing to tennis rackets and swimming pool passes.
According to Vänttinen, the most borrowed items after books in Helsinki libraries are spaces: rooms that can be pre-booked, free of charge, to meet, study, hold political discussions or make music. Among portable items, board games and console games top the list.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260618-the-weird-and-wonderful-libraries-of-finland
#Finland #Libraries

2026-06-21 13:15:02 UTC

"Sorry, I’m saying it. Mastodon. We want fucking Mastodon. It’s run by an actual non-profit foundation, none of this “public benefit corporation” bullshit. It’s not subject to corporate enshittification. It’s not subject to creeping network-wide puritanism. Mastodon. Goddammit. Mastodon Mastodon Mastodon.
“No. Choosing an instance is too hard!” Have you chosen an email provider, fuckers? Yes? Congratulations! You can pick an instance.
“But how do I know that instance won’t implode in a giant cloud of drama?” You don’t. It happens, and it sucks when it happens, but it doesn’t happen all that often. Go find another instance.
“But what if the instance I’m on doesn’t federate with the ones my friends are on, or they change their policies to be more puritanical, or—” Go find another fucking instance. This is not rocket surgery.
“But if I move instances, I’ll lose my posts!” Yeah, you’ll lose your posts. You know what you won’t lose? Your entire group of followers. You know, the way you lost them when you moved from fucking Twitter to fucking Bluesky. With fucking Mastodon, you don’t have that problem."
https://giants-club.net/articles/just-use-mastodon/
#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #Mastodon #Fediverse #Decentralization #BlueSky

2026-04-26 21:34:06 UTC

- reply

The author of the article states that the war was a failure for both the U.S. and Israel. Not Iran, If I'm interpreting correctly. In any case, white supremacism is more than anything else an ideology. And ideologies lie most often than not outside of logic, reason, and evidences... :-/

2026-04-26 13:59:36 UTC

"The catastrophic failure of the American-Israeli war on Iran seems certain to inaugurate another revolution in global consciousness. The most powerful nation in world history has suffered a strategic defeat – a modern Tsushima in the Strait of Hormuz.
Unlike at Suez, where the feebleness of old Europe was brusquely corrected by the rising American hegemon, Hormuz erupts in a landscape where the West’s moral and material “soft power” has been incinerated in the ruins of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and undermined by the spectacle of blatant white supremacism and risible incompetence in Washington. The emotional and psychological consequences of this collapse of post-historical illusion are profound.
The war on Iran, designed to satisfy the maximalist fantasies of an Israeli partner and collapse the Islamic Republic, has achieved neither. Instead, the survival of the Iranian state against the full spectrum of US coercion has clarified the outlines of a post-American world.
The material strength of the American empire remains immense. But what cannot be recovered is the plausibility of the American story: the overarching narrative of the US as a model for all of humanity; the rational centre of human progress around which the world was destined to orbit."
https://www.equator.org/articles/ghost-fleet-iran-post-american-world
#Iran #USA #Imperialism #Geopolitics #Trump

2026-04-24 14:45:34 UTC

RT @deepseek_ai
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Try it now at http://chat.deepseek.com via Expert Mode / Instant Mode. API is updated & available today!
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🤗 Open Weights: https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4

2026-04-18 22:07:04 UTC

- reply

Do you think concepts like "God", "Consciousness", "Subjectivity", or "Metaphysics" can help anyone understand why there is hunger and homelessness in the world? These concepts are ideas and, as such, they don't have direct connection to material reality. Quite the opposite, they exert an external pressure to social relationships - most often more negative than positive.

2026-04-18 21:48:56 UTC

- reply

That is not idealist. Quite the opposite!! It's materialist because it's grounded on the basic requirements for social reproduction of the huma species. A society cannot survive and prosper if it doesn't follow that maxim.

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 traditional 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

2026-04-15 21:19:57 UTC

RT @HedgieMarkets
🦔A study from Mass General Brigham tested 21 AI models on medical diagnosis tasks. For differential diagnosis with incomplete patient information, all models had error rates above 80%. With more complete data, error rates fell below 40%, with the best performers reaching 90% accuracy. The models consistently narrowed to a single diagnosis rather than suggesting a range of possibilities. One in three US adults have used AI chatbots for medical advice in the past year. Google and Amazon are both developing dedicated medical chatbots.
My Take
Above 80% error rates for differential diagnosis with incomplete information is the precise scenario most people are in when they turn to AI with a health concern. Nobody walks in with a complete patient file. They describe symptoms, worry about something specific, and ask what it might be. That's exactly when these models fail most.
The way these models fail is as important as how often. They narrow to a single confident answer rather than offering a range of possibilities. When a doctor says it could be one of several things, that's honesty about uncertainty. When an AI says it's probably this one thing, it reads as authority. I've covered the cognitive surrender research showing people accept AI outputs without scrutiny 73% of the time even when the AI is wrong.
Confident wrong answers in a medical context are a different order of problem than confident wrong answers about anything else. Google and Amazon are both racing to release dedicated medical chatbots into this environment while disclaiming clinical responsibility, and I think that deserves serious regulatory attention before it causes widespread harm.
Hedgie🤗
Link to study: https://massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/press-releases/ai-chatbot-lacks-clinical-reasoning

2026-04-14 00:56:44 UTC

- reply

"Trump’s other interest is hard power, to better crush his foes. The BBB last year included $165bn for the Department of Homeland Security to “deliver on the President’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe again”. Last week, he bet the house to pay for a bigger military. As he put it at an Easter lunch reception last week: “We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
That is proving expensive. By some estimates, the Pentagon spent $12.7bn in the first six days and $28bn in a little over five weeks on the war against Iran, which appears to have next to nothing to do with guarding the country. His budget proposal, released last week, the one that cut the budget for HHS by 12% and the entire non-defense budget by 10%, was transparent about the Brobdingnagian sums Trump wants to spend on this kind of stuff: $1.5tn in 2027 alone. About three times Iran’s entire GDP and 42% more than the budget for 2026.
The message to everyday Americans is: beware. The cuts to the non-defense budget in the 2027 proposal are nowhere near enough to cover this increase in defense spending. Given Trump’s and the Republican party’s aversion to taxes, they are all but certain to come after the rest of the safety net to cover the bill."

2026-04-14 00:53:51 UTC

And yet the far-right complains about immigration originating from these countries !? Utter idiocy!!!
"Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and France (ranked by ODA volume) accounted for 95.7% of the total decline in ODA. The United States alone drove three-quarters of the decline, with its ODA falling by 56.9% compared to 2024. This is the largest reduction in volume by any provider in any year on record. In 2025, Germany was the largest DAC provider of ODA for the first time in history, with its ODA totalling USD 29.1 billion. Eight DAC members increased their ODA."
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/data-explainers/2026/04/a-historic-decline-in-foreign-aid-preliminary-2025-oda-data.html
#HumanitarianAid #ForeignAid

2026-04-13 22:12:18 UTC

RT @ananayarora
Marcus Hutchins, the guy famous for stopping the WannaCry Ransomware, probably has the best take on Mythos doing vulnerability research
https://x.com/ananayarora/status/2043381424594837789

2026-04-11 00:24:49 UTC

"- Webloc is a global geolocation surveillance system that monitors hundreds of millions of people based on data purchased from consumer apps and digital advertising. It was developed by Cobwebs Technologies and is now sold by its successor Penlink.
- In collaboration with the European investigative journalism platform VSquare, we reveal that Hungarian domestic intelligence has been using Webloc since at least 2022 and continues to use it as of today. Webloc customers also include the national police in El Salvador.
- U.S. customers include ICE, the U.S. military, Texas Department of Public Safety, DHS West Virginia, NYC district attorneys, and several police departments in Los Angeles, Dallas, Baltimore, Tucson, Durham and in smaller cities and counties like City of Elk Grove and Pinal County.
- Based on the responses to 96 freedom of information requests we conclude that governments in Europe and the U.K. are highly nontransparent about their potential use of ad-based surveillance.
- Cobwebs Technologies has links to the spyware vendor Quadream through Cobwebs Technologies founder Omri Timianker, who now oversees the international operations of Penlink.
- Webloc is sold as an add-on product to the social media and web intelligence system Tangles. Based on technical analysis and other sources we show that Tangles and other products developed by Cobwebs Technologies are used in many countries across the globe.
- We briefly investigate another Cobwebs product named Trapdoor that appears to help trick victims into revealing information. Our analysis leads us to believe that Trapdoor can help facilitate the deployment of malware on devices."
https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-penlinks-ad-based-geolocation-surveillance-tech/
#Webloc #Geolocation #Surveillance #Penlinks #Malware #CyberSecurity #PoliceState

2026-04-06 08:27:11 UTC

"The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine allocated the majority of the land to a Jewish state, even though Jews were a minority of the population and owned only a small fraction of the land. The war that followed, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, produced the mass displacement and killing of Palestinians. In that sense, the creation of Israel represents a foundational contradiction — an original sin within the supposedly rules-based international order.
Yet the political conversation rarely confronts that contradiction. Instead, it fixates on the ritual question of whether Israel has a “right to exist.” In reality, international law does not recognize such a right for states; it recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination and prohibits territorial conquest. The question functions less as a legal inquiry than as a political litmus test.
As Mohammed El-Kurd has argued, this framing forces Palestinians and others into a rhetorical trap. Rather than addressing dispossession, occupation, or unequal rights, they are first required to perform a moral certification assuring the world they do not seek violence before their political grievances can even be heard. The result is a debate that substitutes abstract pledges for the material realities of military rule, displacement, and statelessness.
The answer to those two fundamental questions should start with the fact that the very order itself was founded on an initial contradiction that set it up for hypocrisy — and hypocrisy is the ultimate vulnerability. The system at once created this contradiction and is weakened by it. What comes next need not rely on false promises but on actions rooted in reality."
https://jacobin.com/2026/04/israel-right-exist-palestine-self-determination/
#Israel #Zionism #Palestine #SelfDetermintation #InternationalLaw

2026-04-04 11:29:27 UTC

“The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 percent exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity (4.1 billion people), according to a new Oxfam analysis published on April 2, 2026, ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers.
The findings show that, a decade later, the super-rich continue to exploit offshore systems to evade taxes and conceal assets, highlighting the urgent need for coordinated international action to tax extreme wealth and end the use of tax havens.
An amount of $3.55 trillion in untaxed wealth was stashed offshore in tax havens and unreported accounts in 2024, according to Oxfam’s estimates. “This sum exceeds the GDP of France and is more than twice the combined GDP of the world’s 44 least developed countries,” a statement by Oxfam noted.“
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/governance/untaxed-wealth-hidden-offshore-by-richest-01-surpasses-entire-wealth-of-the-poorest-half-of-humanity-oxfam
#TaxHavens #Offshores #TaxEvasion #Inequality

2026-04-04 11:05:16 UTC

RT @HedgieMarkets
🦔Google's plan to partly power a Texas data center through a 933-megawatt natural gas plant has been confirmed after Cleanview researchers uncovered the permit application. The plant would emit 4.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than the entire city of San Francisco. Google pledged carbon-free operations by 2030 in 2020, reported a 48% rise in emissions by 2024, and by 2025 had quietly reframed its climate commitments as climate moonshots, a term it uses for speculative projects that may or may not happen. Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are making the same pivot.
My Take
The climate commitments these companies made were always going to last exactly as long as they were cheaper than the alternative. Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft all pledged net-zero goals during a period when renewables were becoming cost competitive and climate leadership was good PR. AI changed the economics. The demand is too large, the timelines too short, and gas is available now. So the commitments are being quietly retired or reframed.
Google's head of advanced energy was asked directly last week how natural gas fits with the company's clean energy goals. His answer was we don't have anything to say on that. These were always profit-driven businesses. The climate commitments were real when they were also good business. They are becoming inconvenient and so they are going away.
Hedgie🤗
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/02/google-ai-datacenter

2026-03-23 04:36:04 UTC

"ProPublica reviewed records of that meeting, providing a rare look at a dramatic shift underway in one of the most sensitive domains of public policy. The Trump administration is upending the way nuclear energy is regulated, driven by a desire to dramatically increase the amount of energy available to power artificial intelligence.
Career experts have been forced out and thousands of pages of regulations are being rewritten at a sprint. A new generation of nuclear energy companies — flush with Silicon Valley cash and boasting strong political connections — wield increasing influence over policy. Figures like Cohen are forcing a “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley ethos on one of the country’s most important regulators.
The Trump administration has been particularly aggressive in its attacks on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the bipartisan independent regulator that approves commercial nuclear power plants and monitors their safety. The agency is not a household name. But it’s considered the international gold standard, often influencing safety rules around the world.
The NRC has critics, especially in Silicon Valley, where the often-cautious commission is portrayed as an impediment to innovation. In an early salvo, President Donald Trump fired NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson last June after Hanson spoke out about the importance of agency independence. It was the first time an NRC commissioner had been fired.
During that Idaho meeting, Cohen shot down any notion of NRC independence in the new era."
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-nuclear-power-nrc-safety-doge-vought
#USA #Trump #Nuclear #NuclearEnergy #DOGE #NRC #AI #GenerativeAI

2026-03-18 20:32:56 UTC

"Iranian life is not so precious a thing, however. 1,400 civilians have been killed so far and the death count will certainly rise as America and Israel run out of military targets and turn to targeting civilians and their infrastructure. The Financial Times reports that as “the US and Israel sought to degrade regime institutions, they have hit more than 20,000 non-military buildings, according to Iran’s Red Crescent, including 17,353 that were residential.” Whatever legally required vetting and basic due diligence that might’ve been in place to minimize civilian deaths has been and will continue to be whittled down, by design, because the point of automated kill-chains is to compress the process, it is to “shrink that into seconds and minutes, almost instantaneous” as one anonymous defense tech expert told The Financial Times. The point is more targets, destroying in weeks what might’ve taken a traditional campaign months—and so, if civilians die they die.
And so we infest the earth with AI tools embedded at every stage of the kill chain—tools built by the same companies and financed by the same capital, that were supposed to inaugurate an era of American technological supremacy; the same tools tested and refined on Palestinians in Gaza over the course of Israel’s genocidal campaign."
https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/how-much-a-dollar-cost
#Iran #Israel #USA #AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #MiddleEast #BigTech #Imperialism #Oil

2026-03-14 14:17:50 UTC

"The point I’m making is fairly simple: the whole “AI SaaSpocalypse” story is a cover-up for a much, much larger problem. Reporters and investors who do not seem to be able to read or use software are conflating the slowing growth of SaaS companies with the growth of AI tools, when what they’re actually seeing is the collapse of the tech industry’s favourite business model, one that’s become the favourite chew-toy of the Venture Capital, Private Equity and Private Credit Industries.
You see, there are tens of thousands of SaaS companies in everything from car washes to vets to law firms to gyms to gardening companies to architectural firms."
https://www.wheresyoured.at/hatersguide-saas/
#SaaS #Software #VCs #PrivateEquity #StartUps

2026-03-09 09:52:45 UTC

"DA: The difficulty I have with both social status and contributive justice is that society determines them in a very organic way. So, if we decide that the current meritocratic equilibrium fails to confer appropriate status or dignity on a large segment of the population, how can we change that, especially when the market serves as such a powerful anchor? Even if that weren’t the case, how could anybody deliberately reshape something as organic as our sense of contributive justice?
MS: You’re right. With the market serving as an anchor, it’s easy to assume that what people earn reflects the value of their contribution, at least under competitive conditions. But even the most ardent laissez-faire economist would be hard-pressed to defend the idea that income is a reliable moral measure. If it were, we would have to say that a casino mogul contributes 5,000 times as much to society as a nurse or a schoolteacher.
Do we really believe that? Consider Breaking Bad. The protagonist, Walter White, began as a high school chemistry teacher, struggling to make ends meet and even washing cars after school. Then he became a meth cook and dealer, earning millions of dollars. Yet no one would claim that his contribution to society was greater as a meth cook. On reflection, we are capable of making qualitative moral judgments about the value of different kinds of work, even if we disagree about the details."
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/saving-democracy-in-the-age-of-ai-by-daron-acemoglu-and-michael-j-sandel-2026-03
#Democracy #Capitalism #Markets #AI #Philosophy

2026-03-08 14:09:49 UTC

"Last week Amodei, in explaining Anthropic’s position on Pentagon contracts, emphasized the company’s overall commitment to national security. He wrote, “I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.” If Amodei genuinely believes that the US military is devoted to addressing actual “existential” threats to the US, he’s too naive to be entrusted with anything as important as running a big AI company.
Obviously, this indictment applies about equally to OpenAI’s Sam Altman (who gladly swooped in and snatched the Pentagon largesse that Amodei will now be denied) and to Google’s Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis and to xAI’s Elon Musk. All the big AI companies are putting their tools at the disposal of the Pentagon to use as it sees fit.
All of these men, if pressed to justify this, would no doubt recite something about the importance of keeping America secure. Maybe somebody should ask them to name a recent US military intervention that had that effect."
https://www.nonzero.org/p/iran-and-the-immorality-of-openai
#USA #Trump #Pentagon #DoD #Iran #AI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic #OpenAI #Google

2026-03-07 12:09:01 UTC

"I left my job as managing editor of the Los Angeles Times in January 2024, not long into the genocide. That decision wasn’t explicitly about Palestine — I did not want to make a career out of layoffs and managing decline. But during those last months at the paper and in the time that followed, that terrible gap between what we could see in real time on our phones and in the tortured inversions and baseline disinformation of Western media made me feel a specific kind of shame that made it impossible to imagine returning to that kind of environment.
The Times was my first real brush with legacy media — and there I understood how “it’s complicated” journalism functions. A long-standing institution can have a set way of doing things baked into its culture, which can make so much of its day-to-day operation run on autopilot. Since October 7, I have spoken to dozens of journalists across different organizations with similar constraints. Many have told me that, especially in coverage of Palestine, questioning the calcified “both sides” approach meant risking being branded a troublemaker or an “activist,” even when their reasoning was rooted in conventional journalistic standards.
One of the clearest examples arrived early on in the genocide: after Israel’s brutal attack on al-Ahli hospital in October, killing over 471 Palestinians, the phrase “Hamas-run Health Ministry” became commonplace as a part of a successful disinformation campaign to distract from the horror of the attack by questioning the death toll’s credibility. The next month, the Associated Press, whose Stylebook sets industry standards for how the vast majority of English-language newsrooms navigate sensitive-language issues, issued guidance using that phrase, and many newsrooms followed suit."
https://www.thekeymagazine.com/p/western-journalism-palestine-objectivity-legacy-media-genocide-bias-gaza
#Palestine #Gaza #WestBank #SettlerColonialism #Israel #Genocide #Media #News #Journalism #Propaganda #Newspapers #Disinformation

2026-03-07 02:33:46 UTC

"The Federal Drug Enforcement Administration opened an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and a dozen other individuals in 2015 that centered on allegations of money laundering, drug trafficking and the procurement of Eastern European prostitutes for high-profile clients, according to five people familiar with the case.
The investigation, which grew out of a longstanding probe into organized crime, was conducted by a secretive intelligence and law enforcement unit of the DEA and a transnational crime-fighting task force. It began after an informant told authorities that Epstein was involved in the illicit funding and distribution of so-called club drugs, including ecstasy, ketamine and methamphetamines, according to the people, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive law enforcement matters.
The individuals named in a document related to the investigation, according to the people, included Epstein’s accountants, attorneys and European women who worked as his assistants or fashion models. The DEA investigation also named two businesses.
None of the individuals were charged with any offenses as a result of the investigation. It’s unclear how long the investigation remained open and what authorities ultimately learned from it because the complete case files have not been released. Yet descriptions of the DEA probe add to questions about what federal authorities knew about Epstein before they arrested him in 2019. By that time, he’d victimized more than 1,000 people, the US Department of Justice has said."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-03-06/epstein-investigated-in-dea-probe-for-ketamine-money-laundering?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3MjgwNTk3MywiZXhwIjoxNzczNDEwNzczLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUQkhESzdLR1pBTTIwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiIyQjE3NzFFOTlEODc0QzRDOTY1Njg1RTZBQkJGM0QwRCJ9.MsUdM724S6JJmgVatbSTT3WtELWBUwrmFq5QLgOCkc8&leadSource=uverify%20wall
#Epstein #EpsteinFiles #Ketamine

2026-03-07 02:10:51 UTC

"Grammarly’s “expert review” feature offers to give users writing advice “inspired by” subject matter experts, including recently deceased professors, as Wired reported on Wednesday. When I tried the feature out myself, I found some experts that came as a surprise for a different reason — one of them was my boss.
The AI-generated feedback included comments that appeared to be from The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, as well as editor-at-large David Pierce and senior editors Sean Hollister and Tom Warren, none of whom gave Grammarly permission to include them in the “expert reviews.”
The feature, which launched in August, claims to help you “sharpen your message through the lens of industry-relevant perspectives.” When users select the “expert review” button in the Grammarly sidebar, it analyzes their writing and surfaces AI-generated suggestions “inspired by” related experts. Those “industry-relevant perspectives” include the likes of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among many others.
The Verge found numerous other tech journalists named in the feature, as well, including former Verge editors Casey Newton and Joanna Stern, former Verge writer Monica Chin, Wired’s Lauren Goode, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier, The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon, Gizmodo’s Raymond Wong, Digital Foundry founder Richard Leadbetter, Tom’s Guide editor-in-chief Mark Spoonauer, former Rock Paper Shotgun editor-in-chief Katharine Castle, and former IGN news director Kat Bailey. The descriptions for some experts contain inaccuracies, such as outdated job titles, which could have been accurately updated had Superhuman asked those people for permission to reference their work."
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/890921/grammarly-ai-expert-reviews
#AI #GenerativeAI #Grammarly

2026-03-06 00:07:39 UTC

CIVIL WAR!?
"In nearly all countries surveyed, more people say that others in their country have somewhat or very good morals than say their compatriots display somewhat or very bad levels of morality.
The United States is the only place we surveyed where more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%).
Because we have never asked this question before, we don’t know whether a majority of Americans have long held a skeptical view of the ethics of fellow Americans, or if it’s something new – and if so, what’s driving it. But partisan politics appear to play a role.
Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to rate fellow Americans as morally and ethically bad (60% vs. 46%). And previous research has shown that rising numbers of both Republicans and Democrats say people in the other party are immoral.
However, this partisan pattern is not unique to the U.S. In more than half of the countries surveyed, people who don’t support the governing party are particularly likely to view their fellow citizens as immoral."
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-country-survey-americans-especially-likely-to-view-fellow-citizens-as-morally-bad/
#USA #Morality #Ethics #Politics #Democracy

2026-03-04 23:10:41 UTC

RT @BenjaminNorton
This is incredible: Spain is the only EU country that has opposed the US war of aggression against Iran.
Spain refuses to let the US use its military bases to attack Iran, so Trump threatened an economic embargo against it.
And now the BlackRock executive who runs Germany on behalf of Washington and Wall Street, Friedrich Merz, said he supports Emperor Trump's attack on another EU member.
As an excuse, Merz claimed it's because Spain refuses to increase its military spending to 5% of GDP. But that's not what this is really about. They're threatening to punish Spain for refusing to support a US war of aggression.
European "solidarity" is a myth. The EU is run by vassals of the US empire who sell out their countries to Wall Street.
(By the way, Merz is a multimillionaire who ran the German arm of BlackRock and owns two private jets.)
https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/2029006394201186489

2026-03-01 21:26:39 UTC

"(Beirut, February 28, 2026) – The United States and Israel on February 28, 2026 carried out airstrikes on Iran, which retaliated with strikes against Israel and Gulf states. All parties to the conflict are obligated to respect international humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war, and prioritize the protection of civilians. Human Rights Watch is currently investigating strikes by all parties that may have violated the laws of war.
Human Rights Watch has previously documented laws-of-war violations by the United States, Israel, and Iran and serious failures to protect civilians in conflict.
Since January 2025, under the administration of President Donald Trump, the US Defense Department has fired top military lawyers without cause and systematically rolled back legal oversight and mechanisms to mitigate harm to civilians, placing fewer constraints on military operations.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has lifted restrictions on antipersonnel landmines and agreed to purchase cluster munitions – weapons inherently harmful to civilians – from Israel. The 2026 US National Defense Strategy omits civilian harm mitigation as an explicit policy consideration."
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/02/28/us/israel/iran-all-parties-should-respect-laws-of-war
#HumanRights #Iran #USA #Israel #InternationalLaw

2026-02-27 06:25:03 UTC

"AI tools are making potentially harmful errors in social work records, from bogus warnings of suicidal ideation to simple “gibberish”, frontline workers have said.
Keir Starmer last year championed what he called “incredible” time-saving social work transcription technology. But research across 17 English and Scottish councils shared with the Guardian has now found AI-generated hallucinations are slipping in.
As scores of local authorities begin to use AI note-takers to accelerate recording and summarisation of meetings with adult and child service users, a seven-month study by the Ada Lovelace Institute found “some potentially harmful misrepresentations of people’s experiences are occurring in official care records”.
The independent thinktank found that one social worker who had used an AI transcription tool to create a summary said the technology had incorrectly “indicated that there was suicidal ideation”, but “at no point did the client actually … talk about suicidal ideation or planning, or anything”."
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/feb/11/ai-tools-potentially-harmful-errors-social-work
#AI #GenerativeAI #AITranscription #SocialWork #UK #Hallucinations

2026-02-25 01:28:01 UTC

"A software engineer’s earnest effort to steer his new DJI robot vacuum with a video game controller inadvertently granted him a sneak peak into thousands of people’s homes.
While building his own remote-control app, Sammy Azdoufal reportedly used an AI coding assistant to help reverse-engineer how the robot communicated with DJI’s remote cloud servers. But he soon discovered that the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps, and status data from nearly 7,000 other vacuums across 24 countries. The backend security bug effectively exposed an army of internet-connected robots that, in the wrong hands, could have turned into surveillance tools, all without their owners ever knowing.
Luckily, Azdoufal chose not to exploit that. Instead, he shared his findings with The Verge, which quickly contacted DJI to report the flaw. While DJI tells Popular Science the issue has been “resolved,” the dramatic episode underscores warnings from cybersecurity experts who have long-warned that internet-connected robots and other smart home devices present attractive targets for hackers."
https://www.popsci.com/technology/robot-vacuum-army/
#AI #IoT #CyberSecurity #DJII #RobotVaccum

2026-02-22 14:12:49 UTC

"In his essay “The West’s Last Chance” (January/February 2026), Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, correctly divines the future trajectory of world order. “The global South,” he writes, “will decide whether geopolitics in the next era leans toward cooperation, fragmentation, or domination.” He’s also right in asserting that “this is the last chance for Western countries to convince the rest of the world that they are capable of dialogue rather than monologue.” Yet to have a dialogue, one must listen. The sad truth is that the West does not seem willing to listen to the global South.
The countries of the global South do not all share the dominant Western perspectives about world order. Stubb emphasizes the challenges posed by China and Russia. But many of the 3.3 billion Asians who are not Chinese, along with many of the approximately 1.5 billion people who live in Africa and the over 660 million who live in Latin America, view China and Russia differently. Western policymakers rarely try to understand why. China and Russia may loom menacingly in Western imaginations, but people in the global South do not think of them in that way—nor should they be expected to. Indeed, the rest of the world has had as much, perhaps more, to fear from the West in recent history as it has from the West’s autocratic competitors. To his credit, Stubb urges the governments of Western countries to take the demands and interests of the global South seriously. But engaging with the global South is not just an exercise in listening. It also requires Western governments to reassess their own positions and approaches to a world they have long taken for granted."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/dream-palace-west
#Geopolitics #Multilateralism #GlobalSourth #China #India #Imperialism

2026-02-15 15:43:30 UTC

RT @lukOlejnik
Meta is putting a "Name Tag" feature in Ray-Bans - facial recognition through the glasses' camera. You look at someone, AI tells you who they are. The company is also working on a "super sensing" mode - the glasses record the user's entire day, like an AI meeting note-taker. Non-stop.
In an internal document, the company explicitly wrote that the timing is good because civil society groups are busy with politics and won't cause problems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-recognition-smart-glasses.html

2026-02-13 09:12:24 UTC

RT @BenjaminNorton
Argentina's libertarian US puppet President Javier Milei is pushing through extreme anti-worker "labor reform" that will allow companies to force employees to work 12-hour days.
The "reform" also restricts the rights of workers to go on strike, and lets companies fire workers without severance pay.
Milei is a loyal servant of Wall Street and Argentina's billionaire capitalist oligarchs. This is the future they want for all workers everywhere -- 12-hour days (and even longer) -- if people don't fight back. Argentine labor unions are planning large protests.
Source: https://cadenaser.com/nacional/2026/02/11/jornadas-de-12-horas-despido-sin-indemnizacion-y-reduccion-de-los-derechos-a-huelga-la-reforma-laboral-de-milei-que-precariza-a-los-argentinos-cadena-ser/

2026-02-12 22:48:15 UTC

"European spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure services is forecast to more than triple from 2025 to 2027 as geopolitical tension drives investment in homegrown services, according to Gartner.
Worldwide sovereign cloud spending is forecast to hit $80 billion in 2026, up 35.6 percent from 2025. The Middle East and Africa (89 percent growth), Mature Asia/Pacific (87 percent growth), and Europe (83 percent growth) are projected to lead, while the US (29 percent growth) and China (26 percent growth) are growing at a more modest rate.
Europe – defined as geographic Western Europe including the UK – faces the most dramatic change, growing from a much higher base than other regions: $6.9 billion in 2025 compared to $851 million for Mature Asia/Pacific.
European concerns over reliance on the US hyperscalers stem from the US CLOUD Act of 2018, which allows American authorities to compel US-based tech companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. Trade and geopolitical tensions between Europe and the US since President Trump return to power intensified these worries, with customers fearing the unpredictable US president could order hyperscalers to halt services to specific customers.
Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor, was among those sanctioned by the US over efforts to prosecute Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, following an investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Khan later had access to Microsoft services temporarily cut. A spokesperson for Microsoft said it had not cut services to the ICC as a whole - yet onlookers worried the two issues were linked. The court later decided to adopt OpenDesk, an open source office and collaboration suite delivered by the German Centre for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS)."
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/09/europe_sovereign_cloud_spend
#CloudInfrastructure #DigitalSovereignty #SovereignCloud #Europe #EU

2026-02-11 00:03:51 UTC

"Two independent analyses of social media content in the lead-up to the German federal election in 2025 have shown that extremist parties, in particular the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), were disproportionately favored by X, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. A report prepared by the German nonprofit organization Bertelsmann Stiftung found that on TikTok, for example, 50% of all suggested political content was found to be AfD-related, with the mainstream conservatives a distant second at 15%. The outsized prominence of extremist content cannot be explained by the parties’ actions alone, because they all used very similar social media strategies. Another study, which has been shared by the authors via the pre-publication platform Arxiv, showed that the X algorithm disproportionately amplified content by extreme parties, especially on the extreme right. This selective amplification is particularly concerning in light of earlier research conducted by me and my team, which showed that German politicians from the extreme right and left share far more untrustworthy content on Twitter than politicians of the four mainstream parties.
A recent field experiment investigated the consequences of algorithmic amplification by re-ranking content favored by the X/Twitter algorithm that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity. When antidemocratic content was downranked, participants’ outgroup animosity declined compared to a control group that was exposed to the standard X/Twitter algorithm, both during the study and afterwards. Reduced exposure to antidemocratic content also reduced people’s negative emotions during the study. This is not an isolated finding but adds to existing evidence that social media causally contributes to hate crimes and xenophobia.
The DSA was designed to address such challenges."
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aee9835
#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #ContentModeration #Algorithms #AlgorithmicRecommendation #EU #DSA

2026-02-10 22:59:58 UTC

"By housing TikTok’s data on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure—a firm whose multibillion-dollar existence is owed in part to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement contracts, and whose co-founder Larry Ellison recently bragged about AI ushering in an era where “citizens are on their best behavior”—the government has finally achieved its aim of securing the app by integrating it into its domestic surveillance dragnet. Considering the drive to secure TikTok was driven by fears of what the notoriously repressive nation of China might do with our private data, this outcome is, at the very least, highly ironic.
The technical wizardry of this surveillance relies on your Mobile Advertising ID, or MAID, a unique string of alphanumeric characters assigned to every smartphone. Every time an app, be it TikTok or a simple weather tracker, makes a bid to show you an advertisement, if your location services are enabled, it shares both your MAID and your precise GPS coordinates to thousands of private bidders. In the past, this metadata has been used by the Pentagon to identify targets.
Data brokers like Venntel and Babel Street harvest these “bid-stream” crumbs into massive, searchable oceans of movement. For ICE, this means they no longer need a wiretap; they can access a digital twin of your life, where your TikTok scrolling habits are pinned to a physical map of your home, workplace, and your child’s school or day care."
https://newrepublic.com/article/205956/americanized-tiktok-backdoor-ice-surveillance
#USA #SocialMedia #TikTok #Oracle #Surveillance #Censorship #ICE #Immigration #Trump

2026-02-09 11:10:22 UTC

"Two New York lawmakers on Friday announced that they are introducing a bill that would impose a three-year moratorium on data center development. The announcement makes New York at least the sixth state to introduce legislation putting a pause on data center development in the past few weeks—one of the latest signs of a growing and bipartisan backlash that is quickly finding traction in statehouses around the country.
Data center moratoriums are “being tested as a model throughout states in this country,” said state senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat, who presented the bill at a press conference Friday with its cosponsor, assemblymember Anna Kelles, also a Democrat. “Democrats and Republicans are moving forward with exactly these kinds of moratoriums. New York should be in the front of the line to get this done.”
The new bill comes as a wave of bipartisan anti-data center sentiment that has swept across the country in recent months. In December, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, became the first national politician to call for a blanket moratorium on data center permitting, saying that a moratorium would “ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”"
https://www.wired.com/story/new-york-is-the-latest-state-to-consider-a-data-center-pause/
#AI #DataCenters #Energy #NewYork #USA

2026-02-07 17:05:33 UTC

Benanav vs Morozov on the Political Economy of AI. Now, this will definitely be quite a read...!
"Choosing among available paths may widen or contract the field of possibilities. Some futures are rendered easier to realize; others are effectively foreclosed; and people’s understandings of what matters shift as they move forward in time—much as in Morozov’s own account of technological worldmaking. The difference is that, in my framework, this process is understood from the outset as political because it unfolds under conditions of scarcity that force collective choice among rival futures.
What is puzzling about Morozov’s critique is that this political core disappears from view. A framework designed to organize conflict over investment—to make trade-offs visible, contestable, and binding when not everything can be pursued at once—is recast as a system of administrative closure that would prematurely discipline experimentation. His analysis is not simply a misunderstanding of my proposed framework but a reversal of its intent: It reads an account meant to politicize worldmaking as an attempt to suppress it."
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-real-political-economy-of-technology/
#AI #GenerativeAI #PoliticalEconomy #Democratization #PublicPolicy #Municipalism #GreenTransition #Communitarianism

2026-02-07 14:42:10 UTC

"Western Europeans prize Europe’s autonomy and values over transatlantic ties and will not give them up to placate Donald Trump, according to a poll suggesting opinions of the US have plunged to their lowest since YouGov began tracking them a decade ago.
The US president’s attempted Greenland grab has succeeded in turning Europeans solidly against his country, the pollster’s latest survey found. Large majorities in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Great Britain all declared an unfavourable opinion.
The figures, ranging from 62% in France to 84% in Denmark – of which Greenland is a self-governing territory – mark a further steep rise in negative perceptions of the US even since November, when the range was between 49% and 70%.
The polling also showed that in ever-increasing numbers, Europeans no longer see the US as a friendly nation, with fewer respondents in all six countries saying they still consider it an ally."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/06/western-europeans-turning-against-us-after-greenland-threat-poll-finds
#USA #Trump #Europe #EU #Greenland

2026-02-06 11:40:22 UTC

"In the fourth quarter of 2025, TollBit estimates that an average of one out of every 31 visits to its customers’ websites was from an AI scraping bot. In the first quarter, that figure was only one out of every 200. The company says that in the fourth quarter, more than 13 percent of bot requests were bypassing robots.txt, a file that some websites use to indicate which pages bots are supposed to avoid. TollBit says the share of AI bots disregarding robots.txt increased 400 percent from the second quarter to the fourth quarter of last year.
TollBit also reported a 336 percent increase in the number of websites making attempts to block AI bots over the past year. Pangrahi says that scraping techniques are getting more sophisticated as sites try to assert control over how bots access their content. Some bots disguise themselves by making their traffic appear like it’s coming from a normal web browser or send requests designed to mimic how humans normally interact with websites. TollBit's study notes that the behavior of some AI agents is now almost indistinguishable from human web traffic.
TollBit markets tools that website owners can use to charge AI scrapers for accessing their content. Other firms, including Cloudflare, offer similar tools. “Anyone who relies on human web traffic—starting with publishers, but basically everyone—is going to be impacted,” Pangrahi says. “There needs to be a faster way to have that machine-to-machine, programmatic exchange of value.”
WIRED attempted to contact 15 AI scraping companies cited in the TollBit report for comment. The majority did not respond or could not be reached. Several said that their AI systems aim to respect technical boundaries that websites put in place to limit scraping, but they noted such guardrails can often be complex and difficult to follow."
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-bots-are-now-a-signifigant-source-of-web-traffic/
#WebTraffic #AI #AIBots #AIAgents #WebScraping

2026-02-05 16:30:32 UTC

"AI’s inextricable materiality is central to its environmental impact. From energy-intensive computation to the extractive demands of hardware and infrastructure, AI technologies are deeply embedded in global material and ecological systems. Examined through a socio-political lens, these environmental dimensions raise pressing justice concerns. This paper argues that discussions of AI’s environmental impacts must move beyond efficiency metrics to incorporate a global climate justice perspective within AI ethics, with particular attention to unequal global impacts. The paper unfolds in three sections. First, it demonstrates how AI’s environmental footprint across its full lifecycle, from development to deployment, constitutes a global climate justice concern. This includes analysis of energy use and water consumption in data centres, as well as the geopolitical implications of mineral extraction for hardware. Second, the paper examines what applying a climate justice perspective to AI ethics entails. Drawing on political philosophy, it focuses on two core dimensions of justice: distributional (who bears the costs and benefits of AI’s environmental impacts) and procedural (who is included in, or excluded from, decision-making about AI development and deployment). Together, these dimensions inform a set of conceptual and normative tools for assessing the AI-climate nexus, with particular relevance to Global South contexts. Finally, the paper grounds this discussion in a case study of India, illustrating how AI development intersects with climate vulnerability and global environmental inequality. The paper concludes by reflecting on how a climate justice approach can clarify the ethical stakes of AI’s environmental impacts and contribute to more inclusive and globally relevant AI governance."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-025-00949-5
#AI #AIGovernance #ClimateChange #GlobalSouth #ClimateJustice

2026-02-03 21:56:06 UTC

"“Terrorist” is the word that the Trump administration employs to describe the victims of its most egregious acts of state violence.
President Donald Trump has used the word “terrorist” to justify the extrajudicial killings of civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. And his deputies used it to explain away the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis by federal agents.
“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists,” Trump wrote following the initial boat strike on September 2, 2025. He said the attack “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said that Good and Pretti were guilty of “domestic terrorism.” And top White House adviser Stephen Miller used similar language to describe both.
These killings were conducted thousands of miles apart by different agencies in very different contexts. But the connection between them could be more than semantic.
Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, Trump’s Justice Department is now assembling a secret “domestic terrorist organization” database. It also maintains a secret list of “designated terrorist organizations” with whom the U.S. claims to be at war.
For months, the White House and Justice Department have failed to answer a question that becomes more relevant with every person branded a domestic terrorist, shot by federal agents, or both: Are Americans who the federal government deems to be domestic terrorists under NSPM-7 subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations on boats at sea?"
https://theintercept.com/2026/02/02/trump-nspm-7-domestic-terrorist-minneapolis-alex-pretti/
#USA #Trump #StateTerrorism #CivilLiberties #Activism #NSPM7

2026-02-02 19:33:33 UTC

"Artificial intelligence researchers are grappling with a problem core to their field: how to stop so-called “AI slop” from damaging confidence in the industry’s scientific work.
AI conferences have rushed to restrict the use of large language models for writing and reviewing papers in recent months after being flooded with a wave of poor AI-written content.
Scientists have warned that the surge of low-quality AI-generated material risks eroding trust and the integrity of the sector’s research by introducing false claims and made-up content.
“There is a little bit of irony to the fact that there’s so much enthusiasm for AI shaping other fields when, in reality, our field has gone through this chaotic experience because of the widespread use of AI,” said Inioluwa Deborah Raji, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
Recent studies have highlighted the prevalence of the technology in AI research. In August, a study by Stanford University found that up to 22 per cent of computer science papers contained LLM usage."
https://www.ft.com/content/54e274c5-de86-4b3e-96a9-95a46b5e48a0
#AI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Research

2026-01-30 21:03:47 UTC

"After proudly renaming the Pentagon from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, Trump now plans to raise the US military budget from $1 trillion to a staggering $1.5 trillion.
This means that, if Trump succeeds, the United States will soon spend more on its military than all of the other countries in the world combined, excluding China.
This is deeply hypocritical, because in his January 2025 inauguration speech, as he started his second term as US president, Trump declared that he would be a “peacemaker”.
Similarly, in the victory speech that Trump gave after he won the November 2024 presidential election, he claimed, falsely, that during his first term, “we had no wars”.
“I’m not going to start a war; I’m going to stop wars”, Trump promised.
He lied. In the first year of his second term, the Trump administration bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.
When his first and second terms are combined, Trump has bombed 10 nations (the aforementioned seven, plus Afghanistan, Libya, and Pakistan).
This means Trump has bombed more countries than all other presidents in US history.
Moreover, Trump is threatening to attack at least four more nations: Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland. He has vowed to colonize Greenland and forcibly turn it into US territory."
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/01/25/trump-bombed-10-countries-trillion-military-budget/
#USA #Trump #Militarism #Warmonger #Imperialism

2026-01-30 14:50:46 UTC

"Meanwhile, the Tech Right’s work continues behind the scenes. While DOGE is widely considered a failed project, its spiritual successor has already arrived—though its organizers have chosen to fly more under the radar this time. The newly launched Tech Force, which aims to assemble a corps of engineers to “accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) implementation and solve the federal government’s most critical technological challenges,” is partnering with private sector companies like Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, and Palantir.
And not everyone in tech has given up hope on the MAGA movement’s electoral prospects: Rabois hosted a fundraiser last night for JD Vance—arguably the politician who most embodies the Tech Right’s ideals—in Miami.
Meanwhile, Teboe said that tech leaders across the political spectrum are starting to realize their complicity in current events—and wondering if it’s too late to undo it. “The silence from folks who have been Trump’s closest allies and mouthpieces,” he told me, “is radicalizing some tech leaders. They’re starting to think, Oh fuck, what is this monster we’ve helped create?”"
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/tech-right-minnesota-shooting
#USA #Trump #MAGA #TechRight #BigTech #SiliconValley

2026-01-28 21:31:49 UTC

"Bottom line
The point isn’t that AI makes democracy impossible. The point is that democracy becomes brittle when it’s cheap to counterfeit social proof—when it costs little to run a fake crowd and minutes to manufacture “public opinion.”
The mission is straightforward: make large-scale impersonation and coordination harder to run, easier to detect, and less profitable to sustain. If we get that right, the public square does not need a central authority to decide what is true. It needs conditions where authentic human participation is visible—and where engineered consensus collapses the moment it tries to scale.
Key takeaways
The next wave of influence operations may not look like obvious copy-paste bots. It may look like communities: thousands of AI personas with memory, social identities, distinct styles, and coordinated goals.
The most dangerous outcome is not a single viral lie—it is synthetic consensus: the illusion that “everyone is saying this,” which can quietly bend beliefs and norms.
This is already moving from theory to reality. In July 2024, the U.S. DOJ announced it disrupted a Russia-linked AI-enhanced bot operation involving nearly 1,000 accounts impersonating Americans.
Defenses should not hinge on policing content. They should focus on coordination and provenance: detecting statistically unlikely patterns, stress-testing defenses with simulations, strengthening identity/proof signals, and shifting platform incentives."
https://www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/when-ai-can-fake-majorities-democracy
#AI #GenerativeAI #AISwarms #Disinformation #Propaganda #SocialMedia #Democracy

2026-01-28 12:25:34 UTC

"Meta has started blocking its users from sharing links to ICE List, a website that has compiled the names of what it claims are Department of Homeland Security employees, a project the creators say is designed to hold those employees accountable.
Dominick Skinner, the creator of ICE List, tells WIRED that links to the website have been shared without issue on Meta’s platforms for more than six months.
“I think it's no surprise that a company run by a man who sat behind Trump at his inauguration, and donated to the destruction of the White House, has taken a stance that helps ICE agents retain anonymity,” says Skinner.
As agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which are under DHS, have continued to terrorize immigrant communities and kill US citizens, activists have sought to track and record their activity online in a bid to hold them accountable. But as well as threatening to prosecute those they claim are “doxing” ICE agents, the Trump administration has pressured tech companies to block any efforts at crowdsourcing the location and activities of those agents.
ICE List has been operating since last June. Skinner says it is run by a core team of five people, including him, as well as hundreds of anonymous volunteers who share information about ICE agents operating in cities across the US."
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-is-blocking-links-to-ice-list-on-facebook-instagram-and-threads/
#SocialMedia #USA #PoliceState #Trump #ICE #Facebook #Meta #Instagram #Censorship

2026-01-28 10:45:40 UTC

"Britain’s reliance on Palantir, the controversial US data surveillance firm, is a “gaping national security vulnerability”, MPs and tech experts have said, as a Nerve investigation reveals how deeply embedded the company is in the UK’s critical national infrastructure.
The Nerve’s investigation shows the company, co-founded by one of President Trump’s most loyal allies, Peter Thiel, is enmeshed in Britain’s civil and defence structures to a far greater degree than previously realised. The Nerve has found at least 34 current and past state contracts across at least 10 government departments, local councils and police authorities.
The investigation also reveals previously undisclosed contracts between Palantir and AWE Nuclear Security Technologies, the agency that underpins Britain’s nuclear deterrence programme.
The agency, formerly known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment, designs and manufactures the nuclear warheads carried by UK submarines. The Nerve has found £15m worth of contracts for “cloud support” on the Crown Commercial Service dashboard, an agency that works with the Cabinet Office and external suppliers.
These contracts are not on the government’s official contract finder website and the Ministry of Defence refused to either confirm or deny their existence. Palantir did not acknowledge or respond to the Nerve’s inquiries.
The Nerve’s research – shown in two infographics here – shows that Palantir has current and historic deals worth £388m with the MOD across at least a dozen contracts and extensions to contracts, and more than £244m with the NHS (12 contracts/extensions). Government agencies and authorities with smaller contracts include Coventry city council, Leicestershire police, DEFRA and the Homes for Ukraine scheme."
https://www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-technologies-uk-government-contracts-size-nuclear-deterrent-atomic-peter-thiel-louis-mosley
#UK #Palantir #Surveillance #Thiel #NuclearWeapons

2026-01-28 09:08:51 UTC

RT @haugejostein
The myth that the world is governed by a functioning system of rules and laws has collapsed.
The rules-based international order is dead. It was killed in three acts.
First, by design: its architects hard-wired asymmetries that entrenched power. It was rigged from the start.
Second, by wrecking ball: Trump shattered the illusion by openly violating international law with impunity, proving global governance was hollow.
Third, by confession: at Davos, Mark Carney admitted what liberal elites had always known — the “rules-based order” was a cover for American-led hegemony.
In my newsletter this week, I unpack the three blows that killed the rules-based international order (link in replies).
https://www.theglobalcurrents.com/p/the-three-blows-that-killed-the-rules

2026-01-26 08:51:21 UTC

RT @jayvanbavel
Scientists who use AI have published three times more papers, received five times more citations, and reach leadership roles faster than their AI-free peers.
But science as a whole is paying the price, the study suggests. Not only is AI-driven work prone to circling the same crowded problems, but it also leads to a less interconnected scientific literature, with fewer studies engaging with and building on one another.
It's a classic social dilemma: what's good for individuals is bad for the collective.
https://science.org/content/article/ai-has-supercharged-scientists-may-have-shrunk-science?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_content=alert&utm_campaign=SCIeToc&et_rid=689109562&et_cid=5855546

2026-01-25 15:23:31 UTC

"Hungary is one of the most striking examples of what happens when Chinese battery companies expand abroad. The country is home to at least four plants already under construction, including possibly the biggest overseas factory ever planned by a Chinese battery company that’s worth approximately $8.5 billion. Hungary has become a gateway for Chinese firms to sell their products to the European market. As a result, it also provides an early blueprint for how communities will react when a Chinese battery factory opens up shop in their backyard.
Many people in Hungary are skeptical about whether Chinese companies will prioritize hiring locals or bring in cheaper workers from elsewhere instead. They arrived in the country at a time when local labor supply was low because many Hungarians moved to other parts of Europe in recent years in search of work, says András Bartók, an assistant professor at the Ludovika University of Public Service who has studied Hungary’s relationship with Japan and China. The companies have worked with the Hungarian government to bring in migrant labor from Central Asia and Southeast Asia, but that has prompted backlash from local residents. When CATL, the world’s largest lithium battery maker, laid off more than 100 employees at its planned Hungarian factory site last summer, the local municipality launched an investigation into whether the firm had kept its stated promise to hire locally.
CATL is also facing local protests in Hungary over its water use and environmental footprint, criticisms that it inherited from Japanese and Korean battery companies that built factories there over the last two decades."
https://www.wired.com/story/chinese-battery-makers-are-building-factories-across-the-world/
#batterymakers #China #Hungary #Batteries #EVs

2026-01-25 15:13:52 UTC

"Early last year, the FBI served Microsoft with a search warrant, asking it to provide recovery keys to unlock encrypted data stored on three laptops. Federal investigators in Guam believed the devices held evidence that would help prove individuals handling the island’s Covid unemployment assistance program were part of a plot to steal funds.
The data was protected with BitLocker, software that’s automatically enabled on many modern Windows PCs to safeguard all the data on the computer’s hard drive. BitLocker scrambles the data so that only those with a key can decode it.
It’s possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. While that means someone can access their data if they forget their password, or if repeated failed attempts to login lock the device, it also makes them vulnerable to law enforcement subpoenas and warrants.
In the Guam case, it handed over the encryption keys to investigators."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/01/22/microsoft-gave-fbi-keys-to-unlock-bitlocker-encrypted-data/
#CyberSecurity #Encryption #Microsoft #FBI #Privacy #BitLocker

2026-01-24 14:19:52 UTC

"What sparked Carney’s intervention was not Sudan, Venezuela or Gaza. It was the US threat to Canada and Greenland.
A western prime minister took umbrage only when the US, under President Donald Trump, threatened to treat the prosperous West in the same way it has long treated the Global South.
Let’s return now to Israel’s recent invasion of Unrwa’s headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem: a gross breach of international law and a direct attack on the United Nations.
Article 6 of the UN charter establishes that any state that persistently violates its principles can be expelled from the UN. The attack on Unrwa is part of a pattern of Israel’s criminal hostility towards the UN, including its refusal to respect orders from the International Court of Justice on Gaza, its slaughter of UN aid workers and its regular attacks on UN positions in southern Lebanon.
The case for expelling - or at the very least suspending - Israel from the UN is overwhelming. Yet neither Carney’s Canada nor Starmer’s Britain, nor any other western power, has so much as suggested the idea.
In his Davos speech, Carney set out Canada’s approach as follows: “We aim to be principled and pragmatic. Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, respect for human rights. Pragmatic in recognising that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner shares our values.”
This is all well and good. But on the evidence so far, Carney is prepared to be principled when it comes to western countries like Canada and Denmark, and pragmatic when it comes to Palestine and Venezuela.
This is a fundamentally racist equation."
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/carney-wants-new-world-order-only-west
#Canada #Carney #Imperialism #USA #Trump #InternationalLaw #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide

2026-01-23 10:54:22 UTC

"The film follows Martin and Prysner around the globe as they uncover the many hidden victims of America’s military-industrial complex, from infants poisoned by toxic waste at the Camp Lejeune military base, to sea mammals slaughtered by detonation tests in the South Pacific. I’ve seen the film multiple times now, and it’s the opening scene that sticks with me the most.
A bright, rolling piano tune emanates from a tent in a homeless camp on a street known as Veteran’s Row in Brentwood, California. Martin and Prysner talk to the piano player, a Black Iraq War veteran named Lavon Johnson who once was featured in a U.S. Army commercial. Lavon reveals that he has nerve damage as a result of exposure to hydraulic fluid during his military service, which causes him severe pain in his musically skilled hands. The scene ends with Lavon sitting on the piano bench and exasperatedly stating, “My life is so fucked.”
The homeless camp is then swarmed and swept by the police, with everyone’s belongings carelessly tossed into trash-bound piles and scooped up with an excavator—including a protest sign reading “Be the change you want to see in the world,” written above a drawing of the Earth. The message is clear from the beginning. It’s all connected: environmental collapse, homelessness, the police state, and US militarism. And by the end of the film, you’ll understand that the root cause of our collective suffering is capitalism’s ever-growing, extractive, exploitative nature and the violent arm of imperialism, led by the United States, that necessarily carries out its dirty work."
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-u.s.-war-machine-is-earths-greatest-enemy
#USA #Militarism #Homelessness #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #PoliceState #Capitalism

2026-01-19 09:05:47 UTC

RT @yarotrof
Trump’s “Board of Peace” looks very much like a plan to replace the UN Security Council with an imperial court of vassals in which he is chairman for life, even after leaving the White House, with veto over every decision and the sole right to designate a successor. And a $1 billion fee for aspiring permanent members.
https://www.ft.com/content/0ee79faa-86d3-4c01-a180-add6e164ac28?accessToken=zwAGSKwUmEg4kc8O55-qhtNMAdOhgK3W4WSsKA.MEUCIG90yhnpd6836G-pd4NwwXgCPPreNo-iI_ERePXH7fj_AiEAmYxxRC9xbqDYh43WecrbO_pFzaZu_3avjEKtNm0zUFw&sharetype=gift&token=b6692b27-71c2-4c84-90c8-4692ba31917b

2026-01-19 08:47:28 UTC

RT @BenjaminNorton
At the peak of the Gilded Age in 1910, the richest 0.00001% of the US population owned wealth equal to 4% of national income.
Now, the richest 0.00001% owns 12%.
US billionaire oligarchs today are even wealthier than the original robber barons.
Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/gzucman/p/standing-up-to-trumps-imperial-blackmail

2026-01-16 22:23:54 UTC

"Intelligence and consciousness are different things. Intelligence is mainly about doing: solving a crossword puzzle, assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation, walking to the shop — all involve intelligent behavior of some kind. A useful general definition of intelligence is the ability to achieve complex goals by flexible means. There are many other definitions out there, but they all emphasize the functional capacities of a system: the ability to transform inputs into outputs, to get things done.
An artificially intelligent system is measured by its ability to perform intelligent behavior of some kind, though not necessarily in a humanlike form. The concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI), by contrast, explicitly references human intelligence. It is supposed to match or exceed the cognitive competencies of human beings. (There’s also artificial superintelligence, ASI, which happens when AI bootstraps itself beyond our comprehension and control. ASI tends to crop up in the more existentially fraught scenarios for our possible futures.)
Consciousness, in contrast to intelligence, is mostly about being. Half a century ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously offered that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness is the difference between normal wakefulness and the oblivion of deep general anesthesia. It is the experiential aspect of brain function and especially of perception: the colors, shapes, tastes, emotions, thoughts and more, that give our lives texture and meaning. The blueness of the sky on a clear day. The bitter tang and headrush of your first coffee.
AI systems can reasonably lay claim to intelligence in some form, since they can certainly do things, but it is harder to say whether there is anything-it-is-like-to-be ChatGPT."
https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/
#AI #AGI #Consciousness #ConsciousAI #Philosophy #Intelligence

2026-01-16 22:02:30 UTC

"AI adoption went viral following ChatGPT’s release on 30 November 2022 and the value of companies has skyrocketed. But uptake in businesses has not been as high as anticipated. Notwithstanding the hype, the use of AI at work is not soaring and may even be slowing, and concerns only a small fraction of the workforce. Recent evidence indicates that there is no immediate productivity boost from using AI. In short, while some automation is underway, there is no evidence of an imminent AI disruption capable of generating the huge economic gains predicted.
As is well known to radical critics and forcefully argued by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, there is no such a thing as efficiency-driven capitalist development; increased technical efficiency is a macroeconomic outcome that depends on the institutional setting. Powerful technologies can prove unprofitable and fail to be deployed if the structure of the market prevents investors from reaping the rewards; and they can immiserate labour if they lead to massive layoffs. With AI, the most immediate danger seems to be an epidemic of workforce demoralization. Research suggests that intensive AI use is demotivating and deskilling, fuelling boredom and mediocrity. We could even see a reverse ‘productivity J-curve’: short-term productivity gains rapidly overwhelmed by a deterioration in labour quality."
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/after-ai
#AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #Capitalism #Imperialism #Automation #Productivity

2026-01-16 21:21:26 UTC

- reply

"All the while, confronted with Trumpian aggression but constrained by their own lack of agency, European leaders are stuck dealing with an Atlantic-sized chasm between their private reactions and what they allow themselves to say in public.
The good news from our poll is that despite the reticence of their leaders, Europeans are both aware of the state of the world and in favor of a lot of what needs to be done to improve the continent’s position. As we have seen, they harbor no illusions about the U.S. under Trump. They realize they’re living in an increasingly dangerous, multipolar world. And majorities support boosting defense spending, reintroducing mandatory conscription, and even entertaining the prospect of a European nuclear deterrent.
The rules-based order is giving way to a world of spheres of influence, where might makes right and the West is split from within. In such a world, you are either a pole with your own sphere of influence or a bystander in someone else’s. European leaders should heed their voters and ensure the continent belongs in the first category — not the second."
https://www.politico.eu/article/the-united-west-is-dead/

2026-01-16 10:22:01 UTC

"- Around the world, many people expect China’s—already considerable—global influence to grow over the next decade, and more now view Beijing as an ally or necessary partner.
- For much of the world, America is globally influential and will continue to matter, but few people expect it to gain in influence.
- In most countries, expectations of Trump are lower than 12 months ago. His first year back in power seems to have caused dramatic shifts of opinion in some places, including India and South Africa.
- In Russia, more people now see Europe as an adversary, while views of America have softened. In China, the EU is held to be a power player that strikes its own stances distinct from those of America.
- Europeans are the world’s chief pessimists. They lack faith in the EU’s ability to deal on equal terms with the US or China and worry about Russian aggression and nuclear weapons.
- European leaders should share greater honesty about where Europe stands in this post-Western, “China first” world in order to devise a successful strategy to navigate it."
https://ecfr.eu/publication/how-trump-is-making-china-great-again-and-what-it-means-for-europe/
#USA #Trump #China #Europa #Geopolitics #PublicOpinion

2026-01-16 09:08:36 UTC

RT @jasonhickel
It's not hypocrisy, it's capitalism.
The bizarre behaviour of Western states and leaders often seems to betray a moral double standard. But in fact it is all perfectly consistent with a single standard, namely, the objective of maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation in the core.
On Iran, they tell us they "support the protestors". But of course they violently brutalize protestors at home, and never support protests against the governments of their often brutal client states.
They say they support "women's rights". But of course they actively support a genocidal regime that has massacred tens of thousands of women, live-streamed to our screens.
They say they want to see "freedom" and "democracy". But of course they prop up several repressive dictatorships in the Middle East.
They say they value international law. But they violate it regularly, in spectacular fashion, as easily as they breathe.
They say they want to see "liberation". But their explicit objective is to impose a puppet monarchy with zero real sovereignty, permanently subordinated to the US and Israel.
Why? Because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation in the core.
This requires a massive flow of cheap labour and resources from the periphery. To keep it going, they do everything possible to crush any state or movement that seeks real sovereignty, because sovereign development in the South means that the South produces and consumes more for itself, so their resources and labour are less cheaply available for accumulation in the core.
This is why they are going after Iran. It's the same reason they are going after Venezuela and Cuba... it's the same reason they fantasize at going to war with China... it's the same reason they invaded Libya and Iraq... it's the same reason they assassinated Lumumba and Sankara. It's the same reason they prop up Saudi Arabia and the UAE...
https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/2011801479384825972

2026-01-15 09:54:25 UTC

RT @BenjaminNorton
Trump has threatened to attack Iran, and there are reports that he is considering bombing it again.
A poll found that 70% of Americans oppose this, including 80% of independents, 79% of Democrats, and 53% of Republicans.
Just 18% of Americans want to attack Iran.
But the US is NOT a democracy; it's an oligarchy. And peer-reviewed scientific research has shown that average people have no impact on US foreign policy.
This is the link to the polling:
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3945

2026-01-14 23:01:30 UTC

"What is so troubling about the Trump administration’s words and actions is not just that the administration is breaking the law. And it is: the intervention in Venezuela clearly violates the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. But more than that, U.S. officials have discarded the idea of legal constraints altogether.
The only constraint, Trump said in an interview with The New York Times last week, is his “own morality.” There is no real argument to defend the government’s behavior. No pretense. No attempt to persuade. When a policy is announced in an online post, without explanation or justification, one has the unsettling sense that its makers see no need to bother cloaking it with a lie. A system of rules can survive some hypocrisy, but nihilism will bring it down.
At the same time, the Trump administration is acting as though the threat or use of force alone can grant it legal entitlements. Gunboat diplomacy, roundly renounced when war was outlawed, has returned. The United States is using oil blockades, coercive seizures, and military threats to extract political and economic concessions from other countries. This is an attempt to assert that power alone creates rights, regardless of reason.
A world in which the powerful no longer feel the need to justify themselves is not merely unjust. It is barbaric: operations to kill, steal, and destroy are severed from any claim of right. That world does not have a legal order at all. It has only force, guided by one man’s whims."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/world-without-rules#
#USA #Trump #Imperialism #InternationalLaw

2026-01-12 18:10:39 UTC

"Nordic governments are rejecting U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertions that Russian and Chinese vessels are operating near Greenland, warning that the claims are not supported by intelligence and are fueling destabilizing rhetoric, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
Two senior Nordic diplomats with access to NATO intelligence briefings told the FT there is no evidence of Russian or Chinese ships or submarines operating around Greenland in recent years, directly contradicting Trump’s justification for U.S. control of the Arctic territory.
“I have seen the intelligence. There are no ships, no submarines,” one diplomat told the paper.
Trump has claimed that Greenland is “covered with Russian and Chinese ships” and argued that the U.S. must take control of the island for national security reasons — rhetoric that has intensified in recent weeks."
https://www.politico.eu/article/nordic-officials-reportedly-dismiss-trump-greenland-claims-nato-defense/
#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Greenland #Denmark #Disinformation #Propaganda

2026-01-12 09:16:01 UTC

"THE PACE of change is breath-taking. On January 3rd United States special forces captured Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator. On January 6th Donald Trump said Venezuela would be “turning over” 30m to 50m barrels of oil to the United States. Two days later the regime said it would release “a significant number” of political prisoners. The next day an American delegation arrived in Caracas, the capital, to work on reopening the embassy. A Venezuelan team is expected to head to Washington, with Mr Trump saying he would meet them “pretty soon”.
A crucial question is whether Mr Trump will “run” Venezuela down the barrel of a gun—he initially threatened interim president Delcy Rodríguez with a fate worse than Mr Maduro’s if she didn’t comply with his plans for the country—or whether he might be more collaborative. The latter may signal an intention to let Ms Rodríguez settle in for a longer period, an alarming prospect for Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Setting aside the bluster there is clear evidence, especially from the emerging deal on oil, of collaboration.
Mr Trump initially framed the arrangement as pure coercion. Officials in Caracas spun it as a “simple sale, a commercial transaction”. The Economist has spoken to a range of oil executives, financiers and traders to assess the possible contours of the scheme. Much remains uncertain and could change, but the deal appears to be mutually advantageous, albeit with some coercive elements."
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2026/01/10/donald-trumps-venezuela-oil-deal-is-already-up-and-running
#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #BigOil #FossilFuels #Imperialism

2026-01-10 17:39:19 UTC

"This essay considers the emergent phenomenon of ‘junkification’ in academic research publishing. The term junkification was originally coined to describe the increasing volume of low-quality content and products permeating digital platforms. Extending junkification to online academic publishing, we draw on literature that frames academic research as an increasingly commodified good. We theorise that this commodification has enabled the same mechanisms that underpin the shift to junkification in digital marketplaces (and their subsequent degradation) to permeate online academic publishing. We argue that this trend represents a further perversion of the long-standing and pervasive ‘publish or perish’ culture in academia. As commercial publishing interests converge with new technologies, a system emerges where scholars increasingly bear the costs of low-esteem publishing that limits genuine scholarly contributions. We analyse the structural and cultural shifts within academic publishing that facilitate and perpetuate the junkification of research, and call for a re-evaluation of the underlying values and practices sustaining scholarly communication to counteract this trend."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13505084251399576
#Science #AcademicPublishing #Universities #HigherEd #Research #PublishOrPerish #Junkification

2026-01-10 17:37:20 UTC

I'm afraid the UK has learned nothing with Brexit...:
"Britain might yet enlarge its scope for sovereignty. If we truly wanted to take back control, we could, for instance, end our reliance on the US for the country’s nuclear deterrent, and return to the status quo ante before Polaris. We could develop a domestic space actor similar to Ariane, a pan-European organisation that is, nevertheless, majority owned by the French government. We certainly need to produce at least some microprocessors for domestic consumption. And we need a strategy for meaningful energy security.
Because of the strategic importance of such shifts, the state should hold at least some equity in these enterprises — in a manner similar to France’s APE (Agence des participations de l’État). Not as excessive as it sounds, it simply means reversing the more egregious mistakes of the Thatcher and Blair years. If uncorrected, these errors — such as discarding the importance of industry — will only create an increasing national vulnerability as the old order fragments,
Taking back control can’t just be rhetoric. To mean anything, those words can’t be constrained to borders, money or laws — they must encompass vital strategic industry. Otherwise, Britain will remain the least sovereign middle power of all. We may have left the clutches of Brussels a decade ago, but in a perverse inversion of the Boston Tea Party, we now risk becoming the 51st State of America — just without the voting rights."
https://unherd.com/2026/01/britain-hasnt-taken-back-control/
#UK #USA #Trump #Imperialism #EU #Brexit

2026-01-08 23:26:56 UTC

"In 2021, the rallying cry was “WAGMI” — we’re all gonna make it. It was a lie then, and the people chanting it loudest knew it. They knew all just meant them: the VCs, the founders, the early whales positioned to dump on latecomers. The retail investors buying at the top, the workers being paid in tokens, the communities being “democratized” — they were exit liquidity.
But now the lie has scaled. The industry that promised it would free us from captured institutions has captured them itself. The anti-establishment rebels are now the establishment, their survival dependent on the very centralized power structures they once claimed to make obsolete. And crypto is being woven into the fabric of traditional finance — integrated into banking and pension funds and retirement accounts, deepening systemic exposure that was once largely quarantined. When it collapses this time, the contagion won’t be contained.
But the foundation is shaky. The AI bubble shows signs of popping. The crypto industry is scrambling to pass market structure legislation before the 2026 midterms, terrified they’ll lose their window. Trump is feeling precarious ahead of the midterms too, recently admitting that he expects to face a third impeachment if Republicans lose control of the House — a threat made more real by his persistently low approval ratings and an Epstein scandal he can’t seem to make go away.
They know it. The technoligarchs aren’t confident their hold will last. That’s why they’re dismantling oversight, rushing through favorable legislation, securing pardons, amassing wealth — grabbing everything they can reach right now.
History offers little comfort here. Authoritarian regimes have maintained power through incredible economic devastation. Economic ruin alone doesn’t topple those who control the security apparatus, the flow of information, and the distribution of patronage. And the technoligarchs are building precisely these mechanisms."
https://www.citationneeded.news/the-year-of-technoligarchy/
#Crypto #USA

2026-01-08 22:38:53 UTC

I would like to think that technical writers, at their best, establish a bridge between the two worlds described below. They not only inform, but also elucidate. They explain how to use technology, often by following a set of successive steps that are deterministic and falsifiable. Good technical writing helps users explore the tools they have access to as much as possible and use them in ways that are potentially far more productive, interesting and creative than you might initially think. If users also have the opportunity to improve their critical thinking skills along the way, even better.
"Under the reign of the STEM lords, the public’s trust in science and scientists is decaying. Far from promoting empiricism and objectivity, the cult of virtuality is encouraging a return to superstition, subjectivity, and myth. The overthrow of the old intellectual elite and its replacement by the new technological elite, we can now see, opened a cultural hole that has been filled by ideological fervour, financial speculation, and prideful ignorance, all amplified by a digital communication system that, in its inhuman scale and speed, leaves little room for reflection or discretion.
Whatever their shortcomings, the old avatars of high culture shared a set of values — a respect for talent, taste, and tradition; a disdain for the flimsy and the fake; a commitment to rigour in thought and expression — that encouraged the pursuit of excellence not only in art and literature but in science, engineering, and other practical pursuits. If Snow were alive today, he might feel nostalgic about the state of affairs he bemoaned at the dawn of the Sixties. He might now see that the divide between the two cultures was not as sharp as he supposed. Their differences masked a deeper bond."
https://unherd.com/2026/01/how-big-tech-killed-literary-culture/
#AI #STEM #Humanities #BigTech #Science #Art

2026-01-07 22:09:38 UTC

"Danish officials think they know how Donald Trump might seize Greenland. In a late-night Truth Social post, the president announces that the Danish territory is now an American “protectorate.” Because neither Denmark nor its European allies possess the military force to prevent the United States from taking the island, they are powerless to resist Trump’s dubious claim. And as the leading member of NATO claims the sovereign territory of another state, the alliance is paralyzed. Arguing that possession is nine-tenths of the law, Trump simply declares that Greenland now belongs to the United States.
This chain of events, which some Danish officials and security experts proposed to us in recent months, may have seemed faintly ridiculous as of last Friday. By the weekend—after the toppling of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Trump’s ensuing insistence that the United States now “runs” Venezuela—it seemed far less so. For months, Danes have anxiously imagined an audacious move by the Trump administration to annex Greenland, whether by force, coercion, or an attempt to buy off the local population of about 56,000 people with the promise of cutting them in on future mining deals. Now those fears are spiking."
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/greenland-trump-venezuela-nato/685511/
#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Greenland #Denmark #NATO #Venezuela

2026-01-06 21:30:44 UTC

"After Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow in Syria, Maduro’s fall in Venezuela represents a serious blow to Russia’s global ambitions, and this is good news for Europe. However, the fall of a regime, illegitimate as it may be, through an illegal military attack by a foreign country and the establishment of a quasi-colonial protectorate constitutes a violation of the most basic norms of sovereignty and independence on which European security is built. It is Russia’s dream for Europe.
True, Putin does not need Trump’s free pass to pursue such a vision. He has done so in Ukraine, as well as in Georgia and Moldova, well before Trump toppled Maduro. But there is no doubt that Trump’s green-lighting of spheres of influence – not just in words but in action – embodies the law of the jungle so dear to dictators such as Putin. For Europeans to silently condone such a vision is not just unethical. It is plain stupid."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/06/europe-venezuela-donald-trump-vladimir-putin
#EU #Europe #USA #Trump #Venezuela #Imperialism #Maduro #Ukraine #Putin #Russia

2026-01-05 09:07:13 UTC

RT @BenjaminNorton
The claim that the US corporate media is "independent" of the government is a myth. It has obediently supported every US imperialist war of aggression.
Major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post knew beforehand about Trump's plan to attack Venezuela, but they did not report it, in order to protect the US military -- and therefore help it commit war crimes.
These corporate media outlets are not truly "independent"; they are tools of the US regime, and they are complicit in its crimes.
Source: https://semafor.com/article/01/03/2026/new-york-times-washington-post-held-off-on-reporting-venezuela-raid

2026-01-04 14:03:24 UTC

"History shows that failed covert regime changes usually make a bad situation even worse. Relations between the intervening actor and its target go downhill, and as we have found in our research, militarized clashes between them become more likely. In the target state, such attempts tend to trigger violence, including civil war, and increase the risk that the regime kills masses of civilians.
The United States has long conducted covert interventions in other countries’ domestic politics—in Afghanistan, Albania, and Angola, to name just a few. But this pattern was especially pronounced in Latin America, where Washington attempted at least 18 covert regime changes during the Cold War. In 1954, it overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected government, ushering in a military regime that rounded up thousands of opponents and presided over a 36-year civil war that killed an estimated 200,000 people. In 1961, the United States backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and launched a coup in the Dominican Republic that unintentionally provoked the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. After Trujillo’s son seized power instead of the U.S.-backed coup plotters, Washington forced him into exile and continued to meddle in Dominican elections—as well as those in Bolivia and Guyana—throughout the 1960s. It also supported coups in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971, and Chile in 1973, and funded the Contra rebels in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s.
Yet not one of these operations produced a stable, pro-American democracy. More often, U.S. interventions installed authoritarian regimes or triggered cycles of repression and violence. Even when Washington found a staunch anticommunist ally, such as Augusto Pinochet in Chile, relations eventually soured over the regime’s brutality and human rights abuses."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/venezuela/regime-change-temptation-maduro-trump-venezuela?utm_campaign=tw&utm_content=&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
#USA #Trump #Imperialism #RegimeChange #LatinAmerica #Venezuela #Maduro

2025-12-29 12:11:00 UTC

"Most-popular streaming service of the last few years is...
YouTube. The Alphabet Inc.-owned streaming service eclipsed Netflix as the most-popular streaming service on TVs a couple years ago and has never looked back. It is now larger than Netflix and Amazon combined.
YouTube has spent the last few years building out its audience on TVs. It’s been so successful that Instagram is now following its lead, while Netflix is looking to compete in new categories like video podcasts. Many Hollywood producers are looking to incubate new shows and talent on YouTube, while every major streaming service and brand is talking to top online content creators about potential partnerships.
Free streaming services are growing more quickly than paid ones
YouTube has been the fastest-growing network on TV, but it’s not the only one. The rise of YouTube is part of a larger trend – the growth of free, advertising-supported streaming. The Roku Channel is the fastest-growing streaming service after YouTube, and Tubi isn’t far behind."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-28/americans-are-watching-fewer-new-tv-shows-and-more-free-tv
#USA #Streaming #Video #TV #YouTube #Netflix

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

2025-12-23 19:33:55 UTC

"The focus on mathematical formalism and consequent abstraction from important issues in the real world do not only have consequences for understanding the economy — it also has consequences with respect to the questions asked within the discipline. Far too many economists are concerned with how a change in measured variable X affects measured variable Y rather than asking normative, important questions such as: Is capitalism preferable to socialism? What are the global consequences of China’s rise in the world economy? What are the limits of looking at climate change purely through the lens of market failures? In fact, I’ve met many economists who say that they think economics is a ‘hard science’ that should be unconcerned with these types of questions. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, two of the most important figures in classical economics, would turn in their graves if they heard this. Despite their political differences, these two scholars approached economics in a similar way. They both understood that economics is shaped by human values, social norms, and ideologies. According to Smith and Marx, to be an economist is also to be a philosopher.
The crisis in economics education isn't just an academic problem — it's a societal one. When policymakers, business leaders, and analysts graduate with a mathematically sophisticated but contextually impoverished understanding of economic systems, it has serious consequences."
https://www.theglobalcurrents.com/p/how-economics-lost-its-soul
#Economics #PoliticalEconomy #Philosophy #Utilitarianism

2025-12-23 18:24:22 UTC

"[R]ather than face the fact that German and Western publics express revulsion at the death and destruction in Gaza, their political classes have decided that the medium and not the message is the problem. Social media is to blame, we hear. It’s because China and Qatar control the algorithm of TikTok that teenagers are seeing “walls of dead children.” Their solution is to change the ownership of TikTok so that pro-Israel messages flood their phones instead.
The political and media classes have reason to be apprehensive. Were it not for the independent journalist with her phone in Amsterdam, who filmed Israeli soccer fans running amok against Dutch citizens, we would have been stuck with the lie propagated by the mainstream media that a “pogrom” against the Israeli fans in Amsterdam had been perpetrated by those very victims of those soccer fans. Only once this journalist placed her footage online were mainstream stations compelled to correct their coverage.
Yet Western governments and media have offered justification or trivialization of these claims in the same breath. Can they be surprised by the crisis of confidence in the media, evidenced by academic studies, and that people are turning to alternative sources and political parties?
All that separates us from the world predicted by George Orwell are independent sources of information and the healthy instincts of publics who have drawn a universal lesson from the Nazi past, namely that the near-total destruction of a region like Gaza is illegitimate, criminal, unacceptable: even in the face of the deplorable Hamas-led attack on Israeli settlements more than two years ago."
https://thediasporist.de/is-holocaust-memory-over/
#Germany #Holocaust #Palestine #Gaza #Israel #Disinformation #Propaganda

2025-12-23 16:34:32 UTC

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a new definition of “reasonable expectation.” According to the justices, it’s no longer reasonable to assume that what you type into Google is yours to keep.
In a decision that reads like a love letter to the surveillance economy, the court ruled that police were within their rights to access a convicted rapist’s search history without a warrant. The reasoning is that everyone knows they’re being watched anyway.
The opinion, issued Tuesday, leaned on the idea that the public has already surrendered its privacy to Silicon Valley.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
“It is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect, and then sell, user data,” the court said, as if mass exploitation of personal information had become a civic tradition.
Because that practice is so widely known, the court concluded, users cannot reasonably expect privacy. In other words, if corporations do it first, the government gets a free pass."
https://reclaimthenet.org/pennsylvania-court-rules-no-privacy-in-google-searches
#USA #Pennsylvania #Google #Privacy #Surveillance #PoliceState

2025-12-20 14:49:43 UTC

LoL. Would you expect any different outcome than this out of a industry built upon "citation cartels" where articles are made to be cited but not to be read?
"What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals.
“There have been lots of AI-generated articles, and those typically get noticed and retracted quickly,” Heiss tells Rolling Stone. He mentions a paper retracted earlier this month, which discussed the potential to improve autism diagnoses with an AI model and included a nonsensical infographic that was itself created with a text-to-image model. “But this hallucinated journal issue is slightly different,” he says.
That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations. This leads to students and academics (and any large language models they may ask for help) identifying those “sources” as reliable without ever confirming their veracity. The more these false citations are unquestioningly repeated from one article to the next, the more the illusion of their authenticity is reinforced. Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to."
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Hallucinations #Chatbots #LLMs #Science #AcademicPublishing

2025-12-19 17:06:01 UTC

- reply

Here's an unpaywalled version of the article: https://archive.fo/p4AcP

2025-12-19 16:35:27 UTC

"An infinitesimal delay in the typed commands of a new IT worker provided an early clue that an imposter had gotten access to an Amazon.com Inc. corporate computer.
Keystroke data from the laptop of a worker who was supposed to be in US should have taken tens of milliseconds to reach Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Instead, the flow from this machine was more than 110 milliseconds, Amazon’s Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt told me.
The barely perceptible lag suggested the worker was half a world away.
The person, who Schmidt said was hired by an Amazon contractor, was part of the surge in recent years of North Koreans skirting strict sanctions by the US and other countries to con their way into remote jobs, often in IT. The purpose is to raise money for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, including for its weapons programs. The pattern of imposters has raised legal and security concerns for small businesses and major corporations.
Since April 2024, Amazon staff have found and foiled more than 1,800 attempts to be hired by North Koreans, Schmidt said during a security event at the company’s New York City office this week. This year, the number of such attempts has gone up 27%, on average, from one quarter to the next, the company says."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-12-17/amazon-caught-north-korean-it-worker-by-tracing-keystroke-data
#Amazon #CyberSecurity #NorthKorea

2025-12-18 21:26:05 UTC

"EU governments are pushing to widen data retention obligations for apps that citizens use every day – and the best VPN apps are among those targeted.
A new internal document dated November 27 (first published by Netzpolitik) provides important insights into the current thinking of the Danish Presidency of the EU Council. It shows that member states largely agree on the need for a new framework on data retention, presenting an important overview of lawmakers main position on the matter.
The topic has been debated since April, when the EU Commission first unveiled "ProtectEU," a strategy aiming to create a roadmap for "lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement." The Commission then presented the Roadmap in June, which outlined an intent to decrypt citizens' private data by 2030.
Crucially, the document reveals that EU governments see metadata – specifically traffic and location history – as the most vital tool for law enforcement.
Most member states argue that simply knowing who owns an account isn't enough. Instead, they want a new legal baseline where companies are forced to log exactly when and where a user was online, as well as the IP addresses they used to connect.
The document notes that member states are aware of the legal hurdles of gathering this data and emphasize that any new system must include robust safeguards and strict proportionality to satisfy the courts.
However, privacy experts and technologists have long warned that such 'safeguards' are not enough, arguing that you cannot weaken encryption or retain this data without fundamentally compromising user security.
Besides virtual private network (VPN) companies, other online services targeted include messaging apps, hosting providers, file sharing services, cloud storage apps, and other over-the-top (OTT) services."
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/the-eu-prepares-ground-for-wider-data-retention-and-vpn-providers-are-among-the-targets
#EU #DataRetention #Privacy #VPNs #Metadata #Surveillance #DataProtection #DigitalRights #ProtectEU

2025-12-12 10:12:27 UTC

"Mac and Crane discuss the essay "Legality and Illegality" by György Lukács (Georg Lukács) in the context of his broader development: after joining the Communist Party in 1918, Lukács would play an important role in the leadership of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March to August 1919), around which time he would write many of the essays later collected and published in Tactics and Ethics: 1919-1929, only to reverse some of his positions on core issues in his subsequent exile in Vienna, resulting in History and Class Consciousness (1923). In their discussion of the vicissitudes of fate and philosophy, Mac and Crane attempt to answer the fundamental question tragically left out of E40's classic song "Choices": Lukács - Nope or Yup?"
https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-lukacs-145622463
#CriticalTheory #Lukacs #Marxism #Philosophy

2025-12-11 21:31:32 UTC

"The best evidence we have shows that rising health spending in the United States since 1975 can explain roughly the same share of the growth in income inequality as increased trade, outsourcing or automation. It has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills.
Despite devastating out-of-pocket costs, Americans are generally insulated from the true cost of health care premiums. However, the expiring subsidies on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, where more than 20 million Americans get their insurance, show just how exorbitant premiums have become. Consider a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 a year. Without subsidies, their health insurance premiums next year will approach $32,000 (akin to buying a new Toyota Camry).
Those of us who get health care insurance from our employers — some 160 million Americans — may be breathing a sigh of relief. But our health care premiums are also staggering (an average of $27,000 a year for a family of four), and the fact that our employers pay part of the tab isn’t much of a reprieve.
That’s because decades’ worth of research shows that, even though employers pay most of workers’ premiums, those costs are passed on to workers in the form of lower wages and fewer jobs. That’s why the rise in health spending above the rate of inflation over the past decade has depressed wages by nearly 10 percent, according to my calculations. And because premiums are a bigger share of total pay for lower-income workers, the job cuts triggered by rising health care spending fall disproportionally on low- and middle-income workers and fuel income inequality."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/opinion/health-care-aca-cost-insurance.html
#USA #HealthCare #PublicHealth #HealthInsurance #MedicareForAll #Capitalism

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

2025-12-10 12:43:31 UTC

"The Justice Department announced two indictments in the Central District of California charging Ukrainian national Victoria Eduardovna Dubranova, 33, also known as Vika, Tory, and SovaSonya, for her role in conducting cyberattacks and computer intrusions against critical infrastructure and other victims around the world, in support of Russia’s geopolitical interests. Dubranova was extradited to the United States earlier this year on an indictment charging her for her actions supporting CyberArmyofRussia_Reborn (CARR). Today, Dubranova was arraigned on a second indictment charging her for her actions supporting NoName057(16) (NoName). Dubranova pleaded not guilty in both cases, and is scheduled to begin trial in the NoName matter on Feb. 3, 2026 and in the CARR matter on April 7, 2026.
As described in the indictments, the Russian government backed CARR and NoName by providing, among other things, financial support. CARR used this financial support to access various cybercriminal services, including subscriptions to distributed denial of service-for-hire services. NoName was a state-sanctioned project administered in part by an information technology organization established by order of the President of Russia in October 2018 that developed, along with other co-conspirators, NoName’s proprietary distributed denial of service (DDoS) program.
“Politically motivated hacktivist groups, whether state-sponsored like CARR or state-sanctioned like NoName, pose a serious threat to our national security, particularly when foreign intelligence services use civilians to obfuscate their malicious cyber activity targeting American critical infrastructure as well as attacking proponents of NATO and U.S. interests abroad,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California."
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-actions-combat-two-russian-state-sponsored-cyber-criminal
#CyberCrime #CyberSecurity #Russia #StateHacking #DDoS #USA #Hacktivism

2025-12-10 11:31:49 UTC

"OpenAI has allegedly become more guarded about publishing research that highlights the potentially negative impact that AI could have on the economy, four people familiar with the matter tell WIRED.
The perceived pullback has contributed to the departure of at least two employees on OpenAI’s economic research team in recent months, according to the same four people, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity.
Dispatches from the heart of the AI scene, with a focus on the people, communities, and companies driving this transformative technology.
One of these employees, Tom Cunningham, left the company entirely in September after concluding it had become difficult to publish high-quality research, WIRED has learned. In a parting message shared internally, Cunningham wrote that the team faced a growing tension between conducting rigorous analysis and functioning as a de facto advocacy arm for OpenAI, according to sources familiar with the situation.
Cunningham declined WIRED’s request for comment.
OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon addressed these concerns in an internal memo following Cunningham’s departure. In a copy of the message obtained by WIRED, Kwon argued that OpenAI must act as a responsible leader in the AI sector and should not only raise problems with the technology, but also “build the solutions.”"
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-economic-research-team-ai-jobs/
#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #AIBubble #AIHype #Automation #Economy

2025-12-08 14:40:27 UTC

"We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet's vital signs are flashing red. The consequences of human-driven alterations of the climate are no longer future threats but are here now. This unfolding emergency stems from failed foresight, political inaction, unsustainable economic systems, and misinformation. Almost every corner of the biosphere is reeling from intensifying heat, storms, floods, droughts, or fires. The window to prevent the worst outcomes is rapidly closing. In early 2025, the World Meteorological Organization reported that 2024 was the hottest year on record (WMO 2025a). This was likely hotter than the peak of the last interglacial, roughly 125,000 years ago (Gulev et al. 2021, Kaufman and McKay 2022). Rising levels of greenhouse gases remain the driving force behind this escalation. These recent developments emphasize the extreme insufficiency of global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mark the beginning of a grim new chapter for life on Earth.
In this report, we seek to speak candidly to fellow scientists, policymakers, and humanity at large. Given our roles in research and higher education, we share an ethical responsibility to sound the alarm about escalating global risks and to take collective action in confronting them with clarity and resolve. We show evidence of accelerated warming and document changes in Earth's vital signs. These indicators build on the framework introduced by Ripple and colleagues (2020), who issued a declaration of a climate emergency that has garnered support from approximately 15,800 scientist signatories worldwide. We also examine recent extreme weather disasters and discuss physical and social risks. The final sections of the report include suggested climate mitigation strategies and the broader societal transformations needed to secure a livable future. A summary of key findings is given in box 1."
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biaf149/8303627?login=false
#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #ClimateCrisis

2025-12-04 15:42:32 UTC

"Mobilizing Rousseau against Thiel, we may be more optimistic about human nature and believe in the possibility of democracy. We should reject Thiel’s false dilemma between state totalitarianism and libertarianism: there are more options in between, even in the U.S. And even global governance could be organized in a (more) democratic way.
Yet it remains a challenge to deal with the problem of violence in a way that does not lead to totalitarianism. This is not only an issue in the post-9/11 context in which Thiel’s thoughts developed, but also and perhaps especially in today’s divided and polarized political world.
This divisive context is not unrelated to tech. Current digital social media, including the Facebook Thiel invested in, have monetized mimetic desire. Girard’s theory has become a business model. The result is there for all to see, and it’s rather ugly. Social media have become the main theatres of mimetic rivalry. Artificial intelligence, in turn, doesn’t seem to make things better, undermining democracy and creating the soil for new forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
That takes us back to the tech world. In practice, Thiel’s way of dealing with the Girardian problem is Palantir. Monopoly as a means to avoid mimetic competition, a classic recipe of Big Tech (as Palaver reminded his audience in his recent lecture at the University of Vienna). But also surveillance and control of the population to deal with the problem of violence. Rejecting the state, Thiel has raised a new Leviathan. Like other libertarian Tech bros, he criticises surveillance and control when it comes from the nation state, but meanwhile he has installed his own “Antichrist” anchored in the private sector (which in turn services Trump’s surveillance state and foreign states)."
https://coeckelbergh.medium.com/enemies-scapegoats-and-the-antichrist-2569ed834fdc
#SiliconValley #Thiel #BigTech #Libertarianism #Surveillance #Democracy #Scapegoating #Philosophy #Girard

2025-12-03 16:30:56 UTC

"AI companies are spending billions on data centers in the race to AGI. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has some thoughts on the math behind those bets.
Data center spending is on the rise. During Meta's recent earnings call, words like "capacity" and AI "infrastructure" were frequently used. Google just announced that it wants to eventually build them in space. The question remains: will the revenue generated from data centers ever justify all the capital expenditure?
On the "Decoder" podcast, Krishna concluded that there was likely "no way" these companies would make a return on their capex spending on data centers.
Couching that his napkin math was based on today's costs, "because anything in the future is speculative," Kirshna said that it takes about $80 billion to fill up a one-gigawatt data center.
"Okay, that's today's number. So, if you are going to commit 20 to 30 gigawatts, that's one company, that's $1.5 trillion of capex," he said.
Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-ceo-says-no-way-103010877.html
#AI #GenerativeAI #IBM #DataCenters #AIBubble

2025-12-03 01:13:59 UTC

"On the heels of an unprecedented UN Security Council resolution endorsing President Donald Trump’s Gaza agenda on November 17, the U.S. and its allies are now trying to move forward with the “second phase” of their plan to colonize Gaza and turn it into a hub of international investment. The aim is to use an international force, which will operate under Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace,” as a means to completely disarm the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and impose imperial tutelage on the Gaza Strip. While it states that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza,” the plan bestows sweeping agency on Israel and is filled with ambiguities that could keep Israeli forces indefinitely entrenched in Gaza.
Trump’s 20-point plan has been endorsed by an assortment of Arab and Islamic states and Mahmoud Abbas, the deeply unpopular 90-year old head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), but it has been rejected by a wide cross section of other Palestinian political factions and parties.
“It’s an Israeli plan that has been rebranded as a Trump plan,” said Diana Buttu, a human rights lawyer who previously served as an advisor to Palestinian negotiators. “All of the guarantees are being given to Israel, but there’s no guarantees that are given to Palestinians. The fact [is] that all of the control rests in the hands of Israel. No control is ceded to anybody else; it looks to me entirely like an Israeli plan that was rebranded as a Trump plan—not the other way around,” Buttu told Drop Site. “It was a plan that was designed to ease the pressure off of Israel and, at the same time, let Israel continue to kill Palestinians—let them try to ethnically cleanse Gaza. It exactly matches what Israel said from the beginning.”"
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-gaza-abbas-oslo-hamas-palestinian-islamic-jihad-fatah-palestinian-liberation-organization-palestinian-resistance-united-nation-macron-france
#USA #Trump #Palestine #Gaza #Israel #Genocide

2025-12-02 11:16:16 UTC

"European banks, cowed by a stern look from a US Treasury official in Washington, rushed to close Guillou’s accounts. European companies, whose compliance departments act as extensions of the US authorities, refuse to provide him services. Meanwhile, European institutions – the Commission and the Council – look the other way, wringing their hands and muttering platitudes about the “complexities” of transatlantic relations. They are not merely failing to protect Guillou; they are actively enforcing US sanctions against their own citizen.
During a week when European leaders loudly protested how the US had sidelined them in drawing up a peace deal for Ukraine, their silence over Guillou’s treatment completely normalized the erosion of their authority. From Trump’s perspective, they swapped the challenging, messy project of sovereignty for the comfortable decline of a US protectorate. How else could French President Emmanuel Macron have expected Trump to interpret his decision to treat the economic assassination of a French judge on French soil as nothing more than an unfortunate technical glitch or a minor bureaucratic snafu? Did he and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz really believe that sacrificing their citizens to Trump would gain them a seat at the negotiating table on issues such as Ukraine and Palestine, which are of existential importance to Europe?
No, Guillou’s Kafkaesque nightmare should not surprise us. What should be shocking is the silence surrounding it. We should be outraged not only by US actions, but also by Europe's inaction. Guillou’s case is a stark metaphor for Europe itself: a union of nation-states that helped build an international court to uphold its values, allowing a foreign power to punish its own judge for doing so, and then helped to enforce the punishment. This is a union that has lost its way, its soul, and its spine, turning Europeans into willing extras..."
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/europe-enforcing-us-sanctions-on-french-icc-judge-guillou-by-yanis-varoufakis-2025-12
#EU #ICC #USA #Trump #Palestine #Israel #Genocide

2025-11-30 10:45:12 UTC

RT @HedgieMarkets
🦔A leak from the ChatGPT Android app beta reveals OpenAI is internally testing ads. The code references include "ads feature," "bazaar content," "search ad," and "search ads carousel." Ads appear to be limited to the search experience initially.
The Scale
ChatGPT now has roughly 800 million weekly users, up from 100 million in November 2023 and 300 million in late 2024. Users send about 18 billion messages per week, with GPT handling around 2.5 billion prompts daily. India has become the largest user base, ahead of the US.
My Take
This was inevitable given the math we covered from HSBC. OpenAI has a $207 billion funding hole and only 5% of users pay for subscriptions. Ads are how you monetize the other 95%. But think about what ChatGPT knows compared to Google. When you search Google, it sees keywords. When you talk to ChatGPT, it sees your thought process, your anxieties, your personal problems, your financial questions. A million users discuss mental health weekly. People ask it for medical advice, relationship help, career guidance. Now imagine ads targeted against that data. OpenAI argued in court this week that a suicidal teenager violated terms of service. They just had a data breach exposing user information. And they're about to build an advertising business on top of the most intimate conversations people have with technology. The company valued at $183 billion that can't pay its compute bills is about to learn exactly how much your private thoughts are worth to advertisers.
Hedgie🤗
https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/1994887090577052074

2025-11-28 21:26:48 UTC

"The Digital Omnibus would pause the enforcement of regulations for high-risk AI systems under Article 6(2), such as biometric identification and categorisation, judicial decision-making or scoring or ranking job applicants, for up to 15 months – to 2 December 2027. While this part of Article 6 was supposed to apply from August 2026, this delay of up to 15 months would significantly extend gaps in transparency and accountability.
This delay is the result of intense lobbying from Big Tech and governments, including the U.S., Denmark and Germany. Tech companies claim they need more time to meet the requirements, but by the time requirements were supposed to kick in (2026), they would have known about them for more than two years. The delay would mean another year that AI systems posing a high risk to fundamental rights are allowed to operate without necessary regulation."
https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/omnibus/45571?
#EU #EC #DigitalOmnibus #AIAct #BigTech #AIRegulation #DataProtection #Privacy #DigitalRights

2025-11-26 17:35:57 UTC

RT @davidsirota
🚨NEWS: Elected officials are signing tech companies' non-disclosure agreements blocking the government from telling the public details of data center projects - including which corporations they benefit, how much water they'll use & how much they'll jack up electricity prices.
https://www.levernews.com/pay-no-attention-to-the-chipmaker-behind-the-curtain/

2025-11-25 21:39:15 UTC

"A quiet shift is happening in Brussels. The European Commission has launched what it calls the Digital Omnibus, a sweeping rewrite of the EU’s core digital protections.
Officials present it as routine housekeeping. Streamlining. Cutting ‘red tape’ to boost Europe’s competitiveness. In reality, the Omnibus marks the most ambitious deregulation of the digital sphere the EU has ever attempted.
This move matters because Europe’s digital rulebook was not built for decoration. Laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the ePrivacy framework and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) protect people’s most basic rights online.
They set limits on what companies and public authorities may do with personal information, how devices can be accessed, and when algorithms may replace human judgement.
If those protections fall, everyday life changes: how we access healthcare, apply for a job, seek housing, or move through public space.
The Commission’s proposals reopen all three laws at once. They tweak definitions, hollow out safeguards and create new exemptions that give powerful actors more room to collect, infer and reuse personal data.
These changes occur alongside the Digital Fitness Check that hints at future changes to nearly any law touching the digital environment.
Taken together, this is not simplification. It is a shift away from the idea that fundamental rights should set hard boundaries for the digital economy. Under the Omnibus, the definition of personal data becomes narrower and more dependent on what companies say they can identify."
https://www.context.news/digital-rights/opinion/europe-is-dismantling-its-digital-rights-from-within
#EU #DigitalOmnibus #DigitalRights #GDPR #AIAct #DataProtection #Privacy

2025-11-25 20:26:10 UTC

SLAVERY IS FREEDOM v2.0:
"The Sam Altman-founded company behind the "Orb," a volleyball-sized metal sphere that scans irises to prove people's humanity, had a message for employees: work weekends and ignore anything outside your job — for the good of humanity.
During a January all-hands with employees of the startup, Tools for Humanity, CEO Alex Blania laid out his expectations.
"We will neither fail, nor will we be an average outcome, and that's what we want and that's all I care about every day and all you should care about every day, and nothing else should matter," Blania said, according to a recording reviewed by Business Insider. "If you should care about something else, and if you want something else, you should just not be here. It's as simple as that."
The company's mission is to build a global digital identity system that can verify who is human in an increasingly AI-driven world. Blania said it exists solely to achieve that goal — and that anything else is a distraction.
"We don't care about politics, we don't care about DEI, we don't care about anything, we just care about how can we achieve the mission through merit, performance, and excellence," said Blania, who also told staffers he had recently attended President Donald Trump's inauguration in Washington, DC.
Several "team values" displayed on a television screen in the start-up's now-former San Francisco office echoed Blania's messaging, a February video viewed by Business Insider shows."
https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-humanity-startup-culture-hardcore-2025-11
#Orb #SamAltman #Billionaires #MassSurveillance #Worldcoin #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies

2025-11-24 20:58:57 UTC

"Victoria’s stilted email, and a closer read of the original pitch, revealed what should have been clear from the start: with its rote phrasing (“This story matters because of… It is timely because of… It fits your readership because of…”), it had all the hallmarks of an AI-generated piece of writing.
I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where “health and money collide,” flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.
But if Victoria’s pitch appeared to be an AI-generated fabrication, and if she was making up interviews and bylines, what to make of her long list of publications?
Since 2022, the byline “Victoria Goldiee” has been attached to dozens of articles. There are a series of “as-told to” stories in Business Insider. (“I’m a 22-year-old Amazon delivery driver. The cameras in my truck keep me on high alert, but it’s my dream job and the flexible hours are great,” is a novel take on Amazon’s labour practices). There had been an interview with the comic actor Nico Santos in Vogue Philippines, a feature on Afrobeats in RollingStone Africa (no longer on the site), a product recommendation for a DVD drive in New York Magazine’s The Strategist, and, in the past two years, a move away from culture writing to meatier features."
https://thelocal.to/investigating-scam-journalism-ai/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Media #Journalism #News #ScamJournalism #AISlop

2025-11-24 09:05:40 UTC

RT @burkov
This paper shows how to beat models with 671 billion parameters using just 7 million parameters on hard puzzle tasks. On the ARC-AGI reasoning benchmark, this tiny model achieves 45% accuracy compared to 15.8% for DeepSeek R1 and 34.5% for OpenAI's o3-mini. On extremely difficult Sudoku puzzles with only 1,000 training examples, it reaches 87% accuracy where the previous best method managed 55%.
The method treats problem-solving as iterative refinement. The network maintains a current answer and a separate "reasoning" state, then repeatedly updates both: reason about the problem, propose a better answer, reason again, improve further. A Sudoku solver might start with a partially filled grid, update some cells, then reason again about the new constraints—gradually correcting mistakes across up to 16 refinement cycles.
The core insight is that large models fail because they generate answers in one pass, so early mistakes cascade. Breaking the problem into iterative steps, even with far less computational power, proves more effective. Training takes hours on a single GPU instead of weeks on clusters, and the model fits in 28MB instead of terabytes.
Let the article talk to you on ChapterPal: https://chapterpal.com/s/e2942994/less-is-more-recursive-reasoning-with-tiny-networks
Download the PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04871