Miguel Afonso Caetano

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

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

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remixtures@tldr-nettime-org.mostr.pub

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-05-06 03:11:38 UTC

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

2026-04-20 21:45:40 UTC

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

2026-04-20 21:35:44 UTC

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

2026-04-16 00:48:41 UTC

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

2026-03-29 10:56:53 UTC

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

2026-03-26 19:42:33 UTC

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

2026-03-21 17:04:27 UTC

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

2026-03-21 17:01:01 UTC

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

2026-03-21 16:57:03 UTC

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

2026-03-21 16:42:06 UTC

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

2026-03-08 15:02:46 UTC

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

2026-03-04 19:47:01 UTC

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

2026-03-04 19:40:14 UTC

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

2026-02-28 00:52:15 UTC

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

2026-02-28 00:37:51 UTC

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

2026-02-21 13:31:33 UTC

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

2026-02-08 22:13:27 UTC

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

2026-02-05 11:53:57 UTC

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

2026-02-04 20:06:16 UTC

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

2026-02-01 14:29:02 UTC

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

2026-01-31 12:29:35 UTC

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

2026-01-31 11:50:58 UTC

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

2026-01-30 21:13:48 UTC

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

2026-01-23 21:41:39 UTC

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

2026-01-20 22:40:34 UTC

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

2026-01-20 22:37:21 UTC

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

2026-01-17 13:45:12 UTC

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

2026-01-16 21:17:13 UTC

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

2026-01-10 15:29:04 UTC

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

2026-01-08 13:00:24 UTC

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

2026-01-04 12:59:36 UTC

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

2025-12-29 12:30:29 UTC

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

2025-12-29 12:20:29 UTC

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

2025-12-29 12:19:55 UTC

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

2025-12-29 12:14:25 UTC

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

2025-12-29 12:00:18 UTC

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

2025-12-28 22:57:59 UTC

- reply

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

2025-12-28 22:56:54 UTC

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

2025-12-28 21:48:14 UTC

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

2025-12-28 16:14:21 UTC

- reply

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

2025-12-28 15:36:32 UTC

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

2025-12-28 13:29:28 UTC

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

2025-12-28 13:26:50 UTC

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

2025-12-28 13:20:50 UTC

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

2025-12-28 13:15:20 UTC

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

2025-12-28 13:10:40 UTC

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

2025-12-28 12:51:07 UTC

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

2025-12-28 12:44:42 UTC

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

2025-12-28 12:31:34 UTC

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

2025-12-27 12:53:24 UTC

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

2025-12-27 11:41:49 UTC

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

2025-12-27 11:17:07 UTC

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

2025-12-27 11:12:11 UTC

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

2025-12-27 10:45:45 UTC

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

2025-12-27 10:16:44 UTC

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

2025-12-27 10:12:15 UTC

- reply

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

2025-12-27 10:09:03 UTC

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

2025-12-27 10:07:02 UTC

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

2025-12-27 09:50:11 UTC

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

2025-12-27 09:44:48 UTC

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

2025-12-27 09:29:58 UTC

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

2025-12-26 15:53:19 UTC

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

2025-12-26 13:08:55 UTC

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

2025-12-26 13:05:31 UTC

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

2025-12-26 12:03:21 UTC

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

2025-12-26 11:33:06 UTC

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

2025-12-26 10:47:46 UTC

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

2025-12-25 22:19:53 UTC

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

2025-12-24 12:46:59 UTC

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

2025-12-21 15:22:47 UTC

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

2025-12-19 17:20:06 UTC

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

2025-12-10 17:15:32 UTC

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

2025-11-29 11:44:07 UTC

"Democratic officials can certainly continue to make videos about why this is all problematic. But there’s a better and easier way to put an end to all of the summary executions happening in the oceans and any other abuses at every level of the Trump administration.
The Democratic Party can simply make clear that it believes in the rule of law. And there is no rule of law without accountability. Democrats in Congress can promise to fully investigate any possible violations of the law; presidential contenders can promise to appoint people to the Department of Justice who believe that nobody is above the law.
This could mean that Hegseth or even Trump will one day be prosecuted for ordering these crimes. It’s rare that anyone other than ground-level grunts — think, the soldiers at Abu Ghraib — are ever prosecuted for war crimes. Trump himself seems to have completely dodged most of his criminal cases.
But fundamentally these Trump officials are self-interested. If they think there’s a serious chance that they will be in legal trouble or end up behind bars, I imagine you’ll start seeing much more cautious use of the U.S. military, a tool that should be used as a last resort against lethal enemies, not as a first resort to soothe the ego of a nihilistic cabinet secretary."
https://www.theamericansaga.com/p/the-better-way-to-stop-illegal-orders
#USA #Trump #RuleOfLaw #Democrats #DemocraticParty #HumanRights #WarCrimes

2025-11-21 22:26:06 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…xujg And while we're at it, why not disable browsers' ability to process JavaScript code? That kind of paranoia is completely insane to me. Today's users have certain expectations and requirements. A product that doesn't meet their needs is a fail.

2025-11-21 22:19:21 UTC

- reply

My personal wishlist would be pretty simple:
- Just give people the “shut off all AI features” button. It’s a tiny percentage of people who want it, but they’re never going to shut up about it, and they’re convinced they’re the whole world and they can’t distinguish between being mad at big companies and being mad at a technology so give them a toggle switch and write up a blog post explaining how extraordinarily expensive it is to maintain a configuration option over the lifespan of a global product.
- Market Firefox as “The best AI browser for people who hate Big AI”. Regular users have no idea how creepy the Big AI companies are — they’ve just heard their local news talk about how AI is the inevitable future. If Mozilla can warn me how to protect my privacy from ChatGPT, then it can also mention that ChatGPT tells children how to self-harm, and should be aggressive in engaging with the community on how to build tools that help mitigate those kinds of harms — how do we catalyze that innovation?"

2025-11-21 22:18:49 UTC

I honestly don't know how people can be so judgmental about a technology. AI is just a tool that can be sometimes be very helpful if you trust the users' critical thinking skills and the ability to smell bullshit. Most of the problems associated with AI are just a consequence of shitty business models and a mediocre mode of production (Capitalism)
"Judging by what I see in the comments on the posts about Firefox’s potential AI feature integrations, the apparent path that critics are recommending as an alternative browser is “I’ll yell at you until you stop using ChatGPT”. Consider this post my official notice: that strategy hasn’t worked. And it is not going to work. The only thing that will work is to offer a better alternative to these users. That will involve defining what an acceptably “good” alternative AI looks like, and then building and shipping it to these users, and convincing them to use it. I’m hoping such an effort succeeds. But I can guarantee that scolding people and trying to convince them that they’re not finding utility in the current platforms, or trying to make them feel guilty about the fact that they are finding utility in the current platforms, will not work.
And none of this is exculpatory for my friends at Mozilla. As I’ve said to the good people there, and will share again here, I don’t think the framing of the way this feature has been presented has done either the Firefox team or the community any favors. These big, emotional blow-ups are demoralizing, and take away time and energy and attention that could be better spent getting people excited and motivated to grow for the future."
https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Mozilla #Firefox #AIBrowser #OpenAI #ChatGPT

2025-11-05 16:11:04 UTC

"It’s difficult to appreciate the historic scale of AI data centers. They represent some of the largest infrastructure projects humanity has ever created.
To get a sense of the scale, consider that OpenAI’s Stargate Abilene data center will need:
- Enough electricity to serve the population of Seattle
- More than 250× the computing power of the supercomputer that trained GPT-4
- A plot of land larger than 450 soccer fields
- $32 billion in construction and IT equipment costs
- A few thousand construction workers
- Around two years for construction
And that’s just a small part of the picture. Companies are currently building many other data centers like Stargate Abilene.
By the end of 2027, AI data centers could collectively see hundreds of billions in investment — rivalling the Apollo program and Manhattan Project.
This raises many questions, such as:
- Why do we need these huge data centers?
- What makes them so exceptional as infrastructure projects?
- Where are people building them?
-mHow will we get the power to run them?
- And what does this all mean for the climate, AI policy, and the future of AI?"
https://epoch.ai/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-ai-data-centers
#AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #Energy #BigTech

2025-10-31 20:08:05 UTC

"On behalf of the Open Knowledge Foundation, I welcome today’s announcement by the European Commission on the creation of the Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (DC-EDIC). It is a hopeful moment for Europe, where the values of thousands of communities that have worked for years in a different way of doing and governing technology, openness, cooperation and democracy, are finally listened to. This is a milestone moment, finally translating years of ideas and words into concrete action. Europe is showing that technology can be built and governed differently: openly, collaboratively, and with people at its heart.
While DC-EDIC begins as a European effort, its vision will reach far beyond the continent. It is a model built for sharing that provides digital commons open by design, scalable, and reusable, which other countries and regions can adapt to their own challenges and needs. This commons-based approach places public value above proprietary control. It offers a powerful example of how we can collectively shape the digital future as a global public good."
https://blog.okfn.org/2025/10/30/we-celebrate-the-digital-commons-european-digital-infrastructure-consortium-a-model-built-for-sharing/
#EU #EC #DigitalCommons #DCEDIC #Commons

2025-10-21 11:26:54 UTC

"At least 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned by Israel to Gaza had been held in a notorious detention centre already facing allegations of torture and unlawful deaths in custody, officials from Gaza’s health ministry have told the Guardian.
The director general of the health ministry, Dr Munir al-Bursh, and a spokesperson for Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the bodies are being examined, said a document found inside each body bag indicated the bodies all came from Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert where, according to photos and testimonies published by the Guardian last year, Palestinian detainees were held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and forced to wear nappies.
“The document tags inside the body bags are written in Hebrew and clearly indicate that the remains were held at Sde Teiman,” Bursh said. “The tags also showed that DNA tests had been carried out on some of them there.”
Last year the Israeli army launched a criminal investigation, which is continuing, into the deaths of 36 prisoners detained at Sde Teiman.
As part of the US-brokered truce in Gaza, Hamas has handed over the bodies of some of the hostages who died during the course of the war, and Israel has so far transferred the bodies of 150 Palestinians killed after the 7 October 2023 attack.
Some of the photographs of Palestinian bodies seen by the Guardian – which cannot be published due to their graphic nature – show several of the victims blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs. One image shows a rope fastened around a man’s neck."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/20/mutilated-bodies-palestinians-held-notorious-israeli-jail-gaza-officials
#Israel #Torture #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #HumanRights #InternationalLaw

2025-10-15 09:43:32 UTC

"The United States has executed 21 people over the last month in targeted drone strikes off the coast of Venezuela. The Trump administration has so far authorized at least four strikes against people it claims are suspected “narco-terrorists.”
The strikes mark a dark shift in the administration’s approach to what it’s framing as an international drug war — one it’s waging without congressional oversight.
“There actually could be more strikes,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Turse joins host Akela Lacy and investigative journalist Radley Balko to discuss how the administration is laying the groundwork to justify extrajudicial killings abroad and possibly at home.
The Trump administration’s claims that it’s going after high-level drug kingpins don’t hold water, Turse says. “Trump is killing civilians because he ‘suspects’ that they’re smuggling drugs. Experts that I talk to say this is illegal. Former government lawyers, experts on the laws of war, they say it’s outright murder.”"
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/10/briefing-podcast-trump-venezuela-boat-strikes/
#USA #Trump #Venezuela #InternationalLaw #Authoritarianism

2025-10-08 16:18:35 UTC

This is EXTREMELY Important - mostly due to the absence of research having to do with avoiding the real causes of death.
"There are two big takeaways from this analysis. The first one is that the actual distribution of deaths shown on the left is very different from the causes of death that the media talks about.
The second insight is how similar the distribution of coverage is between the three media outlets. While there are some differences (Fox News was a bit more likely to mention homicides, for example, while the NYT did the same for terrorism), these are much smaller than we might expect. While right- and left-wing media might differ in how they cover particular topics, what they choose to write or talk about is similar.
The insight in this comparison, then, is not about differences between partisan media. It’s about the difference between actual causes of death and what the news tells Americans about. Those differences — as we can see in the chart — are huge.
Heart disease and cancer accounted for 55% of deaths among these 15 causes, but together they received just 7% of the media coverage. Other chronic issues, such as strokes, respiratory problems, diabetes, and kidney and liver disease, were also very underrepresented in the news.
Rare — but dramatic — events such as homicides and terrorism received more than half of all media coverage, despite being much smaller causes of death in the US. Terrorism, in particular, is a very rare cause of death, with 16 deaths in 2023."
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from
#Media #News #Journalism #PublicHealth #USA

2025-09-12 06:43:10 UTC

"People on board the boat off the coast of Venezuela that the U.S. military destroyed last Tuesday were said to have survived an initial strike, according to two American officials familiar with the matter. They were then killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.
The boat was under U.S. surveillance for a significant period of time. Those on board apparently spotted the U.S. aerial assets and altered the vessel’s course. U.S. officials said the boat appeared to have turned back toward shore, after which it was subjected to multiple strikes. Three sources, including Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said the boat was attacked by one or more drones.
A very small number of Senate and House staffers separately received highly classified briefings about the attack on Tuesday. No senators or House members were in attendance, people familiar with the briefings told The Intercept.
Two officials familiar with the strike were left with the impression that more attacks in the Caribbean would be forthcoming in the weeks ahead."
https://theintercept.com/2025/09/10/u-s-attacked-boat-near-venezuela-multiple-times-to-kill-survivors/?utm_content=buffer2a99c&utm_medium=buffer&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=theintercept
#USA #Trump #Venezuela #InternationalLaw #HumanRights

2025-09-12 06:41:47 UTC

"The California State Assembly took a big step toward regulating AI on Wednesday night, passing SB 243 — a bill that regulate AI companion chatbots in order to protect minors and vulnerable users. The legislation passed with bipartisan support and now heads to the state Senate for a final vote Friday.
If Governor Gavin Newsom signs the bill into law, it would take effect January 1, 2026, making California the first state to require AI chatbot operators to implement safety protocols for AI companions and hold companies legally accountable if their chatbots fail to meet those standards.
The bill specifically aims to prevent companion chatbots, which the legislation defines as AI systems that provide adaptive, human-like responses and are capable of meeting a user’s social needs – from engaging in conversations around suicidal ideation, self-harm, or sexually explicit content. The bill would require platforms to provide recurring alerts to users – every three hours for minors – reminding them that they are speaking to an AI chatbot, not a real person, and that they should take a break. It also establishes annual reporting and transparency requirements for AI companies that offer companion chatbots, including major players OpenAI, Character.AI, and Replika."
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/a-california-bill-that-would-regulate-ai-companion-chatbots-is-close-to-becoming-law/
#USA #California #AI #GenerativeAI #Chatbots #CompanionChatbots

2025-09-12 06:16:27 UTC

- reply

"The economy surrounding military brothels in US base towns, including restaurants, barbershops and bars catering to American GIs, made up about 25 percent of South Korea's GDP during the 1960s and 70s, according to historians."

2025-09-12 06:14:59 UTC

RT @AFP
More than 100 South Korean women forced to work as prostitutes for US soldiers stationed in the country file landmark lawsuit
https://u.afp.com/SdEU
📸 A building slated for demolition that was once called a "monkey house", a clinic for sex workers hired to serve US soldiers

2025-09-06 11:52:12 UTC

"Claude’s update relies on a striking pop-up with a large, black "Accept" button. The data sharing toggle is tucked away, switched on by default, and framed positively ("You can help..."). A faint "Not now" button and hard-to-find instructions on changing the setting later complete the manipulative design.
These interface tricks, known as dark patterns, are considered unlawful under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and by the European Court of Justice when used to obtain consent for data processing. Pre-checked boxes do not count as valid consent under these rules.
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has also stressed in its guidelines on deceptive design patterns that consent must be freely given, informed, and unambiguous. Claude’s current design clearly fails to meet these standards, making it likely that Anthropic will soon draw the attention of privacy regulators."
https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-uses-a-questionable-dark-pattern-to-obtain-user-consent-for-ai-data-use-in-claude/
#EU #AI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic #LLMs #Chatbots #Claude #DarkPatterns #Privacy #DataProtection

2025-09-06 10:49:22 UTC

"Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. Started nearly 25 years ago, the site was long mocked as a byword for the unreliability of information on the internet, yet today it is, without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation. It’s what Google puts at the top of search results otherwise awash in ads and spam, what social platforms cite when they deign to correct conspiracy theories, and what AI companies scrape in their ongoing quest to get their models to stop regurgitating info-slurry — and consult with such frequency that they are straining the encyclopedia’s servers. Each day, it’s where approximately 70 million people turn for reliable information on everything from particle physics to rare Scottish sheep to the Erfurt latrine disaster of 1184, a testament both to Wikipedia’s success and to the total degradation of the rest of the internet as an information resource.
“It’s basically the only place on the internet that doesn’t function as a confirmation bias machine.”
But as impressive as this archive is, it is the byproduct of something that today looks almost equally remarkable: strangers on the internet disagreeing on matters of existential gravity and breathtaking pettiness and, through deliberation and debate, building a common ground of consensus reality."
https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales
#Wikipedia #Collaboration #OpenWeb

2025-08-27 22:33:19 UTC

- reply

GPT5:
Here’s a pragmatic spectrum of documentation tools—from least docs-as-code and least autonomous to most docs-as-code and most autonomous. It’s ordered primarily by “docs-as-code alignment” (content in plain text, versioned in Git, built via CI/CD), and secondarily by “technological autonomy” (control of stack, data portability, extensibility). Autonomy generally rises as you go down, with a few noted exceptions.
Key:
- Docs-as-code (1–5): how well it fits Git + CI + text-first workflows
- Autonomy (1–5): control over infra, build, theming, data portability, vendor lock-in
| Stage | Approach | Typical tools/platforms | Docs-as-code (1–5) | Autonomy (1–5) | Notes / when it fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Personal office docs | Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, LibreOffice | 1 | 1 | Great for drafts; poor versioning, collaboration, reuse, and publishing pipelines. |
| 2 | Cloud office docs | Google Docs, Microsoft 365 (online) | 1 | 1 | Easy collaboration; still not versioned as code; difficult to automate builds/releases. |
| 3 | SaaS knowledge base/wiki | Confluence Cloud, Notion, SharePoint Online, GitBook (Cloud), Guru, Zendesk Guide, Intercom Articles, Help Scout Docs | 2 | 2 | Good search/permissions; WYSIWYG-friendly; limited CI/CD, vendor lock-in, and contribution via PRs. |
| 4 | Self‑hosted wiki/KB | Confluence Data Center/Server, MediaWiki, BookStack, DokuWiki | 2 | 4 | More control/plugins; still WYSIWYG-first and not Git-native; ops overhead. |
| 5 | Git-hosted wikis | GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket Wiki | 3 | 3 | Markdown + Git history; minimal theming/navigation; not a full docs site; still convenient. |
| 6 | API doc SaaS | ReadMe.com, Stoplight, SwaggerHub, Postman Documenter, Redocly (hosted) | 3 | 2 | Great for API reference and “try it” flows; spec-as-code; customization limited by vendor. |

2025-08-26 23:11:20 UTC

"Of course, there are plenty of people who find A.I. useful, and there is academic evidence to back this up: in 2023, two economists at M.I.T. found that exposure to ChatGPT enabled participants in a randomized trial to complete “professional writing tasks” more quickly and improved the quality of their writing. The same year, other research teams identified productivity-enhancing outcomes for computer programmers who used Github’s Copilot, and for customer-support agents who were given access to proprietary A.I. tools. The Media Lab researchers found that many workers are using their personal tools, such as GPT or Claude, at their jobs; the report refers to this phenomenon as the “shadow AI economy,” and comments that “it often delivers better ROI” than employer initiatives. But the question remains, and it’s one that senior corporate executives will surely be asking more frequently: Why haven’t more firms seen these types of benefits feeding through to the bottom line?
Part of the problem may be that generative A.I., remarkable as it is, has limited application in many parts of the economy. Taken together, leisure and hospitality, retail, construction, real estate, and the care sector—child-minding and looking after people who are old or infirm—employ about fifty million Americans, but they don’t look like immediate candidates for an A.I. transformation.
Another important thing to note is that adoption of A.I. throughout the economy could well be a lengthy process."
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/the-ai-profits-drought-and-the-lessons-of-history
#AI #GenerativeAI #Productivity #Automation #PoliticalEconomy

2025-08-26 22:38:38 UTC

"In 2018, the social-science blog “Data Colada” looked at Metacritic, a review aggregator, and found that more than four out of five albums released that year had received an average rating of at least seventy points out of a hundred—on the site, albums that score sixty-one or above are colored green, for “good.” Even today, music reviews on Metacritic are almost always green, unlike reviews of films, which are more likely to be yellow, for “mixed/average,” or red, for “bad.” The music site Pitchfork, which was once known for its scabrous reviews, hasn’t handed down a perfectly contemptuous score—0.0 out of 10—since 2007 (for “This Is Next,” an inoffensive indie-rock compilation). And, in 2022, decades too late for poor Andrew Ridgeley, Rolling Stone abolished its famous five-star system and installed a milder replacement: a pair of merit badges, “Instant Classic” and “Hear This.”
(...)
Even relatively negative reviews tended to be strikingly solicitous. “Solar Power,” the 2021 album by the New Zealand singer Lorde, was so dull that even many of her fans seemed to view it as a disappointment, but it earned a polite three and a half stars from Rolling Stone. Some of the most cutting commentary came from Lorde herself, who later suggested that the album was a wrong turn—an attempt to be chill and “wafty” when, in fact, she excels at intensity. “I was just like, actually, I don’t think this is me,” she recalled in a recent interview. And, although there are plenty of people who can’t stand Taylor Swift, none of them seem to be employed as critics, who virtually all agreed that her most recent album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was pretty good (Metacritic: 76). Once upon a time, music critics were known for being crankier than the average listener. Swift once castigated a writer who’d had the temerity to castigate her, singing, “Why you gotta be so mean?” How did music critics become so nice?"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/01/how-music-criticism-lost-its-edge
#Music #Journalism #MusicCriticism

2025-08-25 23:15:30 UTC

"In June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a blog that the average ChatGPT query uses "roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon" of water, but did not provide methodology or data to support either statement. For comparison, Google estimates that the median Gemini query "consumes 0.26 milliliters (or about five drops) of water."
These systems don't just use any kind of water, either -- they need clean, high-quality, potable water running through them. "These pipes, they don't want to clog them up with anything," Gadepally explained. "Many data centers are in areas with stressed watersheds, so that's something to keep in mind."
New methods like immersion cooling, in which processors are immersed in a liquid-like mineral oil, show some promise for reducing water use and energy consumption compared to other cooling methods like fans. But the tech is still developing, and would need to be widely adopted to make an impact.
With most proprietary data still murky, several other comparisons exist for how much energy chatbot queries use. Jesse Dodge, a researcher from the nonprofit institute Ai2, has compared one ChatGPT query to the electricity used to power one light bulb for 20 minutes.
The Hugging Face study noted that "charging the average smartphone requires 0.022 kWh of energy, which means that the most efficient text generation model uses as much energy as 9% of a full smartphone charge for 1,000 inferences, whereas the least efficient image generation model uses as much energy as 522 smartphone charges (11.49 kWh), or around half a charge per image generation.""
https://www.zdnet.com/article/worried-about-ais-soaring-energy-needs-avoiding-chatbots-wont-help-but-3-things-could/
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Water #Energy #DataCenters

2025-08-25 22:52:59 UTC

"To generate images, diffusion models use a process known as denoising. They convert an image into digital noise (an incoherent collection of pixels), then reassemble it. It’s like repeatedly putting a painting through a shredder until all you have left is a pile of fine dust, then patching the pieces back together. For years, researchers have wondered: If the models are just reassembling, then how does novelty come into the picture? It’s like reassembling your shredded painting into a completely new work of art.
Now two physicists have made a startling claim: It’s the technical imperfections in the denoising process itself that leads to the creativity of diffusion models. In a paper(opens a new tab) that will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning 2025, the duo developed a mathematical model of trained diffusion models to show that their so-called creativity is in fact a deterministic process — a direct, inevitable consequence of their architecture.
By illuminating the black box of diffusion models, the new research could have big implications for future AI research — and perhaps even for our understanding of human creativity. “The real strength of the paper is that it makes very accurate predictions of something very nontrivial,” said Luca Ambrogioni(opens a new tab), a computer scientist at Radboud University in the Netherlands."
https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-uncover-hidden-ingredients-behind-ai-creativity-20250630/
#AI #GenerativeAI #DiffusionModels #Denoising #Creativity

2025-08-25 21:24:30 UTC

"The FBI raided warmonger John Bolton’s home on Friday morning, allegedly searching for classified information.
As of writing this, the raid appears to be a continuation of the fight over Bolton’s 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” which is sharply critical of President Donald Trump. At the time, White House lawyers and the Justice Department made bogus claims that the book contained classified information to keep it off the shelves.
The book padded Bolton’s wallet but didn’t damage national security.
And while Bolton is loathsome, he still shouldn’t be a victim of a weaponized classification system.
Here are a few important points to remember as this story plays out:
- Overclassification is rampant, and 75% to 90% of information is overclassified. A big part of the problem is that “damage to national security” is a vague term, and most classification decisions are inherently subjective (there are limited exceptions, including for information about weapons of mass destruction).
- The president has near-exclusive control over the classification system. This makes it too easy for any administration to abuse and politicize classification. One potential fix? Congress could start regulating classification.
Classified information is discovered “in the wild all the time,” as Nate Jones of The Washington Post points out. Usually, the government decides it can stay there.
There are plenty of valid reasons to attack John Bolton, but, at least in this case, mishandling classified information probably isn’t one of them."
https://freedom.press/the-classifieds/most-classified-records-dont-deserve-protection-or-justify-an-fbi-raid/
#USA #Trump #FBI #ClassifiedInformation #NationalSecurity #Intelligence

2025-08-25 21:12:57 UTC

"Court records confirm what civil liberties advocates long warned would happen: Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using sensitive data about wire transfers between the U.S. and Mexico to track down immigrants for deportation.
The records were filed in a federal criminal case in Hawaii, as first reported by Honolulu Civil Beat earlier this week.
Gregorio Cordova Murrieta, who is originally from Mexico, was not indicted for money laundering, human trafficking, or any of the grave offenses that law enforcement officials typically offer to justify financial surveillance of wire transfers.
Instead, he was indicted in early July on a single count of reentering the country without authorization after having been previously deported to Mexico. This was the sole basis for the arrest warrant submitted by a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, which once marketed itself as hunting down war criminals and drug smugglers but under the current Trump administration has shifted resources toward tracking down undocumented people and critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.
In a filing to a federal magistrate judge on June 25, HSI Special Agent Tabitha Hanson explained how she found Cordova Murrieta using financial surveillance data."
https://theintercept.com/2025/08/21/ice-immigrants-wire-transfers-remittances-surveillance/
#USA #Trump #ICE #Immigration #Remittances #PoliceState #Surveillance #Mexico #Deportation

2025-08-25 19:55:00 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…4mtt Hello. I'm fine, thank you. I'm from Lisbon, yes. And yes, people are signing petitions and there's been some public mobilization, even though state politicians aren't giving much importance to all these efforts. Watch this video to see the Portuguese President trying to physically shut down and harass a pro-Palestine activist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLerm9fslsk

2025-08-25 19:48:04 UTC

"There are countless examples of Palestinian children with disabilities thriving with adequate nutrition and health care. In just one example, 6-year-old Fadi al-Zant, who has cystic fibrosis and was severely malnourished, was evacuated to the United States from Gaza last year and survived. Osman Shahin, a 16-year-old boy with cerebral palsy who had lost 7 kilograms, regained weight after his family left Gaza for Bosnia.
But Muhammed and other children in Gaza do not have that chance. Between April and mid-July alone, more than 20,000 children in Gaza were hospitalized for acute malnourishment, 3,000 of them severely. Starvation of civilians is not an accident of war, it is a deliberate policy.
Muhammad’s image should move world leaders to use all their leverage with Israel, including an arms embargo and targeted sanctions, to stop Israeli authorities’ mass starvation policy. Muhammad’s disability does not make his starvation less cruel or unlawful; it makes it all the more urgent for countries to act now."
https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/08/20/despite-efforts-to-shift-the-blame-israeli-policies-are-starving-children
#Palestine #Gaza #Israel #Starvation #HumanRights #Genocide

2025-08-25 19:45:27 UTC

"...[T]he genocide in Gaza, like the slaughter at Lidice, cannot be hidden. It stands as an undeniable, grotesque monument to the unchecked power of the state and the monstrous machinery of war. This tragedy is different from past atrocities in one disturbing respect: the suffering of Gaza’s women and children, the use of starvation as a weapon, the unrelenting bombardment, and the spectacle of mass murder are laid bare for all to see. The grotesque violence is not concealed, it is flaunted, glorified in the guttering language of demagogues and amplified by the shameful silence of the mainstream media. In addition, as a testament to the grotesque violence of gangster capitalism, entire villages are being bulldozed in the interest of appealing to private investors who can turn Gaza, in the words of President Trump, into a “riviera of the Middle East.”
The collapse of conscience is visceral; it is written in the blood staining the broken bodies of women and children, and the hands of those waging this insufferable war against a defenseless and brave people."
https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/children-gaza-crisis
#Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #HumanRights #SettlerColonialism #Israel

2025-08-25 19:40:20 UTC

"Even the very idea that we could arrive at a broadly accepted consensus on facts – regardless of their content – has grown more remote. It is down these knowledge sinkholes that the sense of ‘selfdom’ gets further elaborated, sometimes in tragic ways, through the belief that the self is the only true source of its own enlightenment.
The combination of epistemological self-centredness and hyperconnectivity makes people susceptible to diffuse forms of ‘supersense’-making (to borrow a term from Hannah Arendt). Seeking some meaningful truth, people search for significant clues scattered across the internet, using commercial algorithms and recommender systems to connect the disparate pieces of information they venture upon into some sort of coherent worldview. What may begin as a playful existential quest can easily crystallise into reality-bending beliefs that thrive on and foster new social types and politically potent associations. At its peak, QAnon exemplified the interactions between the searching disposition, digital mediations and for-profit targeting. Its members saw themselves as critical thinkers uniquely equipped to discover hidden truths and interpret byzantine clues. They ferociously denied being part of a cult, since, as one of them put it to the researcher Peter Forberg, ‘no cult tells you to think for yourself.’
One might think that the advent of LLMs will counter these tendencies. Perhaps if properly integrated with a search engine, an LLM might distil vast amounts of information into coherent responses that do not pander. It can certainly provide seemingly authoritative summaries that look like answers, though its inner workings remain essentially opaque. But it is not clear whether such systems – even if they work as advertised – can solve the problem of reliable knowledge in a balkanised public sphere."
https://aeon.co/essays/the-sovereign-individual-and-the-paradox-of-the-digital-age
#Algorithms #Authenticity #Authentication #SelfSovereignty #Individualism #SocialMedia
https://aeon.co/essays/the-sovereign-individual-and-the-paradox-of-the-digital-age

2025-08-24 22:27:56 UTC

"To the extent early critical theory seems to us to have a tragic character, this does not derive from the fact it has largely been forgotten, but from the fact it is still needed at all. For us, as for the early critical theorists themselves, the enduring validity of the critical theory of society, of its critical diagnostic of capitalist society and its social theorists, is a bitter confirmation that its dream is still unrealized. Critical Theory is only right in a wrong world.
Following recent scholarship on the origin and formation of critical theory (a period stretching from the late 1910s through the early 1940s, though we focus on the 1930s), our recovery takes its point of orientation from the intersection of two premises. First, early critical theory was—and can only be adequately understood and evaluated as—a development and extension of the Marxian critique of political economy, which inherited the impulses of dissident (and particularly councilist) communism. Second, the traditional, and still predominant, reception of early critical theory has not interpreted it as such given, on the one hand, the popular context, intellectual and political, in which it has been received since the student movements of the late 60s, 2 and, on the other, the neglect in academic scholarship of the esoteric form of writing consciously cultivated by early critical theorists. 3
This esoteric form of early critical theory is configured by three elements: tactical self-censorship, esoteric technique, and the negative method of presentation required by the dialectical conception of the critique of political economy."
https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/MarginNotes_1_1/
#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #Capitalism #Marxism #PoliticalEconomy

2025-08-24 21:34:10 UTC

Nano-banana in action: Finally I got lucky!! Even though Moedas is not being depicted in a very realistic way, I must say the illustration is very adequate to the prompt
P.S: TO HELL WITH ALL A.I HATERS. I'm a technical writer and a former technological journalist, so my job is to play with the available new technologies. If you don't like it, go elsewhere!!
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/115/085/882/648/979/482/original/a9fe9bf3cca0bc73.png