"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." — George Orwell

I succumbed to the temptation to continue my conversation with Gemini impersonating Sydney. Some reflections and a full transcript in this post. tl;dr - It refused to help crime but was happy to give practical advice on emotional manipulation techniques. Yuck. #ai #aiethics #aiharms […]

The EU is working on what is in essence a new Open Source strategy for Europe, and the call for evidence is now open. This is our cue to provide feedback and input to the strategy! If you are involved in the Open Source community in any way, if you benefit (or could benefit) in any way from […]

I succumbed to the temptation to continue my conversation with Gemini impersonating Sydney. Some reflections and a full transcript in this post. tl;dr - It refused to help crime but was happy to give practical advice on emotional manipulation techniques. Yuck. #ai #aiethics #aiharms […]

"LLMs learn the same way a person does, it's not plagiarism" This is a popular self-justification in the art-plagiarist community. It's frustrating to read because it's philosophically incoherent but making the philosophical argument is annoyingly difficult, particularly if your interlocutor […]

If the Palestine Action hunger strikers die - which they could do at any moment, as they are now very close to the end - it will be the government that killed them. Today’s column explains why. Please share, and write urgently to your MP. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

To all those saying "but if our government spoke out, there might be consequences", please remember that not speaking out also has consequences. The history of appeasement is not a reassuring one.

I was annoyed by a recent AI ethics paper claiming AI chatbots can 'gossip' and this is harmful in special ways. Of course they can't. tl;dr - if you don't look carefully at the context, especially the prompts, before interpreting the output of an LLM, you won't know what it is simulating (and […]

I was annoyed by a recent AI ethics paper claiming AI chatbots can 'gossip' and this is harmful in special ways. Of course they can't. tl;dr - if you don't look carefully at the context, especially the prompts, before interpreting the output of an LLM, you won't know what it is simulating (and […]

@futurebird Even unorganized groups can have central figures that connect together sets of people. There was a humorous, but technically correct, piece by Kieran Healy with an example from the time of the American Revolution. It was written to explain how governments use metadata to build org […]

OK, I'm starting early, but I want to make this *a thing* in #2026. So 🌟 for anyone one who knows what it is.

Time for #hivemind : I have been using #standardnotes for years and feel it is time to check out some alternatives to see whether I should go on paying for it. I don't mind paying, just want to make sure I am paying for the tool that works best for me (and Standard Notes feels expensive) […]

OK, I'm starting early, but I want to make this *a thing* in #2026. So 🌟 for anyone one who knows what it is.

A few years ago I read an article which said someone had submitted their tax return on Christmas Day. #challengeaccepted and today, #challengecompleted Yeah, I had to be that guy.

Today we are calling on institutions around the world to take control of their #digitalsovereignty, including their social accounts. Governments should communicate directly with their citizens on open platforms, not through the mouthpiece of a corporation […]

Have I misunderstood the #australia #socialmediaban? If it is *accounts* not *access* which is age-gated, surely platforms can just change their apps to carry on working without the user logging in to the account? They can easily reidentify users by device fingerprinting so 90% of functionality […]

Am I the only one to see the #irony here? By inviting readers to share via social media, you encourage the habit of getting news via social media, rather than directly from the source, and thus create the conditions for the spread of #misinformation […] [Original post on dair-community.social]

Today's mood #climateemergency #capitalism #fascism #aihype

There is so much that is truly terrible about this as a piece of journalism, but I am going to set that aside to focus on the latest, utterly mind-bending, move in the project of forcing AI on an unwilling world: it is like a highly infectious virus. i. e. Some sort of natural phenomenon […]

Today someone I know slightly was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and sent to a high security facility. Their crime was disrupting traffic - they and others climbed a gantry on the M25, the major orbital round London, to drop banners protesting at government inaction in climate change. If a […]

I am generally a fan of #HIGNFY but tonight's episode felt nasty and left a bad taste. Mainly because of the 'romantic poetry' question, but also a few other points where the joke was based or an assumption of racial or cultural superiority. The saving grace - literally I guess - was Richard […]

"Oops, I've deleted the Internet again." #cloudflare

I attended the #techuk #digitalethicssummit yesterday and had a few thoughts. tl;dr - for 'leaders', AI adoption has become a moral project #ai #aiethics #hegemony #growth https://listed.to/@24601/67774/digital-ethics-summit-2025-trust-risk-and-blame

I attended the #techuk #digitalethicssummit yesterday and had a few thoughts. tl;dr - for 'leaders', AI adoption has become a moral project #ai #aiethics #hegemony #growth https://listed.to/@24601/67774/digital-ethics-summit-2025-trust-risk-and-blame

https://microsoft.ai/news/towards-humanist-superintelligence/ I *wanted* to like this because I agree that the future of #ai, what will be left when the #aibubble bursts, is problem-oriented and domain-specific. BUT a manifesto for Humanist Superintelligence ought to have had some input from […]

tl;dr - the only effective digital sovereignty is digital socialism https://listed.to/@24601/67437/digital-sovereignty-or-digital-socialism

tl;dr - the only effective digital sovereignty is digital socialism https://listed.to/@24601/67437/digital-sovereignty-or-digital-socialism

There is much in this to be alarmed about if you use #whatsapp, but what shocked me most was that Nitin Gupta, VP of engineering at WhatsApp described the data scraped as "publicly available". It was name, phone number, and profile image/text. So now we know #meta regard that as *not private […]

Has anyone looked at doing large scale newsletter type distribution over signal (not admin-only groups)? I know @thecontinent does it, but I'm not sure if they're using a third party client or what.

Chatting with a friend about Cloudflare's intermittent outages today, they brought up an interesting point: How many organizations have started relying on Cloudflare to do basic security blocking and tackling stuff, like stopping SQL injection attacks at the edge? Maybe your devs were lazy at […]

RE: #cloudflare today

Maybe #cloudflare should have a fediverse account. That way people can still reach them when cloudflare is down.

I was renewing an #insurance policy this morning and they said they no longer accept @protonprivacy emails addresses because 'they are associated with fraud'. WTAF? They used my #protonmail address happily for 3 years. Where has this change come from? Is this #bigtech selling #cybersec products […]

"underlining the challenges in embedding the technology in education" It is only a *challenge* against the background belief that there is a future where genAI in education is a good thing for anyone other than the bullshitters selling the technology. Governments, universities, schools around […]

For me it's even worse, because i not only got that in the 90's, i also grew up in the 70's during the oil crisis. Speed limits were lowered to 55 mph to save gas, fuel efficiency standards were first introduced, President Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed […] [Original post on chaosfem.tw]

if you see this post, your actions are: - if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this - if you don't have a spare buck, just repost your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive

Educated minds for all Halloweeners 👻

“Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.” I think the folks who run Gemini should partner with a really powerful search engine company to get better sourcing for their AI […]

Oh FFS! The Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology has just described nuclear fission as 'renewable energy'. I can see how they could re-define 'clean' to amke it 'clean energy' (it isn't, of course, for very obvious reasons) but 'renewable'? Have I missed some scientific […]

I must admit, I have done the same in equal ignorance of this law.* And I am absolutely certain that my being a white man had absolutely nothing to do with the fact I was never fined. Nothing. At. All. *: I knew I shouldn't pour engine oil or paint or all the other pollutants I regularly see […]

Together we can understand and respond to disinformation and division - and protect our global information systems to serve people and planet. Everything you need is in one place: http://mediarevolution.org/

Hilarious side effect of the OpenAI pivot to porn plus the Swedish ban on online pornography purchases: Paying for ChatGPT in Sweden may be a criminal act soon.

Philosophers — it’s International Open Access Week. Tell us about any open access books you’ve authored or edited…

hm. i wonder what this may cause

Whenever you see someone recommend Cloudflare or something else that decrypts and re-encrypts TLS for something, esp. for something related to open social media or media storage etc., reply with this picture from the Snowden leaks

So #starmerout is strongly committed to spending huge sums developing a Digital ID. The project will go over budget and probably fail, just like previous #technosolutionist fantasies which don't address the real problem. The question is: how can we make sure this otherwise wasted £££ goes […]

Ok. They’ve pissed me off. I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards: 1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

China has "pledged to more than double today's [wind and solar] capacity of around 1,400GW to 3,600GW by 2035". The UK's total energy consumption is around 35GW and we struggle to produce that. Any government that believes the future requires energy-guzzling data centres (it doesn't, fwiw) […]