The Dartmoor Commoners’ Council might sound as if it represents humble salt-of-the-earth types. But it's the opposite. Commoning rights there have become a highly lucrative commodity. Some people have made millions in public subsidies, while trashing our national park. We're being duped.

Two thoughts about https://office.eu/ which looks like Nextcloud on European servers being offered to business as #SaaS. It is a good thing that exists for SMEs that cannot self-hosting, but this is leaning in to a model of #digitalsovereignty where the only issue is the 'nationality' of the […]

Today is the last day of the #bigplasticcount. As I was handing over passport and having a #facialrecognition scan for a financial platform this morning (allegedly to help reduce money laundering), I realised we need to do a #bigidcount and all spend a week logging every time we have to hand […]

Today is the last day of the #bigplasticcount. As I was handing over passport and having a #facialrecognition scan for a financial platform this morning (allegedly to help reduce money laundering), I realised we need to do a #bigidcount and all spend a week logging every time we have to hand […]

one would think that “do you prefer personal convenience over the use of tools produced by a company closely collaborating with a concentration camp administration” is not a hard question.

The Iran regime cuts off internet to millions. UAE bans people taking pictures or filming drone strikes. Authoritarians everywhere hate ordinary people having internet freedoms.

Yesterday I was proudly told by a senior academic now a senior researcher at #google #DeepMind that they are hiring more philosophers and ethicists. This is a BAD THING. Settingaside teh fact that these are insecure jobs since corporations may change their mind about this direction on a whim […]

Israel and the US appear to want to do to Tehran what they have done to Gaza: reduce a busy and complex society to a toxic wasteland.

Great video. Watch it!

An I the only one annoyed by "A donor has agreed to match your donation up to £xK"? Either they have decided to donate £xK or not. If they have, this is deceptive and in fact small donors are being asked to match the big donor, not vice versa. If they haven't and will only give e.g. £0.5xK if […]

Rewatching #andor, it strikes me that the significance of #nemik is that he sees that the real power of the Empire is not the visible coercion through violence and fear, but the all pervading sense that there is no alternative. That too is coercion. In our world we see a separation, but […]

#AI in 2026:

Last Saturday I was at the #marchagainstthemachines organised by #pulltheplug. It was the first march of protest against the direction of #ai development in the UK and called for true democratic control of our future through a #citizensassemblynow. A nice video has been released. If you support […]

Yesterday I learned - from the friend who took me to #golestan Palace 15 years ago - about the importance of the Battle of #karbala (680CE) in #shia Islam, how it is still celebrated every year, and how #arbaeen has been largest gathering of humanity on the planet at ~20m. The key message, so […]

We can play the headline game every time their imperialist wars start.

One conclusion from the by-election seems to be that the @thegreenparty is likely to benefit from #FPTP in the near future because their opposition is split between Reform and Labour. So it will be a real test of their commitment to democracy for them to continue emphasis on #pr as a policy […]

Great coverage from @reuters.com this morning on our days of action to #StopDirtyDataCentres, in solidarity with people across the country opposing Big Tech's hyperscale data centres being built at the expense of communities and climate. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

#stopdirtydatacentres #marchagainstthemachines #pulltheplug

14 year old Max has the right diagnosis (designed to maximise engagement), politicians have wrong solution (bans which require everyone to be policed on the internet). The problem is the business model so politicians need to regulate *that*. #socialmedia #agegating #overpolicing […]

Nothing to see here. Just the US Department of War (sic) threatening #Anthropic to allow it to use its #AI models for military purposes, including unsupervised targeting. #AIEthics #Trumpland www.bbc.com/news/article...

Irony meter aside, what I find striking about this story is: 1. She posted her "rookie error" for everyone to see (and laugh at her) ... 2. ... on Twitter not Insta or Threads or FB or anything else #meta owns ... 3. ... also posting screenshots which reveal she was using #openclaw as a bot in […]

A note on #explanation and #understanding (and a likely limitation on the possibility of LLMs providing genuine #personalisedlearning ) tl;dr - A more effective explanation is not just a reformulation of a less effective one, it involves working out what was taken to be obvious (to the […]

Oh FFS - LLMs are even enshittifying #AbeBooks. I search using an ISBN only. The book I was looking for is an 2011 English Translation of a 17th century Latin translation of Confucius. The translator is Thierry Maynard SJ. "Closest match" was: *Machine […] [Original post on dair-community.social]

If anyone is planning to #marchagainstthemachines on 28 Feb (in Kings Cross) and fancies saying Hi in person, drop me a DM. #ai #aihype #aiethics #datacentres https://pulltheplug.uk/matm-sign-up/

RE: https://gruene.social/@Gerbsen/116052492129846084 Money transfer from the German Federal Administration to Microsoft: 2023: 274.091.361,75 Euro 2024: 347.665.579,71 Euro 2025: 481.369.660,77 Euro (Source: German Parliament 21/4006 page 96 […]

"My friends, if you’re the kind of person who is better attuned, due to your introversion, to the missteps and omissions that frequently make social events unbearable, then you have a huge potential gift to offer the rest of us. You have a unique insight into how to craft an invitation and a […]

“Build community, my friends, because our lives do, in fact, depend on it.” https://thewhitepages.net/p/seven-reasons-why-hosting-a-silly

Why do I find #SSH authentication keys so difficult to implement? The closest I have found to an idiot's guide didn't work and now I have messed with so many config files I will probably have to do a fresh install to have a chance. Does anyone know of a really simple walk-through *which is not […]

At this time of year I get to read a lot of research proposals on #aisafety. Fortunately, most are grounded in reality, not some fantasy of #exitentialrisk. However, this year I have noticed that a lot of specific problems candidates identify boil down to protecting people from their own […]

"AI is built on the collective knowledge of humankind." No. Nononononono. It is not built on _knowledge_, it it built on _data_. And not everyone's experiences are available as data, many communities are included. Also: "Collective" implies some sort of collaboration and shared activity. But […]

A news item today triggered me into blogging. (Also a handy procrastination.) tl;dr - what we should worry about is not LLMs' behaviour, which is easy to explain, but the value alignment of the companies that make them. #ai #aiethics #aihype […]

A news item today triggered me into blogging. (Also a handy procrastination.) tl;dr - what we should worry about is not LLMs' behaviour, which is easy to explain, but the value alignment of the companies that make them. #ai #aiethics #aihype […]

in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with. this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US.

Please download and read the report this article links to, authored by well-known radical environmentalists (checks notes) MI5 and MI6. People have no idea of the catastrophe we're careening towards. #climatecrisis https://www.technosphere.earth/no-war-on-a-dead-planet/

This is the most dystopian thing I've seen all week, and I'm living in 2026 America so that's *saying something* https://rentahuman.ai/

Hello #fediverse! Thanks to my new DFF grant, I'm now looking to hire a PhD student to join me at AAU in Aalborg 🇩🇰 to work on "usable decentralization", i.e. on making distributed and federated cloud services accessible to the everyday user. For more details, see link below, and please don't […]

Microsoft and Google licences cost Denmark's primary schools DKK 66 million annually (approx £7,6 m) Denmark has allowed itself to become over-dependent on American technology - it's a vulnerability. All over the country, pupils come to think that IT/ digitisation = Microsoft /Google. A new […]

I'm a software developer with 40 years' professional experience, lucky enough to be considering early retirement. I love writing code and don't want to stop. I'm keen to give something back, and contribute to one or more open source projects. The questions are, to what shall I contribute, and […]

[UKPol/Economics] So the sunday times hsa announced who's paying the most tax. BBC have reported on it. Concentrating on someone I'm presuming is a celebrity. A google suggests Harry Styles has a networth something like £225m. A lot, but not enough to be a billionaire. In comparison there are […]

@tomstoneham Full disclosure: I summarized depositions for a living for a number of years, which shapes my opinion here, but I totally agree. Good summarization is like an efficient software compression algorithm: you're reducing size without eliminating the meaningful content. That requires a […]

I ought to write this up properly, but here's a tl;dr in advance: #ai does not *summarise* documents - it *shortens* them by using structural similarity to documents in its training data to guess/predict which sentences are important and which are not. If that is what you want, fine. But don't […]

If you or anyone you know is involved in current #fuckice #iceoutforgood #iceout #antifa #ClimateCrisis or other #protest they really need to read this. Everyone can learn something from it. Please boost for reach. content://org.thoughtcrime.securesms.part/part/3167

Why does anyone need a ChatBot in their weather app FFS? Turned it off but now the app (#openweather) leaves a bad taste. Any recommendations for a FOSS alternative?

FAO UK #academic peeps on here. The #Snowflake browser extension (which you should be able to install however locked down your device is) works fine over #eduroam and #janet - so do it now and make your neo-liberal management unwittingly support #Tor and anti-censorship (in the UK as well as […]

NEW: Our investigation for @thenerve_news reveals not only that Peter Thiel’s Palantir is completely enmeshed in our critical national infrastructure. It’s also the ‘cloud support’ for our nuclear weapons system 🤯 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-t...

Please spread this far and wide, as stories don't get much bigger than this. When the government blocks even the intelligence services from telling us we're heading for environmental catastrophe, you know we have a problem. A very big problem. Thank you. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/115962701645642008 Want to replace TikTok? Great. Join @loops. Otherwise, the problem will just follow you to the next platform and keep resurfacing every time that next platform reaches critical mass. Unfortunately, this problem will never get solved, because […]

The US bought TikTok in order to keep the lid over its people who were being exposed to pro-Palstinian content that contributed to their understanding the truth of what Israel is.