anonymous surveillance piecework, somehow worse than dystopia

And it's helping swing elections www.wired.com/story/the-da...

5 years ago, I picked up the first edition of Inclusive Design for a Digital World. I reached out to @rejinae.bsky.social to tell her how much I appreciated her book. Never imagined she would become a great friend and mentor. Also that I would be a technical reviewer on the second edition.

[recalls studies documenting AI psychosis] [heavy sigh in religion scholar and experience designer] </scene>

As of 2015, the entire city of Atlanta was projected to have a water footprint of ~327 billion gallons per year by 2050 (👇🏾) Current "AI" trends project an industry-wide water footprint of ~489 bgal/year by 2030. Yes some other stuff uses more. That's bad too. But we're talking about this right now

A new state-by-state evaluation of the projected energy and water use of "AI" data centers in the US. Looks… real bad. Like, "undoing tech sector climate gains" bad. Strongly recommends immediately ensuring any & all new "AI" data centers to run on existing & expanded renewables grids. Which… yeah.

A new report finds that local opposition to data centers skyrocketed in the second quarter of this year. www.wired.com/story/the-da...

Political consultant Bradley Tusk has spent a fortune on mobile voting efforts. Now, he’s launching a protocol to try to mainstream the technology. www.wired.com/story/bradle...

Honestly, I think GenAI art is some loser shit

I also think GenAI summaries of conversations and personal emails are fucking wack and disrespectful Either you have time to genuinely engage with what someone said or you don’t

I interviewed Paulina Borsook, who warned of tech culture's toxic underbelly over 30 years ago. She wrote a prescient and scathing book, "Cyberselfish." It tanked her career, but a new generation is discovering her work as tech fascism tries to kill democracy 👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL-k...

What a wonderful interview with the woman who described techno-fascism as it emerged, and who was pretty much cancelled for it. Thanks Paulina Borsook and @gilduran.com ↘️

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

NEW: The FTC is removing blog posts, authored by Lina Khan, including some that articulate the potential risks that commercial AI tools pose to consumers.

‘Who’s Afraid of AI?’: #UofT event asks what kind of AI future we want 💻 uoft.me/bVK

Cambridge University Library project Future Nostalgia is archiving information forgotten on floppy disks. However, legacy data storage devices like floppy disks present serious complications for archivists. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

When the state brings violence into our neighborhoods — when it throws elders to the ground, fills bodies with bullets, jails people without cause, and takes children from their homes — we must be able to bear witness, writes Dean Jackson, but Big Tech firms are silencing dissent.

Today's AWS outage, which affected a range of websites and applications—from Signal to Fortnite to key UK government services—reveals the dangers of relying on a handful of Big Tech firms, write Article 19's Corinne Cath and Don Le. These are not glitches; they are democratic failures, they say.

Anthropic partnered with the US government to create a filter meant to block Claude from helping someone build a nuke. Experts are divided on whether its a necessary protection—or a protection at all.

A degree in computer science used to promise a cozy career in tech. Now, students’ ambitions are shaped by AI, in fields that blend computing with analysis, interpretation, and data.

attn: #MedTech

This is almost exactly the logic behind such claims as "Who needs libraries when there's Google?" and "You can learn everything from YouTube." Neither are true. The difference is that both search engines and video platforms serve an actual, valuable function for society; AI slop bots do not.

And, again, maybe the immediate answer here isn't "train on more disabled users' faces!" but rather perhaps stopping and thinking "hey maybe a sociotechnical paradigm that is literally predicated on and made of unending surveillance and a demand for certain 'right kinds' of bodies is bad actually 🤔"

If all that was needed was access, schools would have been phased out by books.

This is really rough stuff. Their data was drawn from transactions processed by third-party financial institutions in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, representing 15% of ChatGPT users, and shows a decline to what looks about 3% (I assume this is month over month?). Nasty!

I would really love to hear an AI booster’s opinion on this. This is the first real proof we’ve had that OpenAI’s growth is slowing, just in time for Clammy Sammy to demand a trillion dollars. He’s a very nasty man and not even the Europeans will pay for his software!

To be clear, the top software markets in the world are US, China, Germany, the UK, France, and Italy and this data is from the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The product is also not meaningfully different functionality wise under the GDPR from what I know. This is really bad folks!

The smaller companies make money by getting the big ones to lease their services providing specific information to the bigger platforms. One company has relationships w/ smart home appliances for data, one company does only social media scraping and analysis, one does metadata from phone companies..

Report Finds Humans Waste 74 Billion Gallons Of Water Each Year Making Tea https://theonion.com/report-finds-humans-waste-74-billion-gallons-of-water-each-year-making-tea/

Amazon pulled an application for a 7.2 million sqft data center in Virginia after massive local opposition. “We’re letting or even entertaining the idea of a billion dollar corporation coming around and messing with our drinking water. I think it’s pretty humiliating,” Brittany Carroll said.

BLOOD IN THE MACHINE was given early access to survey data pulled from interviews with 1,400 Californians on their thoughts about AI. Among the findings: -59% think AI will primarily benefit corporations and the wealthy -55% are more concerned than excited -*70%* want strong AI laws

Our investigation reveals how the man who started Tea, the ‘women dating safety’ app, tried to hire a female ‘face’ for the company and then hijack her grassroots community. 🔗 www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...

New: the inside story of how Tea collected millions of women's secrets, then exposed them to the world. We've found Tea raided women safety groups to get users; paid influencers to undermine others, much more. The “motive is money, not actually to protect people.” www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...

‘Unfortunately, government data is now at risk of becoming less available or disappearing. But there are steps that researchers – and the public – can take to reduce that risk.’

The piece I shared earlier today on AI and Meta is still feeling very on the nose

The biggest trick the devil ever pulled is to call LLMs “artificial intelligence.”

"In July, five months after her death, we discovered that Sophie Rottenberg, our only child, had confided for months in a ChatGPT A.I. therapist called Harry." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/o...

Join us for the launch of @rendezvoux.bsky.social's latest series Design your Career, "Create a Career that Reflects You" with Emma Blackwell Register: lu.ma/2o2sij8a ​Whether you're exploring your next move or just want to feel more aligned in your current path, this session is for you.

I was saying this crap was going to happen! I warned people in March! AhhhhhhHHHH www.wheresyoured.at/core-incompe...

No, really! www.wheresyoured.at/core-incompe...

Going to start calling chatbots sycophancy as a service.

Microsoft is absorbing GitHub into the company and putting it under the purview of Jay Parikh, one of the biggest failsons in valley history. He ran Lacework into the ground then cashed out and went to Meta. Real piece of crap asshole www.theinformation.com/articles/how...

Join us for the launch of @rendezvoux.bsky.social's latest series Design your Career, "Create a Career that Reflects You" with Emma Blackwell Register: lu.ma/2o2sij8a ​Whether you're exploring your next move or just want to feel more aligned in your current path, this session is for you.

Reddit will block the Internet Archive

The giant spreadsheet of AI ethics & policy news has officially hit 2,000 entries! bit.ly/ai-ethics-news I have teaching plans & ideas for this so have been writing up curriculum in case it's useful for others--I know a few folks have told me they use this in their classes, can you tell me how? :)

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