ICE hat ein 5jähriges Kind, das vom Kindergarten nach Hause kam, gekidnappt, um den Vater nach draußen zu locken und auch ihn mitzunehmen. Wenn euch sowas nicht radikalisiert, was dann?

Eine schöne, kurzweilige Reihe dazu, wie Ayn Rand, René Girard und Curtis Yarvin zu Vordenkern des digitalen Autoritarismus in den USA wurden.

More for the “why I don’t use Substack” checklist (🧵)⬇️

"In this media environment, the government doesn’t even have to produce its own propaganda; it simply needs to direct the public to someone who is already doing the job for them"

"A left future worth the name doesn’t need to promise perfection; it needs to promise more control over the conditions of life than we have now. That control will be messy, uneven, often boring." Starkes Essay, @johnalist.de! odds-and-sods.ghost.io/new/

This is precisely why I'm hosting my newsletter "Odds & Sods" on @ghost.org:

Small nit-pick but especially if your argument is about the unreliability of US tech in light of the US' (and its tech sector's) turn towards fascism publishing on motherfucking Substack, a service actively platforming and supporting literal Nazis, defeats the point.

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

Unkool Savas

"Die Militärexperten (in der Schweiz) kommen zu dem Schluss, dass ein Abfluss von Daten aus den Palantir-Systemen technisch nicht verhindert werden könne." Hmm. Das ist ja komisch. Denn die polizeilichen Palantir-Nutzer in Deutschland behaupten steif & fest das sei technisch ja gar nicht möglich. 🤔

Regret to report that there has been another good linkedin post

We have arrived at the stage of the GenAI grift where we pay to outsource pleasure. It will be quantified and reported back to us on a scale from meh to mind-blowing.

„draft documents obtained by POLITICO show officials are planning far-reaching changes to the General Data Protection Regulation to the benefit of artificial intelligence developers.“ www.politico.eu/newsletter/p...

Please take a minute to scroll through this—and share it. It's the story of our time. The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic American—And Why Europe Is Next. www.authoritarian-stack.info

The ability to convince capital markets to hand you a trillion dollars on the strength of obvious bullshit paired with the inability to get a single human to sincerely and spontaneously say they love you is some real punishment of the gods shit.

"This long-running war on knowledge and expertise has sown the ground for the narratives widely used by AI companies and the CEOs adopting it. Human labor, inquiry, creativity, and expertise is spurned in the name of “efficiency.” With AI, there is no need for human expertise"

I'm excited to share my piece in Los Angeles Review of Books @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social, which examines OpenAI's claims about ChatGPT's creative writing skills, Big Tech's weaponisation of grief and nostalgia, and the collapse of the academic humanities. lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...

Answer: no. ChatGPT has no understanding of what words mean. Collocation frequencies of words can’t bring you understanding of what those words mean, even though it might help you predict which words go together. See:

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Felt this was important to write for @slate.com to capture the experience of Wikipedia editors who were there in the room as the armed man took the stage at last weekend's Wikipedia conference. Pharos and Fuzheado showed courage & quick thinking by taking down the gunman and averting tragedy.

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

this is the telling thing about all the billionaire hysteria they would literally rather set more money on fire propping up the most uncharismatic sex pest who ever lived than they’d pay in additional taxes these are not serious people

jfc

from my lunch today; "the trouble is not so much AI making you more productive, but that it's tripling the output of the biggest f***ing idiot where you work"

Es gibt fast 500 Journalistenpreise in Deutschland. Diese Branche ist so kaputt.

media thinks we are computers spitting out data

The best way to get featured in tech media is by pretending you do not want to be mentioned by tech media.

They just invented PR.

kill it, then.

Altman claims the company didn’t anticipate people not wanting their deepfakes to say “offensive things or things that they find deeply problematic,” which sounds like a lie but is also indicative of how they recklessly release tech into the world.

Für eine besondere Folge unseren Dlf Podcast "KI verstehen" habe ich ein langes Gespräch mit @meredithmeredith.bsky.social geführt, am Rande einer UN-Konferenz in Genf. Es geht um AI-Greenwashing, um die gehypten KI-Agenten und die Chancen Europas. www.deutschlandfunk.de/ki-agenten-m...

Expertise matters. I strongly believe that one of the problems with the media has been the tendency to treat everything as just a branch of politics, and to (wrongly) assume that fundamentally politics-focused reporters can 'get across' any topic. It's not just wrong - it's enormously damaging.

Das ist ja interessant:

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. 🔗 www.404media.co/doj-deletes-...

They're openly saying they want to sacrifice LGBTQ people and the planet to appease fascists. This is not only a losing strategy, this is morally repugnant. Every single one of these people should be ashamed, but we know they won't because they are amoral sociopaths.

I feel really bad for the responsible journalists still at Business Insider (some of whose reporting I've really apprecaited) whose work will now be looked on with suspicion -- and rightly so, because now nothing from BI is trustworthy.

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

Dieser Link ist leider tot. www.axelspringeracademy.com/upskilling/u...

Elon Musk hat auf einer Großdemonstration zu Gewalt aufgerufen. Doch die Bundesregierung und viele Medien sind weiterhin auf seiner Plattform X. Was muss eigentlich noch passieren, bis sie diesem gewaltbereiten Rechtsradikalen den Rücken kehren? Ein Kommentar. netzpolitik.org/2025/komment...

"…and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel.”

You cannot understand politics in the United States in 2025 without understanding Gamergate. It is the Rosetta Stone for our current nightmare.

Die Beobachtung, dass mancher sich in der Gesellschaft von rechtsextremen wohler fühlt, weil deren Vorwürfe dem eigenen Selbstbild näher kommen, ist nicht ganz abwegig.

Storytime: Back in 2018, Telekom unveiled its smart speaker. It was pitched as the shining European alternative to Silicon Valley’s data-hungry gadgets—promising privacy standards that would make a regulator weep with joy.

As many of us people who study or work in tech tried to tell y’all, move fast & break things was always about POWER, not progress.

In der Zeit wird behauptet der Terror von rechts richtet sich nur gegen Minderheiten, während Terror von links die Mehrheit attackiert. Dazu gibt es viel zu sagen, aber das Wichtigste ist: Es stimmt ganz einfach nicht. Der Terror von rechts richtet sich selbstverständlich gegen die Mehrheit.

New on the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 newsletter: A bit of historical context for the past week's news that, gee, "AI" isn't all it's cracked up to be buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch... w/@alexhanna.bsky.social and @deccamuldowney.bsky.social

„nonchalance is everywhere. We preface our interests with self-depreciation, as if to admit that we enjoy something without irony is to hand over a weapon to be used against us.“