Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
Why are you yanks not fucking marching in he streets? #Obama wears a tan suit and you lose your shit, but this doesn't have you seething and demanding heads?
@HalfHeartedFanatic
Holy fucking shit, they did.
I happened to take a snap of Library of Congress's Annotated Constitution in January (for some other reason).
https://static.awadwatt.com/U.S.
Point of clarification but when Obama wore his tan suit the only people that lost "their shit" are the same motherfucker's in charge of the Country right now.
@gme And its the same MOFOs who lost their shit at that who are the ones trumpeting 2A rights and yammering on nonstop about government transparency and swamps and going back to your constitutional roots. And yet this is blatant, visible to all no-guff tyrrany right here. So those MAGA idiots SHOULD be losing their absolute shit over this. (I mean, we know why - captured media etc.)
I really really am starting to get concerned for you guys (I love most of you, you're all mostly really nice)
@gme There isn't a direct line between #MikeJohnson's office and the #whitehouse, cmon. Anyways, #congress is more approachable to the everyman. If I were american I would be ringing my congressperson's office non-stop over shit like this.
I just got done talking to both of my Senators' offices and my Representative's office and alerting them about this.
One of my Senator's their aide was very alarmed and concerned about this and when I spoke with my Rep their office said I was the 2nd person to call them about this.
So.....
People are noticing and making their (our) voices heard at least.
The reality is any changes made to congress.gov are mostly symbolic. The version of the Constitution published there -- even by the Library of Congress -- isn't the official Constitution. That's still a paper document and that's held at The National Archives.
But it doesn't look good that's for sure, and is symbolic of this regime's continued gas lighting of the American public.
When we (the US) gets out of this quagmire (and we will eventually get out of it) I think of the biggest changes to come will be such a huge scaling back in the powers of the Executive Branch. That branch of Government is going to be neutered to prevent all this mess from happening again.
Interesting thing is the Library of Congress isn't controlled by The White House. It's literally controlled by Congress. The White House doesn't have the power to change anything in the Library of Congress. This means somebody in Congress did this.
🚫 Top 7 Worst Spring Water Brands in the U.S. — Are YOU drinking these? 🚫Some spring waters are anything but pure… Watch now to see which brands to avoid t...
"Ever notice has George Steven’s who was supposed to be documenting the war is in almost every video you see. Driving through Berlin, filming German war planes, etc. this guy made a movie of himself for the most part. US Marine Corps cameraman were busy laying on their belly’s filming the Marines fighting & occasionally you will see their feet."
Welcome to Timeline - the home of world history. Every week we'll be bringing you one-off documentaries and series from the world's top broadcasters, including the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery and PBS.
A revived EU proposal backed by 19 member states could force apps like WhatsApp and Signal to scan encrypted messages, raising alarm over privacy and surveillance.
“GROK, summarize this way too long shitpost, point out any grammatical errors, lack of punctuation etc. Then judge the statements made against common logical fallacies and see if they are consistent with everything else this person has ever said.
Organize this into a witty response that will fit inside the character limits and make this person believe I have read and care about their opinion.”
@Max_Imum ah, see this is for those who aren’t worth responding to.
Copy paste, wait 15 seconds, copy paste…
Watch the text walls pour in.
It’s like therapy, I’m helping this person work through whatever issue they have by getting it out of their system and it takes basically no effort from me.
Plus if they are arguing with grok via my relay they aren’t off causing more harm and mayhem somewhere else.
Hey 👋 occasional reminder that I have an author page that has all my work and also has links where you can order signed personalized copies of my books from my local bookseller and there is even a photograph of my head. www.armoxon.com
Brooke....Wednesday Vibes..⛳️🏌♂️#golf@GolfGems13 Welcome back to 'Golf Gems,' the channel where we uncover and spotlight the brightest talents and hidden t...
On the latest ‘Sanchez Effect’ Danny Haiphong delves into how U.S. policies have nudged China into a corner, making it ready to respond with whatever it takes. But before resorting to missiles and tan...
#Roku is the same Company that #bricked everyone's devices until they agreed to Roku's #ForcedArbitration because they had a #DataBreach and didn't want anybody to sue them over it.
Roku is so beyond dead to me. I used to have a Roku device in every single room of my house. Not any more. I wouldn't trust that Company to spell my name right. Shady company run by even more shady executives.
Roku has launched Howdy, a new ad-free streaming service that costs $2.99 a month. The streaming platform says it offers 10,000 hours of content from Lionsgate, Warner Bros.
Japon : Il y a 80 ans, jour pour jour, les États-Unis, sur ordre du Président Harry Truman, larguaient une bombe atomique sur la ville d'Hiroshima. Bilan : entre 90 000 et 140 000 morts. Ce fut un génocide. Depuis le Sionistan a largué sur Gaza l'équivalent de 10 Hiroshima
**Quand nous avons tort, nous l’avouons à nous- même. Nous le confessons aussi à d’autres s’ils savent nous prendre avec toute la douceur et la diplomatie voulues, et nous nous flattons même de notre franchise et de notre courage. Mais il n’en est pas ainsi quand on essaie de nous faire admettre cette vérité désagréable. **
Remembering Joaquin: AI Brings Voice to Gun Violence VictimsJoaquin Oliver was killed in the Parkland school shooting in Florida in 2018. Today, on what woul...
Perched at the foot of Tatipu Hill on Lhasa's northern outskirts, Sera Monastery - meaning "Wild Rose" - traces back to the once-vast carpets of wild roses
ich glaube, der hauptdenkfehler beim nachdenken über generative ki, bei den nerds meiner generation, ist zu glauben, dass die systeme noch "besser" werden.
"jaaahaa, jetzt ist das noch buggy as hell, aber in ein paar jahren …"
wir haben diesen approach an unserer erfahrung mit software eingeübt und da hat das meist hingehauen.
aber ki ist anders: die unzuverlässigkeit ist nicht eine noch zu lösende unperfektion, sondern immanent systemische eigenschaft der modelle. das wird nicht besser.
wenn man sich die diskurse über ki so anguckt, gibt es da durchaus ein bewusstsein über die unzuverlässigkeit, aber die bedenken werden dann mit jeder neuen nächsten generation von irgendnem tool aus dem bewusstsein gefegt, das zwar immer noch nichts zuverlässig kann, aber ey, guck mal, jetzt auch mit ton!
Das ist kein Problem, denn die Blabla-Maschinen halluzinieren wie wir. Und sind wesentlich eloquenter als viele Politiker. Und weil sie eine direkte Konkurrenz für Labertaschen sind, sehen Labertaschen darin auch ein großes Potential oder eine große Gefahr. Aber wo wird überall herumgelabert? Genau! In allen Instanzen der Entscheidungsfindung. D.h. es ist keine Gefahr für die Wissenschaft, sondern fürs Management und die Politik.
Interessant! Ich denke, dass das bei manchen Anwendungsfällen eine Rolle spielt, bei anderen gar nicht. Kreative Anwendungen müssen nicht faktisch-zuverlässig sein zum Beispiel. Und wenn Modelle Tools in die Hand bekommen, die ihre Ausgaben überprüfen können, ist das wiederrum eine mögliche Lösung für das von dir beschriebene Problem.
ich weiß nicht mehr genau, wo ich das Bild gesehen habe, aber das erklärt glaube ich ganz gut, wie sich generative AI in den letzten Jahren entwickelt hat. Die ersten Schritte waren krass und jetzt ändern sich noch Details.
Je le redis : le peuple d'Israël est un peuple en exil. Les 12 tribus ont été dispersées. Les pseudos Israélites qui habitent un État appelé "Israël" ne sont que des usurpateurs. La preuve en est que cet État ne repose absolument sur les commandements divins.
FYI if you have a #Synology (or #Qnap or #FreeNAS, whatever) installing #Tailscale on your #NAS is much more safer (and private) than relying on any remote-access solution that your NAS vendor provides (Synology QuickConnect, myQNAPcloud, etc.)
Trump said he wanted the country's help in clearing out the thugs. I just hope we don't have to take defensive measures. Sometimes I have to laugh because I still can't believe that Civil War was in my retirement package.
Ditto, but then, the trash pile was growing ever higher from the first time I was old enough to recognize it, so it was inevitable that there would be a fallout eventually.
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller *Red Team Blues* and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:
I don't think AI can do your job (but I *do* think an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that *can't* do your job). However, there is a class of workers whose jobs can be performed *perfectly* by AI: workers with bullshit jobs:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
* In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-the… (h/t Naked Capitalism)
If you oppose the state of Israel, this post is not for you. Let me repeat: This post is not for you. Many of my readers here, Jews and non-Jews, are already clear about the wrongness of what Israel is doing in Gaza.
New proposals to make online copyright infringement punishable by ten years in jail risk punishing users who share links and files online more harshly than ordinary, physical theft.
My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
My next nonfiction book is "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 7:
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
The Booksmith is so excited to be welcoming Cory Doctorow back to San Francisco for the release of Enshittification at Public Works. More to come, but grab a ticket and join us!About the bookEnshittification: its not just youthe internet sucks now.
The Booksmith is so excited to be welcoming Cory Doctorow back to San Francisco for the release of Enshittification at Public Works. More to come, but grab a ticket and join us!About the bookEnshittification: its not just youthe internet sucks now.
Co-op Congress brings together those working to build a fairer economy to share ideas, get inspiration and take action. See the full programme of Day One at ...
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🔭". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
--
You can also get a fulltext RSS feed, licensed CC BY 4.0:
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly …
Co-op Congress brings together those working to build a fairer economy to share ideas, get inspiration and take action. See the full programme of Day One at ...
this is such a good point, if all customer service reps do is recite phrases from their guidelines, then sure AI can and will replace them. Not like these people were given any agency in the first place!
@pheonix One of the more annoying trends in customer service is the last couple of times I've ordered something and had it arrive broken or with a part missing, they just immediately sent me a whole new one.
Even though the broken part was small and easily repairable if they had someone who actually knew the product on the other end of the line instead and I neither have space for a second one nor a desire to throw out something so repairable.
@rrb I'm always fairly curious about who is included in that "university administrators" label, because there are loads of essential, professional workers on university campuses who never see the the inside of a classroom
@paneerakbari @rrb In french universities, a lot of administrative tasks are done by teachers or researchers. It does not seems to be a very good situation as they have not been trained for this.
@rrb Given how much my last CEO and CPO used GPT clients, I project that their average work day was 3 hours long each. They spend most of their time on outside projects anyway - basically working on their personal brand.
@Jeanniewarner @rrb Yeah, have you ever read those interviews with CEO's that beg the question, 'what does your day consist of?' It's always like, "I get up at 7:00, hit the gym, have a light breakfast, then I get a few calls out of the way. After walking the dogs and a few laps in the pool, I head to work on my eBike at 11:00." It's like they have this rock star rider tour contract. "Coffee & Bagel truck on Wednesday's must park next to the tennis courts."
I was recently lectured by a software development manager that I should attend the 'daily standup'. When I asked why they thought that was the case, they live-chatGPTed the answer. Honestly, I preferred it when managers stuck to misquoting the Scrum Guide. Definitely a prime candidate for replacement by AI.
Wow, Major Russia announcement from Julian Assange News
The storm has arrived. Putin has demanded the extradition of Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci for crimes against humanity—and he's not bluffing. Russia now holds irrefutable intelligence proving COVID-19 was engineered as a weapon, not a mistake. The world is at a crossroads: hand over the monsters who unleashed death and control, or watch the whole house of cards collapse.
except that it's NOT a bioengineered weapon, and evidence for such has NOT been provided. It's a perfect move calculated to fool people like you, one that requires no factual basis.
The 'monsters' who unleashed covid was NOT fauci and bill gates
but meat eaters, not unlike the many who eat from factory farms in the US.
and it's not from assange, either, but a random anon fan account
and then they'll all talk about some other bullshit after that
the fact is world leaders are pretty cozy right now, they just have to maintain the illusion of tension and people will think things are happening or whatever, when the only thing that is happening is everyone everywhere is being squeezed dry
I know this is very childish of me, as “Gesundheitsminister” is a perfectly ordinary, respectful German word ... but to my Anglophone ear it just sounds like an evil troll from a Brothers Grimm tale who kidnaps children and makes them sneeze non-stop until they drop dead.
Der als Impfskeptiker bekannte US-Gesundheitsminister Kennedy will eine halbe Milliarde Dollar an Bundesmitteln für die Entwicklung neuer mRNA-Impfstoffe streichen. Letztere hatten entschieden dazu beigetragen, die Covid-19-Pandemie zu bekämpfen.
I don't think AI can do your job (but I *do* think an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that *can't* do your job). However, there is a class of workers whose jobs can be performed *perfectly* by AI: workers with bullshit jobs:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
David Graeber (RIP) identified several kinds of bullshit jobs and not all of those can be perfectly performed by an AI (for example, the flunkies that minor corporate princelings surround themselves with to demonstrate their status *need* to be human).
But there are whole categories of job that perform functions that corporations don't want performed, like customer service rep, jobs they've spent decades degrading to the point where the people who do them have been stripped of all power and authority and serve no function except allowing a company to claim that they *have* a customer service department.
Replacing these workers with an AI not only saves money by removing their wage-bill from the corporate overhead, but it can actually turn the former cost center into a *profit* center. That's what Air Canada discovered when they replaced their customer service workers with chatbots.
These chatbots gave bad advice to fliers that cost them money, and in every instance except one (where the aggrieved flier was so tenacious that he chased 8 weeks' worth of internal appeals at Air Canada before escalating the matter to a regulator), Air Canada got to keep the money:
All of this raises an obvious question: how can Air Canada (and other firms) get away with having customer service reps who are so useless they can be swapped for defective chatbots?
The answer lies in enshittification. While most people who encounter the idea of enshittification glom onto the symptoms it describes, a three-stage process by which platforms shuttle value from users to business customers to themselves, the crux of enshittification is *why* this decay takes place.
The answer is *power*: firms that enshittify must first overpower the forces that keep their enshittificatory impulses in check, like competition and regulation (these are two sides of the same coin: getting rid of competition paves the way for regulatory capture).
Over decades, Air Canada has merged with the majority of its competitors and has become so structurally important to Canada - a big, geographically dispersed country with many fly-in settlements - that regulators can't really threaten it with meaningful penalties, not without threatening Canada itself. They're too big to fail, thus too big too jail, thus too big to care.
That's how Air Canada was able to turn its customer service into such a joke that it just didn't matter, and so it didn't matter if it replaced those purely ornamental customer service reps with chatbots.
The rise and rise of overseas call-center outsourcing paved the way for AI replacement in the same way that Walmart paved the way for Amazon. Once Walmart destroyed your town center and vaporized all the businesses that served your community, why *wouldn't* you shop on Amazon?
Likewise: once companies replaced their customer service department with immiserated overseas call-center workers who were required to recite rote responses from a three-ring binder and were given no agency or capacity to solve your problem, why not replace them with AIs?
Monopolistic firms are full of people who they don't value because they do jobs the company doesn't value (e.g. moderators on large social media services).
This week, I'm at Skyboat Media studios, recording the audiobook for the *Enshittification* book, and so I got to talking with Gabrielle De Cuir and Stefan Rudnicki, the owners. They talked about the threat they're facing from AI audiobook "narrators," who replace directors, actors and editors with a single piece of software.
There's a whole class of audiobooks where AI can be a perfect substitute - thanks to Audible, and its enshittification. Audible has waged war on unionized voice actors, replacing them with desperate newbies who will tolerate terrible working conditions, including a practice called "punch and roll" that makes actors responsible for doing their own editing when they misspeak, rather than re-recording a passage for an editor to fix later ("pickups").
There are plenty of Audible books that are recorded without a director or an editor or a proofer, meaning that inexperienced actor's mistakes and mispronunciations survive into the final product. These books, produced by the monopolist audiobook platform, with a 90%+ market share for popular fiction, are already degraded to the point of being not fit for purpose. Replacing the actors with AI barely makes a difference.
AI text-to-speech is a giant improvement on existing TTS tools, and there are plenty of people who stand to benefit from this, for example, people with visual impairments. But there's no business model in selling readaloud bots to blind people - certainly not a model that recoups the hundreds of billions that has been sprayed around for AI training and operation.
The AI business model relies on obliterating the wage bill of workers and replacing it with a cheaper software license. Unfortunately (for the fortunes of AI investors) the majority of workers whose wages can be readily swapped for a software license are the lowest-paid, most precarious ones, people whose jobs have already been degraded and enshittified to the point where no one will notice the difference if they are replaced with a chatbot.
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller *Red Team Blues* and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:
The set is now complete. Order your copies today! https://dutchsheets.mybigcommerce.com/Learn more about Give Him Fifteen here:Website: https://www.givehim15...
I was out in the backyard, and I was overcome with joy when I felt the rain coming down, rain that hasn't fallen in months, and then I realized it was just my pee bouncing off the ground and back onto my feet. Sad.
I've just been delivered an envolope containing a packing slip but not the book itself... Is this the fault of * The Seller (Blackwells) * Whistl (who Blackwells use to deliver) * Evri (who deliver for Whistl)
THE IMMORTAL SURVIVOR: WEST AFRICAN LUNGFISH The West African lungfish isn’t just a fish—it’s a biological marvel of endurance. Survives up to 3 YEARS without food or water When rivers dry up, it burrows into mud Forms a protective mucus cocoon around its body Uses its lungs to breathe air, patiently waiting for rain This ancient fish can pause life itself until conditions return. It's one of nature’s most extreme survivalists, defying drought, time, and hunger. A living fossil with a survival strategy millions of years old. source: fb + education.nationalgeographic.o…
Meet the African lungfish, a prehistoric fish that travels through water and mud, and across land. Discover the unique adaptations that make survival possible for this fish.
@Mamako varish users do usually mark posts sensitive but they have emojis and profile pics that can't be marked sensitive. I've requested @Wiz to mark detroitcity.com as sensitive cuz that's the epitomy of depravity without censorship.
my question with the above post wasn't about that though, rather i was asking if there's a fediverse client that lets you hide sensitive posts (that are actually marked sensitive) from your feed, so they don't clog it up.
example of how it looks like on a browser. 3 whole posts in a row are sensitive but muted so they don't take up too much space.
@Mamako thinking on it, marking as NSFW doesn't really hurt anyone since I sure as shit don't browse with the NSFW filter on, and if you do, you definitely don't want their media. So I was gonna ignore it, but on 2nd thought it makes sense.
06/08/2025, Τετάρτη στις 21:30, στο παρκάκι της κατάληψης Βύρωνος 3 Προβολή του ντοκιμαντέρ “Δεν φοβόμαστε τα ερείπια” anarxikoikavalas.squat.gr/archives/8670 #freecinema #kavalacity #SummerCinema #καταλήψεις #αυτοοργάνωση
BP was excellent and the doc thinks it's just the after effects of the Mexican food that I had on Fri. Body isn't used to it, so it messed everything up.
#EA has confirmed that #Battlefield 6 will be completely unplayable on #Linux systems, including #SteamDeck, due to its new kernel-level anti-cheat system, “EA Javelin,” which explicitly blocks Linux. This move is a slap in the face to the growing #Linuxgaming community, especially considering how far compatibility has come with #Proton and #SteamOS.
Worse yet, EA is using open-source tech like the #GodotEngine in parts of the game, while denying access to the very platforms that champion #opensource. It’s hypocritical and #anticonsumer.
George E. 🇺🇸♥🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
in reply to Third spruce tree on the left • • •Third spruce tree on the left
in reply to George E. 🇺🇸♥🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ • • •@gme And its the same MOFOs who lost their shit at that who are the ones trumpeting 2A rights and yammering on nonstop about government transparency and swamps and going back to your constitutional roots. And yet this is blatant, visible to all no-guff tyrrany right here. So those MAGA idiots SHOULD be losing their absolute shit over this. (I mean, we know why - captured media etc.)
I really really am starting to get concerned for you guys (I love most of you, you're all mostly really nice)
George E. 🇺🇸♥🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
in reply to Third spruce tree on the left • • •Third spruce tree on the left
in reply to George E. 🇺🇸♥🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ • • •Anyways, #congress is more approachable to the everyman. If I were american I would be ringing my congressperson's office non-stop over shit like this.
George E. 🇺🇸♥🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
in reply to Third spruce tree on the left • • •I just got done talking to both of my Senators' offices and my Representative's office and alerting them about this.
One of my Senator's their aide was very alarmed and concerned about this and when I spoke with my Rep their office said I was the 2nd person to call them about this.
So.....
People are noticing and making their (our) voices heard at least.
Thanks for getting the word out about this!
Third spruce tree on the left
in reply to George E. 🇺🇸♥🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ • • •@gme
NP - concerned upstairs neighbours =D
Its really very sneaky shit what <whoever THEY are who did this> are doing, but the intent is crystal clear:
George E. 🇺🇸♥🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
in reply to Third spruce tree on the left • • •The reality is any changes made to congress.gov are mostly symbolic. The version of the Constitution published there -- even by the Library of Congress -- isn't the official Constitution. That's still a paper document and that's held at The National Archives.
But it doesn't look good that's for sure, and is symbolic of this regime's continued gas lighting of the American public.
When we (the US) gets out of this quagmire (and we will eventually get out of it) I think of the biggest changes to come will be such a huge scaling back in the powers of the Executive Branch. That branch of Government is going to be neutered to prevent all this mess from happening again.
George E. 🇺🇸♥🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
in reply to Third spruce tree on the left • • •