Paul Versluis

32 Followers
215 Following
309 Posts
IT professional in The Netherlands
Free software enthusiast
Love to travel
Love to read
I'll ride the wave where it takes me
WriteFreelywrite.as/noonesrival
How do you feel about the impending lockdown of Android?
Good, it is necessary for our safety and security
OK, I trust Google to prioritize user interests
Bad, it is an attempt to take complete control
Terrible, this is the end of software freedom
Poll ends at .

AI holt het belastingstelsel verder uit. Inzet van de techniek verhoogt productiviteit, maar dat komt niet ten goede van lonen, en er wordt in totaal niet voldoende belasting over geheven, ziet Hans Stegeman.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/03/11/het-meest-waarschijnlijke-ai-scenario-is-niet-massaontslag-maar-stille-erosie-a4922732?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_term=20260311

Opinie | Het meest waarschijnlijke AI-scenario is niet massaontslag, maar stille erosie

Technologie: AI holt het belastingstelsel verder uit. Inzet van de techniek verhoogt productiviteit, maar dat komt niet ten goede van lonen, en er wordt in totaal niet voldoende belasting over geheven, ziet Hans Stegeman.

NRC

RE: https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/116210928508477743

🎉 ENORME OVERWINNING! Dankzij jullie protesten heeft het Europees Parlement vandaag gestemd voor het BEËINDIGEN van ongerichte massascans! 💪
Maar let op: de definitieve beslissing wordt nu genomen in de trialoog met de EU-regeringen. De strijd gaat door! ⚔️ Volledige info (in het Engels): https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/historic-chat-control-vote-in-the-eu-parliament-meps-vote-to-end-untargeted-mass-scanning-of-private-chats/

@echo_pbreyer

The notion of a broken clock being sometimes right is based on a gross misunderstanding of what information is.

A clock that always shows the same time is never right, even in the moments of the day when the time happens to be what it shows, because you don't gain any information about what time it is by looking at the clock.

This reasoning also applies to chatbots. If you can't tell whether what you have been given is useful information unless you alreay know the information, then you haven't been given useful information.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116165215922836572

Their makers also do not want you to be able to understand. It's about turning the means of understanding and sensemaking into externalized products to rent.

You didn't "vibe code" anything; you asked a computer to make a thing and it did. Did you fucking vibe brew the McDonald's coffee you bought this morning? Idiot.
I genuinely think the worst thing the internet did to reading was convince people that finishing books is a competitive sport. You don't need to read 52 books a year. You just need to read. Books you like. At your own pace. And think about them for longer than a TikTok video.

You're paying AI companies a monthly subscription fee to be fingerprinted like a parolee.

I got bored and ran uBlock across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini simultaneously.

Claude:

  • Six parallel telemetry pipelines.
  • A tracking GIF with 40 browser fingerprint data points baked into the URL, routed through a CDN proxy alias specifically to make it harder to block.
  • Intercom running a persistent WebSocket whether you use it or not.
  • Honeycomb distributed tracing on a chat UI because apparently your conversation needs the same observability stack as a payments microservice.

ChatGPT:

  • proxies telemetry through their own backend to hide the Datadog destination URL from blockers.
  • uBlock had to deploy scriptlet injection — actual JS injected into the page to intercept fetch() at the API level — because a network rule wasn't enough.
  • Also ships your usage data to Google Analytics. OpenAI. To Google. You cannot make this up.
  • Also runs a proof-of-work challenge before you're allowed to type anything.

Gemini:

  • play.google.com/log getting hammered with your full session behavior, authenticated with three SAPISIDHASH token variants, piped directly into the Google identity supergraph that correlates everything you've ever done across every Google product since 2004.
  • Also creates a Web App Activity record in your Google account timeline. Also has "ads" in one of the telemetry endpoint subdomains.

When uBlock blocks Gemini's requests, the JS exceptions bubble up and Gemini dutifully tries to POST the error details back to Google. uBlock blocks that too. The error messages contain the internal codenames for every upsell popup that failed to load.

KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MUSTARD_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MAYO_DISCOVERY_CARD.

Google named their subscription upsell popups after condiments and I found out because their error handler snitched on them.

All three of these products cost money.
One of them is also running ad infrastructure.

Touch grass. Install @ublockorigin

#infosec #privacy #selfhosted #foss #surveillance

@FediTips
I nuked all those accounts and closed registrations again. Sorry for the trouble.

@ColesStreetPothole @FediTips

Everyone has a weak day. So fight scammer scum, but don't condemn those who fall for them.