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RSS fan, I’m here to learn, share and connect. My main interests are: #Books, #Culture, #Climate and #ClimateChange, #Cycling and #Politics. Often found tweaking my privacy settings, because I am not confortable posting publicly anymore and I don’t always know what I am doing. I have de-meta, de-google, de-microsoft. Want to de-amazon (still have a kindle) and de-apple.

Posting mainly in 🇬🇧 and 🇫🇷, sometimes in 🇮🇹 and 🇩🇪. I live in 🇨🇭.

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This is insane...

EU officials had started using encrypted and auto-deleting messaging services in the wake of Washington’s hostile attitude towards the bloc’s digital enforcement.

The US House Judiciary Committee sent letters to ten US tech companies, including Apple, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon, in which the body led by MAGA lawmaker Jim Jordan demanded to see communications between the tech giants and so-called “foreign censors” – including information sent via private messaging channels?!

By Anupriya Datta

https://www.euractiv.com/news/eu-urges-us-tech-firms-to-follow-rules-on-handling-staff-data/

@karmaburrito @pluralistic
But the biggest enshittification of the Internet by far is Government backed: age verification.
Apparently, the biggest sponsor of lobbying for this is… (can’t you guess?) Meta. It’s nothing to do with protecting children, and everything to do with collecting more data about us all.
Let’s regulate the TechBros’ algorithms, not us poor users. Treat the disease, not the symptom.

Hey guys I wrote this short story twelve years ago, but oops it came true. It's a dark look at the AI lifestyle, and it hits so many notes.

I would very much appreciate any boosting you might think warranted.

https://medium.com/message/agency-3d37adfc69a3

Agency

This all started because of two things, I am an engineer, and I wasn’t coping well with my father’s death. He had died about seven years before, but his death kept intruding on my life. I had so …

Medium
Un truc qu'il faut bien comprendre c'est qu'aucun contenu web n'est à l'abri.
La situation aujourd'hui c'est que tout ce que vous mettez en ligne en accès ouvert va être absorbé et digéré en permanence par des bots soit pour être vendu à des entreprises soit pour entraîner des modèles.
Tous vos précieux contenus personnels sont devenus du MINERAI.
De l'herbe pour les vaches artificielles.
Donc l'accessibilité de ces contenus pour de vrais humains qui veulent juste les lire c'est SECONDAIRE.

Loved (subscribers only):

"It's part of that "spreadsheet way of knowledge," the software way of living, that has bent our lives towards computation: every action is quantified, datafied, analyzed, and now -- thanks "AI" -- promised to be automated and optimized. Our days are divided up into the time slots that Google Calendar decrees; our curiosity, our aspirations molded by Facebook's algorithms; our thoughts and words flattened by OpenAI's pattern-matching system."

https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/false-spring

False Spring

Ed-Tech Criticism. AI Refusal.

Second Breakfast
Conservatives built an economy that requires two incomes to do what one did and then blamed women for going to work

Any journalists want to write an article about all the environmental costs of the more than 10,000 Starlinks that are now in orbit? All I'm seeing are breathless articles mindlessly worshiping That Awful Billionaire for crossing the 10,000 satellite mark.

Every single one of those will come down in an uncontrolled reentry. That's a lot of metal in the atmosphere, and a lot of dice-rolling to see if any more pieces will make it to the ground.

SpaceX is truly awful.

@aethernaut Example:

To start a car, you used to put a key in a keyhole and turn it. Which worked with all cars.

These days the key just has to be somewhere near the car, *with* a not-flat battery. OK, so that bit's easy to understand.

Then, somewhere, different in each car, there's a button or switch or something you have to flip or push or slide to start the engine. This button isn't always obvious, particularly in the dark, and even more particularly when it's hidden behind the steering wheel spoke.

And when you've found the button, of course it doesn't start the engine. Not until you've (a) got the car in the right gear, and (b) got the right set of pedals depressed, and (c) maybe done something with the handbrake, and (d) maybe done up the seat belt, and (e) maybe made sure all the doors are properly shut, and, for all I know (f) do something on an app.

Now ... these modern cars have a screen, right? Right in front of the driver? Which could actually *tell* you want you have to do to start the engine, yes?

And does this happen? In some cars yes, actually, jolly good; in some cars no; and in other cars the message telling you how to start the engine appears for a couple of seconds and is then replaced by an advertisement before you've noticed the message is there.

I claim that it wasn't my fault that I had to ask someone how to start a car for the first time yesterday, regardless of my age.

Why is it old folks’ fault they struggle with technology? Why isn’t it on the tech companies to make this stuff usable for everyone?
That intolerance of complexity feeds into why we're where we are now, I think.