People before property.
I do vulnerability research for work. I don't post about work. I don't post very much at all.
into music, synths, speculative fantasy, anime, manga, urbanism...etc.
| pronouns | he/him/they |
| radio station | kexp.org |
| chronic illness count | 3, including t1d |
🧵THREAD: Why Are AI-Generated Black Women Selling War?
There’s a new kind of military propaganda happening—and it has a face.
Not a general. Not a flag.
A Black woman.
Digitally generated. Dressed in fatigues. Smiling, jubilant as she praises a U.S. airstrike against Iran.
Let’s talk about why that’s not progress. 👇🏾
In the linked essay, I mention Nancy Mace's standard TERF question, asked most recently to Tim Walz: "What is a woman?"
My answer is simple. A woman is not a *what.* A woman is a *who.*
I want to expand a bit from the essay on why I think this matters.
When we throw up our hands and say none of it matters, we're doing the fascists’ work for them. They don't need to hide their corruption if they can convince us it's pointless to look. They don't need to silence truth-tellers if we've already decided truth is meaningless.
When we throw up our hands and say none of it matters, we're doing the fascists’ work for them. They don't need to hide their corruption if they can convince us it's pointless to look. They don't need to silence truth-tellers if we've already decided truth is meaningless.
Meta is under investigation for a privacy violation called "localhost tracking." This process allowed Meta to link users' real identities to their web browsing activity, even if they used VPNs, incognito mode, and deleted cookies.
The process involves the Facebook or Instagram app listening for incoming traffic on local network ports and exchanging information with Meta's tracking scripts in users' web browsers.
https://www.zeropartydata.es/p/localhost-tracking-explained-it-could
My takeaway: Satellite launches are undoing the recovery of the ozone layer that should be happening now that CFCs are banned. And this study doesn't even take into account metal deposition from reentries, which might be even worse!
When I teach climate change in my astro classes, I always give the recovery of the ozone layer as an example of how countries can work together to fix a giant problem (Montreal Protocol). I guess satellite companies are now destroying that too.
These pieces are much harsher than Fred’s, much more in the LLM-bashing camp, but feel relevant here:
https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
Fred’s point is that a bad interaction model creates hidden work, then humans do that work and “the machine claims the praise.” These other two pieces make the point that this phenomenon of giving the machine credit for unrecognized human work is age-old, taps into some deep trapdoors in human cognition.
10/
Diligence Jones
Davey 
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
Bob
Kevin Neely 
Cory Doctorow
Molly White
Yogthos
Prof. Sam Lawler
Paul Cantrell