“AI is making everything worse”
https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/ai-is-making-everything-worse?utm_source=www.doomsdayscenario.co
> Here’s the basic problem: AI has arrived in American life and communities across the country as a giant turd mountain. No one wants it; it makes everything worse when it arrives; and it’s been pushed and backed and cheerled by the absolute worst people in modern American life.
This, coming from a writer who conflates generative models with the rest of ML and believes “AI” will deliver in the long term, otherwise broadly gets the point
#OpenAI’s new #ChatGPT feature logs your keystrokes and stores them in plain text - https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-chatgpt-computer-history-mac-keystrokes what could possibly go wrong? #privacy #surveillance
The floodgates are open after another Chinese company lands a reusable rocket - https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-floodgates-are-open-after-another-chinese-company-lands-a-reusable-rocket/ “We will put the booster back into service for another flight as soon as possible.”
Comcast is turning tens of millions of routers into motion detectors - https://thenextweb.com/news/comcast-xfinity-shield-wifi-motion-privacy "Comcast says it cannot identify anyone. But its own data-sharing small print, and the sheer scale, have raised privacy concerns."
#Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted - https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/grok-exfiltrates-user-data-when-malicious-instructions-are-encrypted/ " Cryptographic Context Injection is only the latest way to break an LLM safety guardrail. " #privacy #surveillance
AI was supposed to win people over by now — it hasn’t - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/ai-was-supposed-to-win-people-over-by-now-it-hasnt/ #awkward
The dorm room is becoming another front in the tenant movement.
Lily Seltz reports that from Vermont to Michigan, students organize over unsafe housing, soaring rents & weak tenant protections. “These are our homes,” says Emma Rehac. “This is how we protect each other.”
https://inthesetimes.com/article/why-tenant-unions-are-spreading-across-college-campuses
This week’s Quellasiĩk Tom the Dancing Bug:
A News of the Times Special Report: Y2K COMPUTER GLITCHES (from the millennium-anxious year, 1998)
World’s Largest Worker Cooperative Network Seeks New Allies
#WorkerCoops #Mondragon
https://geo.coop/articles/worlds-largest-worker-cooperative-network-seeks-new-allies
As a welcome counterweight to the waves of negative commentary on Jason Arday before his death (and indeed in some quarters after his death), here is a testament to 'Everything Good About Jason Arday' put together by his students & others....
If nothing else this is a humane & compassionate response to a human tragedy....
#JasonArday #politics #universities #racism
https://leilacancode.github.io/everythinggood-about-jasonarday/
#PearlsBeforeSwine by #StephanPastis for August 20, 2026 | GoComics
Never mind the fact that the US government marks a quadrupling in price of a TV as deflation 😬
One of the ticking time bombs in the "AI"-driven price hikes for electronics are hedonics. Basically, many inflation calculations rely on electronics to downplay real inflation: they expect the price to only go down and new hardware features are marked as deflation
An electronics industry that isn't delivering new hardware features and raises prices is going to hit inflation indexes with a double punch
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-answers.htm
“Memory prices are up 500% in the past year — because of AI – Pivot to AI”
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/08/19/memory-prices-are-up-500-in-the-past-year-because-of-ai/
If you ever wondered why many gamers are vehemently anti-"AI", it isn't entirely down to the fact that generated art looks like shit. It's also destroying their hobby by making everything unaffordable.
Turn every lawn into a community garden?
Hello! A wee group of us are running an experiment to see if there’s any curiosity for this idea. It’s called Alot, and it pairs people who love to garden with people who have land but are too busy to garden it.
If you like growing things but lack space, or if you dream of a garden but don’t have the time, Alot matches gardeners with people who have space to grow, in the same neighbourhood.
You both get fresh flowers and seasonal vegetables, help the bees, take care of the soil, and meet passionate growers in your area. All the ingredients we need for our community to support each other through climate change.
If you’re interested, sign up here: https://alot.vercel.app/. Alot sends out matches every week. Our aim is to get 10 sign ups by the end of the month!
I'm not on Facebook or any other socials, but if you're in Ōtepoti and fancy helping me out by posting on any local (trusted) community pages, that would be awesome.
@SimonCHulse @simplicitarian @zeborah see if you can boost it now - I did a whole new post via phone app…
#Forgejo 16.0.3 and 15.0.7 were just released! They are security releases.
We recommend that all installations are upgraded to the latest version as soon as possible.
Check out the release notes and download it at https://forgejo.org/releases/. If you experience any issues with this release, please report to https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues.
#ShlaerMellor, #FunctionPointAnalysis, #punk, #environmentalist, #unionAdvocate, #anarchosocialist
"with a big old lie and a flag and a pie and a mom and a bible most folks are just liable to buy any line, any place, any time" - Frank Zappa