Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

A Brazilian court has blocked #Meta from implementing its new terms of service that allow for the mass scraping of websites.

The court has set a daily fine of $1m reais ($182K) for non-compliance
https://www.anj.org.br/justica-proibe-meta-de-usar-conteudo-jornalistico-sem-autorizacao-apos-acao-de-anj-abert-e-aner/

This is fucking ridiculous. My https://openbenches.org/ website is serving over two TERABYTES of bandwidth per month!
That's up from 1.5TB the previous month.

While I'd love to believe that's all people fascinated by benches, I think it's more likely to be endless crawlers.

I'm lucky to have a very generous host with no hard bandwidth limits, but I'd want to find a way to block bots without having human-facing interstitials. Looks like robots.txt isn't cutting it.

RE: https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/117562786908197139

This is worse than an PR stunt. To liken what algorithms do in a data center with what humans do in a university is just one more step in the "AI are people"-push and all the shit this contains.

“What the Next Two Years Look Like”

https://davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/what-the-next-two-years-look-like

> One lesson that I hope we take away from last night is that cash spending advantages aren’t what they used to be. Elon spent around half a billion. Crypto and AI interests spend $250 million. It was all wasted. The media environment isn’t nearly as straightforward as it used to be. An advertising blitz simply cannot sway people who aren’t watching live television anyway.

“A generative election - by Brian Merchant”

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/a-generative-election

> I am talking of course about data centers, the only entity that may have fared worse than Republicans in the midterms. Out of the 41 measures on the ballot across the country that addressed data centers, all but one resolved to halt them, induce moratoria, or ban them outright.

hello what do you mean us running bluesky social PBC are a bunch of neoreactionary transphobes no no no uh have some pronouns!!

https://bsky.app/profile/helix.midwestspeedfest.com/post/3mzjktyhn5s2d

In the run up to the US midterms, 70% of AI assistants tested sent users to Kremlin-backed propaganda sites

Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI and Google AI Overviews all cited Russian state media, Russia Today, Sputnik or the Pravda network

https://dosimeteraudit.org/research/ai-chatbots-us-midterms-2026

#misinformation

RE: https://hactivedirectory.com/@josh/117561228868084412

I often wonder what would have happened if General Grant had not personally stopped Robert E. Lee's treason trial. A Norfolk grand jury indicted Lee in June 1865. Grant stopped it.

Lee went on to run a college that raped Black schoolgirls, attacked the Freedmen's school, and tried to lynch a Black man. The Freedmen's Bureau documented it. Lee ran it.

Then every Lee statue, erected mostly in the early 1900s as "America First", symbolized this record of rape and lynching. Unveilings came with speeches like Julian Carr's at UNC in 1913, boasting of whipping a Black woman until her skirt shredded. A 2021 PNAS study proved Confederate monuments are the counties with the most lynchings.

It's clear why Lee should have hanged in 1865.

Americans should have no illusions about the history when they ask why so few Black women reached office, let alone survived. And specifically should be taught why "moving on" instead of punishing white supremacists resulted in widespread domestic terrorism.

FIRST PARAGRAPH ON THE FRONT PAGE OF TODAY'S ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION: In 1860, an enslaved man named Sheppard Peek was listed among the possessions of William Peek, a white man in Crawfordville. His value was placed at $1,400. On another surviving document, Sheppard signed his name with an X. More than a century and a half later, Sheppard’s great-great-granddaughter, Keisha Lance Bottoms, is Georgia’s governor-elect. https://www.ajc.com/politics/2026/11/keisha-lance-bottoms-crawfordville-governors-mansion/

My wife has been put in charge of devising an AI policy for her school, and I started a little project to collect AI critical material that she can feed to her colleagues. I'm making a point to include not just the direct impact on education, but also as many other aspects as I can find.

It feels somehow empowering to collate this material for her.

I could probably use a few more German-language sources.

@feld

Someone used it to describe the way generated food images used by restaurants have been made visually disturbing with stuff like oddly burned cheese on the burgers and oddly textured buns with strange patterns of sesame seeds. And then once you think of that stuff as greebling you see it as a characteristic of AI images everwhere.

You don’t have to throw trans people under the bus to win an election.

You don’t have to cater to the bigots.

You don’t need to abandon the disabled, marginalized and LGBTQ+.

It was a big night for the Dems, but they need to meet the moment.

No more centrist bs.

It’s time for progressive change

#uspol #TransRightsAreHumanRights #disability #ableism #lgbtq #inclusivity

(3) "change my mind" becomes "prove me wrong":

this is in english already!!!! this is why LLMs don't fucking work for translation--THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT LANGUAGE IS!

this exposes, quite starkly, what "translation" means to the LLM vendor--an opportunity to overwrite the original text, on the assumption that the user can't tell the difference. this is, in fact, an incredible microcosm of what the LLM vendor seeks to achieve in general

RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/117561230111500738

White House Staffers Shocked to Learn That Trump Doesn’t Listen to Anyone, Not Even Them

If you’re in D.C. and would like to spend the next two years making Donald Trump and his people miserable, Jamie Raskin is hiring.

https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/about/job-opportunities

#USPol

RE: https://mastodon.social/@carstenfranke/117559201273902159

This is a good chart that reminds us that the US House is supposed to represent PEOPLE, not LAND.

The US Senate on the other hand…

Using an area map of districts and shading it according to the winner is grossly misleading.
Huge red areas in the Midwest that have very few house seats. But you get the impression of overwhelming Republican presence in the US. The NYT gives us a terrible example.
Using a square per seat gives you a much better representation. Most of the US districts are Democrat blue. AP has a great example.

New, from me:

Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/11/want-to-rent-an-internet-address-at-the-white-house/

@alpenglow @drahardja @inarticulatequilter Yep. Etsy’s biggest investors include BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. Everything changed when they went public in 2015. This isn’t surprising if you’ve been following their trajectory over the past decade. They keep the indie handmade facade but they’re just another extractive corporation.

Ars Technica doing their best to silence people who've had enough of their uncritical coverage of SpaceX and Elon Musk. Moneyed interests have made it such a shit site.

#weAreFromTheBottomComingForThoseOnTop #destroyWhatDestroysYou