Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Important reporting on the working conditions of the people building all those data centers. Sure, capitalism, it's exploitative, but the degree of neglect of safety standards and human rights is staggering.

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/electrocutions-mental-terror-and-withheld-wages-the-exploited-workers-building-europes-data-centres

@mcc @glyph Anti-trust enforcement created it. They were *required* to spend that money on R&D by the *government*.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jcoglan/117558987210071026

the spell this out a bit more forcefully: AI tools attempt to achieve lock-in by actively making non-users less productive when forced to engage with AI-derived artefacts

New post: How can a volunteer project keep going when your experienced volunteers are exhausted, trust is short in supply & you’re facing tremendous pressure in a situation ripe for catastrophe?

Lessons from the Ukrainian Wikipedia during the Russian invasion.

https://citizensandtech.org/2026/11/leadership-succession-in-online-communities/

One reason I despise the Chinese dictators is what they have done to Hong Kong and its people -- breaking every promise of "two systems" and running roughshod over free speech and other basic liberties. The ongoing, extended cruelty to Joshua Wong is just one example. https://hongkongfp.com/2026/11/05/truly-reflective-of-his-offence-police-welcome-10-year-prison-sentence-for-activist-joshua-wong-amid-intl-outcry/

Please: if you feel the need to suggest the use of plagiative "AI", consider not doing that. 🙏

And I mean even in jest. Even when it seems clear that it's a "clever" joke.

it adds nothing to the conversation; yawn, we all know these things exist. If we're rejecting them, then usually for a bunch of deep reasons.

So the predictable joke is simply tiresome. It's no longer funny. And, frankly, it's corrosive.

1/3

On the 3rd of November, I implemented my "Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically". Since then it has caught ~150 scrapers and cut ~75% of my traffic.

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