@GuerillaOntologist yeah, the US gov't is the 'insurer of last resort'. Big Tech are trying to make 'AI' an issue of National Security... it's all very calculated and quite evil.
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Have a look at some of this year's presenters at HOPE 26! (MANY more to come) https://www.hope.net/
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THEY WALK AMONG US.
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“Checking in on queer books this Pride month — Malinda Lo”
https://www.malindalo.com/blog/2026/6/5/checking-in-on-queer-books-this-pride-month
> So even though things are tough right now, don't forget that there are a lot of us out there who love queer books. We need to show publishers, libraries, and our communities that we're here. We can do that by continuing to read and buy queer books, and by talking about them on social media and in the real world.
A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.
Why Bernie why?? Dr. Nathalie Maréchal joins me and @alex to observe and contextualize Sen Sanders’ descent into AI Doomerism:
Apparently, this isn't because of "AI" or privacy regulations but because German courts decided that third party liability shields don't apply to "AI" summaries published by Google itself
This should not come as a surprise, I and others warned about this
I wrote this (see image) in The Intelligence Illusion back in 2023 (https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/)
"Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers"
Today I learned that there is an AI data center being built in the Indian city of Raipur, where I used to live.
Raipur is very hot (Wikipidia says the record high is 47.9C), and I'm pretty sure that doesn't take the effect of humidity into account. It wasn't always this hot, but it gets a little worse each year and that has added up.
The majority of the city's electricity is sourced from coal power plants, and for a variety of reasons its grid is not especially stable, with particularly frequent blackouts during the rainy season. That often means that there's no AC during the most humid and second-hottest time of the year.
It is dry year-round except for those few months of monsoons, when the local groundwater reserves are replenished. Despite the intensity of those storms, there have been progressively worse water shortages every year. I've done a lot of rooftop gardening there to reduce the urban heat island effect, and I've watched all but the most heat and drought-resistant plants wither and die. At times water was being brought in by tanker trucks and there just wasn't enough for both human use and the whole garden.
I find it difficult to imagine a worse place to build an AI data center, and yet here we are. They are going to burn coal to power the AI chips and cooling rigs during heat waves and water shortages that are already literally deadly to the people living there.
This is the sort of thing people are justifying when they talk about how much more productive they are thanks to their spicy corporate autocomplete. The anger that I feel is not some abstract moral high ground, but a visceral reaction to having gone outside in deadly climate conditions to spread an insufficient amount of water on my dying plants.
When they say that AI is the future, this is what that actually means.
So here's the other thing that bothers me about all this. Regardless of the eventual results, this thing they're doing is *incredibly* resource intensive. They routinely spend billions of dollars on training these models, and billions more on operating them. It's not simple to parse out what fraction of that is directly attributable to the massive scale vuln finder/fabricator. But for the sake of argument lets just pick a plausible number, and call it 50-100 million dollars.
What could we have gotten for 50-100 million dollars of sponsorship for security audits? Prior to this, the largest single investment into FOSS security I'm aware of was the 2015 audit of openssl, after the heartbleed incident. It's hard to find precise costs for that, but I found a few sources estimating 1.2 million dollars, and that is arguably the most security critical piece of software in the world.
But suddenly there's 100x more resources available to do this work, now that producing the artifact can be done with stolen labor? Now that they can externalize the cost of false positives onto the already mostly unpaid maintainers of these projects? Even if their claims are true, which we have no reason to believe and very good reason not to, it's still a travesty
My side of the jqwik anti AI logging drama: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2026/06/09/the-jqwik-anti-ai-affair/
Absolutely wild to see this and the reactions to it, we must be entering the stage where everyone pretends they never thought it would speed things up in the first place
#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