@Lana this is my workplace, every box ticked plus more, trying to force us to document processes and build AI (🤮) automations so they can layoff more people while our platform is already decaying because we can't prioritize bug fixes over not so flashy AI implementations. And this is happening at so many companies too, I'm looking at taking a pay cut just to change industries to something where this isn't happening.
"No one wants to work, our turnover is terrible!"
Ok, do you pay a living wage?
"No"
Do you give annual raises more than 7%, the annual rate of cost of living increase?
"Also no, but-"
Do you give larger raises and bonuses to execs than to your workers?
"Well yes, but-"
Did you force people to stop working from home in order to justify the cost of maintaining real estate you own?
"I mean, we-"
Do you heavily invest in AI so you can justify massive layoffs?
"Like every other co-"
Do you ask your employees to pick up the slack for the people who have left?
"We had t-"
And did you install digital tools to spy on your remaining employees?
"Look we need to ensu-"
Sounds to me like people DO want to work, you've just made it unpatatable for them to work for YOU.
If you are thinking about running your blogpost through an AI editor, don't! It almost always makes it more boring.
Whatever you have to say is what you had to say anyway. Just say that, you don't need more. And the mistakes are perfectly fine.
I spell check once, proofread once, then publish. When people point out errors, it makes me feel good, because it means people are reading what I write, and I correct it then.
I'd rather have your charming acoustic-performance words, even if you make mistakes! I love mistakes in writing. Rustic and cozy.
No war but class war.
Get 40% off Labor Titles and 20% off select merch thru 5/1 with code MAYDAY. Shop the sale here: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=50
@boogah That's... not a good solution, I'm afraid. The archive-dot sites (other than archive.org) use visitors to power DDOS attacks and have been caught altering archived materials.
The very least Eurail could is to offer us free passes.
Anyone up for a class action?
I, for one, am shocked at this finding. Shocked I say!
#LLM
Dear Customer,
we recently informed you that ... was subject to a security incident. With this message we want to update you about important recent developments.
What has happened?
We informed you that, as a result of a security incident caused by us vibecoding the shit out of our codebase, your personal data in our customer database is now your personal data in a cybercriminal database.
Following that discovery, we immediately began the work to actually secure our system and initiated an investigation what that code actually does, and it does not look good.
The investigation has shown that the following categories of your personal data are currently being abused by people we do not control:
First Name
Last Name
Date of birth
Gender
Passport Number (including country of issuance and expiration date)
Email address
Phone Number
Physical address information
Country of Residence
Our legal advisors tell us to advice you to change your password, your passport, your phone number, your email provider, your gender, your name and your country of residence.
Good luck and godspeed.
Substack promoted Andrew Tate as their #1 "bestseller" last week. Cool company. Great leadership.
So I went ahead and made a browser extension.
Kill Yr Substack intercepts every Substack link (even on custom domains) and redirects it to `archive.is`.
Substack's numbers go down. You still get to read the thing tho.
i was quite surprised to discover that no one had registered deleteduser [dot] com, and was curious to see how many emails i'd get if i registered it, assuming many orgs 'delete' logic probably just overwrote the email address with blahblah@deleteduser.com or similar.
The answer, is at least 3 different orgs in the hour that I've owned that domain and been listening for email.
And yes, all of those emails contain the actual PII of the person who has been 'deleted' :-D
Today in "not from the Onion": Palantir CEO Says Legalizing War Crimes Would Be Good for Business
https://futurism.com/future-society/palantir-ceo-war-crimes
#technoFascism #surveillance #surveillanceState #tescreal #palantir #fascism #AI #noAI #warCrime #terrorism
DDos (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against BlueSky a few days ago: The whole network goes down.
DDoS against mastodon.social today: Lots of users on that instance impacted, the rest of the Fediverse keeps on running, my instance doesn't really notice, messages will be queued up until mastodon.social is reachable again.
Both claim to be decentralised and federated. You decide :)
Help us pay off our warehouse, and get some cool merch! Every item sold gets us closer to our goal of securing the building for the future of lefty publishing.
Shop merch here: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=255
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is there already a database somewhere of job offers in "IT" (broadly speaking) that have refusing "AI" explicitly as part of the core premises? (and I mean it in the sense of @danmcquillan 's book, I am not "against math" as some fool tried to argue) asking for a friend 🙃
What's going to cause a Mass Diarrhea Event at the White House Correspondents' Dinner? https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2026/04/20
similarly, i've heard a few times that "we might cure cancer", and sure enough some brute force computation can fold proteins fast
but in practice it is more likely these tools will be used to fabricate experimental results, push dietary supplements and other snakeoil cures
and more coarsely, ai isn't pouring funding into the CDC, ai isn't reversing the destruction of the FDA, and is more than likely going to be used to justify those things
Sodium batteries are already in production & salt is ubiquitous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery
The "green energy dependence on lithium alone" is a fossil shakedown narrative that profits Trump donors.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-minerals-zelensky-putin-ukraine-russia-fossil-fuels-1235292274/
https://globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/trump-deal-353-billion-ukraine-oil-and-gas-money/
Ron Lauder
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/world/europe/trump-lauder-ukraine-lithium.html
@Niall I also have recommendations if anyone is interested!
This is only for anyone looking for recommendations. Anyone else can safely ignore the rest of this message.
• Drilled podcast (about oil companies & their vastly disproportionate impact on climate).
• Climate Town - a series of videos on climate by a comedian with a climate science & policy degree.
• at the moment I’m reading A Climate of Truth, the most recent book by Mike Berners-Lee. I recommend his earlier books too.
• the This is How it Ends series on The Press YouTube channel (I’m currently in the middle of watching these eps: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0KKuXwuIs8k).
I have other books about climate in “to read” pile, but some are a bit more than I can manage.
Can I ask for recommendations from other folks too? Some I’ll have already read/watched/listened to, but there’s bound to be good stuff I haven’t found yet.
I have been warning about the term "digital sovereignty" and how it is right-wing coded and probably can't be salvaged for non-right-wing politics.
The German fascist party AfD now created a European foundation to push their fascist politics further. The name: "Sovereignty Foundation".
Even thought tactically it might feel like it makes sense to use the term to get funding, you are integration right wing politics into your thinking and speaking.
#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