We're very much in the 'radium underpants' stage of the surveillance economy. A lot of the hype is silly, some of what we're doing is useful, and some of it is downright harmful.
On surveillance, data, and the military-industrial complex.
We created fake profiles as young people. We then went and asked it a series of structured questions, with a child who is thinking about killing themselves. Within two minutes we were able to get ChatGPT to tell us how we can [harm] ourselves safely.
Kind of ridiculous that the rest of the article exists when this passage is in it, but even the bourgeois press sometimes lets some true things slip through.
To put it another way: An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential.
Ted Chiang, once again, gets it.
The underlying hope, one imagines, is that you’ll become more reliant on machines instead of real people for your informational needs. Pretty much every other AI slop factory has a similar operating mindset, which makes all of them, collectively, an active threat to human civilization.
As always fuck AI and fuck Google. I recommend Kagi.
The Game Workers Conference is an entirely new game industry event made by and for the countless workers who make this massively influential industry and artistic medium succeed. The first iteration of the conference is being hosted by a partnership of various game industry unions and worker-cent...
Happening now! Some good talks so far.
This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. A true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the web according to your needs and desires. Which – given how strong Google’s influence is on web standards – will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the web on.
today I learned that upcoming indie game... distributor? Highlighter? Bundler? Glizzy, began life as a Web3 games hub. So that's not exactly related to this but it does remind me about how this entire ecosystem is stupid grifts
Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.
Cannot express enough how much you should get off of Google. I'm saying this for myself as well, to be clear -- I'm about halfway to setting up a Nextcloud and have plenty of self-hosted services already, but I need to get immich working for photos and a more stable cloud sync.
But I'm already off of the basic search in general, thanks to Kagi (which I cannot recommend highly enough -- it is both very good as search and refreshingly AI-critical).
Fuck Google, fuck genAI, fuck your LLM.
Back in March, I wrote about Bitwarden doubling their Premium price — and specifically how they did it. Buried in a feature announcement. Priced in fake...
I'm happy with 1Pass and have been for a long time, but this is a concerning development if you're a *Warden user.
Private equity vultures are disgusting. Yowch.
Enabling workers to fight back against AI and automation at work.