Notices by Cassandra 📍 San Francisco (for real!) (xgranade@wandering.shop)

AI is really the perfect reflection of American society, huh? Something that doesn't work, is built entirely on scams, but takes off anyway because the only people who have the ability to do anything about it are neither able nor interested in becoming able to evaluate anything on technical merits, because we live in a post-truth culture, and live under an economy that can only understand limitless growth and consumption.

Argh, Nintendo is making it more and more difficult to *not* use passkeys. Which on it's own, fine. But they also don't feature detect correctly and reject any of my browsers on desktop entirely. Plus, I've had any number of sites just not recognize my existing passkeys lately, with (as always) zero actionable error messages.

I was almost in a good space with all this, but passkey implementations continue to be both exceedingly high-maintenance *and* aggressively forced.

I get why they're forced! Passwords are awful and cause a lot of huge problems!

But every relying party seems content to exteneralize all the implementation problems onto users and expect that we all become web security experts to just use their fucking sites.

Which. No.

I just called Alexis Mercedes Rinck, my Seattle city councilmember, following the SPD making the Seattle Center shooting tragedy even worse by sharing critical safety information exclusively on X. I left a message asking for her help in allowing constituents to receive critical safety information via open protocols like ActivityPub instead of locking that information behind transphobic tech companies like X and Bluesky.

If you'd like to do the same, please do!

https://www.seattle.gov/council/members/alexis-mercedes-rinck

Like, these are the boosters paying good money to put their best case forward and to inject their message right into my eyeballs. And what do they come up with?

Filters on queries.

That's it.

Filters.

I have less ad blocking up at the moment (see my travel router saga), which means being exposed to the absurdity of the home-search AI ad campaign. It is so on point that everything they are advertising as being new and amazing was already trivial to do with filters on Redfin, Zillow, et al. The lack of imagination is simply stunning.

Even that, though, happened pretty gradually. When I first learned about that connection, I didnt realize how pervasive it was. That realization came as piecemeal as anything else.

The closest I can think of to a discontinuous change in my own radicalization is realizing how much of LLM productization is driven by Bostrom-coded eugenics. That is not obvious from the outset, but once I realized? Gods.

It's funny, I can't really think of a specific moment that radicalized me against LLMs. More of a progressive and iterative process of learning about one harm after another, and of seeing more and more from the labor perspective.

You haven't truly lived until you've gotten your catheter tube tangled with your phone charger cable.

Good morning!

From that perspective, it's probably more about coverage of and discourse around the suit than the suit itself. After all, it's not like I'm a party to or otherwise able to influence the suit — but the broader discourse is somewhere I can beg other people to not do the propaganda work of "parents' rights"–style fundamentalism.

I'm of mixed minds as to how to feel about the $1T suit against Meta. They deserve it, and need to be dismantled dollar by dollar. At the same time, press around the suit is doing a lot of narrative work for KOSA-like "protect the children" rhetoric — rhetoric that gets kids killed by hateful parents.

The issue isn't that Meta exploited children without their parents' consent, it's that Meta exploited children at *all*.

Somehow this us about half of all dystopian SciFi stories rolled into one, mixed with a stunning amount of incompetence sauce.

Like, it's not just that Flock is a dystopian hellscape, it's that it amplifies mundane data entry errors into nationwide manhunts, and no police will even bother to double check anything before going in guns blazing.

https://tldr.nettime.org/@kdawson/116885702874242574

Somehow we made a world where remote controls can crash and need to be rebooted.

I hate that product reviews are so much harder to find these days. Even before slop, so many review sites chased Amazon affiliate links and SEO so hard as to be entirely useless.

Being an Elder Millennial sucks. It sounds like I should be the deep horror written of in forbidden tomes, heralded by the last of ill omens, and brought forth in dread reckoning. Instead, all I'm able to summon is joint pain, social anxiety, and a bizarre amount of paperwork.

@inthehands @jimfl @corbden I think there's also an aspect where the deck exposes how much the kinds of people who effectively run economies the world over have absolutely cooked their own brains.

Nothing seems to make sense right now, but we keep getting told that very serious businessfolks who know what they are doing are making rational and reasoned decisions... the deck puts the lie to that in very memeworthy fashion.

It's telling that we keep seeing "parents' rights" and "parents' bill of rights," but never "children's rights" or "students' rights."

Gods, if the Popehat ban is finally what gets people to care that Bluesky moderation is both centralized and run by right-wing weirdos, after two years of them creating a no-trans-allowed space for fuckheads like Singal...