Notices by Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 (kimsj@mastodon.social)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@AnnaAnthro/117119590004530456

Just in case you thought any company’s claims to keep your data confidential were worth anything…

@fesshole
Salad cream is an invention of the Devil.

@fesshole
A tugboat captain once told me that when he was first promoted he worried about the new responsibilities his role would entail, so he asked the retiring skipper how to deal with them.
The old hand's advice... if it answer isn't obvious. answer questions he's asked alternately 'yes' and 'no':
"Carrots are cheap, shall I buy a sack?" -- Yes.
"Should I grease the anchor windlass?" -- Not today.
...Etc.
I guess it works for politics too!

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116770225862369013

Choose between AI and climate goals? Thanks, data centre lobby, for making the choice clear!

I choose keeping the planet habitable. 👍

Louis Rossmann doing a total fisk of the bullshit ‘results’ of the UK Government’s survey on age verification. As he points out, many of the questions did not offer a ‘I don’t want any age verification’ option in the answers.
#AgeVerification #UKPolitics

https://youtu.be/ICwMUfQg7mc

I was phoned up today by an AI agent to confirm my appointment with tradespeople next week.

That’s a function that could easily have been done with a text or an email, instead of burning the environment and interrupting what I was doing too. I’m not impressed!

@crystallinefire @glyph @rmi
I'm not an LLM user, but from what I can see, it offers those who do use them a feeling of immense power and productivity. That definitely has parallels with the highs produced by some illicit substances: "Using this, I feel like I can do anything".

The trail of destruction is similar too.

#AI #LLMs #Addiction

It's weird. We have a system for refusing even tourist visas to individuals, but apparently no equivalent system to prevent undesirable companies from settling here permanently.

#Palantir

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mikeolson/116608082952011802

Was Google’s “Don’t be evil” always just a scam to get us to trust it? It’s hard not to reach that conclusion.

@Infoseepage
Much to agree with, but at least the Overton window is finally starting to move.

@Infoseepage @dbattistella
On the other hand, small steps are better than no steps, and this one will be politically almost impossible to reverse, so we can hope for more in future.

@aral
indeed. I wasn’t intending to minimise or ignore the wider effects of Israel’s bellicosity, but it has leveraged Eurovision as a propaganda win, and it’s important to counter that.

@pellechristensen @aral
Israel has ruined #Eurovision for all the rest of us.

let's stop UK being part of Trump's war...
Please sign, and publicise.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/762994
#UKPolitics

@adrianww @simon_brooke @bob @aral
At the start of any project it is impossible to know what you don’t know. That’s why Waterfall always fails.

@aral
Cool! You’d find my name in the hidden part of the ROM, if you looked. 😇

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#History

@aral @nileane
I’m definitely installing this next time I sit down at my desktop. 👍

RE: https://mas.to/@therightarticle/116300144161152058

If ever there was proof of the damage done by neoliberalism, this is it! The second wave (which killed 87,000 people in UK) was driven almost entirely by Sunak’s “eat out to help out”, and Johnson’s defying the experts to ‘save Christmas’.
It is extraordinary that you can kill tens of thousands of people with your obsession with the economy, and yet face absolutely no consequences.
Mind you, that’s nothing compared to the death toll that climate inaction will produce.

@aral
Personally I would love to see Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders, with its security guaranteed by international forces, and severe economic sanctions applied if it ever tried expansionism again. #NotGoingToHappen

@karmaburrito @pluralistic
But the biggest enshittification of the Internet by far is Government backed: age verification.
Apparently, the biggest sponsor of lobbying for this is… (can’t you guess?) Meta. It’s nothing to do with protecting children, and everything to do with collecting more data about us all.
Let’s regulate the TechBros’ algorithms, not us poor users. Treat the disease, not the symptom.