Notices by The Sleight Doctor 🃏 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)

...and here it is, the clearest evidence yet of a fascist tech bro deciding the current corpus of human knowledge needs "correcting", and openly stating his intention to use his LLM to manipulate public understanding.

When I called current iterations of AI "Joseph Goebbels' wet dream", it wasn't hyperbole. Musk is talking about rewriting history to suit himself. As George Orwell said, he who controls the past controls the future.

Do you really think other chatbots aren't being similarly gamed?

The more people rely on generative AI, the more the internet becomes swamped with error-strewn content which then gets hoovered back up into LLM training datasets. The cumulative long-term impact of all this is a gradual degradation at the societal level not only of a population's capacity for critical consumption, but of the quality of the knowledge-base itself. Couple that with AI being deliberately used by governments and Big Tech to influence public opinion, and it's hello techno-dystopia.

@mastodonmigration @GottaLaff @Nonilex @knittingknots2 @wdlindsy @fulelo

Yep, already following all of these! Essential accounts for keeping track of what's going on. You'd probably be better informed simply by following these five accounts than by following any one legacy news outlet!

Greta started her climate protests at aged 14, *on her own* because no-one would join her, not a living soul.

She went on to speak to the United Nations, to traverse the Atlantic alone (don't tell me she had a lot of help, you *know* she did most of it alone, so where does that urge to comment come from?).

Most recently, she sailed right into the gnashing jaws of the IDF, even after the first boat was almost sunk by drone fire.

If you hate her, you hate her because she's better than you.

If you wouldn't be the proudest parent to have helped raise the brave and brilliant Greta Thunberg, then you can be no friend of mine.

We are not the same.

@TeflonTrout @Sir_Osis_of_Liver @RickiTarr I suppose you could say...the knives are out?

@ProjectFearlessness @courtcan I keep mentioning this. It's not that hardcore MAGAts *approve* of everything Trump is doing, it's that they have no idea he's even doing it. And when Trump makes absurd claims about his achievements, Fox loyally reports it as fact, and the faithful cheer him on.

They're stuck in an echo chamber of mis- and disinformation. When the repercussions hurt them and Fox blames Joe Biden or immigrants or whatever, they'll believe that too. 🤷♂️

There were far-right demos in cities across the UK today, along with antiracist counter-protests. In this city we got there an hour earlier than the fash to surround the war memorial where they'd planned to meet, and refused to budge until every last one of them had given up and gone home.

It took about five hours of speeches, music, dancing and chanting to finally shatter the resolve of the last few remaining thugs, but we did it!

Alt-text shortly.

#StandUpToRacism #Antifascism #UKResistance

@cstross I can't recommend LibreOffice enough! It's intuitive, reliable, feature-rich and stable. Plus you can import or export in pretty much any document format in existence.

I have had compatibility issues in the past - a job application form which didn't work in LibreOffice because all the input fields were broken, for some inscrutable reason - but it's a rare enough occurrence to not be worth worrying about.

Provided they're well-hydrated, an adult human can go some weeks before complications arising from malnutrition take their lives. Our ancestors were persistence hunters who went for big game, and alternated between "starvation mode" and gorging themselves on big kills.

The same is not true of human children, whose condition can rapidly deteriorate without access to nutritious food - hence the high infant mortality rate in preagricultural societies.

Israel is deliberately starving 290,000 kids.

Fun fact: I was in a band in college, whose access to a studio was part of a local government-funded youth initiative. There was a meeting of all the bands, and we were handed a sheet of paper with questions on it. One of them was, "What's the name of your band?". We put "nothing" because we hadn't thought of one yet.

Then shortly afterwards, our bassist quit. And that's the story of how our band became named Less Than Nothing.

Spain has had a democratic socialist government since 2018, and has now fully transitioned to renewable energy, showing what's possible when the political will exists.

"Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewable energy for the first time on April 16, with wind, solar, and hydro meeting all peninsular electricity demand during a weekday. Five days later, solar set a new record, generating 20,120 MW of instantaneous power – covering 78.6% of demand and 61.5% of the grid mix."

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/04/22/spain-hits-first-weekday-of-100-renewable-power-on-national-grid/

Still seeing the odd AI evangelist pop up in my feed arguing that ChatGPT is good, ackshully.

Erm, missing the point. That it can be misleading or wrong certainly provides ammo to critics of generative AI, but the main problems are that LLMs trade short-term results for future understanding, and slowly erode our critical faculties. Some of us value our ability to think for ourselves and do our own research and writing, above convenience.

Plus why hand even more power to the tech broligarchy?

@StillIRise1963 I think Americans are waking up. They're just waking up painfully slowly...one by one, like there's time for that shit.

It's going to take some catastrophic event to speed up the process. It brings me no joy to say this, because so many will suffer, but the economic shock the Trump admin is about bring may actually do it.

@jmax @StillIRise1963 ...and of course you're talking as much about the Great Depression in America as you are about the rise of the Third Reich in Europe.

Double whammy for Americans. It's so fucking sad that people have to relearn the lessons of history again and again and again.

A reminder that France brought out the guillotines right about now.

@Perrin42 @Janeishly

These things happen. It's not a big deal. 🧐

@Janeishly I saw someone say something like "Facebook is where all the boomers and Gen Xers who need help with their computers live. The fedi is where all the boomers and Gen Xers who *designed and built* the damn computers live".

If the spontaneous, international campaigns to destroy Tesla weren't working by seriously hurting Musk in the only place he can be hurt - his wallet - then there wouldn't be media campaigns to stop them. And there wouldn't be right-wing conspiracy theories that these efforts are being funded by George Soros (or whoever the bogeyman is these days).

Exactly as I said early on, Tesla is Musk's Achilles Heel, so go harder. It's pissing him off, and that's better than nothing.

@Lana I love how they can walk right into the point, and not even feel the rake handle slapping them in the face. 😆