Canadian sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer has released a free version of the venerable word processing program WordStar. It includes a DOS emulator so the app can run on modern Windows. Sawyer says it also supports Mac and Linux.
The true, tactical significance of Project 2025 — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic: Despite its legitimately scary and terrible proposals, the Project 2025 document reveals schisms in the conservative coalition, which can be exploited by a Democratic party led by workers. https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/
Exxon CEO Darren Woods says the quiet part out loud: The problem with renewable energy sources is that they “don't generate above-average returns for Exxon's shareholders.” — @pluralistichttps://pluralistic.net/2024/03/06/exxonknew/
The sun generates virtually limitless and free energy, with much of it available in the form of wind and tides. And we’re already well underway to harnessing that energy.
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic : Companies like Tesla, Amazon and Cruise that claim to have replaced human workers with AI are often outright lying. Often, they’re instead replacing local employees with remote workers paid peanuts in India and other developing countries.
“So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: ‘AI stands for “absent Indian.”’”
Bruce Schneier: It’s easy to think of generative AI as a friend rather than a service, making us vulnerable to profit-seeking corporations. “AI models, controlled by large corporations, inherently prioritize profit over ethics.” https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-trust.html
“Creative workers are part of a class of workers who suffer from ‘vocational awe,’ the sense that because your job is satisfying and/or worthy, you don't deserve to get paid for it.” (1/3) 🧵
@tinfoilhat@waderoberts@pluralistic Copyrights and patents lead to hairy ethical and philosophical issues. All ideas are built on other ideas. If I write a detective novel, how much of that is really original?
Treating payment as a labor issue sidesteps a lot of that difficult philosophy. If you spend a year writing a detective novel, and I read it, I have gotten benefit from your labor and you deserve to be paid for it.
H/T to Cory for thinking that led me here but Im not speaking fr him.
Jews, Christians and Satanists are taking legal action to protect reproductive freedom, claiming—rightly—that abortion bans are imposition of religious beliefs by the state.
@pluralistic: “Jewish religious texts clearly state that life begins at the first breath, and that the life of a pregnant person takes precedence over the life of the fetus in their uterus.”
The Republican-dominated North Dakota state senate voted to increase their own meal reimbursement after rejecting a bill to expand free school lunches for low-income students.
"The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar – even more remarkable is that Google agrees."