Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org), page 11

"But average people like AI poetry better than real one"

(Original title: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Poetry)

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/poetry-2

(I know that for legal reasons many copyright people don't like this phrasing because at least in German law there are data mining exceptions in copyright law)

Replace "AI will be trained on your posts" with "someone will datamine your posts". Those actions are not passive, _someone_ is making choices that you might not agree with.

If you use Python you probably already use `uv` but recently I learned about `uvx --from`and it's so good to get a feel for a new library or to just do a one-shot.

`uvx --from pandas python` implicitly creates a virtualenv, pulls pandas (you can add as many libraries as you want) and runs python in that env (could be any other tool). When you close the environment (as in you exit the python shell in the above case) everything gets thrown out.

Great to not clutter one's path with meaningless packages or venvs.

A friend of mine created a piece of art that meditates on the parallels between our practice of scrolling on phones with the old practice of prayer beads. Thinking about our digital practices as continuation of older analogue practices opens up a wide range of existing knowledge and thought. Love this approach, we should do it so much more.

https://www.hojinkang.com/scrolling-prayer-beads/

This is so fucked up. The #wordpress saga continues and becomes more farcical by the day.
https://vmst.io/@jalefkowit/113549705948965207

Just looked at a new EU "open source" LLM. (opengpt-x's Teuken)

Their idea of "support" is setting up a discord server. Like: Why?

"Oh we can't depend on commercial entities for our AI shit ... but for actual communication it's great."

Tether is the biggest financial scam of history. But also very important for criminals.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

(Original title: Tether Has Become a Massive Money Laundering Tool for Mexican Drug Traffickers, Feds Say)

https://www.404media.co/tether-has-become-a-massive-money-laundering-tool-for-mexican-drug-traffickers-feds-say/

"EA is doing harm, in an increasingly global manner, to the work of activists for liberating causes.

Despite the liberating intentions of many of its advocates, EA is, irredeemably conservative. It favors welfare-oriented interventions that increase countable measures of well-being and both neglects and diverts funds from social movements that address injustices and agitate for social change, particularly in marginalized communities both in the US and in the Global South."
https://blog.oup.com/2022/12/the-predictably-grievous-harms-of-effective-altruism/

I understand why so much open source happens on GitHub (it is free after all) but given how Microsoft has bought themselves into basically all modern tech tool chains this should make people very uncomfortable.

This is a good PR thing for Microsoft/GitHub on first glance but the more you look at the details the more it becomes clear that this is a simple solution that doesn't fit the issues that dominate the domain. Sure you can give Open Source maintainers access to GitHub people and GitHub Copilot but who are you helping? Worst case is more open source projects having to deal with the extra work of double checking and fixing the generated code.

https://fosstodon.org/@donmccurdy/113512775802077660

The fact that we start to have the same conversations about crypto again makes my soul want to leave my body.

Yes. It's still all scams. A socially destructive set of technologies and attached belief systems.

https://tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third-web/

Since I saw a report about 1984 (because of a new audio version done for motherfucking Audible!) with the same talking points, here's the usual correction:

1984 is not a book about total surveillance. It's a book about how to ensure the middle class will never stand with the lower classes against power. It's about how to destroy solidarity. In 1984 only the middle class is surveilled, the lower classes (proles) and the upper class (inner party) are not. It's a book about power and class politics that is more relevant than ever - but not "because our phones surveil us".

"Justine's views in unrelated areas are not relevant to this article."

And that is a problem Tech (corporate and Open Source/Free Software!) needs to fix: It absolutely matters that Justine Tunney uses antisemitic and racist dogwhistles as project names, that she publicly argued for fascist government by tech CEOs. I don't care about her technology at all if her existence is about destroying democracy. (It's still a stain on Mozilla to pay for for her llamafile shit). And Tunney isn't the only character that this logic is applied to.

We don't want tech build by racists, fascists, LGBTQ*IA-phobes and whatever shitlord we can find in some basement dungeon.

https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/113520250162734614

(Original title: They Walk Among Us)

https://leftycartoons.com/2024/11/20/they-walk-among-us/

The reason OpenAI is starting to release "How to use ChatGPT in schools" material is not because they care about the damage they do. It's about pretending their tool can be responsibly used in schools to get access to large, public subscriber bases.

Silicon Valley hates government regulation and paying taxes. But government contracts? It _loves_ them.

Here's the thing: "AI" is stories and tales of magical gains in the future. It needs massive critique.
There also is "machine learning" which is a field of computer science that does sometimes produce relevant work and can be useful.
But those things are basically distinct.

"We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to "read my Amazon". A great director trying to promote their film by saying "click on my Max". That's how much they've pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as "my Substack", there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification."

(Original title: Don't call it a Substack. - Anil Dash)

https://www.anildash.com//2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/

So if you use Matrix I just opened a small "Luddites Unite" Channel on my Matrix Server. Dunno what it will become yet but setting up a "Luddite Slack" felt like it was the dumbest thing on the planet.

https://matrix.to/#/!RjZTZaZdcUlIsCWJcf:tante.cc?via=tante.cc

(all runs on my dedicated server, no 3rd party cloud stuff)

"Remember that nobody has yet worked out how to make an actual profit from AI. So what if — God forbid — number stops going up?

There’s a plan for that: large data center holders will go public as soon as possible and dump on retail investors, who will be left holding the bag when the bubble deflates."

(Original title: Pumping the AI bubble: a data center funding craze with ‘novel types of debt structures’)

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/19/pumping-the-ai-bubble-a-data-center-funding-craze-with-novel-types-of-debt-structures/