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

One thing that the current exorbitant investments in "AI" show is that the investor class and big tech corporations do not pay enough taxes: If you have billions to set on fire for spicy autocomplete we should take some or all of those to do something useful with.

If you use #genAI you can no longer claim to "care about quality". That is just a contradiction. You actions are saying loudly that you do in fact not give a shit about anything of the sort.

@Ruth_Mottram you have not missed anything. LLMs are niche tools that could be used productively in a few specific cases but not in the way currently proposed: These systems are not economically viable.

I was talking to someone yesterday (let's call them A) and they had another "AI" experience, I thought might happen but hadn't heard of before.

They were interacting with an organization and upon asking a specific thing got a very specific answer. Weeks later that organization claimed it had never said what they said and when A showed the email as proof the defense was: Oh yeah, we're an international organization and it's busy right now so the person who sent the original mail probably had an LLM write it that made shit up. It literally ended with: "Let's just blame the robot ;)".

(Edit: I did read the email and it did not read like something an LLM wrote. I think we see "LLM did it" emerging as a way to cover up mistakes.)

LLMs as diffusors for responsibility in corporate environments was quite obviously gonna be a key sales pitch, but it was new to me that people would be using those lines in direct communication.

I never understood the "you need to push out a newsletter every week or people unsubscribe" thing. Like: If you don't send anything you are totally out of my attention and I don't think enough about you to hunt down your page and unsubscribe. What gets me to unsubscribe is some filler post that has a convenient "click here to unsubscribe" post at the bottom.

I built this cupboard with space to put in towels. I was so naive. As if it were up to me.

"AI is a tool (sorry!) that people who are bad at their jobs will use badly and that people who are good at their jobs will maybe, possibly find some uses for. People who are terrible at their jobs (many executives), will tell their employees that they “need” to use AI, that their jobs depend on it, that they must become more productive, and that becoming an AI-first company is the strategy that will save them from the old failed strategy, which itself was the new strategy after other failed business models."

(Original title: The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work)

https://www.404media.co/the-medias-pivot-to-ai-is-not-real-and-not-going-to-work/

The solution is not to open source "AI" but to resist it.

Systemd is one of the best things in moving Linux forward in a long time.

(Original title: systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success)

https://blog.tjll.net/the-systemd-revolution-has-been-a-success/

Don't use the "Change my Mind" meme with Stephen Crowder for anything.

He is a racist and a homophobe who abused his ex wife while she was pregnant with their kids. Fuck that guy and find a better meme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Crowder

"Whatever" is a brilliant essay on "AI" by @eevee:

"But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost."

https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/

So many problems in this world might never have appeared if Mark Zuckerberg had gone to therapy.

Using "AI" is no longer optional at Microsoft. Reminds me how when Meta had to force their engineers to use their "Metaverse" product.

If your product doesn't even gain traction internally, maybe it's just ... shit?

(Original title: ‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at work)

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/30/ai-is-no-longer-optional-microsoft-admits-ai-doesnt-help-at-work/

I think one main issue I have with the whole "EURO Stack" stuff is that it is not looking for an alternative. It's "we want what we got just with EU companies". But the fact that the Internet and its services have been turned into a mall is the big fucking problem. I don't want a "European Facebook" built on the same logic of exploitation.

Google's emissions are up over 50%, Amazon builds huge data centers powered by 75% natural gas.

Remember all those posts telling us that "AIs climate impact isn't that bad" supported by some really funky math/perspective and/or numbers Sam Altman invented?

Here's the actual impact.

"AI" is a fossil fuel technology.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/technology/amazon-ai-data-centers.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SU8.2JRa.e3Ju6r_pL1Im

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/google-emissions-ai-electricity-demand-derail-efforts-green

From CreativeCommons with their "signals" to the OSI with their "open source AI" fiasco it seems that the stewards of the legal structures protecting the digital commons are not on the side of people actually wanting to contribute to the commons for humanity. (Maybe they never were.)
If those organizations don't reorient themselves to align with people's needs maybe we need to fork.

I think a misunderstanding is that people want to fight "scraping" or "automated systems". But my feeling is that the issue is with the _purpose_ of the scraping: It's not "that person is scraping my site" it's "that person wants to use my work to train their slop machine". The issue is the SLOP machine with all the negative externalities they have.
And that is a path worth exploring (that I have similarly argued for code): We want to contribute to the commons but there are specific uses that go against our values.
https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/114754224933740471

Smarte Idee.
Soldat*innen dürfen ja umsonst Zug fahren, damit ist das militärische Infra, damit können wir da beliebig Geld drauf werfen.
https://chaos.social/@geheimorga/114744668728525045

"You can tell what happened — Google promised iNaturalist free money if they would just do something, anything, that had some generative AI in it. iNaturalist forgot why people contribute at all, and took the cash."

(Original title: Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage)

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/19/google-bribes-inaturalist-to-use-generative-ai-volunteers-quit-in-outrage/

Teaching people how to use LLMs is not "upskilling", it's the opposite.