Luís R.

Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on scam ad profits to fund AI Meta goosed its revenue by targeting users likely to click on scam ads, docs show.

In a lengthy report, Reuters exposed five years of Meta practices and failures that allowed scammers to take advantage of users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Banner promoting the workshop I'm leading on Saturday at the Malta Book Festival.

Hello, Malta! My first time in your beautiful country and I'm so happy to be here. Looking forward to meeting the writers who will be attending my workshop on Saturday.

Three shadows on a golden wall in Valletta, Malta (photo by Luis Rodrigues)

Here in Valletta, Malta with @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social and @goblindegook.bsky.social (photo by Luis). Guess which one is me? 😉

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

The Case Against Generative AI Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - First It Giveth Before we go any further: This is, for the third time this year, the longest newsletter I've ever written, weighing in somewhere around 18,500 wo...

Newsletter: This is The Case Against Generative AI, a comprehensive analysis of a financial collapse built on myths I’ll dispel, the markets’ unhealthy obsession with NVIDIA's growth, and the fact that there is not enough money in the world to fund OpenAI.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

Yes, two of my favourite topics combined: cookery and badmouthing Sam Altman.

STAGGERING: This new study of 133 countries is the first to estimate the impact of all USAID’s work. In 2 decades, it has saved *92M* lives. Current cuts, if not reversed, are forecast to cost up to *14M* lives thru 2030. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

I imagined the Chatsubo in 1984. 41 years later I opened its door. Neuromancer is in production.

Two Days in Two Hours On moving fast and not breaking anything.

I wrote a thing.

goblindegook.com/2025/two-day...

See you there!

Internet users advised to change passwords after 16bn logins exposed Hacked credentials could give cybercriminals access to Facebook, Meta and Google accounts among others Internet users have been told to change their passwords and upgrade their digital security after researchers claimed to have revealed the scale of sensitive information – 16bn login records – potentially available to cybercriminals. Researchers at Cybernews, an online tech publication, said they had found 30 datasets stuffed with credentials harvested from malicious software known as “infostealers” and leaks. Continue reading...

Internet users advised to change passwords after 16bn logins exposed

A Brief History of Young People Today Don't Want to Work

🧵

I do sincerely wish they would all eff off to another planet and never come back, though.

Construir blocos com a Interactivity API, Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 7:00 PM | Meetup A Interactivity API oferece uma forma padronizada para programadores adicionarem interacções no front-end dos seus blocos, sendo já utilizada em blocos do core como Pesquis

📢 Meetup: Construir blocos com a Interactivity API
🗣 @s3rgiosan.dev
📍 Sede da Eupago, no Porto (Praça Artur Santos Silva, 74)

#WordPress

i don’t think i’ve ever missed alt text *because* of this setting.

alt text is easy, fun, polite, necessary, &—critically in the age of “govt openly enthusiastic about eugenics & ending accessibility initiatives”—the right thing to do, especially if you’re on bluesky to inform or drive action.

Freedom is when the boss tells you what to write and think. bsky.app/profile/maxt...

Lol John Oliver set up a how-to guide for how to make Meta make less ad $$$ from you. johnoliverwantsyourraterotica.com

The more I think about this, the more it feels like the real trick in Severance is the separation of grievance (the reason to organize) and agency (the ability to organize.)

If you can’t remember being exploited were you actually exploited?

Não senti nada.

Já está a acontecer. Vários novos modelos em certos aspectos são piores que modelos anteriores porque estão a consumir dados gerados por IA. Procura por “Habsburg AI” ou “model collapse”.

Eu já não me quero dar com ninguém, desamparem-me a loja. 😛

Google spent billions of dollars on this shit.

Tweet from popehat: “Someone who fucks goats and says they are doing it ironically is still a goatfucker.”

I keep this tweet from @kenwhite.bsky.social at the ready for this very thing.

Trump hated TikTok (because China) until it helped him win an election (as even he acknowledges) and now he’s going to save it and take a victory lap. So he’ll have X, TikTok, Insta, and Facebook all working on his behalf. That’s a big difference between now and 2017.

At Meta, speech is so free it has flown away.

I’ve been a software engineer for almost 20 years and let me tell you: I don’t trust most programmers to write code correctly, with or without AI assistance, let alone do any job outside their field of expertise.

Why I'm quitting the Washington Post Democracy can't function without a free press

Ann Telnaes, who has worked at The Washington Post as an editorial cartoonist since 2008, says her cartoon criticizing billions currying favor with Trump was spiked — and now she has quit the paper

🛠️ Littlefoot for Footnotes
🔍 @goblindegook.bsky.social maintains littlefoot.js, a lightweight, jQuery-free fork of Bigfoot.js for footnotes. He asked me if I could integrate it with the Footnotes block — so I did! 😃
🌐 github.com/s3rgiosan/littlefoot
🙌 Feedback is welcome!

#WordPress #OpenSource

Exceedingly important discovery: Ikea Kallax shelves are exactly two LEGO studs wide. A simple bracket shape like this will stay in place without any support.