Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.
ICE hat ein 5jähriges Kind, das vom Kindergarten nach Hause kam, gekidnappt, um den Vater nach draußen zu locken und auch ihn mitzunehmen.
Wenn euch sowas nicht radikalisiert, was dann?
Eine schöne, kurzweilige Reihe dazu, wie Ayn Rand, René Girard und Curtis Yarvin zu Vordenkern des digitalen Autoritarismus in den USA wurden.
More for the “why I don’t use Substack” checklist (🧵)⬇️
"In this media environment, the government doesn’t even have to produce its own propaganda; it simply needs to direct the public to someone who is already doing the job for them"
Das ist lieb, vielen Dank! 🤜🤛
"A left future worth the name doesn’t need to promise perfection; it needs to promise more control over the conditions of life than we have now. That control will be messy, uneven, often boring."
Starkes Essay, @johnalist.de!
odds-and-sods.ghost.io/new/
This is precisely why I'm hosting my newsletter "Odds & Sods" on @ghost.org:
Small nit-pick but especially if your argument is about the unreliability of US tech in light of the US' (and its tech sector's) turn towards fascism publishing on motherfucking Substack, a service actively platforming and supporting literal Nazis, defeats the point.
I don’t have a 300‑page plan for “good tech.” I haven’t got concrete blueprints; I’ve just decided that being clever and destructive isn’t enough.
All it is that next year, this newsletter will try something scarier: being constructive.
I’ve spent most of my career saying no. To platform hype, AI nonsense, ethical‑washing, and Silicon Valley messianism. But refusal isn’t a home.
In 2026, I’m setting myself up to risk something rarer: a left idea of the future.
As my newsletter turns one — come see what happens next.
Subscribe.
Time person of the year cover for 2025
I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork
Unkool Savas
"Die Militärexperten (in der Schweiz) kommen zu dem Schluss, dass ein Abfluss von Daten aus den Palantir-Systemen technisch nicht verhindert werden könne."
Hmm. Das ist ja komisch. Denn die polizeilichen Palantir-Nutzer in Deutschland behaupten steif & fest das sei technisch ja gar nicht möglich. 🤔
View Jürgen Geuter’s graphic link Jürgen GeuterJürgen Geuter • 2ndVerified • 2nd Research Director @ART+COM | Independent writer/theorist | Keynote Speaker | AI-Deinfluencer | #LudditeResearch Director @ART+COM | Independent writer/theorist | Keynote Speaker | AI-Deinfluencer | #Luddite 22h • 22 hours ago • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn Follow Very few narratives piss me off as much as the whole "let's give marginalised people LLM assistants for inclusion". Inclusion does not mean giving marginalised people shittier versions of a thing: Sure you can give kids from poorer backgrounds an LLM to "learn" but what you are saying is that poor people are not worth having trustworthy sources of information. When you say that older or lonely people can talk to chatbots to feel less alone you are saying that some people are not worth a social life. This is a deeply inhumane perspective that goes actively against the ideas and ideals of inclusion. likesupportcelebrate 186 You and 185 others
Regret to report that there has been another good linkedin post
We have arrived at the stage of the GenAI grift where we pay to outsource pleasure. It will be quantified and reported back to us on a scale from meh to mind-blowing.
„draft documents obtained by POLITICO show officials are planning far-reaching changes to the General Data Protection Regulation to the benefit of artificial intelligence developers.“
www.politico.eu/newsletter/p...
Please take a minute to scroll through this—and share it.
It's the story of our time.
The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic American—And Why Europe Is Next.
www.authoritarian-stack.info
The ability to convince capital markets to hand you a trillion dollars on the strength of obvious bullshit paired with the inability to get a single human to sincerely and spontaneously say they love you is some real punishment of the gods shit.
"This long-running war on knowledge and expertise has sown the ground for the narratives widely used by AI companies and the CEOs adopting it. Human labor, inquiry, creativity, and expertise is spurned in the name of “efficiency.” With AI, there is no need for human expertise"
I'm excited to share my piece in Los Angeles Review of Books @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social, which examines OpenAI's claims about ChatGPT's creative writing skills, Big Tech's weaponisation of grief and nostalgia, and the collapse of the academic humanities. lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...
Answer: no. ChatGPT has no understanding of what words mean. Collocation frequencies of words can’t bring you understanding of what those words mean, even though it might help you predict which words go together.
See:
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
Felt this was important to write for @slate.com to capture the experience of Wikipedia editors who were there in the room as the armed man took the stage at last weekend's Wikipedia conference.
Pharos and Fuzheado showed courage & quick thinking by taking down the gunman and averting tragedy.
Methodisch unterirdisches Niveau. Was machen die Autor*innen solcher Umfragen beruflich?
photo of paulina borsook
1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).
But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that
this is the telling thing about all the billionaire hysteria
they would literally rather set more money on fire propping up the most uncharismatic sex pest who ever lived than they’d pay in additional taxes
these are not serious people
jfc
