Happy to report that Kolektiva has activated authorized fetch, which will help to protect our instance's posts from surveillance and "AI" ingestion by Meta. Thank you to @subMedia@admin@moderation for defending the zone!
US Government Wants Nuclear Plants to Offload AI Data Center Expansion
' US President Joe Biden's administration has been discussing with big tech to re-evaluate their power sources, possibly using smaller nuclear plants. According to an Axios interview with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, she has noted that "AI itself isn't a problem because AI could help to solve the problem." '
Grimly hilarious that disinformation and brainrot has so subsumed humanity, that Daesh has to work overtime to claim responsibility for the Crocus terror attack; while the Russians try to believe the Ukrainians did it, the Americans try to believe the Russians did it, and the tankies try to believe the Americans did it
The only reason the algorithmic biases of the Zuckerberg entity are not dominating fedi discourse at this very moment is because they began to federate with "sharing" opt-in. If/when they switch that toggle over, 160 million accounts governed by these censorship algorithms will flood in and algorithmic creep could quickly destroy the journalistic prospect of the fediverse. Why would journalists show up here if less than 1% of the network can see their posts?
"Between 2018 and 2021 sixteen new cooperatives were formed by Sharaka [Youth Forum] members. They mostly focus on agriculture, while one is a grocery store. They are spread throughout the West Bank, mainly in the central mountain villages around Ramallah and Nablus… The core values the Sharaka cooperatives have defined for dealing with society, the environment, and with each other are care, justice, equality, and independence… the cooperatives maintain a horizontal structure and experiment with management and remuneration models that fit their egalitarian principles. For them, the cooperative is an attempt at living out the freedom they seek for Palestinians."
"Al-Ouna (العونة) is the historical term used for cooperativism in Palestine, it has always been a part of our Palestinian character, especially in farming. Families would cooperate in their olive harvests and sing folk songs sending gratitude and good wishes to each other."
"Indiana blocks world’s top sex research center from state funds: ‘a scary moment for academic freedom’ - What happens to Kinsey Institute may signal if conservative US lawmakers can dictate the bounds of research on sexuality"
Christofascists are attacking on all fronts - and institutional liberals are caving in at every turn
"The political project of normalizing transmitting COVID and casting basic, scientific mitigations as bad, weird, mean, stupid, and impossible is a fantastic coup for the right. It is the utter rejection of state responsibility for public welfare, paired with the complete shredding of an early-pandemic solidarity that bound those at risk (everyone) together. That solidarity was replaced with a poisonous “us vs them” worldview whereby those who have been and are harmed are weak, lying, lame, unlucky, unusual, uncool, rare, stupid, bad, mean, aggressive, psychologically disturbed and/or crazy. This schism seeps into the bloodstream of leftist organizing and splinters our coalition, shattering our incipient power as, unsurprisingly, the popularity of the fascists surges globally. I would argue it is the most thorough victory of the far-right in living memory, and it has embedded its eugenicist logic into the very foundation of public beliefs about health, disability, and who deserves safety."
"The Biden era has normalized illness and demonized mitigations for the sake of “back to normal”. We now live in a country where educated liberals genuinely think it’s okay-and in fact good- that their kids are constantly ill (to be expected given the immune system-damaging nature of COVID). Where leftists argue that killing old people is less harmful than wearing masks. Where concern for community health is painted as cowardly and using the modern scientific tools we are lucky enough to have is portrayed as rude and stupid. And terribly, this liberal political project under Joe Biden has come down like a hammer on community solidarity, leaving “the vulnerable” squabbling with their mocking former comrades. It’s hard to overstate just how much damage the normalization of COVID has done to the very concepts of public health and community."
This article offers a specifically leftist perspective. An anarchist addendum might go: If the state has dispensed with any pretense of an obligation to the maintenance of public health, it has also dispensed with that justification for it existing at all
@ophiocephalic Never content with any amount of ROI, I guess this is Hollywood's next logical step in maximizing profits by recycling old content. Who needs creatives or creativity, anyway? Humans respond most favourably to things we're familiar with / repetition, no point diverting funds into anything genuinely new+fresh. 🙃🫠
It's been a bit surprising to see some of the folks who understand the threat posed by Meta wave off the nonconsensual intrusion of Bluesky into the fediverse as no big deal. Some perceptions of the problematic data processing and moderation issues follow.
At the moment the network is centralized on a single server controlled by the corporation. It launched with almost no moderation at all, but currently there is a small mod team, which may be a stopgap plugged in after early disasters in racist harassment produced bad press.
However, that doesn't appear to be the long-term plan. The Bluesky whitepaper linked here reveals a hyper-neoliberal architectural vision that could almost be understood as a belief system - a Cult of the Algorithm, as foretold by glassy-eyed guru/antivax billionaire Bitcoin Rasputin. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239
It describes a quasi-decentralized social network with no human moderation at all, and no ability for instance admins to block other instances. They intend to let it all rip - the fascism, hate speech, CSAM, and on - and leave it to individuals to defend their own feeds by selecting from a marketplace of algorithms with which they can try to filter out or in the content they want.
It also seems clear that the most viable way for the VC-funded for-profit to make money is to exploit the user data it collects; and right now, every post on Bluesky is sent to third-party "AI" data miners for algorithmic extraction. When the fediverse bridge activates, every fedi post that crosses it will be as well.
One wonders if the bridge developer has considered the implications of the Bluesky anti-moderation scheme. Will he unilaterally choose what algorithms are appropriate to filter the feed? Will it even be possible to apply algorithms to the feed, or will the sewage stream flood through unimpeded?
Bluesky's registration is open now; anyone who wants to serve as a test subject in a social media experiment in which moderation is replaced by a marketplace of algorithms is free to do so, but that's not what the fediverse is. This is an experiment in community-centered, human-scaled social media beyond surveillance, algorithmic manipulation and the profit motive - let's keep it that way!
Big thanks to the Kolektiva crew ( @admin , @subMedia ) for jumping on this and getting a block in place within hours of learning of it!
It seems that when Bluesky "decentralizes" there will be no real way for instance operators to block or moderate other instances, and that the entire (anti-)moderation scheme depends on the prospect of end-users "consuming" filters which silo various types of content into or out of their own personal view.
Recall that Facebook-linked elements were able to fabricate a moral panic and smear the fediverse in the international press by publicizing the longstanding fact that CSAM instances exist while barely mentioning that everyone else blocks them. What do you think will happen with a protocol in which instances can't be blocked at all?
And how much do you think spittle-flecked rightwing politicians and self-appointed guardians of morality will be willing or able to grasp all this stuff about "labelers" and "app views"? The entire gambit rests on the assumption that Silicon Valley shitheads can continue to get away with anything and everything
@ophiocephalic
Being blocked by BS because you run an instance that blocks other instances. 🤔
I simply love how that would fire back on their idea that domain blocks are not neccesary. 🤗
It's clear that Nancy Pelosi is herself a "seed or plant" of Putin, trying to destroy democracy from within by criminalizing protest. Is the entire Democratic party a Russian front, or just her wing of it? We demand an investigation of Pelosi's connections to Putin
AI Power Consumption Surge Strains US Electricity Grid, Coal-Powered Plants Make a Comeback
"Unable to keep pace, some utilities are scrambling to revise projections and reconsider previous plans of closing fossil fuel plants… Some older coal power plans will stay online, until the grid adds more power production capacity. The result could be increased emissions in the near term and risks of rolling blackouts if infrastructure continues lagging behind demand."
So now, on a burning planet, we're going to center all of our energy resources and human ingenuity on tech for incels to synthesize nonconsensual pop-star porn
Just wanted to come back and say, "You guys were right".
I guess I've been so down on bitcoin miners that I couldn't imagine AI would come remotely close to their electrical use. But..... I guess I wasn't thinking it through.
So, in my most Mastodon and not Twitter mentality: