@mikeoneillcloud
With minabird.bsky.social created very first website consent platform (which actually worked). From 2012 worked on DoNotTrack spec as invited expert in W3C TPWG https://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection/ anti-authoritarian socialist internationalist. 🇺🇦🇪🇺🏴
A cartoon by Ron Cobb (1975), showing a shadow of US B-52 bomber above cratered landscape. Two people who look like Vietnamese peasants look up; one says “they’re having problems with their economy again.”
This is from 1975.
Ad-tech is fascist tech: Surveillance advertising is just surveillance.
bsky.app/profile/doct...
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This is an aggressive exploitation in how willing people with the responsibility to tell the truth are willing to accept half-assed expectations, and how willing people are to operate based on principles garnered from the lightest intellectual lifts in the world. The assumption is always the same: that what has happened before will happen again, even if the actuality of history doesn’t really reflect that at all. Society — the media, politicians, chief executives, shit, everyone on some level — is incapable of thinking of new stuff that would happen, especially if that new stuff would be economically destructive, such as a massive scar across all private credit, private equity and venture capital, one so severe that it may potentially destroy the way that businesses (and startups, for that matter) raise capital for the foreseeable future. People are more willing to come up with societally-destructive theories — such as all software engineering and all journalism and all content being created by LLMs, even if it doesn’t actually make sense — because it fits their biases. Perhaps they’re beaten down by decades of muting the power of labor or the destruction of our environment. Perhaps they’re beaten down by the rise of the right and the destruction of the rights of minorities and people of colour. Or more noxiously, perhaps they’re excited to be the one that called it first, so that the new overlords that they perceive will own this (fictional) future, so much so that they’ll ignore the underlying ridiculousness of the economics, refuse to do any further reading that might invalidate their beliefs, or simply say whatever they’re told because it gets clicks and makes their advertisers, bosses or friends happy. People are willing to fall in line behind mythology because conceiving an entirely-different future is an intellectually challenging and emotionally draining act. It requires learning about a multitude of systems and interconnecting disciplines and being wil…
Need to justify unprofitable, unsustainable AI companies? Uber lost money before. Need to explain why AI data centers being built for demand isn’t a problem? Well, the internet exists, and people eventually used that fiber. You can ignore actual proof while pretending to provide your own, all just by pointing vaguely to things in the past. It takes actual courage to form an opinion, something boosters fundamentally lack. I’m not saying it’s impossible to make predictions, but that the majority of people make them with flimsy information, such as “this thing happened before” or “everyone’s saying this will happen.” I’m not saying you can’t try and understand what will happen next, but doing so requires you to use information that is not, on its face, generated by wishcasting or events that took place decades ago. In the end, the greatest lesson we can learn from is that, historically speaking, people tend to fuck around and then find out. The assumption boosters make is that one can fuck around forever. History tends to disagree.
Modern journalism is continually falling for the same trap of justifying the present excess - burning billions on AI - using the past (dot com bubble/Uber), even when it isn't true. This is a tempting trap that deprives readers of their connection to reality.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-beginnin...
It's the beginning of history - and an era where we'll see thorough tests of the assumptions of the AI bubble as a result of the war in Iran and the economic and social chaos to follow.
It's time to stop using the past as a guide to what happens next.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-beginnin...
In a field as competitive as frontier AI, this feedback loop if allowed to persist could result in harm well beyond the immediate consequences of the government's actions. Training and serving frontier-level models like Claude requires extraordinary computational resources. Anthropic has already spent over $10 billion on model training and inference (serving the model to end users) and expects to spend many billions more in the coming years. Although the company has generated substantial revenue since entering the commercial market exceeding $5 billion to date—it has nonetheless had to raise more than $60 billion in outside capital to fund its operations. Anthropic has raised this capital by issuing investors equity stakes in the company.
Based on their lawsuit filed against the DoD, Anthropic appears to be admitting that reports about its revenue and costs are fake, saying its revenue to date “exceeds $5bn” and training/inference “over $10bn.” Previous reports said $4.5bn.
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
I've just signed a petition calling on the UK government to give British businesses a better deal with Europe. Add your name: www.europeanmovement.co.uk/single-marke...
If true that Trump is signalling an end in sight, then what we’ve learned from this fiasco is that the Iranian regime does not collapse even under intense pressure & the rest of the world can’t endure closure of the straits of Hormuz for very long at all www.wsj.com/livecoverage...
America is gone as a super power.
New substack: "Being a lawyer, Sir Kier knows well the old saying, “never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer.” How to fix capitalism is one of those questions." chrisdillow.substack.com/p/wanted-a-n...
With Reform UK calling for the return of grammar schools, I’ve shared an excerpt from my first book The Myth of Meritocracy examining the evidence on who actually benefits from selection.
Clue: it isn’t working-class pupils. www.forthedeskdrawer.com/p/the-enduri...
UK takes the plunge: following EU standards & rules to attenuate the costs & red tape caused by Brexit. But so far only on agri-food standards.
www.gov.uk/government/n...
Lindsey’s diplomacy working wonders in UAE.
All major sports orgs are an embarrassment
The right-wing used to go bonkers about the UK negotiating common EU consumer protection rules.
Now they believe Britain shld join any US military operation “regardless of our own interests, our own views or our own democratic processes”.
They want “total subservience to American decision-making”
The question for stock markets is a political one: do obviously cretinous policies get reversed or not? If the answer's no, the problem isn't just a few £000s of losses; it's that the political system is broken.
3rd division soccer club adds deeply unspecified "AI", it reads like they don't know what it is either except possible future magic
www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...
On March 18, the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, along with the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, will discuss the Digital Omnibus report on AI and vote on whether to begin interinstitutional negotiations.
At 84, he didn't want to rewrite his song AGAIN for yet another war of choice by corrupt politicians.
I don't blame him.
R.I.P. Joe McDonald. You will be missed.
There are no heroes in commercial AI
"Openclaw [built on Claude] is one big grift. Nobody is building anything real. It’s just grifting influencers telling YOU how to build stuff (but never build anything themselves)." open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...
I know some of you might read this and say "these people can't be stupid! These people run companies! They make huge deals! They read all these books!" and my answer is that some of the stupidest people I've ever met have read more books than you or I will read in a lifetime. While they might be smart when it comes to corporate chess moves or saying "this product category should do this," none of these men - not Altman, Pichai or Nadella - actually has a hand in the design or creation of any of the things their companies make, and they never, ever have. Regardless, I have a larger point: it's time to start mocking these people and tearing down their legends as geniuses of industry. They are not better than us, nor are they responsible for anything that their companies build other than the share price (which is a meaningless figure) and the accumulation of power and resources. These men are neither smart nor intellectually superior, and it's time to start treating them as such.
I also recommend if possible to find whatever humor you can. Make fun of these people. Lampooning them doesn’t discount the seriousness of their actions or the destruction of their works - it undermines their power and status and names, and lightens the soul
www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-...
Reported this two weeks ago
Labour Britain’s New Record – the Highest Level of Young People Out of Work in Europe, by @denismacshane.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/denismac...
There's no reason for Iran to attack NATO nation Turkey—but a drone did. Iran denies sending it.
There's no reason for Iran to attack a UK base in Cyprus—but a drone did. Iran denies sending it.
Now Azerbaijan has been attacked. Iran denies involvement.
I think this is Israel.
The Dutch DPA is conducting an investigation into Reddit, Inc. (Reddit). The DPA has raised questions regarding the legality of Reddit's licensing of Public Content from its users to LLM Partners. See uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=E...
No rubber stamp from Europe, as Macron, Starmer and Sánchez resist Trump’s demands to back his war.
www.politico.eu/article/dona...
AI’s Economic Lie by @lockettwill.bsky.social medium.com/p/ais-econom...
Welcome to the deepest mystery in Science, where Physics meets Philosophy, where Matter meets Mind, where the Universe discovers that it is conscious, has always been conscious, and that you are the proof."
You are not a machine that accidentally became aware, you are awareness itself, structured and organised into a human being capable of understanding its own nature.
Penrose on consciousness:
"Every moment of awareness you have is not just a biological accident - it's the Universe experiencing itself, it's fundamental reality manifesting in its most profound form.
