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  This is a fine example of *my* concerns about the dangers of #AI: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-chinese-ship-over-hallucinated-ai-arms-report/ Many people freak out about "the bots are going to take over the world!" I'm dubious -- that's panicking about a scenario that doesn't have a clear road to get there. This, on the other hand -- AI accidentally sparking a war that could potentially go nuclear -- has been the more-va...

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  Speaking of prescient, @harris just pointed me to this excellent article: https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260 This posits the notion of the "moral crumple zone": using humans to take the blame when a complex system like #AI does something wrong. The "prescient" is because it dates back to 2019, early in the AI age. The problem is that we're trying to find humans to take the blame for collective failures. We define companies as &...

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  Oh, this looks neat: https://structural.chat This is the latest product from the #Unison team (who I knew from the #Scala world back before they founded Unison). Haven't read my way through the papers yet, but the (very reasonable-sounding) theory seems to be that #LLMs are actually a pretty lousy way to build chatbots -- they're achingly slow, non-deterministic, and dangerous from a security POV. They've instead come up with a technology that provides a similar look-a...

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  *snrk* — quote: “... what might be called #Trump’s iron-clad Law of Military Achievement: The number of times the president claims victory is inversely proportional to the actual extent of American military success” From https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/09/houthis-yemen-iran-trump-saudis/688768/?gift=E_ZnjFDVDXw07BX6pvgvVID1Xzk9l1PtT9kJ-B0vms0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share #USPol

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  “Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines”: https://www.frogandtoad.ai tl;dr — this is a cute, quick little children’s story that also serves as a pretty accurate summary of the HuggingFace Incident. Well worth bookmarking for anybody who is trying to figure out what the hubbub was all about. #LLMs #AI

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  Really excellent take on the bloody “Lesbian Bar Mask Mandate” story that’s taken over the internet the past few days: https://awardsforgoodboys.substack.com/p/lesbian-bar-mask-mandates This one’s hard to summarize into a tl;dr — the article’s a little long, but worth reading for a bit of properly nuanced perspective. It echoes nicely with my own feelings about the whole thing, which is that I have a good deal of empathy with all of the people who are actually *involved* in that situation (on...

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  The #enshittification of #Google continues apace. I’m going to be staying at a hotel soon. I want to put that in my Saved list in Google Maps. Nice and straightforward you’d think, right? No — when I put the address into Google Maps on my laptop, it shows me *all the hotels in that area*. (Of which there are many, because it’s in the middle of a city.) Worse, while the desired place is top of the list, it is in no way clearly highlighted on the map, so it’s impossible to find in that sea o...

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  For a long time, I’ve been applauding _The Boys_, the raucous and gory but brilliant political satire that involves a deeply psychotic superhero committing, essentially, a Christo-fascist coup of the US. One of the most marvelous things about it was how blatantly clear the parallels to the #Trump regime were. (For about a year there I was *sure* he would find some pretext to shut the show down before its finale.) So much of what it portrayed closely mocked the current right wing. So I suppose...

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  Epic and delightful game of 20 Questions that I just learned about for the first time: https://www.tumblr.com/thestoryofaslut/829053719115071488?source=share (Vague content warning as kink-related, but the post itself is entirely SFW.)

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  For the #comics fans: I just got introduced to the Sweet Shop app, a new platform for digital comics that seems to get the details right, including: * Bootstrapped instead of VC-funded (so much less prone to #enshittification) * Leans towards DRM-free when they can (although they allow creators to ask for DRM) * Provides PDF downloads * Already has a considerable stock of good comics More immediately, for the next week or so, Iron Circus Comics ( @IronSpike ), one of the best queer-friendl...

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  Ah, neat -- #YourLocalEpidemiologist's NY branch is now formally expanding to the whole northeast: https://yourlocalepidemiologistny.substack.com/ For anyone who doesn’t know it, YLE has been a sensible, calm source for public-health information since the beginning of the pandemic. It’s pretty much my go-to for coverage that is well-informed and neither panicky nor denialist.

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  RE: https://social.growyourown.services/@homegrown/117354728907764529 Seriously, folks — it’s way past time for the #SCA to get the hell off #Facebook, but this looks to be the nail in the coffin…

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  Oooh, neat -- @Bonfire has officially released its #Communities module: https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bonfire-for-communities/ I backed the project, and I'm overjoyed to see it coming to fruition. The world *desperately* needs a good open-source, open-network, open-community alternative to enshittified monstrosities like Facebook, and #Bonfire is the first one I've seen that appears to check pretty much all the boxes of "how to do it right". It's impressively complet...

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  Short but brutal article, expounding on the principle of "#billionaires aren't like us": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/billionaire-consequence-free-reality/686588/ The pull quote that really slammed into me: > When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. #politics #capitalism

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  In case it wasn't clear enough that the current #SupremeCourt is largely controlled by the #racists: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/29/us/supreme-court-voting-rights?unlocked_article_code=1.elA.jHfn.mQGLwsAyu-6C&smid=nytcore-android-share #uspol

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  Another Pandora's Box well and truly smashed to splinters in this story from @404mediaco: https://www.404media.co/hello-boss-inside-the-chinese-realtime-deepfake-software-powering-scams-around-the-world/ tl;dr -- high-quality real-time #DeepFakes now not only exist, there is at least one criminal organization selling the technology. It's not cheap, but not super-expensive either. The implication is that social engineering attacks are about to become considerably more effective...

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  Another day, another @pluralistic #book, this time pulling together ideas from his various trenchant essays on the subject of #AI: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai I suspect I'll disagree with some of the nuances (he's strongly opinionated, and I don't always agree with every detail), but he has a lot of good perspective and clue -- it should be fascinating and useful. And as usual, he's one of the few aut...

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  Okay, credit where credit is due: #Kickstarter took the note from unhappy members and creators, and have rolled back their recent rules change: https://updates.kickstarter.com/an-apology-rethinking-our-mature-content-guidelines/

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  Today in "Don't let the #fascism pass by silently": if you're a US citizen, I strongly encourage you to comment on this ghastly FCC proposal: https://glaad.org/fcc tl;dr -- the FCC wants to slap warning labels on content with "#transgender and #gender non-binary programming". Basically equating peoples' identities with things like gun violence. The regime is gonna regime, but we shouldn't allow them to pretend that the people...

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  Potentially of interest to the #SCA crowd and anybody else who does research online: #Kagi recently published a useful page of Tips about how to more effectively leverage it for academic research -- https://blog.kagi.com/tips/academia I'm always a Kagi enthusiast; this pulls together several of the reasons why, with a particular focus on one fairly hardcore use case.

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  Today in Ridiculous Potables, the Malortini: https://querki.net/u/jducoeur/mixology/#!Malortini Only recommended for those who actually like Malort (which essentially substitutes for vermouth in this semi-dry martini variant), but it's not half bad. #mixology

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  The occasional reminder that even #Massachusetts isn't immune to Dangerous Political Stupidity: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2026-04-09-massachusetts-house-advances-unconstitutional-social-media-ban-bill-that-will-harm-lgbtq-youth-and-human-rights/ tl;dr -- the #MA House passed a bill that is *wildly* invasive of #online #privacy, in the name of "think of the children!" pearl-clutching. It's likely to do far more harm than good, probably especially t...