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  Here's #SimonWilson defending his "AI" criti-hype column, which amplifies the claim that there's a 10% chance of it destroying humanity; "Even if that's ridiculously wrong, the way to measure risk is not to say; is the 10% right, the way to measure it is what you do when you insure your house." https://thedailyblog.co.nz/the-bradbury-group-8pm-live-tonight-minister-mark-mitchell-greens-co-leader-marama-davidson-political-panel-fran-osullivan-simon-wilson-and-sha...

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  A lot of kiwi writers are keen to leave SS, for the same reasons David Farrier did with @webworm, and I did with @disintermedia.net.nz, inspired by his pieces about it. I suspect others could be convinced too. But some I've talked to find the pricing model of Ghost.org intimidating. I think there's an opportunity there for @magnificent@social.magnificent.nz to fill the gap. I wonder if @lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz and @isaacfreeman@cloudisland.nz have decided on a pricing model for ho...

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  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@YvanDaSilva/115563876034073326 Anyone still arguing that the bursting of the "AI" bubble will leave us with useful computing infrastructure, now disused, needs to read and think about this. #AI #AIBubble #EWaste

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  My goddess, Nicky Hager looks and sounds *exhausted*! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SnrFXy7yx0& Maybe also a bit nervous about making sure what he says he stays within what he can back up, and doesn't give the subjects of his book any ammunition for lawfare (like what was pulled on Bomber recently). #NickyHager

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  “If you love classic movies, if you really are interested in the history of film, then streaming's useless for you because Netflix has almost nothing before 1980." #DanSlevin, #RNZ film critic, 2027 https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/screens/movies/the-viewers-ditching-streaming-rot-in-favour-of-dvds #Netflix #streaming

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  Today I was reminded that there are grouplets in Aotearoa who think that supporting Ukraine's self-defence, against an imperial invader, is morally equivalent to supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza, or the US bombardment of Iran; https://community.scoop.co.nz/2026/03/new-zealand-government-backs-criminal-war-against-iran/ This kind of Vulgar Marxist apologetics was already decades out of date when it was defending the USSR's imperial conquests. It makes absolutely no sense now tha...

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  The great Enshittocene is now spreading into in-person UX. A few hours ago I went to the local multiplex to see The Odyssey, and walked out with a refund. But I have no idea what the movie is like, I left within minutes of the start. I left because it was painfully loud for the tiny cinema, and the staff told me the volume was controlled by the distributor in the US. They have no projectionist who can customise the UX to the needs of the room. (1/?) #MovieIndustry #movies #enshittification

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  What, you mean that not only does banning under-16s do nothing substantial to address any of the serious societal issues caused by overgrown social media platforms, it doesn't even keep people under 16 off them? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/3/australias-under-16-social-media-ban-failing-study-shows-what-it-means Who'da thunk it?!? 😱 But seriously, did anyone involved in the social web seriously expect this performative nonsense to work? #B416

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  I'm reading a 2023 piece about a visit to the country by a professional troll. To avoid getting derailed into a discussion about the particular issue this troll uses as bait, I won't give details. But the piece argues - as did many at the time - that those who staged an aggressive counter-protest did a Good Thing(™️). My argument is that they were morally right - I think the underlying position they were protesting for is unassailable - but strategically wrong. Why? Let's unpack this...

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  "AI is not an inevitable force that we need to react to, but these are highly political decisions that need to be made." #FrederikeKaltheuner, 2026 https://www.techpolicy.press/is-europe-getting-ai-wrong/ I want this on a t-shirt! It's a timely rebuttal to the almost religious mania gripping the political class, with deeply distributing consequences on the ground, as described by Nikhil Suresh; https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/ #E...

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  "... China now restricting access to certain open source models." #MaximilianNegele, 2026 If all the points in the OSD (Open Source Definition) are being followed, access can't be restricted. So if it can be restricted, it's not Open Source, by definition. At least, that was the case, until Stefano Maffulli, as director of OSI, led the charge on drafting a new definition for "Open Source AI", by watering down the OSD until some MOLE training fit into it. *sigh* #O...

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  "Within that broader launch, the one substantive new policy announcement was a proposed one-year moratorium on new AI data centre consents." #HenryOliver, 2026 https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin/27-07-2026/a-green-party-for-all-of-us The Greens like to present themselves as radicals, but this is incrementalism writ large. To those of us closely following the disasterclasses of the #MOLE Training industry, this policy is about as ambitious as a 1 year moratorium on fossil fuel exp...

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  "Direct action, what is it? Does it work? Yes." #RobbieNicol, Citizen's Handbook, s02ep5, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1GW52tsgZg Although scholars from Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa at Otago University have collected copious evidence that it's *nonviolent* direct action that leads to the most lasting positive change. It's the combination of willful violation of unjust rules, and a commitment to protect living things - including people - that gives it potency. #DirectA...

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  "However, some projects simply do not have an easy way to tack on the AI label, or the person advocating for them either does not want to lie or has not understood that lying has become necessary. In all cases, this either kills the request for funding outright, or adds a pervasive and intractable drag on all communications, as every request must be worked and re-worked until it is 'AI enough'." #NikhilSuresh, 2026 https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glob...

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  "Being a software engineer, he got to spend a little bit of time backstage with the developers, whereupon they revealed that most of the demos were faked ... Didn't stop them spouting absolute gibberish to a breathless audience for an hour though! I blame not the engineers, who probably tried to actually get the damn thing to work, but the lying blowhards who insisted that they must make the presentation or presumably be terminated." #NikhilSuresh, 2024 https://ludic.mataroa.blog...

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  I don't mean to take a crack at musicians for making strategic decisions within the constraints of the world as it is. But I do think it's ironic to search for subversive, localist bands, and find them only on one corporate hosting platform; https://traumaparty.bandcamp.com/album/ ... and not on any of the, non-corporate hosting services searched by Unstream https://unstream.stream/?q=trauma%2Bparty How can we make discovering and using these independent services easier for our musi...

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  Anyone tried this Matrix<>ActivityPub bridge? "Turns your Matrix server into a fully functioning ActivityPub server. Matrix users can post, follow, reply, react, and DM across the fediverse using ordinary Matrix rooms and clients. No separate account or server needed." https://github.com/Haven-Organization/matrix-appservice-activitypub @evan@cosocial.ca #Matrix #ActivityPub

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  "Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources - even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case." #DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (1/?) #eurocentrism

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  Strap in for another mega-thread of quotes and reflections folks. I just started reading The Dawn of Everything, by the late David Graeber, and David Wengrow. My first reflection is that whether or not institutions support them, we need more anthropologists like Graeber. Researchers willing to question entrenched narratives and go where the evidence takes them. If you're that way inclined, I recommend Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology; https://theanarchistlibrary.org/lib...

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  #TIL about #Harmony, a bleeding-edge project to build a decentralised replacement for Miscord using ActivityPub, E2EE using Vodozemac, a cryptography library used in Matrix software; https://joinharmony.app/ Source code is on GritHub, under AGPL; https://github.com/zcharef/harmony Anyone know anything about this? So far I haven't been able to find fediverse accounts for the project itself, or the creator. #fediverse #ActivityPub #Vodozemac #Matrix

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  “You can dislike his politics, you can envy his money, you can be appalled at some of his misjudgments as a broadcaster, but he is so damned likeable.” #AudreyYoung, Senior Political Correspondent, NZ Herald, 2026 https://thespinoff.co.nz/media/17-07-2026/new-zealands-media-has-been-gripped-by-paul-henry-mania More evidence of the news media's manifest left-wing bias. If a journalist heaped praise on a new Green or TPM candidate like this - let alone a *senior* political correspondent - w...

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  Fukkit. I think I have the 'rona. I've been in bed sick all week, coughing and sneezing up slimy liquids, and this morning I can't taste my cup of tea. Not much I can do except stay in bed, avoid my flatmates, and wait for it to burn out.

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  And in today's edition of staring into the abyss in growing horror; "On Monday, Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children and a victim of Grok deepfakes, told the Guardian she felt 'horrified and violated' after Musk’s fans undressed pictures of her as a child. She felt she was being punished for speaking up against the billionaire, from whom she is estranged, describing the images as revenge porn." #AmeliaGentleman, #HelenaHorton, 2026 https://www.theguardia...

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  I'm forever finding myself trying to free up space on a digital storage medium. If all files took up roughly the same amount of space, then as with piles of paper, there would be no alternative to just sorting through them looking for stuff I don't need. But digital files can be anything from a few KB to several GBs, and the upper size limit is increasing all the time. I'd love a simple-to-use tool that presented the files anywhere in a drive, from biggest to smallest, ignoring fol...

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  After years of people raving about John Wick, I finally got around to watching it. I'm aware I'm very much in the minority here, but honestly, I don't see what the fuss is about. The story boils down to ex-hitman's wife dies, dumb gangster messes with him, ex-hitman takes revenge. That's pretty much it. Sure, the action scenes are nicely done. But the same is true of plenty of other movies before and since that have much more compelling stories to frame the action. #JohnWic...

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  @Sheril@mastodon.social > I just finished Pluribus and found it a very thoughtful exploration of humanity, loneliness, love, and individualism vs a collective hive mind That's a great description. I've been getting sick of the action adventure and superhero variants of scifi movies/ TV for a while now, and craving more thoughtful concept stuff like Arrival. Pluribus fits the bill perfectly. A simple premise that allows the writers to explore all the concepts you mention and many mor...

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  @theleftistlawyer@mastodon.social > do not try to talk your way out of an arrest or detention. Do NOT talk to cops Don't try to appeal to their humanity either. If they have any left it's so deeply suppressed by their indoctrination ... er ... training and the context of their working environment, it can't be reached. I made this mistake as a younger activist, and inadvertently leaked info that they could have used to hurt our movement. Just imagine they're robots, and say n...

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  "... sacredness is a stance toward the world, not an inherent quality of some bits of it; ... adopting the stance that everything is sacred generally leads to better outcomes than the stance that nothing is sacred." #DavidChapman https://vividness.live/sutra-tantra-and-the-modern-worldview #sacredness

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  Kia ora fedizens, a few months ago I was shoulder-tapped to take on stewardship of fediverse.party. One of a bunch of websites that aim to gather lots of useful info about the fediverse in one place. This is a project I've been a casual contributor to for years, and I really want to see it maintained. So I said yes. (1/2) #fediverse #FediverseParty

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  I've never been a fan of Linkin Park. I tend to like music that has at least some social commentary (Rage, Tool, System), and as with Korn, I tended to find Linkin Park turgid and self-indulgent. But over the past week, I've been supporting a close friend through an intense life crisis, which has led me to completely reevaluate LP. One Step Closer and Falling could both have been written about my friend's situation, and they found listening to those songs very validating...