Posts by festal@tldr.nettime.org
(DIR) Post #Au72RyKPZoSKSu0LuS by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-05-15T08:30:48Z
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@tomjennings efficiency is the opposite of resilience. Assume the best case and plan only for that.
(DIR) Post #AuR4orIhpXQr30FRk8 by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-05-22T08:47:23Z
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Is "causal AI" an actual thing? Or is the claim to be able to move beyond mere pattern recognition towards an understanding of the underlying mechanism that produce the pattern just marketing?
(DIR) Post #AvE6Yw6k2IPpsonE6y by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-06-17T10:22:42Z
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For a perfect encapsulation of the spirit and aesthetics of the historical moment the US is experiencing, check out this video!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMftwmyW-ASocial and climate breakdown, all turned into a betting opportunity, rendered through AI slop. A real commercial, produced for cheap, but aired for big money on TV during a prime sports event. For some background: https://pjace.beehiiv.com/p/i-can-t-believe-disney-allowed-us-to-run-this-ai-ad-during-the-nba-finals-f77e73388ab4ca62
(DIR) Post #AvEQAVYv4uWHgebOoi by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-06-17T19:51:41Z
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@tomjennings I agree, I was wondering if I should propagate that, but then again, it's really a revealing piece. Not of anything we haven't known, but in such a condensed way. Like unfiltered collective subconscious. I agree even more with defense mechanisms. TLDR is part of mine. Not that it was planned like that, but turned out like that, for now
(DIR) Post #AvMQIyji32iFkYMqmW by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-06-21T13:41:09Z
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Oh yeah, fast track model collapse!
(DIR) Post #AvflnysC15YDZ71MtE by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-06-30T11:59:33Z
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The AI headlines write themselves (though not exactly the way the techbros imagine),The AI Company Zuckerberg Just Poured $14 Billion Into Is Reportedly a Clown Show of Ludicrous Incompetencehttps://futurism.com/scale-ai-zuckerberg-incompetence
(DIR) Post #Avflo6rQJpgmL2irnk by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-06-30T12:18:39Z
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"The program also got a little taste of the technology it was helping to create. Spammers were submitting so much AI-generated junk that supervisors were advised to use a tool called ZeroGPT, intended to detects ChatGPT usage, to vet entries."
(DIR) Post #AwKqAIMyKyGfP18GaO by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-07-20T09:52:57Z
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I fear that "Resisting AI" will lock us into a fundamentally losing battle, the same way that "Protecting Privacy" does. It's not that the political ends are wrong, but the means are conceptually inadequate. It locks us into a battle where we might achieve a few tactical wins, while the overall situation is deteriorating all the time. At the same time, it's obvious that "protecting privacy" is one of the few institutionalized ways we can push for non-market values in the digital context. So it would be foolish to give this up. But it still locks us into a battle we cannot win.For privacy, see this article by @malteengeler and others.https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13671
(DIR) Post #AwMAfFvNfc6b2PE8yu by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-07-21T11:27:44Z
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@tomjennings @malteengeler For me, the most amazing thing is, and this is different on Europe, is that Trump has managed to forge an surprisingly diverse coalition (TechBros, wealthy Chamber-of-commerce-types, disaffected working class, radical Christians, nationalists, racists etc.). All united, for different reasons, against the liberal elites, protection of minorities, and the rule-bound administration.And what do we have? Fights within feminism (TERF vs Trans) and impossibly high demands to realize the new world within our movements first, and a conservative desire to return to the 1990s. For me, the elephant in the room is climate change. The US right managed to articulate a "coherent" program: build walls against the South, capture the North, and bet on AI to magically solve all problems through super-intelligence. And what do we have? The center is saying climate change will kill us, but we can't do anything about it. The left is into organic farming and recycling. Basically identity politics as personal virtue signaling. I thought the experience of living in an ecologically precarious world might provide a new framework for solidarity, but minus-sum games are tearing things apart.
(DIR) Post #AwcuHXw325HBirFrhg by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-07-29T12:48:19Z
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It's hilarious. Contemporary techno-culture is such a mess; there's hope it will break down under its own ineptitude. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/07/openais-chatgpt-agent-casually-clicks-through-i-am-not-a-robot-verification-test/
(DIR) Post #Ay8UPt1c5ikg90VAMS by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-12T08:22:48Z
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Many of the founders of modern statistics were strong advocates for eugenics. While we associate this view with the right, Carl Pearson (1857–1936) was a socialist. And not the only one.So, this is not simply a question of political ideology. Rather, there is a deep, historical affiliation between statistics and eugenics that we see play out again today. This is widely noted.I wonder, though, where this comes from. Does statistics lead to eugenics, or is statistics attractive to eugenics for making it sound more rational? Or are both the consequences of an underlying worldview that favors abstraction and optimization?
(DIR) Post #AyICn5Y9ydSUHu5jlo by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-17T08:40:23Z
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I wasn't aware that, in addition to Bolsonaro, many top military officials were sentenced as well. 24 years for a general and former minister of defense. That is an astounding assertion of the rule of law.https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/15/brazil-reacts-to-bolsonaro-verdict/
(DIR) Post #AyOdYM2MG9VUmxAteK by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-20T10:29:04Z
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I'm fascinated by this image. Meta's planned 5GW Hyperion Data Center overlaid on Manhattan to demonstrate its size. If you ever needed an image of how digital colonialism looks at home, here it is. And, remember, Zuckerberg published it himself. Btw, 5 GW requires 5 dedicated nuclear power plants (probably more if you factor in redundancy).https://www.threads.com/@zuck/post/DMF6tMAxkX8?xmt=AQF0I6-Ctn0leigUTf6ExxSz9KzG2zhB17D-AQ5kfFzBZQ
(DIR) Post #AyOdYOlo693BGUSDlg by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-20T10:48:23Z
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@malteengeler In this image: the borough of Manhattan, with all its people and history, is eradicated by the new plantation, Meta's data center. Colonialism, as I understand it, is the political regime of the economic system of extractivism. Today, it is no longer structured along geographic lines of center/periphery.
(DIR) Post #AyOdYTkvYqJkjD55ai by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-20T10:42:03Z
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Reminds me of the infamous Crush ad from Apple.https://x.com/tim_cook/status/1787864325258162239
(DIR) Post #Az4xkApIjSEOd9vPyi by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-07T20:51:32Z
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Are there any good studies on disinformation campaigns that aim at influencing LLMs through injecting biased training data? There must be tons of projects working in this direction.On the art side, Herndon/Dryhurst's project xhairymutant is doing something like this.
(DIR) Post #Az4xkC7luGbGejZgPI by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-10T12:19:28Z
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OK, it's trivially easy. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/its_trivially_easy_to_poison/
(DIR) Post #AzPFSvA5P8IZScliTY by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-20T08:14:21Z
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OK. #signal is down. And it seems to be an issue with Amazon Web Services. Not the end of the world, but a reminder that a centralized cloud is a single point of failure. https://aboutsignal.com/news/outage-at-signal-and-several-other-online-services/
(DIR) Post #B1BGw2SazNXJipEY40 by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-12T14:25:53Z
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@tante True. But it's also a question of whether there are any constraining factors to capitalism's logic in place, or if they have all been removed. And it's the latter that @pluralistic talks about.
(DIR) Post #B1vmfnk6LLC5iPdPAO by festal@tldr.nettime.org
2026-01-03T13:32:02Z
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@nettime_mod I know, not fediverse in the narrow sense, but close to the politics of TLDR.I would like to donate to the fundraiser for Paulina Borsook. She wrote the definitive critique of Silicon Valley in 2001"Cyberselfish A Critical Romp Through The Terribly Libertarian Culture Of High Tech".It was so radical (and accurate) that it made her a persona-non-grata in Silicon Valley, where she lives, and effectively ended her career as a writer.She is now ill and in need of help. https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-paulina-disabled-writer-artist-and-activist