Italian Dockworkers Threaten to ‘Shut Down All of Europe’ If Gaza Aid Flotilla Is Blocked
Italian dockworkers have threatened to “shut down all of Europe” and block all shipments to Israel if communication with the latest aid flotilla bound for Gaza is lost. The threat marks a significant escalation in dockworkers’ long history of industrial action in solidarity with Palestine.
Speaking at a procession in the port of Genoa – one of Italy’s two largest commercial ports – on behalf of the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), a syndicate of various grassroots unions in Italy and thought to be the largest of its kind, the dockworker said: “If we lose contact with our boats, with our comrades – even for just 20 minutes – we will shut down all of Europe.”
“Our young women and men must come back without a scratch, and all this cargo, which belongs to the people and is going to the people, must reach its destination, down to the very last box.”
“13,000-14,000 containers leave this region every year for Israel. Not a single nail will leave anymore,” he continued.
Italian Dockworkers Threaten to ‘Shut Down All of Europe’ If Gaza Aid Flotilla Is Blocked
A union representing dockworkers at one of the largest ports in the Mediterranean - a key stopping point for Israeli goods - has said it will ‘block everything’ if Israel stops the inbound aid flotilla. Polly Smythe reports.Novara Media
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Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
Five years ago, Google’s climate action ambitions were the gold standard for Big Tech. Then, with power demand spikes from AI data centres, in July it scrubbed its sustainability website of its 2030 net zero pledge.Canada's National Observer
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New Lloyd’s boss signals shift on insuring fossil fuels | Patrick Tiernan says market will no longer discourage underwriting of such projects
New Lloyd’s boss signals shift on insuring fossil fuels
Patrick Tiernan says market will no longer discourage underwriting of such projects, stressing ‘apolitical’ stanceJulia Kollewe (The Guardian)
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Debate Over Key Climate Change Program Continues In Sacramento [California state capital]
Debate Over Key Climate Change Program Continues In Sacramento | KQED
Lawmakers are debating how to extend the state's cap and trade program amid rising energy costs.www.kqed.org
UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36865760
UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost
UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost
: AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complexPaul Kunert (The Register)
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According to the M365 Copilot monitoring dashboard made available in the trial, an average of 72 M365 Copilot actions were taken per user."Based on there being 63 working days during the pilot, this is an average of 1.14 M365 Copilot actions taken per user per day," the study says. Word, Teams, and Outlook were the most used, and Loop and OneNote usage rates were described as "very low," less than 1 percent and 3 percent per day, respectively.
Yeah that probably won't have the intended effect...this basically just shows that AI assistants provide no benefit when they're not used and nothing else.
I'm not defending it or attacking it, mearly saying that
They probably did multiple queries per day at the beginning, found out it isn't worth it and stopped using it ...
Isnt supported by the information given. The GP gave a story they made up about how usage would be falling based on nothing at all, I gave two other alternate stories about how it could be either rising in usage or remaining flat to demonstrate that we cannot say anything about rate of change from a single average.
It's also possible a handful of power users use it a ton and found value, while the quiet majority only used it a few times because they were required to and didn't see value.
We need more details to draw conclusions. For example:
- what types of tasks did people use it for? What roles did they have?
- what does the distribution of usage look like? What's the median number of uses? What's the average of users within one standard deviation?
- were they forced to meet some quota of uses, or were they left to choose on their own?
- what did the initial training look like?
I'm not saying AI specifically is useful, just that people in general tend to resist change in their work methods regardless of what they are.
I also work with a lot of proprietary knowledge, chemical and infrastructure in my case, and AI still can be useful when used properly. We use a local model and have provided it with all our internal docs and specs, and limited answers to knowledge from these, so we can search thousands of documents much faster, and it links to the sources for it's answers.
Doesn't do my job for me, but it sure as shit makes it easier to have a proper internal search engine that can access information inside documents and not just the titles.
Then maybe it's not useful for you. That doesn't mean AI isn't useful for a number of other roles.
I'm a software developer and find its code generation to be awful, but I also find that it's great at looking up technical information. Maybe I'm looking for a library to accomplish a task, and I want to compare features. Or maybe I'm having trouble finding usage examples for a relatively niche library. Those are task the AI is great at, because it can look at tons of blog posts, stack overflow questions, etc, and generate me something reasonable that I can verify against official docs.
If my workflow was. mostly email and internal documentation, yeah, AI wouldn't be that useful. If my workflow relies on existing documentation that's perhaps a little hard to find or a bit poor, then AI is great. Find the right use case and it can save time.
Then maybe it’s not useful for you. That doesn’t mean AI isn’t useful for a number of other roles.
Case in point, as per the article, AI is pretty useless for regular office work
not sure there is any research done by people using office suite...
it sounds like you are conflating LLM in general with the crappy copilot that MS offers with the office suite
an LLM could be useful for research of large (large) datasets... Copilot would not be
We have it on our system at work. When we asked what management expected it to be used for they didn't have an answer.
We have a shell script that ingests a list of user IDs and resets their active directory passwords, then locks the account, then sends them an email telling them to contact the support desk to unlock the account. It a cron job that runs ever Monday morning.
Why do a need an AI for when we can just use that? A script that can be easily read understood and upgraded, with no concerns about it going off-piste and doing something random and unpredictable.
So yeah, they don't use it, because it won't work.
Worth noting the average includes the people who did use it a lot too.
So you can conclude people basically did not use it at all.
.this basically just shows that AI assistants provide no benefit when they're not used and nothing else.
so you think they may be useful but people just like to work harder? or perhps, they tried and saw no benefit at all and moved on?
That depends on the issue. Sometimes it's a lack of training, sometimes it's obtuse software. That's a call the product owner needs to make.
For something like AI, it does take some practice to learn what it's good at and what it's not good at. So there's always going to be some amount of training needed before user complaints should be taken at face value. That's true for most tools, I wouldn't expect someone to jump in to my workflow and be productive, because many of the tools I use require a fair amount of learning to use properly. That doesn't mean the tools are bad, it just means they're complex.
I've occasionally been part of training hourly workers on software new to them. Having really, really detailed work instructions and walking through all the steps with themthe first time has helped me win over people who were initially really opposed to the products.
My experience with salaried workers has been they are more likely to try new software on their own, but if they don't have much flexible time they usually choose to keep doing the established less efficient routine over investing one-time learning curve and setup time to start a new more efficient routine. Myself included - I have for many years been aware of software my employer provides that would reduce the time spent on regular tasks, but I know the learning curve and setup is in the dozens of hours, and I haven't carved out time to do that.
So to answer the question, neither. The problem may be neither the software nor the users, but something else about the work environment.
The devil is in the details... what you describe screams to me what I call the "new boss syndrome". New boss comes in and they feel the need to pee on everyone to mark their territory so they MUST bring in some genius change.
99% of the time, they are bringing in some forced change for the sake of change or something that worked on their previous place without taking into consideration the context.
I do not know anyone who prefers to work harder... either the changes proposed make no sense (or it's too complex for people to understand the benefit) or the change is superfluous. That is usually where resistance to change comes from.
From reading the study, it seems like the workers didn't even use it. Less than 2 queries per day? A third of participants used it once per week?
This is a study of resistance to change or of malicious compliance. Or maybe it's a study of how people react when you're obviously trying to take their jobs.
I don't think it's people being resistant to change I think it's people understanding the technology isn't useful. The tagline explains it best.
AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex
It's a gimmick, not a fully fleshed out productivity tool, of course no one uses it. That's like complaining that no one uses MS paint for the production of a high quality graphics.
Absolutely, and it's a massive and undeserved cash cow for AI companies (e.g. Sam "Sister-Lovin'" Altman).
AI is never an investment for businesses or individual users. It's a bloated and unfulfillable promise that just makes users dumb, dependant, and destroys the very environment we need to survive.
It also produces bad products (it's easy to tell which devs use it from reviewing poor quality code).
Not to mention the centralisation of power with the rich who are the problem in this world.
The figures are the averages for the full trial period.
So it’s possible they were making more queries at the start of the trial, but then mostly stopped when if they found using Copilot was more a hindrance than a help.
I have a Copilot license at work. We also have an in house „ChatGPT clone“ - basically a private deployment of that model so that (hopefully) no input data gets used to train the models.
There are some usecases that are neat. E.g. we’re a multilingual team, so having it transcribe, translate (and summarize) a meeting so that it’s easier to finalize and check a protocol. Coming back from a vacation and just ask it summarize everything you missed for a specific area of your work (to get on track before just checking everything chronologically) can be nice, too.
Also we finetuned a model to assist us in writing and explaining code from a domain specific language with many strange quirks that we use for a tool and that has poor support from off the shelf LLMs.
But all of these cases have one thing in common: They do not replace the actual work and are things that will be checked anyways (even the code one, as we know there are still many flaws, but it’s usually great at explaining the code now - not so at writing it). It’s just a convenient method to check your own work - and LLM hallucinations will usually be caught anyway.
Just saying, ending comments with "..." doesn't make them look smarter.
Which specifically, accepted by most communists, should I read? Will that something allow a model different than that of classes and formations and dialectic materialism? If not, then it is reductionist.
Just saying, ending comments with "..." doesn't make them look smarter.
You seem mad...
OK, then - no, not capitalism. Expectation of truth will fuck us. All the stabilizers of the humanity were built reliant on that - if it looks like a duck and so on. It doesn't work anymore. Can't blame something on capitalism if with other things equal the change affects capitalist and socialist systems similarly.
Also a new world war seemed like something slowly rolling, with tanks and cargo ships and propaganda speeches.
What people don't understand is the sheer scale and precision of operations available today. You can prepare for 50 years something that will take 30 seconds, and then we will all have a different world.
I think honestly the Internet is just that - a very slow trap for the rest of the world, being sprung by some parties associated with US military/deep-state/whatever first, and then being continued by Silicon Valley powers that be, only with their own dreams for it.
that's pretty much where we are now
shit minimum wage, corporations owning housing, and monopolies in pretty much every market. it's just slavery with the illusion of freedom because you can choose which shitty apartment building to live in for over half your income, and which franchise stores you shop at, while your essentials are getting price gouged and constantly worse quality for higher cost, yet the workers don't make more
that's just slavery with extra steps
If you can be in three meetings at once with AI then every single one of those meetings could have been an email
Or a group chat
There's meetings other people need to have and I just need to know broadly what was said. Transcription and summerizing would be great for that
That is, if I could trust its accuracy. Which I don't.
Because they don't know how to use it.
I work for the government and we're trialing Copilot too.
Yesterday I gave copilot several legal documents and our departments long term goals and asked to analyse those documents and find opportunities, legal complications and a matrix of proposed actions.
In less than 5 minutes I have a great overview to start talks with local politicians. This would have taken me at least a day before AI.
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100%. I'm also trialing Copilot at a medium-sized corpo job and it saves me roughly 12-20 hours of work per week.
I use it often in PowerShell scripting. It occasionally hallucinates and makes up commands, so sometimes it takes a bit of back and forth to get it to do what I want, but it's still a hundred times easier than writing from scratch or tweaking+combining similar scripts I find online.
Probably my favorite part is being able to ask it "Where did I leave off with John on x issue last week?" And it will remind me that I'm supposed to do x and John is supposed to do y. Or even, "I helped a user with this specific issue six months ago. How did I fix it?" and it pulls the exact email and Teams chats outlining what we did, and I can click the link to open those messages and ensure it didn't misinterperate. Way easier than digging by hand.
Finally, I absolutely hate making PowerPoints so I've been having it make all of my rough drafts from transcription notes in meetings. Super nice time saver.
Something I'm concerned about and playing with this week is pronoun usage in transcripts. I'm working with our LGBTQ ERG to ensure that we can make Copilot use preferred pronouns for everyone. If it can't, we'll need to pull back certain features.
It's far from perfect but it genuinely makes my job a lot easier and I'd hate to lose it. I think it will only get better from here.
I've show my coworkers some practical implementations of copilot and that was enough to kickstart the use.
If you're composing the same mails a lot, for example, you can ask copilot to make a template text and then when you have to compose the same email again you ask copilot to compose and personalize the mail for you. That's an awesome function.
I've made an agent that answers HR related questions of my team. This saves me and HR a lot of time and they are assured their questions are handled discrete.
If you're composing the same mails a lot, for example, you can ask copilot to make a template text and then when you have to compose the same email again you ask copilot to compose and personalize the mail for you. That's an awesome funtion.
Uhm, email templates are far older than LLM.
This template adds or deletes links to relevant webpages and adds recent figures when needed.
We've been using templates for years but this adds personality and customisation
Seeing a big uptake in use in the education sector. Teachers paying for their own ChatGPT pro license to lesson plan etc.
Can't comment at this point if that's right or wrong, you hope the teachers using it would identify hallucinations etc. But you can see there is already a change occurring.
Yeah, no shit. But they nearly doubled the price. I canceled my membership, but I doubt enough did to actually matter.
I was fine paying $60 a year for Office. I was never gonna use the AI stuff. When they said it was $100, I bailed. So now they don't get the $60. But enough people will go on paying that they will actually make more money on Office in the next year, not less.
Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets or even their feet to effect any meaningful change. At least not when it comes to their tech toys.
Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets
That and most governments are wrapped up in Windows, and therefore kinda just captive to the insane pricing. I get everything I need out of LibreOffice, personally.
The sole reason I still pay the Microsoft tax is Excel.
Other office suite components are generally good enough to fill in for their Microsoft counterparts.
But, spreadsheet programs are one area where open source competitors need to get their shit together.
Most of them can do the basics but Excel is still in a class by itself for power users and advanced functionality. That's a real bummer because I would love to stop paying the Microsoft tax.
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Our self-hosted ones are quite good and get the job done. We use them a lot for research, and it seems to do a better job than most search engines. We also link it to internal docs and it works pretty well for that too.
If you run a smaller model at home because you have limited RAM, yeah, you'll have less effective models. We can't run the top models on our hardware, but we can run much larger models than most hobbyists. We've compared against the larger commercial models, and they work well, if little slowly.
Ugh, thought this could've referred to a Trial as in "All rise for the judge", not Trial as in "Your free trial has expired".
We're way overdue to put AIs on former trials.
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"speeding up some tasks yet making others slower due to lower quality outputs"
So use it for the tasks that were made more efficient, and stop using it for the ones that slowed down or were low quality.
England Trials Smartphone Rail Payment System with Real-Time Phone Location Tracking
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36878714
England Trials Smartphone Rail Payment System with Real-Time Phone Location Tracking
Cutting-edge rail ticket technology to be trialled across the Midlands and North
Passengers can sign up for digital rail ticket trials on East Midlands Rail and Northern trains.Department for Transport (GOV.UK)
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Why do you consider the UK's ticketing system outdated? There's oyster in/around London and QR codes everywhere else.
What are you missing, is location-based surveillance what would be needed to modernise it in your opinion?
Well, there's JKR, she wrote books pretty closely describing how powerful and arbitrarily unbalanced a computerized world will be, presented as magic. But she's a TERF, so nothing she wrote apparently has value. Or maybe she's a plagiarist, so again nothing she wrote apparently has value, except her plagiarism describes well current events and its sources don't.
I don't think she did that consciously, more like felt "something" in the air. But see the priorities of the public, in her not being a nice person and her having described the future correctly.
Also see the Matrix.
In general I think it's good to remember the initial reception of everything, if you were around then. Because in a few years power dynamic (hating on JKR for being TERF, and her using her fame to promote such views, - both these are that) always regulates the image of any work into something sterile and neutered.
We've had plenty of good art predicting today, but we've been taught after some time that it's capitalist, consumerist, non-original, empty, overrated and has asshole authors.
That direction of thought is wrong. Marcus Aurelius once made a bath for his wife - filled with her lover's blood ; doesn't seem to affect the value of his philosophy. Much of the classics in music was made by order for rich people for their entertainment and prestige. Nothing is life is truly original. And whether something is empty is not decided by the public opinion, it's decided by the reader.
So. We've had some preparation. Less than desired, and impeded by the enemy, as is the expectation always. It's not decided yet.
I didn't realise jkr meant that interpretation but its definitely something to consider.
I've always believed one must separate art from the artist lest all works are reduced to nothing given enough time. People love to dismiss modern works based on the authors opinions yet everyone through history is bad by modern standards. We must judge people by the context of their time. For example both Churchill and Disney where famously antisemitic yet both are now praised for their efforts against the Nazis.
Haven't read any Marcus Aurelius I'm reading Plato at the moment so I'll add it to the list.
I don't think she consciously did, but HP definitely features abuse and misuse of authority left and right, main characters fighting and bypassing it, injustice, fascism, evil being attractive (at least in the first two books she deliberately makes the world of pure-blood wizards more "magical" than that of the rest, and Harry almost being accepted to it or thinking he would be, except that's not so), public judgement being always wrong (talking to snakes, Harry being considered cuckoo, werewolves, and what not), evil being possibly all-poweful (the Taboo spell and such), one can go on and on.
And then Harry becoming an Auror, thus sort of a magical peeler, which is a common criticism - well, law enforcement is a necessary task. In a non-degenerate system that involves preventing murder, rape, stopping human trafficking operations.
It's funny how people usually start with the HP world mechanics being bad, - unbalanced, arbitrary, calling spells out of thin air, - while that's how our world works right now, except they teach very little magic here (BTW, Racket is very cool - I'm again stalling at what I'm trying to do, though, just no willpower at all). Also notice Umbridge in the book 5, in the real world fighting evil with something you always carry with yourself and only skill being important is not a thing usually, for most intents and purposes, except computers.
sbb.ch/en/travel-information/a…
Yup, the UK once again creating a needlessly convoluted and harmful solution to an already solved problem.
I would laugh if I didn’t live here.
Ticketdienst Touch&Travel stirbt in wenigen Wochen
Die Bahn AG hat angekündigt, wann der für seine Nutzer durchaus praktische Service fürs Bus- und Bahnfahren eingestellt wird. Alternativen mit ähnlicher Bequemlichkeit fehlen.Ben Schwan (heise online)
Why they can’t just have turnstiles at the major stations ? I mean that’s how most places work anyway? If someone stays on for a further stop outside the stiles it’s only a short leg anyway.
What’s the point?
Hey...we already have that without needing to use GPS. No really, we have that, without needing to use GPS. No. Really. We have two systems in fact.
We have m-tickets. Most major train, tram and bus companies in the UK have that. You can go onto your phone and buy a ticket without the need for GPS tracking. There's also Contactless on your phone. My city has something called TapTapCap/ToTo. On the buses, you can pay for your fare by tapping on a contactless terminal and it tracks how many journeys you make and caps the fare at the price of a day ticket if you make more than three Journeys. The Trams here have ToTo which is the same deal, but you have to tap on at the smart card terminal and tap off at your destination, as long as you do that and don't go to the Airport: you get the same deal.
That can easily be implemented. Fuck, mTickets have been implimented in Scotland. All you'd need to do is adapt the smartcard terminals, which use the technology as the bus passes, to do something like taptapcap. And before you say "oooh, we couldn't possibly put Smartcard totems on remote stations or Parliamentary stations", there are smart card terminals on every station on the West Highland Line. Yes, including the Fort William to Malaig section. There are Smartcard terminals on the Far North and Kyle of Lochalsh Lines. If Scotrail can do that at places like Dunrobin Castle, GBR can put Smartcard Terminals at Drigg, no GPS surveillance required.
We do the same in my part of the US where transit kinda sucks. You just tap a credit card (or phone w/ contactless payments) or physical card w/ chip on any bus or train and it charges the appropriate amount (i.e. day pass if you exceed some amount). It's not complicated, you just tap when you get on, and tap when you get off, and as long as you use the same payment method, it just works.
It's not complicated at all. At no point is GPS tracking needed, you just need to process the payment and link them together based on the unique identifier you're already using to process payments.
So they've created a dependency on your phone's location service being always on for what reason, exactly?
Why is this not needed anywhere else that contactless payment for transit services has been successfully implemented?
England Trials Smartphone Rail Payment System with Real-Time Phone Location Tracking
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36878714
England Trials Smartphone Rail Payment System with Real-Time Phone Location Tracking
Cutting-edge rail ticket technology to be trialled across the Midlands and North
Passengers can sign up for digital rail ticket trials on East Midlands Rail and Northern trains.Department for Transport (GOV.UK)
Addressing the unauthorized issuance of multiple TLS certificates for 1.1.1.1
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36881324
::: spoiler Comments
- Hacker News.
:::
Addressing the unauthorized issuance of multiple TLS certificates for 1.1.1.1
::: spoiler Comments
- Hacker News.
:::Addressing the unauthorized issuance of multiple TLS certificates for 1.1.1.1
Unauthorized TLS certificates were issued for 1.1.1.1 by a Certification Authority without permission from Cloudflare. These rogue certificates have now been revoked. Read our blog to see how this could affect you.The Cloudflare Blog
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People prefer chatbots when buying embarrassing stuff
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36882952
People prefer chatbots when buying embarrassing stuff
Consumers prefer dealing with chatbots over humans when buying ‘embarrassing’ products online
When purchasing “embarrassing” products, consumers would rather engage with a chatbot over another human, even when they are shopping alone ...Notre Dame News
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..... What are they?
At this stage I need to ask a chatbot about what is expensive, but emberassing to buy.
a specific style of a fem biology steel chastity belt comes to mind first
it's hard to find fem biology chastity belts in the first place, and if you want one that isn't clunky? either pay an actual fortune for one from a western online store (probably a german one) or gamble your money and try to get one from a chinese retailer with 0 reviews and little media presence but significantly cheaper. another actually valid alternative is using that money to sign up for a blacksmithing course and just forge one yourself because fuck €400 is the cheapest price for like 8 pieces of metal and some wires???? (a shady chinese retailer will [probably] get you one for €100, or they might take the money and disappear forever)
Sounds like a leatherworker on old school Etsy would hook you up easy.
Metal? Fuck if I know.
I actually wish I had the time and money to do backyard blacksmithing.
I'd do something like this for cost of materials since it'd be a fun challenge.
I’m a very anxious person and I kinda liked the Taco Bell AI drive thru thing specifically because it was way less pressure even if it was annoying. There’s plenty of other stuff I simply won’t buy because I don’t want it enough to overcome my anxiety.
If the chatbots are reliable, I’d much prefer them in most shopping scenarios. So this makes sense to me.
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Non è arduo sopravvalutare la lunghezza di un anaconda. A meno che provenga dai territori settentrionali - Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri
Non è arduo sopravvalutare la lunghezza di un anaconda. A meno che provenga dai territori settentrionali - Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri
Divulgazione ed approfondimento scientifico sono due processi che nella maggior parte dei casi procedono in parallelo.Jacopo (Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri)
Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
Five years ago, Google’s climate action ambitions were the gold standard for Big Tech. Then, with power demand spikes from AI data centres, in July it scrubbed its sustainability website of its 2030 net zero pledge.Canada's National Observer
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Trump to sign executive order renaming Pentagon the Department of War
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/04/politics/department-of-war-trump-executive-order
Marking things as adult content?
I'm sure there's a lot of discussion about age-verification laws around here right now and for the sake of keeping things on topic I won't really broach the subject here, but it has gotten me thinking that there really isn't much that can be programmatically marked as adult content on the fediverse.
I haven't dived too much into researching the subject, it looks like Lemmy lets you set posts as NSFW, but most activity is centered around microblogging and that appears to have coalesced around Mastodon's approach of freeform content warnings. This seems like a disaster in the making if "don't show adult content to minors" becomes something that has to be more strictly enforced; these content warnings can be used for everything from benign spoiler warnings to very obviously signposting sexually explicit fetish content. Computers can't really understand this level of nuance unless you throw something that does natural language processing at it, and that will almost certainly come up with a lot of false positives and wasted energy in the process; I can't imagine this going over well with anyone really.
So, I've been wondering, how difficult would it be to standardize a separate mature-content warning from the content warnings currently in place? This idea has clearly been floated before (see this issue on Mastodon's GitHub and this blog post written by someone who was a minor and directly affected by this issue at the time) but I haven't actually seen any work towards anything beyond paying lip service to the subject. Maybe it could be a boolean toggle, like how the former Cohost did it (on top of content warnings) or something closer to how Bluesky does it where you have a few set moderation labels that you can apply yourself (see below).
We could also consider moving this distinction beyond posts; the Mastodon issue that I linked above also mentioned applying this to users and even entire instances.
There are a few caveats here in that people historically don't really appreciate being hidden/deboosted for posting adult works, and there is the potential for backlash if something gets marked as adult when it really isn't. I'm not entirely sure how this could be addressed beyond leaving this to implementers and maybe leaving some strong advice to be understanding and not shove people in a corner because they draw kink art for example.
I'd definitely appreciate more thoughts on the subject, please let me know what you think.
NSFW account and instance declaration and NSFW mode
As adult instances are becoming more popular and their reach through the fediverse grows, content on those instances are making their way into the lives of those who are not wanting to see it or ar...Humblr (GitHub)
Hi! We’re actually working on a specification for content labels:
github.com/swicg/activitypub-t…
essentially a Note (or other object ) can have many labels associated with it, and these labels would exist as part of well known vocabularies, such that software can give users better choice over what they see and don't see.
Yes, that does mean software may provide methods of complying with age verification laws may mean certain categories of content are unavailable without some form of age verification (but that's between you, your server software, and you instance administrator as to what that is). Currently there are some tools for instance administrators, particularly of mastodon to completely filter certain content from their servers, making their servers somewhat explicitly child-friendly.
This would also allow for third-party labellers in the future if needed (through annotations), which allow for bluesky style labellers which can catch content not self-labelled.
I want to stress that the goal of content labels is not to moderate the adult content nor queerness from the fediverse, but rather to give creators and consumers of content more control over what they publish and who sees it or what they see.
It is unfortunate and terrible the way that age verification is being rolled out as a means to censorship and authoritarianism, and these laws should be fought in the courts and politically to be repealed or changed. Adults must be able to exist on the internet, not everything is for children.
Workstream: Content Warnings, Labels and Annotations
Issues currently within scope of this workstream are: #1 #4 (issue locked, but where discussion started) #84 There will be future issues for both our recommendation regarding content warnings and a...ThisIsMissEm (GitHub)
Tech companies pledge to ready Americans for an AI-dominated world
Tech companies pledge to ready Americans for an AI-dominated world
The White House is hosting tech CEOs for an event on AI education.Lauren Feiner (The Verge)
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And Amazon says it will help train 4 million people in AI skills and “enable AI curricula” for 10,000 educators in the US by 2028, while offering $30 million in AWS credits for organizations using cloud and AI tech in education.
So, at some point, we do have to move on policy, but frankly, I have a really hard time trying to predict what skillset will be particularly relevant to AI in ten years. I have a hard time knowing exactly what the state of AI itself will be in ten years.
Like, sure, in 2025, it's useful to learn the quirks and characteristics of LLMs or diffusion models to do things with them. I could sit down and tell people some of the things that I've run into. But...that knowledge also becomes obsolete very quickly. A lot of the issues and useful knowledge for, working with, say, Stable Diffusion 1.5 are essentially irrelevant as regards Flux. For LLMs, I strongly suspect that there are going to be dramatic changes surrounding reasoning, and retaining context. Like, if you put education time into training people on that, you run the risk that they don't learn stuff that's relevant over the longer haul.
There have been major changes in how all of this works over the past few years, and I think that it is very likely that there will be continuing major changes.
I agree, I looked into some AI stuff and it was really complex.
I’ve seen this story before and that complex stuff kind goes away and then it was a waste of time learning it.
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BenderNet - a demo app for using Qwen3 1.7b q4f16 with web-llm
GitHub - gajananpp/bendernet: An AI-powered data query assistant featuring Bender from Futurama - completely client-side with WebLLM
An AI-powered data query assistant featuring Bender from Futurama - completely client-side with WebLLM - gajananpp/bendernetGitHub
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BenderNet - a demo app for using Qwen3 1.7b q4f16 with web-llm
GitHub - gajananpp/bendernet: An AI-powered data query assistant featuring Bender from Futurama - completely client-side with WebLLM
An AI-powered data query assistant featuring Bender from Futurama - completely client-side with WebLLM - gajananpp/bendernetGitHub
WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed
WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed - News
Engineers prove their technique is effective even with the lowest-cost WiFi devicesEmily Cerf (News)
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Damn. “TikTok would like to access WiFi”
We need new permissions for this shit. WiFi can do presence detection and now heart rate? What next? Eye tracking?
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Apps watch how we move/rotate devices to understand whether we’re walking, resting, lying down, etc., I assume? (The most popular apps I mean with large data teams)
Wish that stuff could be turned off unless it was e.g. a game that made legitimate use of the accelerometer.
I'm pretty sure applications can only send and receive data, with the finer details being handled by the OS.
But yes, there should be a specific permission to access biometric information.
neurology.columbia.edu/news/mi…
We already live in a world with existing, functional mind-reading devices. There is even a device designed to help people that are suffering from ALS communicate by reading their thoughts, and has a privacy feature where the user can activate and deactivate the device by thinking a password in their mind, in order to allow them to still have private thoughts.
scientificamerican.com/article…
Phones are not fMRIs though.
New Brain Device Is First to Read Out Inner Speech
A new brain prosthesis can read out inner thoughts in real time, helping people with ALS and brain stem stroke communicate fast and comfortablyEmma R. Hasson (Scientific American)
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robo voice: There are 352 hot, single women in your area.
robo voice: 350 of them have a pulse.
People do not have that distinct cardiac ECG profiles, and it would be wrong after one coffee.
Holy shit the US state paranoia in the sub. Buy more guns.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/…
I wouldn't be as sure about that as you are
Biometric Recognition: A Systematic Review on Electrocardiogram Data Acquisition Methods - PMC
In the last decades, researchers have shown the potential of using Electrocardiogram (ECG) as a biometric trait due to its uniqueness and hidden nature. However, despite the great number of approaches found in the literature, no agreement exists on .pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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Hm I'm not sure I'd say it's perfect? I thought 70-80 was?
My cardiologist said it isn't really "danger zone", but if it were like 100+ it might be concerning.
I have had all the scans done, including a close look at my hearteries, and everything came back (surprisingly) clean.
I was referencing digital price labels that retailers are installing.
This technology is being touted by the companies putting them in place to be a cost saving measure as staff no longer need to print new labels and manually replace them for products on the shelf. This is true in that it is a benefit of digital labelling, however there are many other usage options that could be implemented after installation.
- alter prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
- automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
- increases simply as stock begins running low
Imagine in a few years when this technology is combined with network snooping of phone identification, loyalty rewards card purchase histories, and automatic buying of customer information from data brokers, all to create a profile that predicts when a person would be likely to be menstruating and the moment they walk in the store, the hygienic products they buy every month raise in price by 30%.
It's a bleak future I'm afraid.
Good point. A US department store chain -- Kohl's -- has been using electronic shelf labels that change several times per day. Not sure how they handle the discrepancies.
How do I prove the product was prices $1 when I picked it up if the label now says $2? Is it my responsibility to notice the register price was different?
I more or less avoided Kohl's, so I'm not sure how that was handled.
The only solution for that which I see is taking photos of the labels for every product taken off the shelf, but that's quite the imposition obviously. Trouble is there are no laws guiding these practices, and the result is going to be quite the mess for customers to understand.
In my opinion, the best purchasing experience for this type of shopping is using a handheld device with which you both scan the product as you take it off the shelf, and also process payment on your way to the exit. No cashier lines, and even better, no more unloading and repacking of your items just to purchase them. From the shelf into your bag, only back out again in your kitchen.
On another note, it boggles my mind to see the square footage used by all these self checkout machines when these terminal systems exist. Sadly I've never used one in North America. This is an aspect of shopping that could make me loyal to a single vendor. I would actually install the vendor's phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
- YouTube
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I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
I think you’re right, but I dread it. I avoid installing apps. The thought of installing even more tracking for multiple vendors annoys me.
Although I am resistant, your point about bagging once is a true benefit.
One downside, that system doesn’t seem to support cash.
I didn't give the privacy concern much thought in the moment, mainly thinking how useless and poorly designed those apps usually are, but I do agree.
Considering it now, I do have loyalty cards in my company vehicle for certain things, primarily fuel, and those of course remain in that vehicle as they serve no other purpose. Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. Though ideally I'd imagine a few dedicated handheld terminals kept in store for redundancy purposes.
Speaking of redundancy, you're right about paying in cash. Perhaps as easy as a 'cash' button and it would send the purchase total to a customer service desk. Around here, all grocers have a 'cashier' desk where you get lottery tickets and gift cards and such.
Though it would be funny to see these handheld terminals have a compartment to accept notes and coins haha.
This tech scares the hell out of me.
Great if we can make MRI quality imaging eventually available, but being able to monitor where people are in their homes remotely and their health status in our world is fucking dangerous.
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Real question: how do you stop this?
I don't use wifi at all in my home but I live in an apartment and all my neighbours obviously do.
How in the hell do I stop this from getting into my home?
So if you don't want someone to measure your heartbeat and to physically know where you are at all times your only option is to cover your entire living area, including the windows, in aluminum foil?
I guess what I'm getting at here is that this situation is deeply, deeply fucked.
Your neighbors WIFI signals are too weak to matter in this case. Even if they were strong enough, this is a receiver-transmitter setup, so it would still be impossible to do unless you connect to their network. Even then, they’d have to assume you’re the only person present between the transmitter and the receiver.
Presence detection through WIFI was already garbage enough, this one is plain unusable.
Good to know.
The stuff I've read about recently tracking movements using wifi - would this need more powerful radio waves than most people use or no?
In a world where private health care is the norm, yes. It’s scary.
In a world where Public health care is the main provider of health it isn’t.
Yeah I'm with you.
"Using this technological advancement to improve health care is good"
"Not in countries where health care is publicly run"
"What" is the correct response here.
If we think about the applications of the technology to the benefit of someone’s health I think it’s really cool.
Needless to say it does pose a risk to our privacy and data security if used with an intention to monitor ones health without their consent.
Inb4 the cops starts doing nonconsensual "polygraph tests" using wifi
Those 5G Conspiracy Theorists probably feel vindicated after reading this lol
Those 5G Conspiracy Theorists probably feel vindicated after reading this lol
I rather think they will be let down, given we're on wifi 7, not 5G, and also no injected nanites were involved.
wballiance.com/wp-content/uplo…
Comcast knows when you masturbate.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=4zH9Zca1…
- YouTube
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The Paper: ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/d…
This is very cool and useful, but at the same time very concerning. While I see a lot of good use cases for this ranging from hospitals to stress recognition in animals I Am also quite scared, that big corporations will use this to spy on us. Luckily currently it is only possible to measure the pulse at about 3m, but it should be possible to increase the range. It may fall short when multiple persons are in detection range, but as far as I have read from the paper they did not test this.
Pulse-Fi: A Low-Cost System for Accurate Heart Rate Monitoring Using Wi-Fi Channel State Information
Non-intrusive monitoring of vital signs has become increasingly important in various healthcare settings.ieeexplore.ieee.org
And there's a lot of someones.
Article is paywalled for me.
Does it describe the methodology of how they use the transmitter and receiver?
What specifically are they transmitting? Is it actually wifi signals within the 802.11 protocols, or is "wifi" just shorthand for emitting radio waves in the same spectrum bands as wifi?
Yeah sadly it is paywalled, but I have been lucky enough to get access to it through my university.
Heres what I found regarding your question in the article:
Fig 1 illustrates Pulse-Fi's system architecture which consists of three main components: data collection using commodity Wi-Fi devices, a CSI signal processing pipeline, and a custom lightweight Long Short Term Memory neural network for heart rate estimation.
Fig 1:
And this is the Setup they used to collect the ESP-HR-CSI Dataset (left site) and the one that other researchers used to collect the E-Health Dataset (right side):
The parts on how they collected the data:
A. ESP-HR-CSI Dataset
We collected the ESP-HR-CSI dataset from seven participants (5 male, 2 female) in a room of a public indoor library. It was collected using two ESP32 devices, one as the transmitter and the other as the receiver. The sampling rate is 80 Hz, with a 20 MHz bandwidth with 64 subcarriers positioned at different distances. Each participant was measured at distances of 1,2 and 3 m for 5 minutes each. The participants sat in a chair between the devices and wore a pulse oximeter on their finger to collect ground-truth information as seen inB. E-Health Dataset
The E-Health dataset [20] contains CSI collected from 118 participants (88 men, 30 women) in a controlled indoor environment measuring 3 m×4 m (Fig 4). The setup consists of a router set in the 5 GHz band at 80 MHz bandwidth as a transmitter, a laptop as receiver and a single-antenna Raspberry Pi 4B with NEXMON firmware for CSI data collection (234 subcarriers). Participants wore a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 for the ground truth.Each participant performed 17 standardized positions or activities, with each position held for 60 seconds.
To me it sounds like, that they really just used standard WIFI to collect the data (this is especially true for the E-Health Dataset), since all the processing gets done on the Raspberry Pi.
B. E-Health Dataset\
The E-Health dataset [20] contains CSI collected from 118 participants (88 men, 30 women) in a controlled indoor environment measuring 3 m×4 m (Fig 4). The setup consists of a router set in the 5 GHz band at 80 MHz bandwidth as a transmitter, a laptop as receiver and a single-antenna Raspberry Pi 4B with NEXMON firmware for CSI data collection (234 subcarriers). Participants wore a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 for the ground truth.
does that mean a passive observer can do all that observations? and that a raspberry pi, with its single average antenna is capable of this?
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The problem is not sharing and accessing, but generating. If we had a system where people would be paid for generating knowledge, then they wouldn't have to charge for accessing knowledge.
That's why a lot more research should be paid for by the government. In exchange, government-funded research would be excluded from having patents and/or copyright.
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love2d stavolta che gira, nonostante la octo-oriented programming!
Sorprendentemente, appena qualche ora di sonno e qualche ora di scrittura magica un pochino avanti e indietro più tardi, e ho effettivamente trovato una soluzione al problema problemoso delle prestazioni imbarazzanti di Love2D caricato di una tale OOP che non gira affatto bene su una viemmina come quella di Lua… e, anche se come previsto […]
DOJ does damage control as staffer admits Republicans will be redacted from Epstein files
DOJ does damage control as staffer admits Republicans will be redacted from Epstein files
The Department of Justice attempted to do damage control after conservative political activist James O'Keefe released a video of a staffer claiming the government would "redact every Republican" from files about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.David Edwards (Raw Story)
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The United Nations Turns Eighty
The United Nations Turns Eighty
By Vijay Prashad on September 4, 2025 At eighty, the United Nations is bogged down by structural limitations and political divisions that render it powerless to act decisively – nowhere more clearl…Resumen LatinoAmericano English
‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail can stay open, appeals court says
‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail can stay open, appeals court says
Move puts on hold federal judge’s order last month to close Florida immigration facilityGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
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Head of UK's Turing AI Institute resigns after funding threat
Head of UK's Turing AI Institute resigns after funding threat
Dr Jean Innes is stepping down after the government told the charity to focus on defence research.Graham Fraser (BBC News)
Download from Kobo Broken?
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De-ACSM'ing and de-DRM'ing e-books for fun (but not profit) – Matias Kinnunen
A reminder for myself how to make library e-books pleasant to use with the help of Calibre and two Calibre plugins.mtsknn.fi
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GitHub - adrienmetais/adl: Download ebooks from acsm file
Download ebooks from acsm file. Contribute to adrienmetais/adl development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Any Resistance Will Hurt Our Investors
Barra's Error Message Generator
Generate your own funny Error Messages just like the good old days!barrarchiverio.cl
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Project 2025 group wants huge changes to policy to encourage more kids
The right-wing think tank behind Project 2025 is now crafting new policy suggestions, including an incentive for married couples to have more children, according to a report.Following its controversial 900-page blueprint for President Donald Trump’s second term, the Heritage Foundation is now drafting a new position paper that includes calls for a “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family,” referring to the program to develop the first nuclear weapons, the Washington Post reported.
The forthcoming paper, titled “We Must Save the American Family,” reportedly urges the government to pour funds into individual families rather than child care programs, like Head Start, according to the Post.
The Heritage Foundation is also urging the president to issue orders that require all proposed policies to “measure their positive or negative impacts on marriage and family.” If a program scores poorly, it should be revamped, according to the Post.
“For family policy to succeed, old orthodoxies must be re-examined and innovative approaches embraced, but more than that, we need to mobilize a nation to meet this moment,” the paper reportedly reads.
Project 2025 group wants a ‘Manhattan Project’ for babies – with huge changes to policy to encourage more kids
A draft of a forthcoming paper reportedly includes policies that aim to ‘restore the nuclear family’Kelly Rissman (The Independent)
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US | FAA Investigating After 2 United Boeing 737s Collide At SFO
The incident occurred on Monday evening.
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Seeking Justice: Families Of Boeing 737 MAX Crash Victims Speak Out In Latest Hearing
This is the latest in a long line of hearings regarding the deadly accidents
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If You’re a Socialist, Root for the Green Bay Packers
Let’s get one thing straight: the Green Bay Packers are the only socialist team in the NFL.
Nvidia dominates GPU shipments with 94% share — 27% surge in shipments likely caused by customers getting ahead of tariffs
27% increase in GPU shipments, 21.6% increase for CPUs
3 in 4 Gaza Detainees Held Without Trial by Israel Are Civilians, Military Database Says
3 out of 4 of the Palestinian detainees from Gaza held without trial as "unlawful combatants" by Israel are civilians, according to data from a classified Israeli military database.
Archived version: archive.is/newest/commondreams…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
3 in 4 Gaza Detainees Held Without Trial by Israel Are Civilians, Military Database Says
Jessica Montell, director of the Israeli human rights group HaMoked, said Israel's "unlawful combatants" law "has been used to facilitate the forced disappearance of hundreds and even thousands of people."stephen-prager (Common Dreams)
Xi Jinping holds talks with Kim Jong Un
Xi Jinping holds talks with Kim Jong Un
Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and Chinese president, held talks with Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs of the Democratic People's Republi…www.globaltimes.cn
US jobless claims rise, private payrolls growth slows
The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits increased more than expected last week, while hiring by private employers slowed in August, offering further evidence that labor market conditions were softening.
The reports were released a day after government data showed there were more unemployed people than positions available in July for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. Job growth has shifted into stall-speed, with economists blaming President Donald Trump's sweeping import tariffs and an immigration crackdown that is hampering hiring at construction sites and restaurants.
The Fed's "Beige Book" report on Wednesday noted that "firms were hesitant to hire workers because of weaker demand or uncertainty." The softening labor tone was reinforced on Thursday with the release of the ADP National Employment Report, which showed private employment increased by 54,000 jobs last month after advancing by 106,000 in July.
The downbeat assessment of the labor market was also evident in the Institute for Supply Management survey, which showed a measure of services sector employment contracting for a third straight month in August.
Economists, as a result, are bracing for another month of tepid job growth when the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its closely watched employment report on Friday. A Reuters survey of economists estimated nonfarm payrolls increased by 75,000 jobs last month after rising by 73,000 in July.
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-jobless-claims-rise-private-payrolls-growth-slows-2025-09-04/
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Mark Zuckerberg, the Lawyer, Is Suing Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO
Mark Zuckerberg, the Lawyer, Is Suing Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO
An Indiana attorney is suing Meta for repeatedly shutting down his Facebook pagesEce Yildirim (Gizmodo)
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A celebrity? Holy fucking ego, batman!
I say make it a cage match. Thunderdome style.
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An Indianapolis based bankruptcy attorney, named Mark Steven Zuckerberg, is suing Meta over repeated confusion with CEO Mark Elliot Zuckerberg.
That’s far less crazy than the clickbait headline had me believe.
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Without a doubt.
It just seemed clear grammatically that this was two separate people.
If it was some oligarch shenanigans instead of "the" it would have been "as a"
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The attorney is asking for restitution —and a week on Zuckerberg’s yacht.
What
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I was in danger of having sympathy for a lawyer, then this brought me back.
Way to take a serious matter and make it comical.
They're worried that one of his clones might've escaped its "exit interview" and could expose the program. The accelerated aging and memory writing processes aren't perfect and if one starts to degrade, it may be feel compelled to get on Facebook despite the obvious risk of Meta tracking it down. Lucky side-effect, I guess.
Here are some photos of the- hang on, will have to edit and add those later, somebody's knocking on my door.
Serious answer: A surprising number of people, especially those who still have Facebook accounts in 2025, are susceptible to scams where someone pretends to be a rich and/or famous person asking for favours or money.
They get a message from a fake Zuck, and because they are dangerously credulous, they believe it is the real Zuck.
Zuck says they've been selected, or won a prize, or should send a photo or some such, and then suddenly Zuck's blackmailing for a compromising photo or otherwise requesting Amazon gift cards or Bitcoin to "unlock" the prize or whatever.
"Zuck's a rich man who owns the platform. He knows what he's doing. I'd better look into how to do this Bitcoin thing."
Facebook knows all this and so any Zucks that are not the Zuck get flagged as scammers and have their accounts shut down.
Same thing happened after WW1 too btw. The strong anti-German sentiments across the US and Europe prompted multiple changes. William and Vilhelm became Bills or Ville; Müller became Miller; Schmidt became Smith.
I had a lot of Swedish family who did this from around 1915-1930 and as you said, again after WW2.
Idaho attorney general says officers who fatally shot autistic teen won't be charged
Four Idaho police officers who fatally shot an autistic, nonverbal teenage boy who was holding a knife on the other side of a chain-link fence in April were justified in their actions and will not face criminal charges, the state attorney general said Wednesday.
Victor Perez, 17, was in a coma for a week before dying April 12 after doctors removed nine bullets during several surgeries and amputated his leg.
The shooting in the southeast Idaho city of Pocatello, which was captured on video, drew outrage from members of the community who questioned why the officers opened fire within 12 seconds of exiting their vehicles.
The Bannock County Prosecutor's Office asked Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador to review the case to determine whether the officers committed a crime and if their use of force was justified. Labrador said the investigation showed that the officers did not know Perez's age or disabilities, and they were only told an intoxicated man was threatening people with a knife.
Idaho attorney general says officers who fatally shot autistic teen won't be charged
Four Idaho police officers who fatally shot an autistic teen boy who was holding a knife on the other side of a fence will not face criminal charges, according to the state attorney general.AP via Scripps News Group (News Channel 5 Nashville (WTVF))
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Newsom says Trump’s deployment of National Guard to LA cost taxpayers $120M
Newsom’s office evaluated the costs incurred since June when Trump sent more than 4,200 National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines to LA, posting its estimates on X.
According to the office that included $71 million for food and other basic necessities, $37 million in payroll, $4 million in logistic supplies, $3.5 million in travel. “The list goes on,” Newsom’s said.
Most of the soldiers were sent home last month, though 300 remain in Los Angeles, per The Los Angeles Times.
Newsom says the ‘political theater’ of Trump’s deployment of National Guard to LA cost taxpayers $120M
The California Governor’s office evaluated the costs incurred since June when Trump sent more than 4,200 National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines to LAMike Bedigan (The Independent)
Republicans end TPS deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans
The Department of Homeland Security said that the agency had reviewed conditions in Venezuela in collaboration with the State Department, and that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem had determined that the 2021 TPS designation for Venezuela was “contrary to the national interest.”
The decision leaves about 257,000 Venezuelans, including many in South Florida, vulnerable to being deported to a homeland deep in crisis and under the repressive governance of leader Nicolas Maduro.
The decision will also be heavily felt in South Florida, the heart of the Venezuelan community in the United States. On Wednesday, advocates and leaders were already reeling from the announcement.
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Google’s $45 Million Contract With Netanyahu's Office to Spread Israeli Propaganda
Google’s $45 Million Contract With Netanyahu's Office to Spread Israeli Propaganda
Google is in the middle of a six-month, $45 million contract to amplify propaganda with Netanyahu’s office. The contract describes Google as a “key entity” supporting the prime minister’s messaging.Jack Poulson (Drop Site News)
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Embarrassing Ruling Allows Google to Maintain Its Search Monopoly
Embarrassing Ruling Allows Google to Maintain Its Search Monopoly
Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of illegally monopolizing search, and then allowed the company to keep doing it.David Dayen (The American Prospect)
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September 2025 ForumWG Meeting
Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 17h00 to 18h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held (today) on 4 September 2025.
Meeting link: meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg
This month's meeting has no set agenda. Discussions will continue re: FEP 7888/f228 adoption and ongoing FEP drafts.
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Re: September 2025 ForumWG Meeting
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Re: September 2025 ForumWG Meeting
trwnh@mastodon.social there were! Yes, I'll get them up over the weekend hopefully.
The main news was updating everybody on context collection adoption (which I've posted about on ActivityPub.Space), plus TallTed brought up how this was handled in the nntp space
Recent context collection news, in case you've missed:
- Mastodon: PR open
- Lemmy: PR merged
Thanks, I totally missed this development. I blame the conference I was at. 😄
@jesseplusplus Can I ask here, what's the ultimate scope of what you're upstreaming? I see github.com/mastodon/mastodon/p… is a building block, will you be pushing for Mastodon to publish context collections later? It's not clear from what I'm seeing here if that's part of the plan.
@julian@community.nodebb.org @swicg-threadiverse-wg
Implement FEP 7888: Part 1 - publish conversation context by jesseplusplus · Pull Request #35959 · mastodon/mastodon
I would like to upstream my fork's implementation of FEP-7888, which groups conversations or threads together. I have decided to split the implementation into two parts: adding the context prop...GitHub
Re: September 2025 ForumWG Meeting
julian@fietkau.social the work by jesseplusplus@mastodon.social is split into two PRs.
The first allows Mastodon to start serving context collections. This is the critical piece that allows others to backfill conversations.
The latter half to be introduced in another PR will allow Mastodon to consume context collections for backfill purposes.
thanks @julian@community.nodebb.org! and sorry @julian@fietkau.social, my wording of the PR title is a little confusing. I'm using the existing mastodon Conversation model to publish the context property. That PR will publish the collection as part of the AP json-ld for all notes.
I'll follow that up with a PR that will allow mastodon to backfill missing replies from the context on any Create-Notes that come to the inbox with a context collection.
julian likes this.
Re: September 2025 ForumWG Meeting
silverpill@mitra.social oh you better believe I was aware of it 😁
It is a significant step toward broad adoption of context collections in order to enable backfill.
Mannimarco
in reply to silence7 • • •chaosCruiser
in reply to silence7 • • •Data centers are building their own gas power plants in Texas
Dylan Baddour (The Texas Tribune)MrMakabar
in reply to chaosCruiser • • •Elon Musk Reportedly Doing Something Horrid to Power His AI Data Center
Joe Wilkins (Futurism)chaosCruiser
in reply to MrMakabar • • •Botzo
in reply to chaosCruiser • • •datacenters.google/operating-s…
It looks like they're not changing their emissions/sustainability goals for the data centers, which honestly is better than every other player right now.
The political climate makes greenwashing problematic, which is some real irony.
I shit on Google for lots of reasons, but barring a fundamental change in the market, at least they're building renewable energy and taking the local water table into account in decision-making.
Pichai is a McKinsey husk and most of their leadership are yes men. Somehow they're still better than Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and obviously better than Xitter (with their trailers of methane burning generators).
Operating sustainably – Google Data Centers
Google Data CenterschaosCruiser
in reply to Botzo • • •Being better than Meta is not exactly a high bar to clear.😄
Anyway, it’s nice to see that Google is taking at least one thing seriously.
skisnow
in reply to silence7 • • •ragebutt
in reply to skisnow • • •This is more about the drive to be a leader in AI than the public goodwill.
The antitrust stuff revealed a lot but one of the major things it revealed is that Google views chatgpt as the biggest existential threat to search. Younger users skip Google now.
Of course this is because Google spent the past 5-10 years abusing their monopoly protected position to worsen their product so user engagement would go up (a more frustrating search experience means you’re more likely to search several queries, being delivered multiple pages filled with ads and tracking bullshit instead of just one).
But they won’t reflect on that and improve their product. They will leave it as is and try to make their shit AI blurb at the top of search work better. This is inherently foolish vs something like chatgpt because google search is typically fed much less robust prompts. They get something like “best bank account” or “2014 nba mvp” whereas users are conditioned to given chatgpt a conversational prompt, “what bank has the best rate for savings accounts right now?”. The former is part of why you see much more misconception, incorrect information, and hallucination with googles ai shit.
But again they won’t reflect on this. They won’t bow out. They won’t partner. They will simply eat power and literally burn the world to make something that’s not as good as the already underwhelming gpt5 to keep that stock price rising because the investors are stupid and need to see buzzword bullshit even if it comes at tremendous cost
salacious_coaster
in reply to silence7 • • •MTK
in reply to silence7 • • •Don't be evil*
*definition of evil may be changed at any point and has no relation to the official dictionary.