Renowned Canadian hybrid warfare, AI and disinformation expert Blair Maddock-Ferrie of Carleton University writes on the serious threat to national security that AI Companion Apps and girlfriends like Replika, Character.ai, etc. pose today.
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.
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.
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.
Not long ago, developers of the massive server farms talked about powering them with wind and solar energy. Now they’re bypassing the grid and building their own gas-fired power plants on site.
Nah. Rookie numbers. Burning high sulfur coal is the way to maximize pollution, suffering and death. Might not be as cheap as solar, but that’s the price you have to pay if you want to be the number one enemy of humanity and the rest of the planet.
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).
“Don’t Be Evil” got them a lot of public goodwill as a company motto. The only reason to get rid of it was because it was legit starting to get in the way of them doing what shareholders wanted.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 programmatica
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.
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...
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.
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...
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 […]
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.
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…
I have a book in my Kobo library that I want to put in Calibre. When I try to download it on my computer or phone, all that downloads is a URLLink.acsm file. Anyone know what's going on?
There is also a Calibre plugin that's supposed to deal with .ascm files. I've never managed to get it to work personally but maybe someone else will have more luck.
The developer behind Revolution Wind, a large — and nearly complete — wind farm near Massachusetts and Rhode Island, is suing to overturn the Trump administration's stop-work order.
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.
What could possibly spook The Heritage Foundation of all groups to make this tiny leftward shift just a few years after their big evil strategy was released? They’re still an evil organization, but they’re that last group I’d expect to say the government needs to spend more money on more people.
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.