mastodon - Link to source

the whole ai-bro shtick about "ai democritizes art/programming/writing/etc" seemed always so bs to me, but i couldn't put it into words, but i think i now know how.

ai didn't democritize any of these things. People did. The internet did. if all these things weren't democritized and freely available on the internet before, there wouldn't have been any training data available in the first place.

the one single amazing thing that today's day and age brought us is, that you can learn anything at any time for free at your own pace.

like, you can just sit down, and learn sketching, drawing, programming, writing, basics in electronics, pcb design, singing, instruments, whatever your heart desires and apply and practice these skills. fuck, most devs on fedi are self taught.

the most human thing there is is learning and creativity. the least human thing there is is trying to automate that away.

(not to mention said tech failing at it miserably)

reshared this

in reply to Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

mastodon - Link to source

miki

It democratizes it by making it available for the people who can't / don't want to / don't have the time for learning it.

We're already seeing non-programmers successfully create quite substantial coding projects with AI, to an extend which surprises even me, who was a huge proponent for AI in coding from the start.

Same applies to art, there are many people who need or want art (small business owners, hobbyist game creators, wedding organizers, school teachers), but don't have the budget for the real thing.

Of course, many artists and programmers don't want this to happen and try to invent reasons why this is a bad idea, just as phone operators didn't want the phone company to "force" customers to make their own calls, and just as elevator drivers tried to come up with reasons why driverless elevators were unsafe.

in reply to Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

mastodon - Link to source

miki

I see putting a prompt into AI and hoping that the generated code is correct as a bad idea, especially in complex apps that have long-term maintainability considerations, or when security / money / lives are at stake.

For throwaway projects (think "secret santa style gift exchange for a local community with a few extra constraints, organized by somebody with 0 CS experience", vibe coding is probably fine.

For professional developers, LLMs can still be pretty useful. Even if you have to review the code manually, push back on stupidity, and give it direction on how to do things, not just what to do (which is honestly what I do for production codebases), it's still a force multiplier.

in reply to Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

mastodon - Link to source

miki

I think we're painfully re-learning the lessons we learned in programming over the last 70 or so years with AI, just like crypto had to painfully re-learn the lessons that trad fi got to learn in the last five hundred years.

Yes, you can 20x your productivity with AI if you stop worrying at all about architecture and coding practices, just like you can 5x your productivity without AI if you do the same thing. Up to a point. Eventually, tech dept will rear its ugly head, and the initial gains in productivity will be lost due to the bad architectural decisions. Sometimes that

in reply to miki

glitchsoc - Link to source

Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)

@miki

It democratizes it by making it available for the people who can't / don't want to / don't have the time for learning it.


No, I'm sorry, but it doesn't.

What it "democratises" is being an art director who commissions a machine to generate things derived from the (uncredited, un-compensated) work of others (whose lack of consent was gleefully violated).

Gutenberg democratised learning, with his movable-type press.
Encylopaedias took that a step further, and Wikipedia amped it up again.
Blogs and Youtube democratised the sharing of knowledge and skills.
All these things have enabled people to learn how to do a thing.

But if you typed in a description and got a picture in return, you did not create that picture. You commissioned it.

@miki
in reply to Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)

mastodon - Link to source

miki

@KatS It democratizes in the public transit way (by making transport available to non-drivers), not in the car way (by making it easy).

And btw: all art is uncredited and a lot of it is unconsensual. Outside of academia, it's extremely rare to credit every single influence that an artist used, down to Da Vinci or the Gregorian chants, as long as snippets significant snippets aren't extracted directly from that work, something that AI only does when prompted.

@Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)
in reply to miki

mastodon - Link to source

Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

@miki @KatS we're not talking about influences, but more akin to "retracing".

Besides, there are real implications regarding free software licenses and AI generated slop, so it's not exclusively a moral dilemma, but a legal one too.

legal != the right thing to do necessarily, but mangling a bunch of intellectual property that's not yours through a statistical computer program isn't exactly comparable with an aspiring artist learning to draw.

@miki @Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)
in reply to Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

mastodon - Link to source

miki

@KatS Because I use it every day, and I can see how much it helps. And to be fair, it primarily helps people who get X done, not the doers of X. Just as automated telephones primarily help those who want to make phone calls (by making them cheaper, faster and much more convenient), not the phone operators who helped to make them in the past.
@Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)
in reply to Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

mastodon - Link to source

miki

@KatS The more you know about LLMs, the more "calibrated" you are about where they work (and don't work) right now. People who don't know much about them are either hypesters (mmaking a company of a thousand LLMs and firing all their employees), or LLM deniers. Both are just as crazy.

I also see not just where LLMs are right now, but where they are going. We went from coding agents being basically a joke a year ago, to them semi-autonomously solving (some) complex mathematical problems and being used for boring gruntwork by world-class, fields-medal-winning mathematicians. They can now also solve an extremely complex GPU performance engineering task that Anthropic used as an interview question for the most brilliant engineers in that discipline, *better than any human given the same amount of time*.

They're still much better at small, well-scoped and bounded tasks than at large open-ended problems, but "small and well-scoped" went from "write me a linked list implementation unconnected to anything in my code" to "write me a small feature and follow the style of my codebase." In a year. What will happen in another year? 5 years? 10 years? God only knows, and he certainly isn't telling.

@Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)
in reply to Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)

mastodon - Link to source

Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

@KatS look @miki don't get me wrong but any time i've tried using LLMs for my work, which isn't just some fun side project but actual production-running code, LLMs have been way too unreliable. It also resulted in me knowing jack shit about my own code, which is poison for long term maintainability.

Since these models are just statistically determining the next most likely token based on training data and fine tuning, without any actual understanding or thought behind it, I seriously can't see this tech being reliable enough one day. (reliable compared to humans, i don't seek 100% reliable in this case, natural language is too imprecise for that anyways. i would expect "good enough" as "as good as a professional in the given field")

The other part of the equation is the amount of compute and electrical energy necessary to train and operate such a level, and on that level, there's no way in hell that shit is ever gonna be worth it, financially and environmentally.

i'm not expecting the "make job for phone operators easier", i expect the "when i dial a number, it should be at least as reliable and efficient at routing it correctly as a phone operator would be".

you can call me whatever you want, even llm denier if you need to, but autocorrect on steroids isn't worth exploiting other people's work or boiling our oceans.

@miki @Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)
in reply to Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

mastodon - Link to source

miki

@KatS Autocorrect on steroids is basically GPT-3 tech. There's a lot more that goes into modern LLMs. A lot of the improvements are due to reinforcement learning, where LLMs learn to predict tokens that actually achieve some outcome, E.G. code that passes tests, answer that is judged "good" by a domain expert. There's still token prediction involved of course, but it somehow turns out that token prediction can get better scores than any human at (unseen) math olympiad questions. And people still say it's not in any way intelligent...
@Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)
in reply to miki

mastodon - Link to source

Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

@miki @KatS if i memorize every possible answer to a specific test, i can pass too. doesn't mean i know shit about fuck.

There's no actual thinking or reasoning involved (and no, reasoning models don't actually "reason"), so yeah, an LLM isn't actually intelligent, it just shows how flawed our tests for intelligence are.

To get some actual intelligence, thinking or reasoning involved, I'd reckon we'd have to fundamentally change something in the architecture of LLMs, and use a fuckton more computing resources for a single model, and considering how much energy the current tech already wastes, and the whole shtick that made LLMs (and more broadly generative AI) work in the first place is "we discovered that there comes a point where the output gets better when we throw rediculous amounts of compute resources on the problem", and it's already getting super difficult to run and maintain.

Honestly, either you're unreasonably optimistic, or you've never taken a look at how things actually work under the hood, but I really recommend you to take a closer look at the technology you praise so much.

A couple things you could take a look at (without an AI summarizer, otherwise you'd learn jack shit):

Attention is all you need, which is the paper that sparked all that AI craze and the development of GPT models and The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
, which takes a closer look and tests reasoning models to infer strengths and weaknesses of reasoning models with all sorts of levels in problem complexity.

Honestly, before you make any claims about where the tech could be and what it could do, you should have a look at how things actually work under the hood and have a rough idea of how things work, otherwise, no offense, you're just talking out of your arse.


Attention Is All You Need

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism.
arXiv.org
@miki @Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)
in reply to Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

mastodon - Link to source

miki

@KatS I have very specifically said "unseen questions."

If memorizing answers was a viable strategy to pass that test, humans would have done so.

If you still believe that there's no possible use for a tool that can get gold on a never-before-used set of math olympiad question given a few hours of access to a reasonably powerful computer, and that the existence of that tool will have no interesting impact on the world... I don't know what to tell you.

@Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)
in reply to miki

mastodon - Link to source

Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

@miki @KatS > If you still believe that there's no possible use for a tool that can get gold on a never-before-used set of math olympiad question given a few hours of access to a reasonably powerful computer, and that the existence of that tool will have no interesting impact on the world...

How reliable is that source? And if that's true, is it really reasonable to bet everything on this, and let this do all your work when a) you end up completely dependent on the tech and b) utterly destroy the environment in that process?

Real world problems may be less complex but might require much more context.

Oh, and don't get me started on accountability. There's a reason why curl is closing their bug bounty program.

@miki @Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)
in reply to Tech Goblin Lucy 🦝

mastodon - Link to source

miki

@KatS Nothing is ever gonna work right, not even humans. Different technologies are at different points on the price-to-mistakes curve, our job is to find a combination that minimizes price while also minimizing mistakes and harm caused.

E.G. it is definitely true that humans are much, much better psychologists than LLMs, but LLLMs are free, much more widely available in abusive environments, speak your language, even if you are in a foreign country, and work at 4AM on a Saturday when you get dumped by your partner. Human psychologists do not. Very often, the choice isn't between an LLM and a human, the real choice is between an LLM and nothing (and the richer you are, the less true this is, hence the "class divide" in opinions about tech). And I'm genuinely unsure which option wins here, but considering the rate of change over the last 3 years, I woulndn't bet towards "nothing" winning for long.

@Kat (post-Hallowe'en edition)

glitchsoc - Link to source

Current AI Downsides:

> Stole all creative, intellectual works from everyone ever

> Eats so much power that they need tons of nuclear plants yesterday

> Eats up so much electricity that everybody else is priced out

> Eats up so much GPU & DRAM that everyone else is priced out

> Devours jobs like Ghibli's No-face

> Falsely identifies people as criminals who aren't

> Hallucinates legal briefs in your court case

> Destroys the validity of all video evidence in all courts everywhere

> Facetracks children playing at the park

> Generates infinite piles of dogshit spaghetti code that can't be read or revised

> Can't count to 100, doesn't know how many r's are in Strawberry

> Deep-fakes Martin Luther King Jr. stealing fried chicken, Studio Ghibli child porn

> Produces ugly, smeary, unappealing fake video that nobody likes.

Added: Consumes water at a rate that will desertify our entire planet.

Added: Completely destroys college education, both in terms of cheating and inability to read/write

Added: Makes all art suspected as fake, all art stealable and reguritated.

Added: Allows world leaders to fake their health, presence, & speaking capacity.

Added: Not even a Language Model.

Added: Fake/bullshit content and rampant chatbotting means the Internet is now mostly dead.

Added: AI warfare is inept and kills innocent/misidentified people. AI security bots are in the works for your home town.

Added: Allows for extortion, sextortion, scamming at a level never seen before.

Current AI upsides:

> Sam Altman is rich, I guess, idk.

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

mastodon - Link to source

An important PSA for people who are active on #Bluesky and who, upon hearing that the ICE account was officially verified, are saying: "I will just block it."

Blocking on Bluesky is NOT PRIVATE: it's very easy to see who is blocking any account by visiting sites that list that information.

I took a screenshot from clearsky.app, listing all the accounts that are blocking ICE (I pixelated avatars and usernames for privacy purposes).

The safest bet is to mute (that info is private) 😫

a screenshot of the site ClearSky updating in real time the Bluesky accounts that are blocking ICE. The page reads "U.S. immigration and customs enforcement" blocked by 72233 (accounts) with the date of the block... some seconds ago

ClearSky

ClearSky - Bringing information closer to you
clearsky.app
#bluesky

mastodon - Link to source

This post by Bruce Schneier contains so many thoughtful soundbites:

> The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.

> Like the early internet, AI is often described as a democratizing force. But also like the internet, AI’s current trajectory suggests something closer to consolidation.

schneier.com/blog/archives/202…

AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge - Schneier on Security

More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him. Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible.
Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)
in reply to Jamie Gaskins

mastodon - Link to source

miki

I like looking at this through the concept of "enjoyment", which was originally developed in Japan I believe.

From that point of view, copyright only applies to a work when it is used for "enjoyment", for its intended purpose. If the work is primarily entertainment, it applies when the consumer is using it to entertain themselves. If the work is educative, it applies when the consumer is using it to learn something. It does not apply when the work is used for a purpose completely unrelated to its creation, such as testing a CD player on an unusual CD, demonstrating the performance of a speaker system, training a language model to classify customer complaints etc.

(This isn't a legal perspective, not even quite in Japan I believe, but it's useful lens through which we can look at the world and which people can use to decide on policy).

mastodon - Link to source
I'm wasting water and energy, on having GPT compare the SpeechPlayer code from Espeak's integration to the one standalone. What makes it sound different? What makes me prefer the standalone Speechplayer to the one inside Espeak? Why why why. I still don't know, but I've been trying both side by side and comparing. And despite mine having any language over-articulations right now (perhaps "combobox could be less open-mouthed), I still prefer it. Why? Why? Why! It's the same DSP. I checked the code, same 9 files. Same wave generator concept. So what changed.
This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to x0

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@x0 yeah, the analysis between the DSP layers didn't reveal it. It's the same core logic exactly, so for sure moving to Espeak's built-in IPA tokenizer rather than creating our own did it, that's really interesting. Somehow Espeak driving it really changed things versus us just reimplementing the Python tokenizer in C++ to use the same logic as the earlier standalone code always has.
@x0

mastodon - Link to source

TL;DR Most EV batteries will last longer than the cars they’re in. Battery degradation is at better (meaning: lower) rates than expected. Slow charging is better. Drive EV and don’t worry about your battery.

„Our 2025 analysis of over 22,700 electric vehicles, covering 21 different vehicle models, confirms that overall, modern EV batteries are robust and built to last beyond a typical vehicle’s service life.“

geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-hea…

#GoodNews #EV #Battery

Key Insights Average degradation rate: The average annual electric vehicle degradation rate is 2.3%. Power: High-power DC fast charging (>100kW) is the single largest stressor, leading to degradation rates up to twice that of the low power charging group (3.0% vs 1.5% per year). Climate: Hot climates impose a penalty on battery life, with vehicles operating in hot conditions degrading 0.4% faster per year than those in mild climates. Utilization: The increase in degradation from high daily use is a measurable but worthwhile trade-off for the gains in fleet productivity and ROI. State of charge (SOC): For most EV use, there's no need to worry about avoiding fully charging or emptying the battery. Degradation only speeds up when vehicles spend over 80% of their total time at or near-full or nearly empty charge levels.
#ev #goodnews #battery
This entry was edited (3 days ago)

mastodon - Link to source

PQ leader says Legault's resignation further evidence of need for independent Quebec

cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/qu…

tl;dr: the leader of the PQ is full MAGA. He believe in Santa Claus. He believe that in the US dictatorship Quebec and it's francofascism would be safe. Remember MAGA implies hating anyone speaking something other than English.

#cdnpoli #qcpoli

#cdnpoli #qcpoli
This entry was edited (3 days ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Why Poilievre and Carney Are Silent on Grok’s Child Sexual Abuse

thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/01/15/…

The former is just in his cesspool, running is con. The latter is just an hypocrite coward elite that would have no problem with Internet legislation when they can't enforce the basics.

#cdnpoli


Why Poilievre and Carney Are Silent on Grok’s Child Sexual Abuse | The Tyee

The Liberals are afraid of Trump. The Conservatives fear their base.
Eric Van Rythoven (The Tyee)
#cdnpoli

mastodon - Link to source
I think people are going to like this SAPI engine. Although be prepared for 17 times 4 voices added to your list? What's that. Uh, math. 68. So 68 voices at once? Yeah. We use a tokenizer though to create voices, so they're only made for the languages you have. I suppose someone could remove all language files from their pack and just have the languages they care about, then your voice list will shrink. That's the idea. Dynamic tokenization, what a concept. We read it and only expose the voices available not a predetermined list of languages.
in reply to Noel Romey

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@ner Oooh. Yeah, the frontend doesn't expose any synthesize functions yet, mainly because that creates a direct-dependency on LibEspeak to be compiled into the DLL - that's when we get more into GPLV2 VS V3 scuffles. Ugh. This way I can link Espeak outside the DLL alongside it, just use the SAPI wrapper to delegate the communication between both rather than my frontend having a synthesize method. For now it's our best shot if we want the language flexibility of modern Espeak's IPA tokenization, sadly. But it's not a bad alternative.
@Noel Romey

hometown - Link to source

CALL TO ACTION on January 23, 2026

Minneapolis Labor Unions are calling for a full #GeneralStrike. No school, No work, No shopping. Those of us outside Minnesota, stand with the unions by not shopping.

“The Minnesota labor movement is united against the violent ICE occupation of our beloved cities .. Workers are essential for our communities to function. Since the ICE campaign of terror began, both immigrant and non-immigrant workers have feared for their safety when going to work, being at work, and coming home from work.

Working people, our schools our communities are under attack. Union members
are being detained commuting to and from work, tearing apart families. Parents are
being forced to stay home, students held out of school, fearing for their lives, all while
the employer class remains silent. Our labor federations are encouraging everyone to
participate on January 23rd.”

minneapolisunions.org/system/f…

#generalstrike

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

Walter Francis White was a Black man born to two Black parents, but he had blonde hair and blue eyes. (This is genetically possible without any extramarital affairs; it's just rare.)

He used his white passing appearance to pose as a white journalist and learn the truth about lynchings in the South. He investigated 41 lynchings and 8 race riots at enormous risk to his life. His documentation then helped the NAACP lobby for anti-lynching legislation.

abhmuseum.org/walter-white/


Walter White: The Forgotten Hero of Civil Rights - America's Black Holocaust Museum

In the story of America's fight for civil rights, certain names ring out: Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Thurgood Marshall. Yet, many figures who laid the essential groundwork for their work remain less known.
America's Black Holocaust Museum
in reply to Scary Austin

mastodon - Link to source

Scary Austin

...completely defenseless, just like domestic abusers do, and we know these are the same kind of men.

They're scared of being watched, they're so scared of lawyers they shut up a lawyer yesterday by threatening to detain two other people as well as her client if she didn't shut up. (She was rightly saying the kidnapping they were doing was illegal.) She had to shut up at that time but her client will have his day in court. We initiated community support.

They are SCARED scared. They act...

in reply to Scary Austin

mastodon - Link to source

Scary Austin

...tough away from cameras but not when the cameras are going. Not when there's a crowd. Not when there's even one VIP, such as Bishop Pham of San Diego, who showed up to immigration court and made the ICE agents scatter like cockroaches.

The movement makes real difference in the here and now and will make a real difference when we punish these people.

Walter F White realized he had power as one Black man in the US in the heyday of the Klan.

We have real power if we use it.

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

Almost everyone has heard of @dgar
And most of you will know by now that he's also released a song or two.

He shouts out a few his songs - such as "Always Monday On The Moon" and "Space Pop" - but my favourite is always missed.

So I'll shout it out instead - it's "Digital Busker"
youtube.com/watch?v=MjqgzpSDbY…


Digital Busker

Provided to YouTube by Repost NetworkDigital Busker · DgarDigital Busker℗ DgarReleased on: 2021-11-12Auto-generated by YouTube.
YouTube
@Dgar

mastodon - Link to source

WE CAN EITHER HAVE A LIVEABLE PLANET OR BILLIONAIRES. WE CAN’T HAVE BOTH.

The findings of @oxfaminternational’s latest report, released just days ago, are honestly terrifying and infuriating.

This is not accidental. It is the result of an economic system that protects extreme wealth, fuels corporate pollution, and puts profits before people.

It’s time to FLIP THE SCRIPT. Tax extreme wealth. Make polluters pay. Ban private jets and superyachts. Put lives before profits.

The richest 1% have blown through their fair share of carbon emissions for 2026 in just 10 days. Source: Oxfam. In the image, billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are shown jumping with enthusiasm and holding wads of money, against a backdrop of superyachts and private jets and burning forests.

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source
I just used Chrome and gemini to describe a few sample pages of a graphic novel from wandering inn so I could understand and enjoy the series. All I can say is wow! I can say that though clunky, I had to go to the next page and reactivate gemini, it would work and I think I could spend money on this book and still enjoy it even though "The last tide" is a graphic novel. Amazing!

mastodon - Link to source

RE: mastodon.nl/@bert_hubert/11591…

Translated: All ATMs from all big dutch banks rely on Amazon AWS. So if there's a disruption with the US and you think to yourself "hey, I'm gonna pay with cash", you won't be able to get cash.


Bert Hubert NL 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 (@bert_hubert@mastodon.nl)

Attached: 1 image Alle geldautomaten van alle grote Nederlandse banken draaien exclusief op Amazon Web Services. Dus als er verstoring is met Amerika en je denkt, dan betaal ik wel cash, kom je niet aan cash.
Bert Hubert NL 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 (Mastodon.nl door Stichting Activityclub)

mastodon - Link to source

When talking about DRAM please don't use the term "shortage", call it what it is: price manipulation.

Shortages are when things you want to buy cannot be bought anywhere, but DDR5 memory kits are widely available. There's hundreds of different types in stock at online retailers. I've yet to see a kit that is actually out of stock. This is the tech industry attempt at keeping high margins at a time when computer sales were already predicted to be declining. Don't fall for it. It's a scam.

mastodon - Link to source
hmm, should I really give Claud a try? not sure. Wondering if it could do better with scouting out language phoneme rules and Klatt synthesis in general. GPT's good but pro mode irritated me for taking sometimes 60 minutes to respond, no joke. So I'm a bit done with GPT pro for now. I probably wouldn't get the highest-tear Claud plan but it's tempting to give one of them a try.
This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@fastfinge yeah, it's being better at coding, I've even done it where I gave GPT some task and then had Gemini refine it because it can think of nuances like performance and memory safety GPT doesn't, so it's tuned better. 2.5 Pro days sucked balls but now with Gemini 3 it's really getting good at not making rooky mistakes.
@🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

mastodon - Link to source

As John Naughton warns (in parallel to many warnings here too), we are way too dependent on US technologies , although as he observes:

'Unwinding this dependency will be very difficult. But it has to be done'!

In this the Tangerine Tyrant's actions (alongside those of the TechBroligarchy) have been indicative of the trouble we could be in.

Up until now we have been too inattentive to the trap into which we have willingly walked.

#technology #politics

observer.co.uk/news/columnists…

Over several decades, we Europeans constructed a way of living that is totally dependent on technologies run by corporations that describe themselves as “global” but are all, in fact, American. It’s as if, having abolished feudalism, we reintroduced it in the cloud; we diligently tilled our data, while Silicon Valley collected the rent. And for a long time, although we might have had occasional qualms, it seemed like a manageable deal. After all, the US was an ally that – as Winston Churchill allegedly said – could always be relied on to do the right thing, after it had exhausted all the alternatives.

The UK is wedded to US tech. Time for a divorce

Ofcom’s investigation into X is not just a regulatory issue. It will define our future relationship with America
John Naughton (The Observer)
#technology #politics
in reply to Emeritus Prof Christopher May

mastodon - Link to source

ImmigrationIsNotACrime

It's mind-boggling that the UK would give a massive defence contract to a US company when Trump is threatening to invade Greenland. Especially a company like Palantir which is run by a guy who thinks women shouldn't be allowed to vote and is very close to Trump.

The only way this makes sense is if you regard it as deliberate. Filter out what Starmer has said on the issue and look at his actions and who he is linked with. It feels like the UK leadership are either OK with US military dominance or resigned to it. For them, the UK military is simply an extension of the US military. The more compliant the more favours and jobs these politicians will win from US big tech and Washington.

politico.eu/article/palantir-l…


Palantir lands biggest ever UK defense deal

The £240 million contract with the Ministry of Defence has renewed a debate about Britain’s dependence on American technology.
Joseph Bambridge (POLITICO)
⇧