felix stalder

https://tldr.nettime.org/@festal

Researcher, teacher, and activist at the confluence of culture, technology, and politics. Binary, so you don't have to be. Born at 324 PPM.

If you are on this instance, I won't follow you because I'll read all your posts in the local timeline.

Why? Because I want to get a sense of place as I'm currently one of the moderators of this instance, and I wish to recover some of the collective dimensions of social media (rather than simply individual social graphs intersecting).

Home: https://felix.openflows.com

Public Key

npub1malx6cvy0x6s0zpmrv7tkc043vnr6ntp8jpkl2s4fg8ue03jvz6qs6nzws

NIP-05 Address

festal_at_tldr.nettime.org@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsd7lndvxz8ndg83qa3k09mv86ckf3af4sneqm04g255r7vhcexpdqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsux7gjc

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1malx6cvy0x6s0zpmrv7tkc043vnr6ntp8jpkl2s4fg8ue03jvz6qs6nzws

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Last Notes

2026-10-27 19:13:03 UTC

This is how the end looks like. The last piece of the Triglav glacier in Slovenia, pictured on 2 October, 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/27/slovenia-mourns-loss-glacier-highest-peak-scorching-summer
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/514/446/235/259/103/original/4fa049961625d818.jpg

2026-10-19 11:08:56 UTC

This article by the NYT (gift link) points to a dynamic that might be relevant for the resistance to data-centers.
All of them are built on mountains of debt, predicated on coming online quickly, so they can start making money to repay the debt. The timelines are incredibly tight. We don't even need to go into the question of whether they will eventually make enough money.
Simply delaying the build-out will create huge problems for them, and since this is such a speculative economy, merely the threat of significant delays is given debt holders the jitters.
This seems something to work with.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/17/business/ai-debt-coreweave-oracle-softbank.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J1E.MxjO.2HN_Bf64AP2l&smid=url-share

2026-09-29 08:44:21 UTC

The US has currently 45 hyper-scale data centers operational, while China has only 6. The US has 21 more under construction and China just 1. And the Chinese ones are small in comparison to the US ones.
Even if we take numbers from China with some skepticism, the difference is stark. Yet, they are still supposed to be in a head-to-head competition on AI.
How can that be?
Perhaps "compute" is not the deciding factor and the hyper-scale build-out is a dead-end, generated by group-think and speculative investment.
https://aidatacenterindex.com/compare/united-states-vs-china/

2026-09-28 08:03:22 UTC

If you are in Vienna, join us for a hybrid Technopolitics Evening, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 19:00
**Giuliana Furci**
**De-Paralysing Knowledge of Fungal Relationships with People, in Place.**
Added to the scarce documentation of how fungi live with people in place - sometimes even enabling people to live in a place - is the dark shadow cast by the colonial capitalisation of relationships forged between people and other species. There can seem to be no way around the difficulties when it comes to documenting these relationships in order to safeguard them before they are lost. Giuliana will talk about the journey of Fungi Foundation to free itself from the paralysis these issues trigger, and design a way forward to continue living with fungi, in place.
https://technopolitics.info/evenings/index.html
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/347/619/746/946/563/original/66a18ce769e0b342.jpeg

2026-09-17 08:46:48 UTC

“We are now as a society smart enough to know the future, but not prudent enough to act upon the knowledge.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change/satellites-show-earth-lost-12-trillion-tons-ice-greenland-antarctica-rcna598084

2026-09-12 12:20:10 UTC

1/2 Ich durfte gestern beim Protest gegen das Google Center in Linz kurz sprechen (zb. @npub1ffy…jycj den Text lesen, weil ich im Zug stecken blieb). Mir war es dabei wichtig, das Zukunfsmonopol, das sich Big Tech gerne zuschreibt, in Frage zu stellen.
Google stellt sich gerne als smarte Zukunft dar. Doch ein Hyperscale-Datencenter ist nicht die Zukunft, die wir brauchen, und es ist alles andere als smart. Das Datencenter in Kronstorf steht für die Vergangenheit der industriellen Megastrukturen; für die Vergangenheit der Ideologie des ewigen Wachstums; für die Vergangenheit des Empires, das seine Peripherie wie eine Kolonie behandelt; für die Vergangenheit, in der Kosten lokal bleiben, aber die Profite abgezogen werden; für die Vergangenheit, in der die Regeln „top-down“ uns aufgezwungen werden; und für die Vergangenheit, in der kurzfristige Gewinne, oft nur auf dem Papier, über langfristiges Wohlergehen gestellt werden. Sie sind die Vergangenheit, in der Rechenleistung unbegrenzt verstanden wurde. Hyperscale-Datencenter sind Kathedralen alten Denkens.
Und deshalb sind sie auch nicht intelligent. Die helfen uns mit keinem der dringenden Probleme, von denen wir wissen, dass wir sie lösen müssen. Sie sind dumm, denn sie behindern die Energiewende. Im Endausbau soll das Datencenter in Kronstorf viermal mehr Energie benötigen, als alle Windkraft, die in den letzten 20 Jahren installiert wurde, liefert. Viermal mehr. Da sind ein paar Solarpaneele auf dem Dach nur greenwashing. Hyperscale-Datencenter helfen uns nicht, schonender mit Wasser umzugehen, das aufgrund des Zusammenbruchs des Klimas auch bei uns immer knapper wird. Was wir dieses Jahr erlebt haben, ist keine Ausnahme, sondern das neue Normal.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/258/030/011/426/566/original/f6b5de9cba547fdf.jpg

2026-09-03 07:02:03 UTC

No AI in NYC schools for this up to 14 years old (8th grade).
“Children need teachers and human connection in order to learn and grow. They need to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with educators and wrestle with tough problems on their own,” said Mayor Mamdani. “The tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary. We do not see it that way. That’s why we’re implementing a moratorium on generative AI for students in 2-K through 8th grade and spending the next year studying the impacts of this technology.”
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani-and-chancellor-samuels-put-students-first-with-nat

2026-08-28 10:45:59 UTC

"Secretary of State Marco Rubio is attacking the group for running an online platform that the U.S. government can't spy on and for facilitating communications the U.S. government doesn't like. But precisely because Autistici/Inventati is based in another country—Italy—the U.S. government has basically unchecked power to impose counterterrorism sanctions on it."
It's hard to overstate how significant this is. Simply providing infrastructure independent of US tech giants is viewed as terrorism. The same could be said about most nodes on the Fediverse.
https://reason.com/2026/08/27/rubio-uses-terrorism-law-to-ban-secure-email-service/

2026-08-05 10:42:23 UTC

- reply

And there are now an ever growing number of stories who seriously question the these claims from a business-side.
There seem to be two main line there. First, is the realization "AI" cannot solve real-world business problems and is no drop-in replacement for people, no matter how dazzling demos are. Rather, it's a slow and complicated trial and error process to fit it into existing workflows.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/opinion/ai-hype-tech-layoffs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3FA.FTkU.GxD7rMx6FY-I&smid=url-share
Second, once the real compute costs are due, the value proposition of the frontier models becomes very shaky. Tokenmaxxing is out.
Mbioh, W. Capability determinism, energy and AI labour substitution. AI & Soc (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03251-y

2026-08-05 10:32:07 UTC

Just finished @npub1fdr…lvhs 's new, highly readable book: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI:"
The main point I take away from this is that the "magnificent seven" are all mature companies, that need a growth stories like a start-up to justify the enormous stock prices. But if one is already a giant, multi-billion $ company, exponential growth is virtually impossible (not to mention, world-destroying) and requires ever more outlandish claims. To deflate these claims in the most powerful vector of critique.
The second point, which is kind of a classic, is not to ask what a technology "is" or "could do", but to ask who does it do it **for** and who does it do it "*to**. In other words, it's not technical capacities, but social relations that determine the social impact of a product
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/042/393/085/177/384/original/35b4b14a29d4247a.webp

2026-06-10 07:46:34 UTC

Over the last two or three months, we have been witnessing a dramatic increase of the number of bot-generated new account requests, from less than 10% to more then 90% of all requests. I'm sure our experience here is not unusual. This is another aspect of bot-generated traffic overtaking human-generated traffic on the internet.
The better ones take the about page as context and produce something like this:
"Hi! I'm interested in joining tldr.nettime.org because I enjoy thoughtful discussions and smaller online communities that feel more personal than mainstream social media. I like learning from different perspectives, sharing ideas, and connecting with people who have similar interests. I'm looking for a respectful space to engage in conversations and be part of a community."
Often, they are using throw-away email addresses, which makes them easy to spot and reject manually.
We are a small instance, so the overall number of requests is still manageable, and if it gets worse (very likely), we might automate the rejection of the most obvious bot requests. So, I don't see it as overwhelming us anytime soon.
But, and this is the main point, having to go through these submissions is a soul-draining activity. Even in small doses. It forces us to operated under the assumption that that every request is made by a bot. Until proven otherwise. We now have to run a some intuitive, semantic reverse CAPTCHA test in our head to decide whether to hit the the accept or reject button.
The problem is not having bots per se. TLDR as had two really useful bots for a long time, one that re-posts every submission to the nettime mailing list to the fediverse (@npub100y…8a2n) and one that cross-posts trending posts from a select list of interesting mastodon instances (@npub1sas…dr2p).
The problem is the anti-social bots that pretend to be humans and then behave like the total sociopaths. As if we didn't have enough of those already.

2026-03-25 15:43:22 UTC

To mourn a poet kill in Gaza by an Israeli air strike is now "highly divisive". What a shame,
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/mar/25/south-african-work-banned-from-venice-biennale-to-be-shown-outside-main-event

2026-02-24 15:34:29 UTC

The great David Harvey, in a recent conversation with Doug Henwood, on AI in a capitalist society.
"I'm always being asked about artificial intelligence and my answer is I have no idea what it's going to end up doing. But I can tell you one thing, every major innovation that has come in the history of capital, we think of transport, communications and all the rest of it. Every single thing has had [the potential of] good benevolent and and actually even socialistic utilization and it also has had the opposite, that is, it can be used to support capital accumulation. But every one of them historically that has been used has ended up supporting capital accumulation.
Artificial intelligence can make life very easy for all of us. We could all be sit back and have robots clean out the ashes of the fireplace. But it's unlikely to do that. In fact, it's going to be deployed by the prevailing class forces. And the prevailing class force right now is not very happy about the idea of any mass utilization of artificial intelligence for purposes of greater economic equality and the like. In fact, it's going to likely to be the other way around.
So that neoliberalism, which was very much about the reconstruction of the capitalist class and increasing centralization of capital in class form, that's not gone away and it's likely to utilize the new technologies in ways which are advantageous to it rather than advantageous to us."
https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S260205

2026-02-02 21:09:11 UTC

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@remixtures/116002705470134533
AI conferences restrict the use of AI in conference papers. My kind of humor 🤣.
#note1w45…z3fg

2026-01-26 22:50:24 UTC

Fascinating @npub1fdr…lvhs is developing his theory of #enshittification into a general theory of the rise and eventual collapse of power based on network effects.
Short version: Network effects make switching costly. User are trapped and become sitting ducks for ever-increasing exploitation. As long as the cost of switching is larger than the costs of being exploited, nominally free users rationally decide grin and bear it. But when the costs of being exploited becomes to onerous, it starts to look attractive to buckle the costs of switching. Particularly if the burden of exploitation rises for lot of people in parallel.
This, so the general theory, not only applies to social media, but also to other systems with strong network effects, such as the dollar system.
I'm sure economists could turn this into a formula to predict the point where networks suddenly crumble.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

2025-11-16 18:57:03 UTC

This just such a great work. It clearly illustrates what genAI is not. It's not a machine for precise answers to factual questions. I mean, how could it be? It incorporates stochastic elements.
https://clocks.brianmoore.com/

2025-10-07 20:51:32 UTC

Are there any good studies on disinformation campaigns that aim at influencing LLMs through injecting biased training data?
There must be tons of projects working in this direction.
On the art side, Herndon/Dryhurst's project xhairymutant is doing something like this.

2025-09-20 10:29:04 UTC

I'm fascinated by this image. Meta's planned 5GW Hyperion Data Center overlaid on Manhattan to demonstrate its size.
If you ever needed an image of how digital colonialism looks at home, here it is. And, remember, Zuckerberg published it himself. Btw, 5 GW requires 5 dedicated nuclear power plants (probably more if you factor in redundancy).
https://www.threads.com/@zuck/post/DMF6tMAxkX8?xmt=AQF0I6-Ctn0leigUTf6ExxSz9KzG2zhB17D-AQ5kfFzBZQ
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/115/236/074/789/496/791/original/cf38f9e832b1c5ef.webp

2025-09-11 08:21:31 UTC

Join us tomorrow, live in Vienna or via stream, for what will be an extraordinary event. Deep, critical reflection, across theory, music, and dance.
**Renegade Acts against Technocapitalist Authoritarianism**
John Palmesino Territorial Agency, Marit Seyer Stop Killer Robot Coalition, Marek Tuszynski [@info_activism](https://mastodon.cc/@info_activism ) Felix Stalder Technopolitics
This is just the opening for a fantastic three week series of events.
https://thefutureofdemonstration.net/hothouse/
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/115/184/681/950/030/252/original/20da4fc7e844f5c6.png

2025-08-21 11:41:19 UTC

"Think of it. Forty-five hundred years ago, if you were a Sumerian scribe, while your calculations on the world's first abacus might have been laborious, you could be assured they'd be correct. Four hundred years ago, if you were palling around with William Oughtred, his new slide rule may have been a bit intimidating at first, but you could know its output was correct. In the 1980s, you could have bought the cheapest, shittiest Casio-knockoff calculator you could find, and used it exclusively, for every day of the rest of your life, and never once would it give anything but a correct answer. You could use it today!
But now we have Microsoft apparently determining that "unpredictability" was something that some number of its customers wanted in their calculators."
https://defector.com/it-took-many-years-and-billions-of-dollars-but-microsoft-finally-invented-a-calculator-that-is-wrong-sometimes?giftLink=50fb6d3bb4d7516dfa13deb4e27638de

2025-08-19 08:39:20 UTC

- reply

At the same time in the West.
"It seems that one of the many offerings of generative AI is a kind of psychosis-as-a-service."
I increasingly become convinced that it's impossible to understand the West's attitude towards AI outside the context of its relative decline.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-mass-delusion-event/683909/?gift=bQgJMMVzeo8RHHcE1_KM0Yxw_pOVM_AK6Q1K5aHOCSs

2025-08-19 08:20:04 UTC

Let's talk a bit more about nonsense such as superintelligence. Meanwhile.....
https://restofworld.org/2025/china-ai-powered-self-driving-cars/

2025-07-31 15:27:03 UTC

Who could have thought?
https://restofworld.org/2025/colombia-meta-ai-education/

2025-07-29 12:48:19 UTC

It's hilarious. Contemporary techno-culture is such a mess; there's hope it will break down under its own ineptitude.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/07/openais-chatgpt-agent-casually-clicks-through-i-am-not-a-robot-verification-test/
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/114/936/570/384/590/463/original/59a318441d72743c.png

2025-07-21 11:27:44 UTC

- reply

For me, the most amazing thing is, and this is different on Europe, is that Trump has managed to forge an surprisingly diverse coalition (TechBros, wealthy Chamber-of-commerce-types, disaffected working class, radical Christians, nationalists, racists etc.). All united, for different reasons, against the liberal elites, protection of minorities, and the rule-bound administration.
And what do we have? Fights within feminism (TERF vs Trans) and impossibly high demands to realize the new world within our movements first, and a conservative desire to return to the 1990s.
For me, the elephant in the room is climate change. The US right managed to articulate a "coherent" program: build walls against the South, capture the North, and bet on AI to magically solve all problems through super-intelligence.
And what do we have? The center is saying climate change will kill us, but we can't do anything about it. The left is into organic farming and recycling. Basically identity politics as personal virtue signaling.
I thought the experience of living in an ecologically precarious world might provide a new framework for solidarity, but minus-sum games are tearing things apart.

2025-07-20 09:52:57 UTC

I fear that "Resisting AI" will lock us into a fundamentally losing battle, the same way that "Protecting Privacy" does.
It's not that the political ends are wrong, but the means are conceptually inadequate. It locks us into a battle where we might achieve a few tactical wins, while the overall situation is deteriorating all the time.
At the same time, it's obvious that "protecting privacy" is one of the few institutionalized ways we can push for non-market values in the digital context. So it would be foolish to give this up. But it still locks us into a battle we cannot win.
For privacy, see this article by @npub1xqv…uyyg and others.
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13671

2025-07-18 22:46:15 UTC

Something hopeful about the growing tension within Trump's actually quite diverse coalition by @npub1fdr…lvhs . The internal contradictions begin to bite.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/18/winning-is-easy/
And there are many more than named in the article? How about the tensions between AIBros and Christian Ziontists about how to best administer the end-of-times?

2025-07-17 07:46:21 UTC

#ai #creativity
One of the things that comes up again and again is that AI might help with new ideas on an individual level (by creating access to previously unknown areas of culture), reduces creativity on a collective level because it helps everyone in the same way. I posted about this recently.
This is a bit like Wikipedia being a great place to start research, because one gets easy access to new information, but a terrible place to end it, because the very nature of an encyclopedia means that the information is limited and flattened.
I don't want to debate here the merits of AI on an individual level. The point I want to make is that there are different effects on different levels, and our individualistic culture makes it very difficult to see collective effects when they are very different from individual effects.
@npub178j…00g5 and @npub14g2…apna
Make this point (and many others) about science.
https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/could-ai-slow-science?triedRedirect=true

2025-06-30 11:59:33 UTC

The AI headlines write themselves (though not exactly the way the techbros imagine),
**The AI Company Zuckerberg Just Poured $14 Billion Into Is Reportedly a Clown Show of Ludicrous Incompetence**
https://futurism.com/scale-ai-zuckerberg-incompetence

2025-06-30 11:57:19 UTC

**Artificial Intelligence has enshittified the F-35**, America’s long-embattled 5th generation stealth fighter jet. Produced by Lockheed Martin and coming in three different flavors, the F-35 relies on an AI system called the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) to maintain the aircraft. The pitch was that ALIS would keep the F-35 in flying shape cheap and easy.
The reality has been the opposite
https://gizmodo.com/ai-has-enshittified-americas-advanced-stealth-fighter-2000527934

2025-06-21 13:41:09 UTC

Oh yeah, fast track model collapse!
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/114/721/633/063/724/300/original/6888865a19b6c419.jpeg

2025-06-17 19:51:41 UTC

- reply

I agree, I was wondering if I should propagate that, but then again, it's really a revealing piece. Not of anything we haven't known, but in such a condensed way. Like unfiltered collective subconscious.
I agree even more with defense mechanisms. TLDR is part of mine. Not that it was planned like that, but turned out like that, for now

2025-06-17 10:22:42 UTC

For a perfect encapsulation of the spirit and aesthetics of the historical moment the US is experiencing, check out this video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMftwmyW-A
Social and climate breakdown, all turned into a betting opportunity, rendered through AI slop. A real commercial, produced for cheap, but aired for big money on TV during a prime sports event.
For some background:
https://pjace.beehiiv.com/p/i-can-t-believe-disney-allowed-us-to-run-this-ai-ad-during-the-nba-finals-f77e73388ab4ca62
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/114/698/204/011/804/594/original/3f425c2b42c5b913.png

2025-06-06 07:51:31 UTC

Is there a serious argument against the view that we already have agentic AGI that is seriously misaligned with human survival in the form of the capitalist corporation?
In the single-minded pursuit of its "objective function", profit, it exploits every loophole, breaks any rule necessary, and does not mind destroying the entire planet.
It's basically the speculative paperclip-maker in real world action. Just that it has already manipulated human culture to think that paperclips are the greatest thing in the world.

2025-06-02 09:38:00 UTC

"I think Silicon Valley has done a really good job of convincing people that things that are collectively owned actually belong to them, and when we remember they’re ours, we can start shaping what’s happening in this world."
https://www.cambridgeday.com/2025/06/01/karen-hao-tells-the-true-story-of-openai-and-chatgpt-in-empire-of-ai/

2025-05-26 07:11:10 UTC

The first step of automation is turning people to machines.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KE8.3wnj.iWa0IupCahPv&smid=url-share

2025-05-22 08:47:23 UTC

Is "causal AI" an actual thing?
Or is the claim to be able to move beyond mere pattern recognition towards an understanding of the underlying mechanism that produce the pattern just marketing?

2025-05-15 08:30:48 UTC

- reply

efficiency is the opposite of resilience. Assume the best case and plan only for that.

2025-04-27 10:35:43 UTC

For me, this is the best image symbolizing what Gen AI actually **is**. A black box, burning the planet, understood best, paradoxically, through technological means.
What you see here is a thermal image of xAI's Datacenter in Memphis, where 33 methane power generators are burning without permission.
Photograph: Steve Jones/Flight by Southwings for Southern Environmental Law Center.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-musk-xai-memphis
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/114/409/450/044/571/921/original/daecd57712242663.png

2025-04-21 11:22:19 UTC

Ex- Googler Eric Schmidt on the energy demands of the AI industry. "Many people project demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. ... We need the energy in all forms, renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly."
99% of all available energy! They really have given up on people (well, except their own offspring, of which there cannot be enough.)
If this isn't a death cult, I don't know what is one.
https://futurism.com/google-ceo-congress-electricity-ai-superintelligence

2025-03-27 18:25:06 UTC

- reply

In all my institutional experience, reforms to achieve efficiency end up invariably with an additional layer of management.

2025-03-26 13:17:57 UTC

- reply

My shelves are overflowing. I prefer work-related books electronically by now.

2025-03-26 08:11:48 UTC

As a writer myself, I kind of like buying e-books.
What I really hate is when they are so tightly wrapped in DRM that I need to download the unprotected version from libgen just top be able to read the book I just bought.
And, no, installing DRM software on my computer is not an option.

2025-03-23 10:42:55 UTC

- reply

In some way, TLDR is an experiment precisely on this level.
There has been a community on nettime-l (mailing list) and we were thinking about moving it to a new format, Mastodon.
It was a jump of about 30 years in terms of structure/interface, but it seems between that, there has been very little development in networked social communication that was neither corporate nor super-nerdy (Ok, one could argue that Mastodon is still too much of the latter.)

2025-03-22 09:23:16 UTC

#Bluesky nominally has the capacity to be decentralized, in practice, it's fully centralized. What led @npub1xpz…a80p to call it "federation washing".
But what about #blacksky? Is this a working example of #decentralization of Bluesky?
On the level of technical infrastructure, it's a service built on top of Bluesky, on a social level, it's clearly distinct (different feeds, moderation, social user basis).
In terms of building a space of a large minority community, it seems to have succeeded where Mastodon failed so far,. And it might even be large enough to decentralize the infrastructure as well.
https://privacy.thenexus.today/decentralization-and-erasure-blacksky-bluesky-and-the-atmosphere-2/

2025-02-13 10:39:10 UTC

DOGE Is Hacking America
"It’s as if someone found a way to rob Fort Knox by simply declaring that the new official policy is to fire all the guards and allow unescorted visits to the vault."
https://archive.ph/lSHkJ

2025-02-10 12:20:14 UTC

With AI being pushed into government by fascists, we need an updated analysis of the "The Banality of Automated Evil". Because this is what is happening. The evasion of responsibility for inhuman actions through formal procedure.

2025-02-02 12:00:14 UTC

A message from Ubu!
UbuWeb
Founded 1996
February 1, 2025
A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It's now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.
https://ubu.com
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/113/934/176/235/262/249/original/865a0bd2f9f629c8.jpg

2025-01-29 07:39:45 UTC

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No problem. Easily banned.

2025-01-28 21:39:43 UTC

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Yeah, there was even one creep who signed up with TLDR just to tag you the same message!

2025-01-18 09:16:07 UTC

From the late, great Mike Davis. His prescient vision is now here for all to see.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/5427-the-fire-boom
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/113/848/598/399/927/091/original/df0ec0f4db845beb.webp

2024-11-29 08:46:23 UTC

This is a story that almost perfectly illustrates @npub16wc…ehf0 's point about AI being a tech of austerity. Here: courts in Argentina.
Under Milei's slash and burn libertarian reforms, courts are moving to ChatGPT for "cutting legal costs and reducing processing times."
The wrinkle in this story is that they used their homegrown AI since 2017, but are now moving to OpenAI.
I guess this centralization is simply the unavoidable phase II of this process, reflecting the economies of scale built into generative AI.
https://restofworld.org/2024/buenos-aires-courts-adopt-chatgpt-draft-rulings/

2024-11-28 14:55:57 UTC

"On Disaster Nationalism & The Climate Crisis" by Richard Seymour is an astute article, connecting climate crisis and economic crisis, and the rise of the far right through what he calls "disaster nationalism".
https://www.break-down.org/post/on-disaster-nationalism

2024-11-27 10:26:20 UTC

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I think there are two ways of reading the TAZ thing these days. One is that liberation is possible, and it's better to be life free for a short while than not at all. Don't wait for the big revolution. This is, I would say, the meaning that PLW intended.
The other is cynical, "you will get fucked over everywhere, anyway, so take the freebie while it's free." This also implies that it's not worth investing in alternatives because in the end, everything turns against you eventually.
And then, of course, when thinking about media, most people focus on content alone, and don't see or care about structure.

2024-11-26 20:11:12 UTC

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they did. They like it that way.

2024-11-11 09:06:14 UTC

Patriarchy's visions are becoming ever more extreme. Surpassing even Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
"Women “would have their uteruses removed when they turn over 30,” Naoki Hyakuta, leader of the Conservative Party of Japan, said in a stream on his YouTube channel on Friday.
On the channel, he also said that he would make it law for “women who are single after 25 years old not to be allowed to marry.”"
He later apologized by saying: “I cannot deny that the expressions were too harsh".
https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/general-news/20241110-221734/

2024-11-08 09:52:08 UTC

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welcome! We (mods) try to stay on it. :)
The best way to get a feel for the instance is to keep an eye on the "local timeline".

2024-10-29 17:00:53 UTC

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hahaha. Tha's also the only threads account I follow :)

2024-10-29 14:00:02 UTC

I just remembered all the discussions about half a year ago about #threads building a bridge to the #fediverse. It seemed like a big deal.
There were calls for preemptive bans based on the Meta's history of bad behavior, and calls for not banning, so people could flee the walled gardens of corporate media and move to the green pastures of the Fediverse.
We here at TLDR opted for a wait-and-see approach. But, frankly., I haven't seen anything.
Did I miss something? If not, then why was this such a non-event?

2024-10-26 10:49:45 UTC

Fascinating article about the as yet unpredictable changes AI brings to complex knowledge work. Here the case of radiology. The early predictions of displacement of humans by machines have not come to pass (though, as always, they have simply been pushed into the future).
For me, this is the most interesting part, and one that I think applies quite generally.
"Still, I have reservations about AI in radiology, particularly when it comes to education. One of the main promises of AI is that it will handle the “easy” scans, freeing radiologists to concentrate on the “harder” stuff. I bristle at this forecast, since the “easy” cases are only so after we read thousands of them during our training—and for me they’re still not so easy! The only reason my mentors are able to interpret more advanced imaging is that they have an immense grounding in these fundamentals."
If you automate the easy stuff, it's much harder to gain experience necessary to do the harder stuff, This applies to any craft and all creative/knowledge work as an important element of craft to it.
https://newrepublic.com/article/187203/ai-radiology-geoffrey-hinton-nobel-prediction

2024-10-06 11:26:19 UTC

Ex-Googler Eric Schmidt "My own opinion is that we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we are not organized to do it and yes the needs in this area [AI] will be a problem. But I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”
This seems to be a fairly prevalent sentiment among the tech crowd.
It's probably impossible to separate the self-serving bullshitting from the actual tech-utopianism beliefs.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/eric-schmidts-risky-bet-on-ai-and

2024-10-03 10:58:45 UTC

Wikipedia now needs to have a "WikiProject AI Cleanup". They should send Sam Altman a massive bill for all their extra, unnecessary work.
I wouldn't be surprised if, on balance, cleaning up after Generative AI produced more cost than using Generative AI ever saved. Unfortunately, probably not for the same people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Cleanup

2024-09-25 09:47:33 UTC

If you think the world is not in a good shape and that capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy have something to do with it, then Verso is important to you. You know that.
If you have a one of their books at home (or, one of their non-drm ebooks on your device), now it's the time. They need your solidarity.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/versobooks/comrades-verso-needs-your-support-for-radical-publishing
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/113/197/557/112/246/551/original/813b02fb317d724c.jpeg

2024-09-18 10:15:15 UTC

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I think, generative AI actually *is* an autocorrect. But now it's no longer spelling and grammar, but your imagination that is corrects towards the expected.

2024-09-13 16:29:55 UTC

The opposite of "optimized" is "resilient".

2024-08-13 10:03:36 UTC

👏 I'm quite impressed with the new version (7) of @npub15et…uqzt
It's an actual improvement of an already great program. This is what you can get when there are no #enshittification incentives.
https://www.zotero.org/