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Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control

"The blueprint for modern digital computing was codesigned by Charles Babbage, a vocal champion for the concerns of the emerging industrial capitalist class who condemned organized workers and viewed democracy and capitalism as incompatible." "Babbage documented his ideas on labor discipline in his famous volume On the

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The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America' Because It Went Viral on TikTok

I'm pretty shocked that people are sharing Osama bin Laden's letter because they agree with it. Mostly because it is absolutely rife with antisemitic tropes. This is one of the most dangerous aspects of the place we're in: the conflict in Gaza is leading

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AI outperforms conventional weather forecasting for the first time: Google study

This feels like a good use for AI: taking in more data points, understanding their interactions, and producing far more accurate weather forecasts. We're already used to some amount of unreliability in weather forecasts, so when the model gets it wrong - as this did with the intensification

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World behind on almost every policy required to cut carbon emissions, research finds | Climate crisis

"Coal must be phased out seven times faster than is now happening, deforestation must be reduced four times faster, and public transport around the world built out six times faster than at present, if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown, new research has found.

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A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

I feel this myself, but I don't think it means that coding is going away, exactly. Some kinds of coding are less manual, in the same way we don't write in assembler anymore. But there will always be a place for code. Lately I've

In the face of human rights abuses

I want to write something on Israel / Palestine, and I've tried about six times to gather my thoughts, but there's so much to the situation, and there are so many people who will take you to task no matter where you stand, that it's

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I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.

I read this the other day and haven't stopped thinking about it. Mostly I worry about the children who have to grow up in this kind of environment. To my mind it's tantamount to child abuse. What happens to them later? Do they stay inside this

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We need solidarity across creative industries

I strongly believe in this: "Artists and writers must have solidarity across creative industries: if you wouldn’t feel comfortable with your own work being replaced by algogen, then you shouldn’t use generated content of other creative mediums." On top of it being an ethical affront across

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Top consultancy undermining climate change fight: whistleblowers

Management consultants are to blame, for sure, but so are politicians for taking the bait. We know that there's big oil and gas money pushing against real solutions to climate change - anyone who's in that space needs to be vigilant against it. One aspect of

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‘It is a beast that needs to be tamed’: leading novelists on how AI could rewrite the future

This runs the gamut, but generally sits where I am: AI itself is not the threat. How it might be used in service of a profit motive is the threat. Harry Josephine Giles worries about the digital enclosure movement - making private aspects of life that were once public -

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Matt Mullenweg on Tumblr's downsizing

This is a great post from Matt: in response to a leak, he re-posted the full leaked content and added transparent context. Exactly how it should be done. I wish, like many, that this wasn't the reality for Tumblr. But it's likely that it's

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Meet Nightshade—A Tool Empowering Artists to Fight Back Against AI

While empowering artists is obviously a good thing, this feels like an unwinnable arms race to me. Sure, Nightshade can produce incorrect results in image generators, but this will be mitigated, leading to another tool, leading to another mitigation, and so on. For now, this may be a productive kind