I had the great honor and pleasure to contribute an essay framing this call about "Refusing Tech Fascism":

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An essay on Refusing Tech Fascism by Jürgen Geuter aka @tante

tldr.nettime

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I think the most tragic aspect of deploying "AI" in teaching and learning situations is how much it pushes people into a situation of learned helplessness. This constant feeling of not knowing how to do a thing of being incapable of actually doing work on one's tasks is mentally so harmful. How do people under those conditions gain confidence in their abilities? Like ever?

"If all these big companies are shouting from the rooftops that AI is up to production code the money relies on, then zero open source contributions of substance is a glaring absence." (Original title: If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?)

Pivot to AI

If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?

You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers. AI code is abs...

Quick remarks on where the term "agentic AI" fits in and why it's a sign of the crumbling hype.

Smashing Frames

On "agentic AI"

There’s this weird phrase “agentic AI” which looks weid. But it’s a sign for how bad the state of the bubble is: Software a...

Just cause there is a new slew of "AI doesn't use much water" apologisms around. True if you massage the numbers. But _where_ in the physical world is the water taken and from whom?

Bloomberg.com

The AI Boom Is Draining Water From the Areas That Need It Most

A Bloomberg News analysis finds that roughly two thirds of new data centers built or in development in the US since 2022 are in places with high le...

Also ich wäre nicht böse, wenn sich Can'tzler als Kurzname von Merz durchsetzen würde. #cantzler

Really enjoyed the "Permacomputing principles"

principles

(via @npub1fkl8...qagr ) Especially loved "Strict utilitarianism impoverishes. Uselessness also has an important place, so appreciate it."

The whole "AI" thing should have reignited conversations on what "creations" and "creativity" and "authorship rights" mean. Like it seems to have settled on "we take it all, stochastic parrot goes brrrr" and "copyright über alles". Feels like a missed opportunity.

The heading is a bit misleading. GPT usage is not "not bad for the environment", many people just have other worse habits in their lives. (Of course there is always a conversation that needs to happen about the outcome: Flying for shits and giggles or flying to meet a dying relative for a last time have the same CO2 footprint but are not the same. Those kinds of cheet sheets evade actual conversations by making everything abstract and without context)

Mastodon

Simon Willison (@simon@simonwillison.net)

I'm glad somebody out there is brave enough to push back against the "personal ChatGPT usage is terrible for the environment" message https://andym...

Geoffrey Hinton is the literal, proper _worst_. Not only through his baseless boosterism of so-called "AI" with claims of "it will be smarter than us soon" or by training the next generation of hucksters (Meta's LeCunn as well as OpenAI's Sutskever were his students) but by telling people not to study important fields (like radiology) because "the AI will do that". Now we have labor shortages in those sectors (

The “Godfather of AI” Predicted I Wouldn’t Have a Job. He Was Wrong. | The New Republic

) meaning people get diagnoses too late and therefore will die. Just cause some tech dude had a clever idea at some point we should not listen to his rambling on about other topics when he's old. This fucks up our world.

Business Insider

'Godfather of AI' says he's 'glad' to be 77 because the tech probably won't take over the world in his lifetime

Geoffrey Hinton estimated a "sort of 10 to 20% chance" that AI systems could one day seize control, but stressed it's impossible to predict exactly.