The only mod here is inactive as well.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.wtf/post/22266116

Part 1

• https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2025/05/26/Internet-Sucks-Cory-Doctorow/

Part 2

• https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2025/05/27/Musk-Zuck-Use-Our-Love-Hostage/

Via

• https://sh.itjust.works/post/38837138

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64675315

“One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992

https://invidious.f5.si/watch?v=eIPvYq-uVzM

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/44073921

He DOGEd Twitter's employees in France, and it turns out... not so legal.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64024099

Reporting Highlights

• “Maximum Pressure”: The State Department conducted a monthslong campaign to push a small African country to help Musk’s satellite internet company, records and interviews show.
• “Ram This Through”: Working closely with executives at Starlink, the U.S. government has made a global push to help expand Musk’s business empire in the developing world.
• “Crony Capitalism”: Diplomats said the events were an alarming departure from standard practice — because of both the tactics used and the person who would benefit most from them.

The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside "sniper" had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29457110

The firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter came after Perlmutter and her office earlier this week issued part three of a lengthy report about artificial intelligence and expressed some concerns and questions about the usage of copyrighted materials by AI technology.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/19886316

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/363725

Comments

• Megayacht: $300 million.
• Megayacht support vessel: $30 million.
• Avoid law limiting helicopter pollution by landing on megayacht's helipad, not Norwegian soil: priceless!

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/02/elon-musk-spacex-texas-starship-00317693

Right now, this roughly 1.5 square mile community is technically unincorporated Boca Chica Village. But on Saturday, the 200-odd residents — the vast majority of whom are SpaceX employees — will decide whether the land surrounding Musk’s massive rocket launchpad should become its own city: Starbase, Texas. It is an election that the region has been marching toward since December, when several dozen residents submitted a petition to South Texas’ Cameron County asking it to schedule an election that would incorporate Starbase as its own municipality. The move would give SpaceX increased autonomy, virtually its own government, and greater ability to build where and how it wants.

(...)

The measure’s passage could lead to possible land grabs through eminent domain, diminished public beach access and less oversight of the company’s activities.

(...)

Now, 100 years after the era of the company town, the richest man on Earth appears set on reprising the concept for the space age.

(...)

As SpaceX was making moves toward a vote on Starbase, Musk’s company was also supporting a legislative package, one bill for the House, the other for the Senate, in the Texas statehouse. The identical bills would give municipalities with “spaceports” the ability to limit access to public beaches, a move which seemed specifically targeted at Boca Chica. That would mean SpaceX would have the right to close Highway 4 in Cameron County for any activity that involves space flight. Currently, only the county can close the highway.

The incorporation of Spacebase seems to be primarily a question of control for SpaceX. The new city would directly manage its building and permitting, eliminating regulatory hurdles it might have to jump through at the county level. It would control its own land use laws and local taxes, and would also allow it to apply for state and federal grants. Although the ability to shut down the highway for launches is helpful, a Starbase city would have autonomy that extends far beyond that.

To activists like Hinojosa, the bills are just the first step in a series of power grabs that will likely define the era of Starbase, Texas, which she views as part of the slow colonization of her hometown by the tech oligarchy.

(...)

Within 15 minutes [of trying to canvas voters and campaign against incorporation], an unmarked white truck filled with what Treviño described as “mall cops with bullet proof vests” confronted the group and told them that they were on private property. Treviño challenged the men, who identified themselves as SpaceX security, asking why they had the right to boot canvassers off a public thoroughfare. The volunteers said security refused to answer their questions and again forcefully told them to leave. The group returned to their cars, surprised and scared, as they drove back toward Brownsville. (SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

EDIT:

The vote's in. 212 for, 6 against. Musk gets his city.

• https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-starbase-texas-city-7863bf3bac65e9718eef19b27978933b

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62810203

Marc Andreessen is predicting that at least one job is safe from the rise of AI: his own.

Marc Andreessen says that VCs may escape the rising tide of AI automation. On a recent podcast, he said the relationship-driven art of venture capital may make it one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing when other jobs are automated.

And it was just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.

This constellation of rolling elite political conversations revolve primarily around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures.

cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/4147895

Recent years have seen the emergence of a second and arguably more powerful “Armageddon Lobby.” It resides in epicenters of power like Silicon Valley and embraces a “secular” vision of humanity’s grand future — though it shares many similarities with traditional religion, including a belief in “God” and the promise of immortality through cryonics. The renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this vision “The Mindset,”

Advocates of The Mindset claim that the world as we know it will soon expire. In its ashes, a new era dominated by digital lifeforms — that is, artificial intelligences — will emerge. These beings will stand to us as “gods,” though by merging our brains with AI or “uploading” our minds to computers, we may become gods ourselves: Homo deus — the “human god” — as Yuval Noah Harari puts it. “The most devout holders of The Mindset,” Rushkoff writes in reference to Mark Zuckerberg’s failed “metaverse” project,

seek to go meta on themselves, convert into digital form, and migrate to that realm as robots, artificial intelligences, or mind clones. Once they’re there, living in the digital map rather than the physical territory, they will insulate themselves from what they don’t like through simple omission. … As always, the narrative ends in some form of escape for those rich, smart, or singularly determined enough to take the leap. Mere mortals need not apply.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21217025

More on the Xai crimes in Memphis:

White-supremacy-born broligarch installs 35 unpermitted gas turbines and immediately becomes the city's single biggest NOx polluter and possibly biggest emitter of the carcinogen formaldehyde... in a black-majority neighbourhood that already has a life expectancy 12 years below the average of its very own county and cancer rates 4x the national average.

But fret not! Surely the environmental justice unit of the EPA will surely put a stop to this outrage. What? It was just disbanded? By who? The very same white-supremacy-born broligarch who installed... (continue ad ~~nauseam~~ revolutionem)

New data reveals the hidden network of African workers powering AI, as they push for transparency from the global companies that employ them indirectly.

The broligarchy use subcontractors and sub-subcontractors to exploit workers in Africa with a veneer of deniability and to enrich... themselves, naturally. Violating workers' rights and data privacy along the way.

• https://restofworld.org/2025/big-tech-ai-labor-supply-chain-african-workers/

Cross-posted from "Seth Rogen’s Trump Jokes Are Edited Out of Awards Broadcast | Mr. Rogen said President Trump had “single-handedly destroyed all of American science.”" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

Tech oligarchs (Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki) create a science prize, fund the inauguration of an anti-science president who appoints a fellow tech bro to gut govt funding of science, and then cut the part where someone points out the irony... "for time reasons"... from a YouTube video.

Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin all in attendance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Prize

Cross-posted from "What 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘰𝘯 𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 Knew About Tech-Bro Paternalism" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

Last fall, the consumer-electronics company LG announced new branding for the artificial intelligence powering many of its home appliances. Out: the “smart home.” In: “Affectionate Intelligence.” This “empathetic and caring” AI, as LG describes it, is here to serve. It might switch off your appliances and dim your lights at bedtime. It might, like its sisters Alexa and Siri, select a soundtrack to soothe you to sleep. The technology awaits your summons and then, unquestioningly, answers. It will make subservience environmental. It will surround you with care—and ask for nothing in return.

Affectionate AI, trading the paternalism of typical techspeak for a softer—or, to put it bluntly, more feminine—framing, is pretty transparent as a branding play: It is an act of anxiety management. It aims to assure the consumer that “the coming Humanity-Plus-AI future,” as a recent report from Elon University called it, will be one not of threat but of promise. Yes, AI overall has the potential to become, as Elon Musk said in 2023, the “most disruptive force in history.” It could be, as he put it in 2014, “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” It is a force like “an immortal dictator from which we can never escape,” he suggested in 2018. And yet, AI is coming. It is inevitable. We have, as consumers with human-level intelligence, very little choice in the matter. The people building the future are not asking for our permission; they are expecting our gratitude.

It takes a very specific strain of paternalism to believe that you can create something that both eclipses humanity and serves it at the same time. The belief is ripe for satire. That might be why I’ve lately been thinking back to a comment posted last year to a Subreddit about HBO’s satire Silicon Valley: “It’s a shame this show didn’t last into the AI craze phase.” It really is! Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, a year before Musk, Sam Altman, and a group of fellow engineers founded OpenAI to ensure that, as their mission statement put it, “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” The show ended its run in 2019, before AI’s wide adoption. It would have had a field day with some of the events that have transpired since, among them Musk’s rebrand as a T-shirt-clad oligarch and Altman’s bot-based mimicry of the 2013 movie Her.

Silicon Valley reads, at times, more as parody than as satire: Sharp as it is in its specific observations about tech culture, the show sometimes seems like a series of jokes in search of a punch line. It shines, though, when it casts its gaze on the gendered dynamics of tech—when it considers the consequential absurdities of tech’s arrogance.

The show doesn’t spend much time directly tackling artificial intelligence as a moral problem—not until its final few episodes. But it still offers a shrewd parody of AI, as a consumer technology and as a future being foisted on us. That is because Silicon Valley is highly attuned to the way power is exchanged and distributed in the industry, and to tech bros’ hubristic inclination to cast the public in a stereotypically feminine role.

Corporations act; the rest of humanity reacts. They decide; we comply. They are the creators, driven by competition, conquest, and a conviction that the future is theirs to shape. We are the ones who will live with their decisions. Silicon Valley does not explicitly predict a world of AI made “affectionate.” In a certain way, though, it does. It studies the men who make AI. It parodies their paternalism. The feminist philosopher Kate Manne argues that masculinity, at its extreme, is a self-ratifying form of entitlement. Silicon Valley knows that there’s no greater claim to entitlement than an attempt to build the future.

[Read: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]

The series focuses on the evolving fortunes of the fictional start-up Pied Piper, a company with an aggressively boring product—a data-compression algorithm—and an aggressively ambitious mission. The algorithm could lead, eventually, to the realization of a long-standing dream: a decentralized internet, its data stored not on corporately owned servers but on the individual devices of the network. Richard Hendricks, Pied Piper’s founder and the primary author of that algorithm, is a coder by profession but an idealist by nature. Over the seasons, he battles with billionaires who are driven by ego, pettiness, and greed. But he is not Manichean; he does not hew to Manne’s sense of masculine entitlement. He merely wants to build his tech.

He is surrounded, however, by characters who do fit Manne’s definition, to different degrees. There’s Erlich Bachman, the funder who sold an app he built for a modest profit and who regularly confuses luck with merit; Bertram Gilfoyle, the coder who has turned irony poisoning into a personality; Dinesh Chugtai, the coder who craves women’s company as much as he fears it; Jared Dunn, the business manager whose competence is belied by his meekness. Even as the show pokes fun at the guys’ personal failings, it elevates their efforts. Silicon Valley, throughout, is a David and Goliath story. Pied Piper is a tiny company trying to hold its own against the Googles of the world.

The show, co-created by Mike Judge, can be giddily adolescent about its own bro-ness (many of its jokes refer to penises). But it is also, often, insightful about the absurdities that can arise when men are treated like gods. The show mocks the tech executive who brandishes his Buddhist prayer beads and engages in animal cruelty. It skewers Valley denizens’ conspicuous consumption. (Several B plots revolve around the introduction of the early Tesla roadsters.) Most of all, the show pokes fun at the myopia displayed by men who are, in the Valley and beyond, revered as “visionaries.” All they can see and care about are their own interests. In that sense, the titans of tech are unabashedly masculine. They are callous. They are impetuous. They are reckless.

[Read: Elon Musk can’t stop talking about penises]

Their failings cause chaos, and Silicon Valley spends its seasons writing whiplash into its story line. The show swings, with melodramatic ease, between success and failure. Richard and his growing team—fellow engineers, investors, business managers—seem to move forward, getting a big new round of funding or good publicity. Then, as if on cue, they are brought low again: Defeats are snatched from the jaws of victory. The whiplash can make the show hard to watch. You get invested in the fate of this scrappy start-up. You hope. You feel a bit of preemptive catharsis until the next disappointment comes.

That, in itself, is resonant. AI can hurtle its users along similar swings. It is a product to be marketed and a future to be accepted. It is something to be controlled (OpenAI’s Altman appeared before Congress in 2023 asking for government regulation) and something that must not be contained (OpenAI this year, along with other tech giants, asked the federal government to prevent state-level regulation). Altman’s public comments paint a picture of AI that evokes both Skynet (“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” he said at the 2023 congressional hearing) and—as he said in a 2023 interview—a “magic intelligence in the sky.”

[Read: OpenAI goes MAGA]

The dissonance is part of the broader experience of tech—a field that, for the consumer, can feel less affectionate than addling. People adapted to Twitter, coming to rely on it for news and conversation; then Musk bought it, turned it into X, tweaked the algorithms, and, in the process, ruined the platform. People who have made investments in TikTok operate under the assumption that, as has happened before, it could go dark with the push of a button. To depend on technology, to trust it at all, in many instances means to be betrayed by it. And AI makes that vulnerability ever more consequential. Humans are at risk, always, of the machines’ swaggering entitlements. Siri and Alexa and their fellow feminized bots are flourishes of marketing. They perform meekness and cheer—and they are roughly as capable of becoming an “immortal dictator” as their male-coded counterparts.

By the end of Silicon Valley’s run, Pied Piper seems poised for an epic victory. The company has a deal with AT&T to run its algorithm over the larger company’s massive network. It is about to launch on millions of people’s phones. It is about to become a household name. And then: the twist. Pied Piper’s algorithm uses AI to maximize its own efficiency; through a fluke, Richard realizes that the algorithm works too well. It will keep maximizing. It will make its own definitions of efficiency. Pied Piper has created a decentralized network in the name of “freedom”; it has created a machine, you might say, meant to benefit all of humanity. Now that network might mean humanity’s destruction. It could come for the power grid. It could come for the apps installed in self-driving cars. It could come for bank accounts and refrigerators and satellites. It could come for the nuclear codes.

Suddenly, we’re watching not just comedy but also an action-adventure drama. The guys will have to make hard choices on behalf of everyone else. This is an accidental kind of paternalism, a power they neither asked for nor, really, deserve. And the show asks whether they will be wise enough to abandon their ambitions—to sacrifice the trappings of tech-bro success—in favor of more stereotypically feminine goals: protection, self-sacrifice, compassion, care.

I won’t spoil things by saying how the show answers the question. I’ll simply say that, if you haven’t seen the finale, in which all of this plays out, it’s worth watching. Silicon Valley presents a version of the conundrum that real-world coders are navigating as they build machines that have the potential to double as monsters. The stakes are melodramatic. That is the point. Concerns about humanity—even the word humanity—have become so common in discussions of AI that they risk becoming clichés. But humanity is at stake, the show suggests, when human intelligence becomes an option rather than a given. At some point, the twists will have to end. In “the coming Humanity-Plus-AI future,” we will have to find new ways of considering what it means to be human—and what we want to preserve and defend. Coders will have to come to grips with what they’ve created. Is AI a tool or a weapon? Is it a choice, or is it inevitable? Do we want our machines to be affectionate? Or can we settle for ones that leave the work of trying to be good humans to the humans?

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Cross-posted from "This is what resistance to the digital coup looks like" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

Sunday morning I came across a blog post by Jared White bestowing praise on journalist Carole Cadwalladr’s TED Talk: “This is what a digital coup looks like.”

Cadwalladr’s presentation was phenomenal, filled with brilliant, incendiary quotes against the Broligarchy (in her words: tech bros + oligarchy = broligarchy). I would recommend everybody watch it.

It's filled with memorable, superb quotes about the broligarchy. A must see, to be shared widely. But then I looked up Cadwalladr's online activity. She uses Bluesky for social and Substack for publishing. This is impossibly incongruous after her incendiary TED talk. Honestly, it made me sad. One place is owned by crypto bros, the other is funded by A16Z {Andreessen Horowitz}...