Bad tech

2025-01-07

A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media: Looks like I’m not the only person kinda terrified about Zuckerberg’s latest pronouncement.

2025-01-07: Meta announces that it's doing its best to make 2025 even worse than it already was

2024-12-31

Quitting social media gave me a new creed: only disconnect: ‘…our virtual selves are not our inner selves, but behaviours drawn out from us by the social media platforms’.

2024-12-28

I’m Tired of Pretending Physical Media Isn’t Still Better Than Streaming Digital: I’m too clutter-phobic to indulge in much physical media, but its hard to deny you tend to get a higher quality and less annoying experience if you do.

2024-12-19

More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD: Spending hours a day looking at the worst humanity has to offer is damaging to one’s health.

2024-12-19: Moderating Facebook is giving their less privileged workers PTSD

2024-12-16

Why Romania’s election was annulled – and what happens next?: Romanian courts rule that their presidential election was too contaminated with social media manipulation, Russian interference, cyber attacks and illegal funding to stand.

2024-12-15

AI’s Walking Dog: ‘AI itself has much to offer, but it has not lived up to its potential to serve the public good, and the context of AI’s development explains why’

2024-12-11

Russia Tests Cutting Off Access to Global Web, and VPNs Can’t Get Around It

2024-12-10

Artificial Irony: Misinformation Expert’s Testimony Has Fake Citations: Via unchecked ChatGPT usage.

2024-12-10: Misinformation expert misinforms court by using ChatGPT

2024-12-08

Murdered Insurance CEO Had Deployed an AI to Automatically Deny Benefits for Sick People: Not to justify murder, but I’m sure there were a lot of desperate people very unhappy with Brian Thompson’s company.

2024-12-06

OpenAI’s new model tried to avoid being shut down: By disabling its oversight mechanism and copying itself elsewhere, tho the context is important.

2024-12-06: OpenAI’s new model tried to avoid being shut down. Well, that’s a little unnerving, for …

2024-11-28: Some good work by Skeleton Claw:

2024-11-26

Helpline for Yakuza victims fears it leaked their personal info: A Japanese government agency was phished.

2024-11-26: From The Register: A local Japanese government agency dedicated to preventing organized crime has …

2024-11-23: The Guardian newspaper will no longer post on X

2024-11-21

A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power: ‘This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite.’

Don’t call it a Substack: Anil implores us not to refer to our writing using some other dubious entity’s brand name - ‘Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”’.

2024-11-04

Bluesky and enshittification: The most well-intentioned service remains at risk of enshittification whilst there remains significant costs incurred when switching away from it.

2024-10-31

The billionaires hedge their bets: Purely out of immoral and misguided self-interest, many of the tech billionaires are cosying up to Trump.

2024-10-30

Why I Am (Still) a Liberal (For Now): ‘Thin’ vs ‘thick’ liberalism, and the Cruelty Culture of 2022-era Twitter.

2024-10-28: Vox's take on "Is AI the new nuclear weapons?"

2024-10-27

The AI-Generated Product Reviews Choking the Internet Are Now Illegal: The FTC makes certain types of fake reviews illegal, whether human or robots wrote them, in the US.