Realizing the extent to which this is true wildly changed my opinions about how to deal with Trumpism, since they're never going to be satisfied unless they're actively dominating everyone else. You can't give them some concessions and go back to the status quo: they're reactionary revolutionaries.

Better Things Are Possible@internethippo.bsky.social · 15h ago

Antebellum politics is fascinating, the South kept getting policy concessions and whipped themselves up into a paranoid rage anyway, essentially because they couldn't stand being culturally judged for having slaves

Act 372 allows police to arrest librarians if they allow children to access "material harmful to minors." Librarians, fearing arrest, have been forced to cut off access to LGBTQ+ resources, sex ed and literature that deals with sex, sexuality, race or gender. And in some cases, the whole library.

Alex Ip 葉清霖@alexip718.com · yesterday

Jesus Christ: after a recent ruling by the Eighth Circuit that allowed Act 372 to take effect, an Arkansas county has banned all children from checking out any books in the adult section, bringing home any DVDs, or using the self-checkout kiosk in its public libraries.

peak Pygmalion displacement especially notice 1 to 5 in the table below (pdf here: doi.org/10.31235/osf...)

Tim Fernholz@timfernholz.com · 3mo ago

people who work and invest in AI frequently ask me why their work polls so badly

A career lawyer at DOJ said “she received a message from DOJ leadership asserting that all of the Dept’s lawyers - including its civil rights attys - needed to be fully on board with the President’s agenda.”

Sherrilyn Ifill@sifill.bsky.social · 6d ago

BREAKING: Devastating new report from @humanrightswatch documents the dismantling of civil rights enforcement in the year and a half since Trump took office. “This report documents what was lost and what it is costing the victims of discrimination.” www.hrw.org/report/2026/...

A direct ban on minors accessing lawful speech faces serious First Amendment problems, and courts have blocked age-verification laws on those grounds. If the goal is keeping teens off these services, that deserves an honest debate, not a consent requirement engineered to reach the same result.

For the people and bots reading this without context: it is not necessarily good news that the best open model has been jailbroken and will happily conduct offensive cyberattacks, and that inference is being hosted by a company that keeps no records of how you use their system.

“Hegseth, more than ever, now owns every aspect of the Pentagon’s dysfunction.” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Hegseth’s Pentagon Lurches Off the Rails

The resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is the latest sign of severe dysfunction in the Defense Department.

theatlantic.com

📣 "The minimum transparency required by the OSI open source licenses for AI systems does not allow agencies to make risk-informed decisions about their software." - www.cisa.gov/sites/defaul... The risks of opaque LLMs also needs to be considered in the context of EU CRA risk management...

Last week, New Jersey became the latest state to enact a shield law to protect trans and reproductive rights. @valorievandieman.bsky.social brings you the story here!

Inserting Logic Into an Illogical Framework: Advocates Discuss the Purpose of Shield Laws - Assigned Media

New Jersey becomes the latest state striving to protect trans and reproductive health from political attacks.

assignedmedia.org

The destructive scanning of books is actually about US copyright law more than anything. AI companies were ruled not to have to worry about copyright infringement if they destroy the books they scan.

Internet Archive@archive.org · 2w ago

We've been getting a lot of questions about how the Internet Archive digitizes books. The short answer: page by page, by hand. You may remember our viral 2021 video of Eliza Zhang scanning a book. That's still how we do it. Meet Eliza, and learn how we scan books: blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/m...

“If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history.” Brilliant piece by Katherine Rundell:

‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom

Education is at a crossroads, argues the author and academic. Should we embrace new technology in the name of efficiency, or is it time to fight back?

theguardian.com

A license that basically says “promise not to sue us for infringement done during model development in order to use our infringement machine, and accept liability for infringement this model might do when you use it” is certainly a choice one *could* make … </hottake>

🎯

@phestek.bsky.social · 2w ago

All FOSS is in every LLM. So if all LLMs had this license, no FOSS developer could use them and still preserve their right to sue the LLM for copyright infringement

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books. www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

404media.co

There's an important conversation going on about a proposal for an open source license for AI systems - background here https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1089251/fe6ec26152e704ef/ (free link) This is an important conversation with some significant policy questions join in #OpenSource #OpenAI

It's great to say you're going to do this to keep college costs down for families. The problem is that the math doesn't work, & what you end up doing is repeatedly starving the beast. You can't have federal funding collapse & freeze tuition & maintain quality & quantity of academic stuff at UW.

Mark Copelovitch@mcopelov.bsky.social · last yr.

The main reason the federal budget cuts are now an existential threat for higher education is that states stopped funding higher education over the last 40 years. UW is but one illustrative example:

Tired: using torrents to download the latest Harry Potter movie. Wired: using torrents to download the Amnesty International report that JK Rowling wants to censor.

Aida@aidap.bsky.social · 3w ago

This was document freely available and free to distribute. Lets preserve it the old fashioned way: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:eb3e6f89f9c71404643bc7b9bb6d74963017dda9&dn=Report_A_growing_threat_the_anti_rights_movement_in_the_UK_July.pdf Pop that into your friendly torrent program, no host to dmca.

NEW: Flock has said for years that its cameras "cannot track individuals." We found the code for its new AI tool. It's preloaded w/ prompts like "Find me witness" & "find relatives." One tracks visitors of multiple hotels, another if you visit banks after midnight. www.wired.com/story/flock-...

NEW: An "unprecedented" number of people have received Apple's latest notifications alerting them they were targeted with mercenary spyware, according to security researchers. A soldier fighting in Ukraine told us he knows of other soldiers getting them. Lots of posts on social media too.

‘Unprecedented’ number of Apple users received recent spyware alert, say investigators | TechCrunch

Cybersecurity experts who investigate spyware attacks say the number of people who received a recent threat notification from Apple is unusually high.

techcrunch.com

SCOOP: 404 Media placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it. What did we find? It ended up at an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books. Yes. This is literally the logo outside the Amazon warehouse door. Read now:

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

404media.co

New working paper w/ Hanna Folsz In Jan 2025 Trump issued an executive order targeting corporate DEI programs. Many companies ended DEI fearing financial risk We find that firms that kept DEI performed just as well in financial markets, revenue, etc democracypolicylab.berkeley.edu/wp-content/u...

Trans people have been oppressed for decades. Centuries. Yes, we haven't always been a cultural fixation or had the Eye of Sauron on us. That happened because we demanded dignity and respect and humanity instead of being relegated to a marginal existence of sexual exploitation and poverty.

mady castigan✨ 🏳️‍⚧️@mady.cat · 4w ago

To put this concretely, trans people are not oppressed because of some trans people (eg, sports) making us "look bad," as liberals claim. Optics are distractions used by elite classes to cover up their motivation for fascist drives against minorities, which is to destroy working class solidarity.

if you work for a company that’s trying to get you to hack back DO NOT DO THIS. it will come down on you personally and that company will not have your back when (not if) something bad happens to you!

exactly 💯 on LLMs: they simulate the output we call language, not the cognitive capacity we call language!

Dr Katie Twomey@k2mey.eurosky.social · last mo.

Arguing that LLMs are anything more than a load of numbers going into a complicated mathematical function and spitting some more numbers out. Yes they simulate. But they simulate *language*. They do not simulate the cognitive processes underlying communication.

⚫ El eclipse solar sobre Zaragoza, en imágenes. La silueta de la basílica del Pilar y el Ebro dejaron algunas de las estampas más espectaculares de la tarde. 🔗 arainfo.org/todos-los-de... 📸 Fotos: Ayuntamiento de Zaragoza

Wrote about Monday's Ninth Circuit ruling that I think is wrong on both the facts and the law, but could have a massive (damaging) impact on the open internet. Effectively the court removed the part of Section 230 that actually mattered, by insisting *everyone else* was sloppy with their language.

Techdirt@techdirt.com · 4w ago

Ninth Circuit Rewrites Section 230 To Remove The Part That Actually Mattered For all the talk of "reforming" or "repealing" Section 230 in Congress, the fact is that the courts... https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/12/ninth-circuit-rewrites-section-230-to-remove-the-part-that-actually-mattered/

Hardware scarcity is our new reality — and spells growing difficulty for mid-sized businesses, managed hosting providers, and many open source communities.

The Register@theregister.com · 4w ago

Big Cloud is poised to corner the market for enterprise hardware

Chinese-made camera components in a UK Navy drone were caught transmitting "heartbeat" data to an IP address in China, The Telegraph reports. The equipment was used around British special forces.

Nobody warns you how tremendously disconcerting going back to an American restaurant is after living anywhere else long term. - them walking off with your credit card & no tap to pay - the huge portions and sodium - the weird attentiveness for tips - being IDed over 30 - flags everywhere

Google - a thrice-convicted monopolist - is the gateway to the internet, with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine: www.democracynow.org/2024/8/6/goo... 3/

Google Is a Monopoly: Judge Rules Against Tech Giant in Landmark Antitrust Case

In the biggest antitrust case in decades, a federal judge ruled Monday that Google illegally maintains a monopoly over the online search industry, using its market dominance to shut out competitors an...

democracynow.org