In the UK outside an Amazon Fresh

https://bsky.app/profile/wutangforchildren.bsky.social/post/3ln4t2lchwc27

#protest #poster #uk

I frankly speaking didn't expect much from the FTC's case against Facebook. But reading through @pluralistic's piece, I think I should grab some popcorn and a cold beverage, sit back, and enjoy the show. #ftc #meta #monopoly

"Mark Zuckerberg personally lost […]

[Original post on social.tchncs.de]

This week, I treated myself to something nerdy: A luggage tag made from the skin of Emirate's first A380 plane. It comes with engraved information about the plane's operational lifecycle and its visits to Vienna International Airport. #travel #airbus_a380 #aviation #vie

A good and long read that concludes, rightfully in my opinion, that OpenAI represents a critical single point of failure in the ongoing #llm hype. And its economics make the first years of Uber loosing money look like a children's game.

"OpenAI Is A […]

[Original post on social.tchncs.de]

My key takeaway from the past weeks of political and economic madness originating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. is to remind myself not to think of the future as a linear extrapolation of how we got to where we are today. It's challenging but very liberating and empowering […]

During my vacation, I read Hua Hsu's memoir "Stay True" which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it.

Despite the author being a couple of years older than me, coming from a very different […]

[Original post on social.tchncs.de]

A thoughtful #stratechery analysis by Ben Thompson on "American Disruption" on the “liberation day” tariffs as well as some of the deeper underlying issues the U.S. faces […]

We already knew that Clearview is a supremely cynical purveyor of facial recognition software that is becoming a core part of the surveillance state. Now, thanks to some great reporting just published in Mother Jones, we also know how transcendentally evil it is […]

I see that an Australian economist shares @pluralistic 's idea that a suitable reaction to the #trumptariffs is to weaken IP laws benefitting US corporations.
https://gross.substack.com/p/the-smart-way-to-retaliate-against

Mr. Doctorow suggests cancelling legal penalties protecting DRM; Prof […]

It's hard to hear "Val Kilmer" and not immediately think of Top Gun, Heat, and The Doors. However, to me, his most memorable performance was the meth addict and trumpet player he portrayed in "The Salton Sea". May he rest in peace. #ValKilmer

I just finished reading @pluralistic's latest book "picks & shovels". I enjoyed it a lot and it's definitely my favorite in the Martin Hench series so far. The connection it draws between the early PC boom in the mid-80s and today's rampant enshittification […]

[Original post on social.tchncs.de]

The state of tech in the mid-2020s: Having to automatically generate useless content to combat all online content being vacuumed by LLM providers without any regard for copyright, licensing, robots.txt, or similar details. 🙈

Cloudflare is luring web-scraping bots into an ‘AI Labyrinth’ | The […]

It's only the 11th, but I'm calling this to be my favorite quote (supposedly a Turkish proverb, or maybe not) of the month:

"When the Clown is in charge of the castle,
He does not become king.
The castle becomes a circus."

I'll leave it up to your imagination who the article this comment was […]

@pallenberg: Moin moin und danke für den iPhone 16e take, der mich beim Frühstück zum schmunzeln gebracht hat.

Und alles Gute für den Umzug! Wir hatten die Action vor ein paar Wochen und boah, das hat wenig Spaß gemacht. 😬

Frankly speaking, I haven't spent a whole ton of time on thinking about how "AI" in the form of LLMs and agents (whatever the next sub-hype is about) will impact the field of IT professionals. But my overall hypothesis is quite similar to what Tim O'Reilly describes in a lot of detail in this […]

PSA: Downloading your Kindle ebooks to your PC from Amazon will stop working on February 26. And unfortunately, you have to do it one-by-one. Although, going through 15 years of ebook purchases was also a nice trip down memory lane. 😀 #amazon #kindle #download #ebooks […]

Tell me you've been into IT for more than 25 years,
Without telling me that you've been into IT for more than 25 years. 👇

On a completely unrelated note: It's kinda fun to go through boxes that you haven't opened in more than a decade.

Brilliant #38C3 talk by @pistonminer about diagnosing and subsequently fixing a cube-satellite in low-earth orbit that had essentially been useless for more than a decade: "Hacking yourself a satellite - recovering BEESAT-1" […]

I forget who in my timeline had shared this, but it's a long and worthwhile analysis of #netflix and its massive production of irrelevant content that nobody is passionate about, let alone consumes. And I love the #burn with the comparison with #blockbuster […]

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