While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:

The American Prospect

Maureen Tkacik, Author at The American Prospect

- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

Pluralistic: “The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets” (07 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto - trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:

Pluralistic: The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble (09 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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911 words (30817 total) on Enshittification (a nonfiction book about platform decay) #DailyWords Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

Let's take a sec here and notice something *genuinely great* happening in the US government: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's stunning, unbroken streak of *major*, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption, *with* the backing of the Supreme Court (yes, *that* Supreme Court), and which is only speeding up! 1/

I can't get a definitive answer on whether TV static (see attached) constitutes a strobe effect that could endanger people with photosensitive epilepsy. Anyone know? PEAT (the only tool that measures this, seemingly?!) is Windows-only and won't run under WINE.

Even Google admits - grudgingly - that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

Google for Developers

What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developers

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Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

theregister

AI bots hallucinate software packages and devs download them

Simply look out for libraries imagined by ML and make them real, with actual malicious code. No wait, don

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Moneybags on the moon #graffiti #nyc #sciencefiction #monopoly

Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies; and more! Archived at:

Pluralistic: Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies (12 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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