Concentration camps nearby Cuba - very, very typical of the U.S. Empire...
"The Trump administration has moved more than 30 people described as Venezuelan gang members to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, as U.S. forces and homeland security staff prepare a tent city for potentially thousands of migrants.
About a dozen of the men were brought in from El Paso, Texas, on Friday, as Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, arrived at Guantánamo. She is the first senior member of the Trump administration to visit the migrant mission on the base in southeastern Cuba.
Ms. Noem was taken to the rooftop of the base’s aircraft hangar and observed as U.S. security forces led the deportees down the ramp of a C-130 military cargo plane to an awaiting minibus. Maj. Gen. Philip J. Ryan, the army commander overseeing the migrant mission, stood beside her in combat uniform, and a Chinook transport chopper could be seen in the distance.
“Vicious gang members will no longer have safe haven in our country,” Ms. Noem said on social media, calling the men “criminal aliens.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/us/politics/guantanamo-bay-migrants.html
#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Cuba #Guantanamo #ConcentrationCamps #Migrants
"On President Donald Trump’s authority alone, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been unleashed on federal agencies. Employees from Musk’s companies and those of his allies, as well as young staffers he’s recruited, are wresting authority from career workers and commandeering computer systems.
While some have been public about their involvement, others have attempted to keep their roles secret, scrubbing LinkedIn pages and other sources of data. With little information from the White House, ProPublica is attempting to document who is involved and what they are doing.
Musk’s team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, has already thrown entire swaths of the federal government and its programs into disarray — programs that serve millions of Americans.
Musk himself has made no secret of his intentions, saying that DOGE is a “wood chipper for bureaucracy” and that he is “deleting” agencies.
A White House spokesperson wrote, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.” None of the people identified responded to requests for comment."
https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/
#USA #Musk #DOGE #Trump #Plutocracy
"It’s not that social media is fundamentally evil or bereft of any good qualities. Some of my best post-Twitter moments have been spent goofing around with mutuals on Bluesky, or waxing romantic about the joys of human creativity and art-making in an increasingly AI-infested world. But when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.
It’s a lesson the Extremely Online Left still hasn’t fully learned, failing where its political enemies succeed. Reactionary right-wing groups like the homophobic and transphobic Moms for Liberty—which seeks to ban books from LGBTQ and BIPOC authors under the guise of “parental rights”—have claimed political victories by seizing power one public school board and small town at a time. Other reactionaries have similarly managed to take their pet grievances about diversity and wokeness to the national level by moving from online outrage to on-the-ground community organizing.
You can discourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good.
We don’t need any more irony-poisoned hot takes or cathartic, irreverent snark. We need to collectively decide what kind of world we actually do want, and what we’re willing to do to achieve it."
https://www.404media.co/you-cant-post-your-way-out-of-fascism/
#SocialMedia #Activism #Protest #BigTech
"TikTok is back in the US after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration’s ban. A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Trump after Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement.
Remember this: it’s not that Trump is good, it’s that Democrats are just that bad. Biden’s completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among US presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April. From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline.
Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism. The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuse of the US empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end."
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-not-that-trump-is-good-its-that
#USA #Trump #Biden #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #TikTok
RT @manovich
The final version of our book 'Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media' is now available as a free PDF download #GenerativeAI #DigitalCulture #Aesthetics #AIArt https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/artificial-aesthetics
"On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company’s e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack.
He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site.
“We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page,” Tomchuk told TechCrunch. “Each page has at least three photos.”
OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions.
“OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it’s way more,” he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site.
“Their crawlers were crushing our site,” he said “It was basically a DDoS attack.”
Triplegangers’ website is its business. The seven-employee company has spent over a decade assembling what it calls the largest database of “human digital doubles” on the web, meaning 3D image files scanned from actual human models.
It sells the 3D object files, as well as photos — everything from hands to hair, skin, and full bodies — to 3D artists, video game makers, anyone who needs to digitally recreate authentic human characteristics."
#CyberSecurity #AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #WebScraping #DDoS #AITraining
"In newly unredacted documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta’s testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of a dataset called LibGen for Llama-related training.
LibGen, which describes itself as a “links aggregator,” provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement.
According to Meta’s testimony, as relayed by plaintiffs’ counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least one of Meta’s Llama models despite concerns within Meta’s AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes Meta employees as referring to LibGen as a “data set we know to be pirated,” and flagging that its use “may undermine [Meta’s] negotiating position with regulators.”"
#AI #GenerativeAI #Meta #AITraining #LibGen #Copyright #IP #Piracy
"Google is forming a new team to work on AI models that can simulate the physical world.
Tim Brooks — one of the co-leads on OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, who left for Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, in October — will lead the new team, he announced in a post on X. It’ll be a part of Google DeepMind.
“DeepMind has ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world,” Brooks wrote Monday morning. “I’m hiring for a new team with this mission.”
According to job listings Brooks linked to in his post, the new modeling team will collaborate with and build on work from Google’s Gemini, Veo, and Genie teams to tackle “critical new problems” and scale models “to the highest levels of compute.” Gemini is Google’s flagship series of AI models for tasks like analyzing images and generating text, while Veo is Google’s own video generation model."
#AI #AGI #Google #DeepMind
"Capitalist and technology-enabled surveillance has moved beyond targeting users with ads to targeting their lives. This is why privacy online today means freedom tomorrow. Protecting our privacy secures our fundamental rights for the future.
I will be honest, it can be overwhelming; however, in times like this, I like to focus on what can be done instead of worrying about what hasn't happened yet. The most important thing is to act, no matter how difficult it can be during times of fear and stress. Pushing for incremental change and improvements requires small actions every day. We have to engage the folks that are willing to join our fight, pave the way for those actions, and build the communities we want collectively.
There is a lesson to be learned from merging with Tails in 2024 and our growth in the last several years: together we are stronger. And in 2025, I want to use this lesson as a guiding principle, that solidarity and collaboration are our greatest strengths."
https://blog.torproject.org/tor-in-2024/
#Tor #Anonymity #Privacy #Surveillance
"One reason people think Bluesky will be different is that the app has a decentralized ownership model, which means it’s controlled by a four-person board rather than any single person or company. Bluesky is a public benefit corporation, a for-profit company that aims to have a positive impact on society rather than focusing on maximizing shareholder value. There are currently no ads, which means Taco Bell and Tide aren’t trying to get your attention with meme-speak.
The platform is still small, with roughly 25 million users, a fraction of the population of its peers, and it runs on an open-source protocol, which means that anyone can build their own subcommunities on top of it with their own moderators and guidelines. Already there are a few attempts, including Blacksky, a community dedicated to Black users that hopes to recreate the best of Black Twitter. (So far, it’s still a nascent aggregation of scattered photos and messages.)
Yet all other indicators point to a service organized suspiciously like its predecessor: The company hopes to start generating revenue with subscriptions, and has raised close to $23 million in venture funding from private investors. Even Dorsey has lost his early faith: In May, he announced that he had stepped away from the Bluesky board, and later gave an interview in which he lamented that the team was “repeating all the mistakes we made as a company,” referring to the early years of Twitter. Bluesky, he said, was turning into just “another app.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/14/magazine/bluesky-social-media.html
#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #Twitter #Musk #Bluesky #VCs #SiliconValley
"I actually agree with the idea that socialism and democracy have an intrinsic relationship. Or better still, given the disastrous fact that the idea of “socialism” — including things like planning, redistribution, development, and mass education — has been associated with the more or less complete abolition of democracy, in the end leading to the collapse of socialism itself, it’s clear that we must work towards an “organic” combination of socialism and democracy. This certainly influences our very understanding of what “socialism” means, but it should also affect our understanding of what “democracy” means.
I have argued that there are historically three main forms of democratic institutions: those based on representation, direct participation, and social conflict. In Marx’s “communist” program, especially after the Paris Commune, the accent is heavily on “direct” democracy or participation against “representation,” which Marx — or better still, his followers — tended to reduce to “parliamentary” democracy. Perhaps this was too hasty a reduction, and where social conflictuality is concerned, it can actually be dangerous. In fact, the direct form of democracy was conceived on the model of small communities. With social and political problems becoming increasingly global — one need only think of the consequences of climate change, which have become the central problem for humankind — we need various degrees of socialism and various combinations of democratic institutions at different levels, from the local to the global."
https://jacobin.com/2023/12/etienne-balibar-socialism-liberty-equality-democracy-theory-marx
#Marx #Balibar #Socialism #Democracy
"You can ask me questions later, but this is what makes me sad: the most probable outcome is what I call “soft fascism.”
By soft, I don’t mean Nazi-style fascism or outright extermination campaigns. Rather, what I mean is this: the best definition of fascism for me is a conservative revolution.
That means participating in the dynamic of capitalist development, while recognising that unrestrained capitalism and liberalism can lead to social disintegration. Intelligent fascists understood this. So, they envisioned an economy based on capitalism, but controlled by a strong state that legitimises itself by appealing to invented traditions—often religious, but not necessarily so.
Now, I may upset some of you, but do you know who serves as an example of this? China. I’ve been closely following what happens there. Two months ago, their leader gave a speech. He began with: “Our youth is not educated enough; we must train them ideologically.” I expected the usual rhetoric about reading more Marx or Mao.
But no. He emphasised Confucian traditions, saying they were essential for holding society together. Modi is doing something similar in India—brutal capitalism coupled with a narrative of tradition.
This, I think, is the most probable direction for much of the world.
History, I’m afraid, is not on our side."
https://slguardian.org/zizek-on-soft-fascism-ai-and-the-collapse-of-shame/#google_vignette
#SoftFascism #Capitalism #AI #History
"Now that the seal is broken on scraping Bluesky posts into datasets for machine learning, people are trolling users and one-upping each other by making increasingly massive datasets of non-anonymized, full-text Bluesky posts taken directly from the social media platform’s public firehose—including one that contains almost 300 million posts.
Last week, Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at open-source machine learning library platform Hugging Face, released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, including when they were posted and who posted them. Within hours of his first post—shortly after our story about this being the first known, public, non-anonymous dataset of Bluesky posts, and following hundreds of replies from people outraged that their posts were scraped without their permission—van Strein took it down and apologized."
#SocialMedia #Bluesky #AI #ML #GenerativeAI #AITraining #WebScraping
"The Federal Trade Commission has entered a settlement with self-styled “weapon detection” company Evolv, to resolve the FTC’s claim that the company “knowingly” and repeatedly” engaged in “unlawful” acts of misleading claims about their technology. Essentially, Evolv’s technology, which is in schools, subways, and stadiums, does far less than they’ve been claiming.
The FTC alleged in their complaint that despite the lofty claims made by Evolv, the technology is fundamentally no different from a metal detector: “The company has insisted publicly and repeatedly that Express is a ‘weapons detection’ system and not a ‘metal detector.’ This representation is solely a marketing distinction, in that the only things that Express scanners detect are metallic and its alarms can be set off by metallic objects that are not weapons.” A typical contract for Evolv costs tens of thousands of dollars per year—five times the cost of traditional metal detectors. One district in Kentucky spent $17 million to outfit its schools with the software."
#USA #FTC #WeaponDetector #AI #ML #Marketing #Surveillance #PoliceState
"An artificial intelligence system used by the UK government to detect welfare fraud is showing bias according to people’s age, disability, marital status and nationality, the Guardian can reveal.
An internal assessment of a machine-learning programme used to vet thousands of claims for universal credit payments across England found it incorrectly selected people from some groups more than others when recommending whom to investigate for possible fraud.
The admission was made in documents released under the Freedom of Information Act by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The “statistically significant outcome disparity” emerged in a “fairness analysis” of the automated system for universal credit advances carried out in February this year."
#UK #AI #PredictiveAI #ML #MachineLearning
"First, it’s clear that leading AI companies think it’s no longer good enough to build dazzling generative AI tools; they now have to build agents that can accomplish things for people. Second, it’s getting easier than ever to get such AI agents to mimic the behaviors, attitudes, and personalities of real people. What were once two distinct types of agents—simulation agents and tool-based agents—could soon become one thing: AI models that can not only mimic your personality but go out and act on your behalf.
Research on this is underway. Companies like Tavus are hard at work helping users create “digital twins” of themselves. But the company’s CEO, Hassaan Raza, envisions going further, creating AI agents that can take the form of therapists, doctors, and teachers.
If such tools become cheap and easy to build, it will raise lots of new ethical concerns, but two in particular stand out. The first is that these agents could create even more personal, and even more harmful, deepfakes. Image generation tools have already made it simple to create nonconsensual pornography using a single image of a person, but this crisis will only deepen if it’s easy to replicate someone’s voice, preferences, and personality as well. (Park told me he and his team spent more than a year wrestling with ethical issues like this in their latest research project, engaging in many conversations with Stanford’s ethics board and drafting policies on how the participants could withdraw their data and contributions.)"
#AI #GenerativeAI #AIAgents #AIEthics
"Local and state governments can consider using their procurement processes to require technology vendors to disclose more information about the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
“Ask them to disclose their energy usage and water usage,” Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said Wednesday at the GovAI Coalition Summit* in San Jose.
“Put it in a contract, and see what happens. Is that company really going to not want to work with you, rather than not disclose their usage?” she said during a summit panel, in a discussion centered on the environmental costs associated with emerging AI tools used by government and consumers. “If a company is saying, probably. Think about what that means. Think about what it means if a company says, we would rather not work with you than disclose that information.”
The emergence of AI tools like ChatGPT and the rising number of AI-enabled applications used every day by government and consumers at all levels is fueling growth in data centers — and an appetite for the energy and water needed to support those centers. Other environmental concerns are associated with activities like the development of computer chips and related devices also needed in today’s super-computing world, experts said."
https://www.govtech.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-is-an-energy-hog-and-government-needs-to-be-aware
#AI #GenerativeAI #Environment #WaterUsage #Energy
"This report set out to investigate and elucidate the business models behind the generative AI companies that are drawing hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. Such models have pushed companies like Nvidia, which supplies the chips necessary for AI computation, to double and then triple its $418 billion valuation in 2022 to a historic market capitalization in excess of $3 trillion in 2024.4 It soon became clear that understanding the composition of those business models meant understanding the deployment and evolution of the concept of “AGI” as a lodestar for generative AI companies.
Any effort to understand OpenAI’s business model and that of its emulators, peers, and competitors must thus begin with the understanding that they have been developed rapidly, even haphazardly, and out of necessity, to capitalize on the popularity of generative AI products, to fund growing compute costs, and to pacify a growing portfolio of investors and stakeholders. Equally crucial is understanding how “AGI” operates in a material context, and how it serves as a driver of continued investment and enterprise sales, a marketing and recruitment tool, and a framework for bolstering the company’s influence and cultural footprint.
That OpenAI had no discernible business model upon its inception does not mean that profit potential wasn’t a consideration from the beginning. While the headlines announcing OpenAI’s launch reliably painted the project as Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s humanitarian effort to protect the world from a malignant, superpowerful AI, it was from the start a densely corporatized undertaking, established in a posh hotel in the middle of Silicon Valley with seed money from tech billionaires, Amazon, and top venture capitalists—despite being labeled a “nonprofit.”"
https://ainowinstitute.org/general/ai-generated-business
#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #SiliconValley #AGI #BusinessModels
Also totally valid to #TechnicalWriting:
"What does this mean for you?
If you're just starting with AI-assisted development, here's my advice:
1. Start small
- Use AI for isolated, well-defined tasks
- Review every line of generated code
- Build up to larger features gradually
2. Stay modular
- Break everything into small, focused files
- Maintain clear interfaces between components
- Document your module boundaries
3. Trust your experience
- Use AI to accelerate, not replace, your judgment
- Question generated code that feels wrong
- Maintain your engineering standards"
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Chatbots #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming
https://addyo.substack.com/p/the-70-problem-hard-truths-about
"At the start of 2024, OpenAI’s rules for how armed forces might use its technology were unambiguous.
The company prohibited anyone from using its models for “weapons development” or “military and warfare.” That changed on January 10, when The Intercept reported that OpenAI had softened those restrictions, forbidding anyone from using the technology to “harm yourself or others” by developing or using weapons, injuring others, or destroying property. OpenAI said soon after that it would work with the Pentagon on cybersecurity software, but not on weapons. Then, in a blog post published in October, the company shared that it is working in the national security space, arguing that in the right hands, AI could “help protect people, deter adversaries, and even prevent future conflict.”
Today, OpenAI is announcing that its technology will be deployed directly on the battlefield.
The company says it will partner with the defense-tech company Anduril, a maker of AI-powered drones, radar systems, and missiles, to help US and allied forces defend against drone attacks."
#AI #OpenAI #AIWarfare #Cybersecurity #DroneWarfare