Tootfinder

Donald Trump ordered US negotiators to travel to Pakistan on Monday, just days before a ceasefire in the Middle East expires
State broadcaster IRIB on Sunday cited Iranian sources as saying “there are currently no plans to participate in the next round of Iran-US talks”.
The Fars and Tasnim news agencies had earlier cited anonymous sources as saying “the overall atmosphere cannot be assessed as very positive”, adding that lifting the US blockade was a precondition for negotiation…

Nooo, it's shit, it's not an anonymous wafer-thin bezelless screen that disappears into the wallpaper when not in use! How dare a product have any inherent aesthetic appeal outside of its own annihilation! Booo!

> Parts of Asset Hub are still in beta, Yona said, because SimpleClosure removes all personally-identifiable information from the internal company data, a sensitive and technically difficult process that they want to make sure is “rock solid” before rolling it out more widely.
Can't help but suspect that anonymising HR discussions is going to be difficult when the ability to find who held what position at what time can be derived elsewhere. (eg Linked In)

AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails
AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails

Source: federal prosecutors have subpoenaed Reddit to appear before a grand jury, to provide personal data on an anonymous user who criticized ICE (Ryan Devereaux/The Intercept)
https://theintercept.com/2026/04/10/reddit-ice-protest-grand-jury/

A Redditor Criticized ICE. Trump Is Trying to Unmask Them by Dragging the Company to a Secret Grand Jury.
An ICE summons to get the user’s identity failed. Advocates worry the move to a grand jury signals an escalation of the war on dissent.

Als damals Ende des letzten Jahrtausends Helmut Kohl die Verantwortung für die Annahme der illegalen Parteispenden übernahm und erklärte er habe den anonymen Spendern sein „Ehrenwort“ gegeben, dann hatte das seine Ehre zwar sehr beschädigt¹, aber irgendwie war vorstellbar, daß er zuvor welche besaß.
Käme in der aktuellen union jemand mit „Verantwortung“ und „Ehre“ daher, wäre das vor allem lächerlich, diese Kategorien scheinen auf das aktuelle Politikgeschehen und dieses „Spitzenperson…

A US judge issues a $322.2M judgment against pirate library Anna's Archive for scraping Spotify, a largely symbolic victory as the site is anonymously operated (Rachel Scharf/Billboard)
https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-major-labels-win-music-piracy-lawsu…

Spotify & the Major Labels Won a $322M Court Order Against Music Pirates. Will They Be Able to Collect?
Spotify and the three major label groups have been awarded $322 million in a music piracy lawsuit against the pirate library Anna’s Archive.

A US judge issues a $322.2M judgment against pirate library Anna's Archive for scraping Spotify, a largely symbolic victory as the site is anonymously operated (Rachel Scharf/Billboard)
https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-major-labels-win-music-piracy-lawsu…

Spotify & the Major Labels Won a $322M Court Order Against Music Pirates. Will They Be Able to Collect?
Spotify and the three major label groups have been awarded $322 million in a music piracy lawsuit against the pirate library Anna’s Archive.

The "AI Industry" (to the degree that it exists) has burned billions of dollars with no real hope of recuperating that. Models offered by services, charging huge amounts for inference, don't really offer much, if anything, above open source models run locally. Many of the claims made by these companies, and their supporters, have turned out to be lies. It seems as though the whole thing is a huge grift.
Investments will likely never be recovered. We've already seen a bail out in the form of military contracts. We will see much more public money dumped in to these technologies. In fact, threatening workers and suppressing labor strength is so strategically valuable that I expect LLMs to just be publicly funded (by being folded into the military industrial complex).
On these grounds, it can be easy to reject the technology outright. After all, how can anything useful not be profitable?
Even for radicals, capitalism can cloud our lens. The fact is, the dominant technologies of our age tend to not be profitable. Or rather, they are "publicly funded, privately profitable" (/hums in propagandhi/). Just like oil.
Outside of Saudi Arabia, oil is mostly not profitable to get out of the ground. Even there, it had only historically been profitable because of massive global military investments. The oil-centric world we have today is largely built on, and kept in place by, massive government subsidies. Roads, street parking, and direct subsidies to oil companies are all massive investments that tie populations to the resource at the heart of the military industrial complex: oil.
Oil was strategically important, because you can't run a modern military without it. The fossil fuel economy doesn't exist because fossil fuels are so cheap, but because modern militaries are only really possible by militarizing the population.
Unprofitable things *are made profitable* to serve the strategic interests of authoritarian systems. Though we have better alternatives to most oil-based products, it would be hard to argue that oil is not a useful resource. We can acknowledge it's strategic importance while also recognizing that the elimination of oil is essential to the survival of humanity.
Returning to "AI," we're seeing the same type of thing but it's more obvious. After the crypto grift, this seems to just be another way to transfer money into the pockets of the rich.
But crypto wasn't exactly a grift. It had a strategic function to power. It wasn't what we were told it was. It didn't free us from central banks. It wasn't a new way to invest. It wasn't anonymous. But it did create a new way to bribe politicians. It did make it easier to funnel public money into the pockets of the far right.
"AI" can similarly be mostly a grift. It can fail to do most, or all, of the things it claims, and it can still fulfill strategic functions. If we dismiss it as "just another grift," I think we miss a lot. "Just a grift" isn't something sustainable. It is something that will die out. It's something we don't need to resist because it is self limiting. But a strategy is something different. A strategy is more complex. A strategy will be sustained, at any cost. A strategy must be actively resisted.

My grandad has a ton of old papers from his field lying around and they're so beautiful

"The Catalog of Distinctive Type (CDT) uses machine learning to analyze the minute details of 17th-century printing, offering scholars a powerful new way to identify who printed what."
https://www.library.cmu.edu/about/news/2026-05/catalog-distinctive-type