Tootfinder

I don’t understand why we must spend billions of dollars and waste so much water for AI.
I just created an “AI-generated image” from the original using a few dabs of the retouch tool in the Photos app.
Might have taken a sip of water afterwards but that was it.
(Is there a word/phrase for taking a regular image and making it look like it was AI generated? There should be.)

London #FT reports on investors that lost billions on #PumpAndDump stock scheme that inflated values of little known traded entities of small US-listed #ChineseStocks that plunged in value shortly after being heavily

Journalists from The New York Times will not sign the Pentagon’s revised press pass policy,
which threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment.
Since the policy was first announced, we have expressed concerns that it constrains how journalists can report on the U.S. military,
which is funded by nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars annually.
The public has a right to know how the government and military are operating.
T…

A Statement from The New York Times on the Pentagon’s Press Pass Policy | The New York Times Company
Journalists from The New York Times will not sign the Pentagon’s revised press pass policy, which threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment.

Sadly, Elon Musk could not stand being 2nd richest man only, so he spent a billion dollars on pumping the Tesla share price to ensure his top spot on the list of #shame.

Shaheds, Dollars, and Beijing: How China Powers Russia's Drone Production in Alabuga: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/21/shaheds-dollars-and-beijing-how.html

Guess the price in today's dollars! (Solution in a reply.)
#retrocomputing

looking to score the domain http://browzone.com (it was part of some old infrastructure I’m recreating) but it’s currently for sale exclusively through GoDaddy for about 7 billion dollars. anyone know how to avoid paying the scam price and getting the domain for an actual decent price instead? @…

Judge reverses Trump administration's cuts of billions of dollars to Harvard University (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/harvard-trump-federal-funding-bdde8f529f01b96d5521d0e248e8fc6c
http://www.memeorandum.com/250903/p155#a250903p155

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

Tesla’s board has approved the award of
💥29 Billion Dollars worth of shares
to its chief executive, Elon Musk,
after a US court ruled against a previous pay deal for the world’s richest person.
Musk will pay $2 billion
to buy 96 million shares in the electric carmaker
at the same price per share as a 10-year pay package agreed in 2018, which is stuck in legal limbo awaiting a court date for an appeal.
The award was based on a recommendation from a “sp…