@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialMeta signs an AI licensing deal with Newsmax, letting Meta Platforms use current and archived editorial content to help train Meta's search and discovery tools (Matthew Keys/TheDesk.net)
https://thedesk.net/2026/07/facebook-parent-meta-signs-ai…
@penguin42@mastodon.org.ukScreenshots of my beeb series 7 yesterday booting off my restored Cumana floppy drive. The last one, the Teletext editor is I think by my high school Maths Teacher at the time.
#retrocomputing
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSources: Meta internally exposed data from its employee-tracking program meant to help train its AI models, including full prompts and private conversations (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-accidentally-let-employees-access-each-others-k…
@hex@kolektiva.socialNow, I don't especially like the term "church" so I may use something else... like "coven." You can do what you want. But I happen to have already mapped out an example. (It is exactly that, just an example, so take if it's useful, change if you need, and don't stick to anything too closely.) Oh, this mapping also means that you would, for religious reasons, only be allowed to work under capitalism 4 days a week instead of 5.
Given the increases in productivity over the last 100 years, a 4 day work week is a completely reasonable expectation. If we have to annex Monday for the weekend by force of religion, so be it. It is rightfully ours anyway. If enough people try it, this will probably work. If it doesn't work, it just needs more people.
The Practice of Worship:
It is recommended to break down worship in to three sections: the functional, the communal, and the spiritual. It is also recommended to break these across multiple days. A common structure for some Christian churches is to take 10-15 minutes for announcements (Functional), an hour or two for services (Spiritual), followed by (Communal) coffee, tea, and cookies for an unspecified time up to two hours after. When starting or working with limited time a single compressed model like this may work, but it's not optimal.
- The Functional
The purpose of this section is to address the functional needs of the coven. Block out time (less than 90 minute blocks is recommended) to go through reports and updates from those involved in the Dispensary, Library, Works Committee (infrastructure), and Services Committee (providing services internally and, potentially, externally). Talk through any additional announcements, including those from other covens you may be federated with.
It is helpful to include unstructured communal time, such as shared meals, during or after functional meetings. As the federation grows, more time will be needed. It is recommended to break functional meetings, work parties, and such across multiple days. When a federation becomes sufficiently large, it is recommended to take every Monday, on top of Saturday and Sunday, as a third day of community and worship.
The scope of the functional spans 3 realms (which may be more-or-less fluid): the personal or family, the coven and federation, and humanity itself. It is up to each coven and individual to negotiate how to allocate the three days of the weekend once we have liberated Monday from the work week, but it is important to reserve it for one of these three. However, some people must work on weekends. Medical personnel, for example, cannot conform to a standard work week. While the work week should be universally restricted, which specific days are used will be up to the specific coven and their members.
A functional meeting can start with an agenda like the following:
Functional Invocation
Announcements
Report Backs
Dispensary
Inventory Check
What is low
What is empty
What is expiring
What is needed
Funds status
Library
Inventory Check and Items needing return
Library acquisition requests
Funds status and budget check
Works Committee
Upcoming projects
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Services Committee
New capabilities announcements
New needs requests
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Task Check
Breaking the Circle
This agenda is a suggestion for those who don't know where to start. It can be adapted or ignored as appropriate.
- The Spiritual
Spirituality is necessarily an undefined space. It is deeply personal. Each individual taking time to share their own personal spiritual experiences can help each connect with each other. This experience of connection can itself be a spiritual experience. It may also be useful to read esoteric, mystical, or philosophical texts together as type of "book club" and share thoughts. Others may draw from their own knowledge or traditions. This is something that must be defined together within a group.
- The Communal
The communal aspect of the practice of worship bind the coven and federation together. Within the community we find joy and release, connection and comfort. The coven is where we turn in times of need, and where we share our hopes and dreams.
@georgiamuseum@glammr.usHow do we help people connect with art in meaningful ways?
This summer, we’ve been hosting a series of workshops anchored by Julie Green’s “The Last Supper” (on loan from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), an installation on view here through August 16. Through these workshops, which are supported by a learning and engagement grant from Art Bridges Foundation, the museum has provided a space for conversation around justice, ritual and empathy.
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@Techmeme@techhub.socialOpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and others launch Raise Us, a new non-profit led by ex-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to help US workers adapt to AI (Lydia DePillis/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/business/economy/ai-work-…
@seeingwithsound@mas.to'Pass on the warmth': blind Chinese teen aces gaokao, chooses medicine to help others https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3358630/pass-warmth-blind-chinese-…
@markhburton@mstdn.socialCaroline Lucas:
“Burnham’s longstanding commitment to a fairer voting system could transform our democracy and counter the dire threat of a Reform UK government.”
Greens split over how hard to challenge Burnham in Makerfield byelection | Andy Burnham | The Guardian
https://www.
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoI updated my guide on how to deploy self-hosted #Discourse. The configuration of the internal nginx (inside the container) recently changed (for the better) in a way that affected my previous advice.
I seem to have been maintaining this guide for over five years now; I started in June 2021. 79 edits so far, most of which have been mine.
@aral@mastodon.ar.alRE: https://ieji.de/@DiaaMahmoud097/116692720407327920
Please help Diyaa if you can and share this so others might also. He urgently needs medical care to save his leg.
@hex@kolektiva.socialLogistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsLet's say you're building a house. Normally this involves hiring a whole bunch of experts (either directly or via some company). You need to pay a fair wage for their labor, and you have to pay for all the material they're going to use. Some of them will be more experienced than others. They will sometimes make a mistake. They will sometimes get sick. The whole construction work will probably take a few months, and may get delayed in the process. Some construction material will be wasted. There's also a risk that over the next years, you'll discover that they screwed something up, and have to fix it. But you'll get a reasonably good house.
Now, a kid comes and tells you you don't have to do this. Instead of paying all these people, you can hire him. He's wearing a suit and sunshades. He never laid a brick in his whole life. But he's got this new great technology that will give you a great house in no time. Of course it will cost you, but not as much as the labor of all these people. You try to learn more, and you discover that the technology actually builds and razes a hundred of house-like things a day, until it gets close enough to something that actually resembles a house. There's a lot of wasted energy and material, but you don't have to worry because it's all subsidized (for the time being). You pay less, you get a house that looks just right on the outside and inside, and that seems to work just right.
Of course, there's a real risk that in a few months you'll discover that something is wrong. You may have to pay a lot for a real expert to figure out how things were done, and how to fix them. Or they may not be able to help you. You may be stuck having to call the suit again, and he'll happily come and fix it for you. And by "fix", I mean he will just raze a whole part of the house and start randomly spitting it out again until he gets something that looks about right, and works about right. Of course, it may not really be a good fit for the rest of the house, but you don't want to pay for replacing the whole thing, do you? It may also introduce a completely new issues that will surface in a few months, but that's just how it is.
Welcome to the glorious world of #AI.
#NoAI #NoLLM #LLM
@raiders@darktundra.xyzThis Raiders Coaching Hire Has Already Begun Paying Dividends https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-this-coaching-hire-already-begun-paying-dividends
@Techmeme@techhub.socialAdapter, which offers an infrastructure layer to help users leverage and control data for use by AI agents and apps, emerges from stealth with $17.8M in funding (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/deep-dive-adapter-launches-ai-cognition…
@matzekult@chaos.socialSpeaking of starships: sometimes they needed to help each other out in #StarTrek. And a rather prominent case is the subject of today's #TrekTriviaTuesday question.
As always no googling and no spoiling the answer for others. Please boost after voting! :BoostOK:
Vote will run fo…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialGoogle launches Intrusion Logging, a feature developed with Reporters Without Borders and others to log sophisticated attacks, on Android 16 Pixel devices (Tim Starks/CyberScoop)
https://cyberscoop.com/google-android-intrusion-logging-amnesty-spyware-detect…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust finished "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. A fascinating and epic science fiction novel with fascinating ideas about technology and also future societies. As I'm delving into a lot of sci fi looking for social imagination it's a good find in some ways but disappointing in others. The Qeng Ho culture is interesting, but their society is uninspiring; Vinge's rosy view of "trade" is not one I completely share, and their hierarchies and wealth accumulation are less compatible with their freedoms in my imagination than in Vinge's. That said, his perspective on the possibilities of galactic-scale civilization and the idea of the "age of failed dreams" are fascinating, especially right now, and his detailed ideas about programming, AI, automaton, and "Focus" are extremely relevant right now. Ultimately I didn't love some parts of the dénouement, and there's a lot of "great man theory of history" going on, including (only somewhat ameliorated) a focus on men over women. Vinge's damsels in distress have a lot more agency than usual for the role, but with the exception of Victory Sr. and Jr., the damsels are very much in distress, and Victory Sr. gets overshadowed a lot by Underhill.
It definitely helps one expand their imagination of what long-term and large-scale human existence could look like, which is great and no easy feat, and both the technologies that are written in and those written out are extremely convincing. The only thing I didn't find compelling was the transposition of capitalism onto such space and time scales. It's a very standard feature of sci fi from the last few decades, and I'm sure most readers don't question it, but I've become someone who can no longer imagine "capitalism across the stars" without questioning how realistic it is that its self-destructive tendencies could possibly last even a few more centuries, let alone succeed at interstellar travel.
One last extremely fascinating thing: how closely the strengths and weaknesses of Focus track with the strengths and weaknesses of modern generative AI. That, and the way that the "age of failed dreams" idea can help people imagine beyond generative AI in a positive way.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon
@Techmeme@techhub.socialGoogle launches Intrusion Logging, an Android feature developed in partnership with Amnesty International and others, on Android 16 Pixel devices for now (Tim Starks/CyberScoop)
https://cyberscoop.com/google-android-intrusion-logging-amnesty-spyware-detecti…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialA look at AI startup Versus, which gives viewers interactive experiences like games and trivia on second screens to play along with TV programs or other content (Dade Hayes/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2026/07/streamers-churn-emerging-ai-startup-…
