Tootfinder

"Journalism screwed itself over by betting
on Meta and its profit-over-society peers.
Now, nobody trusts “the media” and
everyone is going bankrupt. The next bet
is on generative AI, with its inability to
distinguish truth from “hallucinations” –
fabrications that on the page become lies.
The Continent is an attempt to prove
journalism can be done differently.
Expect more of this in what our team
has decided to call our “serious era”.
We’re no longer a start-up. We’re going
to empower more people with quality
journalism. We’re going to help others
launch newspapers. We’re going to
stay sane. And we’re going to prove
that African excellence can set global
standards."
@… reaches 5 years and 200 issues. If you're not already receiving their copy via @… (or email, telegram or WhatsApp if you must) then it's really worth signing up to remind yourself just how big and diverse the world ist.
This weeks highlights are an extraordinary story about how Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe directly interfered with Mozambique's election. Plus a frankly beautiful photo piece on Addis Ababa

En nu nog iets doen…
From: @…
https://masto.ai/@meduza_en/114931756048380445

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

ICE issued new rules for Congress members visiting detention centers.
Experts say they’re illegal
Rep. Norma Torres (D-Pomona) and three other members of Congress were denied entry to the immigrant detention facility inside the Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles
The lawmakers were attempting an unannounced inspection,
a common and long-standing practice under congressional oversight powers.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said too many prot…

ICE issued new rules for Congress members visiting detention centers. Experts say they’re illegal
Members from California, Illinois and New Jersey have been denied access in recent weeks to immigrant detention facilities in their states. Oversight experts say that's a substantial departure from past practice.

I wrote up a longer post about a bike riding group and how we use the web... along with some of my own thoughts on how to do it.
Feedback and ideas are welcome!
➡️ https://rasterweb.net/raster/2025/05/31/milwaukee-critical-mass-web-site/

Milwaukee Critical Mass Web Site
Thoughts on how we use the web in 2025...

i was put in charge of three grandchildren for a few hours yesterday so we headed straight to ben & jerry's to split a milkshake, then explored the state theater (and even sneaked into a movie but later got thrown out for horsing around on the escalator), then i gave a nickel tour of angell/mason/haven halls, then they chased squirrels on the diag which took longer than you might think, then we looked in all the windows in nickels arcade. it all went slowly and well.

UK Co-op shops / Israel
Nice one Co-op. I do sometimes shop there, and this'll encourage me to do so. Good to see principle being upheld over profit.
"British food retailer the Co-op Group will cease sourcing products and ingredients from 17 countries, including Israel, where there are "internationally recognised" human rights abuses and violations of international law, it said on Tuesday.
"The Co-op, which is owned by its members and trades from over 2,300 food stores across the UK, said it would stop selling carrots from Israel from this month as part of a commitment to no longer stock Israeli goods."
Commiserations to any Israeli food-growers who _don't_ support the atrocities in Gaza and are caught up in this.
#CoOp #food #shopping #Israel #UKPol

GOLIATH: A Decentralized Framework for Data Collection in Intelligent Transportation Systems
Davide Maffiola, Stefano Longari, Michele Carminati, Mara Tanelli, Stefano Zanero
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10665

GOLIATH: A Decentralized Framework for Data Collection in Intelligent Transportation Systems
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) technology has advanced during the past years, and it is now used for several applications that require vehicles to exchange real-time data, such as in traffic information management. Traditionally, road traffic information has been collected using on-site sensors. However, crowd-sourcing traffic information from onboard sensors or smartphones has become a viable alternative. State-of-the-art solutions currently follow a centralized model where only the…

This. Please read, share, and act. 
@StandUpForScience
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rentzhog_makesciencegreatagain-sta…