Tootfinder

Book recc via #CivicsOfTechnology #CivicsOfTech25 #COT2025 keynote chat: “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Hum…

'He's going to do everything to damage the president': Former Musk friend on the Trump fallout (Christine Mui/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/29/silicon-valley-elon-musk-donald-trump-00415544
http://www.memeorandum.com/250629/p64#a250629p64

Meta's Anduril deal shows how much has changed in the past couple of years in Silicon Valley, where developing war tech was once considered a hard red line (Dave Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles

Art house streaming service and distributor Mubi raised $100M led by Sequoia at a $1B valuation; Mubi has about 20M registered users worldwide (Christopher Grimes/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/1e0645d5-054e-4b00-a545-b95a1e2b261a

Sequoia bets on indie films with $100mn Mubi fundraising
Capital infusion led by Silicon Valley firm comes after box office success of ‘The Substance’

Art house streaming service and distributor Mubi raised $100M led by Sequoia at a $1B valuation; Mubi has about 20M registered users worldwide (Christopher Grimes/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/1e0645d5-054e-4b00-a545-b95a1e2b261a

Sequoia bets on indie films with $100mn Mubi fundraising
Capital infusion led by Silicon Valley firm comes after box office success of ‘The Substance’

To my fellow Asians:
All you free market, libertarian freakshows - you know who you are - that voted #Trump cuz #MAGA's racism would NEVVVVER come for you... consider this your wake up call.
▶️ Steve Bannon Suggests There Are Too Many

Steve Bannon Suggests There Are Too Many Asian CEOs In Silicon Valley
But Donald Trump says he wants them to stay because "we have to keep our talented people."

Economic inequality has reached a staggering milestone in Silicon Valley:
just nine households hold 15% of the region’s wealth, according to new research from San Jose State University.
🔥A mere 0.1% of residents hold 71% of the tech hub’s wealth.
The findings come from the 2025 “Silicon Valley Pain Index”,
a report published by SJSU’s Human Rights Institute each year since 2020. The report aims to quantify “structured inequalities” in Silicon Valley, and measures “pai…

Palo Alto Networks to acquire identity security provider CyberArk in $25 billion deal https://therecord.media/palo-alto-networks-cyberark-acquisition

I can't imagine OpenAI is going to Trumpify GPT. I'm pretty sure they've spent more on instruction tuning data than they have on model training.
Even if they wanted to throw all that out and start again, you'd need to build a coherent image of what the bot should do in any given situation. The MAGA worldview simply doesn't have the required coherence.

Tech elites are turning AI into ChatGPTrump
The administration's new AI plan gives Silicon Valley everything it wants — for a price.

"In Empire of #AI, journalist Karen Hao writes about the rise of #OpenAI and the impacts of AI around the world. Below is an extract from the book on the effects on Chile's mineral reserves and water resources."

The CTO of Palantir, the company being tasked with making a master database of intelligence files on all US citizens, is joining the army-ish.
So are other tech execs. This feels…really bad.
https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valley-exe

Silicon Valley Execs Join the Army as Officers (But Won't Have to Attend Boot Camp)
The tech industry is fully on board, but the rank and file won't have to do time as grunts.

At its core, #CCSignals is an attempt by Creative Commons, a Silicon Valley-based organisation, to legitimise the AI grifts of its donors – Google, Microsoft, and Meta (Zuckerberg).
Creative Commons was always a thinly-veiled attempt at enabling Big Tech data farmers to get more data (that’s why the whole “open data” realm is so well funded/popular – open as in “open for business” not fre…

Fediverse-Propaganda hier im Fedi:
»Brauchen wir eine Social-Media Revolution?
Unsere digitale Öffentlichkeit spielt sich vor allem auf wenigen großen Social-Media-Plattformen ab, die unsere Wahrnehmung und Debattenkultur stark prägen. Die Spielregeln geben dabei Tech-Milliardäre aus dem Silicon Valley vor — nicht immer zu Gunsten demokratischer Werte. Was können wir in Europa dagegen tun?«
🔊

Seems a part of what @… warns of...
SLASHDOT: Silicon Valley Execs Join the Army As Officers
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/

Silicon Valley Execs Join the Army As Officers - Slashdot
The U.S. Army Reserve has directly commissioned four top Silicon Valley executives as lieutenant colonels under a new initiative, Detachment 201, aimed at accelerating tech integration into military operations. While these part-time roles are intended to bring private-sector innovation to defense mo...

It's just one crazy day after another in cybersecurity lately, so check out today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know, including
--SharePoint attacks hit 400 organizations, campaign now includes ransomware.
--French cops bust xss.is admin and shutter the platform,
--Trump's AI action plan boosts Silicon Valley powerhouses,
--AZ state hackers likely behind other breach efforts,
--Hacker installed wiper software in Am…

SharePoint attacks hit 400 organizations, campaign now includes ransomware
French cops bust xss.is admin and shutter the platform, Trump's AI action plan boosts Silicon Valley powerhouses, AZ state hackers likely behind other breach efforts, Hacker installed wiper software in Amazon's AI Q assistant, Old Ivanti flaws plague Japan, much more

If #AI is allegedly so good for worker productivity and improving efficiency across organizations, why are the AI companies making their own employees work 72 hour workweeks?
If the tech actually helped them get more done faster, wouldn’t they have SHORTER workweeks? Why aren’t they using their own tools to help their employees?
Context: #Anthropic earlier this year, and they told me that this is a job with far longer work hours than any other place they’ve worked at.
They are also pulling 60 hour weeks there, they have zero tolerance for remote work, because the culture is “you don’t want to be left behind”. This person basically disappeared from social life once they took this job. I had never seen them so tired before.

Im Rahmen des Journalismusfest Innsbruck wurde für für DER STANDARD interviewed.
Wir sprachen über KI und Technologie im Allgemeinen. Und darüber, dass dem #KI Hype hinterherzurennen das Gegenteil von sinnvoll und zielführend ist.

Greatly honored to be the first speaker in the newly inaugurated Nacionalinis Architektūros Institutas in Kaunas, Lithuania. I will be presenting my radical architecture project, "Fables of Accelerationism," an interrogation of AI futures, this Thursday, 31 July.
#aiart #ai

Silicon Valley is pushing senators to follow the House in reviving a favorable tax benefit that disappeared because of a US tax law Section 174 change in 2017 (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/20/silicon-valley-big-tech-tax-benefit

Silicon Valley is pushing revival of game-changing tax benefit for startups
This could change the math for a slew of startups, and even Big Tech.

Silicon Valley AI Startups Are Embracing China's Controversial '996' Work Schedule (Kate Knibbs/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-china-996-work-schedule/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250723/p24#a250723p24

Silicon Valley was never woke. It just played woke on TV. https://tldr.nettime.org/@remixtures/114721179380101771

"How to get the most out of tech while freeing ourselves from the lunatics in Silicon Valley"
Says Ian Dunt in his article on a corporate Substack page linked from his block-chain owned Bluesky account.
He does so without using the words "Fedi" "blog", "decentralize" "open source", "free software", or "mastodon", and while calling Facebook and Instagram "seemingly more benign".
There must be a form of moderate tech disinvestment, which allows us the things we benefit from while removing the things which harm us.
He pleads, admitting
I have no answers for this
Yeah, no kidding.
But he has stopped using Amazon so much and buys more DVDs now, and tries to use a tablet more than a phone!?
Well done I guess.

Creatively Disrupting Capitalism
Richard Muscat* In the series Prospects for Degrowth I am a degrowth activist. It’s not a career path I ever envisaged for myself. I arrived here after a couple of decades working, for want of better phrasing, on “capitalism’s side”. First for a range of high-growth Silicon Valley software companies and their ilk; latterly directly in venture capital focused on climate change technology startups, aka “Climate Tech” or “Impact Investing.”

Creatively Disrupting Capitalism
Richard Muscat* In the series Prospects for Degrowth I am a degrowth activist. It’s not a career path I ever envisaged for myself. I arrived here after a couple of decades working, for want of bett…

Trump's tax bill expands Qualified Small Business Stock benefits for VCs, founders, startup staff, including increasing maximum tax-free gains from $10M to $15M (Ben Steverman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Ich habe diese Doku eben zum dritten Mal gesehen. Jedes Mal habe ich etwas Neues gelernt. Lasst euch nicht von dem T-Wort im Titel abschrecken.
Hauptsächlich geht es um die Sponsoren und Einflüsterer des Trampels. Das ZDF hat das journalistische Schwergewicht Claus Kleber losgeschickt, und er hat Interviews mit Leuten bekommen, die sonst nicht oft mit Journalist:innen reden. Manche von ihnen entlarven sich selbst als extreme Menschenfeinde.
Laut Wikipedia ist »Paypal-Mafia« eine…

Fast charge noise sensing using a spectator valley state in a singlet-triplet qubit
David W. Kanaar, Yasuo Oda, Mark F. Gyure, J. P. Kestner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14108

Fast charge noise sensing using a spectator valley state in a singlet-triplet qubit
Semiconductor spin qubits are a promising platform for quantum computing but remain vulnerable to charge noise. Accurate, in situ measurement of charge noise could enable closed-loop control and improve qubit performance. Here, we propose a method for real-time detection of charge noise using a silicon singlet-triplet qubit with one electron initialized in an excited valley state. This valley excitation acts as a spectator degree of freedom, coupled to a high-quality resonator via the exchange …

I'm no expert in geography, but I strongly suspect that Silicon Valley and San Francisco are not actually in opposite directions from here in London.

Dieser ganze Mythos von Computer-Hackern und Silicon Valley etc stammt aus einer Zeit, in der in den USA kleine Garagenfirmen¹ sich² mit neuen Ideen gegen diese Computerriesen³ und damit auch die Übermacht der staatlichen Bürokratie und ihrer grauen, phantasielosen Kästen stellten, in Deutschland eher der CCC, der sich gegen die staatliche Post mit all diesen Regularien auflehnte.
Computer für alle hieß auch Demokratisierung gegen übermächtige Spaßbremsen.
Und all das hat mit heu…

Why Bell Labs Worked.
Or, how MBA culture killed Bell Labs

[Ctrl F "fairness doctrine" ... "Phrase not found."]
https://www.thedissident.news/the-oligarchs-coup-against-the-free-press-is-happening-now/

The Oligarchs' Coup Against the Free Press Is Happening Now
The American information space is not merely changing; it is undergoing a hostile takeover. It is a deliberate, coordinated campaign by a new class of oligarchs out of Silicon Valley that includes Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg acting in concert with a Trump-led authoritarian political project.

«Fed up with ChatGPT, Latin America is building its own»
Please folks, the torment nexus isn't any better just because it's home-made… I hate how the intellectually bankrupt narratives of Silicon Valley are just copied over, as if that solved anything.
https://restofworld.org/2025/chatgpt-latin-america-alternative-latamgpt/

Rainer Mühlhoff kritisiert den KI-Hype als gefällige Mischung aus Techno-Optimismus und unternehmerischem Heilsversprechen. Die „Gläubigen“ im Silicon Valley preisen #KI als automatischen Fortschrittsmotor und ignorieren dabei hartnäckig Macht-, Verteilungs- und Umweltfragen. KI als neue Ersatzreligion? Nachlesen und urteilen!
Neues Buch! Künstliche Intelligenz: Tech-Ideologien und der neue

Künstliche Intelligenz: Tech-Ideologien und der neue Faschismus
Was sind die ideologischen Ursprünge des neuen digitalen Faschismus? Was treibt den populären KI-Diskurs, was steht hinter der KI-Hype-Dynamik? Ein Auszug aus Rainer Mühlhoffs Buch „Künstliche Intelligenz und der neue Faschismus“, das am Mittwoch bei Reclam erscheint.

@… How weird is it to imagine there is someone out there who looks at this, and not only goes "Eh okay whatever" but actually thinks "YES! This is it! This will work! They will looooove this!".
Silicon Valley needs some serious group therapy sessions. Maybe we can all pitch in to cover the costs.

Früher stand das Silicon Valley für Innovation und Freiheit, heute zerstören Tech-Giganten die Demokratie. Die ehemalige EU-Abgeordnete Marietje Schaake kämpft gegen den zunehmenden Einfluss der Tech-Konzerne auf Politik. Sie warnt Medien davor, sich von Big Tech abhängig zu machen – und hofft auf einen Journalismus, der nicht länger auf die Narrative der Tech-Giganten hereinfällt.

Marietje Schaake: „Medien machen sich von mächtigen…
Marietje Schaake warnt im journalist-Interview Medien davor, sich von großen Tech Unternehmen abhängig zu machen.

Big Tech acquihiring AI startups, like Meta's Scale AI deal, gives VCs only modest returns compared to traditional exits and may entrench Big Tech's dominance (Parmy Olson/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles

Meta, Google AI Talent Grab May Spur a Silicon Valley Rethink
Meta and Google’s AI talent grab may lead to more sustainable tech companies.

How funny would it be if this turned in to a second Silicon Valley industry-wide wage fixing scandal https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-07/apple-loses-its-top-ai-models-executive-to-meta-s-hiring-spree

Silicon Valley's bet on Trump starts to pay off (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/23/trump-ai-action-plan-big-tech/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250723/p32#a250723p32

How an open-source approach helped DeepSeek and other Chinese AI companies; Hugging Face: Alibaba's Qwen is now the world's largest open-source AI ecosystem (South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article

How open-source AI is helping China win hearts and market share
China’s free-for-all AI models, developed by firms like DeepSeek and Alibaba, present a viable alternative to US closed-source systems.

Arizona woman sentenced to 8.5 years for running North Korean laptop farm https://therecord.media/arizona-woman-sentenced-north-korean-laptop-farm

The Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO)
today announced contracts with
Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI
to help it use artificial intelligence for a multitude of military purposes
- each with a $200 million ceiling. 
https://www.

Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI get $800M to hop in bed with Pentagon
: Looks like DoD FOMO struck Silicon Valley

This was really interesting. It's about Topaz AI, which was a denoising/upscaling solution I looked at about nine months ago, and rejected because I wasn't really prepared to make the investment at that stage ($300/yr) https://mstdn.social/@Onmyom/114779996030982643…

A US judge sentences an Arizona woman to 8.5 years in prison for running a "laptop farm" that enabled North Korean workers to secure IT jobs at 309 US companies (Jonathan Greig/The Record)
https://therecord.media/arizona-woman-sentenced-north-korean-laptop-…

Arizona woman sentenced to 8.5 years for running North Korean laptop farm
Prosecutors said Chapman helped the North Korean IT workers obtain jobs at 309 companies, including a major television network, a car maker, a media company, a Silicon Valley technology company and more.

WaPo names Sam Han as its first Chief AI Officer and unveils WP Incubator, modeled after Silicon Valley incubators to develop new products and business lines (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2025/06/

Office of the CTO Announces Sam Han as Chief AI Officer and Creation of WP Incubator

Q&A with Meta's Andrew Bosworth on joining Detachment 201, the Army's tech challenges, the vibe shift in Silicon Valley's military relations, and more (Blake Dodge/Pirate Wires)
https://www.piratewires.com/p/why-meta-cto…

Detachment 201: Why Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth Joined the Army Reserves
a q&a with boz on joining detachment 201 with execs from palantir and openai, tech challenges

C3.ai founder and CEO Thomas Siebel steps down due to health issues related to an autoimmune disease that resulted in visual impairment in early 2025 (Hanh Truong/Silicon Valley Business Journal)
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2025/07…

“The modern-day system of colonialism and sharecropping being constructed by the new East India Company that is Silicon Valley isn’t uncouth or stupid enough to put people in physical shackles. It doesn’t want to own your body, it is content with owning your simulation. And yet, as we have already seen, the more data they have about you – the higher the fidelity of your simulation – the closer they are to owning you.
…
If this doesn’t sound like democracy, it is because it is not…

Yep, seems like different parts of the Fosstodon mod team just keep doubling down on "we are apolitical" – as if that was a real thing and not just reinforcing the existing power and abuse…
And in true fashion for FOSS priorities, the admin can't seem to get a statement out as it's more important to first pick a blogging platform.
This could fit into a FOSS-centric reboot of that Silicon Valley comedy show if it wasn't so sad 😅
#fosstodon

Musk tried and failed to enact systemic change across the entire government.
Many tech executives and investors who support Trump have narrower goals that focus on creating a regulatory climate favorable to themselves.
While Trump and Musk traded barbs on their respective social networks,
a cryptocurrency company whose business had been hamstrung by the Biden administration went public on the New York Stock Exchange,
its share price popping 200 percent.
An art…

Musk and Trump are over. Silicon Valley is just getting started.
The Tech-Trump alliance has always had tensions. But its lucrative nature has outweighed the ideological differences.

How Benchmark's investment in Chinese startup Manus has highlighted a philosophical divide in Silicon Valley over China, patriotism, and the pursuit of profit (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-1…

Silicon Valley's not crying for Musk (Scott Rosenberg/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/09/musk-trump-fallout-big-tech
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p15#a250609p15

In May 2025, a high-profile lunch in Riyadh brought together Donald Trump,
the Crown Prince,
and a group of Silicon Valley billionaires and executives.
The guest list assembled by Elon Musk (Tesla, xAI, SpaceX) and arriving by their own jets:
Sam Altman (OpenAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Alex Karp (Palantir), Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), Ruth Porat (Alphabet/Google), Alexandr Wang (Scale AI), Travis Kalanick (Cloud Kitchens, former Uber CEO), Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone…

Mad Kings and Saudi Princes
Award winning author and futurist Albert Bates writes about ecovillages, permaculture, negative emission technology, drawdown, and climate solutions.

A look at the Catholic Church's decade-long dialogue with Silicon Valley on AI, as Pope Leo prepares to make AI's potential threat to humanity a signature issue (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/pope-leo-ai-te

A look at the lack of consensus in the tech industry on what AGI is, whether LLMs are the best path to it, and what AGI might look like if or when it arrives (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)

Why Big Tech cannot agree on artificial general intelligence
It has been tipped as the next big breakthrough out of Silicon Valley, but is it a scientific goal — or a marketing buzzword?

Sources: in a Trump meeting, Jensen Huang argued US chips should be the global standard and leveraged support from David Sacks, who disliked Biden's chip rules (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)
https://www.

How Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Persuaded Trump to Sell A.I. Chips to China
With help from a longtime Silicon Valley investor turned White House insider, Mr. Huang got the administration to reverse course on restrictions.

Sources: some AI researchers rejected Meta's offers to stay at jobs that align with their values; far fewer defected from Anthropic and DeepMind than OpenAI (Hayden Field/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-int

Meta is trying to win the AI race with money — but not everyone can be bought
The AI industry is full of people motivated by a true belief in what they’re doing, but Meta is betting that at a certain price, anyone can be bought — it’s casting its net across Silicon Valley to do it. And what’s the best weapon OpenAI, its biggest target, has to fight it? That’s money, too.

Sources: Trump's team seeks a potential consent decree as part of an FTC deal forcing Meta to pay restitution to conservative users harmed by content moderation (Lydia Moynihan/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/06/06/business/bi…

Big Tech's bet on Trump hasn't yielded special favors
Silicon Valley giants spent millions on Inauguration Day seats, but they’ve gotten little in return — save for a front-row view of their own reckoning.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says the "tides have turned" in Silicon Valley, making it more acceptable for the tech industry to support the US military's efforts (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Court filing: Deel alleges Rippling's "competitive intelligence manager" Brett Alexander Johnson posed as a customer to access Deel's product and business info (George Hammond/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/abd988f6-e524-48d9-8433-27c…

New spying claims emerge in Silicon Valley corporate espionage scandal
HR start-ups Rippling and Deel trade allegations their leaders directed efforts to steal company secrets from one another

Hangzhou, home to DeepSeek and Alibaba, has become a hub for Chinese AI startups, with the suburb Liangzhu emerging as a hotspot for coders in their 20s and 30s (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)
https://www.n…

The Coder ‘Village’ at the Heart of China’s A.I. Frenzy
As China vies with Silicon Valley for primacy, Hangzhou, home to DeepSeek and Alibaba, is where its aspiring tech titans mingle and share ideas.

An interview with Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs on tech's next chapter, meeting in 1997, Steve Jobs, Apple, Powell Jobs' io investment in 2019, AI, and more (Matthew Garrahan/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/7f0a45b0-a3cc-4e1c-be71-1b7b42958d4…

‘Humanity deserves better’: Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs on tech’s next chapter
After Apple, the Silicon Valley visionaries are looking to artificial intelligence to shape the future again

Sources: Palmer Luckey is preparing to launch Erebor, a US bank backed by Joe Lonsdale and other tech investors to serve startups, including crypto businesses (Tabby Kinder/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/8c903f2e-42a6-496b-b098-ca733f340ffc

Peter Thiel joins tech billionaires backing new lender Erebor to rival Silicon Valley Bank
Start-up named after the dragon’s mountain in ‘Lord of the Rings’