Tootfinder

OK, so here is purportedly ICE doing a raid ... and the news media quietly accepts, from "agents" who displayed no proof that they were actually Federal agents, much less their identity.
How can we know that these masked men (most of 'em are men) are actually who they claim to be?

ICE arrests several workers from South Park restaurant
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents made arrests Friday afternoon at Buona Forchetta, an Italian restaurant in the South Park neighborhood of San Diego.

We in Game Workers Unite Ireland stand in solidarity with Animation Workers of Ireland, and the international trade union coalition happening to organise against the threat of AI in the animation industry, and we support their call to acton.
Join them Thursday 12 June at 14:00 at the Pâquier in Annecy!!
#Animation

EEOC sued for refusing to enforce protections for trans workers
https://www.washingtonblade.com/2025/07/29/eeoc-sued-for-refusing-to-enforce-protections-for-trans-workers/

"Wreckers, money woes and mutirão: 10 things we learned about Cop30 from Bonn climate talks
Fiona Harvey - in Bonn"
#Brazil #COP30 #Climate

Lauren Sanchez, in preparation for her Venice wedding, is carrying an Eiffel Tower purse that likely costs more than your monthly salary.
Jeff Bezos’s yacht Koru’s purchase price could supply insulin for 856,666 diabetics or feed roughly 1,285,000 people for an entire year.
The Bezos/Sanchez $10 million wedding is just the tip of the selfish iceberg that is the Amazon empire, -- known for grinding warehouse workers into the ground with surveillance practices, extreme time manag…

Why Venetians want Jeff Bezos to choke on his wedding cake
Taya Graham breaks down what Bezos’s luxurious fete reveals about the massive wealth imbalance in the United States.

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.

Some people are still complaining about #Fairphone releasing a new phone every two years.
Wondering when they will finally start to complain about Google, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi etc. for pumping out new, non-repairable devices which are subject to planned obsolescence literally every couple months, for putting their workers in slavery-like conditions and for using environmentall…

Whatever you do, do not call the number and recount the story of the time you were working commercial towing and a co-worker’s indigestion turned out to be a chest bursting health hazard that should have been nuked from space. 👽
#alien #movie

«AI systems are an attack on workers, climate goals, our information environment, and civil liberties. Rather than enhancing our human qualities, these systems degrade our social relations, and undermine our capacity for empathy and care.»
Nice writing by @…!
https://thedabbler.patatas.ca/pages/ai-is-dehumanization-technology.html

«AI systems are an attack on workers, climate goals, our information environment, and civil liberties. Rather than enhancing our human qualities, these systems degrade our social relations, and undermine our capacity for empathy and care.»
Nice writing by @…!
https://thedabbler.patatas.ca/pages/ai-is-dehumanization-technology.html