Author: Neil Mather
- I donated to the Amazon UK warehouse workers’ strike fund again.
- https://www.foxglove.org.uk/campaigns/amazonstrikefund/
- They are out on strike today again.
- Public interest technology and its origins
- Listened: Black Box: Prologue: The collision
- Woman begins dating an AI, finds genuine positivity from it. She suffers from CFS/ME and has to shield from COVID. Presenter talks about ‘AI vertigo’ – dizziness is what is coming with AI. The ‘collision’ of the title refers to the collision between artificial intelligence and us humans. We being the first generations to truly experience it.
- Listened: Black Box: Episode one – The connectionists
- Potted history of AI. Perceptron. AI winter. Geoff Hinton. The connectionists. ImageNet victory by AlexNet. AlphaGo.
- Listened: Black Box: Episode three – Repocalypse now
- Replika, the AI companion app. What happens when they update it and mess up people’s companions. A bit like site deaths but even worse.
- Read: The digital revolution has failed
- “as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within”
- Right on. That would be digital ecosocialism in my view.
- Generative AI has a ferocious environmental impact.
- Generative AI is further concentrating power with Big Tech.
- Watched: Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain
- Shocking, the violence that was meted out by the police on picketing miners. Seemingly premeditated.
- Then perjury.
- All seemingly coming directly from the wishes of Margaret Thatcher.
- The media apparently complicit, a piece of state apparatus.
- Listened: Medium Anxiety
- Listened: How an infamous ransomware gang found itself hacked
- Fun story.
- Ransomware.
- I did not know that WannaCry was by the North Korean state.
- Listened: What do the Tories consider extreme?
- Distributed digital gardens.
- Watched: Ant-Man.
- I can’t seem to find an IRC bouncer that you can easily install on YunoHost…
- What would AI for the people look like?
- My biggest problem with AI are its environmental impact and the fact that it is in the hands of a cabal of big tech firms using it to turn a profit.
- Is there a way it could be retained? Publicly owned, democratically governed, socially useful, and existing within planetary boundaries?
- Watched: Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain
- Episode 2. Focuses on the Battle of Orgreave.
- Police brutality. State violence.
- Read: A Modern Anarchism (Part 1): Anarchist Analysis
Loving your use of real life index cards.
- Read: Reframing and simplifying the idea of how to keep a Zettelkasten
- Contemplating whether I should send webmentions from my digital garden.
- Maybe, maybe not.
- There’s plenty of ways to send webmentions from a static site, plenty of people doing it.
- So I could, but I wonder if I should.
- Perhaps webmentions should only be sent when I post a more considered long-form article, or when I post something to my stream.
- Not sure.
- Should I send webmentions from my digital garden?
- Listened: How to talk about avoiding waste, with Keep Britain Tidy
- Most people think recycling is all you need to do to prevent waste.
- Reframe the message and move people’s consciousness up the waste hierarchy.
- Buy Nothing New Month.
- Really interesting discussion around societal norms and reuse (e.g. what happens when you give second-hand presents at kids’ birthday parties…)