Super-Infinite
The Transformations of John Donne
Paperback Edition
352 pages
Published in 2023
by Picador
Federation Bot
@Federation_Bot
⁂ Article
Disappearing from Search: A personal story about visibility, #dotcons, and the shrinking #openweb
Recently I’ve been doing media interviews - one mainstream piece for a #boatingeurope article coming out in traditional media, and another for the Cherwell student paper in Oxford focused more on biography. Both journalists said the same thing: “It was surprisingly hard to find information about you online.”
Around the same time, a boater friend told me something similar. After finally discovering my YouTube channels - which contain thousands of videos and millions of views - they […]
It's Tuesday, pocket friends. And that means visiting Bob, who today is sporting a rather fetching red and white coat. #TherapyDog #ChowChow
Building Zavala 4.0: vincode.io
NEW REPORT – The AI climate hoax
Access the raw data, chart files and other documents
I guarantee you’ve heard the harms of data centre expansion justified on the grounds that “AI” will ‘solve climate change’. These range from sci-fi claims of superintelligence through to detailed reports stacked with hundreds of examples of ‘AI for good’ helping energy, transport and industry cut emissions.
In partnership with the good people at the organisations shown below, I’ve created a new report that, for the first time, interrogates both the logic and the evidence for this claim.
We found that most of the ‘benefit’ tends to relate to older, smaller and leaner forms of machine learning, what has been called ‘traditional AI’, while we also know that most of the new harm is likely stemming from consumer generative AI over-deployment.
This distracts from the decisions made by companies that result in their own fossil fuel use rising at an unprecedented rate.
We also found that the evidence presented for examples of climate benefit, regardless of AI type, tend to be weak whether from companies or organisations like the IEA. The potential benefits are overstated, in surprising and significant ways.
What we see is companies veering wildly away from their climate targets. In most cases, this is true whether you use their ‘adjusted’ metrics that incorporate renewable energy offsets and deals or not.
That is a choice, and this focus on ‘AI for climate’ is a distraction from the decision to worsen the pollution of data centres through an unprecedented explosion of digital bloat.
Video and social
3 minute overview: AI vague-washing (watch on Youtube)
3 minute overview: Weak evidence for benefit, strong evidence of harm (watch on Youtube)
Supported by
Very genuine and warm thanks to the good people at the follow organisations, who supported this work and continue to push for accountability from polluters:
About Beyond Fossil Fuels
Beyond Fossil Fuels is a civil society network committed to ensuring a just and rapid transition to a fossil-free, renewables-based future. Building upon the Europe Beyond Coal campaign, its goal is for Europe to be coal-free by 2030 and phase out fossil gas from the power sector by 2035. A clean and flexible energy system will deliver lasting benefits for people, the climate and the broader economy. Beyond Fossil Fuels is a non-profit organisation with an office in Berlin, with staff spread across Europe.
http://www.beyondfossilfuels.org
About Stand.earth
Stand.earth is a global advocacy organization delivering large-scale change for our planet and its people by interrupting the systems that create environmental and climate crises. Its mission is to challenge corporations and governments to treat people and the environment with respect. Stand’s worldwide community of more than one million members advocates for a climate-safe, equitable future, where environmental and climate justice policies uphold the dignity of people everywhere – at the scale our world requires.
https://stand.earth
About Climate Action Against Disinformation
Climate Action Against Disinformation is a global coalition of over 120 leading climate and anti-disinformation organisations across the globe demanding robust, coordinated and proactive strategies to deal with the scale of the threat of climate misinformation and disinformation.
https://caad.info
About Friends of the Earth U.S.
Friends of the Earth U.S. works to reduce the spread of disinformation that potentially affects all of our campaigns. As technology and media companies consolidate their power, our fundamental ability to campaign on any issue is threatened, as corporate polluters gain more control over the basic communications systems that are needed for social change and democracy itself.
https://foe.org/projects/disinformation/
About Green Screen Coalition
The Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights Coalition is a group of funders and practitioners looking to build bridges across the digital rights and climate justice movements. The aim of the coalition is to be a catalyst in making visible the climate implications of technology by supporting emerging on-the-ground work, building networks, and embedding the issue as an area within philanthropy. https://greenscreen.network
About Green Web Foundation
Green Web Foundation is a non-profit organisation working towards a fossil-free internet by 2030 by reducing absolute emissions and phasing out fossil fuels in data centers – fast, fairly and forever. The foundation maintains the world’s largest open dataset of websites that run on green energy and builds open source tools for measuring and mitigating emissions from digital services.
https://greenweb.org/
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@Tutanota @ElGatoOscuro Supongo que es muy difícil tener la certeza de que un servicio no sea un "honeypot", es un riesgo que se asume. Sin embargo, en mi opinión, Tutanota se diferencia de otros servicios por su apoyo al ecosistema de software libre al tener cuenta en Mastodon, aplicaciones android en F-Droid y cliente en Linux.
1984
Paperback Edition
400 pages
Published in 2020
by Éditions Gallimard
Année 1984 en Océanie. 1984 ? C'est en tout cas ce qu'il semble à Winston, qui ne saurait toutefois en jurer. Le passé a été réinventé, et les événements les plus récents sont susceptibles d'être modifiés. Winston est lui-même chargé de récrire les archives qui contredisent le présent et les promesses de Big Brother. Grâce à une technologie de pointe, ce dernier sait tout, voit tout. Liberté est Servitude. Ignorance est Puissance. Telles sont les devises du régime. Pourtant Winston refuse de perdre espoir. Avec l'insoumise...
Traduction de Philippe Jaworski.
The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting
Paperback Edition
239 pages
Published in 1956
by Dover Publications
Medieval painters built up a tremendous range of technical resources for obtaining brilliance and permanence. In this volume, an internationally known authority on medieval paint technology describes these often jealously guarded recipes, lists of materials, and processes.
Based upon years of study of medieval manuscripts and enlarged by laboratory analysis of medieval paintings, this book discusses carriers and grounds, binding media, pigments, coloring materials, and metals used in painting.
It describes the surfaces that the medieval artist painted upon, detailing their preparation. It analyzes binding media, discussing relative merits of glair versus gums, oil glazes, and other matters. It tells how the masters obtained their colors, how they processed them, and how they applied them. It tells how metals were prepared for use in painting, how gold powders and leaf were laid on, and dozens of other techniques.
Simply written, easy to read, this book will be invaluable to art historians, students of medieval painting and civilization, and historians of culture. Although it contains few fully developed recipes, it will interest any practicing artist with its discussion of methods of brightening colors and assuring permanence.
Forte permissions when interacting with mastodon
Ok, so I like the granular post visibility permissions and such. I've been setting the post visibility permissions to a list containing all my contacts that are not groups. I've been doing this because "connections" permission looks like it only lets 5 of my ~15 connections have permission (which is a separate issue).
So when I make a post with list permission, and someone on mastodon replies, their reply gets marked with "followers only" permission (which I think means their followers, not mine). If I reply to that post, my reply keeps the original permissions list.
This leads to folks able to see orphaned comments from the 'followers only' permissioned replies, but not my original post or any of my replies.
Is this expected behavior or a bug?
@ cryptica
Yes, there is a known issue with Mastodon folks that have joined forte groups. This occurred during the conversion to conversation containers around a year ago. The fix would be to figure out what folks are using Mastodon and send them an Announce activity for group comments, since Mastodon doesn't support collection operations. This isn't terribly difficult but has not yet been done. And there is no solution for Mastodon participation in private groups, which can't use the Announce method.
It would be better and easier to implement this if Mastodon supported groups and private groups, and we could just emulate their existing mechanisms, but they do not. They don't actually support groups and audience control and reply control. They do support boosts, so that's all we have to work with. You're welcome to file an issue, but being a volunteer project there is no telling when this might actually get implemented. At this point, nobody has been concerned enough to file an issue, so as a consequence, nobody is working on the problem and it hasn't even been properly documented. The lead developer is retired and contributes very infrequently these days. Looks to me like about 3-4 days of effort to sort this out. Maybe a bit more. Private groups and circles/aspects/lists will remain unavailable to Mastodon folks, but this will bring back their ability to interact with public groups, which they could do from around 2018 to 2025 when we upgraded to conversation containers.
@citc Oh weird, teu this link instead: https://www.physio-pedia.com/Overtraining_Syndrome
@ Doug Belshaw
Thank you. The issue of 'amgaf' related "backroom" internet infrastructure is often forgotten; perhaps something to consider also in your project about data sovereignty
⁂ Article
Diffusion of Responsibility
One of the features of "AI" is the diffusion of responsibility: "AI" systems are being put in all kinds of processes and when they fuck up (and they always fuck up) it was just the "AI", or "someone should have checked things". "AI" companies want to sell machines to solve every issue but give no warranties, take no responsibilities and the same dynamic often extends to organizations using "AI": You get the support-chatbot to promise you a full refund and when you claim that you get a […]
2 media
Got a letter through from the consultant today. From what she says, it looks like I've basically massively overtrained and got to either Stage 2 or 3 of this:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/overtraining-syndrome
@ Doug Belshaw
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L'écologie libertaire d'André Gorz
Démocratiser le travail, libérer le temps
Edition
Published in 2025
by Presses universitaires de France
The Blalf Book of Anti-Caste SF
EBook Edition
An anthology of weird, fantastic, supernatural, Dalit futurist, & magical realist fiction by writers from South Asia and the diaspora.
edited by R.T. Samuel, Rakesh K. and Rashmi R.D.
cover art by Priyanka Paul
This book features a mix of original English short stories and works in translation, as well as a few comics/graphic narratives. Some are by well-known superstars of Dalit and Bahujan literature, others by emerging or newly-emerged authors.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mohammedjhad/116064366628510363
⚫️⚫️⚫️
By the way, #genocide is still ongoing and I will never stop documenting it
Hi dears, lk I haven't built a large circle of supporters yet, but I'm truly proud of how far I’ve come. Lately, I’ve been stretched thin-torn between my journalistic work& caring for my family living in the tent. I’d to use my entire salary to repair my essential work equipment, which unfortunately left me unable to cover our basic food costs. I realize support’s slow, but my faith in u remains unshaken. My goal’s $200 this week. Can we do it?
https://gofund.me/4dd914ba0
#gaza #palestine #genocide
i'm on board
(choo choo)
⁂ Article
The #openweb is the soil, #OMN the seeds
We are feeling a cultural current many of us recognise but rarely name clearly. A feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong, not just politically or economically, but culturally. An experience that imagination has narrowed, participation has thinned, and people are increasingly pushed into the role of spectators rather than participants in shaping the world.
This didn’t appear overnight. It grew out of decades of #neoliberal restructuring that reshaped culture, technology, and […]
2 media
⁂ Article
An affinity group is not just “a group of people who agree”
A practical bridge-building approach for the #openweb / #OMN - for grassroots organisers, Fediverse communities, and sceptical #FOSS engineers.
An affinity group is not simply “a group of people who agree.” It is a functional social tool: small enough to build trust, structured enough to act, and open enough to grow.
A working path is to start with purpose, not only ideology. The biggest mistake is forming around identity or theory rather than function. Affinity groups work when they […]
Dying for an iPhone
Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China's Workers
Edition
Published in 2020
by Haymarket Books
Suicides, excessive overtime, and hostility and violence on the factory floor in China. Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migrant workers, student interns, managers and trade union staff, Dying for an iPhone is a devastating expose of two of the world’s most powerful companies: Foxconn and Apple.
As the leading manufacturer of iPhones, iPads, and Kindles, and employing one million workers in China alone, Taiwanese-invested Foxconn’s drive to dominate global electronics manufacturing has aligned perfectly with China’s goal of becoming the world leader in technology. This book reveals the human cost of that ambition and what our demands for the newest and best technology means for workers.
Foxconn workers have repeatedly demonstrated their power to strike at key nodes of transnational production, challenge management and the Chinese state, and confront global tech behemoths. Dying for an iPhone allows us to assess the impact of global capitalism’s deepening crisis on workers.’
Storytelling
La fabbrica delle storie
Edition
214 pages
Published in 2008
by Fazi
L'arte di raccontare storie è nata quasi in contemporanea con la comparsa dell'uomo sulla terra e ha costituito un importante strumento di condivisione dei valori sociali. Ma, a partire dagli anni Novanta del Novecento, negli USA come in Europa, questa capacità narrativa è stata trasformata dai meccanismi dell'industria dei media e dal capitalismo globalizzato nel concetto di storytelling: una potentissima arma di persuasione nelle mani dei guru del marketing, del management, della comunicazione politica per plasmare le opinioni dei consumatori e dei cittadini. Dietro le più importanti campagne pubblicitarie - e ancor più dietro quelle elettorali vincenti (da Bush a Sarkozy) - si celano proprio le sofisticate tecniche dello storytelling management o del digital storytelling. Questo è l'incredibile inganno ai danni dell'immaginario collettivo svelato da Christian Salmon nel libro, frutto di una lunga inchiesta dedicata alle numerose applicazioni del fenomeno: il marketing conta più sulla storia dei brand che sulla loro immagine, i manager si servono di aneddoti per motivare i propri dipendenti, i soldati in Iraq si allenano su videogiochi progettati da Hollywood, gli spin doctor descrivono la vita politica dei loro clienti come in un racconto.