#Tag · bonfire.cafe

#literature #books #astronomy #science #technology
Medieval monks reused an animal skin parchment and in the process removed the writing. However, not all the writing was removed and it has been identified that the writing was a map of the stars written by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus. Now x-rays from a particle accelerator are trying to recover the lost text. The original text dating to about 129 BCE is the earliest known map of the stars. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/medieval-monks-wrote-over-a-copy-of-an-ancient-star-catalog-now-a-particle-accelerator-is-revealing-the-long-lost-original-text-180988123/

Smithsonian Magazine

Medieval Monks Wrote Over a Copy of an Ancient Star Catalog. Now, a Particle Accelerator Is Revealing the Long-Lost Original Text

The parchments initially contained references to a star catalog and maps created during the second century B.C.E.

Aethelflaed

@Aethelflaed@mstdn.social · 6 days ago

Smithsonian Magazine

Medieval Monks Wrote Over a Copy of an Ancient Star Catalog. Now, a Particle Accelerator Is Revealing the Long-Lost Original Text

The parchments initially contained references to a star catalog and maps created during the second century B.C.E.

Chip Butty boosted

JuneSim63 💚

@junesim63@mstdn.social · 2 weeks ago

A Labour-linked lobbying firm is selling access to government officials, including tech secretary Liz Kendall and “top advisers to the prime minister”, for tens of thousands of pounds.

#Corruption #Lobbying #UKPolitics #Technology

Arden Strategies lobbying firm offers ‘cash-for-access’ to Labour ministers at Future of Tech Summit | openDemocracy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/arden-strategies-cash-for-access-future-labour-ministers-tech-summit-liz-kendall-jim-murphy/

openDemocracy

    Revealed: Lobbyist selling access to ministers for £30,000

Firms can get direct access to tech minister and No 10 advisers in exchange for sponsoring tech event, brochure says

JuneSim63 💚

@junesim63@mstdn.social · 2 weeks ago

A Labour-linked lobbying firm is selling access to government officials, including tech secretary Liz Kendall and “top advisers to the prime minister”, for tens of thousands of pounds.

#Corruption #Lobbying #UKPolitics #Technology

openDemocracy

    Revealed: Lobbyist selling access to ministers for £30,000

Firms can get direct access to tech minister and No 10 advisers in exchange for sponsoring tech event, brochure says

Billy Smith and 2 others boosted

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · 3 weeks ago

"“There is no alternative” is a cheap rhetorical sleight. It’s a demand dressed up as an observation. “There is no alternative” means: “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”

I’m a science-fiction writer – my job is to think of a dozen alternatives before breakfast."
- @pluralistic

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

#Tech #Technology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #StockMarket #Business #News #World #SciFi

Headline with illustration:
Headline: The featured essay
AI (artificial intelligence)

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

by Cory Doctorow

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Sun 18 Jan 2026 09.00 EST

Illustration: two wireframe hands looming over a person working on a computer — Headline with illustration: Headline: The featured essay AI (artificial intelligence) AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage by Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots Sun 18 Jan 2026 09.00 EST Illustration: two wireframe hands looming over a person working on a computer

the Guardian

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Cory Doctorow boosted

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · 3 weeks ago

"The collapse of the #AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the #StockMarket, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU.

AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a #finance sector and #tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."
- @pluralistic

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

#Technology #ArtificialIntelligence #Business #Economy #News #World

Text from article:
When the AI-investment mania halts, most of those models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the datacenters running. As Stein’s law has it: “Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.”

The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU.

AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.

To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever more outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.

Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it’s worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fueling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls with hi-tech asbestos. — Text from article: When the AI-investment mania halts, most of those models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the datacenters running. As Stein’s law has it: “Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.” The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more. To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever more outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side. Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it’s worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fueling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls with hi-tech asbestos.

the Guardian

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · 3 weeks ago

"AI is a bubble and it will burst... So what will be left behind?

We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics... a lot of cheap GPUs... And we will have the #OpenSource models that run on commodity hardware, #AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images;... These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of."

#Technology #News

Text from article:
AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?

We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing – such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of.

If there had never been an AI bubble, if all this stuff arose merely because computer scientists and product managers noodled around for a few years coming up with cool new apps, most people would have been pleasantly surprised with these interesting new things their computers could do. We would call them “plugins”.

It’s the bubble that sucks, not these applications. The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things. It wants expensive, “disruptive” things: big foundation models that lose billions of dollars every year. — Text from article: AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing – such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of. If there had never been an AI bubble, if all this stuff arose merely because computer scientists and product managers noodled around for a few years coming up with cool new apps, most people would have been pleasantly surprised with these interesting new things their computers could do. We would call them “plugins”. It’s the bubble that sucks, not these applications. The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things. It wants expensive, “disruptive” things: big foundation models that lose billions of dollars every year.

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social replied · 3 weeks ago

"The collapse of the #AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the #StockMarket, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

#Technology #ArtificialIntelligence #Business #Economy #News #World

the Guardian

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · 3 weeks ago

"the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because #copyright is exclusively for humans...

if Getty or #Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use #AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them or give them away for nothing. And the only thing those companies hate more than paying creative workers, is having other people take their stuff without permission."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

#Art #Artist #News

Text from article:
We need to protect artists from AI predation, not just create a new way for artists to be mad about their impoverishment.

Incredibly enough, there is a really simple way to do that. After more than 20 years of being consistently wrong and terrible for artists’ rights, the US Copyright Office has finally done something gloriously, wonderfully right. All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans. That is why the “monkey selfie” is in the public domain. Copyright is only awarded to works of human creative expression that are fixed in a tangible medium.

And not only has the Copyright Office taken this position, they have defended it vigorously in court, repeatedly winning judgments to uphold this principle.

The fact that every AI-created work is in the public domain means that if Getty or Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them or give them away for nothing. And the only thing those companies hate more than paying creative workers, is having other people take their stuff without permission. — Text from article: We need to protect artists from AI predation, not just create a new way for artists to be mad about their impoverishment. Incredibly enough, there is a really simple way to do that. After more than 20 years of being consistently wrong and terrible for artists’ rights, the US Copyright Office has finally done something gloriously, wonderfully right. All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans. That is why the “monkey selfie” is in the public domain. Copyright is only awarded to works of human creative expression that are fixed in a tangible medium. And not only has the Copyright Office taken this position, they have defended it vigorously in court, repeatedly winning judgments to uphold this principle. The fact that every AI-created work is in the public domain means that if Getty or Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them or give them away for nothing. And the only thing those companies hate more than paying creative workers, is having other people take their stuff without permission.

the Guardian

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social replied · 3 weeks ago

"AI is a bubble and it will burst... So what will be left behind?

#Technology #News

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · 3 weeks ago

"“There is no alternative” is a cheap rhetorical sleight. It’s a demand dressed up as an observation. “There is no alternative” means: “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”

I’m a science-fiction writer – my job is to think of a dozen alternatives before breakfast."
- @pluralistic

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

#Tech #Technology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #StockMarket #Business #News #World #SciFi

the Guardian

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Darnell (TeleVerse)

@darnell@darnell.tv · 3 weeks ago

Two glowing butterlies 🦋 in front of the European Union 🇪🇺 & American 🇺🇸 flags (image created using AI)

So, unless you have been living under a digital rock or distracted by wannabe dictators demanding ownership of allied lands, you probably missed hearing about a new European social network called W (which was highlighted at the Davos […]

https://darnell.tv/2026/01/22/bluesky-w-social/

4 media

Rob Whittaker and 4 others boosted

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

"the #US trade rep had ... made it eye-wateringly clear that if they regulated #tech in a way that favoured their own people, industries & national interests, the US would bury them in #tariffs.

But ... If someone demands that you follow their orders or they’ll burn your house down, so you do, and they burn your house down anyway … well, you’re a bit of a fool if you keep on doing what they tell you, aren’t you?"
- @pluralistic

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/10/trump-beginning-of-end-enshittification-make-tech-good-again

#Technology #Politics #News #USA #World

Headline:
Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again

The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives

by Cory Doctorow — Headline: Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives by Cory Doctorow

the Guardian

Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again | Cory Doctorow

The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives, says science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

"the #US trade rep had ... made it eye-wateringly clear that if they regulated #tech in a way that favoured their own people, industries & national interests, the US would bury them in #tariffs.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/10/trump-beginning-of-end-enshittification-make-tech-good-again

#Technology #Politics #News #USA #World

the Guardian

Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again | Cory Doctorow

der.hans boosted

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

" #Republicans effectively rewrote the 2021 #infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants (intended to be spent on affordable, next-generation fiber) was stolen from local communities, and instead given to #ElonMusk & #JeffBezos...

It’s a coordinated hijacking of taxpayer money that will actually undermine affordable #internet access."
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/30/the-wall-street-journal-applauds-republicans-corrupt-illegal-theft-of-billions-in-taxpayer-dollars/

#GOP #Corruption #Politics #Tech #Technology #News #US #UnitedStates

Headline and text from article:
The Wall Street Journal Applauds Republicans’ Corrupt, Illegal Theft Of Billions In Taxpayer Dollars

Tue, Dec 30th 2025 05:27am - Karl Bode

I’ve written repeatedly about how Republicans effectively rewrote the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants (intended to be spent on affordable, next-generation fiber) was stolen from local communities, and instead given to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for expensive, congested satellite service.

I’ve also explained in detail why that’s a problem: These networks may be initially cheaper to deploy, but the networks lack the capacity to actually scale to meet demand. Data indicates they harm astronomy research and the ozone layer. They’re ultimately more expensive for consumers than fiber deployments, especially if those fiber deployments are by cooperatives or community owned.

In short, taxpayer money directed toward Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is also money directed away from higher-capacity, faster, locally-owned (and usually cheaper) fiber and wireless alternatives. And it’s money given to billionaires for technology they already had deployed or would have deployed anyway. It’s a coordinated hijacking of taxpayer money that will actually undermine affordable internet access.

Enter the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which aggressively lies about all of this all of this in a new, comically terrible editorial.... — Headline and text from article: The Wall Street Journal Applauds Republicans’ Corrupt, Illegal Theft Of Billions In Taxpayer Dollars Tue, Dec 30th 2025 05:27am - Karl Bode I’ve written repeatedly about how Republicans effectively rewrote the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants (intended to be spent on affordable, next-generation fiber) was stolen from local communities, and instead given to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for expensive, congested satellite service. I’ve also explained in detail why that’s a problem: These networks may be initially cheaper to deploy, but the networks lack the capacity to actually scale to meet demand. Data indicates they harm astronomy research and the ozone layer. They’re ultimately more expensive for consumers than fiber deployments, especially if those fiber deployments are by cooperatives or community owned. In short, taxpayer money directed toward Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is also money directed away from higher-capacity, faster, locally-owned (and usually cheaper) fiber and wireless alternatives. And it’s money given to billionaires for technology they already had deployed or would have deployed anyway. It’s a coordinated hijacking of taxpayer money that will actually undermine affordable internet access. Enter the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which aggressively lies about all of this all of this in a new, comically terrible editorial....

Techdirt

The Wall Street Journal Applauds Republicans’ Corrupt, Illegal Theft Of Billions In Taxpayer Dollars

I’ve written repeatedly about how Republicans effectively rewrote the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants …

Zhi Zhu 🕸️

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

#GOP #Corruption #Politics #Tech #Technology #News #US #UnitedStates

Techdirt

The Wall Street Journal Applauds Republicans’ Corrupt, Illegal Theft Of Billions In Taxpayer Dollars

I’ve written repeatedly about how Republicans effectively rewrote the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants …