«This can be immensely empowering, and can improve public trust: it’s hard (and unwise) to give yourself over to a technology that won’t tell you how it works, particularly when its predefined settings allow only for meagre approaches to “user privacy”. As I ask my students, if you could develop an AI at your own home, and programme it to reflect your values and prioritise your safety, wouldn’t you trust it more? Well, the idea isn’t so outlandish – it only feels impossible because big tech firms want us to think it is.»
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/billionaire-big-tech-frugal-elon-musk-innovation
Tagged: Akkoma
@julian This is helpful. Thanks.
@julian You were right, it was a bot protection mechanism at Cloudflare. When I turned that off it started working. Oddly, the same system was turned on for the other domain which was working - meaning the LinkedIn bot was behaving "suspiciously" towards only one of my sites(!) Live and learn. Thanks again.
Open question about OpenGraph to any geek who feels like responding 😄
BlueSky and LinkedIn fail to fetch the featured image for posts on axbom.com (my English site) but does it with no issues for posts on axbom.se (my Swedish site).
From my perspective they are set up in exactly the same way (Ghost sites). My estimate is that this started happening more than a month ago and I have no idea why.
So, what could be the issue?
LinkedIn, plattformen för professionellt nätverkande, uppdaterade för några dagar sedan sin policy gällande hatiskt och kränkande innehåll. Specifikt har man tagit bort formuleringar som inneburit ett tydligt ställningstagande mot trakasserier riktade mot transpersoner.
Läs hela inlägget: https://axbom.se/linkedin-raderar-tydligt-stod-for-transpersoner/
This is of course very bad, but I also found it funny. AI evangelists are suddenly privacy-aware and repeating this as a security risk. And it is. But the idea that using ChatGPT itself hasn’t always been a security risk is ridiculous to me.
TLDR: If you’ve ever used the share function on a ChatGPT chat, that full chat can be found via Google, viewable for anyone in the world.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91376687/google-indexing-chatgpt-conversations
If people are wildly optimistic and non-critical about deploying something that is destructive, that should never be framed as a positive.
And continuing on this, if I am being critical of optimism in this scenario, that’s not ”slowing progress” or ”being backwards”. That’s being cognizant of bad outcomes and resisting them.
This all reminds me of when people are understandably confused by ”negative” results in healthcare, when they can be the most welcome of news.
Reading McComas’ article from 1996, and I have to say it’s very refreshing.
TEN MYTHS OF SCIENCE: REEXAMINING WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW...
Some examples:
* Myth 3: A General and Universal Scientific Method Exists
* Myth 5: Science and its Methods Provide Absolute Proof
* Myth 6: Science Is Procedural More Than Creative
* Myth 10: All Work in Science is Reviewed to Keep the Process Honest
https://homepages.bluffton.edu/~bergerd/TenMyths.html
Something to always be aware of: Many wheelchair users can stand and move around for brief periods of time. Not all wheelchair users are paralysed. Reasons for wheelchair use are numerous and varied.
Some wheelchair users choose not to stand in public because chances are they will be chastised and harassed if they do. With more awareness and understanding this risk can hopefully diminish over time.
For example, if a wheelchair user is able to retrieve their own wheelchair from the boot/trunk of their car, this does not mean they are ”faking”, and accusing them of this is ableist in itself.
”Ambulatory wheelchair user” is something you can search for to learn more, as many are sharing their experiences online, like Lauren:
https://www.rareyouthrevolution.com/post/ten-things-i-wish-you-knew-from-an-ambulatory-wheelchair-user
#accessibility #wheelchair #ambulatory
Läser om algblomning och hur farligt det är för hundar. Att det påverkar hundar så här snabbt och är så här allvarligt hade jag inte koll på. Superläskigt... 😳
https://firstvet.com/sv/artiklar/algfoergiftning-hos-hundar
@stephenpa Sounds awesome Stephen!!
@baralheia @liaizon I'd missed this note. Thank you for pinging me. I can easily update the chart a bit over the next week. I'll add it to the changelog on the associated url.
The chart was never meant to be comprehensive but I should certainly remove services that are no longer in the loop.
Take a break from all manners of hype. 😁
A recording of my closing keynote at #CampDigital, on the spectacular lies of maps, has now been published.
This page has all the slides, reference links, embedded videos and a link to the full talk.
https://axbom.com/cdmaps/
Gick igenom gamla skisser på paddan och hittade dessa som jag måste gjort för 6-8 år sedan(!) Handlar om bedömning och triagering av patienter i vården, och hur det utvecklas i och med digitaliseringen.
Security experts: Making all your data available to US spying is a significant risk.
UK government: Hold my beer.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czdv68gejm7o.amp
From the archives.
”As more and more decisions about human fates are made by algorithms, a lack of accountability and transparency will elevate heartless treatment driven by efficiency devoid of empathy. Humans become mere data shadows.”
”The main argument in defense of algorithms is that they eliminate the obstacle of human inefficiency. Often this sentiment fails to take into account the many benefits of human inefficiency, such as taking time to reflect, taking time to question and taking time to listen.”
https://axbom.com/killer-robots/
Once respectable news outlets can be made to believe pretty much anything, and spew out unfounded nonsense that betrays readers and makes them less informed.
This is the world now.
"There is a good chance the quote you have been using to make your strong, serious arguments is both false and wrongly attributed." – Mary Shelley
@troed So much technology these days seem to be just this!
I'm reading Catastrope Ethics by Travis Rieder. This passage drives home why we need to question how politicians talk so promisingly about negative-emissions tech that sucks CO2 from the air:
"The other category of negative-emissions technology avoids at least the land-use problem and is popular among the more techno-optimistic, as it does something that sounds borderline magical: it sucks CO, directly from the air and returns it to the ground. There's only one problem, which is that it doesn't yet exist in a scalable form.
What scientists have come up with so far are proof-of-concept models that show initial promise but that have very real drawbacks.
Consider, for instance, Orca, which is the largest carbon-capture plant in the world, located in Iceland just outside Reykjavik. This facility is instructive for many reasons. First, despite being the largest plant in the world, it will only capture about 4,000 tons of CO2 annually. And while that may sound like a large number, remember the scale that we're talking about: the all-time anthropogenic CO2 budget is 3.67 trillion tons. On average, humanity emits more than 1,250 tons of CO2 per second. What that means is that our largest plant to date, running around the clock for a year, will capture about 3 seconds' worth of humanity's emissions."
Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of human emissions. If institutions are the problem we could be letting them off the hook by focusing on individuals.
"[…] this sort of deflection of responsibility is likely what energy companies and other major corporations want: if we're pointing the finger at one another, we're not pointing it at them." (Catastrophe Ethics, p. 50)
Climate scientist Michael Mann in an interview about his book The New Climate War:
"Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies. Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries. In the 1970s, Coca Cola and the beverage industry did this very effectively to convince us we don't need regulations on waste disposal. Because of that we now have a global plastic crisis. The same tactics are evident in the gun lobby's motto, 'guns don't kill people, people kill people,' which is classic deflection.
For a UK example look at BP, which gave us the world's first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs."
The idea of individual responsibility can be weaponized to prevent real climate progress.