Let me tell you about the most wasteful US federal government spending I know about. It's a humdinger. You and everyone you know are mired in it for weeks, or perhaps months, every year. It will cost you, personally, thousands of dollars over your lifetime. I'm talking about filing your taxes. -- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

Pluralistic: Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit (11 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

1/

While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:

The American Prospect

Maureen Tkacik, Author at The American Prospect

- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

Pluralistic: “The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets” (07 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

1/

The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto - trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:

Pluralistic: The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble (09 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

1/

911 words (30817 total) on Enshittification (a nonfiction book about platform decay) #DailyWords Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

Let's take a sec here and notice something *genuinely great* happening in the US government: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's stunning, unbroken streak of *major*, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption, *with* the backing of the Supreme Court (yes, *that* Supreme Court), and which is only speeding up! 1/

I can't get a definitive answer on whether TV static (see attached) constitutes a strobe effect that could endanger people with photosensitive epilepsy. Anyone know? PEAT (the only tool that measures this, seemingly?!) is Windows-only and won't run under WINE.

Even Google admits - grudgingly - that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

Google for Developers

What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developers

1/

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

AI bots hallucinate software packages and devs download them

Simply look out for libraries imagined by ML and make them real, with actual malicious code. No wait, don't do that

1/

Moneybags on the moon #graffiti #nyc #sciencefiction #monopoly

Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies; and more! Archived at:

Pluralistic: Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies (12 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

#Pluralistic 1/