Wow, it's beautiful!
13.01.2026 00:25
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Wow, it's beautiful!
PSA: @readingsbooks.bsky.social is offering a 10% discount for recent books of authors who have chosen to withdraw from the 2026 Adelaide Writers' Week:
www.readings.com.au/collections/...
We got Meta’s “general global playbook” for defeating advertiser verification regulations, which the company knows would reduce scams. It includes making scam ads “not findable” for regulators searching Meta’s ad library through targeted scrubbing.
www.reuters.com/investigatio...
The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees
🧵
For many, the end of the year is an opportunity to catch up on reading or to purchase books as gifts. In 2025, a number of authors joined the Tech Policy Press podcast, providing fresh insights into how technology interacts with people, politics, and power. Check out the list:
Some of these redactions are almost like modern art
Bracket showing the 32 names in the Worst Person in Tech 2025
🚨 THE BATTLE BEGINS 🚨
Your favorite year-end contest is back. It’s time to choose who will be this year’s Worst Person In Tech for 2025!
Each day of this week new matchups will drop until we choose the winner on Friday.
🗳️ Cast your ballot: twsu.forms.app/worst-person...
Add to this that social media age checks in Australia are being outsourced to KWS, a US-based subsidiary of Epic Games -- created by startup SuperAwesome (youth-targeted ad strategies).
"We may share your information with our Epic Games family of companies" www.kidswebservices.com/en-US/partne...
My photo shows the front side (recto) of an ancient Egyptian administrative document written by the scribe Amunnakht in hieratic script (cursive writing of hieroglyphics). It is written in black ink on papyrus by the scribe Amunnakht. The papyrus is now a yellowy-brown colour and is worn in places. The document is known as the ‘Strike Papyrus’ and recounts that in November of Year 29 of the reign of Ramesses III, the royal tomb workers of Deir el-Medina stopped work for the first time and spent several days at the Theban necropolis in the temples of Tuthmosis III and Ramesses II. They demanded that the grain ratians for their work be distributed, and the authorities subsequently disbursed the grain rations. However, a few days later, the workers went on strike again, this time finding refuge in the temple of Seti I. Their refusal to retum to work stemmed fram the precarious working conditions, a situation they wanted to bring directly to the pharaoh. The last strike documented here was in January of the following year.
Labour strikes aren’t new!
The first recorded strike in history took place in Egypt some 3,200 years ago!
The ‘Strike Papyrus’ records that tomb workers of King Ramesses III downed tools over pay and conditions circa 1157 BC!
Museo Egizio, Turin 📷 by me
#Archaeology
Myanmar’s regime is hunting down those who oppose its upcoming election by using a law criminalising any criticism of the poll, detaining and handing long jail sentences to a wide array of people, from film stars to ordinary citizens.
"Australia passes a shameful milestone: over one million children now living in poverty" #ThePoint
thepoint.com.au/news/251212-...
New! We worked with the Public Interest Research Group to test a bunch of LLM-driven toys ahead of the Christmas. That sexual talking teddy bear wasn't a one-off; it turns out disturbing behavior is deeply built into these toys across the board.
Australia will not get a permanent advisory body on artificial intelligence as promised, with the federal government abandoning the plan despite growing calls for stronger AI oversight www.innovationaus.com/govt-abandon...
The decline of democracy in the US means you can’t visit the US if you commented on the decline of democracy in the US
Mike Benz, the pathological paranoiac who never did find the 22 million tweets Stanford supposedly censored, or explain how the CIA ran me as an asset, is now “investigating” USAID — the agency he boasts about being instrumental in killing — from the inside.
www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
Absolutely buzzing over this new video of a rarely seen giant squid
Sydney Water has estimated up to 250 megalitres a day will be needed to service datacentres planned by 2035, more than Canberra's entire drinking water.
Second feature with @petrastock.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Australia is paying $750m to a US prison company and $2.5bn in a secret deal to Nauru, yet the hundred or so asylum seekers in Nauru are starving.
It’s called corruption, and someone in authority should look into it.
“This award belongs to the people of Myanmar.”
At the Right Livelihood Award Presentation, 2019 Laureate @thunberggreta.bsky.social read fellow Laureate @justiceformyanmar.org’s speech, dedicating the Award to youth, survivors and communities still resisting the junta.
We stand with them.
The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.
Holy shit.
Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa.
www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...
Cover of ASPI’s “The Party’s AI”. A lone man stands on a road where tanks should be, but they’ve been erased, mirroring how Chinese LLMs censor sensitive images. For more, see Chapter 1.
Our new ASPI report 'The Party’s AI' is out now. It shows how China’s LLMs, vision models and “AI+” governance architecture are hard-coding censorship and control into the future of AI.
www.aspi.org.au/repo...
And congrats to Michael Koziol for writing this advert for Woodside
This seems like a version of hell
‼️ Brilliant, brilliant work by my @qutdmrc.bsky.social colleagues @kimosman.bsky.social, Lynrose Genon, and @dezuanni.bsky.social. Asking _actual_ young people about the #SocialMediaBan, rather than their ignorant parents or ill-advised politicians ? Who knew ! 🔥
The benefits of #GenAI for media should not be ignored. Framing it as a fix for society’s information challenges? Even worse.
Our Senior Technical Advisor on why these technologies disrupt global & local information ecosystems ⬇️
🔗 bit.ly/4inZd90
#ArtificialIntelligence #Journalism #TechForGood
good summary of where AI is at, lol
This is your periodic reminder that Google continues to provide single-sign on services to several of the most popular AI nudifiers.
Clothoff has been used to create non consensual deepfake nudes in schools around the world.
What a great headline
Which means within the last month Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines have all had devastating flooding of varying degrees. Climate change an obvious, enormous factor here but so is a total lack of implementation of environmental regulations. Which STINKS!
Premium: This is The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA: A 14k word guide to how NVIDIA makes its money, how millions of Blackwell GPUs have been sold with nowhere for them to be installed, and how NVIDIA's future relies on companies raising hundreds of billions in debt.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...
