Austin Smith

Dopest thing I’ve ever heard

Amazon Tells Driver to Keep Delivering Packages Amid Raging Wildfire Amazon is accused of controlling workers through a surveillance dragnet, while skirting responsibility for their wellbeing.

“Speaking to Futurism, DAIR director of research Alex Hanna said Amazon’s tech panopticon is ‘central to keeping control” over its workers.’”

I thought this was metaphorical hyperbole but, alas, no. The Department of Energy is selling off more than 40,000 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the Cold War arsenal to nuclear reactor startups. All of which I’m sure will be thoroughly vetted and monitored by…their former board member.

Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House One man's robot vacuum was constantly communicating with its manufacturer, sending a detailed 3D map of his house halfway across the world.

Roomba should have been a warning.

Ring’s partnership with Flock raises privacy alarms | Biometric Update Amazon’s subsidiary Ring is joining forces with Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based maker of automated license-plate readers and networked surveillance cameras.

“…studies show disproportionate targeting when algorithms flag ambiguous matches. Cross-jurisdictional data-sharing also raises fears that local data could be repurposed for abortion or immigration enforcement, even in sanctuary or privacy-protected states.”

Flock’s Gunshot Detection Microphones Will Start Listening for Human Voices Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product ...

What could go wrong.

bangs. "They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," Watson said. "That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'f*** them kids.'" Watson said trucks and military-style vans were used to separate parents from their children. Other neighbors said agents destroyed property to get in the building. "They had a big, 15-inch chainsaw with round blade on it, cutting this fence down," said witness Darrell Ballard. "We're under siege. We're being invaded by our own military."

“Fuck them kids.”

That’s literally what an ICE agent said when ICE, the FBI et al. raided an apartment in Chicago, including with a Blackhawk helicopter, separated children from their parents, and zip-tied them to each other.

abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chi...

Anduril and Palantir battlefield communication system has deep flaws, Army memo says WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The much-needed modernization of the U.S. Army's battlefield communications network being undertaken by Anduril, Palantir and others is rife with "fundamental security" problems ...

“‘We cannot control who sees what, we cannot see what users are doing, and we cannot verify that the software itself is secure,’ the memo says.”

Ezra Klein: There's a Rick & Morty quote I really like.

Ezra Klein: It goes like this, "Why would a pop-tart want to live inside a toaster? That would be like the scariest place for them to live."

Ta-Nehisi Coates not saying anything

Ezra Klein: Because in the episode they go to a neighborhood where everyone is a pop-tart and they live in toaster-houses.

AI medical tools downplay symptoms in women and ethnic minorities Large language models reflect biases that can lead to inferior healthcare advice to female, Black and Asian patients

The findings “suggest that medical AI tools powered by LLMs have a tendency to not reflect the severity of symptoms among female patients, while also displaying less ‘empathy’ towards Black and Asian ones.”

Don't worry guys, I have a genius plan to stop political violence.

Step 1: Make elite consensus be that the mild peaceful disapproval be treated as equivalent to violence.

Step 2: Have the government openly violate the law in a manner which proves it nonbinding.

Step 3: Crash the economy.

Reframing Our Relationship to Technology Confronting Data Centers, Deep-Sea Cables, and Colonial Legacies in the South Pacific The Cloud is Dead: A Series on Living with Legacies of Resource Extraction

"Layered both literally and figuratively on top of the future pathway of the Google internet infrastructure, the sugarcane railway tracks evoke the longevity of colonial infrastructures as well as the ideologies underlying them." – @emmaquilty.bsky.social datasociety.net/points/confr...

A Manhattan Project to create exits for venture capital

oh look at this motherfucker who think he’s too good to be interpolated by state authority

Dave Portnoy tweet saying ‘absolutely disgusting and disturbing video from Charlie Kirk shooting today. Hoping for the best for him and his family. Anybody who is happy about this is a disgusting human.’

Pop Crave Tweet: ‘Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy says he hopes a missile hits Greta Thunberg’s boat as she sails away with aid: “I hope they hit a f*cking, like, a missile on her boat. Knock that boat down. Greta or whatever her name is”

This explains it better than I can

AI Darwin Awards Show AI’s Biggest Problem Is Human The AI Darwin Awards is a list of some of the worst tech failures of the year and it’s only going to get bigger.

The AI Darwin Awards are here to catalog the damage that happens when humanity’s hubris meets AI’s incompetence. The simple website contains a list of the dumbest AI disasters from the past year and calls for readers to nominate more.

🔗 www.404media.co/ai-darwin-aw...

US tech companies enabled the surveillance and detention of hundreds of thousands in China U.S. technology firms such as IBM, Dell and Cisco largely designed and built China’s surveillance state, an AP investigation finds. The tech companies deny wrongdoing.

“Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers like the Yangs are trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus.”

“Most of this technology” came from US companies.

bsky.app/profile/bft....

too little attention being paid to the fact battery plants like these are supposed to be a picture of a new Industrial Revolution for electric vehicles & this facility was primed to benefit from the first climate law before it was gutted

Your electricity bill is going up because data centers are raising demand, not because your utility started scaling out some renewables. Pass it on.

Woman wrongly accused of carjacking loses lawsuit against Detroit police who used facial tech A judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Detroit police in the wrongful arrest of a pregnant woman who was charged with carjacking partly because of facial recognition technology.

The purpose of a system…

AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America With more than 80,000 AI-powered cameras across the U.S., Flock Safety has become one of cops’ go-to surveillance tools. Now CEO Garrett Langley has both police tech giant Axon and Chinese drone maker...

Local man embraces fascism.

New one. Super hyped

Finally realized what the FA/HOCKEY editing style reminds me of and it’s the Zapruder film.

Flock Wants to Partner With Consumer Dashcam Company That Takes ‘Trillions of Images’ a Month That dashcam in your car could soon integrate with Flock, the surveillance company providing license plate data to DHS and local police.

Flock seeks to add data from private car dashcams to its massive surveillance network. At minimum it seems like data from random cars driving around is going to be added to their system

www.404media.co/flock-wants-...

The IRA was surprisingly effective at spurring investment in green energy. Where it failed was making it *politically* sustainable by delivering immediate tangible benefits to the public. In that sense, the Green New Deal was, in retrospect, the more prudent and realistic approach. on.ft.com/4n4Ayra

The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good