Technology

[...]How have the copywriters been faring, in a world awash in cheap AI text generators and wracked with AI adoption mania in executive circles? As always, we turn to the workers themselves. And once again, the stories they have to tell are unhappy ones. These are accounts of gutted departments, dried up work, lost jobs, and closed businesses. I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work, and others, who, to their chagrin, have been forced to use AI themselves.

Readers of this series will recognize some recurring themes: The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.

So, I’m using Reeder Classic on iPhone. However, I can’t use it on my PC and it seems the developer has fully abandoned the Classic version and barely updates his newest ReederPlus app (which misses a lot of features I like).

So I’m searching for a new RSS. I was looking on InoReader but it’s a bit expensive (either €80/yearly or €8,99/monthly) and it seems that many old users are not fond of InoReader’s decision making.

What are you using?

The basic insight of sewer socialism is bringing people into your politics by improving their lives in obvious ways. “You win someone’s trust through an outcome” is how Mamdani puts it. The sewer socialists of Milwaukee made the case that municipal ownership of systems like sanitation, water, and power could deliver services more efficiently and more equitably than private ownership. They solved practical problems for their constituents while constructing working examples of a postcapitalist political economy in miniature.

The same method can be applied to the internet. Call it “digital sewer socialism.” Socialist elected officials in New York, Seattle, and beyond can craft policy interventions that increase the quality of life for residents by addressing the difficulties that arise in their relationship with technology. These interventions can be carried out in such a way that, by modeling socialist principles, they win wider support for socialist ideas.

So I guess the solution to this is to backup your phone to someplace safe, wipe it, and then restore it when you get to your destination... WTF!

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/t1EHY

Just when I thought I couldn't have a lower opinion of flock.

What does it take to become the most successful AI surveillance company in 2025? If you’re anything like Flock, the startup selling automatic license plate readers and facial recognition tech to cops, you don’t really need much AI at all — just an army of sweatshop workers in the global south.

Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of US communities, has been outsourcing its AI to gig workers located in the Philippines.

After accessing a cache of exposed data, 404 found documents related to annotating Flock footage, a process sometimes called “AI training.” Workers were tasked with jobs include categorizing vehicles by color, make, and model, transcribing license plates, and labeling various audio clips from car wrecks.

In US towns and cities, Flock cameras maintained by local businesses and municipal agencies form centralized surveillance networks for local police. They constantly scan for car license plates, as well as pedestrians, who are categorized based on their clothing, and possibly by factors like gender and race.

http://archive.today/VtX5G

Semi-related: https://deflock.me/

EDIT: THIS WAS REFUTED. MY BAD. Thanks Gamma! https://beehaw.org/comment/5365674

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/

Looks like there may be prosecution: http://archive.today/2EWwB

End edit

This was just too hilarious not to post.

These guys are really on their resistance game, already stealing jobs from AI

http://archive.today/4O786

On April 7, Muhammad Yunus, chief adviser of Bangladesh, sent Trump an urgent letter. He listed all the ways that his country was trying to comply with Trump’s agenda and asked him to delay tariffs. The note included a curious addition: “We have executed the necessary steps to launch Starlink in Bangladesh.”

Since Starlink launched its first satellites in 2019, the internet provider owned by billionaire Elon Musk has attempted to expand into markets around the world, often facing regulatory red tape in doing so. But with Musk playing a high-profile role in Trump’s White House from January through May, Yunus and other leaders seemed to recognize that accommodating Starlink could be one means of appeasing the new administration.

The same day Yunus sent his letter, Starlink applied for a license with the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission. Three weeks after Yunus’ letter to Trump, the BTRC approved Starlink’s application. The service launched in Bangladesh the following month.

Bangladesh became the latest country around the world to expedite its regulatory approval process for satellite internet providers while Musk took part in Trump’s second administration. During the first five months of the year — as Musk assumed his lead role in the Department of Government Efficiency — Starlink announced it had become available in at least 13 countries, while its applications were approved in two more. In the six months since Musk broke ties with the administration, Starlink announced its entry into an additional 13 countries, totalling at least 26 countries in 2025.

In some cases, Starlink found quick success in countries it sought to enter for the first time. In others, Starlink’s applications had stalled for years until they were suddenly greenlit.

With OpenAI’s memory upgrade, ChatGPT can recall everything you’ve ever shared with it, indefinitely. Similarly, Google has opened the context window with “Infini-attention,” letting large language models (LLMs) reference infinite inputs with zero memory loss. And in consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, this means persistent, personalized memory across conversations, unless you manually intervene.

The sales pitch is seductively simple: less friction, more relevance. Conversations that feel like continuity: “Systems that get to know you over your life,” as Sam Altman writes on X. Technology, finally, that meets you where you are.

In the age of hyper-personalization — of the TikTok For You page, Spotify Wrapped, and Netflix Your Next Watch — a conversational AI product that remembers everything about you feels perfectly, perhaps dangerously, natural.

Forgetting, then, begins to look like a flaw. A failure to retain. A bug in the code. Especially in our own lives, we treat memory loss as a tragedy, clinging to photo albums and cloud backups to preserve what time tries to erase.

But what if human forgetting is not a bug, but a feature? And what happens when we build machines that don’t forget, but are now helping shape the human minds that do?

Well, that's just really shitty.

I just noticed multiple websites show this error. This isn't just me, right?

Bonus video of Swiss-German in the wild included. If you think German sounds harsh, you'll love the Zuerich dialect. At least it's all done in sing-song fashion, as is called for.

A real-world trial by scientists in Switzerland has demonstrated that wireless EV charging can achieve up to 90 percent efficiency compared with conventional cable-based systems, while offering far greater convenience.

Supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy and the cantons of Zurich and Aargau, the project, called INLADE, was carried out by researchers from Empa in collaboration with the electric utility Eniwa AG.

Through this first-of-its-kind initiative, the team tested wireless inductive charging under real-life conditions in Switzerland. They are certain that what has long been routine for phones and electric toothbrushes could soon become a reality for EVs.

“The aim was to test the existing technology in everyday use, clarify technical and regulatory issues and demonstrate its potential for the energy transition,” Mathias Huber, from Empa’s Chemical Energy Carriers and Vehicle Systems lab, said.