In Taiwan’s AI-fueled chip boom, brokers control everything from paychecks to dorm beds, leaving workers feeling trapped and exploited.
Inside the world of extreme-privacy consultants, who, for the right fee, will make you and your personal information very hard to find.
...interest from this group has risen since the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year.
Privacy has become a privilege of the rich.
Abuse allows Meta and Yandex to attach persistent identifiers to detailed browsing histories.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115
Follow up: Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/meta_pauses_android_tracking_tech/
Startups are deploying employee tracking tools in low-regulation markets with help from Silicon Valley venture capital.
Technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers, increasingly using artificial intelligence, are getting entrenched in the developing world, according to a new report by Coworker.org, a labor rights nonprofit based in New York.
Audits of more than 150 startups and regional companies based in Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and India showed workplace surveillance is expanding in scale and sophistication, the researchers said.
"Homo economicus" is the hypothetical "perfectly economically rational" person that economic models often assume us all to be, despite the fact that we are demonstrably not perfectly rational.
we do live in the shadow of such modern demons: we call them "limited liability corporations." These are (potentially) immortal colony organisms that treat us fleshy humans as mere inconvenient gut flora. These artificial persons are not merely recognized as people under the law – they are given more rights than mere flesh-and-blood people. They seek to expand without limit, absorbing one another, covering the globe, acting in ways that are "economically rational" and utterly wicked. As Charlie Stross says, a corporation is a "slow AI"
Ted Chiang has proposed that when a corporate executive like Elon Musk claims to be terrified of AIs taking over, they're really talking about the repressed constant terror they feel because they are nominally in charge of a powerful artificial life-form (a corporation) that acts as though it has a mind of its own, in ways that are devastating to human beings
FTC’s “entire” monopoly case rests on decade-old emails, Meta argued.
Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook could buy Instagram to "neutralize a potential competitor"
relied heavily on teams of human workers—primarily located overseas—to manually process transactions in secret, mimicking what users believed was being done by automation
Example of "AI" hype when it's neither artificial nor intelligent.
misled investors by exploiting the promise and allure of AI technology to build a false narrative about innovation that never existed. This type of deception not only victimizes innocent investors...
Note that the crime is misleading investors, not anyone else, which is very telling. It's only a crime when you rip off other rich people.
Discussed here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1jygobw/ceo_of_ai_shopping_app_faces_40_years_for_using/
A research-backed AI scenario forecast.
We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.
We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like. It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.
So much hype in this one, coming from people who (likely) have very narrow domain knowledge and trying to make hype-y predictions for humanity. Such as a footnote that reduces human brains to equivalents of "compute" as X FLOPS, and comparing "AI" to multiples of human brains as a measure of "superintelligence"...
Amazon.com Inc. equipped some delivery vans in Europe with defibrillators to see if drivers crisscrossing residential areas could speed up aid to heart-attack victims.
So dystopian. Traumatising drivers even more with the added responsibility of responding to heart attacks; a future where Amazon Prime members get priority response from those drivers if they ever get a heart attack, further locking people in; or more public health functions being relegated to Amazon and its ilk...
Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43673921
As OpenAI and Meta introduce LLM-driven searchbots, I'd like to once again remind people that neither LLMs nor chatbots are good technology for information access.
Linked talk - ChatGP-Why: When, if ever, is synthetic text safe, appropriate, and desirable?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpE40jwMilU
Laws included in trade deals protect US companies’ rent extraction schemes and stop us from fixing or improving our own devices — from phones and tractors to insulin pumps. Repealing them will save billions and hit Trump’s donor class.
Repealing anticircumvention laws would allow the world’s small tech companies to make — and export — tools that “jailbreak” tractors, printers, insulin pumps, cars, consoles, and phones. We could end the perverse system in which a euro, dollar, or peso spent on a locally made app goes on a round trip through Cupertino, California, and comes back 30 percent lighter.
Domestic firms could export jailbreaking tools for printers to support third-party ink cartridge sellers — breaking the grip of the printer-ink cartel, which has driven prices higher than $10,000 a gallon, making ink the most expensive fluid a civilian can buy without a permit.
Great quote about the non-scarcity of ideas. Comparable to Thomas Jefferson's quote about candles.
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
Boarding passes and check-in could be scrapped in air travel shake-up | Air transport | The Guardian
Facial recognition and a ‘journey pass’ stored on passengers’ phones are part of UN-backed plans to digitise air transport
Privacy nightmare, and what about people who don't have smartphones? And facial recognition seemingly with little to no consideration for security and privacy.
About two dozen examples of monopolies in different sectors.
The Open Markets Institute uses journalism to promote greater awareness of the political and economic dangers of monopolization.
In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians?
https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf
The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement.
...MEPs, led by Birgit Sippel from the S&D and Markéta Gregorová from the Greens, single out Facebook owner Meta for its not-so-open "open source AI."
"Meta prohibits the use of its Llama models for the purpose of training other AI systems, and forces anyone who develops a highly successful AI system based on Llama to negotiate a special licence with them," reads the letter.
Meta also doesn't share the code for how it trains its models, but very publicly champions its "open" approach.
"Their AI is only free and open until a business wants to compete with them," the MEPs write. "We urge the Commission and the AI office to clarify that such systems cannot be considered Open Source for the purposes of the AI Act."
More details about Meta's Llama 4 release: https://www.404media.co/facebook-pushes-its-llama-4-ai-model-to-the-right-wants-to-present-both-sides/
...computer vision papers often refer to human beings as “objects,” a convention that both obfuscates how common surveillance of humans is in the field, and objectifies humans by definition.
“The studies presented in this paper ultimately reveal that the field of computer vision is not merely a neutral pursuit of knowledge; it is a foundational layer for a paradigm of surveillance...”
...platforms [like YouTube] need to understand that it is in their own interest to make it easy for visitors to become true fans using established sites like Patreon and the new ones that are being launched. Making it hard to do that in a misguided attempt to maximise the time that people spend on sites like YouTube and TikTok will ultimately harm the creators they depend on. Whether they are called true fans, core fans or superfans, they are vital for the future of creativity, not least in a world beyond copyright.
Exclusive: Algorithms allegedly being used to study data of thousands of people, in project critics say is ‘chilling and dystopian’
By Emily tl;dr: Every time you describe your work that involves statistical modeling as "AI" you are lending your power and credibility to Musk and DOGE.
Calling it "AI" is fast becoming yet another kind of anticipatory obedience.
If what you are doing is sensible and grounded science, there is undoubtedly a more precise way to describe it that bolsters rather than undermines the interest and value of your research. Statistical modeling of protein folding, weather patterns, hearing aid settings, etc really have nothing in common with the large language models that are the primary focus of "AI".