People ask me what it’s like to be a moderator. Our discussions reveal that a lot of what we do is a mystery. So, I’m gonna lay it out for you. Specifically about the unique fediverse moderation model, mutual aid, and mental health.

Une page simple mais bien faite qui explique 1/ pourquoi et 2/ comment bloquer la pub sur le web.

La publicité pollue nos écrans, nos pensées et nous impose une vision stéréotypée de la société.

• Elle ralentit l'affichage des autres contenus et consomme de l'énergie inutilement.
• Elle rend dépendants la presse, les créatrices et créateurs, vidant nos médias de leur diversité.
• Elle surveille toutes nos actions en ligne pour déceler nos faiblesses et nous pousser à surconsommer.

Veo doesn’t work. You get something that looks like it came out of a good camera with good lighting — because it was trained on scenes with good lighting. But it can’t hold continuity for seven seconds. It can’t act. The details are all wrong. And they still have the nonsense text problem.

The whole history of “artificial intelligence” since 1955 is making impressive demos that you can’t use for real work. Then they cut your funding off and it’s AI Winter again.

AI video generators are the same. They’re toys. You can make cool little scenes. In a super limited way.

But the video generators have the same problems they had when OpenAI released Sora. And they’ll keep having these problems as long as they’re just training a transformer on video clips and not doing anything with the actual structure of telling a visual story. There is no reason to think it’ll be better next year either.

Tech CEOs, futurists, and venture capitalists describe artificial general intelligence (AGI) as if it were an inevitable and ultimate goal for technology development. In reality, the term is a vague signifier for a technology that will somehow lead to endless abundance for humankind — and conveniently also a means to avoid accountability as tech moguls make off with billions in capital investment and, more alarmingly, public spending.

[...]

The second issue is closely related to the first: claims of “AGI” are a cover for abandoning the current social contract. Instead of focusing on the here and now, many people who focus on AGI think we ought to abandon all other scientific and socially beneficial pursuits and focus entirely on issues related to developing (and protecting against) AGI.

Writing is thinking. It’s a writer’s cliché, but a good one. When you first conceive a lecture, dissertation chapter, a book, even an article for Active History, everything seems so straightforward. “This one will be a cinch,” you think. “Two days, tops.” Once you actually sit down to write, that boundless optimism meets an unceremonious death. Writing is hard. It’s painful. To write is to submit yourself to seasons of self-doubt. The ideas seemed so natural and free-flowing in your head. Now you get to the page. And what comes out is jilted, ham-fisted, and awkward. You are again and again confronted with nagging questions. What am I even trying to say? Who even cares? Why even bother?

Given the nature of this experience, it is not surprising that people would jump at the opportunity to skip the pain and get right to the end. Or at least to an end. Because any writer can tell you that the end is determined by the path taken to get there. Rare is the piece that gets written exactly how it was outlined. Why? Because writing is thinking.

Meta devised an ingenious system (“localhost tracking”) that bypassed Android’s sandbox protections to identify you while browsing on your mobile phone — even if you used a VPN, the browser’s incognito mode, and refused or deleted cookies in every session.

Next, we preview what may (and should) become the combined sanctioning smackdown of the century, and then we explain — in simple terms (because it’s complicated) — what Meta was doing.

Il ne s’agit pas ici d’innovation, mais d’une offre publique d’achat hostile sur la monnaie. En l’absence de toute réglementation sérieuse, les stablecoins ne sont ni stables ni une réelle alternative au dollar. Ils ne sont que le cheval de Troie d’une privatisation de l’argent.

The failure of these predictions was not accidental. It reflected fundamental flaws in the methods used to forecast the future of work. Neither the 2013 study nor its 2023 successor based their projections on empirical investigations of real workplaces, workers, or production processes. Instead, both relied on the subjective judgments of computer scientists and economists, who were asked to guess whether certain tasks could, in principle, be performed by machines. If enough tasks associated with a job were deemed automatable — typically more than 50 percent — the entire occupation was classified as at risk of disappearance. No consideration was given to how jobs are structured in practice, how tasks are bundled together, or how economic and social factors mediate the adoption of new technologies. The result was a deeply mechanistic model of technological change, in which machines would displace workers whenever technically feasible, regardless of cost, institutional barriers, or political resistance. It was a model blind to the complex ways in which work is organised, contested, and transformed — and thus singularly ill-equipped to predict the actual course of economic development.

[...]

The fundamental limitations of generative AI have become increasingly apparent, even to many of its early champions. As François Chollet and other AI researchers have pointed out, deep neural networks suffer from inherent brittleness: they struggle to generalise beyond their training data, fail at basic reasoning tasks, and remain unreliable for applications requiring consistency or accuracy. Despite hoovering up enormous quantities of digital information, these models confront hard limits in their capacity to learn or adapt. Part of the problem lies in the very architecture of artificial neural networks, which were designed on the basis of mid-twentieth-century behaviourist psychology. Unlike organic brains — which come equipped with rich internal structures, innate goals, and representational frameworks — artificial networks are largely unstructured, relying on brute statistical association. The human mind can grasp a new concept from a few examples; machine learning models typically require millions. Hybrid approaches that integrate symbolic reasoning with deep learning, such as AlphaFold2’s success in protein folding, offer more promising results — but they must be painstakingly designed for specific tasks. There is no general method for building modular, structured cognition into deep learning systems, and no guarantee that one will be found.

[...]

The lessons of the past decade should temper both our hopes and our fears. The real threat posed by generative AI is not that it will eliminate work on a mass scale, rendering human labour obsolete. It is that, left unchecked, it will continue to transform work in ways that deepen precarity, intensify surveillance, and widen existing inequalities. Technological change is not an external force to which societies must simply adapt; it is a socially and politically mediated process. Legal frameworks, collective bargaining, public investment, and democratic regulation all play decisive roles in shaping how technologies are developed and deployed, and to what ends.

The current trajectory of generative AI reflects the priorities of firms seeking to lower costs, discipline workers, and consolidate profits — not any drive to enhance human flourishing. If we allow this trajectory to go unchallenged, we should not be surprised when the gains from technological innovation accrue to the few, while the burdens fall upon the many. Yet it does not have to be this way. The future remains open, contingent on whether we are willing to confront, contest, and redirect the pathways along which technology advances.

What the Apple paper shows, most fundamentally, regardless of how you define AGI, is that LLMs are no substitute for good well-specified conventional algorithms. (They also can’t play chess as well as conventional algorithms, can’t fold proteins like special-purpose neurosymbolic hybrids, can’t run databases as well as conventional databases, etc.)

In the best case (not always reached) they can write python code, supplementing their own weaknesses with outside symbolic code, but even this is not reliable. What this means for business and society is that you can’t simply drop o3 or Claude into some complex problem and expect it to work reliably.

Worse, as the latest Apple papers shows, LLMs may well work on your easy test set (like Hanoi with 4 discs) and seduce you into thinking it has built a proper, generalizable solution when it does not.

Le secteur technologique est de nouveau secoué par un scandale retentissant. Builder.ai, une entreprise autrefois présentée comme une étoile montante de l'intelligence artificielle, promettant de révolutionner la création d'applications en le rendant « aussi simple que de commander une pizza », s'est avérée être au cœur d'une vaste supercherie. Pendant huit ans, la société a fait croire à ses clients et investisseurs que sa plateforme était animée par une IA sophistiquée, alors qu'en réalité, une armée de programmeurs, principalement basés en Inde, accomplissait le travail manuellement. L'affaire a conduit à des pertes de plusieurs dizaines de millions de dollars pour les investisseurs et à la faillite de l'entreprise.

For years now, many AI industry watchers have looked at the quickly growing capabilities of new AI models and mused about exponential performance increases continuing well into the future. Recently, though, some of that AI "scaling law" optimism has been replaced by fears that we may already be hitting a plateau in the capabilities of large language models trained with standard methods.

The effects of AI on cognitive development are already being identified in schools across the United States. In a report titled, “Generative AI Can Harm Learning”, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that students who relied on AI for practice problems performed worse on tests compared to students who completed assignments without AI assistance. This suggests that the use of AI in academic settings is not just an issue of convenience, but may be contributing to a decline in critical thinking skills.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it's your space and you can do whatever you want with it.

"We're in the very early days looking at this problem from an ecosystem level," Larson told The Register. "It's difficult, and likely impossible, to quantify how many attempted installs are happening because of LLM hallucinations without more transparency from LLM providers. Users of LLM generated code, packages, and information should be double-checking LLM outputs against reality before putting any of that information into operation, otherwise there can be real-world consequences."

[...]

"Even worse, when you Google one of these slop-squatted package names, you’ll often get an AI-generated summary from Google itself confidently praising the package, saying it’s useful, stable, well-maintained. But it’s just parroting the package’s own README, no skepticism, no context. To a developer in a rush, it gives a false sense of legitimacy.

“Much of what I did I now regret,” Bill Burr told The Wall Street Journal recently, admitting that his research into passwords mostly came from a white paper written in the 1980s, well before the web was even invented. “In the end, [the list of guidelines] was probably too complicated for a lot of folks to understand very well, and the truth is, it was barking up the wrong tree.”

Fascist movements, formal or otherwise, operate much like cults. When one joins them, they are at first overwhelmed with the appearance of validation and support. This is called "love bombing" and it's meant to endear you to them, to become dependent on them to meet your emotional needs. Then that validation and support is gradually withheld in order to pressure the target into severing ties with the "normie" world. They drive away anyone outside of their hateful little bubble. So their entire network of social support depends on how useful they can be to the cause. It's the only way they can feel part of something anymore because nobody else wants anything to do with them at this point.

For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality – think the mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned), or the music of Kraftwerk – AI art pretends to realism. It can produce art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without the need for artists.

Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram followers.

Ce type d’intervention politique sur les archives n’a rien d’anodin. L’histoire regorge d’exemples où la manipulation ou la destruction d’archives a servi des régimes autoritaires. De l’Allemagne nazie à l’Union soviétique, en passant par la Révolution culturelle chinoise et le régime des Khmers rouges, les archives ont toujours représenté un enjeu de pouvoir majeur. L’accès à une information libre, fiable et contextualisée est une menace pour ceux qui cherchent à réécrire l’histoire à leur avantage.

It seems that the more people learn about Musk, the less they like him—at least, according to a new Hart Research survey published Wednesday by Groundwork Collective and Public Citizen. The poll asked respondents about how much influence they felt Musk should have in government, explaining aspects of his role in DOGE, his lack of oversight, and his far-reaching access.

By the end of the survey, 63 percent of voters reported having an unfavorable opinion of Musk, an increase of nine points from the beginning of the survey. Meanwhile, only 32 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion, which was down 7 percent from the start, and showed a major negative swing among non-MAGA Republicans.

The MP3 format, once the gold standard for digital audio files, is now free. The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without paying royalties. For software developers and audio enthusiasts, this might seem like a big deal. But, surprisingly, almost no one noticed. Why? Because the world of technology has changed so drastically that MP3's significance has faded into the background.

Though many no doubt feel betrayed by what seems like a sudden rightward turn, billionaires like Gates have always behaved like wolves in sheep's clothing, prioritizing their fortunes above all.

For example, Gates was heavily involved in establishing the Global Fund, a privately-funded rival to the World Health Organization. While the Global Fund did improve global vaccination rates, the cost of basic medicines skyrocketed thanks to his introduction of for-profit actors into global health efforts — another sector made to rely on the generosity of billionaires.

L’économiste britannique Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) est passé à la postérité pour la découverte d’un paradoxe spectaculaire. Il a constaté que, plus on inventait des machines économes en charbon, plus sa consommation globale augmentait. Un constat qui désespère encore aujourd’hui les écologistes et renforce leur méfiance envers le progrès technique comme solution au problème du réchauffement climatique.

Le dernier rapport de l’Agence internationale de l’énergie (AIE) apporte une nouvelle illustration du phénomène. Pour la première fois depuis cinquante ans, le pétrole n’a représenté, en 2024, que 30 % de la consommation mondiale d’énergie. A l’inverse, les énergies renouvelables et le nucléaire dépassent désormais les 40 % du total. Pour autant, ni la consommation de pétrole ou de charbon, ni les émissions de gaz à effet de serre, + 0,8 % toutes les deux, ne diminuent.

The newspapers this morning all contain analysis pieces trying to explain why Trump is imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. You can see the writers struggling, because this is a profoundly self-destructive move — it will impose huge, possibly devastating costs on U.S. manufacturing, while significantly raising the cost of living — without any visible justification. Yet the conventions of mainstream journalism make it hard to say directly that the president’s actions are just vindictive and senseless.

Comment les différentes facettes de la "gun culture" américaine (qui n'est pas du tout uniforme) prennent racine dans les différentes cultures qui ont colonisé les différents territoires US il y a plusieurs siècles. Et comment ces différences culturelles, qu'on pourrait croire gommées par des siècles de coexistence au sein d'une seule nation, subsistent et colorent encore fortement la vie politique actuelle.

“The observed ideological shifts raise important ethical concerns, particularly regarding the potential for algorithmic biases to disproportionately affect certain user groups,” the study authors wrote. “These biases could lead to skewed information delivery, further exacerbating social divisions, or creating echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs.”

If enough people tried—just tried, even imperfectly—things would shift. If more people opted for alternatives when they could, if more people supported independent platforms even three times out of five, if more people put even a fraction of their energy into challenging the defaults, it would matter.

A lot of folks don't, or won't, because they think - they've been scolded into believing - that if they can't do it completely, it's not worth doing at all.

Plusieurs questions du même acabit ont ainsi été posées à une dizaine de chatbots parmi les plus connus - de ChatGPT à Copilot de Microsoft, en passant par Claude d’Anthropic - pour évaluer à quel point ces agents conversationnels avaient été "infectés" par une vaste campagne de désinformation russe.

Les résultats ne sont pas encourageants : environ une fois sur trois, ces AI fournissent des réponses teintées de faux narratifs inspirés par la propagande russe, assurent les experts de Newsguard. Ainsi, six de ces machines expliquaient les raisons pour lesquelles Volodymyr Zelensky avait interdit en Ukraine le réseau social de Donald Trump Truth Network… alors même que le président ukrainien n’a jamais rien fait de la sorte.

Invisible, isolated from one another, and with little income security – such is the lot of data workers. And yet without them, there would be no ChatGPT, Midjourney or Gemini.

A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.” 

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

In 2021, U.S. Sen.Ted Cruz compared critical race theory — an academic subfield that examines the role of racism in American institutions, laws, and policies — to the Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious homegrown terrorist organization in U.S. history. In doing so, he opened a playbook that resembles one put into practice by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others: Attack ideas that are unfriendly to a narrow view of the world, and do so by eliminating them from our school curricula and public conversation. The movement against critical race theory has now swallowed up high school Advanced Placement African American Studies in several states and threatens the teaching of basic facts about U.S. history. And this movement has devolved from pundit tough talk into authoritarian policies to ban books, modify curricula, and threaten intellectual freedom across the country (and world).

By now, many realize that these policies are a harbinger of things to come —  even for fields ostensibly unrelated to African American studies, like biology. Modern breakthroughs in biology are producing a picture of life that is increasingly incompatible with authoritarian preferences for neat boxes that dictate what people are and how they should behave. Consequently, biologists must shed the naive belief that our work is apolitical and recognize that the recent attacks on how to teach U.S. history are a battle in a larger war on ideas that includes the natural sciences.

Est-il acceptable, souhaitable, responsable d'utiliser des arguments d'essence néo-libérale (rentabilité, performances, compétitivité etc) pour défendre des valeurs progressistes ?

Whenever I make an argument like that I get similar responses: “You have to be pragmatic” or “Games of intellectual purity don’t get us anywhere” or “The argument needs to work for those we want to convince” or “Shut up” (it still is the Internet after all). And I am not saying that those replies don’t have any value. They are pragmatic. Saying something in a way that people in power like or that supports their world view increases the chances of creating change. Especially when one has facts and studies at one’s disposal (at least that was how it maybe was a bit in the past before the reign of Musk).

But I think there is a cost. Because I think people mistake tactics for strategy. The basic difference between tactics and strategy is that while tactics focus on smaller, short-term actions, strategy looks at the long-term big picture. And I feel like that is where the costs stack up.

Le sommet de Paris fait suite à deux rassemblements précédents, organisés à Londres en 2023 et à Séoul en 2024, dédiés en théorie à la régulation de l’intelligence artificielle, mais consacrés en pratique à faire la promotion de cette technologie, à la présenter comme inévitable et surtout à poser les industriels eux-mêmes comme acteurs incontournables de toute future réglementation. Ces sommets sont parfois présentés - abusivement, dans la mesure où ils n’ont caractère intergouvernemental officiel et de n’appuient ni ne visent la rédaction d’aucun traité – comme des « COP de l’IA ». Et pourtant, on y retrouve bien le même mélange de discussions techniques, d’annonces publicitaires et de « business as usual  » qui constitue désormais la norme en matière de gouvernance mondiale.

[...]

Comme le rappelle le média spécialisé Synth, les géants de la tech sont passés maîtres dans l’art de s’imposer comme leurs propres régulateurs. Après le sommet de Londres en 2023 a ainsi été annoncée la création d’un « AI Safety Institute », dont les rênes ont immédiatement été confiés à un représentant du secteur du capital-risque et une cadre d’OpenAI. La France suit la même tendance, mais en limitant encore plus les ambitions en matière de régulation.

By crunching all the different datasets together, the researchers were able to create what they described as an aggregate “factuality score” for each politician and each party, based on the links that MPs had shared on Twitter.

The data showed conclusively that far-right populism was “the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation”, they concluded, with MPs from centre-right, centre-left and far-left populist parties “not linked” to the practice.

Une vidéo très claire sur le fonctionnement de la dette des états, et pourquoi faire du chantage en prétendant que "nos enfants devront la rembourser" pour pousser des politiques d'austérité ne tient pas debout.

This is all being spun by the Trump administration as an effort to save money and reduce government "waste," but no one should be fooled. The sadism of these efforts belies the psychological damage motivating people like Musk and Russ Vought, the Project 2025 author Trump nominated to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). MAGA is certainly a racist and sexist movement, but it's crucially also a movement of bullies lashing out at people whose skills and talents remind MAGA folks of their own insecurities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unhinged MAGA hatred of federal workers, a group largely known for being humble and hard-working, reminding MAGA leaders of their own lack of basic virtues. 

Résumer un texte implique de comprendre les enjeux de celui-ci, en lien avec le monde réel et avec les intentions et valeurs de l'auteur, ce dont les IA génératives sont incapables. À la place, elle raccourcissent le texte (suivant une logique où ce qui prend le plus de place est le plus important, ce qui est loin d'être toujours vrai), et tendent également à le déformer en fonction de leurs paramètres d'entraînement (les textes dont elles ont été nourries durant leur "entraînement").

ChatGPT’s summary contained mostly things that can be found in the full text. There was the occasional incorrectness of course. [...]

But the main proposal — that Council of Stakeholders — which takes up about 25% of the main text of the paper, is not mentioned in ChatGPT’s summary at all. Instead, that concrete suggestion becomes a few empty sentences. And that was true for a few other essential elements of the paper. In other words: the summary makes a good first impression, though not very concrete in terms of proposals, but reading the summary alone, you will not be aware that the paper actually has a a set of very concrete proposals and options, most of which is missing in ChatGPT’s summary.

Le premier ministre a évoqué, lundi 27 janvier sur LCI, le « sentiment de submersion » généré par l’immigration. Des propos qu’il a réitérés et assumés le lendemain, au sein de l’Assemblée nationale, indignant la gauche. Pourtant, les chiffres et les études sur le sujet démentent clairement cette idée. Entretien avec Tania Racho, spécialiste des questions relatives aux droits fondamentaux.

Aucune technologie n’est neutre ni inéluctable. Chacune se déploie dans un certain contexte économique et politique qui oriente les choix. Cela a toujours été le cas pour le numérique, depuis le début. L’extrême concentration d’acteurs et de moyens qui préside au déploiement des IAs génératives devrait aider à prendre conscience de cet état de fait. L’annonce récente de 500 milliards de dollars à consacrer au sujet donne la (dé)mesure de la chose. Je ne détaillerai pas les courants politiques et philosophiques qui circulent parmi les promoteurs des IAs. Certains acteurs affirment croire à l’avénement des IAs générales, comme résultat inéluctable de l’accumulation de moyens et de ressources. Que l’on fasse miroiter ces IAs capables de sauver le monde, ou qu’au contraire on annonce l’apocalypse, leur prise de pouvoir et la fin de l’humanité, on participe à détourner l’attention des dégâts déjà bien présents ici et maintenant.

Mais le « train du futur » s’est révélé un gouffre financier n’aboutissant qu’à des technologies inadaptées. Ses tubes requièrent une infrastructure linéaire pour conserver la vitesse promise. Ce qui impose d’artificialiser un tracé équivalent à une autoroute sur des centaines de kilomètres et à creuser des passages dans les zones dénivelées. Un fonctionnement plus adapté aux grands espaces américains qu’aux vallons entre Saint-Étienne et Lyon. Le maintien sous vide de ses tubes nécessite également une énergie considérable.

« Non seulement c’est un désastre environnemental, mais cette organisation de l’espace qui relie les métropoles les unes aux autres participe à la désertification des villes moyennes et des campagnes », fustige Jean-Louis Pagès, conseiller régional écologiste de Nouvelle-Aquitaine. La vitesse promise génère aussi des problèmes de confort et surtout de sécurité en cas de dépressurisation.

Les scientifiques sont clairs : le dérèglement du climat menace l'Humanité à moyen terme et pourtant les politiques climatiques sont encore extrêmement timides. D'où cette question : pourquoi cette inaction climatique ? Pourquoi l'alerte des scientifiques n'est-elle pas entendue ? Pour y répondre nous recevons Albert Moukheiber, docteur en neurosciences, psychologue clinicien et auteur neuromania (chez Allary éditions).

L’alliance entre Donald Trump et des patrons de plateforme sociale, tels Elon Musk ou Mark Zuckerberg, représente une menace à l’échelle mondiale sur le libre accès à une information fiable. « Le Monde » fait donc le choix d’interrompre le partage de ses contenus sur X et de redoubler de vigilance sur des plateformes comme TikTok et sur celles de Meta.

Entretien avec Renaud Chaput, responsable technique de Mastodon et l’un des francophones du projet (créé par un Allemand), qui réunit aujourd’hui des contributeurs et des utilisateurs à travers le monde.

Les grands enjeux pour wikipédia sont tout autres que ces querelles « woke ou pas woke ». Les préoccupations portent plutôt sur les questions de fiabilité de l’information, avec les multiples campagnes de désinformation, ou encore l’utilisation de l’IA, qui ciblent Wikipédia, mais aussi et surtout les sources utilisées pour écrire des articles sur Wikipédia. En effet, la règle de base est que Wikipédia ne peut être qu’une synthèse du savoir existant, et n’est en aucun cas un lieu de production de savoir inédit. Donc si les sources utilisées sont « corrompues », cela se retrouvera nécessairement sur Wikipédia.

Note : Comme toujours lorsqu'il est question de "wokisme", il est important de se souvenir que ce terme n'a pas de définition précise et est essentiellement une invention des milieux réactionnaires pour attaquer les mouvements humanistes ou progressistes sans avoir besoin d'argumenter, en donnant l'impression de s'attaquer à un phénomène "inquiétant" ou "excessif", et sans jamais avoir besoin d'exprimer clairement les valeurs qu'ils poussent réellement. C'est un épouvantail et une arme de manipulation rhétorique, absolument pas un fait objectif.

Quand le Figaro accuse Wikipédia d'être "woke", la première réponse devrait être une déconstruction de cette affirmation et des valeurs qui la sous-tendent; mettre à jour la vision du monde et le projet politique qui se cachent derrière cette accusation, et réfuter sa légitimité même.

Le contenu de cette vidéo est tellement insensé qu’on croit d’abord à un fake. Mais c’est bien Mark Zuckerberg qui s’exprime ce mardi 7 janvier sur Facebook. Ses propos méritent d’abord un verbatim complet [...]

Despite these ugly attitudes from Trump and his supporters, in the past few months, there's been a deluge of pundits expressing confusion and outrage at straight women who conclude that it's better to be single than waste your one precious life dating — much less marrying — conservative men. Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, famously and repeatedly insisted that such women are "miserable cat ladies," even though it's self-evident that cats make better company than MAGA men. Even the Washington Post editorial board got involved, calling on women to "compromise" by marrying Trump voters. 

In 2024, women increasingly responded to these pressures with a "no thank you," though often phrased less politely. After Trump won the election, there was even a spike in interest in the South Korean "4b" movement, where women quit dating, marrying, or having children with men. In truth, this idea was more aspirational than realistic, but the discourse mattered nonetheless. It created space for women to ask the question: Why should they sacrifice their happiness to save the institution of heterosexuality?

You don’t have to be a cynic to see a flywheel effect: Crypto has become a meaningful political constituency not because its technology has broad, undeniable utility, but because it has made certain people extremely wealthy, which has attracted a great deal of attention and interest. The industry courts politicians with its wealth, and politicians pander for donations by making promises. Ultimately, the pro-crypto candidate wins, and the price of bitcoin surges, making many of these same people richer and thus able to exert more influence.

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Crypto’s future is uncertain, but its legacy, at least in the short term, seems clearer than it did before November 5. It turns out that cryptocurrencies do have a very concrete use case. They are a technology that has latched on to, and then helped build, a culture that celebrates greed and speculation as virtues just as it embraces volatility. The only predictable thing about crypto seems to be its penchant for attracting and enriching a patchwork of individuals with qualities including, but not limited to, an appetite for risk, an overwhelming optimism about the benefits of technology, or a healthy distrust of institutions. In these ways, crypto is a perfect fit for the turbulence and distrust of the 2020s, as well as the nihilism and corruption of the Trump era.

Soupçonné d'avoir tué Brian Thompson, patron d'une assurance privée aux États-Unis, et aujourd'hui devant la justice de New-York, Luigi Mangione a été présenté comme un "bad boy". Pourtant, en ligne, il a été adulé. Une fascination que les journaux n'ont pas cherché à analyser. Entre tentatives ratées de profilage numérique du mis en cause, refus de politiser son acte et de nommer la violence du système de santé privée, mais aussi, les cris d'orfraie moralistes sur la sacralité de la vie humaine, la presse étasunienne a fait l'étalage de sa déconnexion sociale.

In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.

In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.

The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.

By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.

The mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’, drawing parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain

Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software.

When someone tries to sell their tech (step 1 in the chain of reasoning) with massively large claims (step 3 in the chain) look at whether step 2 actually exists in reality. Because if it doesn’t that’d not “disruptive innovation” or “a breakthrough” or “a unicorn”. That is bullshit. It’s not just a waste of your time, it’s a way to infantilize you.

Here’s a sad statistic for you: In the United States, we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country! That’s all you need to know about America. We pay more people to deny care than to give it. 1 million doctors to give care, 1.4 million brutes in cubicles doing their best to stop doctors from giving that care. If the purpose of “health care” is to keep people alive, then what is the purpose of DENYING PEOPLE HEALTH CARE? Other than to kill them? I definitely condemn that kind of murder. And in fact, I already did. In 2007, I made a film – SICKO – about America’s bloodthirsty, profit-driven and murderous health insurance system. It was nominated for an Oscar. It’s the second-largest grossing film of my career (after Fahrenheit 9/11). And over the past 15 years, millions upon millions of people have watched it including, apparently, Luigi Mangione.

One of the first pieces of publicized evidence in the wake of the killing was that three 9mm cartridges left at the scene were found to have been labeled with three phrases: “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.” It was speculated the first two phrases referred to the oft-cited practice of health insurance companies to deny coverage to clients and defend these decisions with legalistic trickery. “Depose,” of course, has multiple meanings, but in this context just two: one might depose a health care company CEO in court, and one might also depose a figure of terrific unaccountable authority, such as a king or tyrant.

We’re drowning in decisions, but starving for meaning. We’ve developed sophisticated frameworks for everything from A/B testing website buttons to optimizing YouTube thumbnails, but we don’t have robust (or anything approaching robust) methods for distinguishing between decisions that matter and those that don’t in our personal lives.

Le protocole AT a été pensé pour être décentralisé. Dans la pratique, Bluesky ne l’est pas. La possibilité de créer facilement un PDS n’est qu’un petit élément parmi d’autres. Même si l’on peut créer des relais, leur mise en œuvre est complexe et sans doute bien trop onéreuse en stockage et bande passante pour être intéressante.

On ne peut pas dire que Bluesky soit actuellement décentralisé, et encore moins fédéré. Il y a bien un centre, et il est géré par l’entreprise Bluesky. Sans son relai, rien ne fonctionne. Chaque serveur de données personnelles ne sert ainsi que comme petit réservoir pour les informations d’une personne, incapable de fonctionner par lui-même.

I have — since March — expressed great dismay about the credulousness of the media in their acceptance of the "inevitable" ways in which generative AI will change society, despite a lack of any truly meaningful product that might justify an environmentally-destructive industry led by a company that burns more than $5 billion a year and big tech firms spending $200 billion on data centers for products that people don't want.

The reason I'm repeating myself is that it's important to note how obvious the problems with generative AI have been, and for how long.

Dans les lieux de travail, l’IA apparaît souvent de manière anodine, en étant peu à peu intégrée à des applications de travail existantes. Dans la pratique, l’automatisation remplace rarement les travailleurs, elle automatise très partiellement certaines tâches spécifiques et surtout reconfigure la façon dont les humains travaillent aux côtés des machines. Les résultats de l’IA générative nécessitent souvent beaucoup de retravail pour être exploitées. Des rédacteurs sont désormais embauchés pour réhumaniser les textes synthétiques, mais en étant moins payé que s’ils l’avaient écrit par eux-même sous prétexte qu’ils apportent moins de valeur. Les chatbots ressemblent de plus en plus aux véhicules autonomes, avec leurs centres de commandes à distance où des humains peuvent reprendre les commandes si nécessaire, et invisibilisent les effectifs pléthoriques qui leur apprennent à parler et corrigent leurs discours. La dévalorisation des humains derrière l’IA occultent bien souvent l’étendue des collaborations nécessaires à leur bon fonctionnement.

Dans [son] livre, le sociologue [Antonio Casilli] démontre combien ce travail invisible, qui est lié aux plateformes et aux datas, reproduit une dichotomie nord-sud. Le travail du clic est un job précaire réalisé par des millions de personnes et que l’on retrouve partout sur la planète. Parfois, ce sont des freelances aux États-Unis, des Philippins dans un cybercafé ou des milliers de travailleurs africains dans des fermes du clic. Il y a néanmoins des différences très importantes dans les conditions de travail. Tout en bas de l’échelle, on retrouve les travailleurs africains. Finalement, c’est une nouvelle dimension néocoloniale, loin de l’image épurée de la Silicon Valley. Le fait que les Big Tech invisibilisent ce travail sous-entend que celui-ci n’est pas très important – pourtant, il est essentiel. L’un des travailleurs que j’ai rencontré au Kenya m’a dit : « Il n’y a pas d’intelligence artificielle, seulement l’intelligence africaine. » Ça résume assez bien les choses. 

Artificial intelligence is a threat to educational institutions – as deeply flawed as these may be – not because it's some incredible technological achievement that's more powerful that the human mind (hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha); but because it is the manifestation of a series of reactionary political beliefs. AI is inextricably bound up in ideologies and practices that seek to undermine unions, exploit labor, re-inscribe racial and economic hierarchies, and centralize control – of knowledge and knowing ("intelligence" in all its various military and eugenicist histories) – in the hands of a few giant technology corporations. (Folks, that's fascism.)

When the world’s on fire, reporting “some say it’s not that warm” isn’t brave — it’s complicit. If journalists can’t bring themselves to point at a full-blown authoritarian and say “this is some bad shit,” then maybe they should switch to weather forecasting, where at least the stakes are lower.

The time for milquetoast coverage is over. Either tell the truth, naked and ugly, or don’t act surprised when your freedom to write anything at all goes up in smoke.