My publisher @TorBooks and @Goodreads are drawing for a giveaway of advance copies of my next novel, "Red Team Blues," a Silicon Valley forensic accounting thriller about a cryptocurrency heist - If you're in the US or Canada, enter here to win a copy:
#10yrsago France remains America’s copyright crash-test dummy: about to ditch HADOPI, poised to adopt the dregs of SOPA instead techdirt.com/2012/12/10/fre…
#5yrsago How a maker with diabetes led an open source project to create a free-as-in-code artificial pancreas al.com/news/huntsvill… 10/
#5yrsago Independent auditor: Trump has made it impossible for students defrauded by predatory diploma mills to get their loans cancelled bbc.com/news/world-us-… 11/
#5yrsago Child molester Roy Moore said he wants to repeal all Constitutional amendments after the first ten, which would revive slavery and end votes for women and black people businessinsider.com/roy-moore-amen… 12/
#5yrsago A law-enforcement agency is trying to figure out who owns the bots that hacked the FCC’s Net Neutrality comment period, but the FCC is obstructing justice vice.com/en/article/wjz… 14/
#5yrsago Open primaries? Democratic establishment bars anyone who challenges an incumbent from using the party’s Votebuilder database wired.com/story/justice-… 16/
#5yrsago Your inbox is full of spyware-riddled emails that are both potentially very harmful to you and also very easy to disable wired.com/story/how-emai…
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, @beaconPressBks et al) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
If you're a @Medium subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
My latest Medium column is "Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers: He was a dick."
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When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of *users*: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine - in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work)...
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It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez charged a woman with murder for having an abortion (not t allowed even in Texas). It's that Ramirez paid for his mistress's abortion, after he impregnated her while having an affair with her *and* her sister:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This is perfect Magaism, as captured by Wilhoit's Law:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Delta's announced new surveillance pricing: they're feeding an AI your nonconsensually harvested personal info that data-brokers and credit bureaux hold to predict the maximum you're willing to pay, and then price their tickets accordingly:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Data-brokers sell all kinds of data, from the "legitimate" info about everywhere your car's been, to everywhere place the Bluetooth radios on your phone and headphones has been, to everything you've bought, to every sit you've visited and every search you've performed.
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Ever notice how many right wing influencers are on the grift?
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Like Alex Jones - that guy is basically Gwyneth Paltrow for conservative bros, selling the same "wellness" crap to a male audience (and not for nothing, Paltrow's victims are reliable boosters for RFK Jr's MAHA movement):
As fascism burns across America, it's important to remember that Trump and his policies are *not popular*.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Sure, the racism and cruelty excites a minority of (very broken) people, but every component of the Trump agenda is *extremely* unpopular with the American people, from tax cuts for billionaires to kidnapping our neighbors and shipping them to concentration camps.
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If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.
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