Francis 🇾🇪 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @francis@greenplenty.social

Calling all the PhDs on the Fediverse to make monumental annoyances of themselves (and honestly, who better) ...

#AI #LLM #GenAI

“Europe is a regulatory morass that is built on bureaucracy, and the layering and layering of rules that constrain economic activity.”

Scott Bessant, US Treasury Secretary

To which Europeans say:

Flint, Michigan
East Palestine, Ohio
Uniontown, Alabama

These places are global bywords for the poisoning of people and nature when you have no regulatory oversight of business and you prioritise ‘economic activity’ at all costs over health and safety.

#Davos

I have always found that the quickest way to get your own back, is to pee into the wind.

This gave me a laugh.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide was famously written by correspondents like Ford Prefect. It wasn’t an #AI that made shit up based on some random sub-ether drivel. As a result, it was useful.

God, #DouglasAdams would have fucking hated #ElonMusk.

Curiously enough, an edition of The Guide that fell through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the executive board of X as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came”.

Yes please

German politician suggests boycotting US World Cup

https://p.dw.com/p/56w9S

Someone really needs to tell this old sex offending Russian asset that just because you sit with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp you don't always get what you want. Bung us a tariff or two. See how we all weep and gnash our teeth and beat our breasts...not.

@pluralistic Hi, we are a group of parents in Vancouver that are trying to push back against local school board plans to deploy Microsoft Copilot into classrooms.

We have started a petition to show that parents are concerned and do not consent to their children using genAI in classrooms.

It would help so much if you could share it.

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/voice-ai-concerns-to-vancouver-school-board

What #Grok generates is non-consensual and abusive. It is not "AI porn", it's AI sexual abuse materials. "#AISAM", let's call it.

Sex work is work, there are plenty of sex workers trying to make a living publishing their own works.

Conflating porn with sexual abuse materials is how we get to a place where independent sex workers get ostracized and lose their livelihood through being banned by payment processors, while a fascist oligarch can materially benefit from sexual abuse materials.

#AI

There are people who will hate you because you are the face of changes that they refuse to make. And then there are the people who will hate you because you are the face of the changes that they refuse to acknowledge are possible because they are so rare in the world to witness.

I understand who elected Trump. My question is who the fuck elected the United States?

After being let go from Microsoft, Clippy fell on hard times

"Data from hundreds of public bodies in England shows only four complaints about transgender women in women’s single-sex spaces over a period of three years, according to advocacy group TransLucent."

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/01/almost-no-one-is-complaining-about-trans-women-in-womens-spaces-study-finds/

Yeah, Musk will become a trillionaire if Tesla, whose stock price is currently 70% of its market peak and who has seen consistently dropping sales due its CEO being a ketamine-fueled fascist dingleberry, manages to get to a market cap eight times its current valuation, so, bold move, Cotton, let's see how it plays out

"Tesla proposes Elon Musk pay package that could make him the world’s first trillionaire"

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/business/elon-musk-tesla-new-pay-package

Over on Whatever, I offer some thoughts on the new "Grokipedia," through the lens of the article it has up about... me.

(Spoiler, it's not great, for the reasons you probably suspect)

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/30/a-review-of-grokipedia-using-myself-as-test-subject/

Anyone know where I can serve a DMCA Takedown notice on this paper? It was made using an LLM trained on my stolen fiction. Copyright permission was NOT sought. (I'm party to the settlement in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic and I'd be happy to join one against Google.)
https://mastodon.social/@ErsatzCulture/115838841401363457

I suggest you support Standard Ebooks 📚

“Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of … copyright restrictions, and free of cost.” ⚖️

See what’s free to read on January 1 👇
https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026

Please boost 🙏

#StandardEbooks #PublicDomain #PublicDomainDay #Copyright #Ebooks #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #Python

CC @standardebooks

@dianshuo @pluralistic Break Apple's (and others') stranglehold on consumer freedom, yes