Brett Hetherington 🍉 (No AI used)

Another new ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reader review (that makes it all worthwhile) "Strikingly akin to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Exudes authenticity and realism. A book meant more for explorers than for tourists..." bretthetherington.blogspot.com/2022/06/anothe…

Chicken Soup for the Soul is suing tech companies OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI, Perplexity, Apple, and Nvidia for copyright infringement, alleging that hundreds of its copyrighted works were ingested without authorization or compensation. buff.ly/hKUPxoD

My uni presented a pro gen-ai lecture to hundreds of art students today,most people walked out,complained to the uni head board and proceeded to have a 5 hour debate w the professors I’ve never seen people so unified 😭 i thought I was the only one that cared, there’s hope 😭 🙏

Responses from residents in 92 countries... Global Study Finds Majority of People Worldwide Prioritize Environmental Protection Over Economic Growth uvm.edu/gund/news/glob…

Tonight in the Catalan capital...

Iran: The War Nobody Is Stopping — with Yanis Varoufakis and Grace Blakeley on DiEM25-tv youtube.com/watch?v=C4zreB…

@Ben_Wray1989 Agreed. Except the role model he refers to doesn't allow for the fact that Spain has some of the lowest average wages (and most stagnant!) in all of Europe.

This war should be the end of the debate about cost effectiveness of renewables v fossil fuels. Renewables won. The only ppl deriving benefit from having gas determining the price of your heating bills are the energy cartels, cos theyre making big profits. x.com/rdomenechv/sta…

Can’t put it down! At some point we’ll all have to face the truth!

Check out this article: The Slow Road to Tehran: Interview With Rebecca Lowe - intrepidtimes.com/2024/09/the-sl…

“Literary translation is one of humanity’s most crucial tasks — one that should never be left to the machines.” Passionately argued piece on what we lose when we use AI to translate books. japantimes.co.jp/commentary/202…

“When a writer is born into a family, it is finished.” ~Czeslaw Milosz.

Good news klaxon: The UK Government has removed its backing from plans to make it easier for AI companies to steal copyright create content (including news articles).

Awkward fact about the AI revolution: it’s being built largely by men, in a field where women make up only ~20–30% of the workforce and far fewer at senior levels. The result is systems that quietly inherit male-centred assumptions, from biased hiring tools to facial recognition that struggles with women’s faces. Proposed fixes include more diverse hiring, better datasets and bias testing, all sensible, if modest. The bigger problem left hanging is ownership: the most powerful AI systems are designed, trained and controlled by a handful of private firms with even narrower demographics. If the future is going to be automated, relying on a small club of tech companies to design it may not be ideal. Possible remedies range from public funding and open models to more radical notions like cooperative or socialised ownership of core AI infrastructure, on the theory that if these systems shape society, society might reasonably want a stake in how they’re built. newscientist.com/article/251941…

How to perpetrate a genocide?

@DiEM_25 CORRECTION: "Israel's murderers." Time to boycott The Spectator.

Zack Polanski: “The very basics, the things we rely on to build the foundations of a good life, have been taken out of our hands, sold for profit – and then sold or rented back to us at crushing rates." theguardian.com/politics/2026/…

Let it roll across the lands of Europe!

#Otd 17 Mar 1938 the most fatal bombing of Barcelona during the Civil War occurred. Italian fascists bombed Gran Via, which was full of pedestrians and traffic. A lorry with 4 tonnes of explosives was hit. The resulting explosion killed 500 & injured 1000 workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e39-th…

The Basque general strike protest in Bilbao stops outside the the Iberdrola headquarters - it's the energy cartels with their war profiteering prices which are robbing us! #GrebaOrokorra #huelgageneral #17M

Working at your abuser's home... "While migrant domestic workers keep millions of European homes running, the widespread harassment they face is largely ignored" Wonderful investigation here from a team including @LeahPattem europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/working-a…