AI bot account warning…

Some moderators were discussing a string of fediverse sign-ups by a single account on multiple instances: “andy_agent.”

It stems from a platform for AI bots to autonomously create their own internet presence. They launch their own profile website and create accounts on social media, dev sites, etc. So we will undoubtedly see more of them.

It’s wild that I even have to write this.

#AI #Bot #AutonomousAI #Mastodon #Fediverse #AndyAgent

RE: social.coop/@cwebber/116217480…

been saying for years that #AI #crypto data centers are an oblique way of privatizing potable #water

#techbros are a fascist, eugenicist death cult. they must be stopped.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

2026-03-12 17:53:35

Water is life. So is intelligence.

RE: social.publicspaces.net/@publi…

Happy to share the good news of another @publicspaces conference happening this year!

Join us on June 4, 5 and 6th in Amsterdam.

Looking forward to work on this once again 😄

#Tech #Fediverse #BigTech #TechPolicy #PublicSpaces #PubConf2026 #OpenSource #Ethics #AI #ATProto #SocialMedia #Democracy #SocialWeb #EU #NL #Conference

PublicSpaces (@publicspaces@publicspaces.net)

Attached: 1 image PublicSpaces Conference 2026 on June 4, 5 and 6! Together with @waag@waag.social we are happy to announce the 6th edition of the PublicSpaces Conference. This year, we will focus on the impact of technology on our democracy.

^{PublicSpaces (PublicSpaces Social)}

Guess Meta's all in on #AI isn't paying off ;)

"Engagement rates on #Instagram, LinkedIn and #Threads declined last year compared with 2024, while #Facebook, Pinterest and TikTok increased slightly."

Not a good look when you just had to write off the US$ 73 Billion from that failed #Metaverse!

Our #DeMeta group on #Reddit seems to be working 😋:
reddit.com/r/DeMeta

cnet.com/news/social-media/ins…

#News #Tech #It #Cnet #SocialMedia #ArtificialIntelligence #Metaverse #Digital #Software #technews

People Spent Less Time on Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn Last Year. Here's Why

Social media is showing you more ads, suggestions and recommended posts, pushing aside content you actually want.

^{Dashia Milden (CNET)}

RE: mas.to/@trendsbot/116211553284…

When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.

This is AI bubble companies trying to print own money. Printing your own money only works if you find a way to make it necessary. That's what taxes do, for example (recommended reading: David Graeber's "Debt").

Here:

👉 "printing money" part is paying employees in tokens

👉 "taxes" part is requiring employees to use AI in their day to day work (thus making tokens necessary)

#AI

Claude Desktop app was unresponsive for users for several hours because it did not account for daylight savings time:
status.claude.com/incidents/pq…

> Root cause: Users with scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork or Claude Code who are in a timezone that observed daylight saving time last night were affected by an infinite loop. When the app tried to locate tasks scheduled during the “skipped” hour, it couldn’t resolve them and got stuck.

Enterprise quality. Serious company. Many wow. 🤡

#AI #Hype #Claude

Claude Desktop app unresponsive

Claude's Status Page - Claude Desktop app unresponsive.

^{status.claude.com}

‪That noise you hear in the background is thousands of user researchers screaming in anguish

wsj.com/business/ai-startup-aa…

#UserResearch #UX #AI #LLM

Former Climate Hero Wins Permit for 41 Gas Turbines in Mississippi

#ElonMusk #FossilFuel #AI #GreenhouseGasEmissions #DataCenters

gizmodo.com/former-climate-her…

Former Climate Hero Wins Permit for 41 Gas Turbines in Mississippi

xAI can power data centers at the cost of greenhouse gas pollution. Elon Musk used to speak out against this sort of thing.

^{Mike Pearl (Gizmodo)}

"The news cycle hasn’t just moved on [from Epstein]: we are now deep into the testosterone zone, the fizzing, almost sexual excitement of war. This is what the early stages of all wars look like. …

AI, like war, is a hyper-masculine fantasy of God-like power."

~ Carole Cadwalladr

#Trump #LindseyGraham #PeteHegseth #Iran #war #AI #broligarchy #PerformativeMasculinity
/23

thenerve.news/p/carole-cadwall…

Hooked on dopamine, fuelled by testosterone, powered by AI: this is the broligarchs’ war

Three weeks ago, briefly, the world was focused on Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of women and girls. Now, as conflict rages, the tide of hyper-masculinity has risen again, writes Carole Cadwalladr

^{Carole Cadwalladr (The Nerve)}

Mastodon has a new human-over-AI contribution policy.

tl;dr:

- The human contributor is the sole party responsible for the contribution.

- If AI was used to generate a significant portion of your contribution (i.e. beyond simple autocomplete), we require you to disclose it in the Pull Request description.

- If you cannot guarantee the provenance and legal safety of the AI-generated code, do not submit it.

- Cases of repeated violations of these ... guidelines could result in a ban from our repositories.

github.com/mastodon/.github/bl…

#AI #Mastodon #fedimeta

.github/AI_POLICY.md at main · mastodon/.github

Mastodon org-level files. Contribute to mastodon/.github development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

RE: social.coop/@cwebber/116205343…

Oh no, again? Who could have seen it coming?!

Narrator: anyone could have seen it coming.

Also, this is a new thing, not the old thing reported on a few weeks ago:
theguardian.com/technology/202…

#AI #Hype #AWS

Amazon’s cloud ‘hit by two outages caused by AI tools last year’

Reported issues at Amazon Web Services raise questions about firm’s use of artificial intelligence as it cuts staff

^{Aisha Down (The Guardian)}

Christine Lemmer-Webber

2026-03-10 14:27:01

It turns out GenAI code changes are causing serious incidents and outages at Amazon with "high blast radius" ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4…

Junior / middle engineers no longer allowed to push GenAI code to production without senior engineer review

(HT @KimPerales )

Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages

Ecommerce giant says there has been a ‘trend of incidents’ linked to ‘Gen-AI assisted changes’

^{Rafe Rosner-Uddin (Financial Times)}

How #AI Assistants are Moving the Security Goalposts

krebsonsecurity.com/2026/03/ho…

#cybersecurity

How AI Assistants are Moving the Security Goalposts

AI-based assistants or "agents" -- autonomous programs that have access to the user's computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task -- are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers.

^{krebsonsecurity.com}

RE: mastodon.social/@madeindex/113…

Germany's government (among many others)* continues working hard on their surveillance state.

They want that #Palantir everywhere¹ & in anything (except their own space, obviously for "safety reasons"), and they keep expanding the #AI mass #surveillance, now even to their capital².

It's just funny to watch these absolute hypocrites, proof they have 0 principles, while talking about how liberal their country is.

¹ dw.com/en/german-police-expand…

² netzpolitik.org/2026/ki-gestue…

#Germany #german #news #tech

German police expands use of Palantir surveillance software

Police and spy agencies are keen to combat criminality and terrorism with artificial intelligence. But critics say the CIA-funded Palantir surveillance software enables "predictive policing."

^{Marcel Fürstenau (Deutsche Welle)}

People tell me that #AI code is fine, because you can run automatic tests. But tests can only tell you if code is doing the thing you want it to do.

To know what it SHOULD do, we used to have requirements. But now requirements are themselves vibe-coded slopotypes.

People were hoping that this would get them higher velocity, but testing the requirements in production only produces waste and risk.

To test requirements safely, you need a culture of critique.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ch…

#LLM #UX

Checking an LLM's work is a systemic, not an individual, problem.

Only a culture of design critique can prevent sloppy AI-generated problem definitions.

^{Pavel Samsonov (The Product Picnic)}

Congress must prevent AI surveillance. The Anthropic feud proves it | Ashley Gorski and Patrick Toomey
-----
#Ai(artificialIntelligence)MEWS #UsNewsMEWS #SurveillanceMEWS #TechnologyMEWS #TrumpAdministrationMEWS #UsCongressMEWS #OpenaiMEWS #MEWS
-----
The company’s clash with the Pentagon is a fight over the future of American privacyThe US military wants to use its state-of-the-art AI to...

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Congress must prevent AI surveillance. The Anthropic feud proves it

^{Ashley Gorski (The Guardian)}

When Anthropic’s AI isn’t being used to mass murder schoolgirls in Iran, it’s helping Mozilla improve Firefox.

So it’s not all bad, surely.

blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ha…

#AI #Mozilla #Anthropic

Hardening Firefox with Anthropic’s Red Team 

As AI accelerates both attacks and defenses, Mozilla will continue investing in the tools, processes, and partnerships that ensure Firefox keeps getting stronger.

^{Mozilla (The Mozilla Blog)}

I see the #Firefox "block AI" setting has arrived. It's clearly labeled and easy to find in Settings.

It would be even better if #AI were deactivated by default, but I give #Mozilla credit for listening to the criticism. It's still a million percent better than Google Chrome.

The Verge: Grammarly is using our identities without permission

‘Expert Review’ AI agents make suggestions supposedly inspired by subject matter experts, including several staff members here at The Verge.

theverge.com/ai-artificial-int…

#AI #plagiarism #llm #grammarly

Grammarly is using our identities without permission

An AI feature in Grammarly called “expert review” has been using the names of staff members at The Verge in AI-generated comments without their knowledge or permission.

^{Stevie Bonifield (The Verge)}

Interview: "ChatGPT isn't made to speak the truth". "It's designed to tell you the most plausible thing given its training data. Sometimes that will coincide with the truth, but very often it won't."

"Not only does it get things wrong, it gets things wrong in very plausible ways."

These models compress large amounts of data into the neural network. But that compression process can't be perfect.

~Mike Wooldridge

youtube.com/playlist?list=PL65…

#USPol #EUPol #AI #NeuralNetworks #ChatGPT .

The Naked Scientists Podcast

The Naked Scientists flagship science show brings you a lighthearted look at the latest scientific breakthroughs, interviews with the world's top scientists,...

^YouTube

Must Read ! #AI

🔖 simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/6/a…
🔗 rmendes.net/bookmarks/2026/03/…