Notices by Joan Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)

Welcome to the Age of the Coward—where billion-dollar corporations crumble faster than a wet paper bag, and craven CEOs like Bob Iger and Tim Cook prove their “values” were just expensive PR stunts with an expiration date.
https://www.theindex.media/this-is-the-age-of-the-coward-2/

If there's one thing we know about American AI companies it's that they have never used unauthorized data in any of their models.

Ever.

Not once.

TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY!

But it’s also a pretty fucked up day in Australia. While officially recognised as Australia Day, it’s actually the anniversary of the English invasion and the arrival of colonialism. For Australia’s first people, it’s a brutal day.

I don’t ask for gifts.

But if you have the means, any donations to BlaQ to support Aboriginal LGBTQ people would be awesome.

https://blaq.org.au/donate/

When you watch Musk openly perform Nazi salutes, support Nazi-adjacent political movements, spread Nazi conspiracy theories, and provide a platform for Nazi rhetoric, it's time to state the obvious: this man is a Nazi.

https://www.theindex.media/this-man-is-a-nazi/

Several times a day, I discover I'm carrying around a backpack full of rocks.

And then I realize I can simply...put it down. A short thread on my rage in 2025. 🧵

Seriously. The first thing you see when you google David Tennant is a borked AI generated picture of *not* David Tennant.

The way Google whiffed on AI while making their flagship product increasingly shit in their attempt to catch up is astounding.

You don’t actually miss Twitter. You miss who you were 10 years ago.

[ slaps mosquito ]
mosquito: harder mummy
me: what
mosquito: what

Jake, 26, said it was easy to bootstrap his startup. ‘I sold my furniture, cut out coffee, and used the $2M inheritance from my grandfather to fund my seed round.’ This story sponsored by YCombinator

billionaires with vanity space programs aren't exploring the final frontier, they're fleeing the crime scene

The media will call you a Socialist, but they'll never call him a Fascist

Kate, 23, said it wasn't as hard to buy a house as people made out.

"I just cut my expenses. Unlike my friends, I didn't go out, I ate at home, I watched free to air TV instead of Netflix and I thrift shopped. Add that to the $500,000 my parents gave me for a deposit, and I was able to achieve my goals in just 6 months"

This story sponsored by realestate dot com dot au

The American dream didn't die.

That makes it sound like a natural event.

Like it was inevitable.

Here's the truth:

It was fucking murdered.

By greedy, unchecked corporations, bought and paid for politicians, and every coked-up asshole on Wall Street.

Mozilla and Automattic really duking it out for who can lose decades of community goodwill the fastest

Capitalism is when your tax dollars pay to bail out the bank that foreclosed on your mortgage

Capitalism is when you're more familiar with brands of bottled water than the names of local rivers

I love that “you sound scared” has become a way to shut down critics of AI.

…yes.

yes, I absolutely am scared of it.

No, I’m not ashamed of that.

I don’t hate AI. I don't believe it’s going to destroy us terminator style.

But I’m scared half to hell of the misinformation, political divisions, unemployment, manipulation, spam and deepfake porn and what it’s going to do to our world.

Like it or dislike it, everyone should have a healthy level of fear about what this technology can do.

Modern work:

you get a message in Slack with a link to the Confluence doc to prep for the meeting on Zoom, where you take notes in Notion, and track project progress on Monday and then update the Trello and you get to the end of the week and instead of doing fucking anything you've just moved bits of information around in 17 different databases and each one costs $15 a month per user...

There is gonna be a whole category of artisanal
writing, coding and design Software that has zero AI and LLM bullshit by choice.

Can’t wait.

@Gargron does long cat have a patreon