#cryptocurrency infrastructure

[bitcoinversus]

Cipher Mining Acquires 300 MW Data Center Site in West Texas

Cipher Mining secures a 300 MW data center in Texas, growing its portfolio to over 2.5 GW.

Cipher Mining has announced the acquisition of a new 300-megawatt (MW) data center site in West Texas, a move aimed at significantly scaling up its Bitcoin mining operations in the region. The company has agreed to purchase the site for $67.5 million, with an additional variable fee of $3 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for the first five years after the site is…

[quasi-normalcy]

Maybe we could just try turning off the internet and starting again?

tumblr trying to be like tiktok then trying to be like twitter then giving us the 3rd unreality inducing immersive ad, its staff members being condescending to the userbase, the marketing team trying to parasocialize their way into your pockets, youtube trying to do away with adblockers after upping the percentage of ads by 40% and making it so even if your video is demonetized watchers will still get them, youtube removing the dislike button then making it so you don't get a home feed if you have watch history turned off, google being able to remove your synched bookmarks if they don't comply with their policy, if i listed every way in which twitter has gotten worse in the last year this post will be as long as a novel, ai generated articles and images everywhere, google searches sucking ass in general, reddit charging for its api, KOSA being introduced into the US senate, tiktok in general, every social media under the fucking sun introducing log in walls, being unable to browse most sites on mobile from the sheer amount of popups taking over your screen WAUUUGH social media being products and thus requiring infinite growth and thus trying to introduce newer and newer shit that alienates its dedicated userbase. saturated sludge era of the internet

[jcmarchi]

CISA employees impersonated by phone scammers - CyberTalk

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/cisa-employees-impersonated-by-phone-scammers-cybertalk/

CISA employees impersonated by phone scammers - CyberTalk

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Earlier today, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reported that cyber criminals are impersonating its employees. In CISA’s own words, the agency is aware of “recent impersonation scammers claiming to represent the agency.”

What happened

Scammers placed phone calls to unsuspecting professionals, claiming to represent CISA and to be relaying an urgent message pertaining to a security vulnerability. The scammers ultimately intended for victims to transfer financial resources to external accounts.

This cyber sliminess reflects a broader trend. Cyber criminals are now trying to cover for their scams by weaponizing government employees’ names and titles.

CISA’s response

For its part, CISA notes that staff will never contact anyone in order to request money – whether that’s wired, cash, cryptocurrency or use of gift cards. It will also never instruct people to keep phone-based discussions secret.

Impersonation scams

In 2023, Americans reported more than $1.4 billion in financial losses due to impersonation scams, according to the Federal Trade Commission. That’s a 3X increase over the reported estimate from 2020.

Some scammers are now impersonating more than one organization in a single scam. In theory, a scammer might impersonate CISA, and then offer to transfer you to a fake FBI or Federal Trade Commission employee, for fake assistance.

Best practices

Even the pros can fall victim to scams, especially those that involve impersonation of CISA contacts. In the event that you find yourself on the receiving end of a CISA scam call, write down the phone number though which the call came in and follow standard procedure – immediately hang up.

Afterwards, call CISA to have the agency validate the phone number (844-729-2472) or report the scam attempt to law enforcement.

Protect your organization

To safeguard your organization from cyber scams, provide employees with training around phishing attempts, which can occur via phone, text or email.

Also, since scammers are commonly after valuable assets or the money itself, establish clear protocols for verifying any requests for sensitive information or financial transfers.

Beyond that, ensure that your organization leverages the latest email security solutions and advanced threat prevention technologies. Learn more here.

Scam insights

For more insights into the latest cyber scams, see CyberTalk.org’s past coverage:

Discover how hackers tried to scam this Check Point cyber security professional – click here

Get details about the latest 401(k) scams – click here

Read about how hundreds of people were rescued from cyber scam factories – click here

Lastly, to receive cyber security thought leadership articles, groundbreaking research and emerging threat analyses each week, subscribe to the CyberTalk.org newsletter.

[my-financials]

Investment Opportunities in Major Cities Around the World

Major cities around the world offer a variety of investment opportunities, from real estate to stocks to businesses. These opportunities can be attractive to investors because they offer the potential for high returns and growth. However, it is important to carefully consider the risks involved before investing in any city. Here are some of the most promising investment opportunities in major…

[usdtpharmacy]

Tether and the Government of Georgia Collaborate to Foster Innovation through Blockchain and Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure

Tether, the company behind the widely used stablecoin and blockchain platform tether.to, has announced a significant partnership with the Government of Georgia. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two entities is aimed at positioning Georgia as a central hub for blockchain technology and peer-to-peer innovation, with the goal of driving economic growth and fostering a thriving…

[blockchainnftgaming]

Controversy erupts over Texas' bold bitcoin battery plan

Controversy erupts over Texas’ bold bitcoin battery plan

Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital, claims that crypto miners involved in demand response schemes helped prevent power outages in Texas this year. The mining operations acted “like a capacitor,” he says, echoing the metaphor of a battery, allowing the grid to stay afloat. Enthusiasm for Abbott’s plan and other crypto enthusiasts has been undermined by scientists who argue that even the basic…

[sexymemecoin]

The Rise of DeFi: Revolutionizing the Financial Landscape

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has emerged as one of the most transformative sectors within the cryptocurrency industry. By leveraging blockchain technology, DeFi aims to recreate and improve upon traditional financial systems, offering a more inclusive, transparent, and efficient financial ecosystem. This article explores the fundamental aspects of DeFi, its key components, benefits, challenges, and notable projects, including a brief mention of Sexy Meme Coin.

What is DeFi?

DeFi stands for Decentralized Finance, a movement that utilizes blockchain technology to build an open and permissionless financial system. Unlike traditional financial systems that rely on centralized intermediaries like banks and brokerages, DeFi operates on decentralized networks, allowing users to interact directly with financial services. This decentralization is achieved through smart contracts, which are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into code.

Key Components of DeFi

Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs): DEXs allow users to trade cryptocurrencies directly with one another without the need for a central authority. Platforms like Uniswap, SushiSwap, and PancakeSwap have gained popularity for their ability to provide liquidity and facilitate peer-to-peer trading.

Lending and Borrowing Platforms: DeFi lending platforms like Aave, Compound, and MakerDAO enable users to lend their assets to earn interest or borrow assets by providing collateral. These platforms use smart contracts to automate the lending process, ensuring transparency and efficiency.

Stablecoins: Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like fiat currencies to reduce volatility. They are crucial for DeFi as they provide a stable medium of exchange and store of value. Popular stablecoins include Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), and Dai (DAI).

Yield Farming and Liquidity Mining: Yield farming involves providing liquidity to DeFi protocols in exchange for rewards, often in the form of additional tokens. Liquidity mining is a similar concept where users earn rewards for providing liquidity to specific pools. These practices incentivize participation and enhance liquidity within the DeFi ecosystem.

Insurance Protocols: DeFi insurance protocols like Nexus Mutual and Cover Protocol offer coverage against risks such as smart contract failures and hacks. These platforms aim to provide users with security and peace of mind when engaging with DeFi services.

Benefits of DeFi

Financial Inclusion: DeFi opens up access to financial services for individuals who are unbanked or underbanked, particularly in regions with limited access to traditional banking infrastructure. Anyone with an internet connection can participate in DeFi, democratizing access to financial services.

Transparency and Trust: DeFi operates on public blockchains, providing transparency for all transactions. This transparency reduces the need for trust in intermediaries and allows users to verify and audit transactions independently.

Efficiency and Speed: DeFi eliminates the need for intermediaries, reducing costs and increasing the speed of transactions. Smart contracts automate processes that would typically require manual intervention, enhancing efficiency.

Innovation and Flexibility: The open-source nature of DeFi allows developers to innovate and build new financial products and services. This continuous innovation leads to the creation of diverse and flexible financial instruments.

Challenges Facing DeFi

Security Risks: DeFi platforms are susceptible to hacks, bugs, and vulnerabilities in smart contracts. High-profile incidents, such as the DAO hack and the recent exploits on various DeFi platforms, highlight the need for robust security measures.

Regulatory Uncertainty: The regulatory environment for DeFi is still evolving, with governments and regulators grappling with how to address the unique challenges posed by decentralized financial systems. This uncertainty can impact the growth and adoption of DeFi.

Scalability: DeFi platforms often face scalability issues, particularly on congested blockchain networks like Ethereum. High gas fees and slow transaction times can hinder the user experience and limit the scalability of DeFi applications.

Complexity and Usability: DeFi platforms can be complex and challenging for newcomers to navigate. Improving user interfaces and providing educational resources are crucial for broader adoption.

Notable DeFi Projects

Uniswap (UNI): Uniswap is a leading decentralized exchange that allows users to trade ERC-20 tokens directly from their wallets. Its automated market maker (AMM) model has revolutionized the way liquidity is provided and traded in the DeFi space.

Aave (AAVE): Aave is a decentralized lending and borrowing platform that offers unique features such as flash loans and rate switching. It has become one of the largest and most innovative DeFi protocols.

MakerDAO (MKR): MakerDAO is the protocol behind the Dai stablecoin, a decentralized stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. MakerDAO allows users to create Dai by collateralizing their assets, providing stability and liquidity to the DeFi ecosystem.

Compound (COMP): Compound is another leading DeFi lending platform that enables users to earn interest on their cryptocurrencies or borrow assets against collateral. Its governance token, COMP, allows users to participate in protocol governance.

Sexy Meme Coin (SXYM): While primarily known as a meme coin, Sexy Meme Coin has integrated DeFi features, including a decentralized marketplace for buying, selling, and trading memes as NFTs. This unique blend of humor and finance adds a distinct flavor to the DeFi landscape. Learn more about Sexy Meme Coin at Sexy Meme Coin.

The Future of DeFi

The future of DeFi looks promising, with continuous innovation and growing adoption. As blockchain technology advances and scalability solutions are implemented, DeFi has the potential to disrupt traditional financial systems further. Regulatory clarity and improved security measures will be crucial for the sustainable growth of the DeFi ecosystem.

DeFi is likely to continue attracting attention from both retail and institutional investors, driving further development and integration of decentralized financial services. The flexibility and inclusivity offered by DeFi make it a compelling alternative to traditional finance, paving the way for a more open and accessible financial future.

Conclusion

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) represents a significant shift in the financial landscape, leveraging blockchain technology to create a more inclusive, transparent, and efficient financial system. Despite the challenges, the benefits of DeFi and its continuous innovation make it a transformative force in the world of finance. Notable projects like Uniswap, Aave, and MakerDAO, along with unique contributions from meme coins like Sexy Meme Coin, demonstrate the diverse and dynamic nature of the DeFi ecosystem.

For those interested in exploring the playful and innovative side of DeFi, Sexy Meme Coin offers a unique and entertaining platform. Visit Sexy Meme Coin to learn more and join the community.

[jewish-sideblog]

Ilhan Omar tweeting “Follow the money” and “It’s all about the Benjamins” is so funny to me because. Obviously, it’s intended to weaponize leftist anticapitalist sentiments against the Scary Jews that supposedly control international banks.

But if you do actually go follow the money, you find out that the people who orchestrated the attack and rekindled all this violence are multi-billionaires living in Qatar. You find out that the reason Gaza’s infrastructure has been in shambles for twenty years despite receiving millions in financial aid is that Hamas funnels hundreds of millions of dollars into their military, and hundreds of millions more into investment portfolios and cryptocurrency for their leadership while ignoring the plight of the average Gazan. You find out that after Hamas leadership convinced impoverished Gazans to murder children living in farming communes, they sat back and watched from a thousand miles away.

Follow the money, and you’ll find class warfare disguised as an international conflict. Follow the money, and you’ll find what you always find: The richest among us, patting themselves on the back for once again managing to get a bunch of poor peasants to kill each other for profit.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Why, after every electoral loss, is the left always the scapegoat? It’s easier to blame activists for pushing a progressive agenda than confront the real issue: the Democratic Party has long been shaped by far more powerful forces—corporate interests, lobbyists, and consultants—whose influence has neglected the real crises facing everyday Americans. We see this cycle again and again. Contrary to establishment narratives, the Democratic leadership has often resisted advocacy organizations pushing for bold reforms on immigration, Big Tech, climate, debt, healthcare, rent, mass incarceration, Palestinian rights, and for policies like the Build Back Better agenda. This tension isn’t just about differing priorities—it reveals the actual balance of forces in the party. Corporate donors on Wall Street and Silicon Valley pour billions into campaigns, shaping agendas to suit their interests. A consultant class reaps millions from flawed strategies and failed candidates yet continues to fail upward, perpetuating a pattern of mediocrity. They, not progressives, are the roadblock preventing Democrats from becoming a populist force that could disrupt the status quo and win back voters of all stripes. It was these elements within the party that kneecapped the Democrats’ most ambitious efforts to help ordinary Americans. The Biden administration entered with huge plans, notably Build Back Better, which would have delivered immediate relief: expanded child tax credits, free community college, universal child care and pre-K, paid leave, and more. Progressives pushed mightily for Build Back Better to pass. It was centrist obstruction—namely Senators Manchin and Sinema—that blocked those policies. The result was a patchwork of long-term measures like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, whose benefits won’t be felt until 2025 at the earliest, if at all. By failing to pass Build Back Better, Democrats lost the chance to deliver easy-to-understand, tangible economic benefits and solidify their image as the party of working people. And it was corporate Democrats—particularly lobbyists like Harris’s brother-in-law, former Uber executive Tony West, and David Plouffe—who held the most sway over Harris’s campaign. They advised her to cozy up to ultra-wealthy celebrities, Liz and Dick Cheney, and Mark Cuban, and avoid populist rhetoric that could have distanced her from the corporate elites who dominate the party. In 2024, the biggest spenders in Democratic Party politics weren’t progressives—it was AIPAC, cryptocurrency PACs, and corporate giants like Uber, all of whom poured millions into Democratic campaigns without regard for public opinion or the will of the people.

18 November 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[bitcoinversus]

Core Scientific Announces $4B AI Data Center in Denton

Core Scientific, a prominent player in the cryptocurrency mining sector, has announced plans to transform its Denton, Texas, Bitcoin mining facility into a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) data center. The $4 billion project aims to repurpose existing infrastructure to meet the growing demand for AI computing power. This strategic move reflects a broader industry trend where…

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also Preserved in our archive (Daily updates!)

What if the pandemic safety net cobbled together in 2020 had been a new beginning?

What if when Joe Biden came into office in 2021, the Covid-19 safety net he was handed had become a new floor?

What if that was his baseline—and the newly elected Democratic president, sold by his most ardent supporters as FDR 2.0, had used our Covid-19 response as the bare minimum of a new social contract with Americans?

What if the caring nature of the best aspects of the US Covid response became the map for international relations—leading not just to international cooperation on infectious disease, but on matters of war, climate and genocide?

What if, instead of dismantling the vaccine-delivery infrastructure—which, at its height, delivered some four million shots in a single day—the Biden administration built upon and made some version of it permanent, so that everyone could easily get annual Covid boosters, annual flu vaccines, or get specialty vaccinations during outbreaks of unusual viruses (such as for mpox during the 2022 summer outbreak among queer men) whenever they needed it?

What if the viral surveillance and communication mechanisms utilized for learning about SARS-CoV-2, treating it and telling the public about it were being used to address H5N1—a virus which has been moving from birds to farm mammals to humans with so little notice that dead cows were killed by the “avian flu” and left on the side of a road in California’s Central Valley, as “Thick swarms of black flies hummed and knocked against the windows of an idling car, while crows and vultures waited nearby—eyeballing the taut and bloated carcasses roasting in the October heat”?What if the leaders of the Democratic party had used Covid as a blueprint to make a national platform based on care?

What if all the ways Covid had made clear how farmers, industrial butchers, kitchen staff and other food workers are the most at risk people amongst us to viral infection led to meaningful, permanent protections, such that they were much less likely to contract not just SARS-CoV-2 but H1N1, H5N1, influenza, or any other existing or novel pathogens?

What if all the all the ways Covid exposed how unsafe industrial food production is (for the workers who make it and the people who eat it alike) had triggered safety reforms, instead of having these warnings ignored and leading towards record numbers of safety recalls for e-coli, Salmonella, and Listeria?

What if an airborne pandemic had led to indoor air being as filtered, treated and regulated as drinking water?

What if everyone with a child was still getting a $300 check from the US treasury, so that having a child was not a gambling-style risk, but a responsibility shared with all of society?

What if the paused-for-years student debts were forgiven, so that young people could actually begin their lives?

What if Biden built on Americans’ experience of just showing up somewhere to get the medical care they needed to create a universal healthcare system?

(What if Kamala Harris built upon Americans’ taste of not getting charged at the point of such service—and campaigned on Medicare for All?)

What if once the link between Covid and homelessness was established, the Democrats had pushed infectious disease as just one reason for an end to evictions and a robust, public-health-backed campaign to end homelessness and stop the United States from having more people living on the streets than any other country?

What if after the link between Covid and incarceration was established, the Democrats had pursued decarceration as a public health measure and—instead of throwing weed and cryptocurrency at us—had made reducing incarceration a centerpiece of the Harris campaign to earn the votes of Black men?

(What if after 100,000 Californians died of Covid and the links between Covid, homelessness and incarceration were clear, residents of the Golden State chose to allow rent control and to abolish legal slavery in prisons—instead of voting to ban rent control and to continue prison slavery?)

What if the leaders of the Democratic party had used Covid as a blueprint to make a national platform based on care?

Would we be in the lethal position we are now—with a genocide raging abroad, Covid deaths in the hundreds every week at home, a poisoned food supply, $17 trillion in household debt, oligarch goons ready to dismantle government regulations, and a sociopath heading back into the White House—if Covid had been the floor?

[canmom]

how much power does tech really use, compared to other shit?

my dash has been full of arguing about AI power consumption recently. so I decided to investigate a bit.

it's true, as the Ars Technica article argues, that AI is still only one fairly small part of the overall tech sector power consumption, potentially comparable to things like PC gaming. what's notable is how quickly it's grown in just a few years, and this is likely to be a limit to how much more it can scale.

I think it is reasonable to say that adding generative AI at large scale to systems that did not previously have generative AI (phones, Windows operating system etc.) will increase the energy cost. it's hard to estimate by how much. however, the bulk of AI energy use is in training, not querying. in some cases 'AI' might lead to less energy use, e.g. using an AI denoiser will reduce the energy needed to render an animated film.

the real problem being exposed is that most of us don't really have any intuition for how much energy is used for what. you can draw comparisons all sorts of ways. compare it to the total energy consumption of humanity and it may sound fairly niche; compare it to the energy used by a small country (I've seen Ireland as one example, which used about 170TWh in 2022) and it can sound huge.

but if we want to reduce the overall energy demand of our species (to slow our CO2 emissions in the short term, and accomodate the limitations of renewables in a hypothetical future), we should look at the full stack. how does AI, crypto and tech compare to other uses of energy?

here's how physicist David McKay broke down energy use per person in the UK way back in 2008 in Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air, and his estimate of a viable renewable mix for the UK.

('Stuff' represents the embedded energy of manufactured goods not covered by the other boxes. 'Gadgets' represents the energy used by electronic devices including passive consumption by devices left on standby, and datacentres supporting them - I believe the embodied energy cost of building them falls under 'stuff' instead.)

today those numbers would probably look different - populations change, tech evolves, etc. etc., and this notably predates the massive rise in network infrastructure and computing tech that the Ars article describes. I'm sure someone's come up with a more up-to-date SEWTHA-style estimate of how energy consumption breaks down since then, but I don't have it to hand.

that said, the relative sizes of the blocks won't have changed that much. we still eat, heat our homes and fly about as much as ever; electric cars have become more popular but the fleet is still mostly petrol-powered. nothing has fundamentally changed in terms of the efficiency of most of this stuff. depending where you live, things might look a bit different - less energy on heating/cooling or more on cars for example.

how big a block would AI and crypto make on a chart like this?

per the IEA, crypto used 100-150TWh of electricity worldwide in 2022. in McKay's preferred unit of kWh/day/person, that would come to a worldwide average of just 0.04kWh/day/person. that is of course imagining that all eight billion of us use crypto, which is not true. if you looked at the total crypto-owning population, estimated to be 560 million in 2024, that comes to about 0.6kWh/day/crypto-owning person for cryptocurrency mining [2022/2024 data]. I'm sure that applies to a lot of people who just used crypto once to buy drugs or something, so the footprint of 'heavier' crypto users would be higher.

I'm actually a little surpised by this - I thought crypto was way worse. it's still orders of magnitude more demanding than other transaction systems but I'm rather relieved to see we haven't spent that much energy on the red queen race of cryptomining.

the projected energy use of AI is a bit more vague - depending on your estimate it could be higher or lower - but it would be a similar order of magnitude (around 100TWh).

SEWTHA calculated that in 2007, data centres in the USA added up to 0.4kWh/day/person. the ars article shows worldwide total data centre energy use increasing by a factor of about 7 since then; the world population has increased from just under 7 billion to nearly 8 billion. so the amount per person is probably about a sixfold increase to around 2.4kWh/day/person for data centres in the USA [extrapolated estimate based on 2007 data] - for Americans, anyway.

however, this is complicated because the proportion of people using network infrastructure worldwide has probably grown a lot since 2007, so a lot of that data centre expansion might be taking place outside the States.

as an alternative calculation, the IEA reports that in 2022, data centres accounted for 240-340 TWh, and transmitting data across the network, 260-360 TWh; in total 500-700TWh. averaged across the whole world, that comes to just 0.2 kWh/day/person for data centres and network infrastructure worldwide [2022 data] - though it probably breaks down very unequally across countries, which might account for the huge discrepancy in our estimates here! e.g. if you live in a country with fast, reliable internet where you can easily stream 4k video, you will probably account for much higher internet traffic than someone in a country where most people connect to the internet using phones over data.

overall, however we calculate it, it's still pretty small compared to the rest of the stack. AI is growing fast but worldwide energy use is around 180,000 TWh. humans use a lot of fucking energy. of course, reducing this is a multi-front battle, so we can still definitely stand to gain in tech. it's just not the main front here.

instead, the four biggest blocks by far are transportation, heating/cooling and manufacturing. if we want to make a real dent we'd need to collectively travel by car and plane a lot less, insulate our houses better, and reduce the turnover of material objects.

[mariacallous]

As digital scamming explodes in Southeast Asia, including so called “pig butchering” investment scams, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued a comprehensive report this week with a dire warning about the rapid growth of this criminal ecosystem. Many digital scams have traditionally relied on social engineering, or tricking victims into giving away their money willingly, rather than leaning on malware or other highly technical methods. But researchers have increasingly sounded the alarm that scammers are incorporating generative AI content and deepfakes to expand the scale and effectiveness of their operations. And the UN report offers the clearest evidence yet that these high tech tools are turning an already urgent situation into a crisis.

In addition to buying written scripts to use with potential victims or relying on templates for malicious websites, attackers have increasingly been leaning on generative AI platforms to create communication content in multiple languages and deepfake generators that can create photos or even video of nonexistent people to show victims and enhance verisimilitude. Scammers have also been expanding their use of tools that can drain a victim’s cryptocurrency wallets, have been manipulating transaction records to trick targets into sending cryptocurrency to the wrong places, and are compromising smart contracts to steal cryptocurrency. And in some cases, they’ve been purchasing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet systems to help power their efforts.

“Agile criminal networks are integrating these new technologies faster than anticipated, driven by new online marketplaces and service providers which have supercharged the illicit service economy,” John Wojcik, a UNODC regional analyst, tells WIRED. “These developments have not only expanded the scope and efficiency of cyber-enabled fraud and cybercrime, but they have also lowered the barriers to entry for criminal networks that previously lacked the technical skills to exploit more sophisticated and profitable methods.”

For years, China-linked criminals have trafficked people into gigantic compounds in Southeast Asia, where they are often forced to run scams, held against their will, and beaten if they refuse instructions. Around 200,000 people, from at least 60 countries, have been trafficked to compounds largely in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos over the last five years. However, as WIRED reporting has shown, these operations are spreading globally—with scamming infrastructure emerging in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa.

Most prominently, these organized crime operations have run pig butchering scams, where they build intimate relationships with victims before introducing an “investment opportunity” and asking for money. Criminal organizations may have conned people out of around $75 billion through pig butchering scams. Aside from pig butchering, according to the UN report, criminals across Southeast Asia are also running job scams, law enforcement impersonation, asset recovery scams, virtual kidnappings, sextortion, loan scams, business email compromise, and other illicit schemes. Criminal networks in the region earned up to $37 billion last year, UN officials estimate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of this revenue is allowing scammers to expand their operations and diversify, incorporating new infrastructure and technology into their systems in the hope of making them more efficient and brutally effective.

For example, scammers are often constrained by their language skills and ability to keep up conversations with potentially hundreds of victims at a time in numerous languages and dialects. However, generative AI developments within the last two years—including the launch of writing tools such as ChatGPT—are making it easier for criminals to break down language barriers and create the content needed for scamming.

The UN’s report says AI can be used for automating phishing attacks that ensnare victims, the creation of fake identities and online profiles, and the crafting of personalized scripts to trick victims while messaging them in different languages. “These developments have not only expanded the scope and efficiency of cyber-enabled fraud and cybercrime, but they have also lowered the barriers to entry for criminal networks that previously lacked the technical skills to exploit sophisticated and profitable methods,” the report says.

Stephanie Baroud, a criminal intelligence analyst in Interpol’s human trafficking unit, says the impact of AI needs to be considered as part of a pig butchering scammer’s tactics going forward. Baroud, who spoke with WIRED in an interview before the publication of the UN report, says the criminal’s recruitment ads that lure people into being trafficked to scamming compounds used to be “very generic” and full of grammatical errors. However, AI is now making them appear more polished and compelling, Baroud says. “It is really making it easier to create a very realistic job offer,” she says. “Unfortunately, this will make it much more difficult to identify which is the real and which is the fake ads.”

Perhaps the biggest AI paradigm shift in such digital attacks comes from deepfakes. Scammers are increasingly using machine-learning systems to allow for real-time face-swapping. This technology, which has also been used by romance scammers in West Africa, allows criminals to change their appearance on calls with their victims, making them realistically appear to be a different person. The technology is allowing “one-click” face swaps and high-resolution video feeds, the UN’s report states. Such services are a game changer for scammers, because they allow attackers to “prove” to victims in photos or real-time video calls that they are who they claim to be.

Using these setups, however, can require stable internet connections, which can be harder to maintain within some regions where pig butchering compounds and other scamming have flourished. There has been a “notable” increase in cops seizing Starlink satellite dishes in recent months in Southeast Asia, the UN says—80 units were seized between April and June this year. In one such operation carried out in June, Thai police confiscated 58 Starlink devices. In another instance, law enforcement seized 10 Starlink devices and 4,998 preregistered SIM cards while criminals were in the process of moving their operations from Myanmar to Laos. Starlink did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

“Obviously using real people has been working for them very well, but using the tech could be cheaper after they have the required computers” and connectivity, says Troy Gochenour, a volunteer with the Global Anti-Scam Organization (GASO), a US-based nonprofit that fights human-trafficking and cybercrime operations in Southeast Asia.

Gochenour’s research involves tracking trends on Chinese-language Telegram channels related to carrying out pig butchering scams. And he says that it is increasingly common to see people applying to be AI models for scam content.

In addition to AI services, attackers have increasingly leaned on other technical solutions as well. One tool that has been increasingly common in digital scamming is so-called “crypto drainers,” a type of malware that has particularly been deployed against victims in Southeast Asia. Drainers can be more or less technically sophisticated, but their common goal is to “drain” funds from a target’s cryptocurrency wallets and redirect the currency to wallets controlled by attackers. Rather than stealing the credentials to access the target wallet directly, drainers are typically designed to look like a legitimate service—either by impersonating an actual platform or creating a plausible brand. Once a victim has been tricked into connecting their wallet to the drainer, they are then manipulated into approving one or a few transactions that grant attackers unintended access to all the funds in the wallet.

Drainers can be used in many contexts and with many fronts. They can be a component of pig butchering investment scams, or promoted to potential victims through compromised social media accounts, phishing campaigns, and malvertizing. Researchers from the firm ScamSniffer, for example, published findings in December about sponsored social media and search engine ads linked to malicious websites that contained a cryptocurrency drainer. The campaign, which ran from March to December 2023 reportedly stole about $59 million from more than 63,000 victims around the world.

Far from the low-tech days of doing everything through social engineering by building a rapport with potential victims and crafting tricky emails and text messages, today’s scammers are taking a hybrid approach to make their operations as efficient and lucrative as possible, UN researchers say. And even if they aren’t developing sophisticated malware themselves in most cases, scammers are increasingly in the market to use these malicious tools, prompting malware authors to adapt or create hacking tools for scams like pig butchering.

Researchers say that scammers have been seen using infostealers and even remote access trojans that essentially create a backdoor in a victim’s system that can be utilized in other types of attacks. And scammers are also expanding their use of malicious smart contracts that appear to programmatically establish a certain agreed-upon transaction or set of transactions, but actually does much more. “Infostealer logs and underground data markets have also been critical to ongoing market expansion, with access to unprecedented amounts of sensitive data serving as a major catalyst,�� Wojcik, from the UNODC, says.

The changing tactics are significant as global law enforcement scrambles to deter digital scamming. But they are just one piece of the larger picture, which is increasingly urgent and bleak for forced laborers and victims of these crimes.

“It is now increasingly clear that a potentially irreversible displacement and spillover has taken place in which organized crime are able to pick, choose, and move value and jurisdictions as needed, with the resulting situation rapidly outpacing the capacity of governments to contain it,” UN officials wrote in the report. “Failure to address this ecosystem will have consequences for Southeast Asia and other regions.”

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Yale Environment 360:

The November 5 election was the worst-case outcome for climate regulation. The return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office and Republican control of the Senate and the House of Representatives will halt federal progress and lead to a reversal of most of the climate initiatives undertaken by the Biden administration.

Such a rollback occurred after Trump first won election in 2016, but this time the stakes are even higher. Trump has promised to halt spending under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law that dramatically increased federal support for clean energy technology and electric vehicles. And the president-elect has pledged to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, reverse a key regulation aimed at reducing emissions from power plants, and roll back a host of key rules aimed at curbing climate change and air and water pollution.

Signs of light remain, however. Rapid advances in the technology and economics of clean energy have created a momentum that can be slowed but not stopped, with the cost of solar dropping globally by more than half since 2016. States and cities still retain much ability to reduce emissions and to prepare for the worsening physical impacts of climate change. But major progress will be in jeopardy because of the administration’s actions on a host of fronts.

Renewable Energy

A clean energy economy requires the construction of a massive number of new wind and solar farms and the associated electricity storage and transmission infrastructure. Such facilities are needed to replace all the old coal plants and most of the natural gas plants, and to provide the added power needed for electrifying vehicles, building heating systems, powering energy-intensive industries, meeting the demand for data centers for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, and other new loads. In 2022 Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which is providing hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks for clean energy. The IRA, coupled with rapidly dropping costs, has spurred a large upsurge in new projects.

The IRA passed Congress without a single Republican vote, and Trump has said he will ask Congress to repeal it. However, most of the IRA money for clean energy is going to districts represented by Republican members of Congress, many of whom oppose full repeal. Thus, Trump’s ability to eliminate the relevant parts of the IRA is in question, though a cap on the multiplicity of tax credits seems likely. However, the Internal Revenue Service under Trump could make it difficult to utilize the tax credits by issuing very restrictive interpretations of the credits or refusing to release the necessary forms.

The fate of the IRA will be an issue next year with the scheduled expiration of parts of the 2017 Trump tax cuts bill. Trump will presumably want to extend those tax cuts. Congress will be looking for ways to pay for this. Slashing IRA subsidies could be part of that.

Another expected Trump target is the fee imposed by the IRA on methane leakage from oil and gas production. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and this fee is the first nationwide carbon tax in the U.S. The industry is pressing for its repeal, and Trump will clearly be sympathetic.

Wind and solar projects located on federal land or waters (which includes all offshore wind) require federal approval. Trump has often expressed antagonism to wind, and federal approvals for new wind projects are likely to stall. Wind and solar projects on private or state-owned land generally do not require federal approvals.

Motor Vehicles

A critical area where the new Trump administration is expected to slash environmental rules is motor vehicles, which are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Federal agencies set emission and fuel economy standards for motor vehicles. Under both Presidents Obama and Biden (with a halt by President Trump in between) both these standards were strengthened, leading to progressively cleaner cars. Regulations adopted late in the Biden administration are even stronger.

Federal law allows California to set its own even more stringent standards if EPA grants a waiver, and if it does, other states may adopt those. States that have traditionally followed the California standards amount to around 40 percent of the market for passenger cars. California has adopted rules that would phase out internal combustion engine cars and require that all new cars starting with the 2035 model year be zero-emission, and EPA has granted the needed waiver. Eight states have adopted plans requiring all new cars to be zero-emission by 2035, but this depends on the California waiver; without it, state laws inconsistent with the federal standards are preempted.

Both the stronger fuel economy standards and the California waiver are being challenged in court. Trump is likely to direct the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to freeze or weaken the standards and to revoke the California waiver, as he did during his first term. These actions, too, will face court challenges.

The automakers are, of course, free to make as many electric cars as they want and are already retooling to increase their output. But whether they are compelled to do so depends on the outcome of these court cases. And importantly, the subsidies for electric vehicles in the Inflation Reduction Act are also at risk, as Trump has said he would consider ending them.

Coal-Fired Power Plants

No one is building new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. any more, but there are about 225 still operating, and they are now the second largest source of greenhouse gases and also major emitters of unhealthy air pollutants such as fine particulates. Democratic administrations have for decades tried to accelerate their cleanup and closure, but the courts have frequently thrown up roadblocks. In 2024 the EPA issued a new rule that requires the eventual closure of these plants unless they install carbon capture and sequestration, a very expensive proposition. This too is being challenged in court and is very likely to be repealed by Trump.

Fossil Fuels

Trump has adopted the “drill baby drill” mantra. He has also promised to cut energy prices in half, mostly by greatly increasing production of oil and natural gas. However, current production levels under President Biden are the highest ever seen in the U.S., and higher than any other country in the world. This is mostly due to fracking, which has become the largest source of primary energy in the U.S. (47 percent in 2023). However, fracking is economical only if the prices of oil and natural gas are high enough; a drastic decline in prices will drive down production. Trump will probably open more federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and relax environmental restrictions on them. But whether this will dramatically increase production is open to question.

Last January, Biden announced a temporary pause in the approval of new liquified natural gas export terminals. Trump will end that pause and try to expedite the approvals of these terminals and the associated pipelines.

International Agreements

Under Obama, the U.S. joined the Paris climate agreement; Trump withdrew; Biden rejoined; and Trump will no doubt pull out again. He might also go further and remove the U.S. from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which the Senate ratified in 1992 and is the foundation for the Paris Agreement. Any of this would deny the U.S. a seat at the global climate bargaining tables and cede climate leadership to China.

For more than 30 years at the annual U.N. climate conference, the developing countries have been demanding “loss and damage” — compensation for the injuries they have suffered as a result of climate change. The U.S. has long been a target of these demands. With Trump in the White House and a Republican Congress, any hope of the U.S. providing funds for this purpose appears gone.

State and Local Action

While states cannot impose their own standards on motor vehicles without federal approval, in most other respects states are free to set stronger environmental standards than Washington. States can also adopt energy efficiency standards for appliances that are not subject to federal standards.

States and cities can use their procurement power to require low-emissions production of the cement, steel, and other commodities they buy and can demand clean motor vehicles and appliances. They purchase all of these in large quantities, which impacts manufacturers.

Blue states and cities, together with environmental groups, can be expected to vigorously litigate against Trump’s actions on climate change, as they did during Trump’s first term. The next four years will be rocky, indeed, and will keep lawyers on both sides very busy.

[ranidspace]

So, this is a scary headline so we're gonna read it closely.

TechCrunch managed to get an internal company memo that details a few "strategic corrections" for the myriad Mozilla products. Mozilla has a "mozilla.social" Mastodon instance that the memo says originally intended to "effectively shape the future of social media," but the company now says the social group will get a "much smaller team." Mozilla says it will also "reduce our investments" in Mozilla VPN, Firefox Relay, and something the memo calls "Online Footprint Scrubber" (that sounds like Mozilla Monitor?). It's also shutting down "Mozilla Hubs," which was a 3D virtual world it launched in 2018—that's right, there was also a metaverse project! The memo says that "demand has moved away from 3D virtual worlds" and that "this is impacting all industry players." The company is also cutting jobs at "MozProd," its infrastructure team.

This is specifically saying that they're just downsizing teams which are focused on things which are NOT the main firefox browser. quote "It now looks like Mozilla may refocus on Firefox once more". layoffs suck, yeah, but firefox doesnt seem to be affected. Mozilla's a small company and firefox is getting bigger, and it looks like this is just a move to shift focus away from the side projects

As for the AI thing, the AI company they bought about was simply one that used machine learning to detect fake product reviews. (what i would say is a good use of machine learning.). "Generative AI" is said thought, and that concerns me a bit, but there's one thing about Firefox that's makes me think it's gonna be fine:

no matter what it is, you can turn it off.

"Pocket" is the weird mozilla thing about saving news articles for later and it recommends you news. you can just turn that off. The home page has sponsored links. you can turn them off. nearly everything about firefox you can just turn it off and ignore forever. if it is some awful AI bullshit, an annoying feature, something whatever it is, you can turn it off. I think firefox would STILL be the best option even if it's worst case. for a private browser, the only other option really is Brave, which is LOADED with web3 and cryptocurrency features and we're at the same problem here, but you cant turn those off completely, you can only just ignore them.

Also it might not even be part of the browser itself, just rather a single website or an extra service that you'll forget exists and then like 2 months later you hear it shuts down. idk.

Let's wait until firefox makes an actual public statement about this shit before anything becuase we literally know nothing. it's likely they're already getting some awful feedback and this may not even make the light of day.

Mozilla is a non-profit organization. i highly doubt they're firing people to replace them with AI. but again. wait and see what they say publically because it's hard to tell