* Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.*

In this article, the list of evils that the VC foist on society is incomplete. "Depending on computing done by programs that the users do not control" is another evil, not mentioned in the article's list. It includes inducing people to run nonfree programs and inducing them to entrust their computing to company's servers.

People overlook this because they have not learned to recognize how it (1) is unjust in itself and (2) makes the other recognized abuses possible.

Scholastic, the main publisher of books (other than textbooks) for students in the US, has reversed its decision to put books with queer characters into a separate catalog.

That decision was aimed at avoiding conflict with right-wing censorship. Reversing the decision means Scholastic will confront the censors head-on. That has a chance of damaging SCROTUS, and since SCROTUS is dead set on wrecking democracy and religious freedom in the US, any damage to SCROTUS has a chance of saving them.

The EU is drawing up a directive to restrict "artificial intelligence".

I get the impression that this directive will also cover machine learning systems. It may be a good thing for the directive to cover those systems, although it is very bad to refer to them as "intelligence".

artificial intelligence item in

The restrictions on facial recognition and emotional recognition are a good start, but I expect they will not go far enough; that they will allow those technologies to be used in ways that would circumvent and defeat the supposed limitations.

The article suggests that AI may be used as an excuse to make copyright more restrictive, over activities that have never been restricted by copyright as long as human beings have done them.

US workers have become far more eager to organize, and far more ready to strike. They are winning substantial pay increases.

An Australian company aims to produce large quantities of hydrogen by electrolysis. hydrogen by electrolysis.

The other part that's necessary is enough renewable electric generation to run that much electrolysis.