Technology

Around 300 London-based tech employees of Google's AI arm, have sought to join the Communication Workers Union in recent weeks, according to three people briefed on the move.

The move to unionise follows growing discontent at Deep Mind after Google dropped a pledge in February not to develop AI technologies that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm”

Three people involved with the unionisation drive said media reports that Google is selling its cloud services and AI technology to the Israeli Ministry of Defence has also caused disquiet

There's an infamous anti-piracy advertisement from back in 2004 that online oldsters will immediately recognize: "You wouldn't steal a car," it begins, complete with shakycam footage of some sketchy looking dude popping a lock, before rolling into various other types of theft and eventually equating it all with downloading a copy of Shrek 2. The ad makes it dramatically clear: Stealing Shrek will get you hard time in the slam when you're inevitably busted for your criminal ways.

It was, and is, overwrought and silly, and so of course it inspired numerous parodies and memes: The British comedy series The IT Crowd did a particularly good one a few years after the original aired—in fact the old URL, piracyisacrime.com, now directs to The IT Crowd Clip on YouTube. I urge you to watch it. The ad itself was only around for a short time, but "you wouldn't download a car" has endured in shitpost form for decades; it's practically embedded in the fabric of the internet at this point.

But as good as many of these parodies are, none are as ridiculous (and funny) as the recent discovery that the world's best-known anti-piracy ad may have used a pirated font.

The distinctive font used in the ad appears to be FF Confidential, created by Just van Rossum in 1992. But there's another font called XBand Rough that's virtually identical, and when journalist Melissa Lewis reached out to van Rossum about it, he told her XBand Rough is an "illegal clone" of FF Confidential.

This is where it gets interesting. After all this, another Bluesky user named Rib used the FontForge tool on a PDF file from the old anti-piracy campaign, available via the Wayback Machine, and discovered the file in question uses the XBand Rough font—the clone.

From their own internal metrics, tech giants have long known what independent research now continuously validates: that the content that is most likely to go viral is that which induces strong feelings such as outrage and disgust, regardless of its underlying veracity. Moreover, they also know that such content is heavily engaged with and most profitable. Far from acting against false, harmful content, they placed profits above its staggering—and damaging—social impact to implicitly encourage it while downplaying the massive costs.

Social media titans embrace essentially the same hypocrisy the tobacco industry embodied when they feigned concern over harm reduction while covertly pushing their product ever more aggressively. With the reelection of Trump, our tech giants now no longer even pretend to care.

Engagement is their business model, and doubt about the harms they cause is their product. Tobacco executives, and their bought-off scientists, once proclaimed uncertainty over links between cigarettes and lung cancer. Zuckerberg has likewise testified to Congress, “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health, ” even while studies find self-harm, eating disorder and misogynistic material spreads on these platform unimpeded. This equivocation echoes protestations of tobacco companies that there was no causal evidence of smoking harms, even as incontrovertible evidence to the contrary rapidly amassed.

At least in the U.S. and Canada, that is.

This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post where a user (presumably a resident of Canada), had posted how Lenovo was shipping laptops with Fedora and Ubuntu at a cheaper price compared to their Windows-equipped counterparts.

Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big price difference shows how ridiculous Windows' pricing is.

When I dug in further, I found out that the US and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives.

I think these manufacturers could do a better job in marketing these Linux-based alternative operating systems to general consumers, showing them how they can save big when opting for these instead of the pricey and bloated Windows.

website to create songs from meme sounds and emoji on pad

it looked something like this

Article mentions, briefly or more substantially:

• Lemmy
• Mastodon
• Retroshare
• Nostr
• Bluesky
• ZeroNet
• Secure Scuttlebutt
• Tor onion sites
• etc

Not my article, just one I found.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62370804

Range

• Small battery range: 240km
• Big battery range: 385km

Motor

• Motor: Single motor, rear wheel drive
• Power: 150kW
• Torque: 264Nm
• 0-100km: 8s
• Top speed: 145km/h

Dimensions

• Bed length: 1.5m
• Vehicle length: 4.4m
• Vehicle height: 1.8m
• Vehicle width: 1.8m

Comparison

• 2025 Kia Niro length: 4.4m
• 2025 Ford Maverick length: 5.1m
• 1985 Toyota Pickup/Hilux length: 4.7m

Weights

• Curb weight 1634kg
• Max payload 650kg
• Max towing 454kg

Charging

• Port: NACS
• Onboard charger: 11kW
• Level 1 AC, 3.6kw, 20-100%: 11h
• Level 2 AC, 11kW, 20-100%: under 5h
• Level 3 DC, 120kW, 20-80%: under 30m

Safety

• Traction Control
• Electronic Stability Control
• Forward Collision Warning
• Automatic Emergency Braking
• 2-stage Driver/Passenger Airbags
• Full Length Side Curtain Airbags (Truck 2) (SUV 4)
• Seat Side Airbags (2)
• Backup Camera
• Pedestrian Identification
• Auto High Beam

More info

• https://www.slate.auto/en/faq
• https://www.slate.auto/api/contentful/download?entryId=qvGTtGysiBEP2JW8jM7GR

Ziff Davis, the owner of several digital outlets like CNET, PCMag, IGN, and Everyday Health, is suing OpenAI over claims of copyright infringement, as first reported by The New York Times. In the lawsuit, the digital media company accuses OpenAI of “intentionally and relentlessly” creating “exact copies” of its outlets’ works without permission. The company also alleges that OpenAI trained its AI models on its work despite Ziff Davis instructing web crawlers not to scrape its data using a robots.txt file, adding that OpenAI allegedly removed copyright information from the content it sucks up.

"Key Points

• Alphabet reported Thursday that Waymo, its autonomous vehicle unit, is now delivering more than 250,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in the U.S.
• That figure is up from 200,000 in February, before Waymo opened in Austin and expanded in the San Francisco Bay Area in March.
• Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Waymo is building partnerships with ride-hailing app Uber, automakers and operations and maintenance businesses that tend to its vehicle fleets."

Archived link: https://archive.ph/Vjl1M

Here’s a nice little distraction from your workday: Head to Google, type in any made-up phrase, add the word “meaning,” and search. Behold! Google’s AI Overviews will not only confirm that your gibberish is a real saying, it will also tell you what it means and how it was derived.

This is genuinely fun, and you can find lots of examples on social media. In the world of AI Overviews, “a loose dog won't surf” is “a playful way of saying that something is not likely to happen or that something is not going to work out.” The invented phrase “wired is as wired does” is an idiom that means “someone's behavior or characteristics are a direct result of their inherent nature or ‘wiring,’ much like a computer's function is determined by its physical connections.”

It all sounds perfectly plausible, delivered with unwavering confidence. Google even provides reference links in some cases, giving the response an added sheen of authority. It’s also wrong, at least in the sense that the overview creates the impression that these are common phrases and not a bunch of random words thrown together. And while it’s silly that AI Overviews thinks “never throw a poodle at a pig” is a proverb with a biblical derivation, it’s also a tidy encapsulation of where generative AI still falls short.