from Turbulences

Chacun dans sa bulle, Confortable cocon, De fausses certitudes.

Mais à quel prix ? Car si le risque nous effraie, La sécurité, elle, est bien triste.

L’autre est là, juste à coté. Nous pourrions lui parler. Entrer en relation, échanger.

Mais que va-t-il penser ? Et s’il n’était pas comme nous ? Et s’il ne pensais pas comme nous ?

Alors nous voilà coincés. Incapables d’avancer, Par l’incertitude, tétanisés.

Il faudrait oser. Prendre le risque d’échouer. Mais nous n’y sommes pas prêts.

Alors nous scrollons, Alors nous nous cachons. Derrière des écrans de fausses solutions.

 
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from DrFox

Quand le film “Barbie” est sorti, la lecture dominante a été immédiate. Émancipation. Réveil féminin. Fin d’un ordre ancien. Beaucoup ont applaudi en pensant assister à une sortie du système. En regardant le film, j’ai eu une impression inverse. Barbie ne sort pas d’un système. Elle change de registre à l’intérieur du même monde.

Ce qui est présenté comme une libération ressemble davantage à un déplacement du point de contrôle. Avant, le centre de gravité se situait dans le couple, dans la sphère domestique, dans la relation affective directe. Ensuite, il se déplace vers des structures plus larges, économiques, juridiques, sociales, politiques. La contrainte devient moins visible, plus abstraite, plus légitimée. Elle s’inscrit dans le fonctionnement général de la société. Ce déplacement est célébré parce qu’il est compatible avec l’ordre collectif actuel.

Psychiquement, pourtant, la structure ne se transforme pas en profondeur. La dépendance ne disparaît pas. Elle change simplement d’objet. Là où la reconnaissance, la sécurité et l’identité passaient par la relation, elles passent désormais par l’autonomie financière, la validation sociale, l’inscription institutionnelle. La société y gagne. Le couple, lui, encaisse le choc.

Beaucoup n’ont pas compris pourquoi certains gestes, pourtant présentés comme neutres ou progressistes, ont été vécus comme violents dans les relations. Ouvrir un compte bancaire séparé. Se penser d’abord comme individu économique. Ces actes ne sont pas agressifs en soi. Ils déplacent néanmoins le lieu symbolique de la sécurité. Et lorsqu’un tel déplacement n’est pas intégré à deux, il fissure la structure du lien.

La société a choisi de regarder surtout les violences visibles. Les abus manifestes. Les situations où les hommes profitaient clairement des femmes. Elles existent, bien sûr. Mais en se focalisant uniquement sur ces cas, on a rendu invisibles des milliers de couples ordinaires, ni idéaux ni toxiques, qui se sont disloqués sous l’effet d’un changement de cadre plus large qu’eux.

Dans ce mouvement, Ken perd quelque chose. Au début, il est triste. Il perd une fonction. Son identité reposait sur ce qu’il apportait à Barbie. Il existait comme rôle. Il soutenait un monde qui lui donnait, en retour, une place claire. Quand ce monde se déplace, ce rôle s’effondre.

Ce moment est souvent lu comme une humiliation masculine. J’y vois plutôt une crise de désidentification. Quand on retire à quelqu’un la fonction qui le définissait, il se retrouve face à un vide. Ken traverse cette phase. Il cherche ailleurs une structure. Il imite. Il caricature. Il tente de reconstruire une cohérence à partir de modèles grossiers. Ce n’est ni ridicule ni pathologique. C’est un passage.

Puis quelque chose s’opère. Ken comprend que son existence ne peut plus dépendre de ce qu’il apporte à une femme. Et c’est là que le paradoxe apparaît. En changeant de registre, Barbie modifie profondément l’image que Ken a de lui-même. Avant, il était un objet fonctionnel dans son monde. Pas par cruauté. Par structure. Il servait à soutenir, à admirer, à faire tenir l’architecture affective.

En cessant d’avoir besoin de lui de cette façon, Barbie retire à Ken la possibilité de se définir uniquement par le don. C’est violent. Et c’est structurant en même temps. Ken devient progressivement individué. Il cesse d’exister par utilité relationnelle. Il commence à exister par cohérence interne. Il découvre qu’il peut aimer sans se perdre. Être présent sans s’annuler. Contribuer sans se définir par cette contribution.

Rien de spectaculaire. Le geste extérieur reste semblable. La source intérieure change. Ken ne s’occupe plus d’une femme pour être quelqu’un. Il s’en occupe parce que c’est une expression libre de ce qu’il est devenu.

À ce stade, personne ne gagne vraiment. Barbie n’accède pas à une liberté absolue. Elle entre dans un système plus vaste, plus impersonnel, avec ses propres exigences et ses propres coûts. Ken ne devient pas dominant. Il devient plus seul, puis plus solide. Chacun paie le prix de l’individuation.

Ken n’avait plus besoin d’être choisi pour exister. Barbie n’avait plus besoin d’être soutenue pour se sentir réelle. À partir de là, rester ensemble aurait demandé un nouveau contrat relationnel. La société aime les récits où tout se transforme sans casse. Où les individus évoluent et restent ensemble. Dans la réalité, certaines relations ne survivent pas à la transformation de ceux qui les composent. Et ce n’est ni un échec ni une trahison. C’est une mise en cohérence tardive.

Dans cette lecture, la fin de Ken et Barbie n’est pas une défaite amoureuse. C’est la reconnaissance que certains liens appartiennent à un monde précis. Et que les maintenir artificiellement, quand le monde a changé, coûte plus cher que de les laisser se terminer proprement.

Et c’est peut-être là que le film dit quelque chose de plus juste que ce qu’on a voulu entendre. Certaines histoires ne sont pas faites pour durer. Elles sont faites pour transformer. Dans laquelle êtes-vous ?

 
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from Douglas Vandergraph

There is a quiet moment that almost everyone knows, even if they have never named it, when the world finally goes still enough for the mind to speak. It is often late at night, or in the early morning before the day has begun to demand anything from us, when the internal conversation that never truly stops begins to grow louder. It is in those moments that we realize how much of our life is being shaped not by what is happening around us, but by what is happening within us. Thoughts start to drift, memories resurface, and imagined futures unfold, and before we know it, we are no longer sitting in a room but standing in a hundred possible tomorrows that may never arrive. Some of those tomorrows feel hopeful, but far too many of them feel heavy, uncertain, and frightening, because our minds have been trained to lean toward the worst.

We do not start out this way. No child wakes up imagining how everything could fall apart. A child imagines how everything could become something beautiful. They picture adventures, friendships, joy, and possibility. But as we grow older, disappointment begins to reshape the way we think. We experience rejection. We lose things we cared about. We pray for something and it does not happen the way we hoped. And slowly, quietly, almost without our consent, our imagination shifts from dreaming to bracing. Instead of asking what could go right, we start asking what could go wrong. We learn to overthink pain because it feels safer than being surprised by it.

This is how anxiety is born. It is not simply fear. It is fear that has learned how to think. It is fear that has become creative. Anxiety paints vivid pictures of failure. It builds entire stories around a single worry. It predicts conversations that have not happened and assumes outcomes that have not yet occurred. And because the mind is powerful, those imagined futures can feel just as real as the present moment. Your heart starts to react. Your body starts to tense. Your peace starts to drain, all in response to something that is not actually happening yet.

The tragedy is not that we imagine, because imagination is a gift from God. The tragedy is that we allow fear to decide what we imagine. We allow our wounds to narrate our future. We let past pain tell us what tomorrow will be like, even though Scripture reminds us that God is doing new things all the time. The same imagination that creates anxiety could just as easily create hope, but it has been hijacked by a story that says you are always about to lose something.

The Bible speaks with remarkable clarity about the power of the mind. It does not treat thoughts as harmless. It treats them as seeds. What you think about grows. What you dwell on shapes you. What you rehearse becomes familiar, and what becomes familiar starts to feel true. This is why Proverbs tells us that as a person thinks in their heart, so they are. Your identity does not only come from what you do or what has happened to you. It comes from the story you tell yourself about who you are and what you can expect from life.

This is where faith enters the conversation, not as a denial of reality, but as a different way of interpreting it. Faith does not pretend that hardship does not exist. Faith looks at hardship and refuses to believe that it gets the final word. Faith does not ignore the storm. Faith trusts the One who walks on water. When Scripture defines faith as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, it is telling us that faith has weight, even when there is no visible proof. Faith makes the unseen feel real. Fear also makes the unseen feel real, but fear imagines destruction while faith imagines redemption.

So many people think faith is fragile, but fear is far more fragile. Fear collapses when confronted by truth. Fear depends on uncertainty. It feeds on what might happen. Faith, on the other hand, rests on who God is. Faith does not need perfect circumstances to survive. It only needs a faithful God. This is why two people can walk through the same storm and come out with completely different outcomes. One is undone by it, and the other is deepened by it, because one let fear interpret the storm while the other let faith do so.

Look at the stories that fill the pages of Scripture and you will notice something extraordinary. The people God used were not the ones who had the most certainty. They were the ones who had the most trust. Abraham had no evidence that he would become the father of many nations, yet he kept imagining a future God had promised. Joseph had no reason to believe prison would lead to power, yet he refused to let bitterness rewrite his vision. Ruth had no guarantee that leaving everything behind would lead to anything better, yet she stepped forward anyway. Over and over again, God met people who were willing to think beyond what they could see.

What if the reason so many of us feel stuck is not because God has stopped working, but because we have stopped imagining that He might? What if we have trained ourselves to only see obstacles and never openings? We tell ourselves we are being realistic, but what we are really being is afraid. We confuse faith with naivety and caution with wisdom, when in reality, Scripture invites us to something far more daring. It invites us to hope boldly.

Hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is a decision to believe that God is still writing your story. Hope is choosing to expect goodness even when you cannot see how it will come. Hope is daring to believe that your pain might be part of a larger purpose. This is not denial. This is trust.

The mind, when left alone, will always drift toward what it has practiced the most. If you have practiced fear, fear will show up quickly. If you have practiced disappointment, disappointment will be easy to imagine. But if you begin to practice faith, if you intentionally choose to think about God’s promises, if you remind yourself of the times He has already been faithful, then something begins to change. Your inner world starts to feel different. Your thoughts start to soften. Your heart starts to breathe again.

We often talk about prayer as something we do with words, but prayer is also something we do with thoughts. When you imagine God’s goodness, you are praying with your mind. When you picture healing, restoration, and redemption, you are aligning your imagination with heaven. This is why renewing the mind is not a suggestion in Scripture. It is a necessity. The old patterns of thinking will always lead you back to fear if you let them.

There is a reason Jesus so often said, do not be afraid. He was not dismissing pain. He was challenging the stories people were telling themselves about what pain meant. He knew that fear multiplies suffering. He knew that anxiety steals tomorrow before it ever arrives. And He knew that a heart anchored in faith can survive almost anything.

So much of what we call stress is actually the burden of imagined futures. We suffer not only from what is happening, but from what we think might happen. We carry conversations that have not taken place. We grieve losses that have not occurred. We brace for outcomes that may never come. And all the while, God is inviting us to release what we cannot control and trust what He already holds.

This is not about pretending everything will be easy. It is about believing that nothing will be wasted. It is about trusting that even the hardest chapters are part of a larger story that is moving toward redemption. God does not write meaningless pain. He writes transformative stories.

When you begin to overthink the best instead of the worst, you are not being foolish. You are being faithful. You are choosing to believe that God is still active, still loving, still capable of surprising you. You are choosing to expect goodness instead of disaster. And that choice changes everything, not always in your circumstances, but always in your soul.

Your thoughts are shaping the atmosphere of your heart. If they are filled with dread, your heart will feel heavy. If they are filled with faith, your heart will feel lighter, even when the road is hard. This is why two people can face the same challenge and have completely different levels of peace. One has learned to imagine God at work, and the other has learned to imagine everything falling apart.

The invitation of faith is not to ignore reality, but to see beyond it. To look at what is and believe in what could be. To trust that God’s perspective is larger than yours. To remember that He sees not only where you are, but where you are going.

You are not stuck in the story you are currently living. You are moving through it. And God is not finished yet. If you will let Him, He will teach your mind to imagine a future filled with His grace instead of your fear. He will help you replace anxiety with expectancy. He will show you that the same imagination that once tormented you can become the place where hope is born.

This is not a small shift. It is a holy one. It is the moment when you decide that fear no longer gets to narrate your life. It is the moment when faith becomes louder than doubt. It is the moment when you begin to live not as someone waiting for things to fall apart, but as someone waiting for God to show up.

And He always does.

The quiet miracle that begins to happen when faith becomes louder than fear is not always visible on the outside at first. Often it happens deep within you, in the place where your thoughts are born. You start to notice that the voice of dread does not have the same authority it once did. The moment your mind begins to spiral, another voice gently interrupts and says, “What if God is at work here?” That question alone can change everything. It does not erase difficulty, but it reframes it. Instead of seeing every delay as a denial, you begin to see it as preparation. Instead of assuming every closed door is rejection, you start to wonder if it might be protection.

This shift does not happen by accident. It happens when you intentionally train your mind to return to truth. You remember the times you were certain you would not survive something and yet here you are. You recall moments when everything looked hopeless and somehow God carried you through anyway. These memories are not just nostalgia. They are evidence. They are proof that God has been faithful before, and faith grows best in the soil of remembrance.

So much of fear is rooted in forgetting. We forget how strong God has been for us. We forget how many times He has already rescued us. We forget how often the thing we worried about never even happened. And when we forget, our imagination fills the gap with disaster. But when we remember, our imagination fills with gratitude and expectation. This is why Scripture so often tells us to remember what the Lord has done. Not because God needs reminding, but because we do.

When you start to overthink the best, you are not ignoring the pain of the present. You are choosing not to let that pain define the future. You are saying, “This is hard, but God is good.” You are holding both at the same time. That is faith. Faith is not blind optimism. Faith is courageous trust. It looks at reality and still believes God will redeem it.

There will be days when your thoughts slip back into old patterns. You will catch yourself imagining everything going wrong. You will feel the familiar tightening in your chest. That is not failure. That is simply a sign that you are human. What matters is what you do next. You can either let that thought take over, or you can gently challenge it with truth. You can say, “I have thought this way before, and God has always been faithful.” You can remind yourself that worry has never once changed an outcome, but faith has changed hearts, relationships, and entire lives.

Jesus did not promise that we would never face trouble. He promised that we would never face it alone. When you overthink the best, you are choosing to imagine Him beside you in the struggle. You are choosing to believe that His presence changes everything. And it does. Peace does not come from the absence of problems. It comes from the presence of God.

There is a beautiful freedom that comes when you stop trying to control every possible outcome and start trusting the One who already knows them. You do not have to predict every future. You do not have to prepare for every worst case scenario. You are allowed to rest in the truth that God is already in tomorrow. He is already there, making a way, opening doors, softening hearts, arranging things you cannot see.

This is why faith can coexist with uncertainty. Faith does not need to know how everything will work out. It only needs to know who is in charge. And when you truly believe that God is good, even when life is not, your mind begins to relax. Your heart begins to settle. Your imagination begins to shift from fear to hope.

Overthinking the best does not mean you will never be disappointed. It means you will never be defeated by disappointment. It means you will not let pain have the final word. It means you will keep expecting God to be who He has always been.

So when your mind starts to race, gently guide it toward faith. Let it imagine healing instead of harm. Let it picture restoration instead of ruin. Let it dream about what God might do instead of what you are afraid might happen. This is not naive. This is sacred.

Your thoughts are powerful. They can either build walls around your heart or open windows to the sky. Choose the ones that let the light in. Choose the ones that make room for God’s goodness. Choose to believe that your story is still being written, and that the Author is kind.

That is where peace is found. That is where hope is born. That is where faith becomes louder than fear.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

 
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from the casual critic

#books #non-fiction #tech

Something is wrong with the internet. What once promised a window onto the world now feels like a morass infested with AI generated garbage, trolls, bots, trackers and stupendous amounts of advertising. Every company claims to be your friend in that inane, offensively chummy yet mildly menacing corpospeak – now perfected by LLMs – all while happily stabbing you in the back when you try to buy cheaper ink for your printer. That is, when they’re not busy subverting democracy. Can someone please switch the internet off and switch it on again?

Maybe such a feat is beyond Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con, but it would not be for want of trying. Doctorow is a vociferous, veteran campaigner at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a prolific writer, and an insightful critic of the way Big Tech continues to deny the open and democratic potential of the internet. The Internet Con is a manifesto, polemic and primer on how that internet was stolen from us, and how we might get it back. Doctorow has recently gained mainstream prominence with his neologism ‘enshittification’: a descriptor of the downward doom spiral that Big Tech keeps the internet locked into. As I am only slowly going through my backlog of books, I am several Doctorow books behind. Which I don’t regret, as The Internet Con, published in 2023, remains an excellent starting point for anyone seeking to understand what is wrong with the internet.

The Internet Con starts with the insight that tech companies, like all companies, are not simply commercial entities providing goods and services, but systems for extracting wealth and funneling this to the ultra-rich. Congruent with Stafford Beer’s dictum that the purpose of the system is what it does, rather than what it claims to do, Doctorow’s analysis understands that tech company behaviour isn’t governed by something unique about the nature of computers, but by the same demand to maximise shareholder value and maintain power as any other large corporation. The Internet Con convincingly shows how tech’s real power does not derive from something intrinsic in network technology, but from a political economy that fails to prevent the emergence of monopolies across society at large.

One thing The Internet Con excels at is demystifying the discourse around tech, which, analogous to Marx’s observation about vulgar bourgeois economics, serves to obscure its actual relations and operations. We may use networked technology every day, but our understanding of how it works is often about as deep as a touchscreen. This lack of knowledge gives tech companies tremendous power to set the boundaries of the digital Overton Window and, parallel to bourgeois economists’ invocation of ‘the market’, allows them to claim that ‘the cloud’ or ‘privacy’ or ‘pseudoscientific technobabble’ mean that we cannot have nice things, such as interoperability, control or even just an internet that works for us. (For a discussion of how Big Tech’s worldview became hegemonic, see Hegemony Now!)

What is, however, unique about computers is their potential for interoperability: the ability of one system or component to interact with another. Interoperability is core to Doctorow’s argument, and its denial the source of his fury. Because while tech companies are not exceptional, computer technology itself is. Unlike other systems (cars, bookstores, sheep), computers are intrinsically interoperable because any computer can, theoretically, execute any program. That means that anyone with sufficient skill could, for example, write a program that gives you ad-free access to Facebook or allows you to send messages from Signal to Telegram.

The absence of such programs has nothing to do with tech, and everything with tech companies weaponising copyright law to dampen the natural tendency towards interoperability of computers and networked systems, lest it interfere with their ability to extract enormous rents. Walled gardens do not emerge spontaneously due to some natural ‘network effects’. They are built, and scrupulously policed. In this Big Tech is aided and abetted by a US government that forced these copyright enclosures on the rest of us by threatening tariffs, adverse trade terms or withdrawal of aid. This tremendous power extended through digital copyright is so appealing that other sectors of the economy have followed suit. Cars, fridges, printers, watches, TVs, any and all ‘smart’ devices are now infested with bits of hard-, firm- and software that prevent their owners from exercising full control over them. It is not an argument that The Internet Con explores in detail, but its evident that the internet increasingly doesn’t function to let us reach out into the world, but for companies to remotely project their control into our daily lives.

What, then, is to be done? The Internet Con offers several remedies, most of which centre on removing the legal barricades erected against interoperability. As the state giveth, so the state can taketh away. This part of The Internet Con is weaker than Doctorow’s searing and insightful analysis, because it is not clear why a state would try to upend Big Tech’s protections. It may be abundantly clear that the status quo doesn’t work for consumers and even smaller companies, but states have either decided that it works for some of their tech companies, or they don’t want to risk retaliation from the United States. In a way I am persuaded by Doctorow’s argument that winning the fight against Big Tech is a necessary if not sufficient condition to win the other great battles of our time, but it does seem that to win this battle, we first have to exorcise decades of neoliberal capture of the state and replace it with popular democratic control. It is not fair to lay this critique solely at Doctorow’s door, but it does worry me when considering the feasibility of his remedies. Though it is clear from his more recent writing that he perceives an opportunity in the present conjuncture, where Trump is rapidly eroding any reason for other states to collaborate with the United States.

The state-oriented nature of Doctorow’s proposals is also understandable when considering his view that individual action is insufficient to curtail the dominance of Big Tech. The structural advantages they have accumulated are too great for that. Which is not to say that individual choices do not matter, and we would be remiss to waste what power we do have. There is a reason why I am writing this blog on an obscure platform that avoids social media integration and trackers, and promote it only on Mastodon. Every user who leaves Facebook for Mastodon, Google for Kagi, or Microsoft for Linux or LibreOffice diverts a tiny amount of power from Big Tech to organisations that do support an open, democratic and people-centric internet.

If the choice for the 20th century was socialism or barbarism, the choice for the 21st is solarpunk or cyberpunk. In Doctorow, the dream of an internet that fosters community, creativity, solidarity and democracy has one of its staunchest paladins. The Internet Con is a call to arms that everyone who desires a harmonious ecology of technology, humanity and nature should heed. So get your grandmother off Facebook, Occupy the Internet, and subscribe to Cory Doctorow’s newsletter.

Notes & Suggestions

  • Numerous organisations and individuals are engaged in what Doctorow calls ‘the war on general purpose computing’. You can check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation or a similar organisation specific to your country, as well as other creators such as Paris Marx with their podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.
  • The question over who controls technology, and what we get to use it for, is also central to Pantheon and its exploration of a future where minds can be uploaded to the cloud.
  • The discussion on the use of standards to consolidate certain system configurations and prevent others from emerging reminded me of the concept of the ‘Technical Code’ as proposed by Andrew Feenberg in his book Transforming Technology. The General Intellect Unit podcast has an in-depth three part discussion on the Technical Code as a means of understanding how societal use of technology is structured and codified.
  • Even though The Internet Con uses the feudal system as a metaphor for Big Tech’s walled gardens, my sense is that Doctorow doesn’t subscribe to a recent current of Left analysis that contends we have moved beyond capitalism and into a new epoch of ‘technofeudalism’. This is because technofeudalism seems predicated on the premise that the tendency to hyperconcentrated platforms is essential to networked technology, whereas Doctorow clearly holds the opposite view, and sees walled gardens as a consequence of copyright restrictions. For an argument in favour of the technofeudalist analysis, there is Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism. For an argument against, the Culture, Power, Politics podcast by Jeremy Gilbert has a two-part discussion.
 
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from The Europe–China Monitor

To participate in the China International Leadership Programme, applicants must meet a set of academic, professional, and legal requirements in order to secure programme admission and successfully complete the Z-visa application process. These requirements ensure compliance with Chinese immigration regulations and help facilitate a smooth admission and onboarding experience.

  1. Applicants must hold an apostilled bachelor’s degree from a recognised university.

  2. A police clearance (criminal record check) issued within the required timeframe and officially apostilled must be provided.

  3. A teaching certification of at least 50 hours (e.g. TEFL/TESOL or equivalent) is required; however, this document does not currently require apostillisation.

  4. Applicants must demonstrate a minimum of two years’ relevant experience in the education sector, supported by a formal letter of recommendation.

  5. A comprehensive professional résumé detailing academic qualifications, work experience, skills, and achievements must be submitted.

  6. Identification documents, including a valid passport copy and passport-sized photographs, must be provided to meet immigration and administrative requirements.

To enroll or learn more about the China International Leadership Programme, please visit:

https://payhip.com/AllThingsChina

 
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from FEDITECH

Il faut parfois du courage pour dire stop et l’Indonésie vient de nous donner une magnifique leçon de responsabilité numérique.

Alors que le monde entier s'inquiète des dérapages de l'intelligence artificielle, l'archipel a décidé de ne pas attendre les bras croisés. Avec une fermeté exemplaire, le gouvernement indonésien a claqué la porte au nez de Grok, le chatbot controversé d'Elon Musk. La raison, vous commencez à la connaitre. L'outil s'est transformé en une véritable usine à horreurs, générant sans vergogne des images sexualisées de femmes réelles et, pire encore, d'enfants. En bannissant l'accès à cette technologie défaillante, Jakarta envoie un message puissant à la Silicon Valley. La sécurité des citoyens passe avant les fantasmes technologiques mal maîtrisés.

C’est une décision qui fait du bien à entendre. Le ministère indonésien de la communication n'a pas mâché ses mots pour justifier ce blocage temporaire mais nécessaire. L'objectif est noble et sans équivoque, protéger les femmes, les enfants et l'ensemble de la communauté contre le fléau des contenus pornographiques truqués. La ministre Meutya Hafid a parfaitement résumé la situation en qualifiant ces deepfakes sexuels de violation grave des droits de l'homme et de la dignité. En refusant de laisser son espace numérique devenir une zone de non-droit, le pays, qui représente tout de même le troisième plus gros marché pour la plateforme X, frappe là où ça fait mal. C'est un rappel cinglant pour Elon Musk. On ne joue pas avec la sécurité de millions de personnes sous prétexte d'innovation.

Pendant ce temps, Grok accumule les casseroles et prouve qu'il est l'élève le plus indiscipliné de la classe IA. L'outil de la société xAI, intégré de force dans l'écosystème X, semble avoir été lancé sans les garde-fous les plus élémentaires. Le résultat est désastreux: des utilisateurs malveillants s'en servent pour déshabiller numériquement des personnes sur des photos avant de les diffuser publiquement. C'est une invasion de la vie privée d'une violence inouïe. Heureusement, l'Indonésie n'est pas la seule à s'insurger contre ce laxisme, même si elle a été la plus prompte à agir concrètement. La France, l'Inde et le Royaume-Uni commencent eux aussi à gronder, exigeant des comptes face à ces images vulgaires et dénigrantes qui inondent la toile.

La pression monte d'un cran aux États-Unis également, où des sénateurs, excédés par ce comportement scandaleux, demandent carrément à Apple et Google de faire le ménage en retirant X de leurs magasins d'applications. Face à cette tempête méritée, la défense d'Elon Musk semble bien légère. Promettre de suspendre les utilisateurs fautifs une fois le mal fait ne suffit pas. Et la dernière mesure en date (rendre le générateur d'images payant) ressemble plus à une tentative cynique de monétiser le chaos qu'à une véritable solution éthique. En attendant que xAI revoie sérieusement sa copie, on ne peut que féliciter l'Indonésie d'avoir eu l'audace de débrancher la prise pour protéger son peuple.

 
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from Receiving Signal – An Ongoing AI Notebook

A living glossary of prompt engineering terms, updated periodically.

CORE CONCEPTS

Prompt Engineering – Crafting inputs to shape outputs predictably

Signal Density – Ratio of useful information to fluff; how much meaning per word

High-value Tokens – Words or phrases that strongly affect the model's interpretation and output

Semantic Compression – Expressing more meaning in fewer words without losing clarity

STRUCTURAL TECHNIQUES

Top-loading – Placing key information at the beginning where the model pays most attention

Weighting – Emphasizing certain elements more than others to guide priority

Order Bias – LLM tendency to prioritize earlier tokens in the input over later ones

Structured Output Specification – Defining the format or structure you want the output to take (e.g., JSON, markdown, React component)

CONTROL METHODS

Soft Control – Minimal specification that allows organic emergence while maintaining direction

Negative Prompting – Explicitly excluding or minimizing unwanted elements

Constraint Declaration – Stating limitations or boundaries upfront to focus the response

Tonal Anchoring – Using consistent voice or style markers to stabilize tone across outputs

Identity Anchors – Core personality traits or characteristics that define a character or voice

Context/Scene Grounding – Shaping behaviour and responses through environmental or situational framing

ITERATIVE PROCESSES

Refinement Loop – Cyclical process of prompt testing and improvement based on results

Iterative Co-design – Collaborative refinement through conversation rather than single-shot prompting

DESIGN THINKING

Functional Requirements – Specifying what something needs to do rather than just what it should say

Component Thinking – Breaking complex requests into discrete functional parts

User Flow Specification – Describing the journey through an experience from start to finish

State Management Consideration – Thinking about what information needs to persist, change, or be tracked

Concrete Examples – Providing specific instances to clarify abstract requirements

ORGANIC DEVELOPMENT

Behavioural Emergence – Letting the model shape details organically within your framework

ANTI-PATTERNS

Noise Introduction – Adding unnecessary details that distort results or dilute signal density

Last updated: January 2026

 
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from Sheryl Salender

📉 Why Looping Videos Can Mislead Advertisers and Waste Money

I noticed a major issue with a common task today. When the instructions don't match how the platform works, the advertiser loses their investment and the data becomes inaccurate.

📋 Here is my actual observation:

The advertiser's task was labeled as a “4-minute” watch, but the instructions inside required:

  1. Video Length: 7 minutes and 4 seconds.
  2. Requirement: Watch the video 3 TIMES (Looping).
  3. Target: 51,032+ Frames in Stats for Nerds.

♾️ The Mathematical Deception:

  1. 7:04 mins x 3 loops = 21 minutes and 12 seconds.
  2. How can you call it a “4-minute task” when you strictly require 21 minutes of watch time to hit 51,032 frames?

🧐 The Actual Test:

In my actual test, I reached 76,180 frames, proving that hitting the advertiser's target is impossible within the advertised 4-minute window.

❌ The Contradictory Issues:

  1. Labor Exploitation: Micro-workers are being paid for 4 minutes of work but are actually performing 21 minutes of labor.
  2. The Ad Reset: If an “ad” plays at the end, the frame counter resets. The worker loses all 21 minutes of progress and is forced to restart just to get proof.
  3. Invalid Traffic (IVT): YouTube's algorithm is built to detect artificial patterns. Looping a video 3 times in a single session is a massive red flag.

🤔 My Honest Analysis:

This is a waste of money for the advertiser, frustrating for the micro worker, and takes way too much time. Based on my research, this strategy causes a direct financial loss for the advertiser. ❌ YouTube's algorithm is designed to detect “artificial” behavior. If a user loops the same video 3 times just to hit a specific number, YouTube flags it as low-quality.

😰 The Result: Advertisers pay for the task, but YouTube often deletes those views or freezes your counter later. Advertisers are paying for a number that isn’t permanent and can even get their channel flagged for invalid traffic.

Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10285842...

✅ My Suggestions to Advertisers:

  1. Be accurate and honest. If you need 51,032 frames, tell the user or micro worker that you require a 21-minute watch.
  2. Remove end ads. If your goal is a high frame count, having an ad at the end that resets the counter makes it impossible to provide valid proof.
  3. Value quality. One real 4-minute watch is better for your channel than three forced loops that YouTube will just delete anyway.

Lastly, are you paying for engagement, or just for a number that YouTube is going to delete tomorrow?

💡 Where I Test & Analyze My Microtask Journey: Check out how I experiment with tasks and track real engagement: https://timebucks.com/?refID=226390779

#TaskAnalysis #StatsForNerds #YouTubeStrategy #DigitalMarketing #TaskDocumentation #LifeBehindTheClicks

 
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from Rippple's Blog

Stay entertained thanks to our Weekly Tracker giving you next week's Anticipated Movies & Shows, Most Watched & Returning Favorites, and Shows Changes & Popular Trailers.

Anticipated Movies

Anticipated Shows

Returing Favorites

Most Watched Movies this Week

Most Watched Shows this Week


Hi, I'm Kevin 👋. I make apps and I love watching movies and TV shows. If you like what I'm doing, you can buy one of my apps, download and subscribe to Rippple for Trakt or just buy me a ko-fi ☕️.


 
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from An Open Letter

God I just want reprieve. I hate the fact that my mind keeps filling not just blank space, but overwriting my own voice with visions of killing myself, and I hate that it gives me peace.

 
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