You can remove me from the taglist, since (as I think I mentioned to you) I had long lapsed, but I just started up with the 2026 group and I’m already further than I made it last year (just finished chapter two)! I’m really determined to see this through. But I think it was important to have this weekly reminder throughout the past year to remind me that this was something I really wanted to tackle in the next year, and your reading list also served as a bit of an on-ramp to get me in the habit of regular reading and introducing me to some of the topics I’ll be engaging with.

I’m hoping I’ll have the time and mental bandwidth to work through the rest of the readings in parallel, since there’s some other topics I want to explore, but we’ll see. Either way, thank you so much for your efforts!

You got this! It’s no big deal if you’re a bit behind at the start, anyhow—it is a year-long reading group, after all, so you’ve got plenty of time to catch up. The first few chapters are supposed to be the toughest, so don’t let that discourage you—just try to read a bit every day, and you’ll get there! I’ve been doing a half hour here, a half hour there, and I think I should finish chapter one in the next day or two. As soon as I can feel my eyes start to glaze over and notice I’m re-reading the same paragraph over and over, I know it’s time to take a break and do something else for a bit.

noooo I’m already behind

not sure I’ll manage to finish chapter 1 in time, but hopefully I’ll be caught up through chapter 2 by the end of next week’s thread. I guess ideally I’d be done with chapter 3 in time for week 3’s thread, but that seems like wishful thinking (I do hope to eventually be ready with a comment by the beginning of each week). Also chapter 1 is gonna be the longest slog both because I’ve heard it’s difficult and because I’m reading all the (checks) four separate forewords/prefaces/introductions that are in my edition (I’m using the new Reitter translation). So if I can power through this, I can go the distance!

edit: locked in today and powered through all the prefaces, so I can tackle Chapter 1 tomorrow! Much excite

Emphasis mine:

I’m inclined to think [the use of fictional company Relecloud] here points to all these advertised Copilot actions being simulated, but a Microsoft rep insists that’s not the case. Nicci Trovinger, general manager of Windows marketing, tells The Verge, “All Copilot responses are actual responses Copilot gave to the scenarios shown and questions asked at a point in time. Responses were shortened for brevity to fit the length of the creative spot, in line with standard advertising practices.”

“A point in time” could mean literally anything. You could have edited 100 hours of prompting down to 30 seconds and that would still technically be true. Holy fucking shit I hate advertisers :bill-hicks-marketing:

From one of the linked articles (emphasis mine):

The data includes highly sensitive and detailed self-reported information, such as usernames, gender, age, location, activity history, lifestyle, height, eye color, hair color, and other physical appearance traits, income range, education, marital status, religion, and even self-assessed IQ, among many other fields.

L M A O

edit: holy shit, literally the next paragraph

Notably, the dataset also contains numerous profile photos, along with embedded EXIF metadata that reveals precise GPS coordinates, device information, timestamps, and other identifying details.

Not stripping EXIF data is a truly astonishing level of incompetence

…no wait, that’s not even the best part:

Root said she contacted a hacker who helped to exfiltrate the data. However, no hacks were required – all it took was a simple URL trick of adding “download-all-users/” to the top-level domain.

Link to the conference presentation

I almost didn’t watch this because based on the title/thumbnail I thought it would be a superficial algorithm bait video, but it actually goes in-depth about family policing in the United States and has original interviews with advocates that fight the abuses of family court and child protective services—definitely recommend that people check it out! I’ll be glad to have some of these points in my back pocket when talking to copaganda-loving friends and family.

PDFs can be OCRed manually but it requires a lot of effort to do so, often hours of painstaking work, and I do not have the capacity to do this for you (except in the case where it is a work of significant importance to revolutionary theory or history, where you might be able to convince me to take on the task of OCRing the work.)

If such a case does come up, hit me up–I’d love to help, and mind-numbing detail-oriented work is my jam.

I don’t think I’ll need your services since I’m usually able to find anything I need, but it’s really cool that you’re offering this!