AJ Sadauskas

Columnist: I'm standing up for what I believe in! Protecting women's sport! And I'll keep standing up for it, no matter how much those snowflakes try to silence me and my right to free speech!

Citizen: That's fantastic! You know, female athletes have to put up with so much vicious misogyny and abuse, especially on social media. Some men really can be snowflakes when it comes to women's sport.

Columnist: No! I'm raising the big issue in women's sport, and I'm being /attacked/ for it!

Citizen: Really?! People are attacking you for saying female athletes deserve equal pay for equal work?

Columnist: Not that one! I'm talking about something far more serious, affecting the health and wellbeing of female athletes. And even the very integrity of women's sport itself!

Citizen: Do you mean how sports science focuses almost exclusively on male athletes, leading to women suffering anterior cruciate ligament injuries at six times the rate of men (citation: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/magazine/acl-tear-women-girl-sports.html )?

Citizen: Or do you mean how elite women's sport is routinely relegated to worse venues and TV coverage, with less sponsorship and promotion?

Columnist: No! I'm talking about protecting women's sport from the scourge of men transitioning for the sole purpose of winning at women's sport!

Citizen: Why would a professional male athlete who's not trans want to go through all the challenges and discrimination of transitioning for less pay, less TV coverage, fewer sponsorships, smaller crowds, less promotion, higher injury risk, worse venue, online abuse, and rampant misogyny, just to win at women's sport?

Columnist: Because *winning*!

Citizen: Can you give an example of where this has actually happened?

Columnist: ...

Citizen: And what do you propose to do about it?

Columnist: Totally dismantle democracy, install a totalitarian dictatorship, arrest or kill anyone who disagrees with said despot, and deport ethnic minorities en masse. Also we'll use it to justify rolling back all healthcare and civil rights to trans people, establishing that human rights exist at the arbitrary will of our overload, which the despot will use arbitrarily against all women and any other individuals or groups he disagrees with.

Citizen: That seems a bit... extreme.

Columnist: It's all to protect women's sport.

Citizen: And what will you do about the other issues I raised?

Columnist: Well, if any of them, such as research into sports medicine for women or facilities for women's sport, require public funding, then we'll cut the funding and give the money back to rich supporters of our despot as a tax cut.

Citizen: I see. Say, just out of curiosity, who do you think will win the grand final in the AFLW this year?

Columnist: I honestly don't care. I'm not into women's sport, sorry.

#AFLW #womenssport #transrights #auspol #ukpol #uspol #politics #feminism #terf #terfs #trans

Just imagine a country that allowed multinationals to export billions of dollars of natural gas tax free.

This country had a housing shortage, and had deliberately spent the past 30 or 40 years underfunding and privatising public housing.

It had also spent billions on automated systems that wrongfully kicked thousands of welfare recipients off their entitlements, justified by the claim that one or two people could rort the system otherwise.

It also severely restricted access to mental health services.

So the homeless population grew.

Some of those people slept in a town square.

So they closed that town square to make sure the homeless people couldn't sleep there anymore.

Welcome to Australia:

"It was pitched as a modern urban space. But the $1.8 million Crescent Plaza is now a no-go zone after Fairfield Council decided it had no option but to shut it down.

"The plaza sits directly opposite the suburb’s busy train station and was built as a meeting hub for families and locals. But the south-west Sydney council responsible for managing it has been struggling to deal with the regular alcohol-fuelled anti-social behaviour the plaza is attracting.

"Its sudden closure on Tuesday, when NSW Police brought in temporary metal fencing, highlights the grey area councils operate in when dealing with anti-social behaviour in their own spaces.

"Councils don’t have the power to move people on, so regularly rely on the police’s extra powers to enforce change."

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-1-8-million-sydney-plaza-now-fenced-off-indefinitely-20260408-p5zm39.html

#auspol

The enshittification for revenue is beginning in earnest at ChatGPT, I see:

"Our ads pilot is focused on supporting broader access to ChatGPT while preserving consumer trust, usefulness, and user control. Guided by our ads principles⁠, the early results are encouraging. We’re seeing no impact on consumer trust metrics, low dismissal rates of ads, and ongoing improvements in the relevance of ads as we learn from feedback. These positive signals support moving into the next phase of our pilot.

"In the coming weeks, we’ll begin expanding beyond the U.S., starting with pilots in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. We’ll roll this out thoughtfully in each market, learn from real-world usage, and adjust as we go. Our hope is to continue to expand to many more markets this year."

https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/

#ChatGPT #AI #OpenAI #LargeLanguageModel #LargeLanguageModels #enshittification #VibeCoding #ArtificialIntelligence

Recently, there was a question by @taylorlorenz@mastodon.social about how you explain the Fediverse to someone who doesn't use it.

And usually, what we tend to do is we talk about servers and decentralisation and federation and ActivityPub and all these highly technical concepts.

I've been thinking about it, and all that technical stuff is really impressive work by people far more clever than I'll ever be.

But for me, that technology is a facilitating thing. It's like trying to describe how a bicycle works, rather than why you ride it.

Instead, what the Fediverse is, is a place to have conversations online without algorithms, AI, and ads getting in the way.

Which is increasingly a rare thing online.

Almost the entirety of the internet, from SEO on the web to YouTube to TikTok to Spotify to Instagram and X and Facebook, has been turned into a race to game an algorithm designed to sell ads.

What makes the Fedi unique is that it's not that.

And I suspect if you're trying to persuade someone to try Mastodon (or Lemmy, or Pixelfed, or GtS, etc), you'll get a lot further explaining it as algorithm-free, ad-free, AI-free conversations, rather than trying to describe a decentralised protocol.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #ActivityPub

A popular TikTok channel featuring an "Aboriginal man" presenting animal facts has been exposed as an AI forgery.

AI is Iggy Azalea on an industrial scale:

"The self-described “Bush Legend” on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram is growing in popularity.

"These short and sharp videos feature an Aboriginal man – sometimes painted up in ochre, other times in an all khaki outfit – as he introduces different native animals and facts about them.
...
"But the Bush Legend isn’t real. He is generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

"This is a part of a growing influx of AI being utilised to represent Indigenous peoples, knowledges and cultures with no community accountability or relationships with Indigenous peoples. It forms a new type of cultural appropriation, one that Indigenous peoples are increasingly concerned about."
...
"We are seeing the rise of an AI Blakface that is utilised with ease thanks to the availability and prevalence of AI.

"Non-Indigenous people and entities are able to create Indigenous personas through AI, often grounded in stereotypical representations that both amalgamate and appropriate cultures."

https://theconversation.com/this-tiktok-star-sharing-australian-animal-stories-doesnt-exist-its-ai-blakface-273004

#ChatGPT #gemini #AI #TikTok #tiktoksucks #Claude #LLM #ArtificialIntelligence #AIslop