melita zajc

Head of research at Ostertrade, journalist, film scholar, researcher and teacher of technology and society

[melita zajc @melitazajc]

@Mimiiben1 5

[melita zajc @melitazajc]

@readswithravi Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

[andrea carugati @andreacarugati]

Dopo la due giorni di vannacci resta la domanda: come ha potuto un uomo del genere, evidentemente estraneo alla costituzione, arrivare a cariche apicali nell’esercito di una democrazia europea? Quanti altri come lui sono ancora in divisa?

[melita zajc @melitazajc]

@lorenamar__ I think only one thing is just - they should be obliged to work their whole life and give their earnings to their victims.

[riccardo cucchi @CucchiRiccardo]

"La parola #femminicidio non indica il sesso della morta. Indica il motivo per cui è stata uccisa."
Michela Murgia.
Non c'è nulla da aggiungere.

[melita zajc @melitazajc]

it’s finally out

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

New York Times investigative journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman are this generation's Woodward and Bernstein.

This story is Trump's Watergate and it's about to EXPLODE:

Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, White House Counsel David Warrington, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and former Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich converted the hallowed Situation Room — America's nerve center for real threats and decisive action — into a pedophile protection racket, where top officials huddled to cover-up the Epstein files scandal and protect a president who used to rape children for fun.

[🅾️sservaMy 👁☮️🍉 @OsservaMy]

"Non ce ne importava niente che fosse omosessuale. Volevamo esaltare la sua intelligenza, la sua sensibilità.” Nel 1977, in Una giornata particolare di Ettore Scola, Marcello Mastroianni, l’attore-simbolo del latin lover italiano, accettò di interpretare Gabriele, un

[Alessandro @venezia_56]

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE🌟

American Flag, 1977

[Nataša Pirc Musar @nmusar]

Genocid nad Palestinci ni ustavljen in ljudje v Gazi in na Zahodnem bregu ne živijo v miru in dostojanstvu. Danes izobešena zastava Palestine na pročelju Predsedniške palače, ki bo tu ostala en teden, potem pa bo, kot opomin vsem, ki obiščejo moj urad, stala v notranjih prostorih, pa pomeni še mnogo več. Je simbol grobih kršitev mednarodnega humanitarnega prava in človekovih pravic ne samo v Palestini, pač pa tudi drugod po svetu. Je preprost klic k spoštovanju temeljnega civilizacijskega načela: človekovega dostojanstva - za vse.

[melita zajc @melitazajc]

@TimurNegru who do i contact for more info?

[John Cusack @johncusack]

The genocide in Palestine and the mass murder in Lebanon must be stopped

[melita zajc @melitazajc]

What a sad news. My condolences to her family.

[Tacchino al Carrie🦃 @andoniopre]

Il cinema italiano sulle sue spalle

[Bettybus @EBustreo]

Belli quegli artisti che non hanno le idee confuse come Francesco De Gregori e prendono posizione su Gaza.
L'intera intervista di Sabina Guzzanti a Francesca Albanese nel suo canale Youtube per Generazione Perennial

[새벽 @saebkkk]

오랜만에 다시 본 <행복한 라짜로>. 다시 보아도 기적 같은 영화... 라짜로 역의 배우 아드리아노 타르디올로가 연기 경험이 전무한 비전문 배우였다는 것은 알고 있었지만, 그를 찾은 과정을 이야기하는 알리체 로르바케르 감독의 표현은 재미있고 아름답다. 배우가 아닌 자기가 오디션을 보았다고.

[Masih Alinejad 🏳️ @AlinejadMasih]

I broke down crying on live CBS television. I couldn’t hold it together anymore. Because it was the 4th time that I sat in a courtroom watching actual assassins, convicted murderers sent by the Islamic Republic to kill me, face charges on American soil.

You’d think that feels like winning. Unfortunately , it doesn’t. Because all I could think about was them. The same killers back home in Iran, The innocent people facing the exact same murderers, the same regime, the same orders, the same hands, with no courtroom. No lawyer. No protection. Just a rope at dawn and a family forbidden from crying at their grave.

In America, they get arrested. In Iran, the same murderers are hanging my protesters killing women and children.

I survived. I am supposed to feel grateful. But how do you feel grateful when the same machine that came for you is still running, and your family back home are still dying?

This is called survivor guilt. And it doesn’t leave me…..
💔

[melita zajc @melitazajc]

my pleasures

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

In the era of #ArtificialIntelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. #MagnificaHumanitas
https://t.co/6i9MWs6LJl

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

the pope and anthropic's co-founder just stood together at the vatican to release "magnifica humanitas," the first ever catholic teaching on AI

yes, you read that right. the full ceremony was 2 hours.

here's the most interesting things for you to know:

1. this is the biggest religious response to AI in history. popes only put out a handful of these huge official letters in their entire time as pope. the fact that one of them is about AI tells you how seriously the church is taking what's coming.

2. small detail with massive meaning: this pope picked the name "leo XIV" on purpose. the last pope named leo was leo XIII back in 1891, and his most famous act was writing the church's response to the industrial revolution. picking the same name is a deliberate signal. this pope sees AI as the new industrial revolution.

3. the catholic church does this every time a major technology reshapes humanity. they wrote "rerum novarum" in 1891 to respond to the industrial revolution. when nuclear weapons threatened the world in the 1960s, they wrote "pacem in terris." climate change and runaway tech got "laudato si" in 2015. now AI gets "magnifica humanitas." they don't issue these often.

4. the pope's main line: "AI needs to be disarmed." he literally compared AI to nuclear weapons. he said the church spent decades pushing for nuclear disarmament because the technology was too dangerous to leave in the hands of a few. he says AI is now in that same category.

5. anthropic co-founder christopher olah told the pope, on stage at the vatican, that anthropic's own research team keeps finding things inside their AI models that "mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease."

6. olah's reframe of what AI actually is: these things are grown. they're trained on a structure roughly modeled after the human brain and fed everything humans have ever written. in his own words: "they are made from us, from our words." he said even the people building them don't fully understand what's happening inside.

7. olah publicly admitted that every AI lab, including his own, faces pressure that can conflict with doing the right thing. commercial pressure to keep shipping, competitive pressure from other labs, plus the older pressures of pride and ambition. his solution: we desperately need outside critics with no skin in the game who will tell the labs when they're failing.

8. olah says there are 3 giant questions the AI labs cannot answer alone and the world needs religion and philosophy to step in on:

> how do we make sure poor countries actually benefit from AI?
> what does human flourishing even look like in this new world?
> and what are these things we're actually building?

9. one of the sharpest lines in the whole encyclical: "the promise of automatic general prosperity often proves illusory." translation: the idea that AI will just make everyone rich on its own is a fantasy. someone has to actually design the system so the benefits get shared.

10. the pope also pulled out a 100-year-old quote: "contemporary man has not been trained to use power well." said by a theologian back in the 1920s. the whole encyclical is basically a long argument that we need to learn how to use this kind of power before it uses us.

11. the pope kept stressing that he doesn't have the technical answers. but he says the church has thousands of years of wisdom on what it means to be human, and that wisdom is exactly what's missing from how we're building AI right now. his closing line: this technology should serve "human flourishing and human dignity, not control consciences."

[Mats Nilsson @mazzenilsson]

Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt's 1948 letter to the New York Times: They saw the creation of a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine at the expense of its indigenous Muslim and Christian population as a profound injustice and moral catastrophe.

Einstein and the other signatories explicitly compared Begin’s Herut (Freedom Party), born from the Irgun, to Nazis and Fascists, warning that their ideology of racial superiority and violent ethnic nationalism posed a grave danger to the moral and political future of the new state.

- - -
Full text of Einstein and Hannah Arendt's letter to the New York Times:
TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
December 2, 1948
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created State of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections and to cement political ties with Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world could condone, even by silence, the appearance of such a party in Israel.
Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other fascist parties, they have been used to break strikes, and they have encouraged demoralization among labor. In their actions they have been marked by cruelty and contempt for human life.
During the recent past, they have systematically terrorized the Arab population, attacked Jewish settlements, and sabotaged the rescue of displaced Jews from Europe.
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war and had even fought off Arab bands that wanted to use it as their base. On April 9 (1948), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants — 240 men, women, and children — and kept a few of them alive to parade through the streets of Jerusalem.
Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent an apology to King Abdullah of Transjordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of it, widely publicized it, and invited foreign correspondents to view the corpses and the ravaged village.
The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have attempted to institute a reign of terror, have beaten up Jews who opposed them, and have, by gangster methods, terrorized the population.
It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world could condone, even by silence, the appearance of such a party in Israel.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a warning to the American people concerning a danger to be found in the Freedom Party in Israel, a danger to which the leadership of Menachem Begin gives the greatest emphasis.
(Signed):
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo, Irma Lindheim, and 22 other Jewish scholars, writers, and public figures.
(Published December 4, 1948, in The New York Times.)