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It's another form of statistical analysis and inference. There's no reason to use all the planet's energy, computing and water to perform that analysis, but the correct and desirable amount of useful AI-style computation is nowhere near zero. 30/

The AI bubble is madness and will lead to ruin - environmental, economic, political: pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/t... The world would be a better place without the AI bubble. But AI? It's fine. 29/

For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been impressing me with the things we can do using advanced statistical analysis. The current generation of AI tools are founded in advanced stats, too. No one should think that advanced stats can solve all your problems of course. 28/

It's treating AI tools are treated as normal technologies, capable of helping skilled practitioners who have discernment born of experience to apply them wisely to achieve important things: pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/h... 27/

He's a "centaur" if ever there was one: pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p... It's exciting to see Patrick and his colleagues and collaborators taking these decisive steps to begin building the post-American internet and a kind of post-bubble AI. 26/

Patrick is one of the best programmers I know, he is the very best statistician I know, and he's found many, many ways to use coding assistants to help him perform massive data-analysis projects that are vital to human rights struggles. 25/

I've known Patrick Ball, the statistician and programmer who founded HRDAG, for more than 20 years, and every time we meet, I learn something from him. He's the person who comes to mind whenever people tell me that AI is useless and that programmers who claim otherwise are deluded. 24/

Today, they're active across the US, tracking and analyzing crimes committed by the Trump regime: hrdag.org/2026/07/05/n... And they are working in Gaza, to document the genocide so that someday, the truth can be acknowledged and the perpetrators brought to justice: hrdag.org/pressroom/ny... 23/

Naming Police Officers Who Kill in CaliforniaNew Functionality in the Police Records Access Project Highlights the Names of Individual Police Officers Oakland resident Erik Salgado was 23 years old when he was stopped by the California Highway P...hrdag.org

They conducted the first census of killing by US police: hrdag.org/poli/ They partnered with Innocence Project New Orleans to sift through mountains of arrest reports to surface cases similar to successful exonerations, helping more innocents to win their freedom: hrdag.org/2025/02/20/i... 22/

HRDAG - Human Rights Data Analysis Group.hrdag-algo-button { margin-bottom: 23px;}.hrdag-algo-button a { border-radius: 18px; background-color: #4f81ed; padding: 8px 24px; text-decoration: none; color: white; font-size:...hrdag.org

They built the largest human rights database ever created, to track every death in the Colombian Civil War and estimate the likelihood that each killing was carried out by a CIA-backed militia, FARC guerrillas, or the Colombian military: hrdag.org/colombia/ 21/

HRDAG - Human Rights Data Analysis GroupData integration and statistical estimation: A collaboration with the Colombian Truth Commission (CEV) and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) The Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed...hrdag.org

Groups like HRDAG have decades of experience using cutting edge statistical techniques to uncover and reveal the extent of crimes committed during civil wars, hot wars, genocides and secret wars. 20/

This federated system serves as a replacement for Big Tech's administrative tools - email hosting, cloud storage, document collaboration. More than that: Tech Freedom Coop is also building out its own AI infrastructure, locally hosted and managed. 19/

Tech Freedom Coop has federated computing resources in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Europe. By spreading out their data and computation across multiple jurisdictions, they seek to ensure that a US seizure or deletion of their data will not halt their work. 18/

They concluded they can't rely on US tech and US servers for their data. Not after Trump and Microsoft colluded to kill the accounts of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to punish him for swearing out a genocide warrant against Netanyahu: apnews.com/article/icc-... 17/

Trump's sanctions on ICC prosecutor have halted tribunal's workNearly three months ago, U.S. President Donald Trump slapped sanctions on the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan.apnews.com

All of these organizations are longstanding, highly effective human rights fighters. They have long, storied histories of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data to address systemic discrimination, false imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, war crimes and genocides. 16/

The Technology Freedom Cooperative is a brand new organization founded by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (San Francisco), Kilómetro 0 (Puerto Rico), Invisible Institute (Chicago), Data Cívica (Mexico) and Innocence & Justice Louisiana: www.linkedin.com/pulse/techfr... 15/

#TechFreedomCoopHuman Rights Organizations Launch Technology Freedom Cooperative to Protect Critical Data and Build Independent AI Infrastructure New cooperative will provide technical infrastructure for organization...www.linkedin.com

That is *exactly* what some American - and international - human rights nonprofits have done. 14/

Big Tech is key to Trump's pogroms. Without Oracle's databases, Microsoft's administrative tools, Amazon's cloud, and Google's location data, ICE would be frozen in place. Big Tech is the source of Americans' risk from authoritarian oppression. 9/

Every time we fail to draw this distinction, we help an AI boss raise another billion dollars. 49/

Finally, there's an *economic* coin-trick: "AI will destroy jobs." Sure, yes, AI is destroying jobs. But there's a vast difference between "You got fired because an AI can do your job" and "You got fired because your boss was convinced that the AI can do your job, even though it *cannot*." 45/