remixtures

remixtures, 3 days ago to TechnicalWriting Portuguese

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #SoftwareDevelpopment: "With few books on technical writing, and even fewer trying to push tech writing into the minds of other professionals, TWfSD is an excellent, necessary book that capably bridges the gap between engineering and tech comms by directly addressing our partners in crime, software developers. I think both Chris and I would agree on making technical documentation a mandatory subject for Computer Science degrees, alongside modern DevOps and PMO techniques. This book could be the basis of a “Documentation 101” course in the syllabus of any modern CS degree (and I’d certainly pay to see Chris as the instructor)."

https://passo.uno/review-technical-writing-software-developers/

remixtures, 3 days ago to internet Portuguese

#SiliconValley #BigTech #VCs #SocialMedia #Web #AI #Capitalism: "I believe we're at the end of the Rot-Com boom — the tech industry's hyper-growth cycle where there were so many lands to conquer, so many new ways to pile money into so many new, innovative ideas that it felt like every tech company could experience perpetual growth simply by throwing money at the problem.

It explains why so many tech products — YouTube, Google Search, Facebook, and so on — feel like they’ve got tangibly worse. There’s no incentive to improve the things you’ve already built when you’re perpetually working on the next big thing.

This belief — that exponential growth is not just a reasonable expectation, but a requirement — is central to the core rot in the tech industry, and as these rapacious demands run into reality, the Rot-Com bubble has begun to deflate. As we speak, the tech industry is grappling with a mid-life crisis where it desperately searches for the next hyper-growth market, eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt technology that nobody asked for in the hopes that they can keep the Rot Economy alive."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/

remixtures, 3 days ago to news Portuguese

#Misinformation #FactChecking #Disinformation #Propaganda #News #Media #Democracy: "If you think people are gullible, misinformation is rampant, and misinformation is the leading cause of troubling beliefs and behaviour in society, it makes sense to try to design interventions that teach people to be more paranoid about misinformation. However, if you think—as seems to be the case—that people are already highly suspicious of manipulation and low-quality misinformation is relatively rare in their information diet, you will realise there is a high chance such interventions will backfire, exacerbating problems of distrust that lie at the root of many profound epistemic problems in society.

It also illustrates why it is appropriate to hold misinformation researchers and misinformation interventions to very high standards. Even if expert classifications and research are not being used to censor, there is a risk that faulty and highly subjective assumptions will shape popular, well-funded interventions that either achieve little of value or worsen the problems they aim to fix."

https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/misinformation-poses-a-smaller-threat

remixtures, 3 days ago to ai Portuguese

I'm not so sure about the statements of the last paragraph... Too much wishful thinking?

#AI #GenerativeAI #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #PromptEngineering: "Generative AI will make coding easier but the world will still need coding skills to guide or correct the chatbots’ work.

One unexpected consequence of AI is that its rise could revive demand for a liberal arts education. AI’s propensity for errors or hallucinations means an increase in demand for prompt engineers. They determine the best way to frame a question when interacting with AI-powered systems. This requires people with strong language and creative thinking skills. Like previous technologies, AI is creating new roles as well as revamping old ones."

https://www.ft.com/content/5eadde17-8fb5-44dd-8b11-8a0690121998

remixtures, 3 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @Carnage4Life
New York is about to pass a law that will require chronological feeds and ban “For You” style feeds for people under 18.

This is a more effective TikTok ban than what Congress passed since a chronological firehouse of TikTok videos would just be unwatchable noise.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/new-york-passes-legislation-ban-addictive-social-media-algorithms-kids-rcna155470

remixtures, 3 days ago (edited 1 hour ago) to ai Portuguese

#AI / #GenerativeAI is so full of bullshit!! A few days ago, I found this web page containing 206 lists of Top 10 best TV shows provided to the BBC by film and television journalists all over the world: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211014-the-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century-who-voted. When I asked a few LLMs to generate a ranking of TV shows appearing in that page based on the number of occurrences, all of them started to hallucinate.

Besides the position and title of each TV show, I wanted the LLM to include the number of occurrences of the given show on those lists appearing on that web page. I even copied and pasted all those lists to the input text box provided by chat[dot]lmsys[dot]org. That approach also didn't work because the text box wasn't big enough to hold all those lists.

To sum it all: wake me up when Claude 3 Opus, ChatGPT 4o or any other LLM is able to read the contents of a web page and generate a list of occurrences based on numbered lists included in that page. Tasks like these one are on paper very appropriate for LLMs to handle: close-ended, very straightforward jobs. Yet they are still completely unreliable. So, sure, of course, we're experiencing a hype built upon overblown expectations.

Nevertheless, I would like to award an honorable mention to Claude 3 Opus, because it helped me to create a Python script that managed to correctly scrap all the 206 lists from this page and create a a ranking of occurrences from it. It took me a while to explain to him the structure used by the BBC in that page but it finally got it. It even guessed that I missed the li tag - it was inside double quotes in a previous prompt and, because of that, it was automatically removed. In the screenshots included above are the winning prompt, the code excerpt suggested by Claude 3, and the first 38 Top TV shows.

remixtures, 4 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #Newsrooms #Journalism #Media #News: "As soon as we started doing interviews, my suspicions were confirmed: a lot of these guidelines were made from the top down. They were made individually by an editor-in-chief or sometimes by parent companies, without any consultation of journalists.

How can we create guidelines from the bottom up? How can we create guidelines involving journalists and all the stakeholders involved in news production? It shouldn’t surprise us that journalists are still making decisions based on their gut feeling. Even with all of these guidelines in place, journalists are still going to make decisions based on what they and their community feel it’s important.

If you impose guidelines from the top down, they are not going to be very effective because journalism is based on gut feeling. So we need to encourage newsrooms to have a conversation with their journalists and ask them about how these technologies should be put in place."

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/ai-newsroom-guidelines-look-very-similar-says-researcher-who-studied-them-he-thinks-bad-news

remixtures, 4 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #Search #Google #SearchEngines #SEO: "AI Overviews are just one of a slew of dramatic changes Google has made to its core product over the past two years. The company says its recent effort to revamp Search will usher in an exciting new era of technology and help solve many of the issues plaguing the web. But critics say the opposite may be true. As Google retools its algorithms and uses AI to transition from a search engine to a search and answer engine, some worry the result could be no less than an extinction-level event for the businesses that make much of your favourite content.

One thing is certain: Google's work is about to have a profound impact on what many of us see when we go online.

Over the last two years, updates meant to make Search more “helpful” devastated many website owners who say they follow Google’s best practices. (Source: Semrush) (Credit: BBC)
Over the last two years, updates meant to make Search more “helpful” devastated many website owners who say they follow Google’s best practices. (Source: Semrush) (Credit: BBC)
The changes came about because Google recognises the web has a problem. You've seen it yourself, if you've ever used a search engine. The Internet is dominated by a school of website building known as "search engine optimisation", or SEO, techniques that are meant to tune articles and web pages for better recognition from Google Search. Google even provides SEO tips, tools and advice for website owners. For millions of businesses that rely on the mechanisations of the Search machine, SEO can be an unavoidable game.

The trouble is SEO can be abused."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-how-googles-new-algorithm-will-shape-your-internet

remixtures, 4 days ago to internet Portuguese

#SocialMedia #Misinformation #Disinformation #FakeNews: "“Misinformation,” some say, is now just code for views one disagrees with. (Right-wing figures have harassed Donovan online and off, and accused her of perpetuating a “censorship-industrial complex.” Other researchers have faced even greater scrutiny, in the form of congressional subpoenas and public-records lawsuits.)

Quantifying the effect of misinformation is even harder than defining it. In the debate over why people fall for conspiracies, some scholars say that too much attention is paid to social media’s role and not enough to other factors, like government officials who make false claims on prime-time TV. Studies have failed to reliably find a direct causal relationship between viewing online misinformation and changing specific behaviors, such as switching voting positions. But to Donovan, Facebook’s ability to disseminate falsehoods at unprecedented scale has obvious consequences. When vigilantes take up arms in the wake of online rumors about “antifa” invaders, when people read on their feeds that vaccines are microchipped and voting is rigged, other members of the public — law-enforcement officials, doctors, journalists, election workers — spend time debunking and reassuring. “There are millions of resources lost to mitigating misinformation-at-scale, where the cost of doing nothing is even worse,” Donovan has written. She is among those advocating for “a public-interest internet,” one where social-media feeds would be required to contain “timely, relevant, and local” news curated by librarians."

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-distortions-of-joan-donovan

remixtures, 4 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #Search #Perplexity #Plagiarism #Journalism #Media #News: "AI-powered search startup Perplexity appears to be plagiarizing journalists’ work through its newly launched feature, Perplexity Pages, which lets people curate content on a particular topic. Multiple posts that have been “curated” by the Perplexity team on its platform are strikingly similar to original stories from multiple publications, including Forbes, CNBC and Bloomberg. The posts, which have already gathered tens of thousands of views, do not mention the publications by name in the article text — the only attributions are small, easy-to-miss logos that link out to them.

For instance, a Perplexity aggregation of Forbes’ exclusive reporting on Eric Schmidt’s stealth drone project contains several fragments that appear to have been lifted, including a custom illustration. Over the past several months, Forbes has broken a series of stories on the former Google CEO’s secretive efforts to develop AI-guided aircraft for the battlefield, and this week reported that Schmidt had poached talent from SpaceX, Apple and Google, and has been testing his drones in the wealthy Silicon Valley town of Menlo Park." https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/06/07/buzzy-ai-search-engine-perplexity-is-directly-ripping-off-content-from-news-outlets/

remixtures, 4 days ago to humanrights Portuguese

#Sudan #Darfur #HumanRights #Genocide: "In May 2024, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, was reported to warn that Sudan's Darfur region was facing a growing risk of genocide as the world's attention was focused on other parts of the world. As the U.N. Special Adviser indicated, “we do have circumstances in which a genocide could be occurring or has occurred.” She added that the situation is “Rwanda-like”, reminding of the 1994 genocide in the country, and that “increased hostilities in El Fasher have now opened a really alarming chapter in this conflict.”

Only a few weeks earlier, the U.N. Special Adviser reported that one year on, violence continued in Sudan. As she noted, “the fighting has taken the lives of more than 14,000 people and injured thousands more. Millions of civilians, including children, remain exposed to violence. Women and girls continue to be exposed to rampant rape and other forms of sexual violence. Five million people are on the brink of famine. Over 8.5 million people were forced to flee, of which 1.8 million have crossed borders, desperately seeking protection. The numbers are staggering, and yet the action in response is limited. Meanwhile, the fighting rages on, without a sign of stopping. One year on, we are no closer to peace than when the crisis started. This is devastating. This is unacceptable.”"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2024/06/06/united-nations-warns-of-genocide-in-darfur/

remixtures, 4 days ago to Bulgaria Portuguese

#EU #DSM #Copyright #Pastiche #Parody #FairUse: "This review of the national implementations in 26 Member States reveals that, five years after the entry into force of the DSM Directive, the EU does not yet offer a harmonised treatment of caricature, parody and pastiche, as envisioned by COMMUNIA’s policy recommendation #6 and policy recommendation #7.

The failure of the Czech Republic and Latvia to cover pastiche within their exceptions is particularly problematic because the pastiche exception appears to take into account artistic freedom considerations that are not adequately safeguarded by parody and caricature, raising even the question if it can be qualified as a general exception for artistic freedom. In our opinion, the omission is relevant enough for the Commission to initiate infringement proceedings against those countries, as is the omission of Spain to cover caricature.

The fact that six Member States failed to extend the exception for caricature, parody or pastiche to uses beyond the for-profit platforms covered by Article 17 shows that EU copyright law, as it stands, has yet to exhaust all the fundamental freedom considerations that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights imposes on its Member States. The EU legislator can certainly do more to achieve a fundamental-rights compliant copyright framework across the EU, and to actually save the memes and other expressions of fundamental freedoms across territories, platforms and AI-powered tools."

https://communia-association.org/2024/06/07/the-post-dsm-copyright-report-meme-supplement/

remixtures, 4 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @BrendanNyhan
New in @Nature: Misunderstanding the harms of online misinfo https://nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07417-w

Debunks unsupported claims about social media exposure/effects and shows low exposure concentrated in motivated fringe. We recommend holding platforms accountable for exposure in high-risk tails

remixtures, 4 days ago to journalism Portuguese

#Journalism #Media #News #OSINT #FactChecking: "Bellingcat’s trajectory tells a scathing story about the nature of truth in the 21st century. When Higgins began blogging as Brown Moses, he had no illusions about the malignancies of the internet. But along with journalists all over the world, he has discovered that the court of public opinion is broken. Hard facts have been devalued; online, everyone can present, and believe in, their own narratives, even if they’re mere tissues of lies. Along with trying to find the truth, Higgins has also been searching for places where the truth has any kind of currency and respect—where it can work as it should, empowering the weak and holding the guilty accountable.

The year ahead may be the biggest of Bellingcat’s life. In addition to tracking conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, its analysts are being flooded with falsified artifacts from elections in the US, the UK, India, and dozens of other countries. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the specter of artificial intelligence: still too primitive to fool Bellingcat’s experts but increasingly good enough to fool everyone else. Higgins worries that governments, social media platforms, and tech companies aren’t worrying enough and that they’ll take the danger seriously only when “there’s been a big incident where AI-generated imagery causes real harm”—in other words, when it’s too late."

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-lead-army-of-digital-sleuths-age-of-ai/

remixtures, 4 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @CriticalAI
📢📢📢CRITICAL AI PROUD TO PREVIEW INTRO TO SPECIAL ISSUE ON LLMS, GEN AI AND THE RISE OF CHATBOTS. Abstract and snips below/ 1 📢📢📢
https://criticalai.org/2024/06/06/sneak-preview-editors-introduction-lauren-m-e-goodlad-and-matthew-stone-beyond-chatbot-k-on-large-language-models-generative-ai-and-rise-of-chatbots-an-introduction/

remixtures, 4 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @edzitron
Oh my god what are you doing here??? If someone says that they have a magical AI "digital twin" that goes to meetings for you, how about asking how that works? And what the hell is this????

https://theverge.com/2024/6/3/24168733/zoom-ceo-ai-clones-digital-twins-videoconferencing-decoder-interview

remixtures, 4 days ago to ai Portuguese

MegaLoL!!!

#AI #AIHype #AIPin: "It emerged recently that Humane was trying to sell itself for as much as $1 billion after its confuddling, expensive and ultimately pretty useless AI Pin flopped. A New York Times report that dropped on Thursday shed a little more light on the company's sales figures and, like the wearable AI assistant itself, the details are not good.

By early April, around the time that many devastating reviews of the AI Pin were published, Humane is said to have received around 10,000 orders for the device. That's a far cry from the 100,000 it was hoping to ship this year, and about 9,000 more than I thought it might get. It's hard to think it picked up many more orders beyond those initial 10,000 after critics slaughtered the AI Pin."

https://www.engadget.com/humane-is-said-to-be-seeking-a-1-billion-buyout-after-only-10000-orders-of-its-terrible-ai-pin-134147878.html?guccounter=1

remixtures, 4 days ago to TechnicalWriting Portuguese

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #Markdown #XML #DITA: "Think about how in Markdown you would ensure that “all our how-to guides must have an h1 title, followed by one or more paragraphs, followed by one or more steps to achieve the guide’s goal”, and then consider how easy it is in DITA.

This is just not really possible today, at least in any popular Markdown-based framework.

There is a path
Bridging the gap between Markdown and structured authoring will require building new tooling and standards. It’s unlikely that CommonMark or any other popular Markdown flavor would consider going in this direction, so we’ll have to create tools around Markdown.

We at Doctave have some ideas about how to achieve this, and have a roadmap on how to get there. At a high level there are a few things we would need:

✅ A parser and template system that is Markdown-aware
❌ A language for describing constraints and rules for your Markdown content
❌ An engine that enforces those rules on your content
We’re already part of the way there!"

https://www.doctave.com/blog/path-to-structured-markdown

remixtures, 4 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @direitosdig
O Sr. Director da Polícia Judiciária volta à carga:

JN: «PJ ataca WhatsApp e outras plataformas por terem conversas encriptadas»
https://jn.pt/7161501329/pj-ataca-whatsapp-e-outras-plataformas-por-terem-conversas-encriptadas/

Este fanatismo contra a segurança de informação tem uma explicação. Demora apenas 8 segundos, e é apresentada pelo próprio:

remixtures, 4 days ago (edited 1 day ago) to random Portuguese

O Liberalismo de hoje é a versão adulterada e burguesa do anarquismo. Após a segunda grande guerra mundial, os burgueses aperceberam-se que as pessoas não queriam ter nada a ver com o controlo dirigista do Estado e passaram a impingir uma ideologia que escavacava com todos os princípios do contrato social pós-Bismarck.

Ora, na verdade o Estado-providência implementado por Bismarck no final do século XIX na Alemanha é apenas uma acomodação estatista aos princípios de solidariedade, ajuda mútua, igualitarismo e anti-autoritarismo do verdadeiro anarquismo.

Com os falsos libertários dos dias de hoje, o que temos é uma anti-política que se arroga a substituir todas as instituições sociais - Estado, Religião, Comunidade, Família - pelo Deus Mercado. Com este novo Deus, o princípio da acumulação de capital torna-se sagrado, logo dogma.

Na verdade, o Mercado é uma amálgama de decisões arbitrárias, constituindo uma enorme teia de aldrabices e charlatanices tecida por agentes muitas vezes anónimos. Tudo com o objectivo de ter sempre mais lucro. Daí que a ideologia dos falsos libertários se resuma a substituir a política (e a sociedade) pela economia.

Ora, escavacar com o Estado e substituí-lo pelo Mercado das relações abstractas, deitando borda fora os princípios de solidariedade social conquistados a ferros pela força colectiva dos trabalhadores a esse mesmo Estado, implica uma regressão social superior a 100 anos. O problema é que há muitos ingénuos que não estudaram História - muito menos Filosofia, Sociologia ou Teoria Política. Assim sendo, é fácil ir na cantiga pseudo-revolucionária dos falsos libertários.

remixtures, 4 days ago to ai Portuguese

According to this writer, we are currently witnessing the fifth hype cycle concerning AI:

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIHype #AIWinter: “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. This hype cycle is unlike any that have come before in various ways. There is more money involved now. It’s much more commercial; I had to phrase things above in very general ways because many previous hype waves have been based on research funding, some really being exclusively a phenomenon at one department in DARPA, and not, like, the entire economy.

I cannot tell you when the current mania will end and this bubble will burst. If I could, you’d be reading this in my $100,000 per month subscribers-only trading strategy newsletter and not a public blog. What I can tell you is that computers cannot think, and that the problems of the current instantation of the nebulously defined field of “AI” will not all be solved within “5 to 20 years”.”

https://blog.glyph.im/2024/05/grand-unified-ai-hype.html

remixtures, 5 days ago to microsoft Portuguese

#Microsoft #Surveilance #Privacy #DataProtection #Cybersecurity: "Microsoft is building a feature into Windows that is monitoring and logging a ton of data about you and the way you use your PC. Traditionally, we’d call this “spyware.” The difference is that Microsoft is giving this particular data collection feature its blessing and advertising it as a banner feature of its upcoming wave of Copilot+ PCs.

The fact that the data is processed locally rather than in the cloud is a good first step, but it's also the bare minimum. Based on both the permissive default settings and the ease with which this data can be accessed, Recall’s security safeguards as they currently exist just aren't good enough.

If Microsoft really does intend for everyone at the company to “do security,” it needs to put these concerns ahead of its apparently all-consuming drive to insert generative AI features into every single one of its products. Improving Recall before it becomes generally available needs to take priority, even if it delays the launch." https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/windows-recall-demands-an-extraordinary-level-of-trust-that-microsoft-hasnt-earned/

remixtures, 5 days ago to politics Portuguese

#Politics #Elections #UE #Democracy: "An election is a device for maximising conflict and minimising democracy. Parties gain ground by sowing division and anger, often around trivial issues that play to their advantage. At the same time, as the big players seek to appease commercial lobbies and the billionaire press, they converge disastrously on far more important issues, such as austerity, privatised public services, massive inequality of wealth and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Many of those who seek election manipulate, distract and lie.

Communities are set against each other: see how the Tories appeal to their elderly base by treating young people as a problem to be solved, currently through national service. The parties reduce our complex choices to a brutal binary; sometimes, as in the 2019 election, to a three-word slogan (Get Brexit Done). Vast questions, such as the environmental crisis, the spiral of accumulation by the wealthy, the possibility of food system failure or the resurgent threat of nuclear war, remain unresolved and generally unmentioned. All that is left to us, except for a 10-second action every five years, is to sit and hope. We end up, in our supposedly representative system, with a highly unrepresentative parliament and a perennial sense of disappointment.

Just as capitalism is arguably the opposite of markets, general elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.

Earlier societies recognised the distinction. Aristotle and Montesquieu observed that elections generated (respectively) “oligarchical” and “aristocratic” rule."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/06/general-elections-democracy-lottery-representation

remixtures, 5 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #Media #News #Journalism #OpenAI: "Those other deals they did a long time ago? The ones with the likes of Google and Apple and, most particularly, Facebook? They actually have learned lessons from them.

Most crucially: Those deals required publishers to change their business — to create new formats, or make a particular kind of video or story they wouldn't normally make, or to make more of them than they'd normally make. (The one I remember most vividly was Facebook's live video push, which paid publishers like The New York Times to make boring videos.)

But the OpenAI deals, the publishers emphasize, are straightforward licensing deals for stuff they're already making. Nothing bespoke. "It doesn't change the way we operate," one of them tells me.

And that is by far the most common theme you hear when you talk to publishers about these deals. They're something close to free money — for work that was going to get made regardless.
Which means — they say — at the end of these deals, publishers won't have to regret investing in another defunct Big Tech project."

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-publishers-deal-explainer-peter-kafka-2024-6