For me, the main lesson from OpenAI trying so hard and failing so badly to buy Scarlett Johansson's voice isn't tech industry's arrogance or dishonesty, it's their insecurity.
When your entire business model is a con, of course exploiting a famous work of fiction to shape the public perception of your product is going to take precedence over law, ethics, safety, and technical excellence.
I recently saw a conversation between two people I respect that ended poorly. This being a social platform, shortage of mutual understanding is not surprising. Most of the time, I just back away slowly, but this time, the topic is important enough, and I think I can see a framing that can help make conversations about it less antagonistic.
Global social networks with algorithmic feeds make #disinfo 10x worse.
A lot of people underestimate how bad it is, for the same reason people underestimated COVID: humans have no intuition for exponents, mechanical metaphors like weight and velocity really don't work for epidemiology.
In a race of exponents, a 0.1% advantage takes only 700 iterations to grow into a 2x advantage. On a platform with a billion users, a 0.1% difference can make one narrative overtake another in hours. 6/
The main threats to democracy are #war and #disinfo. Mitigating the risk of war has never been as straightforward as today: arm #Ukraine, arm #Taiwan, and let their resistance deter fascist empires from invading their neighbors.
Disinfo is a harder problem. Like cancer, it exploits freedom of speech and other essential aspects of democracy to turn a society against itself. Like with cancer, any treatment has to walk a careful balance to eradicate the disease without killing the host. 5/
This is rich. Companies that make billions in profits and pay almost no taxes (1.2% in case of Amazon) are demanding that the federal government foots the bill for an organization they all need in order to make more profit from AI.
I was born and lived most of my life in a country just like this. #TimothySnyder is the only American writer I know who truly gets it. It's not just his experience, it's also lots and lots of empathy and willingness to understand other people. Every word of this essay is true and matches my lived experience in #Belarus to a tee. Americans, don't let you country decay into that. #Vote
Looks like Taylor Lorenz is as bad at fact checking as she is at reporting about trans teens. Her attempt at fact checking the TikTok hearings isn't just carrying water for social platforms controlled by authoritarian individuals or governments, it's so sloppy it's embarrassing. WaPo, please stop giving her gigs she's unqualified for, just leave it to corp PR pros next time. 1/
"openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd does depend on lzma."
No, systemd is not the root cause. The root cause is the sorry state of funding FOSS that leaves even core system components crumbling under tech debt.
We already had that conversation after Heartbleed. We still haven't solved it.
Great translation into plain English by @dangoodin:
> A device inside Microsoft’s network was protected by a weak password with no form of two-factor authentication employed.
> this “legacy non-production test tenant account” was somehow configured so that Midnight Blizzard could pivot and gain access to some of the company’s most senior and sensitive employee accounts.
“There’s a grading-your-own-homework problem,” said Zvika Krieger, a former director of responsible innovation at Meta who worked with the Well-Being Team. “Meta defines what constitutes harmful content, so it shapes the discussion of how successful it is at dealing with it.”
#Facebook always hides bad news behind Friday afternoons and other news cycle dead zones. For this to merit the Thanksgiving weekend placement, it had to be truly horrible.
And it is just that: truly horrible. The unsealed sections are filled with quotes from #Meta employees and execs discussing how to misrepresent the facts about #Instagram causing mental health issues and self-harm in children.
Jury finds right-wing extremist guilty on charges that fit the definition of terrorism (use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims): "a 43-year-old carpenter who immersed himself in conspiracy theories spread online by right-wing extremists, admitted that he hit Paul Pelosi on the head “full force” with a hammer during his bungled attempt to take Nancy Pelosi hostage at their San Francisco home in October 2022." #Disinfo is #Terrorism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/16/paul-pelosi-nancy-david-depape-trial/
As a long time socialist anti-fascist pacifist anarchist, I find it very awkward to ask this, but this the the world we live in. If you are a European, urge your government to step up the defence spending. If you are an American, vote for Democrats. Last time we had a war like this in Europe, it killed tens of millions. The only way to not let this one spill out of #Ukraine is to send more arms sooner. The time when you get to pay this down with just money is running out. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/12/ukraine-europe-aid-trump/
I was born in USSR. There were no votes in USSR. I remember Perestroika. When I was just a teen, my parents were seriously discussing going off the grid to sit out the civil war if the 1991 KGB putsch against Gorbachev succeeded. Everybody was surprised when it failed. What followed was very confusing time, people had no idea how democracy is supposed to work, including the people who somehow made it work anyway, for a few years.
When my new country, Belarus, elected its first (and so far, the only) president in 1994, I wasn't old enough to vote. By the time I was, he has shut down the Constitutional Court, dismissed the Parliament, and put a loyalist in charge of the Elections Commission. I didn't get a chance to vote. I never had a chance to vote in my life.
I don't know how to describe what I feel when Americans tell me that their votes don't matter much, that American democracy isn't something worth saving, or that it already is beyond saving.