festal

festal, 10 months ago to random

Went to see a superblock in Barcelona. Given how much they feature as urbanism of the future, they are amazingly simple. Take an intersection, block traffic in all four directions and you have a square. Plant trees, add some tables and benches. That's basically it. Replace cars with trees and don't privatize the resulting space. All you need, and all that is usually missing, is political will.

festal, 11 months ago to random

This is not going well. Not for Google, not for us.

https://futurism.com/top-google-result-johannes-vermeer-ai-generated-knockoff

festal, 5 months ago to random

This is a great, concise (5 min!) video by @emilymbender

First off, she proposes to replace the term AI with "automation" because this allows raising pertinent questions much more clearly:

• What is being automated?
• By whom and why?
• Who benefits?
• Who is being harmed?
• How well does it work?
• Who is accountable?
• What laws/regulations apply to what is being automated?

(the last point refers to what @tante & @CyberneticForests recently pointed out; don't regulate tech, regulate behavior)

Then she proposes to distinguish different types of automation:

• consequential decisions (e.g. in the courts, banks, or HR departments)
• classification (face-recognition, slotting people into groups)
• recommender systems (automated newsfeeds)
• access to human labor (uber, mechanical turk etc)
• translation of information from one format to another (text-to-image, language translation)
• content generation (chatGPT)

They have in common that they are built on training data and the ability to reproduce certain patterns in that data (including all the biases in that data).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK0md9tQ1KY

festal, 3 months ago to random

The world would probably be a better place if the absolute amount of computing power would no longer grow. Then development would have to focus on making things more efficient rather than relying on brute force everywhere.

festal, 2 months ago to random

Mastodon is really lacking discovery tools beyond the local and the federated timeline.

As a way to address this issue, @tante has set-up the @hypebot which forwards trending posts from a hand-curated list of instances.

You can find the list here:

https://github.com/tante/hypebot-config/blob/main/config.yaml

We want to update that list occasionally, to keep it interesting.

Any suggestion of instances that should be added?

festal, 4 months ago to ai

This is a really great tag-line on the enormous resources used by #AI.

"For all of the fears about AI's brain, it's AI's body that could claim us first."

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-data-centers-land-grab-google-meta-openai-amazon-2023-12

festal, 4 months ago to ai

The state of #AI, as summarized by @pluralistic

"We're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

festal, 8 months ago to random

Ich hatte die wenig vergnügliche Aufgabe, ein Plagiatsgutachten für eine Dissertation einer grossen deutschsprachigen Universität zu erstellen. Die Grundlage für das Gutachten war der Output einer Softwareanalyse.

Hier das Fazits meines Gutachtens:

"Die Prüfsoftware selbst schafft viele Probleme. ... Erstens, sie generiert viele “false positives” und es wird in der Gesamtbeurteilung ein zu hoher Anteil vermeintlich problematischer Stellen ausgewiesen. Das hilft der Skandalisierung und der Eigenwerbung von XXX, aber nicht der Beurteilung.

Zweitens, sie forciert eine falsche Idee der Originalität, die letztlich trivial ist. Bei der Erläuterung allgemein bekannter Tatsachen kann es keine Originalität geben, egal ob die Reihenfolge der dafür verwendeten Wörter statistisch einzigartig ist oder nicht.

Drittens, und vielleicht am problematischen, sie verschiebt die Beurteilung von einer semantischen auf eine syntaktische Ebene. Dies führt zu einer sinnentleerten, rein formalen Analyse, die entsprechend einfach automatisiert werden kann. Dies trägt zur Selbstabschaffung der am Menschen orientierten Wissenschaft bei."

festal, 1 month ago to random

If corporations are a form of slow AI, then what @pluralistic calls #enshittification is indicative of an "alignment problem", when the objective function (paperclip maximization) is persued by destructive means. And like all alignment problems, it has to do with a lack of, or the wrong, constraints.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/

festal, 4 months ago to random

It's probably a case of confirmation bias, but I had to impulse-buy this (comic) book on how the many ways in which the vision of space colonization makes no practical sense. After reading @pluralistic 's review:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

festal, 1 month ago to random

What a great article on the undersea cables that carry most internet traffic. In short, constant maintenance is needed.

https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships

festal, 9 months ago to random

I'm very happy, After 25 years (!) of moderation and other near-daily care-taking work by @tb and myself, the nettime mailing list has been taken over by a fresh crew. This in itself is amazing.

https://tldr.nettime.org/@bot/110848024697055904

Hosting is provided by our friends @servus.

it's hard to overstate how important the list has been for me, intellectually, but also professionally, personally, socially, and emotionally.

And still is, but now as a simple subscriber and occasional contributor to the list.

festal, 1 year ago to random

Learned a new acronym: TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) the seven horsemen of silicon valley thinking.

https://washingtonspectator.org/understanding-tescreal-silicon-valleys-rightward-turn/

festal, 9 months ago to random

Donna Haraway once remarked that we (in the technocultural present) "tend to describe everything as new, as revolutionary, as future-oriented, as a solution to problems of the past. The arrogance and ignorance of this attitude hardly need comment."

Would be nice to think of solutions from the past to problems of the future, ie those we currently create. Which might also lead to trying to avoid creating the problems in the first place.

festal, 9 months ago to random

Beyond the highly sanitized world of corporate AI, there is probably an AI trained for any possible fringe use. Of course, also for porn.

https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-porn-generative-artificial-intelligence

festal, 11 days ago to random

#Zürich

image/jpeg

festal, 5 months ago to random

We would have a much saner, interesting, and politically relevant discussion if we were talking about "labor automation technologies", rather than "artificial intelligence".

festal, 1 month ago to random

What's the rationale for books as PDFs being more expensive than as paper backs? Is it the DRM?

festal, 1 month ago to random

I'm looking for a history of #fracking as a technology and industry. Anyone any good pointers?

festal, 1 year ago to random

I think one of the reasons that many of the AI people are so scared of AI is that they truly believe that there is no (or there will be no) difference between humans and machines. As all capacities of humans can be fully simulated, and then improved on, by machines.

This is not only a fundamentally mistaken and sad assumption, but most importantly a very dangerous one, creating lots of harm.

NatureMC, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

🚨 Breaking news of April Fools Day: Putin poisoned by mysterious substance from the FSB, Trump is arrested for life, Hamas gives up, Netanyahu resigns with his government. In a programme that even Russia and China are joining, the world finally wants to fight hunger and climate change effectively. Special meeting in Davos to introduce a tax on the super-rich and protect democracy around the globe. First serious signs of hope.🌍
Sorry to have to announce this today 😭 unfortunately: 🐟 :Blobhaj:

festal, 8 months ago to ai

"An #AI system independent of humans is the ultimate shell company, purely an available hiding place for corruption by the human agencies that set it in place."

A good working assumption until proven otherwise (it probably will never be proven otherwise, bc calling a system 'autonomous' is deceptive to begin with) by @j2bryson in
https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-very-short-primer-on-ai-ip-including.html?m=1

festal, 1 month ago to ai

A comprehensive overview of the possibilities to opt-out of having our website included in AI #training #data. By using robot.txt. tl,dr: it's increasingly possible, but for existing content likely too late. Removing content already indexed is close to impossible. Contrary to search engines, #AI indexes are not concerned with it reflecting the current state of the web, but simply keep adding.

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/04/21/ai-control

festal, 2 months ago to random

A time, as good as any, to remember that Richard Serra also made very interesting films And you can find ubu.com. Such as this one: Frame, 1969, 14' 29"

https://ubu.com/film/serra_frame.html

festal, 3 months ago to random

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/28/quite-radical-the-feeling-of-exhaustion-is-key-to-tackling-climate-change-says-author-ajay-singh-chaudhary