gmate8

nazgul, 5 months ago to ML

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.

I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.

One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.

But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?

Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.

Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death because of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.

Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things well; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.

The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.

They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.

#ML #TESCREAL

hyc, 5 months ago to random

Thinking about time travel, you can't have a machine like H.G. Wells described that just changes its coordinate in time, while leaving its x, y, and z coordinates in space unchanged. If you tried that, you'd most likely appear in empty space, because the Earth would have been somewhere else at your chosen time. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuaPyQFrYk

DarkGalloway, 5 months ago to Scotland

Cup and ring rock art at Drumtroddan, near Monreith, Galloway.

#StandingStoneSunday #Scotland #History

Illustration of Drumtroddan Rock Art from 1912.

privacyguides, 5 months ago to random

We're starting a new blog series where we cover what we're working on and news from around the privacy space every week, check it out: https://blog.privacyguides.org/2023/12/09/this-week-in-privacy-2023-12-09/ #ThisWeekInPrivacy

18+ hellbeast, 5 months ago to Wikipedia

Can we just casually talk about how mind boggling #Wikipedia is as a concept nowadays?

We're living in a world where knowledge and the infrastructure it runs on is aggressively monetized.

And out here, like a microcosm of the old web, is a wiki that's not run by a profit incentive that has created a repository on human knowledge.

And it has its own mini-culture based on that community from community awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Awards
to injokes.

In no particular order,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_climbing_the_Reichstag_dressed_as_Spider-Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Please_bite_the_newbies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_bad_faith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_not_create_an_account%3F

And that's ignoring the other super useful projects they maintain, like Wiktionary, which provides a free multilingual dictionary that often includes slang and other terms that wouldn't be in a normal dictionary and, as I'm typing this, my feed shows they're just launching another project.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/12/05/introducing-wikifunctions-first-wikimedia-project-to-launch-in-a-decade-creates-new-forms-of-knowledge/

Just amazing how this still exists despite how much the internet changed.

sco7sbhoy, 5 months ago to Scotland

“Scotland is a place full of magic and mystery with legends around every corner. While there are unique creatures of folklore to find here like Brownies or Kelpies, we also have one you’ll be much more familiar with. There are so many stories of Scottish Fairies to explore, with lots featuring in the Scotland’s Stories book, that narrowing down the list is no easy task!
So just exactly what are Scottish Fairies and where can you find them?” #scotland #stories #folklore
https://scotlands-stories.com/stories-of-scottish-fairies/

eloquence, 5 months ago to opensource

A belated addition to the https://bit.ly/eXit (→ GDoc) spreadsheet:

The original X, @XOrgFoundation, left Twitter/X back in May due to the direction of the platform.

The nonprofit provides infrastructure for many essential components of an open source desktop, e.g., a Linux system.

If you're interested the "under the hood" developments of #opensource desktop tech, give them a follow.

thenewoil, 5 months ago to privacy

The House Intelligence Committee's #Surveillance 'Reform' Bill is a Farce

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/section-702-needs-reform-and-oversight-not-expansion-congress-should-oppose-hpsci

#privacy #MassSurveillance #politics

dansup, 5 months ago to php

Christmas has come early 👀

https://frankenphp.dev

#php #pixeldev #laravel #frakenphp

rms, 5 months ago to random

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/07/erdogan-hails-new-era-of-friendship-with-greece-during-historic-visit-to-athens

After 100 years of hostility since the end of the war between them, Greece and Turkey have made a friendship agreement in an effort to end the hostility.

godotengine, 5 months ago to godot

Introducing the new #godotengine Forum 🎉

For the last couple of months, our Q&A platform has been in read-only mode. Now it has been superseded by our new and more powerful forum!

@WinstonYallow wrote about it in our blog:
https://godotengine.org/article/introducing-new-forum/

thenewoil, 5 months ago to random

@protonmail how do you guys handle push notifications? In other words: in light of this article does Proton take any steps to protect users from this type of surveillance?

https://www.404media.co/us-government-warrant-monitoring-push-notifications-apple-google-yahoo/

thenewoil, 5 months ago to apple

Here's a Warrant Showing the U.S. Government is Monitoring Push Notifications

https://www.404media.co/us-government-warrant-monitoring-push-notifications-apple-google-yahoo/

#MassSurveillance #Apple #Google #Android #iOS #privacy #politics

mcnees, 5 months ago to random

How it started / How it's going

A paper by Falcke, Melia, and Agol appeared in The Astrophysical Journal #OTD in 1999, arguing it might be feasible to image the shadow of a distant supermassive black hole using Very Long Baseline Interferometry.

Over the last few years, the Event Horizon Telescope has imaged the shadows of supermassive black holes at the center of M87 and our own Milky Way.

Images: EHT Collaboration.

Image of the region around the supermassive black hole in M87, rendered in polarized light that reveals the structure of the magnetic field around the black hole. Image: EHT Collaboration
The first EHT image: the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the heart of M87. It appears as an orange, yellow, and white ring on a black background.
The EHT's image of the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It appears as an orange, yellow, and white ring on a black background, like the M87 image. But there are three bright "blobs" at different points around the ring.

downey, 5 months ago to apple

🚨 🕵🏽 :apple_inc: :google: Once again proud of my US Senator, who is blowing the whistle on government #surveillance of people through mobile push notifications typically sent through #Apple or #Google servers.

Yet another reason to use @fdroidorg to avoid corporate #spyware. And to use something like @ntfy for your push notifications instead.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/06/us-senator-warns-governments-spying-apple-google-smartphone-users-via-push-notifications/

#SurveillanceCapitalism #privacy #FDroid

alternativeto, 5 months ago to random

Bluesky faces backlash over plans to launch a public web interface, making posts accessible to all. Users argue that the platform should prioritize privacy options before making it public. Bluesky responded by incorporating an opt-out tool in the upcoming release. https://alternativeto.net/news/2023/12/bluesky-postpones-public-interface-launch-amid-user-backlash-over-privacy-concerns/

rainwarrior, 5 months ago to random

After 13 years of service I finally had to retire Windows 7 on my desktop computer.

I'll never forget this awesome tune that came in the Sample Music folder. I still use it as a sound test any time I'm setting up to stream.

Mr Scruff - Kalimba

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZHAb92E31E

paulhellyer, 5 months ago to random

I am not a Led Zepplin fan at all really, but this rendition of 'Stairway to Heaven' at the St Andrews College Prize-giving Finale in Ōtautahi is fantastic and a real joy to watch. The lead singer, Grace Burnett, and the lead guitarist, Mia Fraser, are brillant but all of the performers from the co-ed school are terrific. Currently going 'viral' and deservedly so. The kids are alright you know.

YouTube via Invidious so you aren't tracked.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Wyoog6SdEpU

#LedZepplin #StAndrews

alternativeto, 5 months ago to random

Proton has begun a phased rollout of a new photo backup feature on its Proton Drive Android app. The feature allows users to sync photos from their Android devices to their encrypted cloud storage accounts. iOS version is undergoing beta testing.
https://alternativeto.net/news/2023/12/proton-drive-rolls-out-encrypted-photo-backup-feature-on-android-app-beta-testing-for-ios/

endDRM, 5 months ago to random

#DRM isn't just an annoyance -- it's a violation of your right to use the items you own as you see fit. Learn more about our Defective by Design campaign at http://defectivebydesign.org, and follow our campaign account at @endDRM

jimfrost, 5 months ago to Scotland

The Bridge of King’s Ford with The Buck in the distance. Yesterday at The Cabrach #Moray #Cabrach #Scotland #DJI

fkamiah17, 5 months ago to random

And so say all of us.
“Deep down, I am a revolutionary. I have no faith in the political system as it is … I go on Question Time and I talk to politicians and get involved, but actually I'd like to just burn the lot of them”.
~ Benjamin Zephaniah
#RIP #RiseUp

timjan, 5 months ago to random

I need a new mastodon feature:
Schedule to show me this post again in 12 hours.

Yes, there are bookmarks. I never remember to check bookmarks until 3 months later, when I have no longer any idea why I saved them.

@apps

lichess, 5 months ago to chess

Check out NoseKnowsAll's new study on the Caro-Kann! https://lichess.org/study/8isfzJc8
The study is designed for lichess players rated below 2000. It is organized into 6 sections, each representing a key variation of the Caro-Kann.

The emphasis is on understanding, not memorizing!

#chess #lichess