Organizing childcare as relative newcomers to an area has been really hard. We weren’t on any daycare waiting lists before our baby was born; we don’t have the local connections that can help you figure out how to separate the good facilities from bad. Erin’s back to
“Over 100 artists including Rage Against the Machine co-founders Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha, along with Boots Riley and Speedy Ortiz, have announced that they are boycotting any concert venue that uses facial recognition technology, citing concerns that the tech infringes on privacy and increases discrimination.” #Technology [Link]
“There’s a reason big car companies were open to taking down AM radio … let’s be clear: big business doesn’t like things that are overwhelmingly conservative.” Adding to the list of organizations people think don’t like conservatives: [checks notes] big business. #Media [Link]
There's still time to apply to be The 19th's next Chief Technology Officer. If the idea of working with a women-run, highly diverse, non-profit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy sounds good to you (it's a truly GREAT team), go
“Auto-generating text based on other people’s discoveries and then automatically summarising that text by finding commonalities with existing text creates a loop of mechanised nonsense. It’s a prayer wheel for capitalism.” #AI [Link]
“Meta, which owns Facebook, has been making repeated concessions to Vietnam’s authoritarian government, routinely censoring dissent and allowing those seen as threats by the government to be forced off the platform.” #Technology [Link]
“The 19th spoke with health care professionals who provide gender-affirming care to adults and adolescents — as well as trans young adults who were comfortable sharing their experiences — to answer those questions.” #Health [Link]
Rest in peace, and thank you for everything you did. #Democracy [Link]
I posted a link the other day to this sobering essay about how the promised migration to Mastodon didn’t go as hoped. It makes some assumptions about what people were hoping for in the first place, but if you were (as I was) hoping that this would be a
“Google has made millions of dollars in the last two years from advertisements misdirecting users who were seeking abortion services to “pregnancy crisis centers” that do not actually provide care, according to a new study.” #Technology [Link]
A cathartic read that would be a great back-to-back pair with Matthew Desmond's Poverty, by America. I took some exception to his skepticism towards renewable energy, but the core message and diagnosis of what he calls The Mindset is right on. Now we have the diagnosis, the key
“Human reviewers may read the chats, and researchers found that similar AI could reproduce the data it absorbed during training, creating a leak risk. Alphabet also alerted its engineers to avoid direct use of computer code that chatbots can generate, some of the people said.” #AI [Link]
