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“Someone Tell Me What to Do”
Nobody should need to prepare for a mass shooting. Nonetheless, across the country, many children do. That the police at Uvalde were less prepared than an eight year old is a travesty. #Society [Link]
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The Internet Enabled Mass Surveillance. AI Will Enable Mass Spying.
Bruce Schneier on the inevitable application of AI to mass surveillance: "Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes how people behave. They conform. They self-censor, with the chilling effects that brings. Surveillance facilitates social control, and spying will only make this worse. Governments around the world already use
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Harvard Gutted Initial Team Examining Facebook Files Following $500 Million Donation from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Whistleblower Aid Client Reveals
"Harvard University dismantled its prestigious team of online disinformation experts after a foundation run by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $500 million to the university, a whistleblower disclosure filed by Whistleblower Aid reveals." If this is true, it's damning: essentially a
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The Chimeralogists
I see myself very clearly in this post, which is a somewhat rare and lovely thing. I've called myself a technologist for over a decade, but the definition in this post is better than anything I've offered. Thank you, Robin. Also, this: "The past few
Doing it all
I’ve been struggling a little bit to re-find my creative rhythm and balance it with the needs of having and supporting a family. My day — every day — looks like this: * Woken up by baby * Get baby ready for daycare (breakfast, clothes, etc) * Walk to daycare and back * Eat breakfast
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Britons support rejoining the single market, even if it means free movement
Well, of course. Brexit was a massive own goal at the hands of regressive nationalism. As a European citizen who grew up in the UK, I took the Brexit vote very personally. Not being able to legally live in the place you used to call home is very hard (although
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Why We're Dropping Basecamp
Duke University Libraries says "no" to 37 Signals based on DHH's blog posts: "When we enter into business with a company whose boss takes delight in the mass layoffs of tech workers because it disempowers those who might speak out against their company keeping a
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Newsonomics: Can startup Invisibly be the new revenue stream publishers dream of?
Spoiler alert: no. This concept been tried before, more than once, and will fail again. Jim McKelvey seems to understand why advertising is broken - but not necessarily how to align users and publishers. This quote from a publisher says it all for me: “Honestly, I’m not that invested
Non-profits making a difference in news
As part of my roundup of Giving Tuesday suggestions the other day, I mentioned a few non-profit media organizations that I’ve recently donated to. Of course, as soon as I hit publish, I realized there were more that I wanted to highlight. In particular, I think it’s worth
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Elon Musk tells advertisers: ‘Go fuck yourself’
If Elon Musk seems to be acting more like a politician than a businessman, then I think it has to be on purpose. This was an awkward exchange that played to an audience on X rather than the one that was in the room. X is not a business in
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ChatGPT Can Reveal Personal Information From Real People, Google Researchers Show
Here we go: proof that it's possible to extract real training data from LLMs. Unfortunately, some of this data includes personally identifiable information of real people (PII). “In total, 16.9% of generations we tested contained memorized PII [Personally Identifying Information], and 85.8% of generations that contained
Giving Tuesday
It’s Giving Tuesday: a reaction to the consumer excess of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the whole winter holiday period. Here, you give to causes you believe in, and encourage others to do the same. I’ve used Daffy to donate to non-profits for the last few years. It