For the last few years, AI vendors have had an interesting marketing playbook: they’ve described the potential power of the technologies as being so great that it could lead to an artificial general intelligence that could either kill humanity or leave us behind and head for the stars. We
Technology
[Alex Heath at The Verge] And so begin the knock-on effects on companies across America: "In a Wednesday memo to employees that I obtained (and you can read below), Google’s head of HR, Fiona Cicconi, said there will no longer be DEI hiring targets due to the company’
Technology
[Eoin Higgins, excerpted in Lit Hub] This is a neat encapsulation of Musk’s rightward turn, and everything that happened next: “By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed
AI
[Maxwell Zeff at TechCrunch] I know "don't be evil" is from another era of Google, but still, this rankles: "Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company
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[Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica] From my colleagues at ProPublica: "Citing an urgency to protect students’ civil rights in a second Trump administration, Illinois lawmakers filed a new bill Monday that would explicitly prevent school police from ticketing and fining students for misbehavior." This
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[The Guardian Editorial] The Guardian editorial board isn't mincing words: "Donald Trump is provoking a US constitutional crisis, claiming sweeping powers to override or bypass Congress’s control over spending in a brazen attempt to centralise financial power in the executive branch. If he succeeds, Nobel laureate
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[Jameel Jaffer in The New York Times] Jameel Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University: "The spectacle of powerful media organizations debasing themselves before Mr. Trump has become so familiar that it is beginning to feel like scheduled programming. [...] Mr. Trump captured
askacto
I’ve been a technical leader a few times: CTO and Director of Technology at two nonprofit newsrooms; technical lead at five tech companies of varying sizes; investor and advisor in early-stage startups. I’ve enjoyed reading Ask a Manager for years, and it occurred to me that a similar
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[Cathy Gellis at TechDirt] On point: "So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into government offices to take over computer systems where they had no legitimate authorization or entitlement needs to be understood as a cyberattack by a rogue actor. And every ounce of
Technology
[Matt Haughey] I really like the way this guide to Signal lays it all out. As Matt Haughey explains: "A friend of mine works in the federal government and wrote a guide for their fellow federal workers on how to use Signal. There are lots of good reasons for
Okay, friends. Here’s what we’re going to do. It’s not going to take long. Let’s install Signal. Signal is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted instant messaging app. When you message someone with Signal, nobody can intercept your conversation to learn what you’re saying. It’s very
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[Naseem S. Miller at the Journalist's Resource] A massive, last-minute data preservation effort was undertaken this week as important federal datasets were taken offline: "The new Trump administration has at least temporality halted most communications from the Department of Health and Human Services and has begun taking