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Open Society and Other Funders Launch New Initiative to Ensure AI Advances the Public Interest

This is the kind of AI declaration I prefer. “As we know from social media, the failure to regulate technological change can lead to harms that range from children’s safety to the erosion of democracy. With AI, the scale and intensity of potential harm is even greater—from racially

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The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023

For me, this paragraph was the takeaway: "We affirm that, whilst safety must be considered across the AI lifecycle, actors developing frontier AI capabilities, in particular those AI systems which are unusually powerful and potentially harmful, have a particularly strong responsibility for ensuring the safety of these AI systems,

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Technical Standards Bodies are Regulators

This is an interesting point of view, but I don't think I fully buy it: while these bodies set technical standards, they have no ability to actually enforce. Consider the situation with Internet Explorer back when it virtually owned the web (and, to a lesser extent, the situation

Return To Office is all about power

Expensify’s experiment to use craft coffees and a free cocktail bar to lure employees back to the office failed spectacularly: If the best office in the entire planet can't compete with the local coffee shop, the tightly-closed Pandora's box of "work from anywhere"

That's beautiful!

That's beautiful!

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Pushing for a lower dev estimate is like negotiating better weather with a meteorologist

I've lived this, and I'd go so far that it's a sure sign of a dysfunctional team: when non-technical leadership pushes for lower estimates based on their own business hopes and doesn't accept the ones given by their in-house experts. "Pushing

Senior web development at ProPublica

ProPublica is hiring a senior web developer. You’re familiar with ProPublica’s reporting even if you’re not sure about the name. They’re the newsroom that reported on Justice Clarence Thomas’s close relationship with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow; on TurboTax’s misleading practices that coerce low income

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What Palestinians Really Think of Hamas

Palestinians in Gaza are, by and large, not fans of Hamas, and are not aligned with eliminating Israel. "By and large, Gazans do not share Hamas’s goal of eliminating the state of Israel. When presented with three possible solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as well as an option

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The Handcrafted Artisanal Web

"The future is returning to an artisanal web, where you cultivate your niches and small communities, where maybe you don’t become a millionaire and a star, but you do feel a sense of belonging, and maybe make enough to get by. I think that’d be okay, honestly.

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‘The Messenger’ Speed Runs The U.S. Journalism Implosion Cycle Thanks To Incompetent Billionaires And ‘Both Sides’ Clickbait Gibberish

"Like so many rich media executives (see: Politico owner and CEO Mathias Döpfner), Finkelstein’s incapable of seeing most of the fatal flaws in modern U.S. journalism, whether it’s the inherent class, race and gender biases in most newsrooms, the steady erosion of trust caused by feckless

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Beyond Checkboxes: Privacy Protections That Work for the Future Generation

I think the conclusions here are the right ones. In particular, ensuring privacy by design is a far better strategy than pushing for informed consent, because the vast majority of people are not informed about the implications of data collection (even without considering Gen-Z's ambient comfort with the

Journaling in private with my friends

I kind of miss having something like a LiveJournal. If you missed its heyday about twenty years ago, LiveJournal was a private blogging community that led to much of what we know as social media. You could follow your friends, and they could follow you back if they wanted; your