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We need to focus on the AI harms that already exist

"AI systems falsely classifying individuals as criminal suspects, robots being used for policing, and self-driving cars with faulty pedestrian tracking systems can already put your life in danger. Sadly, we do not need AI systems to have superintelligence for them to have fatal outcomes for individual lives. Existing

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Last Chance to fix eIDAS

This kind of legislation is fundamentally against the public interest and, I believe, should always be opposed: "These changes radically expand the capability of EU governments to surveil their citizens by ensuring cryptographic keys under government control can be used to intercept encrypted web traffic across the EU. Any

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Confessions of a Venture Capital-Backed Startup Founder

"In the past few years, causality inverted: Start-ups and entire markets were manufactured from whole cloth to meet the demand of overcapitalized venture funds searching for a home run." I am certain I'll found another startup, and I'm certain it will be a

Which tech companies are funded may be about to change

I’ve been thinking about Sam Lessin’s latest deck about the future of venture capital and its implications about the future of how technology is funded and built. Sam is General Partner at Slow Ventures and partner to Jessica Lessin, founder of tech industry publication The Information. It’s

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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.

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