Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
AI
[Heather Bryant] "What generative AI creates is not any one person's creative expression. Generative AI is only possible because of the work that has been taken from others. It simply would not exist without the millions of data points that the models are based upon. Those data
AI
[Janet Vertesi at Public Books] "Our lives are consumed with the consumption of content, but we no longer know the truth when we see it. And when we don’t know how to weigh different truths, or to coordinate among different real-world experiences to look behind the veil, there
Technology
[Renee Dudley at ProPublica] "Former [Microsoft] employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others." This is a damning story about profit over principles: Microsoft
Business
[Calm Company Fund] "Inhale. Exhale. Find the space between… Calm Company Fund is going on sabbatical and taking a break from investing in new companies and raising new funds. Here’s why." Calm Company Fund's model seems interesting. It's a revenue-based investor that makes
AI
[The Markup] "Now all three men are speaking out against pending California legislation that would make it illegal for police to use face recognition technology as the sole reason for a search or arrest. Instead it would require corroborating indicators." Even with mitigations, it will lead to wrongful
Notable Links
"Justice Samuel Alito spoke candidly about the ideological battle between the left and the right — discussing the difficulty of living “peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamental” differences that “can’t be compromised.” He endorsed what his interlocutor described as a necessary fight to “return our country
Notable Links
"Open Rights Group has published its six priorities for digital rights that the next UK government should focus on." These are things every government should provide. I'm particularly interested in point number 3: "Predictive policing systems that use artificial intelligence (AI) to ‘predict’ criminal behaviour
Business
"The findings suggest the return to office movement has been a poorly-executed failure, but one particular figure stands out - a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving." Unsurprising but also immoral: these respondents believed that subsequent layoffs
Media
"There’s an ocean of problems with journalism, but the idea that there’s just too damn much woke progressivism is utter delusion. U.S. journalism generally tilts center right on the political spectrum." This is a story about the founder of Politico creating a "teaching hospital
Fediverse
"Remember! If you only signed up to hear when this feature is available, or you're wondering what ActivityPub even is: This probably is not the newsletter for you. This is a behind-the-scenes, engineering-heavy, somewhat-deranged build log by the team who are working on it." And I
Technology
"After 17 of using Twitter daily and 24 years of using Google daily neither really works anymore. And particular with the collapse of the social spaces many of us grew up with, I feel called back to earlier forms of the Internet, like blogs, and in particular, starting a
AI
"Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition whose members include Amazon, Apple and Meta, is launching a campaign to defend the legality of using copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence systems." I understand why they're making this push, but I don't know that it&