Abbe @Abbe@social.cleverlibre.org

Hot take/rant time for #ActivityPub with the news that #Meta plans to dip their toe in the water.

I would view Meta as an existential threat to a non-corporate, AP-based #fediverse in large part *because* of the immaturity of and lack of interoperability in the AP spec itself.

Why?

Because when you have that big of a fish involved in your space made up of small players, the big fish gets to set the rules unless you have some pretty strong protections in place.

Microsoft’s official @dotnet sent its first Mastodon post today.

Pay attention to the domain: dotnet.social.

Which means Microsoft is operating their own Mastodon community server.

@dotnet account was registered in November, but it became active today.

Clearly, Microsoft sees the Fediverse as core to marketing to developers. I wonder what other brands they’ll bring to the Fediverse as well.

https://dotnet.social/@dotnet/109990127969245035

@fediversenews

@billseitz I feel like a lot of #NoCode is just marketing. Tech is in bed with capitalism. I feel like the revolution is the divorce.

The thing driving the idea that #AI can replace human software #developers is the same fantasy that drives #LowCode products: that every automatable business problem is a collection of templates to be stitched together by a “non-techie” who understands what they want enough to express it in the terms of a watered-down vocabulary or interface.

Like #ChatGPT stringing together words from the Internet and books, it assumes everything worth writing has already been written and just needs remixing.

BBC will not broadcast Attenborough episode over fear of rightwing backlash

The BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of #David #Attenborough’s flagship new series on #British #wildlife because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a #backlash from Tory politicians and the #rightwing #press, the Guardian has been told.

The decision has angered the programme-makers and some insiders at the BBC, who fear the corporation has bowed to pressure from lobbying groups with “dinosaurian ways”.

The revelation about Attenborough’s programme comes at the end of a week in which another broadcaster, Gary Lineker, has been condemned by Conservative ministers for his criticism of the government’s immigration bill.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/mar/10/david-attenborough-bbc-wild-isles-episode-rightwing-backlash-fears?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

A man files a wrongful death suit against the women who helped his ex-wife obtain medication for an abortion. He is seeking $1M in damages.

We are entering the modern day equivalent of the Salem Witch Trials.

#reproductiverights #women #abortion #democracy #politics #law #lawfedi

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/10/texas-abortion-lawsuit/

@cdarwin I have been interested in #Longtermism for a while, but hadn’t fully picked up on the central role of #Oxford #Philosophy in it. Just adding here an article referred to in the one you posted. Seems to me there should be far more knowledge and condemnation of all this.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmanv/ok-wtf-is-longtermism-the-tech-elite-ideology-that-led-to-the-ftx-collapse

@strangeseawolf I think you are spot on, here.

Of course, it gets to the subject of varying copyright law around the world and how the Internet works, and what is assumed free or leveraged. I may be mistaken, but I think I've heard that Disney is fighting this fight but I fear their goal will be to make the tool their own or make it prohibitively expensive, not to protect people who could arguably benefit (and there are benefits). History provides a clue; just look at the fight over streaming music.

Again, I'll elaborate.

Programmers will balk, saying how can we know what the AI is producing? Plus more balderdash.

The fact is the sources the AI learned from can be tagged with extra meta data if programmed to do so. Certain requests could have switches to turn them on and off (the Rembrandt switch). Etc., etc. Opt-in/opt-out is possible. Programmers are ingenious.

The programmers will whine, "But we have a piece of work that we've spent so much time and money producing! We can't fix it to do that.

Tough s**t. You've created a knowledge bomb and it will be your fault if it destroys civilization. Fix the program and teach the AI correctly.

Sadly, people cheat.

This discuss completely by-passed another ticking time bomb. If it is ruled unlawful to learn from prior art and for an AI to produce in-the-style-of artwork, this will be applied to human artists.

We live in interesting times.

#writer #writing #author #ai #writingcommunity #coverart #ai #chatgpt #basicincome #labor #automation #programming #coding #streaming

#BoostingIsSharing

"It is easy now to imagine a setup wherein machines could prompt other machines to put out text ad infinitum, flooding the internet with synthetic text devoid of human agency or intent: gray goo, but for the written word." In the Atlantic, @mkirschenbaum wonders whether we might be headed for a "textpocalypse."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-chatgpt-writing-language-models/673318/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

#LLM #ChatGPT #textpocalypse #AI #AIHype

Myślę, że powoli ten zbudowany dotychczas system wierzeń i mitów kulturowych w jakie wierzy ten kraj powoli runie. Młodsze pokolenia nie chcą ich podtrzymywać. Nie chcą, bo ich zwyczajnie nie da się obronić.

Solidarność. #jp2 . Religia. (Pseudo)Patriotyzm.

Przeminą.

#polska #polityka

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/10/ron-desantis-book-bans-martin-county-jodi-picoult/

"“Most of the books pulled do not even have a single kiss in them,” Picoult told us. “They do, however, include gay characters, and issues like racism, disability, abortion rights, gun control, and other topics that might make a kid think differently from their parents.”

“We have actual proof that marginalized kids who read books about marginalized characters wind up feeling less alone,” Picoult continued. “Books bridge divides between people. Book bans create them.”"

Hypercapitalist techbros already calling for, wait for it, government intervention!

What happened to "the market will solve it"?

"The market will solve it" only if it's your money on the line, not their stock options.

Remember all this bullshit about "we get the big payouts because we take the big risks"? Yeah, well… observe what happens when the risks actually materialize. Crying for risk-mitigating bailout *checks notes* literally the next day.

@ummjackson The idea that technology will save the world is practically a religion. One I was indoctrinated into simply by growing up in Silicon Valley. Well, plus having both parents working in tech despite coming from working class backgrounds on the east coast.

I'm pretty sure I'll never quite be out of it.

@stilkov @mnot @timbray@mastodon.cloud @simon @ariadne

Empirically, there are a number of people who would prefer that not every word they post become part of the permanent public indelible record, fully accessible to adTech and attackers.

I understand that you are not one of those people - neither am I - but I don't think it's ethical to ignore them. You might want to read that blog post, which gathers discussion around that point.

Everything is perfect here: a tech bro claiming 97.5% of all science is useless, Baby Elon confirming it, and John Blow retweeting.

In the spirit of reciprocity, I'm not sure how many people know about the tiny miracle of Mom for a Minute on Reddit, but maybe not enough.

Tl;dr: People who have fraught/bad/nonexistent relationships with their families of origin post things they're proud of or worried about, etc, and strangers show up to be proud of them and advise them and offer comfort and love.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MomForAMinute/

@kissane seems like chatgpt wrote that one

If they can find a way to restrict LLM outputs to those that conform with reality,
the biggest tech companies are on the verge of extracting the meaning and style from everything ever posted online, stripping out attribution, and replacing human-written information with the resulting gritty content smoothie.

The really remarkable thing isn't just that #Microsoft has decided that the future of #search isn't links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a #chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar - even more remarkable is that #Google agrees.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

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