Brian Beach @bwbeach@social.cleverlibre.org

"In Defense of Studying 'Basket Weaving' at College" 🧺

An essay on why cultural subjects that get derided for being silly or frivolous (and, surprise surprise, are historically the province of women and indigenous groups) turn out to be intellectually fascinating, deep, and practical as hell

My essay, for Medium subscribers: https://clivethompson.medium.com/in-defense-of-studying-basket-weaving-at-college-a862792f3a85

A "friend" link in case you're not a Medium subscriber: https://clivethompson.medium.com/in-defense-of-studying-basket-weaving-at-college-a862792f3a85?sk=05da00e8ad388013630497ce92368ed8

The EU’s “chat control” legislation is the most alarming proposal I’ve ever read. Taken in context, it is essentially a design for the most powerful text and image-based mass surveillance system the free world has ever seen.

Excited today to have a great guest post from @riana about how Section 230 and the internet are actually important for food safety, and how undermining 230 could make us all less safe *physically* as well. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/09/another-casualty-if-section-230-gets-repealed-food-safety-data/

Yikers: A new paper on reconstructing images from brain activity. Better fasten your mind belts; we're in for a bumpy ride! https://sites.google.com/view/stablediffusion-with-brain/ #AI #ML

Alaska Says It’s Now Legal “in Some Instances” to Discriminate Against LGBTQ Individuals
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On the advice of the state’s attorney general, Alaska’s civil rights agency quietly deleted language promising equal protections for LGBTQ Alaskans against most categories of discrimination, and it began refusing to investigate complaints.

#Alaska #LGBTQ #CivilRights #Discrimination #SCOTUS

https://www.propublica.org/article/alaska-drops-lgbtq-discrimination-ban?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

Comment I just left on a PR: "YES!! I love this, always love to see more smaller functions, and this is a really nice self-contained chunk of logic to break out. Excellent call."

This is your semi-regular reminder to call out the good things in code reviews along with the changes you're suggesting! Coding is an inherently human endeavor, humans have feelings, and that is an attribute, not an inconvenience to be optimized away.

Also, this applies to many other feedback-oriented scenarios too, I imagine. When interfacing over digital mediums, I can always use more reminders that there's a person on the other end.

I love how Facebook doesn't show anyone my post about making my course free on LinkedIn.

I mean, it's what I expected, but it's stunningly obvious.

@pluralistic we frankly need a huge tax on virgin plastic to reflect the externalized costs it involves

Very good look at the variety of problems with automated decision making for social services, credit ratings, predicted recidivism, etc.. Products exist doing these things right now, and there are no regulations or checks.

The systems are flawed and dangerous; resulting in deaths, false accusations, imprisonment, children being taken away, and more.

#ML #ExpertSystems #SocialJustice

Against Predictive Optimization https://predictive-optimization.cs.princeton.edu/

Let's all use our outside voices as we shout once again:

The law that protects hate speech on the internet is *not* Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The law that *actually does* protect hate speech on the Internet is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/23/your-simple-solution-to-section-230-is-bad-julia-angwin-edition/

"I think that if you're going to dump on something in the way many people do about ORMs, you have to state the alternative. What do you do instead of an ORM?"

I've only had this tab open for months. I love this: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/OrmHate.html

This is your regular reminder that “pre-crime” is a lie. Using surveillance to predict crime does not work and disproportionately targets marginalized people and communities.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/02/22/auror-crime-intelligence-surveillance/

Kudos to Coinbase for publishing this fantastic write-up on social engineering. Really would love to see more orgs normalizing their wins (because make no mistake about it, this IS a win).
https://www.coinbase.com/blog/social-engineering-a-coinbase-case-study

legit cannot believe I have to keep saying this:

if bigotry isn’t a dealbreaker for you…

you’re tolerating bigotry and are part of the problem

Twiddler: Configurability for Me, But Not For Thee

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

#platformEconomics #enshittiffication #critihype #freedomOfExit #Fediverse #Mastodon #Twitter #configurability #monopoly #BigTech

New blog post: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/02/19/good-category-bad-category-or-tag-dont-bucket/

Over on the birdsite, some people have been discovering geometric packing problems, about how small of a bounding shape you can draw around some number of a smaller shape.

(Sometimes the solutions are really beautiful, you see. And sometimes, um. See attached.)

I'd been unable to find this page I remembered about these. Turns out the professor who maintained it retired, so the old links to it broke. But it does still exist! So you too can experience the rollercoaster of https://erich-friedman.github.io/packing/index.html