This is the right thing to do to do
The most interesting part of statistics for me has often been trying to make sense of what is happening at the edges of the technical solutions, where some yet unformalized judgment has to come in and make it work.
Conversations about privacy and security often focus on technology and give scant attention to the human, non-technological factors that affect personal privacy and security. This post covers a range of concrete steps we can all take to regain control over what, when, and with whom we share.
Remember, even with privacy settings in place, your data belongs to the platform owner, not you. This is a critical point to understand in any digital space, regardless of ownership or whether it is centralized or decentralized.
In response to the past week — crank.report
… we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God. My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.
I think we have to acknowledge that Donald Trump knows our country better than we do. I think he figured out that anger and, frankly, fear were way more powerful than appealing to people’s better angels. That anger and fear were going to work in this election, whether you’re afraid of immigrants or afraid of people who are trans — he figured that out.
The vote, placed in the hands of those who have been excluded and marginalized, is an opportunity to change an agenda that has been set primarily for men for the majority of American history. This is a prospect that has long been a thrill to some and a threat to others.
On Teen Vogue.
This magazine for teenagers makes point after point about our culpability as Americans in human suffering and how that might be affected by the two candidates in play.
I have such mixed feelings — crank.report
The UW researchers tested three open-source, large language models (LLMs) and found they favored resumes from white-associated names 85% of the time, and female-associated names 11% of the time. Over the 3 million job, race and gender combinations tested, Black men fared the worst with the models preferring other candidates nearly 100% of the time.
Why do machines have such an outsized bias for picking white male job candidates? The answer is a digital take on the old adage “you are what you eat.”
#AI
Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.
#Area #Life
The poll offers a rare look at the priorities of Black women voters, a population that is one of the most dedicated voting blocs and plays a pivotal role in community voter mobilization.
#Responsible #Democracy
Organizing principles range from simple (product line -> product category -> product taxonomy) to complex (a complete business vocabulary that explains the data in the graph). Think of an organizing principle as a conceptual map or metadata layer overlaying the data and relationships in the graph.
#Area #KnowledgeGraph
Nessel made her remarks about Trump and Harris at an elections-related journalism training event hosted by the National Press Foundation. A reporter asked the attorney general about one of her biggest concerns with 100 days to go before the November 5 election. Nessel noted Trump has indicated that he won’t accept the results of the upcoming election.
#Responsible #Democracy
“Christians, get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it any more,” the Republican former president said on Friday night at a rally hosted in West Palm Beach, Florida, by the far-right advocacy group Turning Point Action.
“You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.”
(snip)
Experts on authoritarianism warn the public to take Trump seriously when he speaks in that manner.
#Responsible #Democracy
I just donated $47 to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. If you can, I think [you should too].(https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ads-gs-dd-kdhsearch-july2024?refcode=om2024_ads_gs_240721_kdhexmdonate_dd_us_all_actblue&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAApjbCfdRIdipfR275WOM1sgGkHfhv&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI7O26pb-5hwMVoA6tBh3_UQr0EAAYASAAEgLsmvD_BwE)
Like so many Democrats in the U.S., I’ve been refreshing every news site… — crank.report
Yes. And the old media is data that can be processed, along with associated behavioral data, to be sythetic culture.
Ugliness, transgressiveness and shock all represent an incoherent, grasping attempt to keep the world out of your demimonde – not just normies and squares, but also and especially enthusiastic marketers who want to figure out how to sell stuff to you, and use you to sell stuff to normies and squares.
#Area #Creativity
I have a link blog hosted on micro.blog and a longer form website hosted on wtite.as. I’d like to integrate the two, both in terms of design and presentation. Not sure how, though. I welcome any thoughts.
#Responsible #CrankReport
CrowdStrike doesn’t quite fit the definition of a classic monopoly, but its impact, as shown by the widespread system failure, suggests otherwise. It isn’t the only service that helps guide the world in an invisible fashion. We need to rethink not only how we regulate but also what we regulate.
#Responsible #Resilience
The question of Ms. Harris’s fate could polarize the party along racial lines. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other Black leaders have strongly supported Mr. Biden staying in the race but simultaneously have warned the party not to try to displace Ms. Harris if the president were to drop out.
#Area #US #Politics
“The suggestion that any candidate who won their primary should simply step aside because victory appears difficult at the moment is disrespectful to the voters, unjust and undemocratic,” the women wrote.
Together the groups underscore a growing frustration among Black Democrats over the mounting calls from other, predominantly white, wings of the party for Mr. Biden to step aside. And they reflect a concern that, should the president be shoved aside, Ms. Harris might be passed over, too.
“We don’t have to go and find a savior or great hope elsewhere,” the letter from the PAC states. “We already have it in our vice president.”
Although each country’s violence has differing local causes, there are clear patterns that echo across countries. American political violence has much in common with that taking place in Germany and India, as well as in France’s most recent election. In all these states, a significant portion of the attacks are largely the product of radicalized partisans, often egged on by parties. Containing it requires containing these parties’ politicians.
The new order more than halves the per-minute rate caps for all prison and jail phone calls across the country. It also establishes interim per-minute rate caps for video calls, marking the first time the FCC has set rules for prison communication beyond phone calls.
Isn’t winning literally her job description?
People who have talked with her say Ms. Pelosi is motivated by the prospect of a second Trump administration unraveling her hard-fought accomplishments from two decades as leader, including the Affordable Care Act. She also views Mr. Trump as an existential threat who drove the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, is totally unsuited and unqualified to be president, and is a tool of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won’t. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.
Distributing equity literally means handing over the means of production not just to workers but to those impacted by the work, reconnecting the decisions to their consequences.
Today, we’re introducing highly-requested features that enhance Docs' interoperability with other Markdown supporting tools.
Understanding Puerto Rico’s Past: A Recommended Reading List - UNC Press Blog
Our research team created the Utility Disconnections Dashboard, in which we track utility disconnections in all places where data is available.
In recent years, more states have required regulated utilities across the country to disclose the number of customers they disconnect. However, state regulations only apply to the utilities that they regulate. Public utilities and cooperatives, which serve over 20% of U.S. electricity customers, often aren’t covered. That leaves massive gaps in understanding of the full magnitude of the problem.
Currently reading: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚and it generating copious notes on the things — economic theory! — I want to learn more about.
People will use AI for everything from parole processing to granting mortgages, from marking middle-school tests to spotting thieves (or trying to) in shopping malls. But we’ll also use it for optimising wind turbine blades and laying out cycle lanes. Some of those have ethics issues, or bias issues, and some of them have scope to screw up and kill people, but they’re all different problems, with different questions and consequences and different kinds of expertise.
I’ve been sharpening my thinking about the necessary conditions to do good work, and how to achieve them. Here’s a window into how I’m thinking about these ideas across three dimensions: Organizational Context, Team Leadership, and Technology Trends.
That’s because possibility is the art of being willing to be wrong. It’s exploration. It’s far easier to explore on foot than it is on a high-speed train.
Finished reading: The Wager by David Grann 📚like ship adventure tales? This is a good one.
I love these kinds of lists.
For example, it’s hard to write long and prolifically without cringing at the memory of some of your own work. After all, if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled.
One of my favorite quips from the very quotable Riley Quinn is that “leftists are cursed with object-permanence” – that is, we actually remember what just happened and use it to think about what’s happening now. The Memex Method is object permanence for 20+ years worth of stuff. A lot of those deep archives never see use, but there’s a surprising number of leading indicators buried in the stuff that happened in years gone by.
I don’t write the marmot to get attention. I write the marmot to “see what I think.”
#Area #Blogging
Breakfast bowl: a smidge of leftover turkey meatloaf, the last of some mushrooms, cabbage that had been sliced for tacos all sautéed together and a sunny side up egg on top.
It’s tempting to imagine we have less power than we do. It lets us off the hook. For now.
#Area #Commonplace
I’d prefer to think of it as a manifesto for diversity of communications, the freedom to share your knowledge and lived experiences on your own terms, and maintaining the independence of freedom of expression from business interests.
#Area #IndieWeb
I think the headline says it all.
Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms.
#Area #Web
Year in books for 2023
Here’s how my imaginary program would work. There would be a pot of money at the center of it, managed by a foundation or an endowment of some kind, that would be ring-fenced to support software in the public interest. There would be no expectation that these projects would be self-sustaining: the fund would pay for them.
#Area #FOSS #Funding
I love this idea for marking a birthday.
And I love this first wish:
I wish the form of media was fully separate from its content.
#Area #Media
The idea of NFTs can be solid if put into practice purely on the technological aspects of what they can provide. NFTs for archiving data and records, intellectual property, concert tickets, certifications and so forth do have a potential value.
#Area #DWeb #NFTs
AI is a force multiplier for all aspects of our lives — both for good and for bad. I believe good will outweigh the bad, but the transition is going to be quite bumpy.
#Area #AI
Intelligence can be artificial. Or it can be a tool to help humans survive a more complex, more connected world that is moving ever so faster.
#Area #AI
Everybody knows and is aware Meta brings a “trust deficit” to the Fediverse. The best mitigation mentioned was to be as transparent as possible about all aspects of what they plan and do.
#Area #Fediverse
The proposed system, TrustNet, is a system for interacting with and managing trust. Underlying the system is a transitive trust algorithm.
#Area #CommunityOrganizing
It’s worth pausing here for just a second to point out that, in reality, most of this technology is still not very good. Large language models “hallucinate,” which is a nice way of saying they make stuff up, all the time.
#Area #AI
There will always be a significant number of people, of any ideological persuasion, who will welcome a “strong leader” to provide simple answers to complex questions. To give the illusion of creating order amidst the chaos.
#Area #Democracy
Tech Policy Press is rounding up what we do (and don’t) know about the forums and will continue to catalog what information comes out of future meetings. Our goal is to create a central resource to track attendees, key issues discussed, and major takeaways from each event, in order to understand what ideas, individuals, and organizations are influencing lawmakers.
#Area #AI #Policy
The most interesting enrichment I’m releasing today is datasette-enrichments-gpt. This enrichment provides access to various OpenAI language models, allowing you to do some really interesting things.
#Resources #Datasette #AI
Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color are more likely to be located in urban heat islands, a legacy of segregation and racist redlining practices.
Want to read: How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra 📚
It didn’t come up as directly, perhaps because many projects are still pilots rather than in production, but I’m very interested in the practical issues around including ‘enriched’ data from AI (or crowdsourcing) in GLAM collections management / cataloguing systems. We need records that can be enriched with transcriptions, keywords and other data iteratively over time, and that can record and display the provenance of that data – but can your collections systems do that?
#Conferences #FF2023
That meant that the “governance” of the web was often just a matter of the technical details of its standards. Code may not be law, but it was sure law-like – if something was in, say, a W3C browser standard, then all the browsers would support it, and then anyone trying to do something cool on the internet could rely on every potential user having it.
#Area #OSS
It serves as a reminder for everyone, especially startups and businesses, to start thinking about building “resilience” into their plans. Sure, start with OpenAI, and continue using it, but it’s crucial to explore and invest in open-source LLMs. Even Microsoft is starting to support Open Source LLMs on its Azure platform. As an investor, you really should be asking your startups about ‘resilience.’ It’s important to have a moat around your own business.
#Area #AI
But the largest gains can be blamed on the poor decisions of other platforms. Tumblr saw an influx of Twitter users fleeing Elon Musk’s takeover, and then another wave during protests against Reddit’s changes to its API.
#Area #SocialMedia
I’ve found that thinking in terms of paying for a team helps me elevate my financial goals and be much more ambitious about making serious revenue from this thing, if I’m going to achieve these dreams.
#Area #FOSS #Sustainability
The “not dumb[ing] it down” is the sticky part for me, though: how much do I need to recreate my mental path for others when I assert a claim? What should I spell out and what should I cite? I think part of my conundrum here is that I am inclined to blog in a casual, opinionated style, but my training in formal writing was in the sciences where it seems like you source every dang sentence.
#Area #Writing
The scholar must also have a good sense of the history of the question and the interests that drive our inquiries into them. This awareness can sometimes make it difficult for the scholar to make up their own mind. But, ideally, the scholar will also take a postion.
#Area #Research
Ina’s thought bubble: The characterization of Grok could add a political dimension to the AI market, with customers evaluating not just how accurate AI is, but also how much they like the politics of the answer.
#Area #AI
I want user-focused pragmatists who aim high while understanding they don’t have the resources available for perfection.
#Responsible #Management
How fast can you read 10GB from RAM? From SSD? There’s a subtle yet crucial skill that many developers overlook: the art of approximation. It’s not about knowing everything but about having a mental toolkit of numbers to guide decisions, shape solutions, and prevent costly missteps.
#Area #HabitsOfWork
The effort to define the open internet as being about “blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization” is a misleading head fake, a definitional misdirection that allows the ISPs to claim they would never block or throttle while leaving wide open their ability to make their own rules for everything else.
#Area #DigitalEquity
Deeper involvement in the community started as an emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic. As schools shuttered their classrooms, many became hubs where families obtained food or internet access. Months later, many schools opened their doors to become vaccine centers.
#Area #CommunityAnchorInstitutions
There are two key factors at play here: a loss of trust in journalistic institutions in favor of individuals, and a change in expectations around where to find content on the internet.
#Area #Journalism #TrustAndSafety
However, the company is aiming to tackle some of the obstacles that have prevented users from joining and participating in the fediverse so far, including the technical hurdles around onboarding, finding people to follow and discovering interesting content to discuss.
#Area #Fediverse
In our study, we found that Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to want to remove misinformation, while Republicans are about twice as likely as Democrats to consider removal of misinformation as censorship.
#Area #Misinformation
When we talk about “the algorithm,” we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can’t be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.
#Area #Attention
They have an entire personal history that you can never know and this history has shaped the way the read your words, the way your text affects them. That is, while you are in complete control of the text (you choose which words go in which order) you are not in control of the reading. This otherness of reading must be respected.
#Area #Writing
Companies developing models that pose serious risks to public health and safety, the economy or national security will have to notify the federal government when training the model and share results of red-team safety tests before making models public.
#Area #AI
Disinformation researchers have found relatively few A.I. fakes, and even fewer that are convincing. Yet the mere possibility that A.I. content could be circulating is leading people to dismiss genuine images, video and audio as inauthentic.
#Area #Disinformation
The gene autocorrect problem was spotted nearly 20 years ago and appears to be getting worse. The proportion of genetics papers with autocorrect errors was estimated in 2020 to have reached 30 per cent. The Human Gene Name Consortium decided to rename the genes in question, wisely accepting that this would be easier than weaning researchers away from Excel.
These little badges used to mean ‘notable person’ (in a chaotic and inconsistent way typical of the old Twitter) and are now supposed only to mean ‘real person’ (but often don’t) - and they give you both amplification in all the algorithms and a share of revenue if you drive a lot of replies. The more you troll, and the more furious replies you generate, the more Twitter promotes you and the more Twitter pays you.
#Area #CommunityOrganizing #SocialMedia
#UCLA #MarchingBand
If this ActivityPub-fueled change takes off, it will break every social network into a thousand pieces. All posts, of all types, will be separated from their platforms. We’ll get new tools for creating those posts, new tools for reading them, new tools for organizing them, and new tools for moderating them and sharing them and remixing them and everything else besides.
#Area #IndieWeb #ActivityPub
Using Midjourney, we chose five prompts, based on the generic concepts of “a person,” “a woman,” “a house,” “a street,” and “a plate of food.” We then adapted them for different countries: China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria. We also included the U.S. in the survey for comparison, given Midjourney (like most of the biggest generative AI companies) is based in the country.
#Area #AI
This study estimates the number of transgender teenagers affected by five types of laws and policies from the 2023 legislative session—gender-affirming care bans, bans on sports participation, bathroom bans, gender-affirming care “shield” laws, and conversion therapy bans.
#Area #HumanRights #LGBTQ
Human well-being and dignity should be our North Star—with innovation in a supporting role.
#Area #AI
A Theory of Change exercise prompts individuals to think beyond research outputs and consider the broader implications of their work. It compels researchers to articulate the intended impacts and establish the causal links between their research and desired outcomes. In this way a ToC helps make underlying assumptions explicit. The process challenges researchers to identify key audiences and determine effective communication channels. In co-creation settings, a ToC provides a structure for this overall design process.
#area #theoryofchange
As we emerge into post-pandemic public spheres, we have the opportunity to imagine new versions of the public sphere, evident in concepts such as the 15-minute city, in which all needs can be met within a quarter-hour walk; the creation of third spaces to interact outside of home and work; and more broadly in the efforts to make both urban and rural areas greener and more flourishing.
I’m taking the emerging adult to college this weekend.
Data helps illuminate the issues in our communities and allows to identify gaps in our understanding. Filling those gaps with knowledge and insights of grassroots organizations is exactly why I am motivated to work on this project.
How Google’s Data Commons uses AI to make data more accessible
In other words, vendors are competing on the quality, characteristics, and sometimes ideological slant of their models.
This is so much bad, I don’t know where to start. — crank.report
Continuously executing against the obvious plan gets you much further than you’d think.
We are charging our commercial customers for our Copilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers’ problem.
My hope is that most of the money will go directly to newsrooms, and to the sorts of shared infrastructure that every newsroom needs. I also hope that this shared infrastructure will be open sourced as much as possible, so that any public interest organization can take advantage — thereby increasing the impact of these donations.
The lack of official data creates an impossible choice of invisibility or putting ourselves in life-threatening scenarios.
This marks one of the country’s largest mass arrests in recent years targeting homosexuality.
As I’ve written before, I would like to see a kind of tech union for newsrooms that would provide technical advice and commodity technology under an open source license, and then represent newsrooms in technical forums like the W3C.
If I ask Midjourney for an image in the style of a particular artist, some people consider this obvious and outright theft, but if you chat to the specialists at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, or wander the galleries of lower Manhattan or Mayfair, most people there will not only disagree but be perplexed by the premise - if you make an image ‘in the style of’ Cindy Sherman, you haven’t stolen from her and no-one who values Cindy Sherman will consider your work a substitute (except in the Richard Prince sense).
The goal of those documents is to provide an implementation path for adding fediverse capabilities to Gitlab.
Python practitioners can now marry scripts and rich visualizations with the widespread accessibility of Excel, enabling an uninterrupted workflow and making your work easier to share with colleagues who primarily use Excel.
My RSS reader is a place of joy, never of stress. I’ve tried to boil down the principles that makes it so…
…we want to help journalists share data with each other and with the public without needing to configure and run Datasette on their own hosting provider.
This document updates some OSPF terminology to be in line with inclusive language used in the industry. The IETF has designated “Guidance for NIST Staff on Using Inclusive Language in Documentary Standards” by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for its inclusive language guidelines. It is intended that all future OSPF documents use this revised terminology even when they reference the RFCs updated by this document.
There is much to say about the summer of Taylor that is pertinent to technology and the Internet: start with the desire for communal in-person experiences driven not only by the pandemic, but also the general fracturing of culture inherent in a media landscape where personalized content delivered directly to your personal device is the norm.
Reading is a place. The more you skip, the more it becomes browsing. And browsing is not a place. You want to be in the place.
“I don’t feel any satisfaction,” Clinton responded. “I feel great, just great profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges that went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive.”
This tool is a collection of macros that work with Microsoft Word to export Word comments into a pre-formatted Excel spreadsheet, which is used to disposition comments during a document review and serves as an official record of the disposition of each comment.
It is an invitation to do your own experiments and explorations and learn about the protocol in this way. And once you have some practical experience with the protocol, trying to read the Spec is probably not as daunting anymore.
A curated list of modern Generative Artificial Intelligence projects and services.
The findings paint a picture of youth who are proud to be queer, but still face discrimination and live in fear.
It doesn’t always take an expert to spot when something is off, but it usually takes an expert to fix it. I think about this as descriptive (what’s wrong) vs. prescriptive (how to fix it).
From Prescriptive vs descriptive feedback
Finished reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 📚catching up my reading list. Finished this a while ago. Everything everyone said it was.