Yes, please

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.

From

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.

From

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.

From

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.

From

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.

From

I don’t write the marmot to get attention. I write the marmot to “see what I think.”

From

#Area #Blogging

Now playing

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

From

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

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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

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Here are the books I finished reading in 2023.or at least the ones I kept track of. I can see I did t do a very good job of recording g everything. …

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

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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

From

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

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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

From

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

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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

From

The proposed system, TrustNet, is a system for interacting with and managing trust. Underlying the system is a transitive trust algorithm.

#Area #CommunityOrganizing

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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.

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

I want user-focused pragmatists who aim high while understanding they don’t have the resources available for perfection.

#Responsible #Management

From

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

From

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

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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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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

From

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. 

From

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

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#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

From

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

From

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

From

Human well-being and dignity should be our North Star—with innovation in a supporting role.

#Area #AI

From

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.

From

#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.

From

I’m taking the emerging adult to college this weekend.

I made a playlist.

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.

From

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.

From

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.

From, via

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.

From

The lack of official data creates an impossible choice of invisibility or putting ourselves in life-threatening scenarios.

From

This marks one of the country’s largest mass arrests in recent years targeting homosexuality.

From

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.

From

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).

From

The goal of those documents is to provide an implementation path for adding fediverse capabilities to Gitlab.

From

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.

From

My RSS reader is a place of joy, never of stress. I’ve tried to boil down the principles that makes it so…

From

…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.

From

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.

From

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.

From

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.

From

“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.”

From

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.

From

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.

From

A curated list of modern Generative Artificial Intelligence projects and services.

From

The findings paint a picture of youth who are proud to be queer, but still face discrimination and live in fear.

From

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.

The only code you should ever build yourself is that which adds to your core value proposition.

From Engineering principles

Therefore, judicial decisions finding copyright infringement based on the nonconsensual creation of datasets might encourage companies to collect online data more carefully. While this might (briefly) impede technological progress, it would be an important tool in the fight against data colonialism.

From Data Colonialism and Data Sets - Harvard Law Review

My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space.

From Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t - Erin Kissane’s small internet website, Via

The AI Act holds promise to set a global precedent in regulating AI to address its risks while encouraging innovation. By supporting the blossoming open ecosystem approach to AI, the regulation has an important opportunity to further this goal through increased transparency and collaboration between stakeholders. Unfortunately, current proposals threaten to create impractical barriers to and disadvantages for contributors to this open ecosystem.

From Supporting Open Source and Open Science in the EU AI Act

Personally I feel like it’s a dangerous precedent because it shifts open source from a community concept to something that a company lets you have with a bunch of conditions.

From Llama had already become a defacto standard for LLMs, between all the fine-tunes… | Hacker News

Reduce Competitor’s Moat. Llama 2 hurts two kinds of competitors. The first is companies with proprietary models — Google and OpenAI (Microsoft, by association). The second is any company that sits in the serving stack but needs to organically build its audience (Meta has billions of captive users across its properties).

From Why Did Meta Open-Source Llama 2?

The tools that people use to do their jobs, and the tasks that might now get a new layer of automation, are complicated and very specialised, and embody a lot of work and institutional knowledge. A lot of people are experimenting with ChatGPT, and seeing what it will do. If you’re reading this, you probably have too. That doesn’t mean that ChatGPT has replaced their existing workflows yet, and replacing or automating any of those tools and tasks is not trivial.

From AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans

Let me paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s remark to Dan Quayle during the vice-presidential debate in 1988: I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no Robert F. Kennedy.

From I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and you’re no Robert F. Kennedy

Rather, there are two separate threads – only one of which can properly be called a body of scholarship – that are being held up as in conversation or in competition with each other.

From Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical | by Emily M. Bender | Jul, 2023 | Medium, via

Now, the Supreme Court will decide whether to take the next logical step and strike down laws prohibiting people who have domestic violence restraining orders against them from having guns.

From

Many developers have been working to bring awareness to the problems of massive, centralize platforms — and bloggers and journalists have been doing the same — so much that users increasingly understand the value of decentralization and content ownership.

From

In San Francisco’s District 8, a public library has been shutting down Wi-Fi outside business hours for nearly a year. The measure, quietly implemented in mid-2022, was made at the request of neighbors and the office of city supervisor Rafael Mandelman. It’s an attempt to keep city dwellers who are currently unhoused away from the area by locking down access to one of the library’s most valuable public services. 

From A San Francisco library is turning off Wi-Fi at night to keep people without housing from using it - The Verge

Some of Reddit’s biggest communities including r/videos, r/reactiongifs, r/earthporn, and r/lifeprotips are planning to set themselves to private on June 12th over…

From Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps - The Verge

Picture this: control over forum infrastructure is not concentrated in a single, centralized authority but dispersed across a network of individuals or groups.

From Viksit Gaur - The case for decentralization of online forums

#CommunityOrganizing

Accurate numbers for food loss from konbinis are not published, but from public information the estimated amount of food thrown away, despite being safe to eat, is a staggering 25,000 tons.

From A peek into Japan’s Convenience Stores (Part 2)

#FoodSecurity

We will also study the policies and procedures being established by instructors, publishers, and academic institutions, with a goal of creating guidelines that reflect the many real-world applications of AI-generated text.

From How to cite ChatGPT

#research

So much of what people call “conviction” is actually a willful disregard for facts that might change their minds.

From Mental Liquidity · Collab Fund.

#Learning

The whole point of going from free-of-charge to very-expensive with these APIs is to get OpenAI and similar companies to pay for them. It’s a pipe dream.

From Daring Fireball: Reddit’s Hoped-For IPO and Pipe Dream of Cashing in on OpenAI’s Hype

Let’s buy the Oakland A’s. There is a model.

#mutualism

Tiny Awards is a small prize awarded by an equally-small selection committee of online makers to the website which we feel best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.

From Tiny Awards via

It’s not lost on me that two-thirds of the world’s school-aged children don’t even have internet at home, according to a 2020 UNICEF report. As AI takes root in our lives, will it widen the chasm between those who have access to such technology and those who do not?

From The Very Hungry Algorithm: Bedtime with ChatGPT – The Markup

As I stated in my veto letter for SB1001, I will veto every bill that aims to attack and harm children.

-Arizona state governor on anti-queer bills vis Pink News

To address this need we introduce value scenarios, an extension of scenario-based design which can support envisioning the systemic effects of new technologies.

From Value Scenarios: A Technique for Envisioning Systemic Effects of New Technologies

#design

Looking forward to being a part of this conversation at #RightsCon

Friedenbach said that free Wi-Fi is crucial for homeless people to access services, make calls, apply for benefits and jobs, and deal with healthcare. She said that many homeless people sleep during the day because it is safer to be awake at night, making after-hours internet access especially important. From Mission Local…

Steven Kabuye, a human rights activist in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, told The Guardian the act “violates basic human rights and sets a dangerous precedent for discrimination and persecution against the LGBTQ+ community” in the country.

From Axios

Tech companies are laying off their ethics and safety teams.

“We’ve built the infrastructure for nuanced moderation” is not an adequate answer to people who are suffering, or who are prone to suffer, abuse.

From werd.io

If it’s going to work with me, it ought to pass the interview, right? It didn’t. In fact, it failed miserably.

From xorvoid

The industry provides corporate and government clients with insight into conversations on private, invite-only Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums, and dark web message boards to help those powerful customers keep tabs on a variety of potential threats, from political hacktivists to the illegal markets that traffic in stolen passwords and intellectual property. From Private Spies Hired by the FBI and Corporate Firms Infiltrate Discord, Reddit, WhatsApp…

The organisation, along with GLAAD, analysed the tweets of nine prominent right-wing figures and accounts, and tracked retweets of posts containing the word “groomer” – which saw an 1,200 per cent increase following Musk’s takeover.

From PinkNews

As Ellul already knew in the 1950s, a society ordered by technique is necessarily inhospitable to the human person.

From The One Best Way Is a Trap - by L. M. Sacasas

They tend to start out making products that western companies are willing to concede to them because shareholders sniff at their low margins. And they go into developing countries that western companies don’t like to be too entangled with…

From Interview: Dan Wang

By contrast, when a human body uses language, it is a clear indication of a deep and broad array of cognitive functions. As far as we know, human beings can’t use language without being sentient (and conscious and intelligent).

From Inframethodology.

Make sure you have the resources and resolve to develop your following and your skills regardless of how well you do in the first interactions.

From Seth’s blog.

On top of the dangers of weaponizing medical research, AI in healthcare settings poses a risk of worsening racial, gender and geographic disparities, since bias is often embedded in the data used to train the models.

From Axios.

Is there another kind?

I got a chance to write about what we are trying to accomplish in our project with Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web.

Unconstitutional TikTok ban would open the door to press censorship. Slippery? Meet slope.

Michael Tsai - Blog - Post-Twitter Diaspora Options.

These are great examples of using AI as a collaborator -> Hot AI Summer (or, my practical uses for AI generators)

These models are used and created by people who are deeply immersed in their particular subgenre, lending a depth of knowledge and empathy we cannot hope to match.

From Google “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”

I spent the three days at the #GoodTechFest in Washington D.C. It has given me a lot to think about. Including thoughts on how we support and fund PublicGoodTechnology.

…let’s call it the “More Data framework.” This framework allows us to be pragmatic and work incrementally to achieve our mission of increasing shared understanding of our world. The framework explicitly states that there is always more to do.

From We Don’t Talk About Open Data

The business community has grown far more quiet in the face of 469 anti-LGBTQ bills that the ACLU is tracking.

From Axios

I’m on the board of Chapter 510 , an Oakland-based writing program for youth. Tonight, I listened to my fellow board members talk about why it is urgent to support this organization and these youth now. We know that when young people write epic things happen. They make connection. They add their perspective to the community. They push back loneliness. In a world whose laws and disasters are silencing them, they make a joyful noise.…

This is the final inversion of blogging: not just publishing before selecting, nor researching before knowing your subject — but producing to attract, rather than serve, an audience.

From The Memex Method

Not only are political groups setting up nonprofits as fronts for political money laundering, they are using the nonprofit information infrastructure to help them spread falsehoods . . .

From Philanthropy 2173

Though it makes me feel like a grandmother on her deathbed to admit it, I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read.

From The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small - Defector

What a message to big brands and celebrities: stop posting to Twitter and they’ll reassign your longstanding username.

From Daring Fireball: ‘Nice Twitter Handle You Have There. Would Be a Real Shame if Something Happened to It.'

I want to noodle around for a moment with a different issue: deskilling.

From danah boyd via LinkedIn

Spring has sprung in our little backyard.

This seems like the journalism version of the community reinvestment act -> techpolicy.press

At the same time, digital access gaps mean women produce less data than men, and a lack of data disaggregation leads to unequal representation in data sets.

From Power on: How we can supercharge an equitable digital future - UN Women – Europe and Central Asia

…President Carter showed the world by example what a public servant could be, what a public servant should be, and how a person’s ideas can grow and change as time brings more clarity to the true tenets of progress.

From www.dailykos.com

In this blog post, I will make the argument that prompt engineering is a real skill that can be developed based on real experimental methodologies.

From Prompt Engineering vs. Blind Prompting – Mitchell Hashimoto.

PhotoSwipe: Responsive JavaScript Image Gallery

It’s a zero sum game–paying for a slot increases market share by stealing sales from the competition.

From seths.blog

The collective findings reveal an increase … in hate crimes and efforts to change classroom curriculums, attempts to make voting more difficult and extremist views being normalized in politics, the military and law enforcement.

From Report finds democracy for Black Americans is under attack

But ChatGPT’s availability has altered the landscape, enabling people to generate entire blogs' worth of content at a single click.

From The ChatGPT vs Bear Blog spam war

Mifepristone and the rule of law, part II

Cal Newport’s thoughts on ChatGPT: calnewport.com

Honestly, at this point using ChatGPT in the way that I do feels like a massively unfair competitive advantage. I’m not worried about AI taking people’s jobs: I’m worried about the impact of AI-enhanced developers like myself.

From simonwillison.net

ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can

Terrific breakdown of David Bowie’s Changes from www.ethanhein.com

Good marketing is the craft of understanding what people want and need and helping them achieve it.

From seths.blog

Daring Fireball: Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko With Nilay Patel on Decoder

A gift to dictatorial leaders who hide behind claims of persecution, these corrosive changes occur in an increasingly hostile online environment, where censorship and suppression of free speech are major concerns.

From techpolicy.press

…how do I work with something that’s completely unreliable, that invents things, that comes up with APIs that don’t exist… how do I use that to enhance my workflow anyway?

From simonwillison.net

In looking at this, we wanted to frame the work of Makers — and the digital solutions they are building — in a way that could provide a base for conversation and collaboration with Makers and with key civil society stakeholders.

From The Makers Behind Apps for Good

…. governments, businesses, and civil society organizations should develop norms and policies for the use of AI-generated text, as well as techniques for figuring out the origin of a particular piece of text and whether it has been created using AI.

From Foreign Affairs

I don’t want streaming music, I just want to stream my music • Cory Dransfeldt

Harris is a woman and Harris is Black and Harris is a Black woman and that underlies the media coverage she gets, which then informs (or misinforms) how even reasonably well-informed Democrats view the vice president.

From www.dailykos.com

Deciding Whether to Respond to Breaking News (or Not)

What the US can learn fro Europe on addressing disinformation

US IMMIGRATION AND Customs Enforcement agents are using an obscure legal tool to demand data from elementary schools, news organizations, and abortion clinics in ways that, some experts say, may be illegal.

From ICE Is Grabbing Data From Schools and Abortion Clinics | WIRED via

Southern California.

The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far…

From Stephen Wolfram Writings

The only way to escape the productivity treadmill is to actively choose what matters to you. If friendships are important to you, choose to spend an evening with friends instead of delivering that project report ahead of time.

From Inverted Passion

But women around the world are finding ways to access the pills despite barriers, from turning to telemedicine and online pharmacies through to black markets.

From Context

Hacker’s larger argument is that both high schools and colleges should switch to teaching more useful types of math that can help students navigate the real world.

From Math for Future Scientists: Require Statistics, Not Calculus

Finished reading: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 📚Beautifully written examination of poverty and the rural south, through the fictional first person telling of a young boy’s life.

By the time Brazil’s environmental special forces team piled out, the miners were out of sight, but the mine’s two large pumps were still vibrating in the mud. The federal agents began dousing the machines in diesel fuel. New York Times

Datasette: An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data

It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.

MO lawmakers strip library funding over book ban lawsuit - The Kansas City Star

Why Engineers Need To Write - by Ryan Peterman

When I write design docs, I often discover optimizations or edge cases I didn’t think of at first. So long as critical thinking is necessary, writing will not be obsolete.

Uganda’s new anti-LGBTIQ bill includes life in prison - openDemocracy

Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill

If the bill becomes law, those found guilty could face up to 20 years in prison, while those convicted of “aggravated homosexuality” could be executed.

How AI might change our judgement and decision-making

I’m enjoying mastodon more and more

Not only the absence of algorithmic feeds, but the fact that the people I follow are just so erudite and intelligent.

Wordpress and ActivityPub

The federated social web - here I’m talking about the idea, not specific protocols - has the potential to replace the building blocks of version one blogging.

It just occurred to me that ActivityPub could be used in ways comparable to a headless CMS.

GPT-4 Techical Report via Simon Williston.

Urge Congress: Permanently expand SNAP benefits! - Feeding America

It takes just a minute. Do this because we should.

Hate crimes increased in 2021, in the US

Silicon Valley Learns to Love Socialism for the Rich - The Nation

But, you know, school loan forgiveness? Raise minimum wage?

Tell Congress to fund libraries

Fragility & Boundary Conditions - Blog

Here are a few common ways that increase the fragility of startups (VC backed and others).

Good list. Leaves me wondering: what is the comparable list for NGOs?

Joe Biden Is a Mediocre Liberal, Yet a Successful President

The truth is that Biden fulfilled a small fraction of his campaign goals. The biggest surprise of his presidency may be that he has left almost no mark at all on the social safety net.

Using AI to forecast food crisis

Write a great feature request

This is what we are trying to do at Caravan Studios for civil society organizations.

We can’t fail our Afghan allies

Despite being thoroughly vetted by Homeland Security, Afghan refugees still have to apply for asylum, a largely redundant and overly onerous process that takes years and requires extensive paperwork, in order to stay in the U.S. permanently.

Barbican library creates map of LGBTQ authors

It’s colour-coded and designed similarly to the London Underground map, segmenting the authors into general fiction, plays, essays, memoir, science fiction and poetry.

A Racially Biased Scoring System Helps Pick Who Receives Housing in L.A. – The Markup

A question you might be asking yourself is, Until this new, better system comes out, why would LAHSA still use the one it knows has “troubling racial disparities”?

“Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why can Large Firms Hike Pr” by Isabella M. Weber and Evan Wasner via pluralistic

Wired shares its generative AI policy

From a day of walking.

The vibration is the way in (presets and intros)

A great sample works on the original in a sense, it changes it a bit, makes you hear it in a different or more interesting way.

Google is giving Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides a Material You redesign - The Verge

I’m excited about the addition of third party smart chips.

It’s time to take back control of what we read on the internet

Alaska re-legalizes LGBT discrimination.

val town

Vals are snippets of code that live under your username, can be scheduled, called, and more.

Via Waxy.org.

Teacher turnover hits new highs across the U.S.

Journalists, You Should Be Looking for Undocumented APIs. Here’s How to Start – The Markup

Micro.blog – Blogging on the Fediverse (And Everywhere Else) - Aywren’s Nook - Gaming & Geek Blog

Daring Fireball: Josh Marshall: ‘The Deep Archeology of Fox News’

Stand up tile counters keep diners moving at Los Tacos No. 1.

South Carolina’s newest pro life bill would subject people getting abortions to the death penalty. This is terrifying.

Fountain Society

Many public things are utilitarian; they are also interfaces to what economists call public or common goods, like security and education and health care, that ideally are accessible to all without restriction.

I love how Micro.blog posts to my Mastodon account. Can it work the other way? Posts on my Mastodon account shows up here? Would particularly love a nice way of showing boosted toots. cc @jean and @manton (I think you might be able to do this with a custom domain name)

Extra federal food stamp assistance ending leaving nearly 100k San Franciscans at risk of food insecurity

Research found that the enhanced SNAP benefits helped to keep 4.2 million people above the poverty line … according to the economic think tank the Urban Institute.

Solitude, end of the night, business travel.

The weather looks more dreary than it is.

How to stop the internet becoming a junk heap - Prospect Magazine

We might also benefit from rethinking the incentives that make the current internet work. Spam is a function of an ad-supported internet with constant competition for users’ attention.

The Future of Flipboard Is Federated

Kenya: Supreme Court rules in favour of LGBTQ rights group

…the right to freedom of association is a human right, vital to the functioning of any democratic society as well as an essential prerequisite enjoyment of other fundamental rights and freedoms…

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

Search Google … and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

The PARA method from Forte Labs. Big fan, with a tweak. I’ve added “Responsibilites”: PARRA. Areas are topics in which I have ongoing interest — democracy, civil society, photography. Responsibilities are places that I must follow and maintain — marketing, revenue, parenting.

SNAP is returning to pre-pandemic benefit levels. It shouldn’t be.

Marginalia Search

“This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.”

Finished reading: Me & Patsy Kickin' Up Dust by Loretta Lynn 📚

Prompted me to rewatch Ken Burns’ Country Music. It avoids the hard parts of politics and racism. Makes it hard to take it seriously.

Keeping an eye out

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

Via

Writing an engineering strategy

“This document–often an implicit document that no one’s ever quite written down–is your constitutional document for running engineering, and writing it is one of the most valuable things you’ll do as an engineering executive.”

Finished reading: Spare by Prince Harry 📚

Not sure what the fuss was about.

Finished reading: Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart 📚 I read and loved Shuggie Bain, also by Douglas Stuart. And Young Mungo has a lot in common — poverty, a mother who manages to be absent and cloyingly oppressive, a child whose difference brings on violence. Young Mungo has a kind of hope and beauty that Shuggie Bain lacks. The violence in Young Mungo has a kind of intention that lets you see the characters as real people.…