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Platformer: Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams
What was I saying about that Silicon Valley mantra again?
From Platformer:
Some members of the team pushed back. “I'm going to be bold enough to ask you to please reconsider this decision,” one employee said on the call. “While I understand there are business issues at play … what this team has always been deeply concerned about is how we impact society and the negative impacts that we've had. And they are significant.”
Montgomery declined. “Can I reconsider? I don't think I will,” he said. “Cause unfortunately the pressures remain the same. You don't have the view that I have, and probably you can be thankful for that. There's a lot of stuff being ground up into the sausage.”
Commercial pressures trump societal damage limitation, it seems.
Who the fuck do these people think they are?
14 March 2023 — French West Indies
First, drive people apart. Then sell them tech to bring them together. But only on our terms. And monetised.
While I’m on the topic of bullshit and the onanistic nature of Silicon Valley, it seems the “metaverse” is dying on its arse.
Fucking good riddance to it, too.
It’s a solution looking for a problem. That is nothing new, and most people have instinctively felt that from when it first burst onto the news cycle. Some of us were sceptical (stating it politely), and others saw the grit opportunity it afforded.
But what is new is that it is a solution to a problem created by the same tech companies that have worked hard to break society and monetise human interaction by being the gatekeepers and mediators.
They have driven human interaction to a transaction that (shitty and racist) advertising can piggyback—in turn, driving a wedge in human interaction, leaving at least one generation inadequate or incapable of having normal relationships with themselves and, therefore, with others.
13 March 2023 — French West Indies
“Move fast and break things”. - Silicon Valley’s mantra. I call bullshit.
It’s been the mantra for some time now in the valley. Everyone benefits by moving fast and breaking a couple of things because we move faster at a quicker pace. But is that true?
My take: It’s bullshit and always has been.
On inspection, this mantra should actually be:
Break things and move fast.
Silicon Valley and all the poor copycats dotted around the planet are causing untold harm on a social level, let alone on an economic one.
Don’t believe me or think that I’m being alarmist?
Have a read of this article from Jon Haidt.
Conclusion: Social Media Is a Major Cause of Mental Illness in Girls, Not Just a Tiny Correlate
On the financial side.
FTX, SVB. I could go on.
As for “move fast”, that really means “run away” and blame others or deny responsibility.
13 March 2023 — French West Indies
Facebook tests deliberately drain phone batteries
As reported by 9to5 Mac from an article in the New York Post —I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about that— Facebook seems to have been conducting A/B testing that can drain the battery on your smartphone.
They raise important points about safety and transparency, as well as moral issues confirming that Facebook continues to show that it is morally corrupt (link).
But there’s another aspect.
This might seem picky and a little silly, but this is deliberate damage to a device. Accidental damage, we can all pass off; it happens. A drop or an app that goes haywire through some random bug. No real problem.
But deliberately draining the battery, which has a finite lifespan of around 500 charges to 80% of the battery capacity, is intentionally damaging the battery, ensuring the affected users will have to either replace their phones or their phone batteries before it can be reasonably expected.
The tests might be limited and, therefore, not affect too many people, so this is a small-scale panic. Still, Facebook should be absolutely upfront about this and offer compensation for those affected.
What they should have done, as responsible citizens (which they are not currently), is contact users requesting authorisation to be included in the test, guaranteeing batteries would be replaced free of charge.
What a shitty company, through and through.
2 February 2023 — French West Indies
The End of Writing
From ia.net.
Soon, you won’t need to write much anymore. Artificial Intelligence will do it for you. With all the free time we will have, we could try to rethink how we learn, work, and how we communicate.
An excellent blog post from the developer of a fantastic writing application. One that requires good old sweat and tears. None of this prompted 12-year-old-level gibberish produced by Open AI’s latest baby.
30 January 2023 — French West Indies
The enshittification of air travel
Ever since the horrendous attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, the airlines and various states’ security organisations trusted with guaranteeing security have gone into overdrive to enshittify air travel.
From condescending orders barked at you by barely-trained staff with no interest in making their job easier on themselves to the already frustratingly-long queues to get past that hurdle of show and tell. A burden that was already astonishingly tedious, usually as a direct result of a passenger not understanding that metal detectors detect … wait for it … metal!
A Swiss hacker reports that he/she/they discovered a file containing all the names and other information on the US Government’s “No Fly List”. A list that, like the first rule of fight club, no one talks about.
If that wasn’t bad enough, consider that on that list, there are children as young as four years old, according to those that have seen the list.
But here we reach a new low.
The name of the “database” of names?
NoFly.csv
Yep, you got that right. A fucking comma-separated file.
Words cannot describe the level at which this is unacceptable, regardless of circumstances.
… but wait. It does get worse.
I’ll let you read on through the Techdirt article for more analysis.
24 January 2023 — French West Indies
Apple AirTag tracks a big detour of luggage
In an article on Apple Insider, a couple of Air Canada passengers followed their luggage after it was lost for several days.
To their surprise, the luggage took quite a detour, proving all the communications from Air Canada were either wilfully incorrect or ineptly incorrect. Either way, it shows how frail baggage systems can be. As one might imagine, those systems are not 100% robotised and computer-controlled. They rely on several steps operated entirely by humans.
And what can humans be, if not stupid? Corrupt. Just look hereand here.
I write about this personally, having had a similar incident while travelling with Air Canada. Flying out of the French West Indies to get to Toronto, we have to fly to Montreal, then hop over to Toronto. Arriving at Montreal, given that it is the entry point, we must collect the bag and then go through customs and immigration. Unfortunately, my bag wasn’t there, and I was told to go to Toronto anyway, as they’d find my bag and deliver it to me at my hotel. So off I went after filling in the requisite lost luggage forms.
To cut a long story short, I got my bag with, as far as I can tell, everything in it, but given that I flew in on Sunday night and my bag was delivered on Wednesday evening, I had to purchase some new clothes to tie me over, not knowing if or when the bag would arrive.
I have a theory about what happened, as the bag went to Paris before winding its way across the Atlantic several days later. Drugs.
I’m pretty convinced that there are baggage handlers or others in the chain of operations that select bags and then divert them to other airports for them to be recovered and sent to the actual destination days later, thus providing a decent cover for the transport of drugs and arms to and fro.
It’s pretty easy to open a suitcase or a bag, even with a lock, thanks to security legislation after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Every lock has a back door —a TSA-compatible key. Finding one for each lock type is trivial. And it grants unimpeded access to every piece of luggage passing through the basement of an airport. A basement that offers plenty of opportunity to conduct this kind of illicit business.
Technology offers us a view into the depths when we use it for good. Who knows, It might make it harder for illicit activity to proliferate.
I, for one, am investigating picking up a couple of AirTags for when I next travel, checking in luggage. I try to fly light, ensuring I only have cabin luggage, but that is not always feasible.
20 January 2023 — French West Indies
Revenue haemorrhage at Twitter.
From The Information:
A senior Twitter manager told employees that the company’s daily revenue on Tuesday was 40% lower than the same day a year ago, underscoring the crisis facing its core ads business, according to a person with direct knowledge.
In a staff meeting on Tuesday, Siddharth Rao, an engineering manager overseeing the engineers working on Twitter’s ad business, also told employees in a presentation that more than 500 of Twitter’s top advertisers have paused spending on Twitter since Elon Musk took over in October.
I fear for the poor engineers that —outside of their control— are suffering and will suffer job losses due to Elmo’s stupidity and revolting attitude.
I only hope that it affects Elmo’s pocket even more.
18 January 2023 — French West Indies
The Before. A curated playlist of samples and originals
I’ve been having a lot of fun curating a playlist of songs and the corresponding tracks they sampled from. Well, that’s not entirely fair. Some of the tracks are inspirations or plain remakes.
Much of it is hip-hop, unsurprising for any fans of the genre. Hip-hop pretty much defined sampling, getting the biggest artists and labels into trouble back then. Things have changed, and declarations and authorisations are required to be granted before a track is released. There is a perverse net negative result to that for the artists, but that can wait for another day.
I’ve been a hip-hop fan since I first heard some early tracks in 1980/1981 when I got deep in the weeds of hip-hop for more than 15 years. To this day, it has a special place in my heart.
So when a friend recently told me about a playlist on Spotify (I’m not a subscriber), I asked him to export the tracklist so I could manually recreate it using Apple Music.
That playlist was featured in a New York Times article, giving me inspiration for my own take on the idea.
My list is currently a work in progress with 49 songs and lasts 4:19 hours, although that is likely to grow. It features several types of music, from Rap, Jazz, Reggae and Ska. The goal is to have one or more original tracks directly before the track that uses its samples from the previous track(s).
It’s called, The Before. I described it as:
Many popular tracks stand on the shoulders of previous songs. This playlist gives you the originals before they were sampled, covered, or otherwise copied.
If you want the playlist, let me know.
16 January 2023 — French West Indies
Microsoft’s new AI can simulate anyone’s voice with 3 seconds of audio
Via Ars Technica:
On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person's voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker's emotional tone.
The possibilities for this technology are pretty endless. Good and bad.
As we move forward deploying and using these products, I don’t think we place enough emphasis and what the bad could be. I’m reminded of that quote from Jurassic Park
Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
I’m convinced there’s plenty of good to come from this and similar technologies like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, but I’m equally convinced that the bad stuff might be so bad that its effects on society could be disastrous.
This is why I believe regulation should be one of the first priorities for the world’s governments surrounding the use of these tools.
Regulation is coming, but too little and too late. Governments need to work to internet assumptions, not 20th Century ones as they currently do.
14 January 2023 — French West Indies