Blog
Exodus, movement of Jah people
The mass exodus to Mastodon continues.
Over 9 million accounts were created, with 113,393 new users last week (see bot):
4 January 2023 — French West Indies
The Dark Risk of Large Language Models
From Wired:
Unless you’ve been hiding, in a coma, or purposefully ignoring Social Media, you will have seen the explosion of the use of GPT-3 through a website called ChatGPT.
The above is a transcription of what transpired when the model was used for interactions of a health-related matter.
Quite extreme and clearly nothing a human would do —sociopaths notwithstanding.
Please read the article to get the context. It’s not that long and is quite informative about some of the risks of Large Language Models (LLMs).
3 January 2023 — French West Indies
“what the fuck happened to my FTX account”
Poor guy woke up from a 5-month coma after a car accident to find that FTX had shit the bed.
Anecdotal and to be taken with a pinch of salt.
2 January 2023 — French West Indies
What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?
From The Honest Broker:
So many businesses and industries could learn a lot from this. Every time you go into a big chain store, you feel that everything that put it in that position has been sucked out.
I remember loving going to Dixons in the UK when it first got some notoriety. It died several years ago from Rigor Mortis, and being the most absolutely shitty experience in the UK.
I also love this line in the article:
I now have a rule of thumb: “There is no substitute for good decisions at the top—and no remedy for stupid ones.”
2 January 2023 — French West Indies
Simple pleasures
I’m sitting here listening to music at a volume I deem perfect, with a freshly brewed espresso.
The house is empty, apart from me. And it is sheer bliss.
I don’t get a chance to do this very often, and when I can, I’m not always in the mood, but today is perfect. I hear things I don’t usually hear in the music because I am engaged in the experience.
What a lovely way to end the year.
Take time to find the thing that you love, and enjoy it.
31 December 2022 — French West Indies
I don’t make predictions …
… but I do think that Social Media, in general, will come to a reckoning over the next year or so.
There’s building evidence of it being a net negative for society.
It may even be called a WMD one day. It is weaponised. It has a mass reach and is indiscriminate (despite the bs the likes of Meta et al. tell you about micro-targeting). We only need to establish the destruction it causes.
30 December 2022 — French West Indies
“There is only one Pelé”
From the Guardian:
João Saldanha, the coach who helped shape that 1970 side, once said: “Ask me who is the best right-back in Brazil, and I’ll say Pelé. Ask me about the best left-back or midfield man, or the best centre-forward. Always I must say Pelé. If he wants to be goalkeeper, he will be. There is only one Pelé.”
Indeed.
29 December 2022 — French West Indies
“What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.”
Buying Instagram is best understood as part of a long pattern of Mark Zuckerberg coercing others into giving him power. From his days as a 19 year old designing a sexual-harassment-as-a-service website that exploited his female classmates to the Instagram acquisition, Zuckerberg — and thus Facebook’s — overwhelming ethos is “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.”
This a must-read from Cory Doctrow.
In my opinion, the key to getting out of this rut of division and extremism is related to the end of Facebook, sorry, “Meta”.
29 December 2022 — French West Indies
AI-Created Comic Has Been Deemed Ineligible for Copyright Protection
The United States Copyright Office (USCO) reversed an earlier decision to grant a copyright to a comic book that was created using "A.I. art," and announced that the copyright protection on the comic book will be revoked, stating that copyrighted works must be created by humans to gain official copyright protection.
This is so interesting on several levels.
The USCO says that works “must be created by humans” but doesn’t seem to define what “created” means clearly.
At what point in the creation process does the USCO determine that computer-enhanced artworks are no longer “created by humans”? Could Photoshop be too much AI? What about auto-generated insights on BI platforms producing visualisations? Where is the line drawn?
The artist pleads that “prompting” the AI is the artwork, and I sympathise with that argument.
However, where this argument is a little weak is that the AI in question is drawing from human-produced work —as are many AI systems— from other artists and does not necessarily have permission to be included in the model to create “copy writable” works. And as we’ve recently discovered, there’s a growing dispute about whether or not there is a legal basis for training an AI model using images etc., without the owner’s consent.
28 December 2022 — French West Indies
Ask, and ye shall receive
File this under “I did not know that.”
If you’re a researcher and you happen upon a scientific paper that you’re interested in reading, and it’s found on one of those scientific publisher sites, you’ll be asked to pay anything from a few dollars to hundreds to get a pdf.
From what I can tell, virtually (or literally), nothing goes to the author/s. Do this instead:
I’m starting to think scientists should have a Patreon account so I can bung them a cup of coffee or something.
26 December 2022 — French West Indies