Notes
“Officer Naughty”
From the Grauniad:
What a twisted little egotistical world we occupy currently. ‘It’s ok, as long as I’m alright.’ Dreadful.
“While under investigation for the failings, Lee quit the force and reportedly set up an OnlyFans account called Officer Naughty. She now faces being barred for life from the police service.”
23 May 2023 — French West Indies
Take your coronation and shove it
I, for one, will not be pledging allegiance to “the King”.
Royalty is essentially a criminal enterprise and always has been. The gangs of the past successfully killed, terrorised, pillaged and set up elaborate rent-seeking schemes to consolidate enough power that still permeates to this day.
This current incarnation got rich off the backs of enslaved people and has so far refused to acknowledge such and do something meaningful to apologise and repair.
The ceremony itself is a silly fantastical ritual of Disney proportions for a well-connected, dubiously super-rich man having a metal hat —decorated with stolen diamonds— placed on his head.
And we’re supposed to bow down to this?
I don’t believe one strand of human DNA is more important than another’s.
Take your coronation and shove it.
30 April 2023 — French West Indies
The Guardian: Meloni praises Sunak’s immigration policies on visit to No 10
From the Guardian: Not the kind of endorsement that I’d be comfortable with —more of an indication of just how far right the UK has shifted in recent times.
This will not end well.
28 April 2023 — French West Indies
A tale of two headlines
From BBC News 24/04/2023:
Also, from the same day:
Both of these presenters got fired. Sacked. Booted out.
I’ll leave it up to you to spot the difference in treatment and the possible reason.
It’s so tiring.
24 April 2023 — French West Indies
Repeating the mistakes of AI past
With the current news cycle being dominated by all things ChatGPT and AI, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit a book I first read in 1997/1998, the year it was released.
The book is “HALs Legacy - 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality”. It was issued by MIT Press in 1997 and was edited by David G. Stork. You may find a secondhand hard copy, but no ebook exists as far as I can tell.
It contains a forward by one of my favourite Science Fiction authors, Arthur C. Clarke, who you will no doubt know was the writer of the original novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This paragraph in Chapter 1 struck me :
Marvin Minsky (who, incidentally, nearly lost his life consulting on 2001.) argues (in chapter 2) that the field made such good progress in its early days that researchers became overconfident and moved on prematurely to more immediate or practical problems —for example, chess and speech recognition. They left undone the central work of understanding the general computational principles —learning, reasoning and creativity— that underlie intelligence. Without these, he believes, we will end up with a growing collection of dumb experts and will never achieve Al.
I can’t help thinking about the parallels to this new rush of AI deployment, and it feels as though we are falling into the same trap once again. The various ChatX machine learning algorithms impress on one level but are brutally stupid and over-confident simultaneously on another. The risks are multiple, some benign and others too frightening to ponder.
What is it that we say about the past and the future?
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana
6 April 2023 — French West Indies
The open blockchain, my arse! More like Fraudola.
In a Bloomberg article by Nick Baker called An NFT Just Sold for $532 Million, But Didn’t Really Sell at All, we see that transactions on blockchains were there, but no one understood what the hell was going on… to the tune of more than half a billion dollars!
The process started Thursday at 6:13 p.m. New York time, when someone using an Ethereum address beginning with 0xef76 transferred the CryptoPunk to an address starting with 0x8e39.
About an hour and a half later, 0x8e39 sold the NFT to an address starting with 0x9b5a for 124,457 Ether -- equal to $532 million -- all of it borrowed from three sources, primarily Compound.
To pay for the trade, the buyer shipped the Ether tokens to the CryptoPunk’s smart contract, which transferred them to the seller -- normal stuff, a buyer settling up with a seller. But the seller then sent the 124,457 Ether back to the buyer, who repaid the loans.
And then the last step: the avatar was given back to the original address, 0xef76, and offered up for sale again for 250,000 Ether, or more than $1 billion.
It is discussed in more detail in DSHR's Blog: How Bubbles Are Blown.
This is a great example of how one of the central ideas of openness and transparency on the blockchain is, in fact, complete bullshit.
If anyone tells you that the blockchain is “open” and therefore anyone can see what’s going on, ask them to show you how. Practically. In simple steps. Not just a parroting of the crypto-bro indoctrination mutterings.
If they can’t, then show them this article about how those manipulations play out in plain sight precisely because it is indecipherable to most.
Fraudola.
5 April 2023 — French West Indies
WSJ: Meta to Let Users Opt Out of Some Targeted Ads, but Only in Europe
From the Wall Street Journal.
Meta Platforms Inc. is planning to let European users of Facebook and Instagram opt out of certain highly personalized ads as part of plans to limit the impact of a European Union privacy order, according to people familiar with the planning.
What this proves, beyond doubt, is that Meta will only respect your privacy when it is legislated to do so.
Note also the “opt-out” rather than the “opt-in” that is desired.
Why else wouldn’t they roll this out to the entire world?
It seems to me that Meta is on the wrong side of worldwide public opinion. At some point, this will present a serious enough risk for the company —either through data mishandling (selling some data to unscrupulous brokers) or being the target of a massive breach (it is only a matter of time) —for them to act on it fundamentally.
From what we know, most “digital marketing” is smoke and mirrors, providing no real value to advertisers over and above Media/TV/Radio and billboards. The value chain has been hijacked to introduce these gatekeepers that squeeze profits from both sides, making most small businesses poorer.
From the European Commission’s Study on the impact of recent developments in digital advertising on privacy, publishers and advertisers:
The most widely used products in digital advertising rely on large amounts of personal data and profiling of individuals. However, there is limited evidence to suggest that the efficiency and efficacy gains to advertisers and publishers outweigh the societal impact of these products. There is a lack of independent analysis to assess the benefits of using personal data and profiling in advertising. The few studies that do exist fail to take into account important considerations such as the impact of fraud and buyer expectations.
I thoroughly recommend the report.
30 March 2023 — French West Indies
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