Notes
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
AI is coming for the Lawyers too
The term “low-hanging fruit” tends to invoke a particular disdain from me, given that it has been overused throughout the tech bro sphere.
Still, I can’t see a more fitting term in this case. From Gizmodo:
An AI-based legal advisor is set to play the role of a lawyer in an actual court case for the first time. Via an earpiece, the artificial intelligence will coach a courtroom defendant on what to say to get out of the associated fines and consequences of a speeding charge, AI-company (sic) DoNotPay has claimed in a report initially from New Scientist and confirmed by Gizmodo.
From the website of DoNotPay:
DoNotPay utilizes artificial intelligence to help consumers fight against large corporations and solve their problems like beating parking tickets, appealing bank fees, and suing robocallers.
DoNotPay’s goal is to level the playing field and make legal information and self-help accessible to everyone.
Low-level lawyers and legal advisors should probably start looking to move up the stack in the coming years.
This is a theme of AI, and much like the automation of assembly lines, AI is coming for the low-hanging fruit.
11 January 2023 — French West Indies
A brief history of maps
From archdaily:
When in what was called Junior School at the time, ages 7 to 10, our teacher took us to a small village and got us started on a project to map the surroundings.
We drew the roads (there were two, a crossroads), the stream, buildings, and plenty of distinguishing features (trees, postbox, etc.) and added any relevant information we could think of.
We visited several times, adding more and more data to the documents we were collecting and drawing by hand. We even did a topology study using basic tools, but it was enough for us to get a rough 3D model of the village built as the final conclusion to the project.
I’ll never forget that experience. During the project and again at the end, my teacher told me I would make a good Cartographer. I didn’t know what that word meant at the time, so I looked it up in the dictionary. The definition in my crappy dictionary was “Map Maker”.
I didn’t turn out to be a “map maker”. However, I have continued to enjoy maps, and these articles are catnip. Enjoy.
7 January 2023 — French West Indies
Key Bitcoin developer calls on FBI to recover $3.6M in digital coin
Via Ars Technica:
The irony!
Oh, wait. We need a centralised system to police the blockchain thieves now!
Seriously, why do they think the banks and regulators exist? Is it some kind of conspiracy against the world?
Grow up FFS.
4 January 2023 — French West Indies
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
That Steph Curry Video
I don’t know if you’ve seen the video, but it is damn impressive. But I had doubts. Turns out, for a good reason:
How to Use Physics to Tell If That Steph Curry Video Is Real
I’m not going to spoil it for you, but the ending is just as impressive when you think about it.
25 December 2022 — French West Indies