I’m wondering if this is a turning point for Social Media. There’s a confluence of factors that are starting to bite. And it doesn’t look like it will ease up anytime soon.

Firstly, regulation and accountability. Governments and Civil Society are interested in making platforms more accountable for the outputs of the various algorithms used by the latter. It’s no longer enough to wave their hands and say, “look over there” people want real analysis and accountability.

For example, look at this lawsuit as reported by Ars Technica.

"Research tells us that excessive and problematic use of social media is harmful to the mental, behavioural, and emotional health of youth and is associated with increased rates of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, eating disorders, and suicide."

Secondly, the ownership and centralisation of Social Media have come to the fore through the abject stupidity of how Elmo handled the Twitter takeover and subsequent (mis)management.

It was firing many people that provided, albeit limited, accountability and balance had nearly disastrous consequences, echoing much of the popular delusion that sparked the January 6 storming of the Capitol. There is much scrutiny around what role Social Media played in this.

This has provoked a mass exodus of technology journalists, enthusiasts, experts and academics to invest more time and effort in Mastodon. It remains to be seen if it reaches critical mass to ensure its survival in this new form. For the record, Mastodon will continue regardless, but it may return to being a modern-day equivalent of the BBS of yore.

Thirdly, the polarised populations are now becoming poorer through global economic mismanagement and exploitation by populism that has ripened the world for autocrats and extremists to seize their opportunity to amass decisive power. See above.

Recent reports suggest Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election and likely others, but the analysis is too little too late. It does, however, suggest deeper scrutiny is on the horizon. I would guess that newer tools will make this quicker and simpler to use, to the point where near real-time analysis of the effects of Social Media is possible. Those best placed for this are the Social Media companies themselves. Not in any “police the police” sense. More being compelled and scrutinised by an independent body. Facebook’s Oversight Board is a start but pathetically reductive and free from real scrutiny.

But most importantly, and possibly one of the only easy-to-implement chances we have to correct this path, cutting off the oxygen to these platforms. Ad money. Unregulated and uncontrolled advertising poisons everything.

Advertisers are starting to wake up to this and are wincing at the things they and their products are being associated with algorithmically and uncontrollably. And they’re not happy.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/126219c4-5ac0-4c8b-996c-307c24a4cd61 (Paywalled)

I think we can look forward to greater scrutiny and a wholesale effort to reign in these platforms.

10 January 2023 — French West Indies

From The Verge:

Like Superman III

8 January 2023 — French West Indies

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

From Wallpaper:

Daisy. Daisy…

6 January 2023 — French West Indies

There’s a number which is called Dunbar’s Number. It’s around 150 or so.

It’s a significant number in that it seems to indicate that, as humans, we are incapable of having a meaningful discussion and keeping personal links with other humans if we have to do that for a group larger than this number.

Think about how many friends you have, no not Instagram acquaintances, real friends? Now think about how many of them you can keep in touch with in a meaningful way. It’s probably much less than Robin Dunbar’s suggestion.

I’ve started to see discussions about having a much more sociable social network, prompted by not just Elmo’s destruction of Twitter but the abject fatigue surrounding the use of social media that sucks you dry and intentionally disconnects you emotionally from a human being on another smartphone. Connecting more people was supposed to bring us together. Instead, it has succeeded in doing the exact opposite. For example, suggestions discuss limiting follows and followers to around 300 people or so and making them mutually agreed upon.

I don’t know the solution, and I don’t think it is Mastodon in its current guise. Still, I think it is a good starting point for people, organisations, institutions and even governments to see how they can build more community rather than more division.

Community centres and youth clubs were everywhere before. They weren’t perfect, nor do I expect Social Media to be. But I think there’s an opportunity to build something more localised and connected simultaneously. And that is what I think the value of something like Mastodon may inspire.

5 January 2023 — French West Indies

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

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

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

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

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

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

… 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

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

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

CBR.com:

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

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

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

See more here.

23 December 2022 — French West Indies

The Verge:

If you have an account you use to store passwords and login information on LastPass, or you used to have one and hadn’t deleted it before this fall, your password vault may be in hackers’ hands. Still, the company claims you might be safe if you have a strong master password and its most recent default settings. However, if you have a weak master password or less security, the company says that “as an extra security measure, you should consider minimizing risk by changing passwords of websites you have stored.”

If I were a LastPass user, I’d be very worried.

I’d probably move to another service, or find an on-premises solution that doesn’t rely on trusting someone’s ability to implement security correctly.

Whether or not they had played fast and loose with the security of their customer’s data or not is irrelevant —unless you are an EU Citizen, and perhaps you should look at provisions under the GDPR for redress. I’m not a lawyer, yada yada…— their slow drip feed of disclosure is unforgivable.

They either knew and were withholding information (did someone mention GDPR?), or they didn’t know that they had put customer password data on backups, albeit encrypted. Both are dreadful examples of management.

There are a number of commentators speculating that cracking this data will take millions of years. I doubt it. Quantum computing, for one, is likely to solve that problem soon. Two, that estimate only holds true if we are static and don’t progress. A hundred years ago, we couldn’t imagine that we would have things we take for granted today in less than a million years.

23 December 2022 — French West Indies

According to the Guardian, “Cheating in professional exams is still a ‘live’ issue at the UK’s biggest audit firms, the accountancy watchdog warned.”

Just wait till ChatGPT or its successor gets good.

I’m a teacher, and I’m already trying to find ways to understand how to test that makes it harder for AI models like ChatGPT to provide coherent answers. I fear I may be losing that battle.

21 December 2022 — French West Indies