“ongoing by Tim Bray · Amazon Q1 2023 Financials”
And why is it legal for Amazon to be the prime competitor of the economy’s whole retail sector while not having to make a profit?
I didn’t realise people genuinely thought summaries led to actual understanding. I alway thought the people obsessed with summarisation were all about passing as read without actually reading
Looks like generative AI is going to show us what sort of economic value mediocrity and arrested created development have in a capitalist society when scaled up into the stratosphere
Kinda hoping supply and demand dynamics haven’t been monopolied out of existence.
“Using crypto for crime is not a bug — it’s an industry feature - Financial Times”
“AI translation jeopardizes Afghan asylum claims - Rest of World”
‘False Alarm: How Wisconsin Uses Race and Income to Label Students “High Risk”’
Fjandinn.
“Too Big to Challenge?. I find it deeply disturbing that the… - by danah boyd - Apr, 2023 - Medium”
We have, as an official, critical division of our humanist utopia of Starfleet, an organization that openly commits war crimes… and it’s just become part of the setting.
“Quantifying ChatGPT’s gender bias”
We found that both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are strongly biased on one such benchmark, despite the benchmark dataset likely appearing in the training data.
“‘As an AI language model’: the phrase that shows how AI is polluting the web - The Verge”
“Forums will be destroyed by Blogs,” they said. “Forums are doomed.”
“Blogs will be destroyed by Twitter!”
“Twitter is doomed! Mastodon is the future.”
“Mastodon will be destroyed by Bluesky!”
That all of these things continue to exist in some form is instantly forgotten
“FTC Chair Khan and Officials from DOJ, CFPB and EEOC Release Joint Statement on AI”
Today, our agencies reiterate our resolve to monitor the development and use of automated systems and promote responsible innovation. We also pledge to vigorously use our collective authorities to protect individuals’ rights regardless of whether legal violations occur through traditional means or advanced technologies.
This doesn’t happen often
“An AI Scraping Tool Is Overwhelming Websites With Traffic”
Why should these companies sit idly by as a new generation of technology stripmine them for data in order to build tools that could compete with them later?
Techies keep forgetting that you can’t just do whatever you want with other people’s data.
“Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature, calling for its removal”
The idea that users want more “AI” in their existing software is an entirely unproven assertion.
It’s kind of worrying to see how many software developers are convinced that emergent behaviour in a complex system is evidence of sentience, when that’s just what happens in complex systems.
From John Gall’s Systems Bible:
The point is that real novelty in the world increases as complexity increases. As the necessary richness of underlying structure is attained, the new property emerges, seemingly out of nowhere.
“The Dark Side of the Mac App Store: How Scam Apps and Shady Developers Are Preying on Users”
App store are more of a liability than a benefit.
“Deno vs. Node: No One is Ready for the Move”
I actually prefer Deno these days, much nicer experience. But I also think that Node’s massive community is it’s biggest liability.
These sort of experiments are genuinely important research in terms of understanding animal cognition.