onfocus

"“Contrary to industry narratives, the increase in the price of eggs has not been an ‘Act of God’—it has been simple profiteering,” the letter notes, adding that the industry’s profit margins have risen to “unprecedented” levels alongside egg price increases."

Trust-busters assemble! Is a thing I would say if we had a department of justice. Or a representative government of any kind.

"As a result, it will be increasingly difficult for any but the most popular podcasts to claim a sizable chunk of the ad dollars available. Creators will therefore need to maximize ad revenue as much as possible, and limiting their potential audience through an exclusive distribution model will be increasingly untenable."

GOOD. I am so happy we still have a distributed, open podcast distribution system based on RSS.

"Concerns are, indeed, growing. A regular reader of the Times might conclude that the paper itself is cultivating those concerns—even when the “data is sparse.” With the story about social transitioning in schools, in the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast."

NYT continues to be awful and push a harmful agenda.

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

I really wish this die phase would hurry up. A company can wreck a lot in the time it takes to die. (And Cory has been on a roll lately! This post is a barn burner!)

"Ironically, Manatee County is making thousands of books inaccessible to students just in time to celebrate ‘Literacy Week’ in Florida, which runs from January 23 to 27. Only about 50% of students in Manatee County are reading at grade level."

Felony prosecution for providing books in the classroom! This is the nazi behavior we have been warned about happening in modern times.

"Over the past two school years, the number of attempts to remove books from schools has skyrocketed to historic highs. Of the thousands of titles targeted, an overwhelming majority were written by or about people of color and LGBTQ individuals, according to the American Library Association and PEN America."

The real cancel culture in America. Feels like governments in many states trying to dismantle or at least diminish the effectiveness of public education.

"But the need for humans to label data for AI systems remains, at least for now. 'They’re impressive, but ChatGPT and other generative models are not magic – they rely on massive supply chains of human labor and scraped data, much of which is unattributed and used without consent,' Andrew Strait, an AI ethicist, recently wrote on Twitter. 'These are serious, foundational problems that I do not see OpenAI addressing.'"

Warning: this article is disturbing. Companies shouldn't be able to cause people psychological damage to get funding.

"...some internet policy experts say the company’s new direction has exposed the drawbacks of public agencies becoming over-reliant on private platforms, and that issues like the D.C. bus system’s mysterious deactivation could pave the way for a more publicly managed alternative."

Fingers crossed, I guess. It seems like public agencies are more than happy to hand off the problem of managing servers and paying developers to corporations. Unfortunately our public infrastructure suffers in the process. If you can only see important public information though a barrage of advertising and misinformation are these agencies still serving the public?

"…where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 4.4 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come."

Fun collection to browse through. I can even post this image of a Bell X-1 cockpit without attribution!

"The problem with this description isn't just that it's wrong. It's that the AI is eliding an important reality about many loans: that if you pay them down faster, you end up paying less interest in the future. In other words, it's feeding terrible financial advice directly to people trying to improve their grasp of it."

Our unevenly distributed AI future is terrible already! Update (1/23): And who cares about copyright?

"This academic-to-commercial pipeline abstracts away ownership of data models from their practical applications, a kind of data laundering where vast amounts of information are ingested, manipulated, and frequently relicensed under an open-source license for commercial use."

Andy explains the research to corporate profit pipeline. Seems like there should be a way to handle consent even at this scale. Many CC licenses require attribution—I wonder how these image models handle that.

"At min­i­mum, Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion’s abil­ity to flood the mar­ket with an essen­tially unlim­ited num­ber of infring­ing images will inflict per­ma­nent dam­age on the mar­ket for art and artists."

Describing image models as sophisticated collage tools takes some of the mystery out of AI and makes it clear work is being used without consent. This essay has a clear description of the diffusion process.

"The research discovered that excess deaths between Democrats and Republicans remained steady in the early part of the pandemic then began to separate after vaccines were widely available. Schwartz said the reasons why were beyond the remit of the study, but speculated that early COVID prevention measures were government-driven while the vaccine required someone to make a personal choice."

We should never forgive the political party and their media servants that made this happen.

"In the piece, Fuller recounts a time in 2016 he saw a man grab “a handful of beef jerky” and walk out of a Walgreens. Based on this five-year-old anecdote and a statement from Walgreens, Fuller declared a “shoplifting epidemic” and called into question a sentencing-reform measure that reduced some thefts from felonies to misdemeanors. The piece, notably, does not include any data on crime rates in San Francisco."

The media wrote dozens of stories about a retail theft epidemic but it wasn’t based on reality. Why does the media choose to write about some topics frequently based on hearsay? Why aren’t there consequences or retractions with the same volume?

"The OGL 1.0a includes a strange term claiming that you agree to be bound by this contract by “using” the “Open Game Content,” such as the mechanics. Wizards of the Coast wrote D&D’s license to operate like a cursed helm, where you’re doomed the moment you put it on."

This is a fun read about the company behind Dungeons & Dragons attempting to change the way people create content for the game. It must be frustrating for Hasbro to see frequent million dollar kickstarter projects for D&D products they didn’t develop. But that demand for their game wouldn’t exist if creators were worried about being sued. They rose to popularity with an open license and now they want to change the terms.

"Facebook addressed this problem by giving MySpace users who switched to Facebook a bridge between the two services. Simply give this tool your MySpace login and password, and it would use a bot to login to your MySpace account, scrape all the waiting messages in your queues and inbox, and push them into your Facebook feed. You could reply to these, and the bot would log back into MySpace and post those replies as you."

A wild moment in time in Facebook history and total platform lock-in makes this idea of mixing data between services unimaginable today. Happy to see we’re starting to leave these walled gardens and imagining new ways of being online.

"To ignore Musk is to sacrifice the precious clicks that a new Musk prediction will inevitably garner. Thus a for-profit tech journalism website faces a conflict between its financial self-interest and its integrity. In a time when it’s tough for media outlets to survive, it’s hard to turn down the clicks."

Good rant. Bullshit pays for the media (among others) but causes significant problems for society. Seems like an intractable problem.

"There are also health and attitudinal consequences for managers who are laying people off as well as for the employees who remain. Not surprisingly, layoffs increase people’s stress. Stress, like many attitudes and emotions, is contagious. Depression is contagious, and layoffs increase stress and depression, which are bad for health."

This Stanford professor says the current tech layoffs aren’t based on business fundamentals or economics. It’s basically bad vibes among lemming executives that is causing real pain for everyone.