onfocus

The pace of change in AI does feel as if it could soon overtake our collective ability to process it. And the change signatories are asking for — a brief pause in the development of language models larger than the ones that have already been released — feels like a minor request in the grand scheme of things.

Not sure it’s possible to slow this train but it is interesting to hear arguments that we should let society absorb what we already have before releasing more evolutions.

"After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year."

This is a bummer. And it's a good reminder to support your favorite indie websites so they can stay independent. Has anyone checked on Goodreads?

"Mastodon, a text-based social network similar to Twitter, is the most popular example of ActivityPub in action. Users can post text, share images, and follow others. But Mastodon, unlike Twitter, is not hosted as a singular service but instead a collection of independent servers that communicate through ActivityPub. Joining Mastodon means joining a server with its own community and code of conduct. Users can interact with users on other servers, but their account is hosted on the server they choose."

Nice intro to Mastodon here. And speaking of apps, I have been using Ivory as my main mobile Mastodon app for a while now and I'm enjoying it more than the official app. It's great to have so many options.

Crybully definition: “a person who presents himself or herself as a victim of injustice in order to intimidate and manipulate others”.

I’m calling it: word of the year!

"CEO Greg Becker personally led the bank’s half-million-dollar push to reduce scrutiny of his institution – and lawmakers obliged."

A lesson we should all take from this: sometimes you have to tell the libertarians no so people don’t get horrifically screwed if things blow up.

"Now is the time for the real news media to publicly and definitively distinguish between Fox and actual journalism. That means explaining journalism’s core values and how Fox does not share them. It means never again allowing anyone – the public, the pollsters, the funders, the political parties – to confuse the two."

I'm not holding my breath but this recent round of Dominion/Fox revelations does have a different tone. This article has some steps besides circling the wagons that journalists could try to make it clear Fox is operating in a different way from traditional journalism.

"Silicon Valley Bank Chief Executive Officer Greg Becker sold $3.6 million of company stock under a trading plan less than two weeks before the firm disclosed extensive losses that led to its failure."

It’s so funny when these coincidences happen.

"The models are built on statistics. They work by looking for patterns in huge troves of text and then using those patterns to guess what the next word in a string of words should be. They’re great at mimicry and bad at facts."

I, for one, welcome our intelligent octopus overlords.

"The most remarkable aspect of the project is that Meta plans for the network to be decentralized. While the company would not elaborate beyond its statement, in a decentralized network individual users are typically able to set up their own, independent servers and set server-specific rules for how content is moderated."

Using ActivityPub, no less! I did not foresee a pivot from metaverse to fediverse. Text updates? In this economy?!

"The Federal Trade Commission has issued a proposed order banning online counseling service BetterHelp, Inc. from sharing consumers’ health data, including sensitive information about mental health challenges, for advertising. The proposed order also requires the company to pay $7.8 million to consumers to settle charges that it revealed consumers’ sensitive data with third parties such as Facebook and Snapchat for advertising after promising to keep such data private."

Targeted advertising money makes people behave in awful ways. We need more government intervention like this because companies have shown over and over and over that they don’t respect privacy.

"When fascists throughout history have looked for victims, they almost always begin with queer people. That minority has the smallest circle of people (compared to racial and religious minorities) who personally know and accept them, who will stand up and defend them, and who will speak out against their persecution."

This is important historic context for our current moment where Republicans are trying to make groups of our friends and neighbors illegal. It's an old playbook that we need to recognize and stop.