onfocus

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

I know it’s true, but it feels rare to see it in print because media organizations typically don’t acknowledge this truth. They usually smooth over reality so they don't offend potential customers and make their owners happy.

LAION-5B is an open-source foundation dataset used to train AI models such as Stable Diffusion. It contains 5.8 billion image and text pairs—a size too large to make sense of. In this visual investigation, we follow the construction of the dataset to better understand its contents, implications and entanglements.

An exercise in (and advocacy for) AI dataset transparency. Excellent information and presentation here.

Calculating the energy cost of generative AI can be complicated — but even the rough estimates that researchers have put together are sobering.

Generative AI tools can be fun and can help productivity but are those gains worth their higher resource cost?

“Some firms seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further hike prices to increase their profits, and profits remain elevated even as supply chain pressures have eased,” the report read.

Some firms deserve our scorn and ridicule, I say. It would be nice if the government could reign in the profiteering but I'm not holding my breath. Burn your large grocer loyalty cards I guess.

“When Americans see a case like this – so clearly concocted and motivated by special interests, and with evident connections between those interests and the judges on the case, it does tremendous damage to the reputation of the courts, and to the public trust in their ability to give all litigants an even shake,” said Alex Aronson, the executive director of the nonpartisan group Court Accountability and a former chief counsel to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

"It’s not technically illegal" is the first refuge of scoundrels.

I feel personally attacked by this C64-inspired keyboard. The nostalgia is strong with this one.

Fun game where you adjust the RGB sliders to match the background color. I thought I was pretty good at eyeballing RGB and I get to 90% pretty quickly. But getting that last 10% is tricky.

In the wake of Louisiana's abortion ban, pregnant women have been given risky, unnecessary surgeries, denied swift treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, and forced to wait until their life is at risk before getting an abortion, according to a new report first made available to NPR.

We wouldn’t find this acceptable in another country but it’s happening in Louisiana and other states with abortion bans. Please register to vote and vote for people who don’t find medical malpractice acceptable.

Hippocratic promotes how it can undercut real human nurses, who can cost $90 an hour, with its cheap AI agents that offer medical advice to patients over video calls in real-time.

First, do no harm. Tech culture is going just great.

The numbers were nearly as bad worldwide, as daily active users on the mobile app fell to 174 million in February, down 15% from a year earlier, the firm said. The worldwide user base has been flat or down every month during Musk’s tenure began except one, when it grew slightly in October and then resumed falling, according to Sensor Tower.

Or: how to get minimal utility out of $44 billion.

Putting a 25% tax on 750 people to benefit the 330 million other members of the American public? Maybe you can see why it's not a radical idea when middle-class people are already paying higher rates themselves. To be clear, those affected by the rate increase would continue to be billionaires—it's just that their fortunes would grow past a billion at a slightly slower pace.

Escape velocity is a great way to think about when enough is enough for any one human to have. Society doesn't see much benefit from allocating so many resources to a small number of individuals. The standard argument is job creators! but that's a joke in a world where record profits lead to mass layoffs.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently reported on a poll of 1,200 voters deemed gettable for Biden in three swing states, including Pennsylvania, and found the vast majority didn’t know about Trump’s “dictator for a day” comments, or that he’d echoed Adolf Hitler in calling enemies “vermin” and claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The pollster said only 31% of persuadable voters had heard much about these statements.

This is the media functioning as its owners want: smoothing the way for autocracy in America so they can optimize profits.

Most really unacceptable losses don’t happen because of a single bad event or what we might call a component failure, but because two subsystems, both operating correctly according to their designers’ intent, interact in a way that their designers didn’t foresee.

I would like to make this quote into a cross stitch and hang it on the wall in every IT department everywhere. Lots of great thinking here about how we keep systems operating safely, especially with AI chaos engines being integrated everywhere.

Despite recurring fantasies about the end of work or the automation of everything, the central fact of our industrial civilisation is labour, and most of this work falls far outside the realm of innovation.

This 2016 article about innovation, maintenance, and our attention feels especially relevant in our 2024 AI hype bubble. I would love to see maintenance become a core value of our society because that would improve our daily lives so much more than innovation does.

At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent…You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend.

So strange that everyone at the NYT is working on this project to normalize Trump. Shouldn’t there be high profile resignations or some indication of unease from professional journalists?

Butler told CNN how he unknowingly helped Nauta deliver boxes of classified information from Mar-a-Lago to the former president’s plane in June 2022 – the same day that Trump and his attorney were meeting with the Justice Department at Mar-a-Lago about the classified documents.

Seems bad for national security.

Trust in AI technology and the companies that develop it is dropping, in both the U.S. and around the world, according to new data from Edelman shared first with Axios.

Not much to this summary, but interesting to hear AI skepticism is on the rise even as it's being built into every technology product.

Cuban needs no more convincing on who he’ll vote for come November. Speaking to Bloomberg this month, he shrugged off concerns about Biden’s advanced age: “If they were having his last wake, and it was him versus Trump, and he was being given last rites, I would still vote for Joe Biden.”

Pretty funny for a billionaire.

I mean, yeah, I don't know why nobody else picked up on that, because the big detail that got my attention was that she says that the trafficking had started when this woman was 12, and well, then that can't—Joe Biden's only been president for three years, so he can't—it made no sense.

A good interview with the journalist who broke the SOTU rebuttal trafficking lie on TikTok.

Reporting (endlessly) that Biden is old without noting that Trump is deranged is not “independent” journalism, it’s just bad journalism.

The NYT is basically the PR division for the Republic party. They have fully embraced fascism and trolling for attention.

If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.

This article really is as good as everyone is saying. Read it on the Internet Archive while you still can. Why it was removed we'll probably never know. cough unhappy rich people cough