onfocus

"Stanford’s communicative infrastructure cannot depend on the judgment of social media companies or volunteer maintainers of servers, and social media is too important for our university to leave on the hands of profit-making enterprises or well-meaning nonprofits."

I think all institutions should be considering this if they believe social media is an important way to communicate.

"And that’s fair because this is new—not just the drug, but the idea of the drug. There’s no API or software to download, but this is nonetheless a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old—and now the sin is washed away. Baptism by injection."

Paul Ford shares his experience and anxieties taking a newly approved drug that removes hunger.

"“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?