onfocus

"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.

"It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things."

Your periodic reminder that free speech does not mean speech that is free from consequences. I'm sure this mediocre cartoonist will have a career on the right's "victim" circuit. He should be shunned by everyone else for his repulsive racism.

"For generations, members of the Beers family of Canton, Ohio, have used Christian faith to sell health coverage to more than a hundred thousand people like Martin. Instead they delivered pain, debt and financial ruin, according to an investigation by ProPublica based on leaked internal documents, land records, court files and interviews. They have done this not once but twice and have faced few consequences."

Another side effect of our broken US health care system is evil people like these using people's faith and right wing media diet against them to steal money.

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.

Sometimes an organization is so cartoonishly evil it takes a comedian to point it out. The Onion nails the tone of the bigoted NYT response to criticism of its reporting on trans issues.

"Bearing all this in mind, our ancestor from 1791 might well conclude that a legal system crafted to protect life and liberty should readily encompass the value of protecting people from being terrorized by gun-possessors with a propensity to physically harm others."

The ridiculous Federalist Society "mission" of interpreting law through a historic lens is only one narrow, misguided way to interpret history. I think it’s clear by now that this history garbage is obfuscation and their mission is enacting authoritarian policies.

"To reach this extraordinary conclusion, the court engaged in the worst version of Drunk History. It went all the way back to the English Militia Act of 1662 (not a typo) and treated us to a recitation of the king’s prerogatives, James II, and Oliver Cromwell, to conclude that the law’s restriction on “dangerous” individuals was not in line with the thinking of the authors of the US Constitution."

Please vote for Democrats so we can have reasonable gun laws in this country and save people’s lives. Republicans are out of control and nothing will change them but repeatedly losing elections.

"A few days later, Marc Benioff said in an interview that he took a 10-day digital detox that included a vacation to French Polynesia after the layoffs announcement."

It sounds really stressful to lay off 7,000 people for no good reason. Glad he got a nice vacation.

"University campuses as well as elementary through high schools, are supposed to be places where students can flourish—places where ideas can be generated and learned. They can’t serve this purpose if they are environments of mortal fear."

We can’t continue to watch this without changing anything.