Frank Pasquale

Author of The Black Box Society & New Laws of Robotics; law professor at Brooklyn Law School.

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FrankPasquale_at_mastodon.social@mostr.pub

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Last Notes

2024-10-16 11:02:12

“Section 230 is just massively overbroad,” Sag says. “It’s well past time we replaced it with some kind of notice and takedown regime, a simple expedient system to say, ‘This is infringing on my rights to publicity,’ or ‘I have a good faith belief that there’s been an infliction of emotional distress,’ and then the companies would either have to take it down or lose their liability shield.”
https://www.wired.com/story/characterai-has-a-non-consensual-bot-problem/

2024-10-11 12:08:22

“Making companies more ‘efficient’ often means little more than raising prices and lowering quality. Take US trailer parks, which PE firms have been amassing with the avidity of an eight-year-old playing Monopoly. Once they own these low-income residential communities, the firms jack up ground rents, transfer utility costs to residents and cut back on maintaining vital infrastructure such as sewers….to charge more for less, it’s smart business to target” the vulnerable.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-private-equity-out-of-control

2024-09-14 23:27:39

“With no role in strategy, filming or production, Mr. Trump would not typically see the contestants “working” during the week.
“He would fire the absolute wrong person,” recalled Mr. Braun “Our job then was to reverse engineer the show and to make him not look like a complete moron,” Mr. Braun said. They would go back through the tape from the week and selectively choose snippets “to make the person who he fired look not as good,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/business/donald-trump-apprentice.html

2024-09-12 10:49:40

“Without an electric vehicle industry, without the ability to mass-produce batteries in an emergency, the United States will lose its status as an energy superpower.
It is possible to fall so far behind in an industry that a country cannot reasonably catch up.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/opinion/trump-electric-vehicles-china.html

2024-09-07 01:25:01

“Apple is the epitome of the “hollow corporation”; it is less a manufacturer than a co-ordinator of activities mostly undertaken by others. The largest supplier of iPhone components is Samsung, Apple’s principal rival; assembly is the responsibility of the Chinese-based Foxconn; chips once came from Intel but, now designed by Apple, are manufactured by Taiwanese TSMC.”
https://www.ft.com/content/dbc3a391-6e61-4df4-939c-cdc53a4a9c85

2024-09-03 18:26:58

Justice Dino compared X’s “refusal to comply with court orders to suspend accounts to the operator of a private highway refusing to stop traffic to prevent the escape of a dangerous criminal. “Would it be reasonable for this company to choose whether or not to comply with the court order, arguing that stopping the highway would violate the criminal’s freedom of movement?” he asked.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/02/world/americas/brazil-elon-musk-supreme-court.html

2024-09-03 12:54:47

“In a world where deepfakes are prevalent and uncertainty is widespread, public figures and private citizens alike can capitalize on that uncertainty to sow doubt in real audio content or video footage and potentially benefit from the liar’s dividend. In the courtroom, lawyers have attempted the “deepfake defense,” asserting that real audiovisual evidence against a defendant is fake.”
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/deepfakes-elections-and-shrinking-liars-dividend

2024-09-02 11:57:29

“Recht argues that researching to find the accepted solutions to certain problems “is more like learning guitar than it is taking a standardized aptitude test.” If you want to be a musician, you want to know how to play music, not merely what music sounds like. Chiang offers a similar metaphor: “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/commodified-incuriosity

2024-08-30 12:26:21

“Platforms are not passive conduits; they are far from bulletin boards. Their algorithms curate, promote, and downgrade content. These algorithms affect what content users see, and they also affect the content users create, because users create content in response to what the algorithms encourage and promote. It’s high time for companies to be held responsible for what they are doing.”
https://teachprivacy.com/the-limits-of-section-230-accountability-for-algorithmic-decisions/

2024-08-29 21:58:05

“Generalist appellate judges will be forced to independently evaluate highly technical interpretations of statutes-a task that judges are ill-equipped to accomplish. Rather than take the time to properly understand complex statutory regimes, judges may purposefully or inadvertently fall back on partisanship.”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4939536

2024-08-29 21:57:09

“The conflation of these two types of studies is problematic because it does not make sense to consider a 5-minute exposure to Facebook measuring momentary mood with a 3-week abstinence from social media measuring risk of clinical depression on a validated scale to be measures of the same effect.”
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-case-for-causality-part-1

2024-08-24 22:43:57

“Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them. (The inherent fragility of this kind of metadata was supposed to be addressed by Google’s invention of the theoretically unremovable SynthID watermark”
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/22/24225972/ai-photo-era-what-is-reality-google-pixel-9

2024-08-20 01:46:22

“Worldcoin has come under assault by authorities over its mission. It has been raided in Hong Kong, blocked in Spain, fined in Argentina and criminally investigated in Kenya. A ruling looms on whether it can keep operating in the European Union.
More than a dozen jurisdictions have either suspended Worldcoin’s operations or looked into its data processing.“
https://www.wsj.com/tech/sam-altman-openai-humanness-iris-scanning-4d0e1dab

2024-08-13 21:45:34

“Deployed on everything, Apple and Google’s AIs end up assuming strange roles, acting like personal assistants for administrative work but also for … talking to your friends and family? It’s mediation for mediation’s sake. Like a lot of first-wave AI tools, these are features that exist because they’re newly possible, not necessarily because they make sense.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/chatgpt-gmail-apple-intelligence-ai-summaries.html
Summary as operational language.

2024-08-12 02:04:12

“In 1843, Feuerbach complained that his own era “prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being.””
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-image-culture

2024-08-11 14:50:44

During Rawls’s time working at a donut factory in Baltimore, he “was the helper of an older man named Ernie who operated one of the mixing machines. He had been there for 18 years and had three children to support, and it seemed he’d be there forever, breathing flour dust all his life.”
https://aeon.co/essays/john-rawls-liberalism-and-what-it-means-to-live-a-good-life

2024-08-10 23:19:53

“In 2017, then–FTC Chair Ohlhausen gave a speech to antitrust lawyers warning about the rise of algorithmic collusion. “Is it okay for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market and then tell everybody how they should price?” she asked. “If it isn’t okay for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t okay for an algorithm to do it either.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/ai-price-algorithms-realpage/679405/

2024-08-09 20:11:18

“We need to include a kill switch in case we lose control over our own creations — in case things get too real.”
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/virtual-reality-reboots-history

2024-07-29 11:53:17

A “re-immersion in Geertz’s opus left me with the feeling I have when I go back to read founding thinkers like Max Weber, or Ruth Benedict – that the richness of their response to the empirical realities with which they dealt far exceeded the labels placed on their work.”
https://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2006/11/a_brief_tribute.html

2024-07-28 15:34:54

As the internet both homogenizes and atomizes culture, the “British might be losing something crucial if terms like “pillock” or “numpty” are forgotten. These traditional terms of abuse tend to be softer than their more contemporary equivalents, allowing a wider range of emphasis and intensity. Linguists say they can help defuse what could be an otherwise tense situation.”
https://www.wsj.com/world/uk/british-slang-might-not-be-the-dogs-bollocks-much-longer-bc79c791?mod=mhp

2024-07-16 10:23:12

“Houstonians are, sadly, old hands at this. Lots of people have invested in generators—which have basically become an essential household appliance—to power things like fridges and fans and portable AC units. But there have even been issues in getting gas to fill those generators. Gas stations with no power mean inactive pumps.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/07/houston-power-outage-beryl/678990/

2024-06-16 13:27:26

When “Oxford and Cambridge universities competed in the Boat Race, rowers were urged to avoid coming into contact with the water, which had tested with high levels of E. coli. The Cambridge men shunned the traditional victory celebration of throwing their coxswain into the water, with their coach instead promising to find a bucket of clean, sanitized water to douse him.”
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/poo-in-the-water-how-financial-engineering-sullied-britains-most-famous-river-5e22a171

2024-06-15 00:55:31

Doge was “rescued from a puppy mill, was named Kabosu, after the Japanese citrus that the pooch’s round face resembled.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/what-doge-taught-me-about-the-internet

2024-06-11 01:43:28

“New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/07/phoenix-climate-drought-republican-politics/678494/

2024-06-10 22:35:07

“At Meta, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Times. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/technology/tech-giants-harvest-data-artificial-intelligence.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

2024-06-07 22:50:26

“At this time 15 years ago, real-estate agents had 2.2 million vacant housing units available to show prospective buyers. That number has dwindled and dwindled and now sits at just 732,000, despite the country having added 30 million people to its population. The Case-Shiller index of home prices sits near its highest-ever inflation-adjusted level; houses are unaffordable for middle-class families across” US.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/buying-house-market-shortage/676088/

2024-06-06 20:02:27

“I cannot see that a system can be called robust when it produces complete misanalyses and does so without leaving any indication that it has had difficulty processing the text. It would probably be better if the system produced no analysis at all and indicated that it could not process the text.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-hallucination-examining-the-history-and-stakes-of-how-we-label-ais-undesirable-output

2024-06-06 00:45:01

“People are already working to exploit the data structures and algorithms that govern our world. Amazon drivers hang smartphones in trees to trick the system. Songwriters put their catchy choruses near the beginning to exploit Spotify’s algorithms. And podcasters deliberately mispronounce words because people comment with corrections and those comments count as “engagement” to the algorithms.”
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structure

2024-06-04 01:15:53

“We have a sense for how confident we are about our own knowledge. This has been a big problem for LLMs. They have no calibration for how confident they are …Without some extra ability to ground what they’re saying in the world, they can’t really know if something they’re saying is true or false.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-raise-your-artificial-intelligence-a-conversation-with-alison-gopnik-and-melanie-mitchell

2024-06-01 20:07:53

“According to the Center for Automotive Research, seven other auto plants — GM and Chrysler — shut down within months of Janesville. Eventually, these others have found new uses. The one that sat empty longest held its grand opening last autumn as one of Georgia’s largest television and movie production studios.”
https://www.ft.com/content/7ee5a314-1aa1-439b-817e-41a3c5f3c410
America’s economic shift in a nutshell: from Fords to films. 🎥

2024-05-31 19:55:14

“Creators must also be influencers to compete in the attention economy. “Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture,” Chayka says, whether by tweeting about it, posting visuals on Instagram, making TikTok videos, or writing newsletters. But lately, the social-media landscape has changed in a way that disadvantages unknown novelists specifically.”
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a60924704/debut-fiction-challenges/

2024-05-30 19:29:28

“End-of-days idioms are showing up around the world. In Argentina, “disociando” (to zone out during stressful situations) enjoyed a spike in 2023. Also in 2023, SGL chose “krisenmodus” (crisis mode) as Germany’s word of the year, explaining, “There have always been crises. But it feels like there is so much crisis [now] … Between apathy and alarmism, it is difficult to find an appropriate way of dealing.””
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a60295595/doomslang-trend/

2024-05-29 18:40:27

“Today, American “tech” companies compete to host crypto apps on your phone and mount video game consoles on your face, while the American economy remains chained to fossil fuels through dirty energy lobbying and political inertia. The future belongs to green tech and green manufacturing, and the US is only beginning to consider its role in the 21st century commercial milieu.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/biden-china-alexander-hamilton-tariffs-electric-cars-green-energy.html

2024-05-27 15:21:07

“In theory, more data should enable Tesla to efficiently identify edge cases its self-driving software needs to handle. More data should also enable Tesla to train better neural networks.
But…access to more data is…not a magic bullet. One issue is that the data Tesla collects is unlabeled. Waymo’s safety drivers document each disengagement to help identify flaws in Waymo’s software. But Tesla customers are unlikely to do that.”
https://www.understandingai.org/p/on-self-driving-waymo-is-playing

2024-05-27 13:45:16

“Losses from severe convective storms increased by about 9% every year between 1989 and 2022, according to the insurance firm Aon. Last year these storms caused more than $50bn in insured losses combined – about as much as 2022’s huge Hurricane Ian. No single storm event caused more than a few billion dollars of damage, but together they were more expensive than most big disasters.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/24/hail-storm-tornadoes-midwest-home-insurance

2024-05-24 21:25:42

“When a generative model develops a particular schematism, the institutions deploying the model can invoke this logic to insist that it is objective, and that the schematisms we have consciously and deliberately negotiated socially or inherited through various forms of institutionalization and tradition are wrong and should be amended or discarded without recourse to other political means of decision-making.”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/the-blackbird-must-be-flying

2024-05-24 15:22:05

“By describing as superhuman a thing that is entirely insensible and unthinking, an object without desire or hope but relentlessly productive and adaptable…we implicitly erase or devalue the concept of a “human” and all that a human can do and strive to become. Of course, attempts to erase and devalue the most humane parts of our existence are nothing new; AI is just a new excuse to do it.”
https://www.noemamag.com/the-danger-of-superhuman-ai-is-not-what-you-think

2024-05-18 13:30:00

“Creators may be in a stronger position than they realise. To obviate the necessity of licensing, models are being trained on the artificial output of AI itself. But this hasn’t gone…well. Researchers have found that AI models “collapse” or go “MAD” — Model Autophagy Disorder — in the words of one team who explicitly evoke the analogy of BSE (mad cow disease) to describe the cannibalistic process. It turns out they need” humans after all.
https://thecritic.co.uk/ai-and-the-great-data-robbery/

2024-05-18 11:25:24

“Facts are irrelevant to the truth of the experience OpenAI sells, which is grounded in the fantasy of having someone you can always talk to and boss around without having to worry about managing their performance. The chatbot performs “assistance” in a way that makes its actually doing anything more and more beside the point”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/empires-of-modern-passivity

2024-05-15 00:44:30

“Isn’t AI good news for people who can’t afford legal representation?”
“It depends. If you’re talking about very basic disputes where it’s just about knowing the rules, technology can improve access. But when you’re looking at more complex questions, generative AI doesn’t actually know what the law is & could be giving you rubbish
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/11/human-rights-lawyer-susie-alegre-ai-artificial-intelligence-human-rights-robot-wrongs-book-interview

2024-05-14 12:16:26

“New York City streets are teetering between lively and unlivable. Residents clash over traffic, noise, parking, 5G towers and heaps of trash. Most years, far fewer pedestrians get killed by motorists than in generations past, but last year was the deadliest year for cyclists since 1999.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/13/nyregion/nyc-traffic-congestion-pricing-parking.html

2024-05-14 12:09:51

“Poetry can induce peak emotional responses, a strong reaction that might include goose bumps or chills. It can help you locate an emotion within yourself, which is important to health as a form of emotional processing. Poetry also contains complex, unexpected elements”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/04/reading-aloud-health-brain/678194/

2024-05-14 11:41:44

“99 percent of Chinese companies whose stock trades publicly received direct government subsidies in 2022.
China keeps factory wages low, which helps the competitiveness of its manufacturers. Residence permits limit the ability of rural families to move permanently to cities, where they would qualify for better job benefits. Independent labor unions are banned, and would-be organizers are detained by the police.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/business/china-exports-manufacturing.html

2024-05-12 12:53:47

“Mr. Corman “was able to nurture other talent in a way that was never envious or difficult but always generous,” Mr. Scorsese said. “He once said: ‘Martin, what you have to get is a very good first reel, because people want to know what’s going on. Then you need a very good last reel, because people want to hear how it all turns out. Everything else doesn’t really matter.’ Probably the best sense I have ever heard about movies.””
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/movies/roger-corman-dead.html

2024-05-06 11:04:26

“Today I am encouraged to post symptoms on an app called Dr iQ, which is designed to make medical care more efficient. But the app encourages patients to cram symptoms into tick boxes that seem devised expressly to prevent one giving a rich, subjective account of how one is feeling. We are reduced to identikit puppets with identikit symptoms. Quality of care? A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/18/the-crisis-of-narration-byung-chul-han-review

2024-05-05 14:58:11

“Since Trump has a special animosity for the EU, Britain, regardless of its government, might even be a beneficiary. In the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation’s 887-page “Project 2025” document, the de facto plan for a Trump presidency, Britain is singled out as the only country with which a Trumpian US would seek to do more trade.”
https://www.ft.com/content/60df8c35-667a-4672-a356-220dfb60ddde

2024-05-05 14:16:08

“An entire half-page of Baron’s book is filled with variations of this single sentiment, ranging from Horace Walpole’s “I never understand anything until I have written about it” to Joan Didion’s “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.””
https://newrepublic.com/article/180395/ai-artifical-intelligence-writing-human-creativity

2024-05-05 12:28:02

“The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.”
https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet

2024-05-04 11:13:43

Prices of fresh food were up 19.1 per cent from April 2023 to April 2024….”Examples of shrinkflation on the website of the state Korea Consumer Agency” included “a bag of honey butter-flavoured almonds from HBAF reduced by 20 grammes, a sausage made by CJ CheilJedang whose weight was cut by 12.5 per cent and a packet of sliced cheese from Seoul Dairy that was slimmed down 10 per cent.”
https://www.ft.com/content/61c3975d-ca0e-4043-bc47-79120bb19347

2024-04-29 12:08:56

“She talks to experts who have audited CV screening tools for potential bias — and found them liable to filter out candidates from certain postcodes, a recipe for racial discrimination; to favour particular nationalities; or to view a liking for male-dominated pursuits such as baseball as a marker of success.”
https://www.ft.com/content/e27ee51f-ea02-4489-b223-51fed88fd6a8

2024-04-29 11:46:53

“The Big 5 publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) [subsidize] all the rest of the books.”
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

2024-04-26 17:45:33

“She upheld a canon of the English lyric, of first-person poems grounded in strong feeling, passed down from Shakespeare and George Herbert (she wrote books about both) through the Romantics to moderns like Yeats, Auden and, above all, Wallace Stevens. Many of the contemporary poets she praised, like Merrill and Robert Lowell, could be assimilated to that lineage.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/books/review/helen-vendler-appraisal.html

2024-04-21 14:35:23

Thanks to the black box algorithm, patients “were left in agony. One had her opioids stopped in the hospital and was then dismissed from care by her gynecologist during treatment for painful endometriosis, because of a high score. She didn’t have a drug problem; her score seems to have been elevated because prescriptions for her rescue dogs were recorded under her name, making it appear she was doctor shopping”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/opinion/addiction-risk-score-avertd-narxcare.html

2024-04-18 01:46:29

“BYD has achieved unparalleled control over its production cycle—according to it, only the tires and windows are entirely outsourced. In the manufacturing of the hatchback Sedan Seal, BYD produces internally a whopping three-quarters of all components—compared to just one-third for a comparable Volkswagen electric car, giving it a 35% cost lead.
BYD is also increasingly active in the “downstream” part of the car industry, namely sales & service.”
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/byd/

2024-04-13 00:22:53

“While the patterns in short-term rates are noisy, if you look at long-term real rates (that is, nominal rates adjusted for inflation) there is a clear and striking trend. These have been steadily sinking over the centuries. They calculate this decline equates to almost 2 basis points a year, on average, since 131”
https://www.ft.com/content/ffb545b7-86b6-4c91-ad9b-ce75b305cadd

2024-04-08 01:20:37

“In Genova, no new taxi licences have been issued by the city council since 1980. In Livorno, none have been granted since 1977, and in Napoli, despite its explosion in tourism, taxi licences haven’t increased since 1997. Rome hasn’t increased its taxi numbers for nearly 20 years.
It’s hard to ignore the problem. At peak times outside every major railway station, there’s a 50-metre or so queue of people waiting in vain for a lift.”
https://unherd.com/2024/04/taxi-drivers-are-corrupting-italy/

2024-04-06 13:01:08

“Even with its new billions in funding, the IRS will have to navigate federal pay rules that limit how much government officials can earn.
“There are literally less than 20 or 25 people out there that most of us think of in terms of, ‘Well this person is really a master in partnership tax,’”
https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2024/04/how-investment-firms-shield-the-ultra-wealthy-from-the-irs/

2024-04-05 02:01:00

“Many open-source software projects are governed via hierarchy; developers suggest changes to a program’s code, then more experienced developers have to review & approve the changes.
The attacker…spent several years slowly gaining the trust of other xz Utils developers and getting more control over the project, eventually becoming a maintainer, and finally inserting the code with the hidden backdoor earlier this year.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cyberattack-linux.html

2024-04-04 13:49:59

“Ghana and Ivory Coast still dominate global cocoa production, but it has not made their economies rich. Prior to a recent surge in cocoa prices, for decades the raw commodity was exported for dismally low prices. The real money is made further down the chain. The Fairtrade Foundation, an NGO, estimates that cocoa farmers receive around 6 per cent of the final value of a chocolate bar.”
https://www.ft.com/content/99958fff-8f69-42ca-b90b-5e2e2677845b

2024-04-03 00:23:09

“Farley’s business model rests on the sheer bulk of his output. And so does his artistic model. Whatever the dubious value of any individual song in the Farley universe, it’s as part of the enormous body of the whole, the magnum opus, that it gains power. An AI could conceivably produce 24,000 songs, Farley’s entire oeuvre, in about a day, a fact that gives his defiantly human, even artisanal, labor a kind of lonely Sisyphean dignity.”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/captcha-culture

2024-04-01 21:18:28

Sam Harnett’s 2020 “Words Matter: How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies Into Existence” remains “one of the best accounts of how swaths of the media enthusiastically generated on-demand propaganda for the tech industry, directly setting the stage for these firms to exploit, codify, and expand legal loopholes that largely exempted them from regulation as they raided their users for data and generated billions in revenue.”
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso

2024-03-29 21:47:01

“In a 1944 study, 2 psychologists had participants watch a simple animation of two triangles and a circle moving around one another. They then asked some viewers what kind of “person” each of the shapes was. People described the shapes using words like “aggressive,” “quarrelsome,” “valiant,” “defiant,” “timid,” and “meek,” even though they knew that they’d been watching lifeless lines on a screen.”
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/the-lifelike-illusions-of-ai

2024-03-28 13:52:26

“Luckey became obsessed with one of the character’s lines: “You said tech has limits. Wrong.” (As Luckey puts it, Seto Kaiba then proceeds to “kick everyone’s ass using his incredible technology”.) “Sometimes I wonder, how much free will do I actually have over my life?” Luckey tells me, after animatedly recounting this scene. “Is it possible that I actually had no choice at any point but to pursue VR and weapons development?””
https://www.ft.com/content/ce6f96f8-6ab8-4089-b7db-f99db22c2071

2024-03-28 13:04:37

“Tocqueville’s independent American yeomanry, bound only by civic ties and market transactions, had morphed into a nation of technicians and salarymen whose lives were slotted into the workings of a vast “societal machine” [社会尤其]. Wang sees this social state as the child of science and technology”
https://scholars-stage.org/american-nightmares-wang-huning-and-alexis-de-tocqueville-dark-visions-of-the-future/

2024-03-27 00:15:53

“It was classic for Putin to discount the warnings,” said Fiona Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council. “The security services don’t have the bandwidth. They never have because they’re so focused on internal repression, and so focused on Kyiv, and they want everything to fit that narrative.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/europe/russia-terror-attack-ukraine.html

2024-03-25 14:17:43

“How do we know that the rise of smartphones has caused poor mental health among young people, as opposed to just being correlated with it?
Because, in addition to the correlational evidence, which is very consistent, there are also longitudinal studies that allow us to infer causality.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/24/the-anxious-generation-qa-00147880

2024-03-23 23:07:49

He “met “a senior person at a well-known A.I. startup” whose p(doom) was fifty per cent. If you truly believe that A.I. has a coin-toss probability of killing you and everyone you love, Nielsen asked, then how can you continue to build it? The person’s response was “In the meantime, I get to have a nice house and car.””
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/among-the-ai-doomsayers

2024-03-22 20:26:25

“The perfect postapocalyptic vehicle isn't a big ugly truck. It's a bicycle — light, reliable, easy to fix and scavenge parts for, able to move cargo, doesn't need any power except you and calories. And the thing that will actually get us through an apocalypse — or, preferably, prevent one — isn't driving a steel-plated War Rig. It's working together.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-cybertruck-apocalypse-inequality-2023-12

2024-03-20 01:32:46

“A study from Boston Consulting Group found that consultants that "solved business problems with OpenAI's GPT-4" performed 23% worse than those who didn't use it, even when the consultant was warned about the limitations of generative AI and the risk of hallucinations.”
https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/

2024-03-16 23:04:11

AI’s sonic exhaust: “As he mills about his home, as he works, and eats, and bathes, it is there, a monotonal drone, a clatter unceasing, a constant, undesired companion to his life. It festers in his mind, clawing at his thoughts, probing his sanity, poisoning him with a constant spell of dread and anxiety. He cannot leave; he cannot escape. He is there, with it, a prisoner to its monotone.”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/

2024-03-15 17:26:47

Fashion as conspicuous waste:
Garfinkel “distilled the spiraling epistemological vertigo around pants into an absurdist fashion koan. “Whatever style pants look like [expletive] to you are the pants you’re supposed to wear,” he wrote, “and as soon as they start to look normal to you, those are not the right pants anymore. You should always be wearing pants you think look stupid.””
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/magazine/big-pants-style.html

2024-03-15 14:35:09

“While it is easy to see the jobs that will be disrupted by AI, it is hard to imagine those that will be created. About 60 per cent of the job categories in the late 2010s did not exist in 1940 — in medicine, software, entertainment and solar power, for example. “Barring a massive change in immigration policy, the US and other rich countries will run out of workers before we run out of jobs”
https://www.ft.com/content/f9b964bd-0edc-4dfd-ad30-88b011cd4fde

2024-03-15 14:24:18

“Many regulated utilities also have financial incentives to build new gas plants, since they can recover their costs to build plants, wires and other equipment from ratepayers and pocket an additional percentage as profit. As a result, critics say, utilities often overlook, or even block, ways to make existing power systems more efficient or to integrate more renewable energy into the grid.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/13/climate/electric-power-climate-change.html

2024-03-14 20:37:29

“As Donald Trump reverses his position on potentially banning TikTok ahead of an expected House vote this week on legislation that could lead to it being blocked in the U.S., the former president has been rebuilding his relationship with a GOP megadonor who reportedly has a major financial stake in the popular social media platform.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-the-tiktok-ban-is-scrambling-washington.html

2024-03-11 23:38:10

“Twitter’s decline in traffic, app downloads, usage, and civility is troubling, and most data-savvy prognosticators expect Meta’s Threads to overtake them within a few years.”
https://sparktoro.com/blog/who-sends-traffic-on-the-web-and-how-much-new-research-from-datos-sparktoro/

2024-03-10 01:14:58

“A driver has about one minute to get out of a car sinking into water. When vehicles were made with more manual mechanics, a driver could crank down the window to get out, though it would still require a clarity of mind often elusive in an emergency. In newer cars, like the Tesla Model X vehicle, the driver might have seconds to push the button to roll the window down before the water level rises too high”
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/angela-chao-death-texas-tesla-safety-c435daa0

2024-03-09 20:34:49

“The United States produces fewer engineers than Russia does, not just per capita but in absolute numbers. It is experiencing an “internal brain drain,” as its young people drift from demanding, high-skill, high-value-added occupations to…finance and various occupations that merely transfer value around the economy and in some cases may even destroy it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-decline-west.html

2024-03-04 14:22:01

“Many of us have had to abandon handling important tasks online because they can’t get resolved. This could be due to software algorithms not being programmed to handle our contextual needs. Or, it could be that these companies are not aware that we have needs outside of what their designers projected onto the personas they use in place of doing enough qualitative research with real people”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90976171/over-automation-is-breaking-the-web

2024-03-03 13:26:42

In December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/02/can-ai-chatbot-therapists-do-better-than-the-real-thing

2024-03-03 01:16:51

“Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump. Google search? They often lead with fake AI-generated images amid the real things. Post on Twitter? Get replies from bots selling porn. But that’s just the obvious stuff. Look closely at the replies to any trending tweet and you’ll find dozens of AI-written summaries in response.”
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/here-lies-the-internet-murdered-by

2024-03-01 23:19:17

“These companies must cross a bridge from one business model to another: They must use their robust truck and S.U.V. earnings to subsidize their growing electric vehicle business and learn how to make E.V.s profitably. If they can make it across this bridge quickly, they will survive. But if their S.U.V. profits crumble before their E.V. business is ready, they will fall into the chasm and perish.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/opinion/gm-ford-electric-vehicles.html

2024-03-01 22:47:10

“Rather than debate the status of generative model’s outputs, perhaps more attention could be paid to the status of prompting: what does it mean to “prompt” when the prompts are recast in opaque ways that suit the company’s ends. This is a variation on the question of what it means to query a search engine when it interprets the query in obscure and self-serving ways.”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/practico-inertia

2024-02-26 23:03:30

“The laws in question are bad, and if upheld, will have bad consequences. But a broad constitutional ruling against them—a ruling that holds that the government cannot prohibit dominant platforms from unfairly discriminating against certain users—would be even worse.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/social-media-netchoice-texas-supreme-court/677494/

2024-02-25 16:13:22

“A lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it,” the LLM said.
If that sentence sounds suspiciously familiar, you may remember hearing it in 2016: “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”
It came from the mouth of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump”
https://www.salon.com/2024/02/17/does-ai-want-to-nuke-us-we-dont-know--and-that-could-be-more/

2024-02-23 22:41:05

“Visual coherence is OpenAI’s only apparent criterion for “fidelity”; it simulates a world where causal relations are fully reduced to that coherence — but coherent for whom? Who is looking and why? Even if we accept …the reduction of experience to a 2-D video simulation on demand, we still can’t get around how it all still requires subjectivity. Instead we get to see the world through the meager stunted perspective afforded by a company”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/a-photo-of-a-hamburger

2024-02-23 14:15:35

“Schools remain unprotected against marketing rhetoric from edtech companies, and even big tech companies, who promise significant benefits for schools without supplying evidence that their product ‘works’ in the claimed ways. It may just exacerbate the worst existing aspects of schooling.”
https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2024/02/22/ai-in-education-is-a-public-problem/

2024-02-23 12:33:12

“Recently, Électricité de France, the French state utility that is constructing the nuclear plant, warned of yet more delays. The start date, which two years ago was scheduled for 2027, has been pushed to the end of this decade, or perhaps 2031.
The additional time will add billions more to a final bill that could reach as much as 47.9 billion pounds, EDF said. In 2016, the price tag was pegged at £18 billion.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/business/uk-nuclear-power.html

2024-02-23 00:00:55

“His place in the nation’s culture is so revered that, traditionally, people hoping to address him in one of his palaces approach by crawling.
But the king presides over a country where youth unemployment is a suffocating 58%…Critics said he showed up at a traditional ceremony wearing a watch that sells for 13 times the annual income of most of his subjects.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/world/africa/king-mswati-eswatini-africa-youth.html

2024-02-20 22:36:02

“The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.
The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.
It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined.”
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024

2024-02-20 20:51:25

“For all the talk about who spends the most on defence by percentage of gross domestic product, Russia currently makes more than twice the amount of artillery shells each month than Europe and the US combined.
Defence spending and defence readiness are two different things. For example, Germany spends considerably more than France on defence each year, with little to show for it.”
https://www.ft.com/content/3c87ef13-122f-4e78-a7af-54c75c30a91d

2024-02-18 18:51:13

“8,000 investors have been given until 5 March to accept a sliding scale repayment plan that would return 80% of capital to the smallest investors, while those who had invested more than 10m yuan would get back 40%. Investors are furious.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/18/anger-grows-at-china-struggling-shadow-banks

2024-02-18 13:10:53

“All of this Sora content is obviously going to flood social media channels, making it harder for everyday people to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake, and making the internet, in general, a whole lot more annoying. I don’t think it requires a global panel of experts to figure that out.”
https://gizmodo.com/openais-sora-is-a-giant-f-ck-you-to-reality-1851261587

2024-02-16 18:02:29

“Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen told Jo Sales that the dating app's swiping feature was partially inspired by a famous experiment by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. In it, Skinner "turned pigeons into gamblers" by giving them food delivered at random intervals. But the pigeons believed their pecking prompted the food to appear, causing the birds to ceaselessly hammer away at their trays.”
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/14/1231513991/tinder-hinge-match-group-lawsuit

2024-02-16 14:52:13

“In a low-turnout election, an outsized share of votes are cast by the highly politically engaged — typically well-educated, well-off people. More peripheral voters — typically on lower incomes — tend to sit these out. And these different groups have different politics, meaning high-turnout and low-turnout elections can produce different results.”
https://www.ft.com/content/b3738a2e-7094-4c92-93cc-f2fa340375be
But Biden won voters making under $50K in 2020.

2024-02-16 14:48:41

More social media effects: Many “feel insecure and inadequate compared to what they see on social media. They do this to boost their looks.”
https://www.ft.com/content/220b23f5-408c-4822-ba67-4e337f53a50c

2024-02-11 19:19:55

“Language can be at once descriptive and value-loaded in the case of what philosophers have come to call thick ethical concepts. Think of words such as ‘friendly’, ‘mean’, ‘aggressive’, ‘rude’, ‘impatient’, ‘brutal’ and so on, and notice how these terms evaluate behaviour positively or negatively at the same time as they describe it. They contrast with thin ethical concepts such as ‘right’ and ‘should’ and ‘ought’.”
https://aeon.co/essays/bernard-williams-moral-relativism-and-the-culture-wars

2024-02-10 13:12:44

“Sorting algorithms, as John Cheney-Lippold’s We Are Data argues at length, instantiate identity as fluid and provisional, probabilistic; coining spurious terms and labels mirrors that provisionality. They aren’t meant to be describing essences. They aren’t sorting people and things once and for all but generating a category on the fly whose situational usefulness can then be tested and measured.”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/infinite-concretude

2024-02-05 15:23:09

“The politically popular decisions to rely on developer levies rather then setting higher education taxes, and to invest more in highways to far-flung new suburbs than in mass transit in older ones, “encouraged us to cycle through a series of disposable communities with shelf lives just long enough to extract a little more opportunity before we moved out [and] stuck someone else with the bill,” Herold writes.
https://www.ft.com/content/b96e6142-0174-45dd-9017-3a653a1ab251

2024-02-05 13:14:46

“An Architectural Digest article on AI design tools describes them as offering a fresh perspective that can “inspire architects” to think “outside the box.” But though A.I. prompts are seemingly endless, the results are often eerily banal. Much of the A.I. décor that surfaces on Instagram features the same uncanny images: liquid throw blankets, accidentally surreal wall art, hearths lit with inert flames.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/arts/design/artificial-intelligence-fantasy-home.html

2024-02-05 02:03:15

They “assume fairness can be mathematically formalized, that we collect gender labels on every applicant, & we only care about a single axis of discrimination. The validity of such assumptions has been challenged, raising concerns over technical interventions in AI systems as a panacea.
Despite this criticism, the idea of tackling fairness through mathematical formalism remains popular.”
https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2024/2/279536-inherent-limitations-of-ai-fairness/fulltext
via Instapaper