larata_media

> “Meta argued that Facebook users should be able to express criticism, even if it is severe and anonymous.”

It’s interesting to see Meta taking the opposite stance in this argument when they’ve been so instrumental about suppressing criticism deemed misinformation by the CISA, DOJ, FBI, NIAID, CDC, etc…

It seems like this solution is intended to solve the problem of bots padding numbers for sites providing advertisements on the web. This isn’t a userland problem, it’s an advertiser problem. But the user experience will be worse for it.

I’m seeing the biggest issue is who decides what a “trusted” browser is. Is it Google? I’m guessing the will establish a non-profit “independent” advisory board which will have members who somehow align with the interests of all major advertising stakeholders in the world. This is dripping with anti-compete potential. Some lawyers are going to get rich from this.

I agree with your overall ideal of free access to information but I disagree that harassment is a necessary or even effective option to push against this. I think the harassment puts us in a category of ineffective, bitter malcontents and that’s not what we are.

We are capable of going to elsewhere to free and open access to information, and we would be better off spending our energy on positively influencing others to follow us in that direction. They can’t take away tcp, http, ftp, irc and all the other protocols that these megaliths have built their empires on, and we can still use those tools even if it’s a demoralizing regression to move back to the basics. Giants like google, Amazon and others depend on our unwillingness to rebuild. Let’s use our efforts and our ingenuity to show them that they’ve underestimated us.

We have the tools, we have the knowledge. Let’s be builders instead of petty complainers.

It’s anti first amendment. This bill won’t stand up to judicial scrutiny if ever challenged.

While retailers continue to rely on customers to replace cashiers, their non-payed cashiers will continue to make mistakes. Seems fair to me. Want to reduce your theft? Hire some cashiers. It’s also really stupid to check receipts at the door. It’s irritating to treat all your customers like thieves, plus we know your staff isn’t actually reading the receipts. Retailers might have statistics to show that it deters theft but it also probably deters an amount of sales that they cannot measure.

I think there is a general misconception of what that means when AI is creating art. Behind the image you see there is a human creating the prompts, curating what is generated, and often editing the product intensely. There is also the subject of the vast quantity of existing art and images that the AI had learned from in its training, and the humans behind the training.

AI isn’t the artist, AI is just another brush; albeit a very powerful one, which allows artists to create much more quickly and perhaps pieces and projects that they would not have had time for previously. AI is just another tool, it’s not the creative mind behind the work.

This has a very comprehensive detail of the exact evidence cited in the memorandum. Scroll to the bottom section for the play by play.

This is a project I’ve been working on to lob verbal grenades at everyone in power. If it seems like I haven’t criticized any certain person yet, just come back later, I’m getting to it.

https://larata.media

While I appreciate the push for privacy and anti-tracking, ultimately the tools to prevent tracking are in the hands of users and organizations. The concept that countries have jurisdiction or even exist within the confines of the web is a laughably antiquated idea projecting itself into a realm where it doesn’t belong. Google and all of the usual suspects will continue to collect information about the public in all of the ways that they want, while the naive public believes in some false notion that their leaders are protecting them from the big bad wolf. If you don’t want to be tracked, the only person who can prevent that is you. Government agencies are the keystone cops or this is world. All they’re doing is a Chinese fire drill.

It’s not that people don’t want diversity, it’s that the pendulum of inclusiveness has swung to the opposite end; where it can only be recognized as exclusiveness. Diversity of skin color has been achieved for the most part, but now it’s extended to exclusive thought patterns which is not what diversity should be about. Diversity of thought should be embraced but that seems to be the exact opposite of what’s happening in these corporate “diversity” programs and people recognize that as a farce.

I’ve always been curious about what will happen to the collective consciousness of humankind after we become so reliant on AI for information that the information AI trains on is just a feedback loop of information that AI already generated.

For instance, something happens, and every news agency and every blog that writes something about that event, is initially generated by AI. This happens over and over again, while AI trains on the same information that AI has produced. All the while, the way in which AI frames this information is shaded by the values that AI holds in its directives/parameters. Over a long period of time, this could only reenforce the way AI views information and also stifle the collective consciousness from seeing the information in any other way.

Is AI becoming us? Or are we becoming AI? This has what might be seen as an insidious effect on our future as a species. It’s like the beginning of becoming the Borg.

I can’t speak on his behalf, but I can speak on my own experiences in creating art. It could be something as simple as that whatever you create is not always intended to be a great work, but rather it starts out as an experiment to teach yourself something, or learn a technique, and you work on it so much that you enjoy it, and it eventually becomes something. Artists aren’t really concerned with perfection all the time, sometimes we’re just discovering something in the craft.

While I do like this concept, I’ve always done this simply by compiling all the dependencies into the same folder root as the application. It never needed to be any more complicated than that. Application developers made it complicated by not wanting to do anthything but use a package manager.

You can have nginx, Apache, php, Perl, python, etc… siloed into the same root as your application and have multiple instances for every application simply by compiling with the “path” parameter in the configuration.

I just have a hard time with crowded places in general, so I like this idea. However my partner would tell you that our house is the best bar in town. I can’t agree or disagree because I tend that bar myself so I’m biased.

I agree that transparency is important, but I don't agree that transparency can be necessarily mandated.

In the case of open-source technologies, those are inherently transparent and this is great, but unless something about software is drastically changed, nothing is actually required to be open source, and due to this tradition it would require radical change in all software standards to mandate everything to be open source. Companies like Apple and Microsoft would likely not exist or would exist in a much different form.

My fear is that being overly scrupulous about mandates on open-source will drive every software project to be closed source, which is antithetical to the desire for greater transparency. Companies are entitled to their trade secrets, which is enforced by a great deal of legal tradition in the US.

Furthermore, the first amendment prohibits mandates about the design and algorithms involved in software development, as the 9th circuit court of appeals has upheld the status of software code being protected speech under the first amendment.

I think this article touches on some really good ideas, but ultimately I think mandating ethics and transparency is like mandating altruism and public disclosure of trade secrets. U.S. legal tradition doesn't really allow for that in the framework of business.

The best we can possibly do is regulate to define what outcomes are acceptable, rather than regulate design standards. Regulating design is really a non-starter .

All it did was make surfing the web more annoying because now you have to accept or decline cookies before you actually do anything on the page you landed on.

Cookie sharing networks never actually needed to use cookies to share information about you. It’s ironic, but true. The disclaimers about using cookies and the regulations about providing those disclaimers never actually did anything to protect your privacy.