Month: May 2023
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WGA Strike and Efficiently Burning Our Economic Future
G.R.R. Martin may need to get his books done, but he has an important point about the how the studios are going to ruin the future of television: The juniors may have worked for as long as half a year on the show. All of it in a room, with other writers. But they won’t…
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OpenAI Acts As If They Are Thieves
The European Union is working on regulations that would regulate certain AI systems. These regulations would require transparency regarding the system’s design and information about any copyrighted data used in training their systems. The leadership of OpenAI’s immediate response was to claim that they would have to stop operating in Europe. They backed away from…
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Generative AI Won’t Cure Your Cold
One of the claims for generative AI tools like ChatGPT is that they could provide things like legal, medical or therapeutic services for those people who either cannot afford those service or who do not have access to them because of language, proximity, or other barriers. On its face, this sounds like a reasonable potential…
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Technology is Not Going to Save Us
I probably owe Andy Boenau a bit of an apology. I got a bit pedantic and grumpy with him in the comments of this post, where he takes to task people who are skeptical of technology and urban planning. Andy describes LLMs basically correctly but then goes on to ascribe to them uses that they…
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Book Bans, Parental Rights, and the Heckler’s Veto
Unsurprisingly, the large majority of book challenges in this country were filed by eleven people. Eleven people have tried in an organized fashion to remove reference to LGBTQ people and people of color from American schools and libraries (42% of the challenges were for books that referenced LGBTQ people and 28% were for books that…
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Ireland Targets Facebook’s Targeted Advertising and the Political Question of Privacy and Freedom on the Internet
Ireland has punished Facebook for ignoring its data privacy laws: Meta (META.O) was hit with a record 1.2 billion euro ($1.3 billion) fine by its lead European Union privacy regulator over its handling of user information and given five months to stop transferring users’ data to the United States. The fine, imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner…
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Can Democracy Survive Meritocracy?
I am a lucky person. I do not mean I am lucky in the general “look at how well I am doing, how happy I am” sense that people usually use the term, though that could certainly apply to me as well. I am doing well, and I am pretty happy, the tenor of these…
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Nice is Nice: A Review of Legends and Lattes
I wonder if Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree would have taken off quite like it did if it had been published outside of the pandemic. This is not to say that the book is bad, far from it. But it is very much of a time, the Ted Lasso of literature. And while I…
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America Is Broken: No Accountability for Telcom Corps
As a better writer than me once said, a fine is a fee: You might recall how when U.S. telecom giants lobbied the Trump FCC to kill net neutrality, they hired a bunch of PR firms to flood the FCC with fake comments from a bunch of fake and dead people. The goal: create the illusion…
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Sunday Good Reads
Some links to things I liked this week: Realism and Unreality in Japanese Storytelling: An interesting look at how Japanese story telling mixes realism and unreality in a way Western traditions do not. A Single Mom’s Manifesto for Mother’s Day – by lyz (substack.com) A powerful essay about single mothers and the radicalism that used…