Category: Society
-
You Don’t Need to Know the Name of Ohtani’s Dog. Or: Reporters Aren’t Normal, and That is Generally Okay
ESPN’s daily podcast on Friday devoted itself to the then unfinished pursuit of Shohei Ohtani (he has subsequently signed with the Dodgers for 700 million dollars. For perspective, his annual salary is more than the annual salary of this year’s Minnesota Wild. If you want to be filthy rich, play baseball at the highest level.)…
-
RTBs, Stalking, and the Value of Early Regulation
A new paper shows how RTBs (Real Time Bidding) providers enable anyone to track anyone and anyone to get sensitive information about people’s medical history, opinions, and locations. The emphasis of the paper is on the national security implications, but it also demonstrates that waiting on regulation to advance innovation is a fools game. Today,…
-
It’s Monday. Let’s Save Ourselves from the Business of Tech
A series of proposals that will make Marc Andreesen furious and ensure I am never promoted by Substack. But the technology industry is massively broken, socializing the costs of its work while privatizing the benefits in fewer and fewer hands. Technology is only beneficial to the extent that it improves the lives of the people…
-
Meatballs, Worms, NASA, Joy and the Public Sphere
I unabashedly love this story about designers celebrating the return of the “worm” logo at NASA. It is a silly little story about a meaningless design change but the people in it are just so happy their favorite logo is making a comeback. They are so deep into their design nerdery and I just love…
-
Fine Are Just a Cost: C Suite Executives Need to Start Going to Jail
Recently un-redacted documents show that states claim to have evidence that Meta, Facebook’s and Instagram’s parent company, knew that children under the age of 13 were using the system, took no steps to prevent children from gaining access to Facebook, profited off of collecting their data without parental consent, and recieved over a million reports…
-
In Praise of Nurses
A short one today. My wife has had four surgeries in the last three years (including yesterday), three of them lifesaving (one more and she gets the next one free), and my son one and a long stay in the hospital for an emergency infection. At each and every one of them, it was the…
-
Hackers and Restorative Justice
Wired, surprisingly, has a very interesting story about three hackers who created a botnet tool that eventually crashed significant parts of the internet. It raises very interesting questions about how kids — because these hackers were kids when they started — fall into these kinds of self-sabotaging traps and how justice is applied. Unsurprisingly, because…
-
The Sexism of AI and STEM Expectations
In an oddly telling article, the BBC reports that significantly fewer woman than men report using AI tools like ChatGPT. I say the article is oddly telling because it seems to be reinforcing sexist stereotypes while trying to report on how cultural expectations might cause women to be more reluctant to be caught using AI.…
-
Why Has Zuckerberg Not Been Charged With Human Rights Crimes?
I assure you, the title is not a provocation. It is a legitimate inquiry based on the latest report from Amnesty International on their actions in Ethiopia. Essentially, Meta manipulated their algorithms to maximize engagement, which meant, in the words of Amnesty International, Facebook “… supercharged the spread of harmful rhetoric targeting the Tigrayan community,…
-
Capitalism Cannot Save the Internet
There is a very good article in the MIT Technology Review that discuss how to fix the internet. The theme is a bit of a misnomer, as the “fixing” portion of the article is both wrong and very short. But the piece does do a good job of highlighting the internet’s original sin: personalized advertising.…