Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org)

@murph https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/114036484356103379

Mozilla's blog post about new leadership perfectly illustrates a core issue (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/):
The new members/roles of the board are all introduced with the big tech companies they come from (Twitter, Google, Walmart, Uber etc.)

And sure that comes with a lot of experience running a company and organization, I am not saying that those people don't have skills. But given their resume they also have immense paychecks. And there is very little information about why they should steer one of the most influential organizations in the free software space.

That's the issue. Further corporate logic instead of thinking fresh about what role an organization such as Mozilla could and should play.

So much this comment on LWN:

"While we still mention Firefox in this press release because it's the only thing we do that anyone actually wants us to do, we will also do a thing nobody wants, a thing nobody wants, and ask for money."

https://lwn.net/Articles/1010925/

"Because #AI the 4 day work week can come true".

This is bullshit. Recent studies show that we could feed and house and take care of literally _everybody_'s needs with everyone just working 30% of what we consider "full time" today. We literally could all work less than 2 days every week and be fine. Capitalism just doesn't allow for that conceptually. Don't fall for that bogus argument.

The reason OpenAI is starting to release "How to use ChatGPT in schools" material is not because they care about the damage they do. It's about pretending their tool can be responsibly used in schools to get access to large, public subscriber bases.

Silicon Valley hates government regulation and paying taxes. But government contracts? It _loves_ them.

Brian Merchant summarizes his reasoning for why the Generative AI hype is now beginning to implode.

"One persisting headache will be generative AI being wielded as job automation technology. It’s going to remain as a threat to artists and creatives because it really can cheaply pump out derivative images and text. The tech companies may lean further into enterprise use cases, insisting it can generate efficiencies if employees are properly trained to use it, for a while yet. It will be used to flood social media with dumb and occasionally disorienting images. And the AI companies may increasingly lean on winning military and government contracts, where a lack of results can be better obfuscated or at least play out over a longer period. So for all those concerned with the deleterious impacts of generative AI, we’re definitely not out of the woods yet."

(Original title: The great degeneration: Is this the beginning of the end of the AI boom?)

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-great-degeneration-is-this-the

"AI will not democratize creativity, it will let corporations squeeze creative labor, capitalize on the works that creatives have already made, and send any profits upstream, to Silicon Valley tech companies where power and influence will concentrate in an ever-smaller number of hands. The artists, of course, get 0 opportunities for meaningful consent or input into any of the above events. Please tell me with a straight face how this can be described as a democratic process. "

(Original title: AI is not "democratizing creativity." It's doing the opposite)

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-not-democratizing-creativity

(And if you still follow Aral Balkan, you probably don't want to follow me. Cause if you are OK with his antisemitism and Holocaust relativism I wonder where our common base could ever be)

Balkan trivialises the industrial eradication of Jews. That's relativising the Holocaust and Antisemitic.

That is quite a difference to criticism of the actions of the Israel government.

Data is never "raw" or "unprocessed" or "neutral" or "objective". The decision to record a thing (and not others), the structures and data formats it's pressed into, the granularity and frequency of collection are already a curation and interpretation of the world.

A data set with unclear collectors, without a declaration of the original purpose and goals is basically unusable responsibly.

Ok, Mastodon question: Can I (for a user that authenticated via OAuth with their mastodon instance) find out through a defined API endpoint if that person is one of the admins of that particular instance?

// cc @Gargron

From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

The study, which was undertaken by psychology researchers at the University of Hagen, Germany, explored the link between 'mobility behaviour' – specifically whether people use their car or a bike – and four measures of 'common good': political participation, social participation, neighbourhood solidarity, and neighbourly helpfulness.
[...]
"Cycling", the authors write, "was the only variable that was a significant positive predictor for all four facets of orientation towards the common good after controlling for possibly confounding variables (homeownership, personal income, education, sex)."
(Title: New study suggests cycling gives us an 'orientation towards the common good') https://www.globalcyclingnetwork.com/general/news/new-study-suggests-cycling-gives-us-an-orientation-towards-the-common-good

Today in "LLMs can't do even simple reasoning":

Prompt: Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?

See a whole bunch of LLMs fail: https://benchmarks.llmonitor.com/sally

Really disappointing to see CreativeCommons argue that "generative AI" on the basis of the appropriation of cultural works often against their creators' wishes is somehow like remixing and in the "public interest".
https://creativecommons.org/2023/02/06/better-sharing-for-generative-ai/

The spam I get is now mostly back to being for viagra, no longer crypto.
Nature is healing.

I feel like a lot of the hype for "machines are conscious now" even by smart people is the wish to be part of something big that's not just the climate catastrophe and crumbling infrastructures. It's a weird kind of futurism.