Reddit moderators thought they were caretakers of a community and Spez reminded them they are overseers of a content farm for advertising revenue.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/29/23778997/reddit-remove-mods-private-communities-unless-reopen

Ten years ago, in 2013, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility was dissolved after decades of important work because they couldn't find enough people to sustain it.

A sign of the times that we're now re-inventing institutions that computer science was unable/unwilling to sustain during one of its most lucrative periods.

https://www.publicsphereproject.org/content/cpsr-dissolution-and-gary-chapman-winner-cpsrs-norbert-wiener-award

Lots of well deserved remembrances of Ellsberg’s heroism today. I’ll just post my favorite passage from his incredible memoir, Secrets. He’s telling Henry Kissinger (who as many have noted is somehow still alive) what access to truly secret information can do to a person’s mind.

@aeva @mcc tiny but affluent. are there games that could get a $1K price point from a few thousand people or companies initially? and of course the hope is that hardware prices come down over time so the market grows.

@ubiquity75 Well, actually, what you're not understanding is ... (1/2048)

"I'm working on an updated version of "Mastodon, a partial history". Is it okay I screenshot and link to this?

One of the decisive moments in my understanding of #LLMs and their limitations was when, last autumn, @emilymbender walked me through her Thai Library thought experiment.

She's now written it up as a Medium post, and you can read it here. The value comes from really pondering the question she poses, so take the time to think about it. What would YOU do in the situation she outlines?

https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-the-national-library-of-thailand-f2bf761a8a83

@elipariser @ubiquity75 I'm sorry to report that while we used to have a huge lead in Edible Arrangement technology but after years of underinvestment, there's now an Edible Arrangement Gap

@Tbeauchamp ShotSpotter's own numbers show they change the results 10% of the time was important new information ... they can try to spin it but it clearly highlights that their "97% accuracy" is a lie even with their own numbers. Before this, there wasn't any info about the frequency. Agreed though it's not surprising!

#StopShotspotter @ben

@BlackAzizAnansi yep. And I can see from the other responses I'm not the only one!

Wow. RStudio (recently rebranded as Posit) is partnering with Palantir. Yes, the same Palantir with ties to Cambridge Analytica. The same Palantir that partners with and actively supports ICE and other oppressive surveillance.

This is really not ok ethically, and can only mean a bad direction functionally for the company's software going forward. I never use RStudio for research myself, but it looks like I'll stop using it in teaching.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/palantir-posit-partner-integrate-rstudio-115900656.html

#rstudio #palantir #posit #ice

I might sound like a broken record, but the newest episode of Tech Won't Save Us on AI hype with @parismarx and AI expert and former Google Ethical AI co-lead @timnitGebru is, again, incredibly enlightening. Most of the silicon valley AI vanity projects seem to be, at the moment, little more than unregulated theft and VC/M&A marketing material when they could be used for good instead of profit. Required listening, especially for tech journos. https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/151_dont_fall_for_the_ai_hype_w_timnit_gebru

@asb have you seen @nolan's 2018 post on moderation? It's still relevant! https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/

Greetings to the fediverse!

Washington Privacy Organizers is a resource for privacy advocates, activists, and organizers here in "the other Washington". The state legislature is currently working on some exciting privacy bills. Over the next few months there's also likely to be activity in cities, counties, and Congress.

We'll use this account to share updates, action items, and Washington-specific privacy-related news. For more general privacy news, check @nexusofprivacy

#introduction

Digital Driver's License bill in Washington state -- TAKE ACTION to defend #privacy

SB 5105 requires Washington's Department of Licensing (DOL) to put together an implmentation plan for digital driver's licenses by the end of the year, and deploy the system by September 2024.

This timeframe is far too aggressive. As ACLU's What Digital Driver’s Licenses Could Mean for Privacy, Equity, and Freedom highlights, these systems have major risks -- and initial deployments of digital's drivers licenses in other states have caused major problems for domestic violence survivors, immigrants, and other groups who often bear the brunt of surveillance. And the recent fiasco in California, where a hacker was able to track GPS locations of all digital license plates, shows what can go wrong when systems are implemented without enough attention to security and privacy.

SB 5105 has a hearing on Monday afternoon. If you're a Washington resident, signing in "CON" is an easy way to let your legislators know you oppose this rushed implementation of a potentially-harmful technology.

1 Click here

2 From the drop down menu choose Con

3 Fill out the rest of the form and click on Submit registration

The deadline is 3:00 pm on Monday, January 23. Here's SB 5105's page on the legislature's site, which has link to the text and the video for the hearing.

#waleg

@anildash Ah yes, the Journal of Emacs and VI Studies

@czimm_economist thanks very much, that's great info!

Updated https://find.sciences.social has two new lists.

Communication and Media Studies managed by @josh https://find.sciences.social/search?field=communication-and-media-studies

Economics managed by @czimm_economist https://find.sciences.social/search?field=economics based on the RePec list of economists on Mastodon https://ideas.repec.org/i/emastodon.html

Excited for the publications of our paper (w/ Kaitlyn Zhou and Emma Spiro): Spotlight Tweets: A Lens for Exploring Attention Dynamics within Online Sensemaking during Crisis Events. The paper, which looks at sensemaking during the 2018 Hawaii missile crisis, makes several contributions, including: presenting the concept of “spotlighting” and introducing our cumulative graph technique, which reveals how audience exposure affects the propagation of social media posts.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3577213

@czimm_economist @markigra @josh The lists are certainly useful at helping people discover users they wouldn't otherwise. The lists certainly not the only factor reinforcing white dominance (and other biases) here -- and they could counter it. Which is why I was wondering i anybody's looking at the demographics!

@czimm_economist @markigra @josh It depends on the demographics of the lists (which in turn depends both on the demographics of the population here and any potential skews introduced by who knows about and nominates themselves to be indexed).

For example, if there are almost no Black people on a list, then it's going to reinforce white dominance.