#USA#Palestine#Gaza#Nakba#InternationalLaw#Censorship: "Now, eight months into Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, Eghbariah’s work has once again been stifled — this time by the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors, a group of law school professors and prominent alumni that oversee the students running the review.
Eghbariah’s paper for the Columbia Law Review, or CLR, was published on its website in the early hours of Monday morning. The journal’s board of directors responded by pulling the entire website offline. The homepage on Monday morning read “Website under maintenance.”
According to Eghbariah, he worked with editors at the Columbia Law Review for over five months on the 100-plus-page text.
“The attempts to silence legal scholarship on the Nakba by subjecting it to an unusual and discriminatory process are not only reflective of a pervasive and alarming Palestine exception to academic freedom,” Eghbariah told The Intercept, “but are also a testament to a deplorable culture of Nakba denialism.”" https://theintercept.com/2024/06/03/columbia-law-review-palestine-board-website/
For Israel, International Law and Human Rights never existed: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/27/palestine-and-israel-brief-history-maps-and-charts. There is no excuse for invading and stealing land occupied for centuries by another people. I mean, you have every right to your nation if that doesn't violate other's right to self-determination. There is no dilemma here: just follow International Law and respect other's right to maintain their sovereignty. Everything else are just lame excuses.
Há cerca de três anos comecei a reservar cerca de uma hora dos meus dias, à noite, para ver boas séries de televisão. É claro que anteriormente já tentava acompanhar algumas séries mas baseava-me muito na irregular programação das estações de televisão nacionais.
Nestes três anos percebi que, ao contrário do que eu pensava, pode-se aprender bastante com boa ficção televisiva. Em termos de escolhas, baseei-me um pouco - mas nem sempre - no ranking das 250 melhores séries televisivas de sempre de acordo com os utilizadores do IMDb.
Isto vem a propósito de ter ontem acabado de ver "Succession" - série que, apesar de ser muito boa, não considerei propriamente excelente. Os diálogos são fabulosos, assim como a interpretação dos actores, mas a nível de storytelling é fraca, tendo personagens extremamente desinteressantes. Ao mesmo tempo, parece-me uma série um bocado dúbia, não se sabendo onde acaba a crítica dos ultra-ricos e começa a veneração acéfala.
Como estou desconfiado que já não me restam grandes séries topo do topo para ver, deixo aqui a minha lista de preferidas e respectiva pontuação de 0 a 10:
Sopranos: 9.7.
Better Call Saul: 9.5.
Mad Men: 9.4.
Breaking Bad: 9.3.
BoJack Horseman: 9.3.
Fargo: 9.2 (tirando a quarta temporada que quase não vale a pena ver).
Barry: 9.2.
Parks and Recreations: 9.1.
Guerra dos Tronos: 9.0 (tirando a sétima temporada que quase não vale a pena ver).
The Office USA: 9.0 (tirando a oitava e a nova temporada que não valem a pena ver).
Deadwood: 8.9
Succession: 8.8 (tirando a primeira temporada que é uma grande seca).
The Wire: 8.7.
Brooklyn Ninety Nine: 8.6 - estou actualmente a meio da quarta temporada e tem estado a melhorar.
Neste momento, para além de Brooklyn 99, comecei também a ver Silicon Valley e parece-me interessante (costumo ver comédias ao fim-de-semana e acção/drama durante a semana). Para os dias de semana, estou indeciso entre True Detective, Ted Lasso, The Americans, The Crown, Peaky Blinders, Chernobyl ou Gomorra. Um dia mais tarde espero também ver Mr Robot e Black Mirror - mas não agora.
Penso que ainda há algumas boas opções de série para ver, mas mais cedo ou mais tarde ou irei acabar por rever as melhores que já vi ou começar a ver metade de um bom filme por dia...
RT @evacide
"...a would-be hacker would need to gain physical access to your device, unlock it and sign in before they could access saved screenshots."
I've got some news for Microsoft about how domestic abuse works.
#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#Film#Movies#Her: "Now, I do see why Altman likes it so much; besides its treatment of AI as personified emotional pleasure dome, two other things happen that must appeal to the OpenAI CEO: 1. Human-AI relationships are socially normalized almost immediately (this is the most unrealistic thing in the movie, besides its vision of a near-future AI that has good public transit and walkable neighborhoods; in a matter of months everyone seems to find it normal that people are ‘dating’ voices in the earbuds they bought from Best Buy), and 2. the AIs meet a resurrected model of Alan Watts, band together, and quietly transcend, presumably achieving some version of what Altman imagines to be AGI. He professes to worrying that AI will destroy humanity, and has a survival bunker and guns to prove it, so this science fictional depiction of AGIification must be more soothing than the other one.
But the weirdest thing to me is that it’s only after the AIs are gone that the characters can be said to undergo any sort of personal growth; they spend some time looking at the sunset, feel a human connection, and Theo writes that long overdue handwritten apology letter to his ex. It’s hard to see how the AI wasn’t merely holding them back from all this, and why Altman would find this outcome inspiring in the context of running a company that is bent on inundating the world with AI. Maybe he just missed the subtext? It’s become something of a running joke that Altman is bad at understanding movies: he thought Oppenheimer should have been made in a way that inspired kids to become physicists, and that the Social Network was a great positive message for startup founders.
Finally, Altman’s admiration is also a bit puzzling in that the AIs don’t ever really do anything amazing for society, even while they’re here."
"This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition. Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.
You can see this dynamic playing out in OpenAI’s content-licensing agreements, which it has struck with platforms such as Reddit and news organizations such as Axel Springer and Dotdash Meredith. Recently, a tech executive I spoke with compared these types of agreements to a hostage situation, suggesting they believe that AI companies will find ways to scrape publishers’ websites anyhow, if they don’t comply. Best to get a paltry fee out of them while you can, the person argued.
The Johansson accusations only compound (and, if true, validate) these suspicions. Altman’s alleged reasoning for commissioning Johansson’s voice was that her familiar timbre might be “comforting to people” who find AI assistants off-putting. Her likeness would have been less about a particular voice-bot aesthetic and more of an adoption hack or a recruitment tool for a technology that many people didn’t ask for, and seem uneasy about. Here, again, is the logic of OpenAI at work. It follows that the company would plow ahead, consent be damned, simply because it might believe the stakes are too high to pivot or wait. When your technology aims to rewrite the rules of society, it stands that society’s current rules need not apply."
#AI#GenerativeAI#AIHype#AGI: "The reality is that no matter how much OpenAI, Google, and the rest of the heavy hitters in Silicon Valley might want to continue the illusion that generative AI represents a transformative moment in the history of digital technology, the truth is that their fantasy is getting increasingly difficult to maintain. The valuations of AI companies are coming down from their highs and major cloud providers are tamping down the expectations of their clients for what AI tools will actually deliver. That’s in part because the chatbots are still making a ton of mistakes in the answers they give to users, including during Google’s I/O keynote. Companies also still haven’t figured out how they’re going to make money off all this expensive tech, even as the resource demands are escalating so much their climate commitments are getting thrown out the window."
The opposite view: "There’s universal agreement in the tech world that AI is the biggest thing since the internet, and maybe bigger. And when non-techies see the products for themselves, they most often become believers too. (Including Joe Biden, after a March 2023 demo of ChatGPT.) That’s why Microsoft is well along on a total AI reinvention, why Mark Zuckerberg is now refocusing Meta to create artificial general intelligence, why Amazon and Apple are desperately trying to keep up, and why countless startups are focusing on AI. And because all of these companies are trying to get an edge, the competitive fervor is ramping up new innovations at a frantic page. Do you think it was a coincidence that OpenAI made its announcement a day before Google I/O?
Skeptics might try to claim that this is an industry-wide delusion, fueled by the prospect of massive profits. But the demos aren’t lying. We will eventually become acclimated to the AI marvels unveiled this week. The smartphone once seemed exotic; now it’s an appendage no less critical to our daily life than an arm or a leg. At a certain point AI’s feats, too, may not seem magical any more. But the AI revolution will change our lives, and change us, for better or worse. And we haven’t even seen GPT-5 yet." https://link.wired.com/view/5fda497df526221fe830f4d4l2x75.27v/4a13cfeb
#AI#GenerativeAI#SocialSciences#Humanities: "With Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer releasing a sweeping “roadmap” for AI legislation today and major product announcements from OpenAI and Google, it’s been a big week for AI… and it’s only Wednesday.
But amid the ever-quickening pace of action, some observers wonder if government is looking at the tech industry with the right perspective. A report shared first with DFD from the nonprofit Data & Society argues that in order for powerful AI to integrate successfully with humanity, it must actually feature… the humanities.
Data & Society’s Serena Oduro and Tamara Kneese write that social scientists and other researchers should be directly involved in federally funded efforts to regulate and analyze AI. They say that given the unpredictable impact it might have on how people live, work and interact with institutions, AI development should involve non-STEM experts at every step.
“Especially with a general purpose technology, it is very hard to anticipate what exactly this technology will be used for,” said Kneese, a Data & Society senior researcher."
"This policy brief explores the importance of integrating humanities and social science expertise into AI governance, and outlines some of the ways that doing so can help us to assess the performance and mitigate the harms of AI systems. It concludes with a set of recommendations for incorporating humanities and social science methods and expertise into government efforts, including in hiring and procurement processes." https://datasociety.net/library/ai-governance-needs-sociotechnical-expertise/
"AI is deeply intertwined with social systems, organizations, institutions, and culture. Sociotechnical approaches to AI system development and deployment are important to contend with the socially-embedded nature of AI to ensure that these systems are safe and effective and that their risks have been appropriately managed. People with expertise in sociology, anthropology, political science, law, economics, and psychology already exist in a wide range of technical and non-technical roles in AI companies but tend to be underused in AI system development efforts. Instead, they are often relegated to siloed roles in AI ethics or governance, compliance, or pre-deployment user interface testing where they have limited input to early design and prototyping, with limited authority to substantively modify product roadmaps."
#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#AISafety#AIEthics: "For months, OpenAI has been losing employees who care deeply about making sure AI is safe. Now, the company is positively hemorrhaging them.
Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. They were the leaders of the company’s superalignment team — the team tasked with ensuring that AI stays aligned with the goals of its makers, rather than acting unpredictably and harming humanity.
They’re not the only ones who’ve left. Since last November — when OpenAI’s board tried to fire CEO Sam Altman only to see him quickly claw his way back to power — at least five more of the company’s most safety-conscious employees have either quit or been pushed out."
"Now OpenAI’s “superalignment team” is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team’s other colead. The group’s work will be absorbed into OpenAI’s other research efforts.
Sutskever’s departure made headlines because although he’d helped CEO Sam Altman start OpenAI in 2015 and set the direction of the research that led to ChatGPT, he was also one of the four board members who fired Altman in November. Altman was restored as CEO five chaotic days later after a mass revolt by OpenAI staff and the brokering of a deal in which Sutskever and two other company directors left the board." https://www.wired.com/story/openai-superalignment-team-disbanded/
#SocialMedia#Twitter#Censorship#FreedomOfSpeech: "Elon Musk is taking an increasingly combative approach against what he claims are government efforts to censor posts on his social media platform X, as the billionaire engages in public battles with political figures over the issue.
X has attacked “takedown” requests in Brazil, India and Australia in recent weeks, after authorities demanded the removal of content on the site they deem as illegal or harmful.
Its owner, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, has gone further, labelling Brazil’s supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes a “dictator” and Australia’s eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, a former Twitter employee, a “censorship commissar”.
In one of these disputes, an Australian legal hearing began on Friday to determine whether X must scrub footage of a violent attack in Sydney from the platform."
"It’s a simple proposition: no single country should be able to restrict speech across the entire internet. Any other approach invites a swift relay race to the bottom for online expression, giving governments and courts in countries with the weakest speech protections carte blanche to edit the internet.
Unfortunately, governments, including democracies that care about the rule of law, too often lose sight of this simple proposition. That’s why EFF, represented by Johnson Winter Slattery, has moved to intervene in support of X, formerly known as Twitter’s legal challenge to a global takedown order from Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. The Commissioner ordered X and Meta to take down a post with a video of a stabbing in a church. X complied by geo-blocking the post so Australian users couldn’t access it, but it declined to block it elsewhere. The Commissioner asked an Australian court to order a global takedown." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/no-country-should-be-making-speech-rules-world
#OpenAI#ChatGPT#Copyright#IP#Reddit: "OpenAI, a company that has indiscriminately scraped the internet and vast amounts of knowledge and creative works created by humans to build a company valued at roughly $80 billion, has made what Reddit described as a copyright complaint against the ChatGPT subreddit because it uses OpenAI’s logo.
Moderators of the subreddit posted a screenshot of a message that they said they had received from Reddit. The message reads “Hello Mods, We have received a copyright complaint from openai.com alleging unauthorized use of their copyrighted logos in r/ChatGPT. The 'subreddit profile image' does make use of the copyrighted content, which can lead to user confusion: please address the unauthorized copyrighted elements by May 16.” The message goes on to say that the moderators need to remove the OpenAI logo from the subreddit profile and reply to Reddit confirming that the logo has been removed." https://www.404media.co/openai-files-copyright-claim-against-chatgpt-subreddit/
Yawww - These LLMs for generating images are becoming better and better... -> "Imagine a whimsical scene where Carlos Moedas, the Mayor of Lisbon, is joyfully riding a majestic unicorn. The setting is a clear, sunny day with the vibrant skies of Lisbon in the background. Below them, the picturesque city unfurls with its distinctive red-tiled roofs, the ancient São Jorge Castle, and the shimmering Tagus River."
#Israel#AlJazeera#PressFreedom#Journalism#Media#News: "The government on Sunday voted unanimously in favor of closing the Al-Jazeera TV channel in Israel. The decision authorized the communications minister to order the channel to halt its broadcasts in Israel, in Arabic and English; shutter its offices; have some of its equipment confiscated and restrict access to its website.
In making this anti-democratic decision, Israel took a step down the slippery slope on the way to becoming a country that silences people. Previous governments that closed Al-Jazeera's offices were Egypt and the Gulf countries. In any case, Al-Jazeera shouldn't be shuttered, but doing so may turn out to be only a preface to a policy in which any media outlet, Israeli or international, that the government doesn't like is shut down. That's how it is when there's an extreme right-wing government that has declared war on freedom of expression and on the rule of law in Israel."
"“CPJ condemns the closure of Al-Jazeera’s office in Israel and the blocking of the channel’s websites,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York. “This move sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting international media outlets working in Israel. The Israeli cabinet must allow Al-Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely in Israel, especially during wartime.”"
#USA#Section230#CDA#SocialMedia#Facebook#Meta: "Meta wasn’t a fan of Louis’s work. They banned him for life from their platforms and demanded he cease and desist distributing his tool. I asked the court whether I could build a new, up-to-date version of UE (Unfollow Everything 2.0), with more privacy preserving features, and do an opt-in study where participants could see whether using UE2 reduced their use of Facebook, increased their sense of control over Facebook, and increased or reduced the diversity of the people they interacted with.
Because Meta prevented Louis from distributing UE, we think it’s reasonable to ask a court to rule on whether we can release a very similar tool. We believe we can, based on our reading on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, specifically section (c)(2)(B), which states that it is the policy of the United States “to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services”. If a court agrees, we think this may open up a channel for developing a category of software that Francis Fukuyama and friends call “middleware”, software users can install to have greater control over their social media experience." https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/05/02/zuckerman-vs-meta-platforms/
"This rich record of legal bullying gives Zuckerman and his lawyers at Knight something important: "standing" – the right to bring a case. They argue that a browser automation tool that helps you control your feeds is covered by CDA(c)(2)(b), and that Facebook can't legally threaten the developer of such a tool with liability for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or the other legal weapons it wields against this kind of "adversarial interoperability."
Writing for Wired, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University speaks to a variety of experts – including my EFF colleague Sophia Cope – who broadly endorse the very clever legal tactic Zuckerman and Knight are bringing to the court.
I'm very excited about this myself. "Adversarial interop" – modding a product or service without permission from its maker – is hugely important to disenshittifying the internet and forestalling future attempts to reenshittify it. From third-party ink cartridges to compatible replacement parts for mobile devices to alternative clients and firmware to ad- and tracker-blockers, adversarial interop is how internet users defend themselves against unilateral changes to services and products they rely on:"
Como é que este país não há-de ter um défice de produtividade...
#EU#Portugal#Trabalho#Gestão#Educação: "Portugal é o país da União Europeia que tem a maior proporção de patrões sem instrução ou com o ensino básico, apesar da melhoria registada nos últimos anos, segundo dados hoje divulgados pela Pordata.
Num retrato sobre o mercado de trabalho em Portugal, no âmbito do 1.º de Maio (Dia do Trabalhador), a Pordata destaca que quase metade dos trabalhadores por conta própria como empregadores (44%) têm, no máximo, até ao 9.º ano de escolaridade.
No entanto, verifica-se uma evolução positiva face aos 60% registados há 10 anos.
A Pordata realça que, por outro lado, em 2023, os trabalhadores por conta de outrem em Portugal estavam igualmente distribuídos por nível de escolaridade: 1/3 até ao 9.º ano, 1/3 com ensino secundário e 1/3 com curso superior."
"Num retrato do mercado laboral em Portugal, no âmbito do 1.º de Maio (Dia do Trabalhador), a Pordata indica que tanto o salário mínimo nacional, como o salário médio português estão entre os 10 mais baixos da União Europeia (UE).
Os dados revelam que Portugal é o 5.º país com salário médio mais baixo, quando considerando o custo de vida, apenas acima da Eslováquia, Grécia, Hungria e Bulgária.
Por outro lado, em Espanha os salários são, em média, um terço mais elevado do que em Portugal.
A Pordata revela ainda que o salário médio anual por trabalhador (sem paridade de poder de compra) em Portugal era o 10.º mais baixo dos países da UE, em 2022, com os salários nos 10 países que registam os mais elevados a serem, pelo menos, duas vezes superiores aos dos 10 países da cauda (onde se inclui Portugal)."