remixtures

remixtures, 13 days ago to random Portuguese

"Buena parte de la opinión pública siente que las noticias solo se enfocan en problemas, y nunca en soluciones; que solo atienden a lo que va mal en el mundo, y nunca a asuntos que dan razones para la esperanza. Y en muchas ocasiones, quienes siguen las noticias suelen pensar que el mundo es mucho peor de lo que realmente es y que vivimos más polarizados de lo que realmente estamos. Cuando esto sucede tenemos un problema. Y también lo tenemos respecto a la relación con los políticos. A los periodistas les gusta decir que son los vigilantes del poder establecido, pero desde el punto de vista de la mayoría del imaginario colectivo un periodista es la persona que sostiene un micrófono frente al político. Aunque resulte injusto, para mucha gente los periodistas son parte del espectro político. El periodismo no está fuera del establishment, forma parte de él; no está al margen de las compañías privadas, se ejerce mediante ellas. En gran parte del mundo la mayoría sospecha que los periodistas actúan bajo intereses políticos y comerciales. Si los periodistas creen lo contrario, deben convencer a la gente de por qué está equivocada."

https://elpais.com/eps/2024-05-25/rasmus-kleis-nielsen-a-los-politicos-no-les-gustan-los-periodistas-la-diferencia-antes-tenian-que-lidiar-con-ellos-hoy-ya-no.html

remixtures, 13 days ago to uk Portuguese

#UK #Privacy #Biometrics #FacialRecognition: "Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, has filmed the police on numerous facial-recognition deployments. She was there the night Shaun Thompson was picked up by police.

"My experience, observing live facial recognition for many years, [is that] most members of the public don't really know what live facial recognition is," she says.

She says that anyone's face who is scanned is effectively part of a digital police line-up.

"If they trigger a match alert, then the police will come in, possibly detain them and question them and ask them to prove their innocence."

The use of facial recognition by the police is ramping up.

Between 2020 and 2022 the Metropolitan Police used live facial recognition nine times. The following year the figure was 23.

Already in 2024 it has been used 67 times, so the direction of travel is clear.

Champions say that misidentifications are rare.

The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.

But the error count is much higher once an someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive."

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945

remixtures, 13 days ago to Germany Portuguese

I like this concept of Centrist Authoritarianism:

#Germany #Democracy #FreedomOfSpeech #GermanConstitution: "Just five years ago, the 70th anniversary of the birth of the post-war German democratic state was accompanied by euphoric celebrations across the country. This week, by contrast, few Germans were in the mood to party. Aside from the Federal Republic of Germany’s economic woes, the prevailing opinion is that German democracy isn’t in very good health.

Who is to blame? The liberal-centrist consensus is that the country is facing an unprecedented threat from nefarious populist and far-Right forces — most notably the AfD, which aims, according to the country’s vice-chancellor, to “turn Germany into an authoritarian state”. But one may very well argue that Germany is already displaying worrying signs of authoritarianism, at the hands of those very same liberal-centrist forces that claim to be defending democracy from the barbarians at the gate."

https://unherd.com/2024/05/germanys-authoritarian-turn/

remixtures, 13 days ago to Humanism Portuguese

#InternationalLaw #Humanism #Liberalism: "It is less a question of Western or Eastern, but rather liberal humanism as such that has died. When hearts and minds quietly change below the surface of an otherwise resilient and powerful liberal order, then imaginations and preparations toward a viable alternative have inevitably begun, even if only unconsciously.

In many ways, this moment echoes the lamentations of anti-colonial intellectuals, activists, and statesmen around the Global North’s betrayal of liberal humanism with respect to national self-determination in the twentieth century. If the horrifying images from the Vietnam War and subsequent anti-war movements constituted a watershed moment across the world, then the ongoing carnage across Palestine and global protests against it may constitute yet another such moment. It could have transformative implications for the global majority’s perception of the Global North’s values and principles, and build momentum for a new, multipolar, and anarchic world that nobody is prepared for.

At stake now is not only Ukraine’s and Palestine’s national survival, but the survival of international law and anything that is left of basic human decency. The violence and brutality of the last two years must prompt all of us — whether in the Global South or North, East or West — to enter into an honest and thorough introspection about the kind of world that we want to live in. What kind of geopolitics, notions of sovereignty, human rights, and legality are needed to overcome today’s challenges? Otherwise, we will slip ever closer towards the abyss of a more violent, nihilistic, and soulless world, in which the weak are crushed in the interests of the powerful few."

https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/52087/gaza-ukraine-and-the-moral-bankruptcy-of-the-rules-based-order

remixtures, 13 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #CollectiveIntelligence: "In this conversation, we discuss how Herndon collaborated with a human chorus and her “A.I. baby,” Spawn, on “PROTO”; how A.I. voice imitators grew out of electronic music and other musical genres; why Herndon prefers the term “collective intelligence” to “artificial intelligence”; why an “opt-in” model could help us retain more control of our work as A.I. trawls the internet for data; and much more."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MJ2D9uCLLA

remixtures, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago) to random Portuguese

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:

1. Sopranos: 9.7.
2. Better Call Saul: 9.5.
3. Mad Men: 9.4.
4. Breaking Bad: 9.3.
5. BoJack Horseman: 9.3.
6. Fargo: 9.2 (tirando a quarta temporada que quase não vale a pena ver).
7. Barry: 9.2.
8. Parks and Recreations: 9.1.
9. Guerra dos Tronos: 9.0 (tirando a sétima temporada que quase não vale a pena ver).
10. The Office USA: 9.0 (tirando a oitava e a nova temporada que não valem a pena ver).
11. Deadwood: 8.9
12. Succession: 8.8 (tirando a primeira temporada que é uma grande seca).
13. The Wire: 8.7.
14. Brooklyn Ninety Nine: 8.6 - estou actualmente a meio da quarta temporada e tem estado a melhorar.
15. The Office UK: 8.6.
16. Downtown Abbey: 8.5.
17. Fleabag: 8.4.
18. Boardwalk Empire: 8.0.

remixtures, 14 days ago to random Portuguese

#InternationalLaw: "It’s just a cold, hard fact that “international law” is never enforced against powerful nations or their protected allies, because there’d be no way for the international community to enforce those laws upon them without waging a massive world war involving nuclear-armed states. The US notoriously put in place its “Hague Invasion Act” between its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to ensure that it can use military force to free any military personnel of the US or its allies (this would include Israel) who wind up detained by the ICC. There is currently no force in the world that would be both willing and able to stop the US war machine from doing such a thing."

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/like-so-much-else-the-fuss-over-international

remixtures, 14 days ago to random Portuguese

#Negri #Marxism #Capitalism #Multitude #ImmaterialLabour: "On November 27 and 29, 2014, Prof. WANG Hui, the Director of Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences in Beijing, invited Prof. Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most leading Marxist philosophers and activists, to give a series of lectures. I was invited by Prof. WANG Hui to offer comments and reflections on one of Prof. Antonio Negri’s lectures, titled “The Metropolis as Post-Industrial Factory”. New Bloom published this article in Chinese based on the transcripts of the above lecture. It was translated into English by Ngai Pun."

https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1510

remixtures, 14 days ago to Bulgaria Portuguese

#EU #TechRegulation #TechPolicy: "Is the premise here, that without such shackles, Europe would be free to build competitors equal to the US tech giants? If that’s the presumption, that’s not true. They know this is not true. Anyone who understands the history, the business models, the deep entrenchment of these companies also knows that’s not true.

There may be frustration with regulation ‘slowing down your series B’. But I think we need to look at a definition of ‘progress’ that relies on casting off all guardrails that would govern the use and abuse of technologies that are currently being tasked with making incredibly sensitive determinations; currently being linked with mass surveillance infrastructures that are accelerating new forms of social control; that are being used to degrade and diminish labor. Is that what we want? Is that progress? Because if we don’t define our terms, I think we can get caught in these fairy tales.

Sure, some guys are going to be solidly middle-class after they cash out, and that is good for them. But let’s not conflate that with progress toward a livable future. Progress toward a socially beneficial governance structure, progress toward technology that actually serves human needs, that is actually accountable to citizens."

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/24/signals-meredith-whittaker-on-the-telegram-security-clash-and-the-edge-lords-at-openai/

remixtures, 14 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @PrivacyMatters
MPs urge under-16s UK smartphone ban and statutory ban in schools <unworkable on many levels. And smartphones are not the evil many portray. As a parent there are tools to help control content of concern + involves dialogue with kids

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/25/mps-urge-under-16s-smartphone-ban-statutory-ban-schools

remixtures, 14 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @ViliLe
Echoing the #Letta report—Europe to move from fighting Big Tech to trying to create its own? Antitrust reform but in the opposite direction as @linakhanFTC?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-23/macron-says-he-d-prefer-that-mistral-ai-grow-on-their-own

remixtures, 14 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @KenRoth
Biden supposedly agrees with the International Court of Justice that Israel should NOT invade Rafah and should open the Rafah border crossing. So why isn't Biden embracing today's ICJ order and signaling support if needed for Security Council backing?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/opinion/biden-gaza-ukraine-war.html

remixtures, 15 days ago to random Portuguese

A ideia de colocar as pessoas até 35 anos de idade a pagarem uma percentagem menor de IRS é uma discriminação etária com graves implicações a nível da constituição.

O governo de Portugal - que deve ser de todos os portugueses - não deve poder ter o direito de obrigar todos os restantes contribuintes nacionais a pagarem mais de IRS do que os menores de 36 só por uma questão de idade.

Quem compara o desconto no valor do IRS para os jovens com os passes mais baratos para os idosos está a fazer uma confusão perigoso. Enquanto "jovem" de 48 anos, eu posso não querer andar de metro mas não tenho como não pagar os meus impostos ao Estado.

É claro que uma medida discriminatória de cariz fiscal não baseada no nível de rendimentos ou em qualquer outro critério de esforço e mérito por parte dos beneficiários só pode ser considerada inconstitucional.

Para além de, como é óbvio, não estar fundamentada em qualquer princípio de justiça fiscal. Enfim, leis escritas com os pés por um governo que quer esquartejar a sociedade portuguesa em clientelas eleitorais.

remixtures, 15 days ago to random Portuguese

"A hacker claims to have breached a scam call center, stolen the source code for the company’s tools, and emailed the company’s scam victims, according to multiple screenshots and files provided by the hacker to 404 Media.

The hack is the latest in a long series of vigilante actions in which hackers take matters into their own hands and breach or otherwise disrupt scam centers. A massively popular YouTube community, with creators mocking their targets, also exists around the practice.

“Hello, everyone! If you are seeing this email then you have been targeted by a fake antivirus company known as ‘Waredot,’” the hacker wrote in their alleged email to customers, referring to the scam call center. The email goes on to suggest that customers issue a chargeback “as this trash software isn’t worth anywhere NEAR $300-$400 per month, and these trash idiots don’t deserve your money!”" https://www.404media.co/hacker-breaches-scam-call-center-emails-its-scam-victims/

remixtures, 15 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @matthew_d_green
Several people have suggested that the EU’s mandatory chat scanning proposal was dead. In fact it seems that Belgium has resurrected it in a “compromise” and many EU member states are positive. There’s a real chance this becomes law.

https://netzpolitik.org/2024/internes-protokoll-belgien-will-nutzer-verpflichten-chatkontrolle-zuzustimmen/

remixtures, 15 days ago to Samsung Portuguese

#Samsung #RightToRepair #DataProtection: "In exchange for selling them repair parts, Samsung requires independent repair shops to give Samsung the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops, according to a contract obtained by 404 Media. Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to “immediately disassemble” any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to “immediately notify” Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts.

"Company shall immediately disassemble all products that are created or assembled out of, comprised of, or that contain any Service Parts not purchased from Samsung,” a section of the agreement reads. “And shall immediately notify Samsung in writing of the details and circumstances of any unauthorized use or misappropriation of any Service Part for any purpose other than pursuant to this Agreement. Samsung may terminate this Agreement if these terms are violated.""

https://www.404media.co/samsung-requires-independent-repair-shops-to-share-customer-data-snitch-on-people-who-use-aftermarket-parts-leaked-contract-shows/

remixtures, 15 days ago to random Portuguese

The Borg Kingdom:

#Students #Universities #HigherEd #Neoliberalism #Capitalism #EffectiveAltruism: "Some faculty see the influence of effective altruism among this generation: In the last five years, Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia University and the former director of its Center for the Core Curriculum, has noticed a new trend when he asks students in his American Political Thought classes to consider their future.

“Almost every discussion, someone will come in and say, ‘Well, I can go and make a lot of money and do more good with that money than I could by doing some kind of charitable or service profession,’” Mr. Montás said. “It’s there constantly — a way of justifying a career that is organized around making money.”

Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”
But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/business/gen-z-college-students-jobs.html

remixtures, 15 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @Carnage4Life
Amazon plans to charge a fee for future versions of Alexa to offset the cost of LLM features. The pressure from ChatGPT is immense.

But how long this business model can last when Google is going to provide LLM features for free as part of search and Google Assistant?

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/22/amazon-plans-to-give-alexa-an-ai-overhaul-monthly-subscription-price.html

remixtures, 16 days ago to LateStageCapitalism Portuguese

Ghost Jobs for Unicorn Candidates - Lo Ritual de lo Habitual in the era of Late Stage Capitalism:

"Job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed continue to advertise open positions, and workers are actively submitting applications. Yet despite an influx of highly qualified candidates, plenty of desirable job adverts have languished on digital platforms with an increasingly common label: "Posted 30+ days ago".

While the listings may be old, job seekers generally still assume companies are actively hiring for the roles. The truth is more complicated. Some of these are simply not-yet-removed adverts for jobs that have been filled – but some were never meant to be filled at all. These are 'ghost jobs', and they're becoming an increasingly common – and problematic – obstacle for job seekers."

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240315-ghost-jobs-digital-job-boards #GhostJobs #UnicornCandidates #LateStageCapitalism

remixtures, 16 days ago to random Portuguese

"In the case of Facebook, the decline is either reflected in — or directly facilitated by — two specific features: People You May Know and the News Feed. It’s my belief that these products, piloted by deeply insidious people led by Mark Zuckerberg himself, are central to the darkness inside this company.

And I want to dispel a notion that many people have: Facebook has, from the very beginning, been a rotten, manipulative company, one that acted with little regard for users, even at times when it pretended to do so. The goal has always been more — not just more money, but more engagement, more time on the app, more visits to the website, and perpetual growth, all mandated by Mark Zuckerberg and a rogue’s gallery of rot economists." https://www.wheresyoured.at/killingfacebook/

remixtures, 16 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #BigTech #SiliconValley: "Company documents obtained by Vox with signatures from Altman and Kwon complicate their claim that the clawback provisions were something they hadn’t known about. A separation letter on the termination documents, which you can read embedded below, says in plain language, “If you have any vested Units ... you are required to sign a release of claims agreement within 60 days in order to retain such Units.” It is signed by Kwon, along with OpenAI VP of people Diane Yoon (who departed OpenAI recently). The secret ultra-restrictive NDA, signed for only the “consideration” of already vested equity, is signed by COO Brad Lightcap.

Meanwhile, according to documents provided to Vox by ex-employees, the incorporation documents for the holding company that handles equity in OpenAI contains multiple passages with language that gives the company near-arbitrary authority to claw back equity from former employees or — just as importantly — block them from selling it.

Those incorporation documents were signed on April 10, 2023, by Sam Altman in his capacity as CEO of OpenAI."

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equity-nda-sam-altman-documents-employees

remixtures, 16 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Claude: "We successfully extracted millions of features from the middle layer of Claude 3.0 Sonnet, (a member of our current, state-of-the-art model family, currently available on claude.ai), providing a rough conceptual map of its internal states halfway through its computation. This is the first ever detailed look inside a modern, production-grade large language model.
Whereas the features we found in the toy language model were rather superficial, the features we found in Sonnet have a depth, breadth, and abstraction reflecting Sonnet's advanced capabilities.
We see features corresponding to a vast range of entities like cities (San Francisco), people (Rosalind Franklin), atomic elements (Lithium), scientific fields (immunology), and programming syntax (function calls). These features are multimodal and multilingual, responding to images of a given entity as well as its name or description in many languages."
https://www.anthropic.com/news/mapping-mind-language-model

remixtures, 16 days ago to Bulgaria Portuguese

#EU #AI #AIAct: "Yesterday, at the Council of the European Union, Member States adopted the AI Act to regulate Artificial Intelligence systems. This step marks the final adoption of this legislation under discussion since 2021, and initially presented as an instrument to protect rights and freedoms in the face of the AI steamroller. In the end, far from the initial promises and emphatic comments, this text is tailor-made for the tech industry, European police forces as well as other large bureaucracies eager to automate social control. Largely based on self-regulation, crammed with loopholes, the AI Act will prove largely incapable of standing in the way of the social, political and environmental damage linked to the proliferation of AI."

https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2024/05/22/with-the-ai-act-adopted-the-techno-solutionist-gold-rush-can-continue/

remixtures, 16 days ago to brasil Portuguese

#Brasil #IA: "O grupo de trabalho de inteligência artificial (IA) da Coalizão Direitos na Rede (CDR), coletivo formado por cerca de 50 organizações civis, manifestou seu descontentamento com o texto preliminar substitutivo do projeto de lei (PL) nº 2338/2023, que regula a IA no país. De acordo com a CDR, o texto do senador Eduardo Gomes (PL-TO) traz mudanças “substanciais” com relação ao texto originalmente apresentado pela Comissão de Juristas do Senado Federal (CTIA) e que deu origem ao PL apresentado pelo senador Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG).

“Apesar de propor alguns avanços em relação à agenda regulatória para temas que não haviam sido contemplados anteriormente na discussão legislativa – como IA generativa e questões de sustentabilidade no uso dessas tecnologias – o texto preliminar substitutivo não ampliou a gramática de direitos fundamentais sedimentada no texto original do PL 2338/2023”, argumenta a entidade em texto publicado em seu site."

https://telesintese.com.br/coalizao-direitos-na-rede-critica-pl-de-ia-e-defende-amplo-debate/