remixtures

remixtures, 18 days ago to random Portuguese

One of the biggest advantages of living in Portugal: almost unlimited freedom of expression ->

"In 2023, the percentage of people living in countries in Crisis rose to 53%. That’s more than 4 billion people in 39 countries. This growth in the population in Crisis countries is due to the shift of India into this expression category between 2022 and 2023."

https://www.globalexpressionreport.org/

remixtures, 18 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedMusic #Suno: "Suno, a generative AI music company, has raised $125 million in its latest funding round, according to a post on the company’s blog. The AI music firm, which is one of the rare start-ups that can generate voice, lyrics and instrumentals together, says it wants to usher in a “future where anyone can make music.”

Suno allows users to create full songs from simple text prompts. While most of its technology is proprietary, the company does lean on OpenAI’s ChatGPT for lyric and title generation. Free users can generate up to 10 songs per month, but with its Pro plan ($8 per month) and Premier plan ($24 per month), a user can generate up to 500 songs or 2,000 songs, respectively, on a monthly basis and are given “general commercial terms.”"

https://www.billboard.com/business/tech/ai-music-company-suno-raises-new-funding-round-1235688773/

remixtures, 18 days ago to ai Portuguese

#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."

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-is-sam-altman-so-obsessed-with

remixtures, 18 days ago to random Portuguese

#DigitalArchiving #DigitalPreservation #InternetHistory #DigitalDecay: "The headline finding from "When Online Content Disappears" is that 38% of the web of 2013 is gone today. Wikipedia references are especially hard-hit, with 23% of news links missing and 21% of government websites gone. The majority of Wikipedia entries have at least one broken link in their reference sections. Twitter is another industrial-scale oubliette: a fifth of English tweets disappear within a matter of months; for Turkish and Arabic tweets, it's 40%.

Thankfully, someone has plugged the web's memory-hole. Since 2001, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has allowed web users to see captures of web-pages, tracking their changes over time. I was at the Wayback Machine's launch party, and right away, I could see its value. Today, I make extensive use of Wayback Machine captures for my "This Day In History" posts, and when I find dead links on the web.

The Wayback Machine went public in 2001, but Archive founder Brewster Kahle started scraping the web in 1996. Today's post graphic – a modified Yahoo homepage from October 17, 1996 – is the oldest Yahoo capture on the Wayback Machine:"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#pew-pew-pew

remixtures, 18 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #USA #Universities #HigherEd: "The student cofounders of an AI studying tool won a $10,000 entrepreneurship prize from Emory University for their idea, were championed publicly and repeatedly by the university’s business school for creating the software, and then were promptly suspended by the school for a semester for building exactly what the school had just given them money to build.

The students were suspended by the school’s Honor Council because their AI tool “could be used for cheating” and because they connected it to a software platform used by the university to host course reading material, homework, and other assignments without obtaining express permission, though this feature was mentioned at the competition it won $10,000 at. But the school’s Honor Council did not actually find evidence that it was ever used to cheat, and a review of the Honor Council’s writeup shows an incredible misunderstanding of how the specific tool, called Eightball, was designed and a misunderstanding of how large language models are trained and what they can do.

“While nothing about Eightball changed, Emory’s view of Eightball changed dramatically,” a lawsuit filed by Benjamin Craver, one of the suspended students against the university reads. “Emory concedes that there is no evidence that anyone has ever used Eightball to cheat. And to this day Emory advertises Eightball as an example of student innovation and entrepreneurship.”"

https://www.404media.co/university-suspends-students-for-ai-homework-tool-it-paid-them-10-000-to-make/

remixtures, 18 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #Humanities: "Without some minimal agreement as to what those basic human capabilities are—what activities belong to the jurisdiction of our species, not to be usurped by machines—it becomes difficult to pin down why some uses of artificial intelligence delight and excite, while others leave many of us feeling queasy.

What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. AI dating concierges would not enhance our ability to make romantic connections with other humans, but obviate it. In this case, technology diminishes us, and that diminishment may well become permanent if left unchecked.

Over the long term, human beings in a world suffused with AI-enablers will likely prove less capable of engaging in fundamental human activities: analyzing ideas and communicating them, forging spontaneous connections with others, and the like. While this may not be the terrifying, robot-warring future imagined by the Terminator movies, it would represent another kind of existential catastrophe for humanity."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/ai-dating-algorithms-relationships/678422/

remixtures, 18 days ago to opensource Portuguese

#OpenSource #FLOSS #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Bitcoin: "The P2P Rights Fund aims to support various legal efforts, including subsidizing defense counsel, sponsoring amicus briefs in pivotal cases, and financing affirmative impact litigation to set favorable legal precedents. Additionally, the fund plans to offer free or subsidized regulatory advice to developers working on non-custodial Bitcoin tools.

The initiative is in direct response to recent legal actions that have raised concerns within the Bitcoin community. Developers of non-custodial tools, such as hardware wallet creators and transaction node operators, are increasingly being treated as financial institutions, which is seen as a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology by the government."

https://www.tftc.io/p2p-rights-fund-defends-open-source-bitcoin-developers/

remixtures, 18 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @molly0xFFF
back in my day we called this spyware

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/microsofts-new-recall-feature-will-record-everything-you-do-on-your-pc/

remixtures, 18 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #Automation #Unemployment #UBI: "The computer scientist regarded as the “godfather of artificial intelligence” says the government will have to establish a universal basic income to deal with the impact of AI on inequality.

Professor Geoffrey Hinton told BBC Newsnight that a benefits reform giving fixed amounts of cash to every citizen would be needed because he was “very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs”.

“I was consulted by people in Downing Street and I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea,” he said.

He said while he felt AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “and not the people whose jobs get lost and that’s going to be very bad for society”."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnd607ekl99o

remixtures, 18 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #Copyright #IP: "Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to augment and democratize creativity. However, it is undermining the knowledge ecosystem that now sustains it. Generative AI may unfairly compete with creatives, displacing them in the market. Most AI firms are not compensating creative workers for composing the songs, drawing the images, and writing both the fiction and non-fiction books that their models need in order to function. AI thus threatens not only to undermine the livelihoods of authors, artists, and other creatives, but also to destabilize the very knowledge ecosystem it relies on.

Alarmed by these developments, many copyright owners have objected to the use of their works by AI providers. To recognize and empower their demands to stop non-consensual use of their works, we propose a streamlined opt-out mechanism that would require AI providers to remove objectors’ works from their databases once copyright infringement has been documented. Those who do not object still deserve compensation for the use of their work by AI providers. We thus also propose a levy on AI providers, to be distributed to the copyright owners whose work they use without a license. This scheme is designed to ensure creatives receive a fair share of the economic bounty arising out of their contributions to AI. Together these mechanisms of consent and compensation would result in a new grand bargain between copyright owners and AI firms, designed to ensure both thrive in the long-term."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4826695

remixtures, 18 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @josephfcox
New from 404 Media: FBI arrested man for allegedly using Stable Diffusion, a text to image AI model, to create thousands of images of minors. One of the first known instances of FBI investigating someone for using AI to create child sexual abuse material

https://www.404media.co/fbi-arrests-man-for-generating-ai-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/

remixtures, 19 days ago to random Portuguese

#PersonalizedNutrition: "Another problem is that personalised nutrition research bases a good deal of its findings on analysis of mountains of data collected by its users. This throws up lots of associations between diet, blood glucose levels, weight and so on. But these “cross-sectional” studies can only ever find associations, not causation. So the existence of an association between greater spikes and higher average blood glucose levels, even in healthy people, does not tell us anything about causation. The higher spikes may be a consequence of an underlying metabolic problem, not the cause of one. If that were the case, keeping the spikes down would be addressing a signal of a problem, not its cause.

Worse, in very large data sets, Guess explains, cross-sectional studies will inevitably generate false positives: associations that are statistically significant but in effect random, “like buying an iPhone on a Tuesday is associated with risk of Crohn’s”."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/18/zoe-nutrition-app-diet-tim-spector-wellness-science?mc_cid=067c41abe1

remixtures, 19 days ago to random Portuguese

RT @DorotheaBaur
"AI may also help managers directly. Its capabilities in empathy, summarisation, and customisation make it a powerful tool for coaching and mentoring"
Empathy? You must be kidding. AI has about as little empathy as any other corporate psychopath.

https://www.ft.com/content/389e505c-a1cc-4176-a592-dd1d0fa171b8

remixtures, 19 days ago to UX Portuguese

#UX #UserExperience #OpenAI #AI #GPT4o #GenerativeAI: "It is unethical to slap an interface, which convincingly simulates 100% confidence, onto a product which is anything less than 100% accurate, let alone a product that CTO, Mira Murati, calls “pretty good”.

No exceptions; no “it will get better”. If the house doesn’t have a roof, don’t paint the walls.

This does not mean that reduction or removal of complexity is inherently deceitful, but it does mean that the complexity which informs a person, not how, but why something works the way it does can be an important factor in them deciding to use it.

Nothing could make this more evident than the crypto/web3 community’s obsession with “mass adoption” which they generally resolve to being a UX problem. They know that the complexity of crypto is intimidating to non-technical people (crimes and scams aside) so they relentlessly try to remove as much of the complexity as possible.

The unfortunate thing about removing complexity is that you never remove it, but rather, you move it to another place. The other place is always what crypto people like to call a “trusted third party” the very thing that Bitcoin, was created to eliminate."

https://fasterandworse.com/known-purpose-and-trusted-potential/

remixtures, 19 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #BigTech: "For years now, OpenAI told everyone that these were all secondary concerns — that its deeper ambition was something nobler, and more public-spirited. But since Altman’s return, the company has been telling a different story: a story about winning at all costs.

And why bother with superalignment, when there’s winning to do?

Why bother getting actresses’ permission, when the right numbers are all still going up?"

https://www.platformer.news/open-ai-scarlett-johansson-her-voice-sam-altman/

remixtures, 19 days ago to cooperatives Portuguese

#Cooperatives #Coops #Socialism #SolidarityEconomy #WorkerOwnedFirms: "Fast forward to 2024. Once again, the Left is discussing strategies for political advance. It is clear that electoral campaigns on their own and short-lived protests are not enough to win durable victories. But unlike socialists of the past, the contemporary left’s discussions have largely ignored the strategic role that cooperatives — and the solidarity economy more generally, i.e., enterprises geared to serving the needs of workers and achieving broader social goals — can play in building up the Left’s power.

This is a mistake. History shows that a flourishing solidarity economy can provide a distinctive set of material and social benefits for the Left, benefits that can play a key role in socialism’s broader political revival. This is not to say that supporting cooperatives and other kinds of worker-owned firms should supplant our other political tactics — but neither should they be ignored. Rather, cooperatives can and should complement the Left’s other strategic efforts, as the Second International recognized long ago."

https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cooperatives-dsa-left-strategy-solidarity

remixtures, 19 days ago to journalism Portuguese

#Wikileaks #Assange #PressFreedom #Media #Journalism #USA #UK: "To my mind, Julian Assange is in some ways recognizably a journalist. He’s also a publisher, an entrepreneur, an activist, a whistleblower, an information anarchist and a hacker. That’s true of many of this new breed of net warriors.

But in the work we did together when I was editor of The Guardian and he was editor of WikiLeaks we collaborated on a series of groundbreaking stories which were absolutely journalistic.

However, to many journalists Assange is not a proper “journalist,” and they can’t really see what his fate has to do with theirs. I think that’s a mistake.

This week Assange may learn his fate when judges in the UK High Court consider final representations from lawyers on both sides over the bid to extradite him to the US — where he could face a lengthy spell in a maximum security prison."

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/19/opinions/julian-assange-extradition-hearing-alan-rusbridger/index.html

remixtures, 19 days ago to philosophy Portuguese

Don't fool yourself: It's mostly just about family connections and pure randomness.

#Capitalism #Liberalism #Philosophy #MoralPhilosophy #Inequality #Poverty: "Rawls thinks agents designing a society from behind the veil of ignorance might nevertheless allow some inequality, in exchange for greater economic efficiency. But in navigating such tradeoffs they’d be guided by the principle that inequalities need to earn their keep by (a) making the better-off positions available to every qualified applicant under conditions of meaningful equality of opportunity and (b) only allowing inequalities, even inequalities that satisfy condition (a), when whoever is worst off would still be better off than they would be under a more equal alternative.

The resulting loophole for acceptable inequalities is much narrower than many readers of Rawls over the decades have realized. Rawls himself, who certainly wasn’t a radical firebrand by personal inclination, had reluctantly come to realize by the end of his life that even a form of capitalism modified by a generous welfare state couldn’t meet his demanding standard.

Meanwhile, one of Rawls’s most important critics, the Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen, argued that even this loophole was too large for it to be appropriate to call any arrangement that passed Rawls’s test “justice.” Cohen acknowledged that economic efficiency matters, for much the same reason Rawls thought it did — the standard of living of even the lower classes — but he thought we should keep a more demanding notion of egalitarian justice as our north star."

https://jacobin.com/2024/05/random-factor-inequality-capitalism-review

remixtures, 19 days ago to apple Portuguese

#Apple #AppleNews #Media #Journalism #News: "At the moment, Apple News is as good a partner in Big Tech as many media companies are going to find. Almost every publisher Semafor spoke to said that Apple paid well and directed eyeballs to their longer, more ambitious work. While some of the articles surfaced by the app are algorithmic and based on user behavior, the company also employs a team of journalists — led by editor-in-chief Lauren Kern, a well-regarded former New York Magazine editor — who seem to prioritize putting quality journalism front-and-center on the app. As a reader, it’s a nice product, and in many cases a better reading experience than publishers’ own homepages and apps.

But the partnership also raises some of the questions publishers avoided during the peak social media era. It incentivizes users to subscribe to Apple News+ rather than to publications directly, likely cannibalizing some potential revenue. It’s driving editorial decisions, meaning publishers are once again changing their content strategy to placate a platform. And of course the company could wake up one day and decide, like Facebook, that it no longer really wants to be in the news business, leaving news publishers stranded."

https://www.semafor.com/article/05/19/2024/as-clicks-dry-up-for-news-sites-could-apples-news-app-be-a-lifeline?utm_source=newslettershare&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=semaforstory&s=09#a

remixtures, 20 days ago to privacy Portuguese

#AdTech #DataProtection #Privacy #TargetedAds: "In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library.

Her audiobook consumption, she explained, had been highly focused the previous month, focused on a specific subgenre that she doesn't believe would come up by chance.

"You don't coincidentally come across mobile ads [for that particular subgenre]," she told The Register. "Those ads made me extremely angry."

Concerns about the privacy of library reading material date back to the early 20th century, explained Dorothea Salo, academic librarian and library-school instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to The Register.

"There was a time when American libraries weren't sure what their stance on reader privacy should be," said Salo."

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/18/mystery_of_the_targeted_mobile_ads/

remixtures, 20 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIHype #Media #News #Journalism: "More broadly, across news media coverage of AI in general, reviewing 30 published studies, Saba Rebecca Brause and her coauthors find that, while there are of course exceptions, most research so far find not just a strong increase in the volume of reporting on AI, but also “largely positive evaluations and economic framing” of these technologies.

So, perhaps, as Timit Gebru, founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), has written on X: “The same news orgs hype stuff up during ‘AI summers’ without even looking into their archives to see what they wrote decades ago?”

There are some really good reporters doing important work to help people understand AI—as well as plenty of sensationalist coverage focused on killer robots and wild claims about possible future existential risks.

But, more than anything, research on how news media cover AI overall suggests that Gebru is largely right – the coverage tends to be led by industry sources, and often take claims about what the technology can and can’t do, and might be able to do in the future, at face value in ways that contributes to the hype cycle."

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-news-coverage-often-uncritical-helps-build-ai-hype

remixtures, 20 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #ChatGPT: "This contradiction is at the heart of what makes OpenAI profoundly frustrating for those of us who care deeply about ensuring that AI really does go well and benefits humanity. Is OpenAI a buzzy, if midsize tech company that makes a chatty personal assistant, or a trillion-dollar effort to create an AI god?

The company’s leadership says they want to transform the world, that they want to be accountable when they do so, and that they welcome the world’s input into how to do it justly and wisely.

But when there’s real money at stake — and there are astounding sums of real money at stake in the race to dominate AI — it becomes clear that they probably never intended for the world to get all that much input. Their process ensures former employees — those who know the most about what’s happening inside OpenAI — can’t tell the rest of the world what’s going on.

The website may have high-minded ideals, but their termination agreements are full of hard-nosed legalese. It’s hard to exercise accountability over a company whose former employees are restricted to saying “I resigned.”" https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai-departures-sam-altman-employees-chatgpt-release

remixtures, 20 days ago to ai Portuguese

#AI #AIEthics: "Technology is built by humans and controlled by humans, and we cannot talk about technology as an independent agent acting outside of human decisions and accountability–this is true for AI as much as anything else. The integrity that Mann rightly envisions for AI cannot be understood as a property of a model, or of a software system into which a model is integrated. Such integrity can only come via the human choices made, and guardrails adhered to, by those developing and using these systems. This will require changed incentive structures, a massive shift toward democratic governance and decision making, and an understanding that those most likely to be harmed by AI systems are often not ‘users’ of the systems, but subjects of AI’s application ‘on them’ by those who have power over them–from employers, to governments to law enforcement. To truly ensure that AI systems are deployed in ways that have integrity, and uphold a dignified and equitable social order, those subject to AI’s use by powerful actors must have the information, power, and ability to determine what AI systems with ‘integrity’ mean, and the ability to reject or contest their use."

https://theinnovator.news/interview-of-the-week-meredith-whittaker-ai-ethics-expert/