FrankPasquale

FrankPasquale, 8 days ago to random

“Creators must also be influencers to compete in the attention economy. “Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture,” Chayka says, whether by tweeting about it, posting visuals on Instagram, making TikTok videos, or writing newsletters. But lately, the social-media landscape has changed in a way that disadvantages unknown novelists specifically.”
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a60924704/debut-fiction-challenges/

FrankPasquale, 10 days ago to random

“Today, American “tech” companies compete to host crypto apps on your phone and mount video game consoles on your face, while the American economy remains chained to fossil fuels through dirty energy lobbying and political inertia. The future belongs to green tech and green manufacturing, and the US is only beginning to consider its role in the 21st century commercial milieu.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/biden-china-alexander-hamilton-tariffs-electric-cars-green-energy.html

FrankPasquale, 15 days ago to random

“By describing as superhuman a thing that is entirely insensible and unthinking, an object without desire or hope but relentlessly productive and adaptable…we implicitly erase or devalue the concept of a “human” and all that a human can do and strive to become. Of course, attempts to erase and devalue the most humane parts of our existence are nothing new; AI is just a new excuse to do it.”
https://www.noemamag.com/the-danger-of-superhuman-ai-is-not-what-you-think

FrankPasquale, 22 days ago to random

“Facts are irrelevant to the truth of the experience OpenAI sells, which is grounded in the fantasy of having someone you can always talk to and boss around without having to worry about managing their performance. The chatbot performs “assistance” in a way that makes its actually doing anything more and more beside the point”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/empires-of-modern-passivity

FrankPasquale, 1 month ago to random

“BYD has achieved unparalleled control over its production cycle—according to it, only the tires and windows are entirely outsourced. In the manufacturing of the hatchback Sedan Seal, BYD produces internally a whopping three-quarters of all components—compared to just one-third for a comparable Volkswagen electric car, giving it a 35% cost lead.
BYD is also increasingly active in the “downstream” part of the car industry, namely sales & service.”
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/byd/

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“In Genova, no new taxi licences have been issued by the city council since 1980. In Livorno, none have been granted since 1977, and in Napoli, despite its explosion in tourism, taxi licences haven’t increased since 1997. Rome hasn’t increased its taxi numbers for nearly 20 years.
It’s hard to ignore the problem. At peak times outside every major railway station, there’s a 50-metre or so queue of people waiting in vain for a lift.”
https://unherd.com/2024/04/taxi-drivers-are-corrupting-italy/

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“Though themselves dependent on large-scale datasets, generative models are almost uniquely equipped to pollute such datasets at scale. So while models have been built through a…deranged positivism (all the data, no matter what it is or where it came from, can be seen as significant), they ultimately invalidate that by feeding synthetic data back into the field of social practices that ‘data’ is supposed to unproblematically reflect.”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/so-called-well-meaning

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“Many open-source software projects are governed via hierarchy; developers suggest changes to a program’s code, then more experienced developers have to review & approve the changes.
The attacker…spent several years slowly gaining the trust of other xz Utils developers and getting more control over the project, eventually becoming a maintainer, and finally inserting the code with the hidden backdoor earlier this year.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cyberattack-linux.html

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“Ghana and Ivory Coast still dominate global cocoa production, but it has not made their economies rich. Prior to a recent surge in cocoa prices, for decades the raw commodity was exported for dismally low prices. The real money is made further down the chain. The Fairtrade Foundation, an NGO, estimates that cocoa farmers receive around 6 per cent of the final value of a chocolate bar.”
https://www.ft.com/content/99958fff-8f69-42ca-b90b-5e2e2677845b

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

Sam Harnett’s 2020 “Words Matter: How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies Into Existence” remains “one of the best accounts of how swaths of the media enthusiastically generated on-demand propaganda for the tech industry, directly setting the stage for these firms to exploit, codify, and expand legal loopholes that largely exempted them from regulation as they raided their users for data and generated billions in revenue.”
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“In a 1944 study, 2 psychologists had participants watch a simple animation of two triangles and a circle moving around one another. They then asked some viewers what kind of “person” each of the shapes was. People described the shapes using words like “aggressive,” “quarrelsome,” “valiant,” “defiant,” “timid,” and “meek,” even though they knew that they’d been watching lifeless lines on a screen.”
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/the-lifelike-illusions-of-ai

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“Luckey became obsessed with one of the character’s lines: “You said tech has limits. Wrong.” (As Luckey puts it, Seto Kaiba then proceeds to “kick everyone’s ass using his incredible technology”.) “Sometimes I wonder, how much free will do I actually have over my life?” Luckey tells me, after animatedly recounting this scene. “Is it possible that I actually had no choice at any point but to pursue VR and weapons development?””
https://www.ft.com/content/ce6f96f8-6ab8-4089-b7db-f99db22c2071

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“Workers assembling planes would sometimes try to install parts that had not been logged or inspected, an attempt to save time by circumventing quality procedures intended to weed out defective or substandard components.
In one case, the employee said, a worker sent parts from a receiving area straight to the factory floor before a required inspection.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/boeing-quality-problems-speed.html

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“It was classic for Putin to discount the warnings,” said Fiona Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council. “The security services don’t have the bandwidth. They never have because they’re so focused on internal repression, and so focused on Kyiv, and they want everything to fit that narrative.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/europe/russia-terror-attack-ukraine.html

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

He “met “a senior person at a well-known A.I. startup” whose p(doom) was fifty per cent. If you truly believe that A.I. has a coin-toss probability of killing you and everyone you love, Nielsen asked, then how can you continue to build it? The person’s response was “In the meantime, I get to have a nice house and car.””
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/among-the-ai-doomsayers

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“The perfect postapocalyptic vehicle isn't a big ugly truck. It's a bicycle — light, reliable, easy to fix and scavenge parts for, able to move cargo, doesn't need any power except you and calories. And the thing that will actually get us through an apocalypse — or, preferably, prevent one — isn't driving a steel-plated War Rig. It's working together.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-cybertruck-apocalypse-inequality-2023-12

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“A study from Boston Consulting Group found that consultants that "solved business problems with OpenAI's GPT-4" performed 23% worse than those who didn't use it, even when the consultant was warned about the limitations of generative AI and the risk of hallucinations.”
https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“A handful of centralised companies, such as Tether and Circle, dominate this sector. A small number of centralised exchanges (of which FTX was once a leading example) have meanwhile cornered the market for trading.
These crypto intermediaries are in reality more centralised, less accountable and less transparent than their analogues in mainstream finance.”
https://www.ft.com/content/10fe3070-c739-495c-941d-fd57f1daafa9

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“A written sentence has a level of verifiability to it: it is true or not true – or, at the very least, we can have a meaningful discussion over its truth.
But an image? One never says a picture is true or false. It either captures your attention or it doesn’t. The more TV we watched, the more we expected…entertainment”
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman-trump-orwell-huxley

FrankPasquale, 2 months ago to random

“The United States produces fewer engineers than Russia does, not just per capita but in absolute numbers. It is experiencing an “internal brain drain,” as its young people drift from demanding, high-skill, high-value-added occupations to…finance and various occupations that merely transfer value around the economy and in some cases may even destroy it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-decline-west.html

FrankPasquale, 3 months ago to random

“After she stopped the medication, she could finish a plate of fries and a burger and still crave dessert. “I was insatiable,” Ms. Ford said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what’s going on? I’m hungry all the time.’ It shocked me how fast it happened.” Her doctor prescribed additional medications to manage her blood sugar, but she ended up on Ozempic a second time in an effort to shed the weight again.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/well/live/ozempic-wegovy-weight-loss.html

FrankPasquale, 3 months ago to random

“Many of us have had to abandon handling important tasks online because they can’t get resolved. This could be due to software algorithms not being programmed to handle our contextual needs. Or, it could be that these companies are not aware that we have needs outside of what their designers projected onto the personas they use in place of doing enough qualitative research with real people”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90976171/over-automation-is-breaking-the-web

FrankPasquale, 3 months ago to random

In December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/02/can-ai-chatbot-therapists-do-better-than-the-real-thing

FrankPasquale, 3 months ago to random

“Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump. Google search? They often lead with fake AI-generated images amid the real things. Post on Twitter? Get replies from bots selling porn. But that’s just the obvious stuff. Look closely at the replies to any trending tweet and you’ll find dozens of AI-written summaries in response.”
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/here-lies-the-internet-murdered-by

FrankPasquale, 3 months ago to random

“A lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it,” the LLM said.

If that sentence sounds suspiciously familiar, you may remember hearing it in 2016: “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”

It came from the mouth of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump”
https://www.salon.com/2024/02/17/does-ai-want-to-nuke-us-we-dont-know--and-that-could-be-more/