Necklace of bones
byu/Badspacecomics incomics
A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).
READ
“On one hand, the predators in the Dark Internet Forest are the mega-platforms themselves, at the core of which are machines for turning human action and feeling into saleable data objects. On the other hand, the predators are clearly us: Individual people doing galaxy-brain bad-faith readings of other people’s banal posts for the juice and swarms of people looking for ideological opponents to mob, largely as a way of claiming or defending quasi-spatial territory: This is ours, not yours. We don’t do that here.”
against the dark forest
“…Amazon had refused during the inquiry to disclose how it used data recorded from Alexa devices, Kindle or Audible to train its AI. Google too, he said, had refused to answer questions about what user data from its services and products it used to train its AI products. Meta admitted it had been scraping from Australian Facebook and Instagram users since 2007, in preparation for future AI models. But the company was unable to explain how users could consent for their data to be used for something that did not exist in 2007. Sheldon said Meta dodged questions about how it used data from its WhatsApp and Messenger products.”
Amazon, Google and Meta are ‘pillaging culture, data and creativity’ to train AI, Australian inquiry finds | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian
“For most people in the U.S., the threats that they face and the methods by which they are likely to be surveilled or harassed have not changed, but the consequences of digital privacy or security failures may become much more serious, especially for vulnerable populations such as journalists, activists, LGBTQ+ people, people seeking or providing abortion-related care, Black or Indigenous people, and undocumented immigrants. EFF has decades of experience in providing digital privacy and security resources, particularly for vulnerable people. We’ve written a lot of resources over the years and here are the top ten that we think are most useful right now:”
Top Ten EFF Digital Security Resources for People Concerned About the Incoming Trump Administration | Electronic Frontier Foundation
“Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.”
The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly
“StumbleUpon commanded a massive influence in the early 2010s. For many, it became the go-to place to waste time online. People were hitting the Stumble button over a billion times a month at the height of its powers. By some measures, more than half of the traffic that social media platforms sent to other parts of the internet in 2011 came from StumbleUpon – it sometimes beat out Facebook, even though StumbleUpon had hundreds of millions fewer users.”
‘There was almost a utopian feeling to it’: How StumbleUpon pioneered the way we use the internet
“Quantum computing – which harnesses the discovery that matter can exist in multiple states at once – is predicted to have the power to carry out far bigger calculations than previously possible and so hasten the creation of nuclear fusion reactors and accelerate the impact of artificial intelligence, notably in medical science. For example, it could allow MRI scans to be read in atom-level detail, unlocking new caches of data about human bodies and disease for AI to process, Google said. But there are also fears that without guardrails, the technology has the power to crack even the most sophisticated encryption, undermining computer security.”
Google unveils ‘mindboggling’ quantum computing chip | Computing | The Guardian
WATCH
EXPLORE
Make It Yourself is a pdf with links to a 1000 useful DIY projects.
Times New Dumbass is inspired by Elon Musk’s attempt to do a star-jump.
Does what it says on the tin: Page Printer creates a printer ready pdf from a url.
Great post about the Creator economy platform costs which deconstructs the varied pricing models out there.
A massive ‘playbook’ of how to approach and be successful at cold emailing in this The Cold Email Handbook.
Dive deep into the The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group Identification Guide (the plastic thing that keeps the bread fresh which ties off the bag).
121 Brands That Matter in 2024 is Fast Company’s attempt to list those who have made a mark in marketing rather than anything else—still a list to peruse.
B612 is a free and open source font and is the result of a research project initiated by Airbus to improve the display of information on the cockpit screens.
A little ‘manifesto’ regarding humanity’s place in the Universe and our role in its future, by investor Yuri Milner (basically advocating for evolving our species into the cosmos).
Nominations for the Trustbuilding Awards are open which aim to recognise and uplift outstanding organisations and individuals in trustbuilding, empower youth efforts to create a more cohesive future, and inspire higher standards for trustbuilders worldwide (applications close on 15 February 2025).