Pluralistic: Saving the news from Big Tech with end-to-end social media (13 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Podcasting "Ideas Lying Around" (12 June 2023)


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The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve Has a Business Model

It is difficult to get a public procurement officer to understand something, when a vendor’s salary depends on his not understanding it.

A jail cell, seen through the bars. Bundles of US $100 bills are piled up on the floor of the cell.
Flying Logos/CC BY-SA 4.0 (modified)

In the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve,” oppressive technologies are first imposed on people who don’t get to complain — prisoners, migrants, children, mental patients, benefits recipients — in order to normalize these tools and sand down their rough edges. Once the technology has been rendered a little more acceptable, it crawls up the privilege gradient, bit by bit, until even the most socially powerful among us are using it.

In other words: 20 years ago, if you ate dinner under a CCTV’s unblinking eye, you were probably dining in a supermax prison. Today, you’re likely just someone who bought some luxury surveillance, like a “home automation” system from Google, Apple, Amazon or Facebook.

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Pluralistic: Links, dumped (10 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Capitalists hate capitalism (09 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: To save the news, repeal the app tax (07 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: A business model for bankrupting the oil companies(06 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Wall Street Journal goes to bat for the vultures who want to steal your house (04 June 2023)


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Ayyyyyy Eyeeeee

The lie that raced around the world before the truth got its boots on.

A portrait of OpenAI founder Sam Altman. It has been altered so that his eyes are replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He is holding a flashlight under his chin and is shrouded in darkness.
Jasleen Kaur/CC BY-SA 2.0; TechCrunch/CC BY 2.0; Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

It didn’t happen.

The story you heard, about a US Air Force AI drone warfare simulation in which the drone resolved the conflict between its two priorities (“kill the enemy” and “obey its orders, including orders not to kill the enemy”) by killing its operator?

It didn’t happen.

The story was widely reported on Friday and Saturday, after Col. Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, USAF Chief of AI Test and Operations, included the anaecdote in a speech to the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) Summit.

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Pluralistic: Washington State's capital gains tax proves we can have nice things (03 June 2023)


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