Lit Hub – Leigh Stein Wonders Why More Book People Don’t Embrace the Publishing Juggernaut. “Shallow, fake, showy, and performative—these are a few of the adjectives used to describe BookTok, the corner of TikTok where young women share and discuss books on camera, by drive-by tourists to a culture they don’t understand. I’m no BookTok… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Knowledge Management
Report: Terrible employee passwords at world’s largest companies
The Wealthiest Companies with the Weakest Passwords – “Do large companies have unbeatable password habits? Think again. NordPass has compiled a list of passwords used by the world’s largest companies across 20 industries and 31 countries to “secure” their business accounts. Spoiler alert: they’re terrible. Don’t believe us? See for yourself but please, don’t get… Continue Reading
Libraries Need More Freedom to Distribute Digital Books
The Atlantic: “Last week, a district court judge in New York ruled on Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive, a case that is likely to shape how we read books on smartphones, tablets, and computers in the future. Although the case hinged on technical details of copyright law, the source of the conflict is… Continue Reading
Top Russia-Adjacent Disinformation Sites
Via Dave Troy – “The top 35 sites are, well, quite representative. Treat all of these outlets with extreme caution.Folks interested in Russia-linked propaganda should take a look at the top 250 or so sites here (Google Doc) and make sure they’re not missing anything.” See also the accompanying visualization map. Continue Reading
Executive Order on Prohibition on Use by the United States Government of Commercial Spyware that Poses Risks to National Security
March 27, 2023 – “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Policy. Technology is central to the future of our national security, economy, and democracy. The United States has fundamental national security and foreign… Continue Reading
How unbelievably realistic fake images could take over the internet
Vox: “..In just a few short years, AI-generated images have come a long way. In a more innocent time (2015) Google released “DeepDream,” which used Google’s artificial neural network programs — that is, artificial intelligence that’s been trained to learn in a way that mimics a human brain’s neural networks — to recognize patterns in… Continue Reading
Declassified report suggests “Havana syndrome” could result from energy weapon
Salon: “A newly obtained declassified report prepared for the director of national intelligence by a panel of experts appears to show conclusively that “Havana syndrome” — a cluster of unexplained symptoms experienced by diplomats and government personnel abroad — is not a naturally occurring health problem. It does not reach any conclusions about who or… Continue Reading
A.I. Is Sucking the Entire Internet In. What If You Could Yank Some Back Out?
Slate: “Over the coming years, A.I. companies will release even more advanced models that will remind us that this is just the beginning. At least one of these tools will be different in an important way: It will be prohibited from seeing 80 million of the images that helped teach its predecessors to draw and… Continue Reading
How to recognize AI snake oil
Much of what’s being sold as “AI” today is snake oil — it does not and cannot work. Why is this happening? How can we recognize flawed AI claims and push back? Presentation by Arvind Narayanan Associate Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy. Continue Reading
LocalView
LocalView is a database co-created by Soubhik Barari and Tyler Simko to advance the study of local government in the United States. “We introduce LocalView: a comprehensive dataset of over 100,000 real-time U.S. local government public meeting videos from 1,000+ localities (and counting). If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that attention,… Continue Reading
New report from OpenAI finds that higher-income jobs are most exposed to GPT
Working Paper – GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models, March 27, 2023. “We investigate the potential implications of large language models (LLMs), such as Generative Pre- trained Transformers (GPTs), on the U.S. labor market, focusing on the increased capabilities arising from LLM-powered software compared to… Continue Reading
How to Become an Expert on A.I.
The New York Times. How to Become an Expert on A.I. Part 1 of our weeklong series See also The New York Times – A.I. Is Being Built by People Who Think It Might Destroy Us See also WIRED: AI Loves—and Loathes—Language. “…Deep learning networks may look like brains, but that doesn’t mean they can… Continue Reading
