there’s lots to think about this post on innovation in Europe (vs the US and to a lesser degree China) by @bert_hubert.
one fun bit is that ordinary life is so precarious and dystopian in the US you’re not really giving up much risking a startup, while very safe and comfortable life paths are available to ordinary europeans. (if safe comfort were more unconditional, maybe it could flip the US’ risk-tolerance advantage.) https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/is-europe-just-not-good-at-innovating/
it takes democratically accountable central power to overcome centralizing dynamics inherent in market arrangements to sustain decentralization in the marketplace.
cf eg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe
"The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good." ~Caitlin Flanagan https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/sheryl-sandberg-leaving-meta-lean-in-feminism/661291/ //the end of the piece is wrenching
Conjecture: Art AI makes art more like science. Individual contributions matter less, the cumulation matters more. That's a big mismatch for the current funding model. We should fund artists well (of course) and encourage them to develop "orthogonal art" — art not within the range of extrapolation from the existing corpus. I'm not sure whether there is a way to measure this, with respect to existing models.
Critique (one of many): Subsumes the expressive dimension of art to the instrumental.
Once we’re talking about influence operations, debate becomes almost impossible, we find ourselves in a war of irreconcilable priors. 1/
Allegations of Russian influence operations like this one, to my more anti-US-Imperialist friends, are nothing more than elements of an influence operation by the American deep state.
Somebody is disinforming, somebody is to be believed, evidence for and against “credibility” always available. So an impasse. /fin
in theory an account with no margin requirement—not even zero, negative balances permitted—ultimately can never lose. no matter how underwater one gets, with no limit to gambling for redemption, eventually you must find it.
but in practice, there is no such thing as an account with no margin requirement. an institution that purported to offer it, even to a single customer, would eventually find it faces its own margin requirement.
i’ve been encouraging people to withdraw their attention and writing from twitter. i see when doing so a lot of people are taking their accounts private, or fully deleting them.
i don’t think i’ll do that. there’s important history in past public twitter. a lot of links rot and important conversations become unintelligible when that history is taken offline.
i’m restricting my use of twitter mostly to encouragements to move and critiques of current management. but i’ll leave my past around.
“Being right for the wrong reason makes someone dangerous.” ~Claudia Sahm https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/burden-of-proof-is-on-the-inflation
(Personal apology) Yesterday I attempted https://www.movetodon.org/ to troll thru many thousand twitter contacts + follow those I don’t. I’d done a find/import weeks ago with https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ but movetodon found lots of new contacts, and seemed easier as it follows directly, no import step. but my sheer bulk (and dumb retries) stressed https://fosstodon.org/. i’m rate-limited from following ‘til this evening.
if you’ve followed me i’m likely to follow back, but not til then! sorry!
machine learning is analogous to the copernican revolution in the sense we are having to grapple with learning we are not so special.
AI art is both derivative and integrative so it collapses in on itself and winks out of existence in a burst of pure energy.
i think it’s really excellent that @pkrugman is here, on his own and his own initiative.
but shouldn’t any serious lager-scale journalistic organization have its own instance? shouldn’t, as a matter of course, he have an identity as @pkrugman@masto.nytimes.com, along with all of his colleagues?
the most effective disinformation is a careful selection of true information.
if you chisel away the things you don’t want seen from all the things that are true, you can sculpt whatever impression you like. where is the lie?
@mossguy@mastodon.green Thanks! I’d not noticed “unlisted”. And maybe!
Toot! describes unlisted as “Your toot will be shown only on your profile and to your followers, but not on public timelines.”
i guess the question would be whether it’s shown to followers on other instances.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if Mastodon had some kind of “for export” switch for posts. posts not marked for export would not be pushed to people on other instances who follow the author. 1/
the promise of a post-centralized social media world is different forums can have different community standards. but communities that export what other communities find wildy out-of-standards will and should be widely defederated. 2/
a “for export” flag would enable different moderation standards for internal-only conversations than for posts that will participate in the global public square. a degree of caution and diplomacy might be required for the latter that would not be desired, should not be required, for conversations “at home”, in a world of diverse, weird, not mutually intelligible homes. /fin
so often people call it sensitive content when what they mean is it’s insensitive content.
there is nothing more cliché than edgy, but it can hardly be edgy if it’s cliché.
"The most important thing about a technology is not necessarily what can be done with it in singular instances, it is rather what habits its use instills in us and how these habits shape us over time." @lmsacasas https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/lonely-surfaces-on-ai-generated-images
i know it's derivative, but these “Rate limited Please retry after…” messages are boring.
masstodon should adopt a "fail snail". or maybe a "fail tail" showing a mastodon from behind.
the conceit the dead would care enough to haunt us.