Here’s how my imaginary program would work. There would be a pot of money at the center of it, managed by a foundation or an endowment of some kind, that would be ring-fenced to support software in the public interest. There would be no expectation that these projects would be self-sustaining: the fund would pay for them.
#Area #FOSS #Funding
I love this idea for marking a birthday.
And I love this first wish:
I wish the form of media was fully separate from its content.
#Area #Media
The idea of NFTs can be solid if put into practice purely on the technological aspects of what they can provide. NFTs for archiving data and records, intellectual property, concert tickets, certifications and so forth do have a potential value.
#Area #DWeb #NFTs
AI is a force multiplier for all aspects of our lives — both for good and for bad. I believe good will outweigh the bad, but the transition is going to be quite bumpy.
#Area #AI
Intelligence can be artificial. Or it can be a tool to help humans survive a more complex, more connected world that is moving ever so faster.
#Area #AI
Everybody knows and is aware Meta brings a “trust deficit” to the Fediverse. The best mitigation mentioned was to be as transparent as possible about all aspects of what they plan and do.
#Area #Fediverse
The proposed system, TrustNet, is a system for interacting with and managing trust. Underlying the system is a transitive trust algorithm.
#Area #CommunityOrganizing
It’s worth pausing here for just a second to point out that, in reality, most of this technology is still not very good. Large language models “hallucinate,” which is a nice way of saying they make stuff up, all the time.
#Area #AI
There will always be a significant number of people, of any ideological persuasion, who will welcome a “strong leader” to provide simple answers to complex questions. To give the illusion of creating order amidst the chaos.
#Area #Democracy
Tech Policy Press is rounding up what we do (and don’t) know about the forums and will continue to catalog what information comes out of future meetings. Our goal is to create a central resource to track attendees, key issues discussed, and major takeaways from each event, in order to understand what ideas, individuals, and organizations are influencing lawmakers.
#Area #AI #Policy
The most interesting enrichment I’m releasing today is datasette-enrichments-gpt. This enrichment provides access to various OpenAI language models, allowing you to do some really interesting things.
#Resources #Datasette #AI
Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color are more likely to be located in urban heat islands, a legacy of segregation and racist redlining practices.
Want to read: How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra 📚
It didn’t come up as directly, perhaps because many projects are still pilots rather than in production, but I’m very interested in the practical issues around including ‘enriched’ data from AI (or crowdsourcing) in GLAM collections management / cataloguing systems. We need records that can be enriched with transcriptions, keywords and other data iteratively over time, and that can record and display the provenance of that data – but can your collections systems do that?
#Conferences #FF2023
That meant that the “governance” of the web was often just a matter of the technical details of its standards. Code may not be law, but it was sure law-like – if something was in, say, a W3C browser standard, then all the browsers would support it, and then anyone trying to do something cool on the internet could rely on every potential user having it.
#Area #OSS
It serves as a reminder for everyone, especially startups and businesses, to start thinking about building “resilience” into their plans. Sure, start with OpenAI, and continue using it, but it’s crucial to explore and invest in open-source LLMs. Even Microsoft is starting to support Open Source LLMs on its Azure platform. As an investor, you really should be asking your startups about ‘resilience.’ It’s important to have a moat around your own business.
#Area #AI
But the largest gains can be blamed on the poor decisions of other platforms. Tumblr saw an influx of Twitter users fleeing Elon Musk’s takeover, and then another wave during protests against Reddit’s changes to its API.
#Area #SocialMedia
I’ve found that thinking in terms of paying for a team helps me elevate my financial goals and be much more ambitious about making serious revenue from this thing, if I’m going to achieve these dreams.
#Area #FOSS #Sustainability
The “not dumb[ing] it down” is the sticky part for me, though: how much do I need to recreate my mental path for others when I assert a claim? What should I spell out and what should I cite? I think part of my conundrum here is that I am inclined to blog in a casual, opinionated style, but my training in formal writing was in the sciences where it seems like you source every dang sentence.
#Area #Writing