crank.report

Links

Civil Society Signal and Noise?

I’ve noticed an uptick in my email of research reports from nonprofits and advocacy groups. I suppose this makes sense in a time of continued pressures on journalism and the swamp of bad information that is the internet. How should we know to trust these reports?

AI won’t make artists redundant – thanks to information theory – Piotr Migdał via Hacker News and read the comments.

Would be easy to create conceptually and aesthetically new works using prompts? Think about “addiction to social media” or even a broader idea “a current societal problem”. The question of “how?” turns quickly into “what do we want to do in the first place?”. Sure, you can create a stock image of someone looking at their phone. But if you want to create something genuinely new, you will need to expand your prompt a lot.

Fan Vote 2023

The top five artists, as selected by the public, will comprise a “Fans’ Ballot” that will be tallied along with the other ballots to choose the 2023 inductees.

Roots of Rock & Roll | Country, Folk, and Bluegrass

Playlist from they Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

#Links #CivilSociety #AI #Music

Discuss...

The Breadth of the Fediverse | Electronic Frontier Foundation

People coming from Twitter tend to think of the fediverse as a Twitter-replacement for the obvious reasons, and thus use Mastodon (or perhaps micro.blog), but that’s only a fraction of its potential. The question isn’t if the fediverse can replace Twitter, but if protocols can usurp platforms in our life online. With enough momentum the fediverse can be the fabric of the social web, incorporating existing systems like Tumblr and Medium and outright replacing stragglers.

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech via Of Course Mastodon Lost Users

Moving to a world where protocols and not proprietary platforms dominate would solve many issues currently facing the internet today. Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services, allowing whichever ones work best to succeed, without having to resort to outright censorship for certain voices. It would allow end users to determine their own tolerances for different types of speech but make it much easier for most people to avoid the most problematic speech, without silencing anyone entirely or having the platforms themselves make the decisions about who is allowed to speak.

Doc Searls Weblog · Is Mastodon a commons?

I find myself wondering if each of Mastodon’s boats is a commons. Or if some of them could be, or already are. Or if Mastodon itself is one.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong? | MIT Technology Review

But when she looked at the ideas themselves, Cornforth had questions: “I was like, ‘You didn’t talk to anyone who works in a school, did you?’ They were not contextualized in the problem at all.” The deep expertise in the communities of educators and administrators she worked with, Cornforth saw, was in tension with the disruptive, startup-flavored creativity of the design thinking process at consultancies like IDEO.org. “I felt like a stick in the mud to them,” she recalls. “And I felt they were out of touch with reality.”

How New Ideas Arise | The MIT Press Reader

Ideas arise from boredom. During a conference on film in Assisi in 1962, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini got bored and started absentmindedly flipping through a copy of the Gospel of Matthew. He was struck with how the world of the farmer in the age of Christ was documented in a text that was important not only for its religious fervor but also for its realistic brutality. This inspired the amazing shots of his film “La ricotta” and, later, the revolutionary shots of “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo.”

#Links #Fediverse #Ideas #DesignThinking

Discuss...

I'm Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass via Hacker News

You don't need to worry about scalability on your Rails-over-Mysql application because nobody is going to use it. Really. Believe me. You're going to get, at most, 1,000 people on your app, and maybe 1% of them will be 7-day active. Scalability is not your problem, getting people to give a shit is.

GitHub – mattnigh/ChatGPT3-Free-Prompt-List: A free guide for learning to create ChatGPT3 Prompts

Prompt engineering is the process of designing and refining the initial text or input (the prompt) that is given to a language model like ChatGPT to generate a response. It involves designing prompts that guide the model to generate a specific tone, style, or type of content.

Daring Fireball: Joanna Stern on Microsoft’s New AI-Powered Bing

...you’d be a fool to count Google out in this race. But shipping talks and bullshit walks. Microsoft is opening up the new Bing to real people now.

Yes, Republicans are discussing genocide against LGBTQ+ people

Things appear dire for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States, especially when it comes to transgender and non-binary folks— who have found themselves a current primary target of a well-oiled right-wing hate machine fueled by Republican politics. After recently meeting with anti-LGBTQ+ ideologue Chaya Raichik (AKA Libs of TikTok, a major proponent of the “grooming” anti-trans narrative), Donald Trump, the de-facto leader of the MAGA far-right movement and the Republican Party— has followed the trend of genocidal rhetoric against LGBTQ+ people, laying out an apocalyptic vision if he wins in 2024.

#Links #Areas #Scale #AI #LGBTQ #HumanRights

Discuss...

CS182: Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change

Our goal is to explore the ethical and social dimensions of technological innovation. Stanford has a special responsibility to address these topics in light of its role as a seedbed of Silicon Valley. By integrating perspectives from computer science, philosophy, and social science, the course will provide learning experiences that robustly and holistically examine the impact of technology on humans and societies.

What Is Pleroma? | Lainblog

Pleroma is a microblogging server software that can federate (= exchange messages with) other servers that support the same federation standards (OStatus and ActivityPub). What that means is that you can host a server for yourself or your friends and stay in control of your online identity, but still exchange messages with people on larger servers. Pleroma will federate with all servers that implement either OStatus or ActivityPub, like GNU Social, Friendica, Hubzilla and Mastodon.

Comment by nicbou on I prefer semi-automation | Hacker News

Automation is not just about saving time. It’s also about saving a “recipe” for a task, about avoiding human error, and about staying in the flow.

It’s our industry’s equivalent to mise en place. Deal with the drudgery in advance to focus on your work when it matters.

Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering by Vadim Kravcenko via Hacker News

Although it may sound surprising, the primary focus of a software engineer’s job is not writing code but rather creating value through the use of software that was written. Code is simply a tool to achieve this end goal. Code -> Software -> Value.

How They Must Write: Saving the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Contingencies by Thomas Basbøll

The five-paragraph essay forces students to be both knowledgeable and articulate about an assigned topic “on the spot” and therefore gives them a straighforward opportunity demonstrate to us whether they have learned what we have tried to teach them. If they know they actually have to a write a good one to a prompt they don’t know in advance ((but of course on a topic that is relevant to the class they are taking) they have a reason, not just to learn the material, but to keep their thinking and prose in good shape.

Why cassettes? by Dominique Cyprès via Hacker News

The way I relate to a recording when I carry it around physically in my pocket—not just my phone, which can provide access to that recording and many others, but a tape dedicated to containing just that recording and no other—just feels different. The tape becomes a little talisman that turns an intangible recording into a very tangible object, something I can see and turn over in my hands and physically give to another person.

GitHub is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing by Roy Kaufman

Plaintiffs allege that OpenAI and GitHub assembled and distributed a commercial product called Copilot to create generative code using publicly accessible code originally made available under various “open source”-style licenses, many of which include an attribution requirement. As GitHub states, “…[t]rained on billions of lines of code, GitHub Copilot turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions across dozens of languages.” The resulting product allegedly omitted any credit to the original creators.

#AI #copyright #ethics #automation #writing #links

Discuss...

User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

For people hosting instances, however, it can also mean some legal risk. Fortunately, there are some relatively easy ways to mitigate that risk – if you plan ahead. To help people do that, this guide offers an introduction to some common legal issues, along with a few practical considerations.

Embracing My Butch Identity Was a Challenge, Here’s Why by Ro White

On one of many occasions when I was stopped by the TSA, an agent demanded to know what was “strapped to my chest.” “My boobs,” I said. “I’m wearing a bra.” Strangers regularly ask me what my gender is or ask leading questions to reveal my “true” identity. My life is a never-ending “It’s Pat!” sketch, and it’s only funny sometimes.

HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons by Zanin Andrea

Any activity you do on the Internet (reading this article, buying stuff on Amazon, uploading cat pictures) comes down to sending and receiving messages to and from a server.

This can be a bit abstract so let’s imagine that those messages were delivered by carrier pigeons.

Tokyo’s Urban Planning Secrets Revealed in New Book by Max Zimmerman

It’s based on the idea that systems and phenomena, through local interactions of their parts, can create orders. The classic example would be the flocking behavior of birds, in which you can see clearly the formations but there is no bird leading it.

#links #fediverse #gender #explainer #urbanplanning

Discuss...

Anti-marketing by Andy Matuschak

If you make anti-marketing the goal, then interesting challenges become a positive thing: fodder for public conversation, not something to be swept under the rug.

My Information Operating System Part 1: Reading by Kyle Stratis

My goal when reading is to generate knowledge and insights that can be connected with knowledge and insights derived from other sources. That is a mouthful to say that I want to integrate information from something I read and connect it to my existing knowledge.

Why are there so many minor scales by Ethan Hein

The minor-key world is more complicated than the major-key world. But that also makes for a lot of musical variety. Let’s dig in!

Levels of Racism: Systemic vs Individual – Anti-racism Resources – Research Help at Fitchburg State University via D. Elisabeth Glassco on Mastodon

We pledge to provide access to information, resources, and programming that works towards dismantling the racist systems on which our country has been built, as well as the many other insidious forms of inequality that persist in our society.

#links #marketing #pkms #music #anti-racism #libraries

Discuss...