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Archived link: https://archive.ph/BdFwc

In an unbelievable hit piece, the Atlantic's deputy executive editor blamed "progressives" for the death of American Dream, blaming Jane Jacob, an advocate for mixed use building in urban environments, for the lack of housing in the US.

Somehow the editor completely failed to account for various obvious reasons that housing became unaffordable, such as NIMBYism, financialization of housing, speculative purchases, loose monetary policies, etc. and put all the blame on "progressives".

Insane paragraph below:

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

A good article in which the author researched how Twitter's algorithm pushed people interested in history into alt-right content.

Quote: "Adhering to my guidelines to follow accounts suggested by the algorithm, I clicked the “follow” button. This was the first time I was recommended content adjacent to alt-right and "manosphere" ideology. Prior to that, it was all history related. After “liking” approximately 100 Tweets, however, I saw that the accounts suggested to me were becoming increasingly political, and I was specifically being recommended accounts run by internet political commentators – as opposed to professional politicians or journalists. I cannot definitively call this observation evidence of being led down an alt-right pipeline, but it was interesting to note that those were the types of accounts suggested to me by the Twitter algorithm."

Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI.

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."

Right, surely the energy intensive AIs will make the world invest in climate-friendly energy instead of just burning more fossil fuels as they always did.

Also shows how unsustainable the current neoliberal system is.

On Amazon, I searched for “OpenAI policy” and boy, did I get results! I’m not entirely sure what this green thing is but I’ve been assured that it will “Boost your productivity with our high-performance [product name], designed to deliver-fast results and handle demanding tasks efficiently, ensuring you stay of the competition.“ Phenomenal! Unfortunately, there are no customer reviews — yet, anyway!

The Verge article made reference to this thread:

At this point Amazon is like generative AI for products - you can just make up ideas and some alphabet soup company will drop ship a low quality version of it to you

Welcome to the New World, powered by AI Overlord

Apparently, stealing other people's work to create product for money is now "fair use" as according to OpenAI because they are "innovating" (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?

"Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials," wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.

OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit "misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence."

Since this billionaire doesn't want us to learn about what bad things he did, I figured we should let as many people know as possible:

In a move that has press freedom campaigners troubled, Rajat Khare, co-founder of Appin, an India-based tech company, has used a variety of law firms in a number of different jurisdictions to threaten these U.S., British, Swiss, Indian, and French-language media organizations.

On Nov. 16, Reuters published a special investigation under the headline “How an Indian startup hacked the world,” detailing how Appin allegedly became a “hack for hire powerhouse that stole secrets from executives, politicians, military officials and wealthy elites around the globe”

Khare retained the powerhouse “media assassin” firm Clare Locke LLP, which boasts on its website about “killing stories,” to send Reuters several legal threats over the past year about the story

Across the pond, Khare had his name removed from a joint investigation between The Sunday Times and the nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, titled, “Caught on camera: confessions of the hackers for hire.” Three paragraphs that reported on Khare were removed from both publications following legal threats on his behalf

Lets spread the word!!!

Amazing video produced by Jessie Gender along with a group of creators whom many of them are from the ** LGBTIAQ+ community** .

I knew from my anthropology class many years ago that George Lucas borrowed concept from the The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

What I did not know is that the author, Joseph Campbell is:

1. A misogynist
2. An antisemite
3. Didn't research properly

This explains why the hero must be a (white) men.

Carl Jung's theory about collective unconsciousness and archetypes are also outdated and discarded by psychology.

The archetypes reduce women to "mother", "Goddess". etc. but never the hero.

Also, since Jung's theory categories people neatly into archetypes, those who does not fit social norm (LGBTQIA+ people) were never represented.

When the creation is based on such shaky foundations, no wonder the Star Wars fandom turns out to be racist and misogynist.

Btw, do you know who else's book borrows heavily from Jung? Jordan Peterson.

The investors might want a refund after seeing what the money were used for.

Notable quotes:

Several employees pointed to Suzuki’s research into the American far right, which included him presenting on QAnon during a company wide all-hands meeting and attending Donald Trump rallies using company funds.

This mission would, at times, lead Suzuki down far-right rabbit roles, according to several former employees. “[He] really wanted to get inside QAnon and figure out what’s going on there,” one former employee told Rest of World, saying Suzuki’s interest in its conspiracy theories only heightened during the Trump administration. “We were worried for him.”

The trips often included visits to rallies for Donald Trump, multiple employees said. “Why would I want to give up one week of my life showing some guy from Tokyo around a Trump rally?” recalled one employee who declined an invitation to join the road trip in 2020. “The whole premise of the idea was very bizarre.”

Yeah, not exactly a good working environment.

More efforts from tech bros to build Rapture.

Interesting quotes:

it had backing from tech heavyweights such as billionaire Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, and venture capitalist** Fred Wilson**, a Coinbase board member who sold his shares in the company for $1.8 billion after it went public in 2021.

“Bitcoin, if it wins, completely changes the world, because it changes the ability of centralized states to do what they’ve been doing,” Srinivisan said in a presentation delivered to a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam in October.

The Bitcoin-based Network State will be based on “internet values” such as “open source” and “peer-to-peer,” Srinivasan has written.

An utopia run on Bitcoin? What could possibly go wrong?

Great video by Caelan Conrad who dissected the anti trans movement from their origins.

I didn't know TERFs existed even back then at Stonewall. It was such a great lesson in history.

The video also went on to show gays and lesbians who tried to be assimilationists and why it wouldn't work. i.e. Leopards eat their faces too.

A must watch for everyone who are interested in LGBTQIA+ communities. I honestly need to read more books about it.

This is too funny to not share!

Some of the requests like listening to multiple songs and type in the number which changed instruments are genuinely difficult.

The 3D puzzles can be very tricky as well. Whose genius idea is this??

Article from The Atlantic, archive link: https://archive.ph/Vqjpr

Some important quotes:

The tensions boiled over at the top. As Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman encouraged more commercialization, the company’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, grew more concerned about whether OpenAI was upholding the governing nonprofit’s mission to create beneficial AGI.

The release of GPT-4 also frustrated the alignment team, which was focused on further-upstream AI-safety challenges, such as developing various techniques to get the model to follow user instructions and prevent it from spewing toxic speech or “hallucinating”—confidently presenting misinformation as fact. Many members of the team, including a growing contingent fearful of the existential risk of more-advanced AI models, felt uncomfortable with how quickly GPT-4 had been launched and integrated widely into other products. They believed that the AI safety work they had done was insufficient.

Employees from an already small trust-and-safety staff were reassigned from other abuse areas to focus on this issue. Under the increasing strain, some employees struggled with mental-health issues. Communication was poor. Co-workers would find out that colleagues had been fired only after noticing them disappear on Slack.

Summary: Tech bros want money, tech bros want speed, tech bros want products.

Scientists want safety, researchers want to research...