Digit_al Society

"Some of those rules have had unintended consequences: a law meant to prevent piracy also prevents you from fixing your own car, using generic printer ink, or adapting your e-reader for your visual impairment. And a law meant to encourage innovation is routinely abused to remove critical commentary and new creativity."

"TikTok has already come under fire for its data collection, and this is just another step in yet another app collecting information on its users and doing whatever it pleases with it. It seems being online in 2022 is becoming more and more difficult to do while maintaining some semblance of privacy and data autonomy."

"That is why we must demand transparency here, especially in the case of technology that uses human-like interfaces such as language. For any automated system, we need to know what it was trained to do, what training data was used, who chose that data and for what purpose. In the words of AI researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, mimicking human behaviour is a "bright line" - a clear boundary not to be crossed - in computer software development. We treat interactions with things we perceive as human or human-like differently. With systems such as LaMDA we see their potential perils and the urgent need to design systems in ways that don't abuse our empathy or trust."

"Data is sometimes compared to oil, but a better analogy might be coal. Coal was the fuel that powered the steam engine. It propelled the capitalist reorganisation of manufacturing from an artisanal to an industrial basis, from the workshop to the factory, in the 19th century. Data has played a comparable role. It has propelled the capitalist reorganisation of the internet, banishing the remnants of the research network and perfecting the profit engine."

"The researchers noted that different platforms appeared to be associated with different psychological outcomes. "For example, our results indicated that reducing time spent on Twitter and TikTok may mediate the effect abstaining has on reductions in symptoms of depression, whereas only TikTok mediates reductions in anxiety," they explained."

""We submitted another two examples of real-life Amharic-language hate speech to them a week later," said Global Witness. "Both ads were, again, accepted by Facebook for publication within a matter of hours.""

"A digital twin is a virtual representation of a real system - a building, the power grid, a city, even a human being - that mimics the characteristics of the system. A digital twin is more than just a computer model, however. It receives data from sensors in the real system to constantly parallel the system's state."

"There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild.""

""Many bosses want everyone back in the office every day because they think that staff are most efficient when all in together," he says. "All this stuff Rees-Mogg and Boris [Johnson] are saying about people not really working properly unless they're in the office is disproved by the research.""

"Gambling on shitcoins takes the subtext of much of the crypto space and turns it into the entire purpose. There is no pretence, here, of anyone banking on widespread use, or of the coins having a purpose. The game is to find one that will go up, buy it cheap, push it as hard as you can to others, and then cash out at the top. The community takes phrases usually associated with financial crime - "shilling", "pump and dump", and so on - and wears them like a badge of honour."

""As expected, we found evidence of a performance improvement over generations due to social learning," the researchers wrote. "Adding an algorithm with a different problem-solving bias than humans temporarily improved human performance but improvements were not sustained in following generations. While humans did copy solutions from the algorithm, they appeared to do so at a lower rate than they copied other humans' solutions with comparable performance." Brinkmann told Motherboard that while they were surprised superior solutions weren't more commonly adopted, this was in line with other research suggesting human biases in decision-making persist despite social learning. Still, the team is optimistic that future research can yield insight into how to amend this."

""Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists," Hawley said in a press release. "It's time to take away Disney's special privileges and open up a new era of creativity and innovation." His proposal would apply retroactively to copyright owners with a market capitalization of more than $150 billion in the motion pictures and videos or arts, entertainment, and recreation industries."

"The glasses pick up audio and visual cues, translating them into text that gets displayed on your lens, right in your line of vision. These virtual subtitles overlay on your vision of the world, providing a contextual, USEFUL augmented reality experience that's leaps and bounds ahead of what the Google Glass was designed to do in 2013."

""I would reverse the permanent ban," Musk said on Tuesday, speaking via video link at a car industry conference organised by the Financial Times. "I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," he said. "I think that was a mistake. It alienated the country and did not result in Donald Trump not having a voice."

"Activists say that, either way, Marcos did not conduct his campaign fairly. "He flooded social media with historical distortions and refused to engage the media to answer the painful questions that we wanted him to address," said Ilagan, who said the campaign was based on "trickery and historical distortions"."

"Cathy Hackl: I think it's important to state that there is really no agreed-upon definition right now. Every morning-it's become a bit of a ritual-I go to the Merriam-Webster dictionary and type in the word metaverse. And every day it says this word is not in the dictionary. But if we needed to define it, I tend to have a pretty expansive view of what the metaverse is. I believe it's a convergence of our physical and digital lives. It's our digital lifestyles, which we've been living on phones or computers, slowly catching up to our physical lives in some way, so that full convergence. It is enabled by many different technologies, like AR [augmented reality] and VR [virtual reality], which are the ones that most people tend to think about. But they're not the only entry points. There's also blockchain, which is a big component, there's 5G, there's edge computing, and many, many other technologies. To me, the metaverse is also about our identity and digital ownership. It's about a new extension of human creativity in some ways. But it's not going to be like one day we're going to wake up and exclaim, "The metaverse is here!" It's going to be an evolution."

"As reported by The Independent this week, Microsoft has been granted a patent that allows the company "to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people." Under the patent, Microsoft can create an artificial intelligence bot "based on images, voice data, social media posts, electronic message, and more personal information" of a deceased person."

"I'm now realising that complete openness was limiting. Privacy is a cloak, under which we are at liberty to explore the intricacies of the self, beholden to no audience other than ourselves. I have grown up in a generation that overshares in order to be heard. Only through the slow, gruelling process of learning to be private am I really beginning to listen to myself."