Weekend Edition 23 – The AI Wars Are Beginning Now, and More...

Not Enough Censorship, Says European NGO
More Nuttiness at Facebook
The AI War Begins
Zoom Late to the Layoffs Party

#weekendedition #Facebook #meta #solarreflection #globalcooling #notenough #censorship #metasued #kenya #moderation #laborlaws #ai #chatgpt #microsoft #google #bard #zoom #TechFreedom #technews #currentevents #FOSSnews

WE 23-1: There’s Not Enough Censorship Online! WHAAAAAAA!!!!!
According to a super woke NGO in Europe, Big Tech isn’t doing enough to censor wrongthink. They have done a study of 108 fact-checked posts across Big Tech platforms (Twitter, YouTube, Meta, LinkedIN, and TikTok) about a movie regarding the CONvid killshot, and found that only 22% of these “disinformation” posts resulted in the post being marked, much less removed. They were horrified by this. I suppose that from their perspective, that could be seen as a failure to “act responsibly” by these platforms. It allows people too much latitude to question the narrative of the elites, which this NGO is clearly toeing the line for.
Of course I am entirely in the other camp. I can’t think of a single “fact” that doesn’t deserve a healthy challenge in the court of ideas. Yes, even religious ones. Even givens of faith need to be considered in each generation, whether that looks like re-imagining language while maintaining the ultimate message, or something else. That sounded very edgy for me, didn’t it? It’s true, though. Every thought and narrative deserves a challenge, even if you land where you started in the beginning. Just go through the effort to question and refine things for yourself. That is anathema to [them], though, as that takes too much power from [their] hands when everyone questions everything, rather than just going along like good little sheep, believing exactly what they are told, merely because an “accepted authority” said some thing or other. Utter nonsense, and I thought that we established that concept with Rene Descartes in the 18th century. We have lost it somewhere along the way, though, particularly in the last 40-50 years. Let’s recover that. Don’t simply follow people because others follow them, think about what they stand for, what they say, and what they do before you fall in line with what the masses are doing and saying. Ok, rant over.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/big-tech-not-doing-enough-remove-fake-news-activist-ngo-avaaz-says-2023-02-07/

#weekendedition #censorship #bigtech #europe #notenough #TechFreedom #freethinking

WE 23-2: Facebook Co-Founder Seeks to Stop Global Warming
That was a very tame way to write that... This guy is trying to literally block the sun from reaching the earth, at least in part. The theory is that if he stops enough solar radiation from reaching the surface of the earth, then there won’t be as much heat to get trapped by the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, from cars, planes, boats, trains, and cow farts. Sorry, I can’t write or read this nonsense without almost dying laughing.
So this nutjob wants to partially block the sun by funding research along those lines, in the interest of preventing further heat waves and extreme droughts in places around the Global South. The ways in which they are looking at accomplishing this are tantamount to polluting the upper atmosphere with aerosols such as sulfur dioxide which can not only serve the intended purpose, but create acid rain and respiratory difficulties, among other things, for those who are affected by these measures. Who is to say that governments haven’t been screwing with this stuff for 60-70 years, anyway? Ever heard of HAARP? That is an element of it, along with cloud seeding with silver dioxide, along with heavier elements, like barium, arsenic, and aluminum, among other things. This is weather manipulation which we are told is for our benefit, but if that were really the case, then why would [they] use so many toxic substances to “help” us? These things wind up in our food, water, and air, and now these climate “scientists” are working to add even more to that concoction in our atmosphere. Great, just great. Cow farts. Eat ze bugs. Save the planet. Block out the sun. Oh yes, this sounds like a plan straight out of a Bond film or Austin Powers, for that matter. Laughable, except that there aren’t enough thinking people to oppose these hair brained schemes.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/07/facebook-co-founder-moskovitz-funds-sunlight-reflection-research.html

#weekendedition #drevil #blockthesun #cowfarts #eatzebugs #smh #givemeabreak #think #TechFreedom #currentevents #Facebook

WE 23.3: Facebook Sued by Former Content Moderator from Kenya
He is suing because of emotional damage suffered for far too little remuneration, as he was constantly exposed to heinous content, such as child abuse, beheadings, and the like in the posts that he was paid to moderate for the giant. The man has been diagnosed with PTSD from his time as a content moderator. He wakes up imagining that he is the victim of some of the posts he was forced to wade through. That is brutal. I can’t imagine being forced to look at that stuff in order to protect (allegedly) the public from these kinds of content. The reality is that those things are (and should be) against the TOS for any platform, but then we get into the question of when speech, images, and videos legitimately cross the line from reporting on things that happen, and into promoting those barbaric and brutal things. These are sticky issues. I was going to rail on Facebook, and they do bear a good deal of responsibility for the issue, however, this gets too close to the hate speech or mis/disinformation conversation. I do not have a good solution, but certainly believe that the companies in question should be held liable for the effects of the role that they hired him to fulfill.
I’d love to be glib about this one, but I can’t. This wound up being more “real” than I expected it to be. I’d love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments below.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64541944
#weekendedition #meta #contentmoderation #dowork #dirtyjobs #ptsd #africa #TechFreedom #bigtech

WE 23.4: Let the AI Wars, and the Butlerian Jihad Commence
So, in case you didn’t realize, Microsoft has largely bankrolled the creation of ChatGPT, last week, I covered how they are folding chatGPT into the next version of Windoesn’t. Now, they are launching a chatGPT powered version of Bing and the Edge broswer. Oh boy. Mor data gathering for Microsoft, as if they need it. Microsoft is trying to make Edge stand out from the crowd of Chromium-based browsers that have proliferated over the last several years or so. Let’s see how many chromium-based browsers we can name off of the top of our heads.... Let’s see... Chrome, Vivaldi, Brave, Chromium, Cake, Opera, and Edge. I don’t think that was anywhere close to being exhaustive, but these are probably the best known ones. Enhanced Bing is only available on the desktop for now, just as the new version of Edge is. They claim that it is “next-gen” ChatGPT, that sounds like mirketing hyperbole to me, but what do I know?
What else can I say? Well, Google has begun releasing their generative AI answer, in the form of Bard. Here, the war begins. Will Google’s effort measure up to the viral success of ChatGPT? Time will tell. Google is in limited beta testing with Bard, which seems to be fairly capable right now... My question is whether Bard will have direct internet access, rather than being limited to a now 12-24 month old dataset for the basis of its generated answers. It can do allot, and that is where I bring the Dune reference in the title in... In Dune, the Butlerian Jihad was a war between sentient AIs and humans, who had largely outsourced their thinking to computers for generations, then a small subset of humans chose to rise against that, and sought to destroy the thinking machines, ultimately outlawing their existence, and leading to a very strong emphasis on humans pushing their limits in every possible way. So, are we about to go down that path? I, for one, will not outsource my thinking to AIs. I will use technology, but I will never use AI to write content or anything like that, even if it would be easy to do so, vs spending too many hours every week researching, writing, then delivering the stories I generate. It will always be a human on the other side of the camera, so to speak, on my channels.
As much as I find characters like Tate to be distasteful at best, they make a valid point about how we all need to stop being mindless consumers, get off our collective and individual back sides, and better ourselves. Learn skills, sharpen your mind, discipline your body, develop your spirituality. Become the best you can be, without reference to what others are doing. Just put your head down, put in the work, and grow.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/07/microsoft-open-ai-chatgpt-event-2023-live-updates.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/06/google-announces-bard-ai-in-response-to-chatgpt.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/08/google-bard-heres-more-of-what-the-chatgpt-competitor-can-do.html

#weekendedition #AI #aiwars #Dune #google #microsoft #bigtech #TechFreedom #FOSSnews

WE 23.5 – Zoom Late to the Party... To Lay Off 15% of Workforce
The founder and CEO, Eric Yuan, shared the news in a blog this week, and has taken some steep accountability for the way that they grew over the course of the scamdemic. He has taken a 98% paycut for the year, and foregone his 2023 bonus. That was very sobering. Maybe he sees the writing on the wall, that with the increase in something akin to normalcy, and the privacy issues that they have been shown to have over the last couple of years... I don’t know. My sense is that if they really want to be long-term viable, they need to pull all of their data and datacenters out of China. That GIANT elephant in the room seems like it would be one that would be hard to overcome. Well, we can all start using services like Jitsi, Brave Voice, or GabVoice (all essentially the same thing, built on webRTC, but with end to end encryption and self-hostable). Given, there is not full feature parity, but these are strong contenders, in that they are FAR more private, as well as being FOSS, which is a big deal to me, obviously. I believe that decentralization and privacy are the way forward, so we all need to do ourselves a favor and learn about these things. Adopt them where possible. Move away from the control of Big Tech and Big Government.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/07/zoom-to-lay-off-1300-employees-or-about-15percent-of-its-workforce.html

#weekendedition #zoom #layoffs #privacy #economics #TechFreedom #FOSSnews