2024-04-21

Items of interest, April 21 - April 28, 2024, Overwhelm Edition

A long list of items of interest this week as I’m catching up and closing browser tabs:

The search engine DuckDuckGo has released a new AI-powered feature called DuckAssist and here’s where you can turn it off: https://duckduckgo.com/settings#duckassist

The Judgment of Magneto - Asher Elbein, Defector. A good overview of the X-Men character Magneto and how his Jewishness and connection to the Holocaust have shaped him.

The Person Saving The Media You Love Is You - Chris Person, Aftermath. Why media gets lost, how it has been preserved and an explanation of a better way to do it (for video media originally released on VHS or Laserdisc).

Also by Chris Person on Aftermath: Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing?:

At first you may say to yourself, “Hey this thing looks kinda like a Playdate” and you wouldn’t be far off. Teenage Engineering, the company behind a lot of nice-looking but comically overpriced audio gear (minus the pocket operator), did the design for both Panic’s Playdate and the rabbit r1 (rabbit’s CEO is on Teenage Engineering’s board of directors). But the difference is the Playdate is a fun, charming, intentionally simple little console that you play for five minutes whenever you remember you own it, and the rabbit is a cretinous imposition that I don’t ever want to hear about again after this blog.

Yep, Teenage Engineering has lost its way more and more.

ChatGPT provides false information about people, and OpenAI can’t correct it - Noyb.

In the EU, the GDPR requires that information about individuals is accurate and that they have full access to the information stored, as well as information about the source. Surprisingly, however, OpenAI openly admits that it is unable to correct incorrect information on ChatGPT. Furthermore, the company cannot say where the data comes from or what data ChatGPT stores about individual people. The company is well aware of this problem, but doesn’t seem to care. Instead, OpenAI simply argues that “factual accuracy in large language models remains an area of active research”. Therefore, noyb today filed a complaint against OpenAI with the Austrian DPA.

A MESSAGE FROM THE CHANCELLOR ON THE RECENT STUDENT PROTEST - Andrew Patrick Clark, McSweeneys:

Dear members of the University community,
The University administration respects all student protests, just not this one. Students have fought for many important causes over the years, and their right to protest is sacrosanct. In this case, however, we must arrest and slander them.

John Cage Would Want You to Listen to Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Protesters - Inae Oh, Mother Jones.

The idea of 4’33” is to provide a frame for listening to the sounds of the world as a piece of music. Sometimes this means the sounds of nature, but most often it is the sounds of people. At the premiere in 1952 in Woodstock, NY, the initial sounds were of the forest surrounding the concert hall. By the end of the four and a half minutes, however, those natural sounds were drowned out by audience members who began to complain. Supposedly, one person stood up to shout, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s run these people out of town!” Cage was thrilled.

Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why. - Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with data analysis by Haru Coryne, ProPublica, and Ryan Little, from 2022.

One of the algorithm’s developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had “too much empathy” compared to computer generated pricing.

Everything Owned by Nestlé - Mark Pierce, Esq, Wyoming LLC Attorney. I’m not sure why an attorney’s firm would post this, but it’s handy. One thing I found interesting in supermarkets in Portugal was that information on who produced food products was much more transparently displayed on the shelves, making it easier for me to avoid products from Nestlé, probably the most evil company in the world, and I don’t say that lightly.

The Man Who Killed Google Search - Edward Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At. Putting names to the villains of the Great Enshittening.

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

Speaking of villains, in My Dinner With Andreessen, Rick Perlstein drops the revelation of what the inventor of the modern web browser thinks of rural America, and these words need to be hung around his neck forever:

“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” (from three-part series in The American Prospect)

I’m a Tenured College Professor. I’m Quitting. Here’s Why. - Jessica Wildfire, OK Doomer. I knew it was bad for adjuncts in the US but the situation is pretty dire for tenured professors as well:

That’s right, the same university that gave me a chocolate bar for a raise also says I can’t take on a second job to support my family. They’re worried it would distract me from all the free work I’m doing for them. They never say this part out loud, but I also think they don’t want anyone to ever build up any kind of financial cushion or independence. If we did that, they wouldn’t be able to push us around. We could actually quit.

People Are Slowly Realizing Their Auto Insurance Rates Are Skyrocketing Because Their Car Is Covertly Spying On Them Karl Bode, Techdirt. Don’t get a new car. None.

And as the sector is getting automated by sloppy AI, those determinations aren’t going to go in your favor (see: AI’s rushed implementation in healthcare). That’s before the fact that consumers aren’t being told about the surveillance, and aren’t given a clear option to stop it. Or that the data is also being sold to a litany of dodgy data brokers who, in turn, see minimal oversight.

How Conservative Policies and Rhetoric Kill People - Thom Hartmann, The New Republic. To be honest, this one is still on my to-read list, but I gotta go close a bunch of tabs now.

It’s all a lot, isn’t it? So here are some palate cleansers.

The new Deep Purple album, presumed to be their last because 4 out of five members are over 75, will be called =1 - Nick Soveiko, The Highway Star. Here’s the first single off it, a track named Portable Door:

All The Hooded Crow songs are rare, because we only ever had the demo tapes and one compilation CD that sold maybe 100 copies, but this one is extra rare, because it’s a rehearsal recording. An actual demo recording exists and for this remix, Johan took a vocal from that and blended it with the rehearsal tape, so this is a never-heard-before arrangement clocking in at 1:50 and full of energy. And - bliss - the thumbnail is not AI but a new drawing I made back in November for a video of my own.

And here’s another one, also one that got away from any kind of release at the time: now that I’m hearing it again for the first time in decades, “The Reverend’s Comic Adventure”, the only The Hooded Crow track written by Danny Barnhoorn, is kind of the missing link between the Crow and Alpha Alpha, Danny and Johan’s other band.