sculd

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."

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?

(Video has full English subtitle if you turn it on)

Okay...as expected, the AI revolution has already reached Hololive. First using ChatGPT for script in previous episode, now AI tools to generate video...

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...

I have seen so many articles, tweets, posts, etc. in the past few months about AI eradicating all jobs or something along the line, and robots eliminating all needs for human labour.

And then I look at all the jobs that I have worked on.

Good luck using AI to get through government bureaucracies. I am sure ChatGPT get help you navigate all the regulations, apply to all the licenses automatically, comply with regulations etc. I am sure when a company is fined millions they can just say "but...ChatGPT say this can work!"

Good luck telling the CEO to use AI assistant. I am sure the 70-years-old CEO would prefer shouting to a phone which may tell them the idea does not work instead of shouting to a group of employees who would nod nervously and then implement the ideas while ignoring the bad parts.

Good luck replacing humans with robots. The maintenance costs of hardware and software on an army of robots which needs fuel and electricity and probably internet connection MUST BE lower than hiring labour at minimum wages. Right? Did I forgot to mention that human can takes care of themselves?

Remember that the society is run by humans. Even the rich and the powerful are human and have human needs. They would want other people to work for them.

What if a singularity AI took over the world? I mean if that is possible and the society fail to prevent such an event from happening then humanity deserves to perish anyways. Also please don't tell me you believe in Roko's basilisk.

Stop worrying and start living your life!

I strongly recommend this indie singer songwriter. I can feel the emotion every time to their song.

(FYI. Kei Sugawara is non-binary.)

From article:

If you have the Brave Browser installed on your Windows devices, then you may also have Brave VPN services installed on the machine. Brave installs these services without user consent on Windows devices.

More reason to ditch the crypto bro browser.