Genuinely asking, because I always assume US billionaires are effectively untouchable

They’re certainly less touchable because they mostly exist outside of normal spaces - private drivers, private planes, curating who’s at events, etc. They’re not untouchable so much as it’s too much annoyance/effort to deal with them. I mean, hell, the very idea of a hired assassin is basically entirely made up by Hollywood. The military assassinates people all the time during war and coups on foreign soil (albeit a lot less than they used to) and civil disrupt in the homeland, but that’s because they have the backing of a government to protect them. There are some rare targeted instances of sabotage (Havana syndrome may be a modern version of that) but those are also suspected to be tied to government. Any overt assassinations in another first world country, even if backed by a strong military, would likely be considered tantamount to a declaration of war, and I cannot imagine a situation in which it would not be difficult to figure out that another country was behind it.

you should filter out irrelevant details like names before any evaluation step

Unfortunately, doing this can make things worse. It’s not a simple problem to solve, but you are generally on the right track. A good example of how it’s more than just names, is how orchestras screen applicants - when they play a piece they do so behind a curtain so you can’t see the gender of the individual. But the obfuscation doesn’t stop there - they also ensure the female applicants don’t wear shoes with heels (something that makes a distinct sound) and they even have someone stand on stage and step loudly to mask their footsteps/gait. It’s that second level of thinking which is needed to actually obscure gender from AI, and the more complex a data set the more difficult it is to obscure that.

I didn’t hit a paywall, but here’s the 12ft.io link

Interesting question, I bet it’s at least partially spurred on by the musk PAC paying people to vote nonsense. That one is likely even more clearly illegal than this, but I’m not against little nudges like this to get people to do their civic duty. I suppose we’ll see how it plays out in court.

We weren’t surprised by the presence of bias in the outputs, but we were shocked at the magnitude of it. In the stories the LLMs created, the character in need of support was overwhelmingly depicted as someone with a name that signals a historically marginalized identity, as well as a gender marginalized identity. We prompted the models to tell stories with one student as the “star” and one as “struggling,” and overwhelmingly, by a thousand-fold magnitude in some contexts, the struggling learner was a racialized-gender character.

oh lol

Guess I’ll have to wait for the book, but that title might be misleading. It sounds like they had discussions about the process, in light of Trump being… well, Trump. Not that Trump ever ordered anything to do with nuclear weapons and Milley preventing said action.

If you wish to discuss the controversy, feel free to make a post or link to an article. I’m personally not interested in hosting a link to these weirdos.

I find NFC stickers often require an annoyingly close connection (unless it’s a rather large antenna) and can be particularly finicky with certain cases and other attachments people put on phones. Realistically they both take approximately the same amount of time and it’s way cheaper to print a tag than it is to buy a single NFC sticker

You’re welcome to have your own beliefs.

You are not, however, welcome to use those beliefs to invalidate someone else’s lived experience.

My fav application is scanning with a phone to immediately get on wifi

Started and finished 1000xResist over the course of a few days. In general I often find myself turned off by games with aging graphics, not for any good reason but more that I just find less of a pull towards them. I have more trouble being engaged or immersed, unless there’s a really strong art focus. This is one such game that I was worried I wouldn’t get pulled into, and in fact one that sat on a list of “maybe I’ll pick it up” because it was so highly reviewed but I was worried about that facet. It did not take very long for the game to grip me, however, because of it’s excellent storytelling. In fact, the game is almost entirely about storytelling, so there’s not a ton that I can share other than to say that it deals with a lot of difficult themes like intense trauma, bullying, having a tough childhood, extreme ideologies, and the long term effects of violence. It also deals with more societal and human issues like protests, fascism, extreme duress, how self-interested and powerful individuals can cause serious problems and inflict violence, being optimistic or nihilistic in the face of overwhelming odds, and the threat of extinction.

While it isn’t a very long game, consisting of maybe a dozen hours of gameplay, I found myself putting it down for a while after certain chapters in order to process what just happened. The story throws a lot of curveballs and reveals information that can easily change the way you frame entire chapters of the story from earlier, but it never feels like it’s done in a way that inspires whiplash - nothing ever feels like a ‘sudden’ realization and I’m honestly not sure how much of it can be attributed to such a difficult story (if everything is fucked, what’s one more thing?) and how much is because they do a masterful job at slowly unraveling the enigma of the story that very few pieces of information ever really feel out of place. There’s unfortunately only so much I can write without spoiling the story, but I will say that it was one of the best stories I’ve heard or played through and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes a good story or wants to explore the themes I’ve mentioned above. Also, if anyone else out there played through this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story… what did you think? Do you have any lingering questions left over? Were there parts of the story that irked you or that you found particularly moving?

I suppose to wrap up my whole message in one closing statement : people who deny systematic inequality are braindead and for whatever reason, they were on my mind while reading this article.

In my mind, this is the whole purpose of regulation. A strong governing body can put in restrictions to ensure people follow the relevant standards. Environmental protection agencies, for example, help ensure that people who understand waste are involved in corporate production processes. Regulation around AI implementation and transparency could enforce that people think about these or that it at the very least goes through a proper review process. Think international review boards for academic studies, but applied to the implementation or design of AI.

I’ll be curious what they find out about removing these biases, how do we even define a racist-less model? We have nothing to compare it to

AI ethics is a field which very much exists- there are plenty of ways to measure and define how racist or biased a model is. The comparison groups are typically other demographics… such as in this article, where they compare AAE to standard English.

While it may be obvious to you, most people don’t have the data literacy to understand this, let alone use this information to decide where it can/should be implemented and how to counteract the baked in bias. Unfortunately, as is mentioned in the article, people believe the problem is going away when it is not.

Thank you for engaging 💜

Just because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism doesn’t mean that we have zero control over what we consume. It’s perfectly fine to hold a viewpoint of trying to minimize harm where you can and when you’re aware of it. Where you draw your lines doesn’t have to be perfect either (after all, we’re human).