Olives @olives@qoto.org

My science post is thousands of words long which is probably longer than a lot of social media posts but it's not that long otherwise.

It's always interesting how references can make a post look far longer than it actually is.

Reviewing the science post again for a blog posting, I am thinking of making it a bit more formal in a future iteration, as blogs kinda vibe as a more formal setting for me than social media.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/10/30/japan/crime-legal/same-sex-ruling-unconstitutional/
"The Tokyo High Court ruled on Wednesday that not allowing same-sex couples to marry is unconstitutional, with the beaming plaintiffs team calling the judgment “historic.”

It is the second high-court ruling to describe the ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. The first high court ruling was handed down in March at the Sapporo High Court.

Six same-sex marriage lawsuits have been filed in five district courts nationwide."
#HumanRights #Japan

As a reminder, if someone is talking about how content is being unfairly censored on page ten of a random thread on an obscure forum, chances are we are not going to know about it.

To mirror the science post onto a blog, I'm going to change the format of it a bit for it to fit better there and to carry out a quick round of review.

One of the reasons I wrote a new preamble (largely in the style of the previous one) was to make it easier for it to stand on it's own without having to provide additional context.

I'll look into making other parts of the science post flow better but I'm trying to avoid introducing too much text there which doesn't directly address a particular point.

I'd like to avoid making too many impromptu posts right now. These ones were important to address potential issues in the meanwhile.

At the very least, that is a less intrusive intervention than that other one, and yet, because Facebook does that other one, that is the one he thinks is gospel.

Also, on the issue of child safety, he would resort to tactics like describing the details of someone being abused to defend Facebook's scanning practices, however, he failed to take action on the issue when he was an executive responsible for it.

For instance, he didn't set the privacy settings on the accounts of minors to the highest level by default. We know this because Facebook is only announcing doing this recently.

He also commented on how Facebook wasn't doing enough to deal with things like foreign interference... This was at a time though when Facebook was already under pressure.

So, he would keep throwing them softballs of small clusters of accounts that he found and they would resolve them.

His positions on things like end-to-end encryption would be strangely specific and tailored to whatever Facebook was willing to do at any particular time.

For instance, Facebook had already done E2EE for Whatsapp but kept delaying it for FB Messenger. He would come up with very specific arguments for why Facebook was in the right, and how FB Messenger was somehow "different". He would later forget these points after Facebook rolled E2EE out in FB Messenger.

At first the Facebook executive looked like someone who was actually "concerned", but then, I noticed that he would keep giving Facebook easy challenges to solve for them to appear "responsible" (usually during times when they were already being questioned), while viciously attacking competing companies.

Don't be a useful idiot for Facebook.

I'm tempted to write a new piece on "#AI", but as always, I have to get around to doing the other things first.

Remember that algorithms which ingest things and generate content are not new. What might be new is the architecture and how much data a few companies want to put into it (there are researchers looking for ways to train models with smaller datasets).

Also, not that long ago, there was an "academic" who worked at an institution which was run by a Facebook executive, and who just so happened to come out with things which attacked Facebook's competitors in contrived ways.

On the other hand, Facebook was not held to the same standard. If they were to be held to a standard, it would be one that they could trivially "resolve" with a gesture.

There's always a new idea for what I could do.

https://theintercept.com/2024/10/25/africom-microsoft-openai-military/ This reminds me of that Project Maven thing which the folks at Google really didn't want to get involved in.

https://apnews.com/article/jaywalking-legalized-new-york-6df1eacddfa5b7951a51dadc05a4ce6b I've never been a fan of banning jaywalking, so this looks good to me.

"404" was upset that someone didn't speak to them prior to one of their hit pieces (and instead refuted each and every point in a more neutral outlet), because what company would talk to someone who looks like they have an axe to grind, and might spin whatever they say against them.