Olives @olives@qoto.org

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.

I think someone thought that the article was being too hard on a particular company. Anyway, the reaction was quite surprising.

There was also an incident a couple of years ago with the Vice blog.

One of the writers, I think it was someone called Emanuel, got into a social media spat with someone for... them mildly criticizing one of the articles, and he attacked them saying that they should be flattered that he would pay attention to them at all.

Excuse me if I've posted a fair bit of media critique lately.

I wanted to get that out of the way as I don't really want to revisit it later, in the case that a blogger posts something stupid and I have to comment on it.

Wired tends to be better than things like "404", although it has it's flaws (such as an over-emphasis on "AI").

That said, these tend to be people with more expertise in a particular area, rather than a general current affairs blog as those others are.

To be fair, I've seen good articles on Substack, just as I've seen good articles on blogs.

The question box doesn't appear to work though.

I was following up on an old article from there to see if it was still live before making a post and I noticed that it's been bought up by... What appears to be some sort of AI firm.

The articles are gone.

Speaking of which, did you notice that Gawker's domain has expired and it's been bought up by a completely irrelevant company?

If I start writing a blog, maybe I'll go a bit into this form of journalism, although honestly, I think it might be going downhill.

Vice went bankrupt.

Gawker's domain has expired.