Sasha Akhavi @sakhavi@qoto.org

The expansion of AI, and especially LLMs such as ChatGPT, is … not going well, to say the least. @jeffjarvis offers self-described “unpopular opinions” about where we are and where we should (and will?) head. https://buzzmachine.com/2023/08/21/a-few-unpopular-opinions-about-ai/

@opengeohub @mwfc Scariest thing about AI? The corporations that own it and the data that makes it work.

No, it can’t help us combat the climate crisis any more than the autocorrect on your phone can.

How do you create ethical AI? You tax trillion-dollar corporations and billionaires to extinction and you build technology for the commons, funded by the commons.

So this is crazy fcuked.

https://gizmodo.com/sat-college-board-tells-facebook-tiktok-your-scores-gpa-1850768077

Oh myyy, this is too good not to share!

Community college is now free for Mass. residents 25 and older. Millions qualify

https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/08/24/healey-massachusetts-massreconnect-higher-education-cost-free-students

#HigherEd

So now the deadbird site, formerly known as Twitter, is inviting developers to come back and "build what's next" with the much abused API.

Twitter (and Reddit)'s greed-infused API restrictions wrecked a project we (ASU News Co/Lab) were doing to help journalists send corrections down the same social media pathways as the original journalism.

The idea what we'd ever work with them again is a sick joke.

Maui update from Senator Schatz of Hawaii: please visit SOUTH Maui, he says

We don't talk much in this culture about how boys become the men we think so poorly of.

It's analogous to why we never ever talk about why the demand for drugs is so high, but only about how evil the suppliers are, and what we'll do to shut them down.

If we did, well, we'd have to take on some responsibility that most of us don't want.

Interesting article:

There are 2.2 million human beings confined in prison and jail cells in the United States tonight. About 500,000 of them are presumptively innocent and awaiting trial, the vast majority are confined by the government solely because they can't pay enough money to buy their release. This country has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners—the highest rate of human caging of any society in recorded history of the modern world. At least another 4.5 million people are under government control through probation and parole “supervision.”

Between 80% and 90% of people charged with crimes are so poor that they can't afford a lawyer. Twenty-five years into America’s incarceration boom, black people were incarcerated at a rate 6 times that of South Africa during apartheid. The incarceration rate for black people in the nation’s capital, where I live, is 19 times that of white people.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy

#massincarceration

Horrifying.

University of Houston students brace for LGBTQ Resource Center closure in response to Texas’ DEI ban: The announcement confronted students with the impact of a new law that will require all state-funded colleges and universities to close their diversity, equity and inclusion offices.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/17/university-houston-lgbtq-center-dei-ban/

Happy to announce that my next book, tentatively titled "Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media" will be published by Oxford University Press!

Read more about it, and my process of writing the book, here on #FOSSacademic

https://fossacademic.tech/2023/08/17/OxfordUP.html

[Replies to this post will appear as comments on my blog if they are set to public]

#books #fediverse