tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

Boudain explains Kissinger far better than I ever can:

Very fascinating paper from Google DeepMind researchers prompts ChatGPT to spit out training data in response to basic queries. This includes large amounts of PII, passages of text pulled from scraped directly from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, fandom wikis, Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, copyrighted legal disclaimers, Wikipedia pages, a casino wholesaling website, news blogs, and random internet comments. 

https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-chatgpt-to-reveal-its-training-data/

"Proctorio, for example, is a popular remote proctoring platform that uses AI to detect perceived behavior abnormalities by test takers in real time. Because the platform employs facial detection systems that fail to recognize Black faces more than half of the time, Black students have an exceedingly hard time completing their exams without triggering the faulty detection systems, which results in locked exams, failing grades, and disciplinary action."

https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/ai-educational-equity-for-marginalized-students-tanksley-20231125/

Going through an archaeological exhibition in southeast Europe is mostly a familiar experience for a Swedish prehistorian. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, everything looks nice and familiar. But then comes this weird urban semi-industrial Classical interlude with the Romans, and you're completely confused in that museum hall. Finally though the Goths and the Slavs show up and put everything to rights again, so you can relax back into fond recognition.

#Archaeology #slovenia

🇫🇷 The French welfare agency uses an algorithm to detect potential fraudsters. Every month, it ranks the households of 32 million people, including 13 million children, with a "risk score".

For the first time, @LaQuadrature obtained its source code and could run it.

The criteria that increase the risk score are
- being poor,
- living in a poor neighborhood,
- being a single mother,
- being unemployed,
- having a disability.

https://www.laquadrature.net/2023/11/27/notation-des-allocataires-lindecence-des-pratiques-de-la-caf-desormais-indeniable/

Rightwingers are promoting aggressive anti-bikeism as a key element of the reactionary political identity. Just the most destructive people, reflexively raging against anything coded “left” or “woke.” And so even the most universally beneficial trends and behavior are declared evil and “Un-American” 1/

Paywalled article here, I'll share once I have a non-paywalled link (hopefully soon): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03610-5

The summary: astronomers spent a lot of time asking SpaceX and other large satellite operators to pretty please make their satellites fainter and/or use fewer satellites. And then BlueWalker 3 was launched by some tiny company and is one of the brightest things in the sky. Asking nicely isn't working: international regulation and pollution penalties are needed.

So, what do I think of Finland closing all but the northernmost border crossing with Russia?

That Finns are stupid and in haste and thus do not make good decisions. They are also quite racist, and when someone is both stupid and racist, they are very easy to play, as Russia have been doing here. Finns do exactly what Russia wants them to do. The northernmost crossing is kept open only because it was made clear to the government that closing them all would be illegal and the gov doesn’t have guts to do such openly illegal decisions.

We might also argue whether low hundreds asylum seekers are such a _serious_ threat to national security that is needed to close border crossings at all according to Finnish law, especially considering that Finland is prepared to receive six-digit number of asylum seekers in short notice.

As I said, Finland has been really stupid. We have opposed EU-level solutions to asylum seekers coming to EU, as if we are not the country with longest land border of the EU. Russia has done border control for us on its side, with no legal obligation to do that, and we simply trusted that they will keep doing that so we don’t have to worry about it. You can always trust Russia to play fair, right?

We have a long tradition of being very legalistic country. That was actually a form of resistance against Imperial Russia back in the days of Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. There was even very famous painting by Edvard Isto called “The Attack” (1899), where the two-headed eagle tries to rip the law from the hands of the maid of Finland. Even and especially under the attack, Finland sticks to law.

There was strategic pragmatism in following the rules ourselves and making sure that if someone breaks them it is the other guy. Especially after WWII it was evident that for a small country such as Finland it would be of utmost importance that international relations are based on laws, contracts and agreements.

For big countries like Russia it is more beneficial to have an order where everyone bends and breaks the rules at will, and in this case right now they wanted to make evident to everyone, especially the majority world, that also Finland, this former poster child of human rights and playing by the rules, is actually willing to ditch them in an instant. This is what Russia wants.

And Finns as fools were ready to do exactly that. A large part of the society started immediately demanding that now we need to get rid of all international agreements and such.

The cartoonist Ville Ranta illustrated that very well by drawing the maid of Finland holding the law, and small one-headed sparrow trying to bite a corner. Behind a rock hysterical people shout to let it go, that we can't afford to hold into that anymore.

My proposal would be that all and every asylum seeker that comes to Finnish border will be given due process. They come from countries where majority of asylum seekers have got refugee status in Finland, and looking at their countries of origin, it is more likely than not that they have a case that at least needs to be investigated properly.

Like, 100% of Jemenis get refugee status in Finland because the country is in ruins, and weapons systems Finns sold to the Emirates have been used there.

But because Russia is using those people as an instrument to pressure Finland, Finland should get other EU countries to the bandwagon, and announce that for every third-country asylum seeker that comes to Finland from Russia, there will be extra 10 million euros donated to artillery rounds and other arms supplies to Ukraine.

In addition EU could announce that for every 1000 asylum seekers that Russia sends to Finnish border, one Eurofighter would be donated to Ukraine.

It would mean that people fleeing from some of the worst conflict areas in the world will get a due process from civilized world, and Ukraine would get more weapons to drive Russian invaders out faster.

And instead of being stupid and letting Russia set the play, we could play smart, take the initiative and keep our cool.

There are important stories to be reporting in this space. When automated systems are being used, who is being left without recourse to challenge decisions? Whose data is being stolen? Whose labor is being exploited? How is mass surveillance being extended and normalized? What are the impacts to the natural environment and information ecosystem? 25/

Wow, IEA dropping this just before COP28 is quite a move.

https://youtu.be/UzQJ2norrEw?si=2KRwFw70s0oL9Q3f

This video is one minute long, but I’ll also link to the one hour long report launch video with the key findings in the next post. It feels as close as I think you’ll ever get to an energy thinktank doing a mike drop on debunking the usual fossil fuel talking points.

Especially when they were set up in the 70s to *secure* fossil fuel supply for rich westerners on economies.

Doing reviews for a conference and 1) getting annoyed about the authors assuming US readers, and 2) learning horrible things about the US.

"[...]having an eviction on record makes it more difficult to [...] qualify for affordable housing programs."

WHAT? That's who those programs are _for_?

"Exempel på brister som skulle kunna leda till utvisning är bristande regelefterlevnad, som bidragsfusk och skulder. Det kan också handla om association eller samröre med kriminella nätverk och våldsbejakande organisationer. Även missbruk och vissa uttalanden kan komma att räknas till sådana brister, enligt regeringen."

https://omni.se/fler-utlanningar-ska-utvisas-for-bristande-levnadssatt/a/3EaoJq

Elva nazister vid bordet, som sagt.

#SvPol #Nazister #Regeringen

This is of course my favorite cover of The Continent, from May of this year. I wouldn’t mind having it as a poster. This is how the magazine explained the image:

”Cover: The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo’s iconic fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel depicts the Christian deity breathing life into the very first man. Today, a handful of incredibly rich men in Silicon Valley claim a similarly grandiose mission. This is, apparently, the dawn of the age of ’artificial intelligence’.

According to its creators, this emerging technology is godlike in its abilities: so powerful that it could one day create unimaginable wealth and luxury – or destroy us all. But not everyone is buying into
this hype. We spoke to several African AI researchers who see, instead, an all too familiar pattern of exploitation and extraction.”

@thecontinent

This is not a fully formed thought, but I have a visceral reaction to seeing coverage of Altman’s firing treated as a top-left news headline. It feels part of the hagiography of these dudes, that we cover them like kings and we cover their companies like nations, but somehow we don’t cover what their tech is going to do to real people.

According to all reports, he was triggered by the fear that, exactly after her graduation, she would definitely leave the city and move abroad, or to another city.
In this sense, getting such an important University result appeared to the guy as a level of independence and personal accomplishment too big to bear, and enough to make him a killer.
(there were other reports of him being "too possessive", but that was the final trigger)

Last week poor Giulia Cecchettin was ready to have the final discussion on her thesis in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Padova, but a few days before she disappeared, together with her former boyfriend. This weekend, she was found dead in the mountain at a hundred kilometers of distance, while a day later the boyfriend was arrested in germany, where he drove until he ran out of money and gasoline.

It’s curious that I haven’t seen anyone bring up the Sabra and Shatila massacre that Israel aided and abetted during their invasion of Beirut in 1982. The reason I’m surprised it doesn’t come up is that it was very close to Oct 7: attackers going door to door, torturing and butchering 1000-2000 civilians in their own homes in a “hands-on” fashion. Palestinian civilians in that case.

The point is absolutely NOT that the earlier horror somehow justifies the later one. It emphatically does not.

The point is that, unfortunately, what happened on Oct 7 was not “a new dimension” of horror, or a “uniquely” evil event. And when it happened before, Israeli voters later enthusiastically elected Ariel Sharon, regardless of the fact that Israel’s OWN inquiry at the time found him ultimately responsible for the massacre (at least he got a slap on the wrist and not a slap on the back). Memory is short, and double standards run high.

“In February 1983, an independent commission chaired by Irish diplomat Seán MacBride (the then-assistant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations) launched an inquiry into the violence and concluded that the IDF, as the erstwhile occupying power over Sabra and Shatila, bore responsibility for the militia's massacre. The commission also stated that the massacre was a form of genocide.”