Climate activists see surge in support following German raids
Following Wednesday’s raid targeting 15 properties affiliated with members of the group in seven German states, the activists called for people to join protest marches in several cities, including Berlin and Munich.
The rally in the German capital drew several hundred people on Wednesday evening, making it the largest to date, Last Generation said.
There is a good report by Lighthouse, a Dutch media collective, about the families falsely accused by their state. There’s a high number of similar cases like the one of Prof. Torley’s, and such ‘false positives’ will always happen as they are inherent to such analyses.
The point for me here is that this guy from Microsoft likely knows that (or, in case he doesn’t, there are certainly a lot of experts at MS who know it as we can reasonably assume). What I don’t understand is that executives get often away with such statements, journalists rarely raise the issue of biases these models have. I feel that is not understood by the masses, and companies and governments exploit that use it against the people.
This is very impressive. I would have tons of questions, though, as I don’t understand :-)
How did the device know that he accepts the call? He didn’t do something as far as I am aware.
And how did the device know that he wants the translation into French, or that he wants a translation at all?
He says that it’s private. But how? Doesn’t have the device sync with other data, e.g., some health data base (regarding the chocolate example)? Where does the data sit, in the cloud or on the device? Meaning, does the device also work offline or do you need a cloud (or a network)?
And how does the device learn and store new data (e.g., that he ate a chocolate)? And when he eats the chocolate, does this go into some database? If so, who controls this data?
I am wondering whether this technology could enable communication with non-human species. There’s a fair evidence from research that animals have someform of intelligence, e.g., the paper posted yesterday. I mean, if this decoder can be trained on an individual human being’s brain activity, why not on any non-human being’s?
It’s all written in the linked article and this thread already imo, but as I just stumbled about this:
If you post any content to the Bluesky Web Services, you hereby grant Bluesky and its licensees a worldwide, perpetual […] licence to use, reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, modify, sublicense …
That’s from BS’s Terms of Service.
And this is somewhat at the other end of the spectrum: Texas governor decried for ‘disgusting’ rhetoric in wake of mass shooting
Republican Greg Abbott condemned for calling […] victims of Friday night shooting in rural Cleveland ‘illegal immigrants’.
The victims, which included a young boy and two women who were shielding children from gunfire, were all from Honduras.
After reading this site (btw, they appear to be using Cloudflare for their decentralized service) it doesn’t change anything. They indeed “may soon be able to migrate”, may “federate soon”, and all that, but it simply isn’t. It is a centralized service, and they promise once again that this time everything will really be better.
ActivityPub has a over 20k different independent instances, mostly federating with one another. BlueSky has one, and if you try to set up an independent one, it won’t federate.
Yes, and the current owners have no economic incentive to change that. It’s a project backed by financial investors, which means they’ll want to get back as much money as possible as soon as possible.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not some “venture capital bashing”. It’s their full right to earn their money back and do with their companies whatever they want. If I were a financial investor, I did the same (what is ignored in many discussions on this is the fact that the vast majority of VC investments fail due to their high-risk nature, but that’s a different story). I just argue that if you want a distributed and/or decentralised system, you likely need a different kind of funding and a more decentralized form of decision making.
it decentralizes the cost to the central authority by pushing data load onto volunteers
the sad reality is that people will buy the hype
I have been discussing BlueSky some time ago with a friend of mine, and we soon agreed exactly on these two things. This is an excellent article, thanks for sharing this.
it is time for me to walk the walk and change funds
We all should do this, although it is going to get very hard as investments in fossil fuels (and all other investments) are highly concentrated.
For example, the world’s 2 biggest asset managers, Vanguard and Black Rock, account for 17% of all global investments in fossil fuels. 50% of the total institutional investments in fossil fuel companies are held by just 23 investors. One new study is here.
The same two AMs -Vanguard and Black Rock- are also the two biggest shareholders of Google, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta, Apple, and Microsoft, as well as many other multinationals across practically all industry sectors.
The concentration in the asset management industry has increasingly become concerning and appears to have accelerated since the financial crisis 2007/08 for various reasons (e.g., there’s a growing trend to passively managed portfolios, which is basically a good thing imo, but it puts AM’s fees under pressure, which is why they further concentrate, which in turn increases asset price volatility, which also means higher systematic risks, …).
It is high time we start codifying at least some protections into law
Yes, it’s sadly true.
For the issue you described above you wouldn’t necessarily need license plate scanners as it might be done with "correlation analysis" using CCTVs.
China’s government, which has been the most aggressive in using surveillance and AI to control its population, uses co-appearance searches to spot protesters and dissidents by merging video with a vast network of databases.
[In the US] no laws expressly prohibit police from using co-appearance searches […], “but it’s an open question” whether doing so would violate constitutionally protected rights of free assembly and protections against unauthorized searches.
In Europe, Asia and Africa the situation is similar to the US afaik, which means police departments and private companies have to weigh the balance of security and privacy on their own.
It would be a start but not helpful if it stops there. The surveillance in China and its social credit system is a desaster for the people and much worse. A ban in the US doesn’t help the people over there.
Edit for an addition: Iran to install cameras in public to spot women wearing no hijab
There is also https://beehaw.org/c/finance just fyi.
Yeah, mistake corrected. Thanks.