#and data does not look like mark zuckerberg | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

blazehedgehog · 9 months

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Thoughts on the twitter clones popping up because El*n is destroying twitter? Hive was hilariously shortlived. But do you think Mastodon, Cohost, or Bluesky have what it takes to replace twitter?

I think a lot of them are dumb and greedy. The way people so willingly flock to anything even remotely promising is depressing, even when it's a pretty much open fact that monsters are behind them.

Like, Threads. Threads sucks! It's by Facebook! You know, Mark Zuckerberg, the dude who literally had to go before congress and explain himself because they were stealing and selling so much of your personal data without your permission? Because, by the way: That's not supposed to happen. You're supposed to care about that. You can't just be like "oh well they have my data already, may as well ignore it". That's a bad thing to just let happen!

This is the guy who invented the "pivot to video" concept that decimated an entire industry of writers who were now expected to produce videos, all because Facebook was dramatically faking viewership numbers in a bid to lure in more advertisers. He runs a site that was proud to accept and promote insane fringe theories and undoubtedly contributed to the attempted coup of the United States Government on January 6th 2020. That Facebook. That Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. They're behind Threads.

Or what about Bluesky? Everybody hated Jack Dorsey when he was running Twitter, so much so that they basically forced him out of the company. Now he's behind Bluesky, a website that is literally just Twitter 2, which openly admits he's feeding and selling all of your personal data to machine learning databases (like ChatGPT or Midjourney).

They also openly have settings for whether or not you want to see racist and bigoted content, which actually means being a Nazi on Bluesky is totally okay! They're going to welcome those people with open arms! They're just going to give you a setting to hide them instead of, you know, eradicating them off the platform like cockroaches. But it means Bluesky allows them, marks them, and lets them freely indoctrinate more people into becoming literal murderers.

Remember Hive? Remember how many people FLOODED to Hive and it was discovered they had an eensy weensy teeny tiny security flaw that allowed anyone to both edit and delete any post on the entire platform? Hive said they were going down "for a couple days" to fix it and ended up being down for six months. Also, the developers behind Hive actively hid their identities this entire time! Even before they were popular! There was no way to be sure who was EVER running that service! People were joking that it was a CIA operation! Who knows!

People are trading one dumpster fire for another with these places. You might be escaping the stupidity of Elon Musk but you're still digging deeper, not out of the hole. Every single option is going to lead to more regret and misery eventually.

Even Cohost isn't perfect! And I like Cohost! It's a lot more like Tumblr used to be in the early days. And Cohost is a lot more grassroots than any of these other services, they're a lot more open with whether or not the service is going to survive, but that's also because they respect the poster, respect their data, and just want to make a cool place to hang out at. Out of all the places to spring up during Twitter's death march, Cohost is where I've been posting.

But I heard someone say that Cohost is a very "holistic" approach to posting, and that's true. It's the social media website version being a vegan. It's all kale and chia seeds.

Cohost has no recommendation algorithm. It does not tell you who is following who. It does not offer numbers to tell you how many likes or shares a post has, or who liked or shared it. Everything you do on that site exists in a near-total vacuum unless you specifically put in the work and go looking for it. On some level it's admirable, because they don't want people developing the same competitive, toxic habits of only posting to "do numbers."

But also it sucks because, like, there's no way to identify and reference notable posts, nor see who your mutuals are. The only way to find friends through other friends is if they share one of their posts. And once a post falls out of favor, it's basically lost in the void to all those except a chosen few who remember how to speak its name.

But the vibes at Cohost are... good. I guess. It feels much more like everybody knows everybody. One good post will come across the feed and it feels like the whole dang website shares it that day.

But I would like a little bit of numbers. As a treat. Just because we can subsist on tofu does not mean we do not also deserve a nice, juicy hamburger too.

There's also Mastodon, and I have a friend who really liked Mastodon and wanted it to succeed, but I also heard it described as "the linux of social media" and that's exactly why I'd never use it as my primary platform. It's supposed to be decentralized, making it more diverse and easier for sub-communities to exist within the network, but last I checked, it just made it a pain in the ass to actually follow people that were on different networks than you.

Each one had a different compatibility song and dance you had to do in order for you to follow them from your network. Didn't like it. The whole federated platform feels like slightly too much work to use.

I will probably keep posting on Twitter until the last ember burns out. But I am believing more and more that what Elon is doing to Twitter is deliberate murder in order to deplatform his enemies. He's an idiot, don't get me wrong, but he's also doing things that are deliberately malicious "for the lulz." I'm sure he thinks he can rebuild Twitter into whatever he wants because he's just that rich and smart so he's willing to gut it from the inside out first.

#questions #Anonymous #twitter #cohost #bluesky #mastadon #hive #threads #tumblr

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w3bpunk · 10 months

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A lot of reactions to this controversy are hard for me to understand, like what is the purpose of encouraging sending anon hate to staff, of all possible courses of action. I feel like that isn't very different from yelling at a random worker at a restaurant because you got the wrong order or something? :/

I'm glad that there's at least some people that aren't just going with the rampant misinfo regarding anything staff does and keeping a level head about things, because it's super upsetting to see people encourage behavior that should be against their personal ethos.

You're right that it isn't much different from yelling at a worker at any other establishment. It also is a little similar to when people get so caught up in performatively hating terfs, they forget to support actual trans people. To explain why-- I feel like most of the time people are justifying this by imagining every single member of staff is more or less an Elon Musk or a Mark Zuckerberg, or otherwise complicit in that techie capitalist corpo culture. A common rebuttal for saying anything vaguely in defense of Tumblr staff is to imply that you're a bootlicker. To which I say, WHAT boots? It makes about as much sense as yelling at a cashier at Chick-fil-A for their employer's bigoted corporate decisions. That cashier is still selling their labor for a living and deserves workplace autonomy. And for you to treat them like a god damn person. You need to identify who specifically is actually causing harm here. Your hatred of the enemy is superseding your care for the people you're claiming to protect.

People lose track of what specifically makes tech companies corrupt too. It isn't immediately apparent to them how to articulate on a technical level what is happening that is bad and wrong. Like most people seem to think any kind of data collection is problematic, because the idea of that data is too abstract for them to talk about at length. They just heard that they should be worried about it in general.

Their idea of how moderation works is likewise too abstract to be useful. Even other people on staff who aren't on the moderation team don't know the details of what their average day looks like, so why would a random 22 year old with no experience working with customer service software tools? Most moderation will always be invisible to people, and that's just the inherent nature of that work.

In all, I think people are just like this because Tumblr staff are relatively accessible compared to other social media platforms, and they can be fungible for everything people don't like about those in addition to what's wrong with Tumblr. Thanks for this ask because it was a good chance to rant about this for a while. I also find it upsetting. I really hate how performative it all is.

#w3bpunk says #tumblr #tumblr staff #tumblr commentary #tech companies

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ailtrahq · 8 months

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People have already started thinking of the metaverse as a dead space. However, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, is still betting on its future. Although it did appear like the social media giant is pivoting towards artificial intelligence (AI), his latest discussion with Lex Fridman, a computer scientist, showcases how the company is not ready to give up yet. More Metaverse Experiences On the Rise The podcast took place in a metaverse setting where Fridman and Zuckerberg were seated miles apart. Lex Fridman expressed “The realism here is just incredible.” Meta CEO addressed the photorealistic avatars as Codec Avatars. The technology uses real-time scanning to present life-like avatars in front of the participants. Fridman said, “For me to have this kind of conversations with loved ones that would just change everything.” [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg[/embed] Additionally, he asked what Mark is doing to make this technology more accessible to people. To that, Meta CEO explained that they are yet to figure out the matter which they’ll start with scanning a handful of people. They require more scans of people which the company is trying to capture. The company is likely to roll out this technology progressively over time. There needs to be more data associated with people. Interestingly, the real-time scanning feature may eliminate identity theft in the metaverse entirely. It would not be possible for a cybercriminal to cloak and disguise until they are actually wearing a mask. Meta CEO presented the possibility of people encountering more metaverse experiences in the coming years. He explained about his latest mixed reality (MR) product Meta Quest 3 that “It’s not ready to be like a kind of mainstream product yet but we just want to we’ll keep tuning in, keep getting more scans in there.” In context to its upcoming Quest 3 headset, Mark revealed that it comes with an advanced chipset. Additionally, it is a third of the cost of Quest Pro. In short, it is better and cheaper as compared to its last products. He described “The display is better. And the chip is better so you’ll get better graphics. It’s 40 percent thinner so it’s um so just more comfortable.” Bringing The Dead Back To Life Zuckerberg also envisions an advanced world where people simply see the world through glass but with holograms. Such reality may exist by the end of this decade, he believes. He also explained the real world as a combination of virtual and physical worlds. People often use the terms physical world and real-world synonymously. Bringing the dead back sounds like a work of fantasy. But it’s all a reality in the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg also discussed the future of virtual worlds. Zuck Bucks put forth the possibility of creating a digital avatar of a deceased person using the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR). Lex Fridman appeared curious about this possibility. He put forward his curiosity during the interview and asked “If you look into the future, is that something you think about, people who pass away but they can still exist in the metaverse.” Mark hinted at the possibility of such a setting. He explained, “If someone has lost a loved one and is grieving, there may be ways in which you know being able to interact or relive certain memories could be helpful but then there’s also probably an extent to which it could become unhealthy.” It does sound like Harry’s addiction to the Mirror of Erised. Additionally, he believes they require more research in this matter. AI and Metaverse Walking Side-by-Side The show also discussed AI in the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg told in one of Meta’s recent earnings calls that they will focus on artificial intelligence temporarily. Now the podcast creates an impression that both technologies are moving side by side in the company. Artificial intelligence should not act against a creator’s will in the metaverse. Mark explains, “AI embodying a real

creator, there’s a whole set of things that you need to do to make sure that AI is not going to say things that the creator doesn’t want right and that the AI is gonna know things and be able to represent things in the way that the creator would want the way that the creator would know.” Mark Zuckerberg was booed for a low-resolution selfie he shared on Instagram. The podcast, however, confounds the expectations of critics based on an initial version of a world Meta is creating. Still, accessibility remains a major constraint. Even if Meta’s latest product is cheaper and better than the rest of the fleet, its price will be a financial blow to several middle-income individuals.

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sandyzakk · 1 year

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Metaverse: The replication of our reality in the digital world

The world of technology and innovation has never been as popular as it has been in recent months, a period in which a new concept began to be studied and, very quickly, also put into practice . Yes, we are talking about the metaverse.

Considered one of the greatest digital revolutions , the Metaverse Development Company is a feature of the virtual universe that enables interaction between people in a unique way, previously seen only in the world of games.

After Mark Zuckerberg announced the change of Facebook’s name to Meta , the theme reached the peak of search on Google, boosted the sector and became the big bet of the technology giants. According to Bloomberg Intelligence’s projection, the metaverse market should reach US$800 billion , which is equivalent to R$4.5 trillion in 2024.

Furthermore, Gartner research reveals that by 2026, 2 billion people will spend at least 1 hour a day in the metaverse for work, entertainment, consumption and education purposes. The areas stand out in the sector and will be increasingly integrated into the physical and virtual world .

But after all, what is this trend in fact and why does it promise to transform the digital world ?

What is metaverse?

The metaverse came out of science fiction movies and reached the technological market of the biggest investors in the world. This is because, with this technology, people are inserted into an immersive and hyper-realistic digital space that merges between the two realities. In other words, digital representation is based on user interaction and experience .

For this reason, the metaverse is based on augmented reality, avatars, 3D images, holograms and prototypes .

However, to access this parallel reality, it is necessary to use equipment such as headsets and virtual reality glasses that allow users not only to look at the device screen, but also to interact immersively . That is, as if they were physically in the digital environment.

It may seem like something from another world, but you don’t have to go that far to imagine the technology in practice. Electronic games like Free Fire and Minecraft, for example, are a successful species of the Metaverse Development solution for exploring immersive reality in different ways.

Want another example? Microsoft , one of the pioneers in the development of the metaverse, stands out with the AR headset, valued at $3,500 . Last year, the device sparked the interest of the United States Government for military use. Similarly, medical companies claim that augmented reality technology not only drives the industry forward, but can improve surgical procedures.

Want to know more about how technologies get involved in the metaverse process? Check it out below!

What is the difference between virtual reality and augmented reality?

Virtual Reality (VR)

Virtual reality is nothing more than a 3D environment created by computer systems. The technology simulates the real world and allows full interactivity with users.

However, to access and take advantage of all this technology, specific equipment is needed, such as computers, headphones, virtual reality glasses or helmets , among others.

Augmented Reality (AR)

Unlike VR, augmented reality inserts virtual data and elements into the real world . The Pokémon GO game is a great example of augmented reality due to the combination of technologies.

In the game, the user uses the smartphone’s camera to capture virtual characters, spread across a real world map .

In addition, we can also mention the use of QR Codes for the provision of digital public services , which benefit the population and improve the quality and experience of the service.

Metaverse and smart cities, can this reality exist?

With the metaverse city concept , applications, strategies and technologies for real life in the Metaverse Token Development Company are based on the way we live and how cities develop .

Indeed, the cities of the future have a lot to do with the growth of smart cities . Providing interactive services and new digital tools, the city of the metaverse aims to be a virtual communication channel for the population , as is the case of the city of Seoul.

With an investment of US$3.3 billion until 2030, the city of Seoul, South Korea, will be the first city inserted in the metaverse . By 2023, the “Metaverse 120 Center”, a virtual office for general public services , will be established .

In this environment, citizens will be equipped with virtual reality headsets to meet with officials in the form of avatars to deal with the population’s queries and demands .

The projection is that in 2030, technologies will intelligently manage all administrative services, in addition to covering the areas of culture, tourism, economy and education .

In fact, people need to be aware of city plans and new solutions. Seoul will be no different. This is because the metaverse city must benefit all age groups with new resources , with inclusion being the main objective.

For this reason, the initiative is to develop services with content, security and accessibility through extended reality .

Was this content relevant to you?

With the promise of revolutionizing the future, the migration to the Metaverse Store Development Company will allow users to replicate reality in a unique and digital way.

Still under process, the metaverse is a gateway to completely new experiences, its main objective being to improve people’s lives.

Stay well informed: click here and learn more about new technologies and the development of futuristic cities .

#metaverse #metaverse development #metaverse services

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jesse-eisenberg-interview · 2 years

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Jesse Eisenberg On The Return Of Lex Luthor: “I’d Be Shocked If I Wound Up In A DC Movie – But It Would Be A Pleasant Shock”

Speaking to an enthusiastic crowd at the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival after screenings of his directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg covered a lot of bases, from his introduction to acting as an anxious teenager to his dislike of the sitcom Friends (“My sister loves it, and we get into arguments all the time,” he said. “Because no one talks that way, and there’s not a group of six people that are all that good-looking and all that funny”). Eisenberg also expressed dismay at the response to his portrayal of Lex Luthor in the 2016 blockbuster Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. “I felt very personal about it,” he said. “The writer, Chris Terrio, is a very serious writer, and he’s a very emotional person. He thought a lot about my character, and I thought a lot about my character too. I talked with my acting coach about the character a lot, about his backstory with his father and his emotional life—and then people hate me.”

Speaking to Deadline afterwards, Eisenberg clarified that he would not rule out a return to the DC or even Marvel world if called upon. “I’d be shocked if I wound up in a DC movie, but it would be a pleasant shock,” he said. “Listen, I’m not a comic book fan. To me, it was not playing a role that I’d envisioned since childhood. To me, it was a chance to play this great character that this great writer wrote, and I loved doing that. So, to play it is a joy, and to not play it isn’t something that I’m going to be ashamed to tell my kids about, because that is not an important genre in my life, even though I loved doing that movie.” So he would still do a superhero movie? “Yeah. Because as an actor, you do all kinds of different things, and sometimes great roles show up in really commercial things and sometimes terrible roles show up in independent films.”

For the time being, however, Eisenberg is keeping his diary clear, as he prepares to shoot his next film, A Real Pain, in Poland. “The story is about two cousins who have grown apart,” he explained, “and they go on a heritage-slash-Holocaust tour after the death of their grandmother. It’s about their lives and their little struggles, as opposed to the bigger struggles that they’re facing, and trying to juxtapose how we think about modern pain versus how we think about the pain of our ancestors. Our ancestors were killed, and our struggles are so minor, comparatively. The movie kind of asks the question, ‘Are [those minor struggles] also valid?’”

The writer-director’s co-star in the film will be Succession star Kieran Culkin. “I always thought of him for the role,” said Eisenberg. “I actually haven’t seen Succession, but my little sister, who I send everything I write to, had. When she read the script, she said, ‘You have to give it to Kieran.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’d love to, he’s just phenomenal.’ He does Kenneth Lonergan plays in New York, and I have real love for those plays.”

Eisenberg not having seen Succession isn’t entirely surprising, given that he doesn’t even see his own movies. But it’s perhaps a little remarkable that he doesn’t keep tabs on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose portrayal brought him an Oscar nomination for 2010’s The Social Network. “I guess I don’t, because I don’t have a Facebook page,” he mused. “The stories are typically meaningless to me. I notice sometimes when a story comes out about Facebook in the news, but I think people just worried that their data is being mined or sold. I feel a little chuffed that I never got a Facebook page.”

Despite the many plaudits for David Fincher’s film, Eisenberg doesn’t get much recognition from the public for it. “When I go to the airport,” he said, “people have seen me in Now You See Me. As great a movie as it is, The Social Network is still a drama. It’s not a popcorn kind of movie. Even though it’s considered one of the greatest movies [of recent times], it’s just not a movie that people shout at me about from across the room. People shout at me from across the room because I was in a movie about magic.”

Fans off the Now You See Me franchise will be pleased to know that a third is very likely on the way. “They’ve been trying,” he said. “but I think it will happen sooner rather than later. It’s such a beloved franchise. I only know this because I’m in it, but you feel it. I don’t know why that is, because my finger’s not really on the pulse of culture, but I feel, as a person involved with it, that it’s something that people really love, and I know that the people who produced the movie feel that too.”

All this recent activity will presumably make up not just for the disappointment of Batman V Superman but also for the crushing rejection that happened during the pandemic, when his work was turned down by satirical website The Onion. “I got very, very close,” he said. “They give you a probationary period, so you submit 10 ideas a week for a number of weeks. I got very close twice, and then, ultimately, I didn’t make it. It’s very competitive.” How hard did it hit? “Listen, I’ve had every advantage in my life because of being in movies. This experience proved to be completely useless during this time. They don’t have bylines—no one knows who writes these things—so for me to be a famous actor is completely meaningless. In a way, it was a humbling experience, because you kind of learn, ‘Oh, this is the way the world would react to me were I not in movies.’ Which is to say that I’d probably get rejected multiple times.”

SOURCE

#jesse eisenberg #2022

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danielemarinellibigdata · 2 years

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Daniele Marinelli’s Metaverse will be different from the Facebook one?

Last year Mark Zuckerberg, while the world was still facing the Covid-19 pandemic, announced that Facebook is well underway with Metaverse.

A message that has aroused many adverse reactions, including those of some employees of the Blue Giant, who said that Zuckerberg's Metaverse could repeat the same mistakes of the past. And this despite the great promises about how there will be greater security in the Metaverse. Actually, it looks like we may face problems similar to the ones already seen in the past.

The Facebook Metaverse: still problems with privacy

Privacy issues, according to Facebook employees, will also repeat themselves in the Metaverse. In particular, they are very concerned about how many sensors will be used. To enter the Metaverse, we will need to use microphones, allow facial recognition that will extend probably to expressions recognition, to use visors and who knows what else with the passing time.

And the user will not have much of a choice, unless he wants to become a digital outcast. He can only hope that the company owning the metaverse does the right thing.

In this climate of general uncertainty, however, a solution to the privacy dilemma already seems to emerge.

An Italian-speaking solution, conceived by Daniele Marinelli, who started to work on metaverse two years before of Mark Zuckerberg's announcement.

This idea is Umetaworld.

Umetaworld: what it is and why it is better than the one thought by Zuckerberg

Umetaworld, to begin with, is not built for gaming but it’s a faithful replica of the real world and opens up to a concept of Metaverse as an evolution of the web and as a place in which anybody can find a world of new opportunities.

Furthermore, unlike the other metaverses, in Umetaworld the user will not always live with the fear that his data could be stolen or used for unknown purposes.

One of the objective of this virtual world created by Daniele Marinelli, in fact, is to guarantee a safe experience, free from worries regarding people’s privacy. Furthermore in Umetaworld everyone can explore the world and enjoy new experiences, even people who cannot move around for economic reasons or because they suffer from some sort of disability.

On Umetaworld, which was presented at an online event that involved more than half a million of people, you can do almost whatever you can think of: from shopping to university education, or visiting museums and listening to concerts.

There is no need to wait for Facebook to make the leap into the future: the future is already here, thanks to Daniele Marinelli's Umetaworld.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Facebook's alternative facts

Facebook acquired a company called Crowdtangle in 2016; it makes a social media analytics tool that the press has used to monitor subject-matter trends on Facebook, especially in the runup to the 2020 elections.

Facebook just gutted Crowtangle.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.html

Crowdtangle had operated as a semiautonomous unit within Facebook, primarily used by media companies to track the social media performance of their stories. A turning point came when the NY Times’s Kevin Roose figured out how to rank posts that included links to the real web.

Roose created a Twitter account called @FacebooksTop10 that served as a moment-to-moment leaderboard for the most popular web-links being “engaged with” on Facebook (Facebook separates “engagement” — liking and replying — from “reach” — how many people see a post).

Roose’s research revealed that far-right cranks like Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity were dominating Facebook’s news ecosystem. These reports were most unwelcome within Facebook leadership, whose internal communications were leaked to Roose.

These leaks reveal the anxieties of top Facebook leaders — including Nick Clegg, the former UK Deputy PM who sold out his supporters, created the conditions for Brexit, and then landed a cushy, 4-million-per-year job as head of FB’s “global affairs.”

These leaders worried that objective data about Facebook users’ “engagement” would validate suspicions that the service was a far-right echo-chamber whose US users were trending to ageing conservatives, a group that advertisers are lukewarm on.

Facebook’s leaders debated what to do about this and ultimately decided to neuter Crowdtangle, replacing it with selective disclosures that put the service in a better light, choosing among several other metrics (like reach) to characterize the discourse on the platform.

Publicly, Facebook says it’s not killing Crowdtangle, but rather, integrating it into an “integrity team” — minus its leadership (on “vacation” with no defined role at the company) and key personnel (who are being scattered to other parts of the business).

Facebook’s attack on Crowdtangle is significant, especially in light of its sustained assault on independent accountability and transparency tools like Ad Observer, a project from NYU’s engineering school.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

Ad Observer tracks paid political disinformation on the platform. Its users volunteer to install a free/open browser extension that captures the ads Facebook serves to them. These are flensed of any private information and uploaded to Ad Observatory, a public repository.

Accountability journalists and researchers use Ad Observatory to track whether Facebook is living up to its public promises to limit paid political disinformation. The project has documented many failures to uphold those promises.

In its smear campaign against Ad Observer, Facebook has insisted that the project is both dangerous (Facebook falsely claims it captures private information) and redundant, because Facebook maintains its own ad repository for researchers.

But Ad Observer has already caught multiple instances of paid political disinformation that was not included in Facebook’s repository.

Facebook has proven that it cannot be trusted to honestly reflect its own practices in its transparency efforts.

As Crowdtangle enters a decline — leadership sidelined, engineers scattered — we should interpret Facebook’s promises to replace it with its own “accountability” tools, run by the leadership faction that decried Roose’s top-10 list, in light of the Ad Observer fiasco.

After all, these leaders insisted that the problem with Roose’s list is that it measured “engagement” and not “reach” — but when the company produced its own internal “reach”-based leaderboards, they looked much the same as the “engagement” ones.

Roose agrees with FB leaders in that Facebook isn’t merely a far-right echo chamber (he says that it contains such a chamber, but that’s not the whole story). But there’s one way in which FB is firmly Trumpian: its insistence on “alternative facts.”

Trump is a bullshitter, raised in the “positive thinking” church of Norman Vincent Peale, whose gospel dictated that you could manifest new realities by insisting that they were already here — “fake it till you make it” (AKA “gaslighting”).

https://www.npr.org/2017/01/19/510628862/how-positive-thinking-helped-propel-trump-to-the-presidency

This ideology — call it gaslightism — is the fantasy that powerful people can warp reality simply by declaring it to be something else (think of the GWB official who sneered at the “reality-based community” and its skepticism over war in Iraq).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

It’s a common trait among wealthy narcissists. Elon Musk insists that the laws of physics will bend to his satellite internet network and allow for multiple universes’ worth of electromagnetic signalling.

He’s sure that the laws of geometry will bend to his tunnels and somehow relieve traffic congestion by adding private vehicles; that he will make massive leaps in computer science and create safe autonomous vehicles.

Trump’s insistence the virus would “disappear…like a miracle” was just the latest installment in a long history of bullshitting (“positive thinking”), including things like pretending to be his own publicist, boasting to journos about his prowess.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/audio-listen-donald-trump-pretend-be-his-own-hank-berrien

Facebook’s desire to “control the narrative” is part of this intellectual tradition, and it’s hardly the first time the company has done it.

Early in the company’s history, Zuckerberg defended his “real names” policy by saying that anyone who objected was “two-faced.”

It’s hard to overstate how deranged this is: surely Zuckerberg presents a different facet of his identity to his spouse, his kids, his shareholders, his co-workers and the press. It’s not “two faced” to talk to your boss differently from how you talk to your lover.

However, by forcing billions of Facebook users to confine themselves to a single identity, Zuckerberg does make it easier to target them with ads. This “two-faced” business is just an attempt to will a radical, sociopathic norm into existence.

This attitude permeates Facebook’s corporate conduct: remember the “pivot to video?” Facebook wanted to compete with Youtube — the number two supplier of display advertising, after FB itself — so it declared that videos were very popular on Facebook.

Not that videos would be popular — they were already popular. The company told its media and ad partners that they were missing out on a gold-rush because FB users loved watching FB videos.

Media companies literally laid off their newsrooms in order to hire video production teams based on this intelligence. The entire media- and ad-ecosystem reoriented itself around Facebook’s market intelligence.

There was just one problem. Facebook was lying. FB users weren’t watching its videos, and Facebook knew it. The company was just betting that if it convinced media companies to spend billions making videos, its users would watch them.

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-lawsuit-pivot-to-video-mistake/

This fraud devastated the media world, first by triggering waves of layoffs of experienced journalists to make way for young video producers, then by killing or hobbling their employers and triggering another wave of mass layoffs.

Zuckerberg knows it’s not “two-faced” to show different parts of yourself to different people. Facebook knew that no one was watching FB videos. They were just betting that they could fake it until they made it — the core tenet of gaslightism.

The Crowdtangle affair is more of the same. Facebook’s US market is dominated by furious, old conservatives. The company knows it — but they also know that if they admit it, people who don’t match that description will be less likely to stay on its platform.

They know that advertisers don’t pay much to reach that audience. They know that an aging user-base will dwindle over time unless there’s a cohort coming in behind it. They think that if they suppress the true nature of their business, the nature will change.

Gaslightism is what Exxon embraced half a century ago, when it suppressed its own scientists’ conclusions that its product would render our planet unfit for human habitation. They were betting that if they just kept the news quiet, something might come up that changed it. #ExxonKnew

The wealthy and powerful have always practiced gaslightism (hence folktales like “The Emperor’s New Clothes”).

To be clear, we’re all prone to kidding ourselves with wishful thinking, but wishful thinking is different when it’s combined with unchecked power.

That’s why Thomas Jefferson argued for an anti-monopoly clause in the Bill of Rights — not because he disbelieved in smart people with good ideas, but because he disbelieved in infallible people.

Mark Zuckerberg is not an evil supergenius. He’s not a supergenius, or any kind of genius. He’s just an everyday mediocrity like you or me, someone who talked himself into thinking that he should be the czar of 3 billion lives.

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

The problem of concentrated, unaccountable, autocratic power isn’t evil supergeniuses. The problem is people no better or worse than you or me, indulging their worst impulses with no one to call bullshit on them.

Nerfing Crowdtangle and attacking Ad Obverser are just ways for Facebook to preventing journalists from calling bullshit on it — a way to further secede from the reality-based community. It’s pure gaslightism.

Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

Minette Lontsie (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Facebook_Headquarters.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Anthony Quintano (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/quintanomedia/41793468502

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic

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reading-writing-revolution · 3 years

Text

Heather Cox Richardson

October 4, 2021 (Monday)

“hello literally everyone,” the official account of Twitter tweeted this afternoon, after Facebook and its affiliated platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went dark at about 11:40 this morning. The Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours and appears to have been caused by an internal error. But the void caused by the absence of the internet giant illustrated its power at a time when the use of that power has come under scrutiny.

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal began to publish a series of investigative stories based on documents provided by a whistle-blower.

The “Facebook Files” explore how the company has “whitelisted” high-profile users, exempting them from the rules that put limits on ordinary users. Another article reveals that researchers showed Facebook executives evidence that Instagram damages teenage girls by pushing an ideal body image and that they flagged the increasing use of the site by drug smugglers, human traffickers, and other criminals; their discoveries went unaddressed.

Concerned about declining engagement with their material, Facebook allegedly privileged polarizing material that engaged people by preying on their emotions. It appeared to have encouraged the extremism that led to the January 6 insurrection, lowering restrictions against disinformation quickly after the 2020 election.

Last night, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed herself to be the source of the documents. She is concerned, she says, that Facebook consistently looks to maximize profits even if it means ignoring disinformation. Her lawyers have filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees companies and financial markets. Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said it was “ludicrous” to blame Facebook for the events of January 6. Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg have not commented.

Lawmakers have repeatedly asked Facebook to produce documents for their scrutiny and to testify about the social media platform’s public safeguards. Tomorrow, Haugen will testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security about the effects of social media on teenagers. Her lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, told Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima of the Washington Post that Haugen’s information is important because “Big Tech is at an inflection point…. It touches every aspect of our lives—whether it’s individuals personally or democratic institutions globally. With such far-reaching consequences, transparency is critical to oversight, and lawful whistleblowing is a critical component of oversight and holding companies accountable.”

Amidst the outrage over the Facebook revelations, technology reporter Kevin Roose at the New York Times suggested that the company’s aggressive attempts to court engagement reveal weakness, rather than strength, as younger users have fled to TikTok and other sites and Facebook has become the domain of older Americans. He notes that Facebook’s researchers foresee a drop of 45% in daily use in the next two years, suggesting that the company is desperate either to retain users or to create new ones.

While the technology Facebook represents is new, the concerns it raises echo public discussion of late nineteenth century industrialization, which was also the product of new technologies. At stake then was whether the concentration of economic power in a few hands would destroy our democracy by giving some rich men far more power than the other men in the country. How could the nation both preserve the right of individuals to build industries and preserve the concept of the common good in the face of technology that permitted unprecedented accumulations of wealth?

While money is certainly at stake in the issue of Facebook’s power today, the more pressing issue for our country is whether social media giants will destroy our democracy through their ability to spread disinformation that sows division and turns us against one another.

When we began to grapple with the excesses of industrialism, lots of people thought the whole system needed to be taken apart—by violence if necessary—while others hoped to save the benefits the technology brought without letting it destroy the country. Americans eventually solved the problems that industrialization raised for democracy by reining in the Wild West mentality of the early industrialists, protecting the basic rights of workers, and regulating business practices.

The leaked Facebook documents suggest there are places where the disinformation at Facebook could be reined in as the overreaches of industrialization were. When Zuckerberg tried to promote coronavirus vaccines on the site, anti-vaxxers undermined his efforts. But one document showed that “out of nearly 150,000 posters in Facebook Groups disabled for Covid misinformation, 5% were producing half of all posts, and around 1,400 users were responsible for inviting half the groups’ new members.” Researchers concluded: “We found, like many problems at FB, this is a head-heavy problem with a relatively few number of actors creating a large percentage of the content and growth.”

“I don’t hate Facebook,” Haugen wrote in a final message to her colleagues at the company. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

While most Americans were busy watching Facebook crash—the falling stock took between $5 billion and $7 billion of Zuckerberg’s net worth—drama in Washington, D.C., was an even bigger deal.

Los Angeles Times reporter Sarah D. Wire noted that the rioters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 ran more than 100 feet past 15 reinforced windows, “making a beeline” to four windows that had been left unreinforced in a renovation of the building between 2017 and 2019. They found the four windows, located in a recessed part of the building, Wire wrote, “by sheer luck, real-time trial and error, or advance knowledge by rioters.”

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will likely look into this oddity.

The committee has begun to take testimony from cooperative witnesses. Observers expect fireworks on Thursday when former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino, Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Trump appointee Kash Patel must hand over documents. Trump has vowed to fight the release of any information to the committee. Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) says the committee will make criminal referrals for anyone ignoring a subpoena.

Finally, today, the debt ceiling fight got even hotter. While Congress passed a continuing resolution to fund the government through December 3, the issue of the debt ceiling, which stops the government from borrowing money Congress has already spent, remains unresolved. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the government will be unable to pay its obligations after October 18, and warns that a default, which has never before happened, would be catastrophic.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) insists the Democrats must raise the debt ceiling themselves, although the Republicans raised it three times under former president Trump and added $7.8 trillion to the debt, which now stands at $28 trillion. But when Democrats tried to pass a measure to raise the ceiling, Republicans filibustered it. As Greg Sargent points out in the Washington Post, McConnell is trying to force the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered. Since they get only one chance to pass such a bill this year, this would force them to dump their infrastructure bill.

McConnell is holding the nation hostage to keep the Democrats from passing a very popular bill, and today, Biden called him on it. McConnell complained that congressional Democrats were “sleepwalking toward significant and avoidable danger,” prompting Biden to demand that Republicans “stop playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy.... Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, but threatening to use their power to prevent us from doing our job—saving the economy from a catastrophic event—I think, quite frankly, is hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful. Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds.”

When asked if he could guarantee we would not default on our debts, Biden said, “No, I can’t…. That’s up to Mitch McConnell.” If McConnell doesn’t blink and the Republicans continue to filibuster Democrats’ attempts to save the economy, there will be enormous pressure on the Democrats to break the filibuster.

Meanwhile, every day this drags on, Congress does not pass the Freedom to Vote Act.

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popolitiko · 3 years

Text

Artificial intelligence

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can't fix the problem

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was apologizing to his audience.It was March 23, 2018, just days after the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, had surreptitiously siphoned the personal data of tens of millions of Americans from their Facebook accounts in an attempt to influence how they voted. It was the biggest privacy breach in Facebook’s history, and Quiñonero had been previously scheduled to speak at a conference on, among other things, “the intersection of AI, ethics, and privacy” at the company. He considered canceling, but after debating it with his communications director, he’d kept his allotted time.

As he stepped up to face the room, he began with an admission. “I’ve just had the hardest five days in my tenure at Facebook,” he remembers saying. “If there’s criticism, I’ll accept it.”The Cambridge Analytica scandal would kick off Facebook’s largest publicity crisis ever. It compounded fears that the algorithms that determine what people see on the platform were amplifying fake news and hate speech, and that Russian hackers had weaponized them to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor. Millions began deleting the app; employees left in protest; the company’s market capitalization plunged by more than $100 billion after its July earnings call.

In the ensuing months, Mark Zuckerberg began his own apologizing. He apologized for not taking “a broad enough view” of Facebook’s responsibilities, and for his mistakes as a CEO. Internally, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, kicked off a two-year civil rights audit to recommend ways the company could prevent the use of its platform to undermine democracy.Finally, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, asked Quiñonero to start a team with a directive that was a little vague: to examine the societal impact of the company’s algorithms. The group named itself the Society and AI Lab (SAIL); last year it combined with another team working on issues of data privacy to form Responsible AI.

Quiñonero was a natural pick for the job. He, as much as anybody, was the one responsible for Facebook’s position as an AI powerhouse. In his six years at Facebook, he’d created some of the first algorithms for targeting users with content precisely tailored to their interests, and then he’d diffused those algorithms across the company. Now his mandate would be to make them less harmful.Facebook has consistently pointed to the efforts by Quiñonero and others as it seeks to repair its reputation. It regularly trots out various leaders to speak to the media about the ongoing reforms. In May of 2019, it granted a series of interviews with Schroepfer to the New York Times, which rewarded the company with a humanizing profile of a sensitive, well-intentioned executive striving to overcome the technical challenges of filtering out misinformation and hate speech from a stream of content that amounted to billions of pieces a day. These challenges are so hard that it makes Schroepfer emotional, wrote the Times: “Sometimes that brings him to tears.”In the spring of 2020, it was apparently my turn. Ari Entin, Facebook’s AI communications director, asked in an email if I wanted to take a deeper look at the company’s AI work. After talking to several of its AI leaders, I decided to focus on Quiñonero. Entin happily obliged. As not only the leader of the Responsible AI team but also the man who had made Facebook into an AI-driven company, Quiñonero was a solid choice to use as a poster boy.

He seemed a natural choice of subject to me, too. In the years since he’d formed his team following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, concerns about the spread of lies and hate speech on Facebook had only grown. In late 2018 the company admitted that this activity had helped fuel a genocidal anti-Muslim campaign in Myanmar for several years. In 2020 Facebook started belatedly taking action against Holocaust deniers, anti-vaxxers, and the conspiracy movement QAnon. All these dangerous falsehoods were metastasizing thanks to the AI capabilities Quiñonero had helped build. The algorithms that underpin Facebook’s business weren’t created to filter out what was false or inflammatory; they were designed to make people share and engage with as much content as possible by showing them things they were most likely to be outraged or titillated by. Fixing this problem, to me, seemed like core Responsible AI territory.I began video-calling Quiñonero regularly. I also spoke to Facebook executives, current and former employees, industry peers, and external experts. Many spoke on condition of anonymity because they’d signed nondisclosure agreements or feared retaliation. I wanted to know: What was Quiñonero’s team doing to rein in the hate and lies on its platform?

But Entin and Quiñonero had a different agenda. Each time I tried to bring up these topics, my requests to speak about them were dropped or redirected. They only wanted to discuss the Responsible AI team’s plan to tackle one specific kind of problem: AI bias, in which algorithms discriminate against particular user groups. An example would be an ad-targeting algorithm that shows certain job or housing opportunities to white people but not to minorities.

By the time thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol in January, organized in part on Facebook and fueled by the lies about a stolen election that had fanned out across the platform, it was clear from my conversations that the Responsible AI team had failed to make headway against misinformation and hate speech because it had never made those problems its main focus. More important, I realized, if it tried to, it would be set up for failure.The reason is simple. Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth. Quiñonero’s AI expertise supercharged that growth. His team got pigeonholed into targeting AI bias, as I learned in my reporting, because preventing such bias helps the company avoid proposed regulation that might, if passed, hamper that growth. Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.In other words, the Responsible AI team’s work—whatever its merits on the specific problem of tackling AI bias—is essentially irrelevant to fixing the bigger problems of misinformation, extremism, and political polarization. And it’s all of us who pay the price.“When you’re in the business of maximizing engagement, you’re not interested in truth. You’re not interested in harm, divisiveness, conspiracy. In fact, those are your friends,” says Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who collaborates with Facebook to understand image- and video-based misinformation on the platform.

“They always do just enough to be able to put the press release out. But with a few exceptions, I don’t think it’s actually translated into better policies. They’re never really dealing with the fundamental problems.” In March of 2012, Quiñonero visited a friend in the Bay Area. At the time, he was a manager in Microsoft Research’s UK office, leading a team using machine learning to get more visitors to click on ads displayed by the company’s search engine, Bing. His expertise was rare, and the team was less than a year old. Machine learning, a subset of AI, had yet to prove itself as a solution to large-scale industry problems. Few tech giants had invested in the technology.Quiñonero’s friend wanted to show off his new employer, one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley: Facebook, then eight years old and already with close to a billion monthly active users (i.e., those who have logged in at least once in the past 30 days). As Quiñonero walked around its Menlo Park headquarters, he watched a lone engineer make a major update to the website, something that would have involved significant red tape at Microsoft. It was a memorable introduction to Zuckerberg’s “Move fast and break things” ethos. Quiñonero was awestruck by the possibilities. Within a week, he had been through interviews and signed an offer to join the company.His arrival couldn’t have been better timed. Facebook’s ads service was in the middle of a rapid expansion as the company was preparing for its May IPO. The goal was to increase revenue and take on Google, which had the lion’s share of the online advertising market. Machine learning, which could predict which ads would resonate best with which users and thus make them more effective, could be the perfect tool. Shortly after starting, Quiñonero was promoted to managing a team similar to the one he’d led at Microsoft.

KEEP READING

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

#Facebook #misinformation

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anonymouslyangsty · 3 years

Note

If you haven’t done it already how about Ultimate programmer Taka?

Indeed I have not done it.

Ya know, I usually keep the backstory for talent swaps pretty similar to canon, and I'm doing the same thing here more or less. But also? I kinda want Toranosuke to be the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg.

So consider. Toranosuke is a tech giant. A billionaire, created his own social media site and search engine kinda deal. And it's Toranosuke, so you know it isn't totally moral. He's selling so much data, allowing misinformation to spread like wildfire, deleting positive posts about politicians that don't support him.

But he doesn't have his downfall. Toranosuke Ishimaru was and is a big name in business, and he's got a pretty decent reputation (and a lot of politicians in his pockets)

So Kiyotaka doesn't grow up surrounded by disdain for his family name. He's the grandson of a big shot, and is thus respected on that principle alone.

And Kiyotaka looks up to his grandfather so much. The man has created a platform that encourages simulating debate and connects people together regardless of how far they physically are! Toranosuke has revolutionized how the internet functions, making it a better place for everyone!

(sidenote: Imagine someone thinking Twitter is such an inspirational creation that they start crying about it. That's Kiyotaka)

Kiyotaka truly believes in his grandfather, so much so that he wants nothing more than to follow in his footsteps. Programmer Kiyotaka is extremely dedicated to improving his tech skills, even though he's not naturally gifted in it whatsoever.

And what better way to learn than to see the work of the best? So Kiyotaka starts digging around in his grandfather's work, learning the ins and outs of how his code functions. And in doing that, Taka starts noticing the...less than savory aspects of it.

We already know that Kiyotaka doesn't deal well with his world views being questioned. So realizing all the shady dealings his grandfather is doing, both with his program and with politicians, would be devastating.

Because the man he's looked up to for years, the man whose career he's based his own path on, is not who Taka thought he was. Because all the luxuries and wealth his family enjoys isn't based on honest hard work like Taka thought, but through bribes and the exploitation of users.

And there's no way Taka can just accept that as fact. So he goes to his grandfather, because surely there's an explanation, right? There must be some explanation that allows Toranosuke to be the honorable man Taka believes him to be.

But there isn't

The man just looks at him like he's an idealistic, foolish moron. Because of course Toranosuke isn't running some ultra moral business, because that kind of business doesn't make a profit. Kiyotaka just needs to 'grow up', to see that the world isn't the selfless, innocent world he wants it to be.

But Taka, regardless of how much he loves his grandfather, isn't going to be able to do something like that. His morals come before anything else.

So Kiyotaka turns against his grandfather. He drags all of the man's questionable dealings into light, revealing all that dirt into the light.

It causes quite the stir up of course, even sparking an investigation and some significant controversy. But Toranosuke is powerful, both in his connections and in his control of the media.

It wouldn't be hard to get lawmakers and judges on his side, encouraging them to speak in his favor. And it wouldn't be hard for him to paint his grandson as a bitter, greedy young man looking to usurp his grandfather's position. It wouldn't be hard to paint it as family drama rather than the serious dialogue on privacy and misinformation that it is.

Toranosuke doesn't face a total downfall. He's still continuing his same corrupt practices despite Taka's best efforts to force strict regulations on such actions. The man just has too much power.

Knowing that he can't take down his grandfather (yet at least), Taka decides to become everything he thought Toranosuke was. He mainly focuses on programs that will have some impactful affect on the world, rather than social media. Improved vote counting, better security for banks and government facilities, ect

He also does his own fair share of speeches regarding internet safety. Mainly about the importance of security and whatnot. He's regularly petitioning for stricter regulations on data collection. Which usually doesn't work, because Toranosuke's influence is absolutely present, but he's doing his best.

#talentswap #kiyotaka ishimaru #danganronpa

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

Link

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 4, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal began to publish a series of investigative stories based on documents provided by a whistle-blower.

“I don’t hate Facebook,” Haugen wrote in a final message to her colleagues at the company. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

While most Americans were busy watching Facebook crash—the falling stock took between $5 billion and $7 billion of Zuckerberg’s net worth—drama in Washington, D.C., was an even bigger deal.

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will likely look into this oddity.

Meanwhile, every day this drags on, Congress does not pass the Freedom to Vote Act.

—

Notes:

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20online:%20testimony%20from%20a%20facebook%20whistleblower

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/03/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-revealed/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

https://apnews.com/article/facebook-whatsapp-instagram-outage-8b9d3862ed957029e545182a595fdce1

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower-facebook-frances-haugen.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/04/facebook-instagram-down-outage/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-vaccinated-11631880296

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-04/jan-6-rioters-exploited-little-known-capitol-weak-spots-a-handful-of-unreinforced-windows

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/01/bennie-thompson-jan-6-panel-subpoena-514940

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/04/jan-6-panel-trump-collision-514979

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/10/04/biden-schumer-debt-ceiling/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#quotes #political #facebook #social media #debt ceiling #political hardball #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American

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zamgoods · 3 years

Text

Facebook's Name Meta Morphs to Thanos' Eugenics Agenda: TruthאמתAMET or DeadמתMETA

Sunday October 31st 10.31 / 31.10 304th day; 61 days remain Waning Crescent Illumination: 24% Age of the moon is older The Chrone

Mark is marking the timeline in the Metaverse. Hebrew speakers say "META" is Hebrew for dead and that Zuckerberg knows that since he is "Jewish." Facebook's new name being dead is only a part of the story. The Mark of a new beast of surveillance and Data analysis. Infinity signed warped.

Therefore Metaverse means Deathverse. Like Thanos is his inspiration in a cross translation of Greek to Hebrew. And in a snap(chat) 1/2 of the Universe will no longer exist. Maybe thats why the logo looks like a ghost.

So you gotta wonder, what does MetLife means?

DeadLife. Wow that's a pretty gloomy name for Life Insurance. But I guess it's the truth. Which brings us to an anagram for META is AMET which can also be spelled EMET meaning truth in Hebrew.

Truth and Lies mixed to confuse and steer everyone down the primrose path. Which by the way may lead to death. There is a book that can bridge these languages together, Hebrew and Greek. The Holy Bible. Check out our recent blog on the Shining. Yes to shine is divine and scary too.

And Facebook's sudden metamorphosis to Meta is written in scripture even the death part. To understand the depth of this name change you have to know the story of the skin on the face of Moses and Jesus when communing with God. Their faces transformed and meta-morphed into something that scared those that saw them.

God spoke to Moses about the new Covenant (Covid) keep the Sabbath by not working. Any one who works on Saturday will be DEAD-META.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/huge-mistake-foreboding-action-never-guess-facebooks-new-name-meta-means-hebrew/

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/28/tech/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-keynote-announcements/index.html

#Facebook #meta #hebrew #transformation

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yonojono · 3 years

Text

The Imitation Game, now a social dilemma

The Imitation Game is another name for the Turing Test created by Alan Turing in 1950. It is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equal to or indistinguishable from that of humans. With advanced technology, we have seen that almost anything can be hacked into and stolen while the victims are left unaware of the situation that has undergone inside their devices. If data is not being hacked into, chances are that the companies of the applications that they use on a regular basis, are stealing data and not for anything good. The Netflix Documentary “The Social Dilemma” which is a play on the title of the movie “The Social Network” which just so happens to be the biopic movie of this guy that you may have heard of called Mark Zuckerberg and how he creates this platform that you may have also heard of called Facebook. The documentary starts off with a touch of irony and a pinch of salt as a bunch of employees who worked or still work at a lot of the big shot companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram and Snapchat speak about circumstances that they faced at their respective companies. They had ethical concerns and were campaigning for ethical designs but at the same time, these are the very people that take advantage of the users’ psychology and work to keep them on their platforms for as long as possible such that it has become a battlefield for them to see who can hold the users’ attention the longest. This is quite concerning because of how fast technology is changing and becoming better by the day such that at this rate, people can might as well live inside a small box and look at screens of social media platforms all around them, day in and day out.

However, it is important to address this issue in countries apart from the US as the social dilemma focuses mainly on the audience from the US. It shows a parallel storyline where siblings in a family are struggling to disconnect their personal, offline lives from the virtual one. In countries like India, China, South Korea, Japan and many other eastern and third world countries, there is a huge cultural difference as opposed to the west. Especially when it comes to children doing well at studies, it is quite common for eastern parents to be authoritarian and do whatever they have to do so that they do not have any distractions around them and focus on studying. Having said this, it does not mean that the west does not have the concept of strict parenting or that the east does not know how to go easy on their kids, but the fact is that an Indian parent spends on helping their kids with homework is 12 hours per week whereas an American parent spends 6.2 hours per week on an average. Most of the Generation Z Indians did not have access to technology and social media as the concept of mobile phones and touchscreens did not arrive in India until much later than it did in the US. Albeit there may be some people that do get carried away in the world of virtuality, a lot of the people still know how to draw the line between social media and reality because they have a lot more to be worried about in real life than on social media. Blame it on the education system or on the strict parenting, children are still worried about scoring well even in their preliminaries, let alone their board examinations. We see them studying day and night to make this happen and most of them do not get to have mobile phones until much later in their lives, beyond an impressionable age. We only see the negative side of the coin when it comes to these things but if the coin could be bothered being flipped over, maybe there is a positive side to it after all. It is very probable that people do not get influenced as easily as the document portrays it and that maybe there’s a slight exaggeration about how people believe everything that they see on the internet.

But the fact that big tech conglomerates have been taking advantage of people who use their platforms and have been influencing people in the worst ways possible is not moral. We see terrorists and crime insinuators being bred at homes because of the propaganda that these companies have been feeding them. A lot of lives have been impacted because of this and it is about time that they take responsibility for what they have been doing and for what? A few measly bucks. An example for this is the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. In 2018, the world was shaken when they found out that Facebook and a political data analysis firm called the Cambridge Analytica were the perpetrators of a massive data breach. They obtained and used the data of millions of users without their consent to their advantage. Hundreds of thousands of users had signed up for a survey called “this is your digital life” which they might have thought, sounded harmless, at the time. But Facebook allowed the survey to take all the data that the users had entered and played the psychology card to get people to vote for the politician, Donald Trump. His institute paid Facebook to get the data of users regarding their political preferences. As shown in the documentary, users are shown as puppets being controlled by imaginary people literally behind the screen and are shown only what the companies want them to see. AI has advanced to a level that can show human-like behaviour and knows what humans want to see and uses methods to show it and more to them. But the big tech conglomerates exhibits behaviour similar to that of a child having newly discovered a toy that it constantly solely wants to play with and shows no interest in absolutely anything else. Unfortunately, the toy is the actions they take that can affect emotions, behaviours and actions of the user in real time, which they monetize and exploit. This is not just limited to people who can possibly do no harm, it has an impact on deranged people who end other people’s lives for their extremist causes. It does not just bring people closer and make the world smaller, it may possibly end them as well.

With COVID-19 plaguing the world, forcing people to be indoors and isolate themselves, it took a toll on their mental health. Without technology and social media, people would not have been able to get any work done from home or would not have been able to stay connected to their loved ones. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that social media has done a lot of good and was intended to connect people from different parts of the world for each other’s benefit. It was not created with malicious intent and none of the creators thought of how it could have a totally different face to it than what they imagined. People decide that their self-worth revolves around something as inconsequential as the amount of likes and views that they get on social media. They make careers out of being an influencer and millions of people all around the world struggle to achieve the façade of perfection that is displayed on screen. It has insinuated to put down a lot of the viewers’ selfconfidence and self-esteem which in turn affects their mental health.

People are having their freedom and right to decide taken away and they don’t realise it. However, with the help of the documentaries like “the social dilemma” and “the great hack”, they are finally aware of how deep the problem goes and just how serious of an effect it can have on people’s lives. Social media is not just seen as a tool that brings people closer to each other anymore. It is seen as a destructive weapon that could cause a lot of damage to a community, instigate hate crimes, terrorise people and ruin mental health. It would be impossible to lead lives without social media in this day and age because it causes a great deal of good and a great deal of harm at the same time which is why it is about time that we, as users, become more mindful and aware about giving our time and energy to the platforms and if we actually need to use it as much as we do now. We need to reflect on ourselves and think about what we say on social media as it can leave an impact on other people as well. Now that we know the adverse effects that it can have, we need to spend more time with real people than we do online. We can very often forget that everyone displays a persona on screen and that it is not a true reflection of a person. There is a lot more to life than a mere screen on a device. Humans should strive to become a real life indicator of the Turing test and identify what is real and what is imitation

#the social dilemma #social media #blog post #introspect #mindfulness #mental health #awareness

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phroyd · 4 years

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This week’s remarkable character assault by some top White House advisers on Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, signified President Trump’s hostility toward medical expertise and has produced a chilling effect among the government scientists and public health professionals laboring to end the pandemic, according to administration officials and health experts.

As novel coronavirus cases surge out of control coast to coast, the open rancor between the scientific community and a White House determined above all to resuscitate the economy and secure a second term for Trump threatens to further undermine the U.S. response, which already lags behind those of many other developed nations.

A chorus of voices — including Fauci; Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and even Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff during the start of the pandemic — has been speaking out publicly and with increasing urgency about the crisis in ways that contradict or undermine Trump. Some of them have sharply criticized testing capacities and efficiencies, suggested that everyone wear masks and warned of the virus spread worsening.

Though Trump does not automatically distrust the expertise of public health officials, he is averse to any information or assessment that he considers “bad news,” that compromises his economic cheerleading message or that jeopardizes his reelection, according to several administration officials and other people with knowledge of the dynamic.

In addition to Fauci, the White House has repeatedly undermined and sidelined the CDC over the last several months, which prompted four former CDC directors to pen an op-ed in The Washington Post this week that argued no president had politicized the CDC to the extent that Trump has.

The result has been open warfare from some hard-line Trump loyalists seeking to discredit Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who is shown by polls to be regarded as a truth-teller by a majority of Americans.

Two of the White House officials with the closest and longest-standing ties to Trump, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and trade adviser Peter Navarro, attacked Fauci this past week. Navarro penned an op-ed in USA Today in which he stated that Fauci was “wrong about everything,” while Scavino shared a cartoon on social media mocking Fauci as “Dr. Faucet,” drowning Uncle Sam with a deluge of “extra cold” water.

Their critiques were echoed by one of Trump’s outside economic advisers, Stephen Moore, and come after the White House anonymously shared last week with The Post a lengthy, researched list of comments Fauci has made intended to support Trump’s earlier claim that “he’s made a lot of mistakes.” The list was reminiscent of research that campaign operatives distribute to reporters about their political opponents.

Trump sought to distance himself from those efforts and insisted he has a good relationship with Fauci, despite the fact that Fauci no longer briefs the president on the pandemic and is rarely if ever in the Oval Office anymore. Trump told advisers to tamp down their criticism of Fauci because he believed it was politically harmful to him, aides said, and in a show of solidarity Vice President Pence tweeted a photograph of him meeting with Fauci in the Situation Room.

Fauci said the push to discredit him was “bizarre,” telling the Atlantic, “If you talk to reasonable people in the White House, they realize that was a major mistake on their part, because it doesn’t do anything but reflect poorly on them.”

The interpersonal strife and the deliberate push by some inside the White House to protect Trump by sowing distrust of scientists is hampering the nation’s efforts to combat the virus, according to public health experts.

“It seems that some are more intent on fighting imagined enemies than the real enemy here, which is the virus,” said Thomas R. Frieden, a former CDC director and president of Resolve to Save Lives.

“The virus doesn’t read talking points,” Frieden said. “The virus doesn’t watch news shows. The virus just waits for us to make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, as Texas and Florida and South Carolina and Arizona did, the virus wins. When we ignore science, the virus wins.”

Trump in recent weeks has been committing less of his time and energy to managing the pandemic, according to advisers, and has only occasionally spoken in detail about the topic in his public appearances. One of these advisers said the president is “not really working this anymore. He doesn’t want to be distracted by it. He’s not calling and asking about data. He’s not worried about cases.”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews countered in a statement: “President Trump has always acted on the recommendations of his top public health experts throughout this crisis as evidenced by the many bold, data-driven decisions he has made to save millions of lives. Any suggestion that the President is not working around the clock to protect the health and safety of all Americans, lead the whole-of-government response to this pandemic, including expediting vaccine development and rebuilding our economy is utterly false.”

At federal health agencies, the barrage against Fauci has taken a significant toll, seen by many as a broadside against their community at large. The acrimony has angered career scientists at the National Institutes of Health, where Fauci is hailed as a hero, and at the Food and Drug Administration, where officials work closely with Fauci and his team, according to current and former government officials.

Many FDA career scientists and doctors see the White House criticism of Fauci as an effort to bully him — to make it clear that no one should consider crossing the president in the months leading up to the election, according to people familiar with the scientists’ thinking.

“To see an NIH scientist and a doctor attacked like that, the feeling is, ‘Oh, my God, that could just as easily be me,’ ” said a former FDA official, who like some others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid without risking retribution.

Some agency professionals worry the episode is a sign the FDA might come under political pressure to approve a vaccine or treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, before it has been fully vetted for safety and efficacy.

Furthermore, they say the character attacks further undermine America’s historic standing as a worldwide leader in public health, which is already tarnished by the nation’s beleaguered response to the coronavirus and inability to contain it.

Another former senior administration official called the Fauci attacks a global embarrassment. “It’s one thing to question science,” this official said. “It’s another thing to attack science.”

Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents state and local labs, said, “The whole public health community has been demoralized by this.”

Indeed, almost 90 organizations — including the American Society for Microbiology, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and several AIDS groups, as well as the public-labs association — sent a letter to Pence, who chairs the White House’s coronavirus task force, condemning the recent moves.

“We object to any attempt to cast doubt on science and sow mistrust for public health expertise, and to spread misinformation during this challenging time for all Americans,” the letter read. “Such efforts not only put the health of our population in greater peril, but also undermine the work underway to move our country beyond the pandemic and return to normalcy.”

The substance of Trump allies’ criticism of Fauci centers on his statements early in the pandemic that wearing masks would not necessarily stop the spread of the virus. But as Fauci and other scientists learned more about the virus, their assessments evolved with that knowledge.

“That’s really the nature of science,” Fauci said Thursday in a live-stream conversation with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “You look at the data and the information you have at any given time, and you make a decision with regard to policy based on that information. As the information changes, then you have to be flexible enough and humble enough to be able to change how you think about things.”

Moore, a conservative economist who is on leave from the Heritage Foundation to run a group called Save Our Country focused on reopening the economy, said the fact that Fauci is heralded in the media and trusted by the public is a problem for efforts to convince schools and businesses to reopen.

“I’ve seldom seen someone who has been more wrong more consistently over his whole career than Dr. Fauci that continues to be listened to and held up as some kind of expert,” Moore said.

He went on to express dismay that Fauci does not act like “a team player” by parroting to the public Trump’s talking points.

Navarro has led a fierce campaign inside the White House against Fauci, telling colleagues that the infectious-disease expert “has no clue what he’s talking about,” according to a person who heard his comments.

Others in Trump’s orbit have privately shared frustrations about Fauci, including White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Pence chief of staff Marc Short. Still, Meadows reacted angrily about Navarro’s op-ed, and Short told others he thought it was a mistake, White House officials said.

In recent weeks, there was what one adviser described as a “widespread effort” by White House officials, lawmakers and outside advisers to convince Trump to wear a mask in public — something he did for the first time last weekend when he visited Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

In the coming weeks, health officials plan to more forcefully urge people to not only wear masks but to wear them consistently and correctly and to emphasize that masks are a supplement — not a substitute — for social distancing, one federal official said.

“You have to acknowledge the obvious, that this thing is going to be with us for a long time,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist close to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “You have to be realistic. People are willing to do difficult things if you give them a pathway of how do we get to the end of it.”

This week, Redfield said that Trump ought to “set an example” by wearing a mask and that the epidemic could be brought under control in four to eight weeks if everyone wore one.

On June 30, Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and an informal Trump adviser, had a call with House Republicans, organized by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), on which he laid out a grim prediction of rising case numbers and encouraged people to wear masks.

“At some point, we’re going to have a confluent epidemic in the U.S.,” Gottlieb said in an interview. “At some point, we’re going to have so much infection that it’s going to be hard to prevent a simultaneous national epidemic. It’s going to be very difficult for us when this starts to run into flu season.”

Phroyd

#science #covid #trump

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wheretobuycbdinvirginia · 3 years

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Everything You Need To Know About How To Buy Real Bitcoin.

The best way to learn about bitcoin, is to jump in and get a few in your "pocket" to get a feel for how they work.

Despite the hype about how difficult and dangerous it can be, getting bitcoins is a lot easier and safer than you might think. In a lot of ways, it is probably easier than opening an account at a traditional bank. And, given what has been happening in the banking system, it is probably safer too.

There are a few things to learn: getting and using a software wallet, learning how to send and receive money, learning how to buy bitcoin from a person or an exchange.

Preparation

Before getting started, you will need to get yourself a wallet. You can do this easily enough by registering with one of the exchanges which will host wallet for you. And, although I think you are going to want リアルビットコイン購入方法 to have one or more exchange wallets eventually, you should start with one on your own computer both to get a better feel for bitcoin and because the exchanges are still experimental themselves. When we get to that stage of the discussion, I will be advising that you get in the habit of moving your money and coins off the exchanges or diversifying across exchanges to keep your money safe.

What is a wallet?

It is a way to store your bitcoins. Specifically, it is software that has been designed to store bitcoin. It can be run on your desktop computer, laptop, mobile device (except, as yet, Apple) and can also be made to store bitcoins on things like thumb drives. If you are concerned about being hacked, then that is a good option. Even the Winklevoss* twins, who have millions invested in bitcoin, put their investment on hard drives which they then put into a safety deposit box.

*The Winklevoss twins are the ones who originally had the idea for a social networking site that became Facebook. They hired Mark Zuckerberg who took their idea as his own and became immensely rich.

What do you need to know about having a bitcoin wallet on your computer?

Below you can download the original bitcoin wallet, or client, in Windows or Mac format. These are not just wallets, but are in fact part of the bitcoin network. They will receive, store, and send your bitcoins. You can create one or more addresses with a click (an address is a number that looks like this: 1LyFcQatbg4BvT9gGTz6VdqqHKpPn5QBuk). You will see a field where you can copy and paste a number like this from a person you want to send money to and off it will go directly into that person's wallet. You can even create a QR code which will let someone take a picture with an app on their phone and send you some bitcoin. It is perfectly safe to give these out - the address and QR code are both for my donations page. Feel free to donate!

NOTE: This type of wallet acts both as a wallet for you and as part of the bitcoin system. The reason bitcoin works is that every transaction is broadcast and recorded as a number across the entire system (meaning that every transaction is confirmed and made irreversible by the network itself). Any computer with the right software can be part of that system, checking and supporting the network. This wallet serves as your personal wallet and also as a support for that system. Therefore, be aware that it will take up 8-9 gigabytes of your computer's memory. After you install the wallet, it will take as much as a day for the wallet to sync with the network. This is normal, does not harm your computer, and makes the system as a whole more secure, so it's a good idea.

Bitcoin Qt

The original wallet.

This is a full-featured wallet: create multiple addresses to receive bitcoins, send bitcoins easily, track transactions, and back up your wallet.

Outside of the time it takes to sync, this is a very easy to use option.

Search for Bitcoin Qt wallet download to find their site.

Armory

Runs on top of Bitcoi Qt, so it has all of the same syncing requirements.

Armory allows you to back up, encrypt, and the ability to store your bitcoins off line.

Search for Bitcoin Armory Wallet to find their site.

If you don't want to have that much memory used or don't want to wait for your wallet to sync, there are good wallets that do not make you sync the entire history of bitcocin:

Multibit

A lightweight wallet that syncs quickly. This is very good for new users.

Search for Bitcoin Multibit Wallet to find their site.

Electum

In addition to being quick and light, this wallet allows you to recover lost data using a passcode.

Search for Bitcoin Electum Wallet to find their site.

After you get the wallet set up, take a few minutes clicking around. Things to look for:

o There will be a page that shows you how many bitcoins are currently in your wallet. Keep in mind that bitcoins can be broken up into smaller pieces, so you may see a decimal with a lot of zeros after it. (Interesting note, 0.00000001 is one Satoshi, named after the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin).

o There will be an area showing what your recent transactions are.

o There will be an area where you can create an address and a QR code (like the one I have above). You don't need the QR code if you don't want it, but if you run a business and you want to accept bitcoin, then all you'll need to do to accept payment is to show someone the QR code, let them take a picture of it, and they will be able to send you some money. You will also be able to create as many addresses as you like, so if you want to track where the money is coming from, you could have a separately labeled address from each one of your payees.

o There will be an area with a box for you to paste a code when you want to send money to someone or to yourself on an exchange or different wallet.

There will be other options and features, but to start out with, these are the items that you should know about.

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