In a world that faces unprecedented challenges, from a resurgence in global fascism to the fast-developing storm of the climate crisis, we need more technologists to focus on doing good work.
Here's how to take the leap.
https://werd.io/using-technology-skills-for-positive-change/
"Now, nearly two years and more than 250 assassinations later, I can count the names of the living journalists in Gaza I follow on one hand." #Democracy https://werd.io/how-do-we-tell-the-story-of-gazas-murdered-journalists/
General poll: if you need to keep your sensitive conversations secure, what platforms are you using beyond Signal?
I'd love to read some takes on the pan-European political movement Volt.
I think Elon Musk is probably the most dangerous man in the world right now, but I have to respect him bringing his kid to work. After all, Baby X, Future Ruler of Mars needs to learn despotism from somewhere.
And another thing: I hate the idea that "masculine energy" is dressing up like a modern-day Roman emperor, getting really into UFC, and being hyper-competitive. Masculine energy is anything you want it to be. These jerks are not what I'd call quintessential men. (Neither am I. Or any of us.)
"We felt the system was designed to take decision-making power away from nurses at the bedside. Deny us the power to have a say in how much staffing we need." On AI in healthcare: #AI https://werd.io/2024/im-a-neurology-icu-nurse-the-creep-of-ai-in
"Microsoft and Constellation Energy have announced a deal that would re-open Pennsylvania's shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant." #AI https://werd.io/2024/re-opened-three-mile-island-will-power-ai-data-centers-under
"The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility." #AI https://werd.io/2024/project-analyzing-human-language-usage-shuts-down-because-generative-ai
What kind of place would you prefer to live in? What's important to you in terms of infrastructure, culture, values? Not everyone thinks an inclusive, diverse society is a good thing. A conversation with myself about immigration and what I think is important: https://werd.io/2024/a-conversation-with-myself-about-immigration
"The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real)." #AI https://werd.io/2024/andy-jassy-on-using-generative-ai-in-software-development-at
“Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future.” #AI https://werd.io/2024/procreates-anti-ai-pledge-attracts-praise-from-digital-creatives
"Under this program, when Perplexity features content from these publishers in response to user queries, the publishers will receive a share of the ad revenue." Now we're talking. This was inevitable. #AI https://werd.io/2024/perplexity-is-cutting-checks-to-publishers-following-plagiarism-accusations
"A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films." #AI https://werd.io/2024/runway-ripped-off-youtube-creators
"ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two." #AI https://werd.io/2024/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind
From Cloudflare: "To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier." #AI https://werd.io/2024/declare-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with
#AI
"This entire class of person is, to put it simply, abhorrent to right-thinking people. They're an embarrassment to people that are actually making advances in the field, a disgrace to people that know how to sensibly use technology to improve the world, and are also a bunch of tedious know-nothing bastards that should be thrown into Thought Leader Jail until they've learned their lesson, a prison I'm fundraising for." I enjoyed this. #AI https://werd.io/2024/i-will-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again
The FTC on AI: "Don’t misrepresent what these services are or can do. Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods." #AI https://werd.io/2024/succor-borne-every-minute
"Our lives are consumed with the consumption of content, but we no longer know the truth when we see it. And when we don’t know how to weigh different truths, or to coordinate among different real-world experiences to look behind the veil, there is either cacophony or a single victor: a loudest voice that wins." #AI https://werd.io/2024/the-encyclopedia-project-or-how-to-know-in-the-age
There's no good way to prevent AI models from being trained on art published on the fediverse. But there's work we can do to prevent it and protect the artists who post there. #fediverse https://werd.io/2024/protecting-artists-on-the-fediverse