🧊✈️ SEATTLE: A girl in chains boards an ICE-chartered GlobalX airplane (tail: N630VA) at Boeing Field, to be transported south to Arizona 👀

Two accurate posts made even more trenchant by coming up next to each other. The issuer of an agent is responsible for that agent, whether OAI or DHS. No agent is “rogue”. (Click to see in full.) @maggiemcneill.bsky.social @rincewind.run

THIS IS SO COOL. 🪲

Digital Naturalism Laboratories@dinalab.bsky.social · 5d ago

Open Dataset Publishing day! With help from @wildlabs.bsky.social Boring fund, the @amnh.org, collaborators around the world, and @wellreadpanda.bsky.social 's relentless rectangling, we are happy to share 15K insects annotated + oriented on 1.7K high resolution images! zenodo.org/records/2314...

Man who won’t give his employees piss breaks claims many piss breaks on the horizon

The point here is that you cannot exert democratic power over decisions that aren't yours in the first place. The companies that are testing their products on the public or are open to their feedback are doing R&D, not democracy. lesscomputer.ca/advocate-for...

Something I find quite tiring is that one’s “perspective on AI” (whatever that means) is just a matter of opinion. I get that most people have opinions about “AI,” but “opinion” isn’t how I would qualify all subaltern AI scholarship and activism link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The golden thread of AI subalternity: epistemic activism - AI and Ethics

There is a rising tide of initiatives countering predominant AI practices and narratives. The social and environmental consequences of AI-dedicated data centres; the death, injury and human displaceme...

link.springer.com

I LOVE how @propublica.org dealt with official comment here, editorially and stylistically.

Ken Schwencke@schwanksta.com · last wk.

A year ago, @propublica.org told you immigration agents had detained more than 170 U.S. citizens. We’ve updated our count, and we’ve got all the receipts. The tally: At least 506 citizens detained. Sometimes held at gunpoint, handcuffed, or even deported. projects.propublica.org/american-cit...

Over 500 candidates running for state legislator positions in November are members of far-right groups on Facebook that promote militias, gun rights, and Christian nationalism, according to data shared with WIRED.

These Extremists Are Running for Election in November

With the threat of political violence at unprecedented levels, state and federal GOP candidates are openly sharing racist, pro-militia, anti-vaccine, sexist, antisemitic, and secessionist views.

wired.com

If the Western Mass Lesbian Bar Discourse has hit your feed this week… 😭 @jgieseking.bsky.social brings together the reporting & historical context for this week’s QG: www.queergeographies.com/stuck-on-the...

Why We’re Stuck on the Last Ditch

Why does the public delight in watching lesbian bars unravel?

queergeographies.com

Alignment & redteaming & quality review walk into a bar

Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · 2w ago

Crucially these contractors are not hired to filter out offensive content. They are hired to report whether Copilot successfully made a good AI image. So if the request is, make this person's breasts larger, they have to review based on whether it did or not. Insane www.404media.co/humans-readi...

Quick, without looking, everybody count to three and name the industry. 1, 2, 3… (Whatever you named, yes.)

Micah@rincewind.run · 2w ago

it’s bad, actually, that much of the industry is gatekept by people whose standard for hiring a woman is “are you a Cool Girl who is into weird men doing sex stuff at her all the time?”

“The tiresomely old-school cost of supporting scholarship and pedagogy is so dull compared to the exciting opportunity of an Ambient.ai contract that will empower the tracking potential of our 500 new surveillance cameras!”

Catherine D'Ignazio (she/her/ella)@kanarinka.bsky.social · 3w ago

MIT spent $3 million on 500 AI-capable surveillance cameras while laying people off, shutting down libraries, and canceling journal subscriptions. In this article, 4 faculty & I discuss our new arts initiative to celebrate surveillance and repression on college campuses: fnl.mit.edu/how-we-learn...

33 years ago today, the Stranger stepped onto the dock of Myst Island for the first time. We can still hear the water splashing against the pilings.

In "The Patina of Distrust," Eugenia Mitchelstein, Pablo Boczkowski, María Celeste Wagner, and Facundo Suenzo explore how distrust of the media can protect audiences from both misinformation and attempts to correct it through the lens of Argentina's 2019 elections: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255076...

This one’s for everyone who gets misty over Carney’s “middle powers” speeches and measured leadership something something.

John Clarke@johncke.bsky.social · 3w ago

..the legislation comes after a big push from federally regulated industries to provide more stability and predictability in places like ports, railways and air travel.' The decoded version is, #Carney will launch a major attack on #workersrights.' www.ctvnews.ca/politics/art...

To put that into dollar terms: Oregon residents are now paying $1.6 billion more for electricity than they were paying just 5 years ago, which comes out to roughly $950 extra per household per year. Alternately, that $611,000 from the pockets of Oregonians each year for each data center job.

The "culture" of accident reporting came about through regulation, in the face of massive opposition from airlines. The companies are forced to share their data and have their failures investigated independently.

Our new volume on Global Platform Governance is now available for pre-orders, gathering perspectives from academics and practitioners all over the world on key debates around regulating platforms so that folks are not just engaging what works for the US or the EU. www.bloomsbury.com/uk/global-pl...

Global Platform Governance

This is a field-defining open access playbook for identifying and responding to the global regulatory challenges created by large digital platforms.Here Nanjala…

bloomsbury.com

whew boy

but the feeling is really visceral, like people deeply understand what eg an invasion of privacy feels like; they feel it in their bones even if they can't articulate it EXCEPT if you involve a computer, then the intuition seems to vanish

Lex Jansen, in both personal and website forms, has died. blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/...

Remembering Lex Jansen: Friend to SAS learners everywhere

For many SAS users, lexjansen.

blogs.sas.com

Believing that other people are real is antifascist praxis.

Someday I hope to have more rights than AI generated child sex abuse material

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · last mo.

If you are still asking why regular people hate ai, you aren’t paying attention.

Said another way: they want you to talk about the flashy, $2 million robot distraction. They do not want you talking about the $38 billion private prison and ICE prison camp expansion.

Project Salt Box@projectsaltbox.com · last mo.

There has been, rightfully, a lot of angst about ICE buying robot dogs and shock gloves. There is not NEARLY enough outrage about the massive detention apparatus they are building out, or the inexperienced contractors "checking in" on migrant children, or collecting fines in foreign countries, etc.

*INDIANA JONES AND THE CLOSURE OF THE ARCHAEOLOGY DEPARTMENT*

Weather forecasting in my lifetime has become nearly perfect thanks to the government investing in constant and high quality data collection up until now. Some dark ages shit is happening because there's enormous money to be made by breaking everything.

Chris Vagasky@coweatherman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If they’re going to be paying out based, in part, on personal weather stations with questionable installation, maintenance, and calibration history, then you get what you get, I guess. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The best way to honor the two who have left us recently, imo, is to keep being as gay as possible

Mechanical Turk may be shutting down, but AI will always depend on data workers whose knowledge trains and tunes models. AI runs on extracted cultural skills and knowledge, and culture is always changing. Less the end of an era, but the end of an early prototype.

Louise Matsakis@lmatsakis.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Amazon is officially shutting down Mechanical Turk next month. It feels like the end of an era. I've written about the platform on and off for close to a decade. We wouldn't have the AI tools we do now if it weren't for the low-paid, largely invisible labor of MTurkers

I’ve read Charlotte’s Web aloud so often to my kids over the years, and I don’t think they’ll ever get tired of it or grow out of it. I never did either.