Definitely this. There's still so much to achieve through FOSS, lots of missed opportunities. The mentioned factors clearly played a huge part in the current situation.
Welcome in France, this country which claims to be a beacon for Human Rights but has a problem with its law enforcement for the past two centuries... surveillance abounds and its accelerating.
This is an excellent and needed work of contextualization. Ten years after, looking back at how the Snowden Revelations impacted the internet and the work done by the IETF. It also shows there is plenty more to do...
Concerning moves on the ICANN side... already in the agreements around .com and now trying to make its way into .net.
This is an excellent piece. Very nice portrait of Emily M. Bender a really gifted computational linguist and really bad ass if you ask me. She's out there asking all the difficult questions about the current moment regarding large language models and so far the answers are (I find) disappointing. We collectively seem to be way too fascinated by the shiny new toy and the business opportunities to pay really attention to the impact on the social fabric of all of this.
There's really something rotten in this AI "arms race"... they're clearly making mistakes to go fast for PR purposes and using tools the wrong way. This can only lead to large scale disinformation if they don't correct course quickly. This has more political impacts than it looks at first sight.
It's limits and biases are well documented. But, what about the ideologies of the people behind those models? What can it tell us about their aims behind those models? Questions worth exploring in my opinion.
Very interesting model, I didn't know about this one. As pointed out you can't really base policy decisions upon it but that's still powerful since it explains some of the phenomena at play in the real world. In this way it is enough to debunk some of the assumptions taken a bit too much for granted.
As they say: follow the money. That gives an idea about the incentives and various agendas behind this take over.
This is really going down the drain. Right wings extremists basically took over the content moderation vacuum. I wonder how long before this turns into simply into an extremist echo chamber with no real user on it.
Interesting food for thought. Not necessarily easy to see it used in as many fields as the article claims. Maybe a bit too much on the techno solutionist side at times. Still, that sounds like an interesting guideline and path to explore.
Too little too late? Let's hope not... now it's time to see radical changes.
An excellent piece about the links between collapse and complexity. Obviously focuses more on socio-economics systems. Still some of it applies to other fields.
Good points of the problem with nudge backed "policies"... they're pretty completely avoiding to address the difficult political questions.
You think you don't use power on others? Think again, this can be more subtle than you think. Keep it in mind, be mindful and try to use your advantages fairly.
A good reminder on how science and politics are more intertwined than we'd like to believe. It also shows why trying to have politics determined only by science brings its own set of biases in itself and can only lead to killing any form of debate or compromises.
Nice extracts with comments about finding joy in your (work) life or not. Two paths really... which one are you on?
Too bad this is stretching a bit too far on the politics side (although it's not unjustified, I think it muddies the initial message in this context).
This is an excellent reminder on how the Popperian falsification came to be and how weak it is. More surprising are the ethics and politics ramifications of it and how they got used.
As usual with Zeynep Tufekci a mind bending article about the heuristics one might use at times when official institutions are simply trying to lie to your face and when they switch to authoritarian mode. This is indeed times when it becomes very hard to trust information and make sense of the world... how to overcome that? Well there are a few examples in that article.
FR: Pour une fois un pas positif que la création de cette mission. Cela va dans le bon sens en espérant que cela soit respecté par ailleurs.
EN: For once a step in the right direction the creation of this mission. It goes in the right direction indeed but let's hope it'll be respected.