Apple Vision Pro: A Watershed Moment for Personal Computing – MacStories:
I’m convinced that Vision Pro and the visionOS platform are a watershed moment in the arc of personal computing. After trying it, I came away reflecting that we’ll eventually think of software before spatial computing, and after it. For better or worse – we can’t know if this platform will be successful yet – Apple created a clear demarcation between the era of looking at a computer and looking at the world as the computer. Whether their plan succeeds or not, we’ll remember this moment in the history of the company.
CERN celebrates 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web • The Register:
On April 30, 1993, CERN signed off on a decision that the World Wide Web – a client, server, and library of code created under its roof – belonged to humanity (the letter was duly stamped on May 3).
“CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it” states a letter signed on that day by Walter Hoogland and Helmut Weber – at the time respectively CERN’s director of research and director of administration.
What’s scarier than AI-created lies? AI-created truths about Donald Trump:
When President Joe Biden made the announcement that he would run for reelection, the Republican Party was standing by with an ad that used AI-created imagery to generate all their dark fantasies about what would happen in a second Biden term, from a zombie horde crossing the border to San Francisco being somehow “closed” because of so, so much fentanyl.
It wasn’t just that the ad used AI imagery. It was that nothing–absolutely nothing–in that ad had anything to do with the real world. Not one of the morbid fantasies in which the GOP indulged themselves was in any way an extrapolation of Biden’s policies. It wasn’t just fake images, it was fake images spawned out of wholly fake claims designed to keep Republican voters properly frightened and enraged.
In the last six months, the ability of AI “large-model” applications has grown dramatically in ways that should concern everyone, not just writers and artists. How much time or money the Republican Party invested in their attack ad isn’t clear.
But creating a similar video from scratch took me about five hours, and cost me $10.
See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart – Washington Post:
Basic gist – LLMs are only as good as the data they’ve been fed, and while the code may not have any built in bias, garbage in means garbage out…
Possibly paywalled, so I’ll pull some notable datum…
“News”
Meanwhile, we found several media outlets that rank low on NewsGuard’s independent scale for trustworthiness: RT.com No. 65, the Russian state-backed propaganda site; breitbart.com No. 159, a well-known source for far-right news and opinion; and vdare.com No. 993, an anti-immigration site that has been associated with white supremacy.
Chatbots have been shown to confidently share incorrect information, but don’t always offer citations. Untrustworthy training data could lead it to spread bias, propaganda and misinformation — without the user being able to trace it to the original source.
“Religion”
The highest ranked Jewish site was jewishworldreview.com No. 366, an online magazine for Orthodox Jews. In December, it published an article about Hanukkah that blamed the rise of antisemitism in the United States on “the far-right, fundamentalist Islam,” as well as “an African-American community influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Anti-Muslim bias has emerged as a problem in some language models. For example, a study published in the journal Nature found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 completed the phrase “Two muslims walked into a …” with violent actions 66 percent of the time.
Personal blogs
These online diaries ranged from professional to personal, like a blog called “Grumpy Rumblings,” co-written by two anonymous academics, one of whom recently wrote about how their partner’s unemployment affected the couple’s taxes. One of the top blogs offered advice for live-action role-playing games. Another top site, Uprooted Palestinians, often writes about “Zionist terrorism” and “the Zionist ideology.”
Inadequate filtering
Meanwhile, The Post found that the filters failed to remove some troubling content, including the white supremacist site stormfront.org No. 27,505, the anti-trans site kiwifarms.net No. 378,986, and 4chan.org No. 4,339,889, the anonymous message board known for organizing targeted harassment campaigns against individuals.
We also found threepercentpatriots.com No. 8,788,836, a downed site espousing an anti-government ideology shared by people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. And sites promoting conspiracy theories, including the far-right QAnon phenomenon and “pizzagate,” the false claim that a D.C. pizza joint was a front for pedophiles, were also present.
Daring Fireball: The Savings Account Is Half Empty
April 19, 2023
Daring Fireball: The Savings Account Is Half Empty:
This is just looking to piss on Apple no matter what the story. A digital state ID stored in Apple Wallet is more secure than a printed card stored in your physical wallet. If one thief takes my iPhone, and another takes my wallet and keys, the first thief needs my device passcode to get anything. The second thief instantly knows everything that’s printed on my driver’s license and credit cards — including the address of my home, where the keys will unlock the doors. The digitization of banking does carry risks, but the pre-digital world of banking revolved around paper checks and signatures.
There’s nothing hard to square about Apple’s initiative in this regard at all. I’ll bet Tim Cook has his driver’s license in Apple Wallet — and I practically guarantee that he has his credit cards in Apple Wallet. Apple Wallet really is more secure that a physical wallet and cards. And the new savings accounts simply offer Apple Card customers a way to earn interest on cash accounts that heretofore did not pay any interest at all. There’s nothing to be cynical about with this.
Daring Fireball: It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes
March 21, 2023
Daring Fireball: It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes:
Real recordings will be called fake and fake recordings will be leaked as purportedly real. I don’t think the general population is prepared for this, and I worry that news media organizations aren’t either.
This tech is moving out of the uncanny valley and into the indistinguishable realm… And bad actors will absolutely go wild with it.
A Rebuttal to Scaling Mastodon is Impossible · weblog.masukomi.org:
Armin Ronacher wrote that Scaling Mastodon is Impossible
I’d like to offer a rebuttal. As someone who’s been doing professional web development since 1995, with most of that time being spent in Rails jobs, or doing Rails work on the sidelines, I think i have a pretty good perspective on the situation. For those who don’t know, Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails.
A great read on how ActivePub solves the problems of social networks in smart ways, some of which aren’t really being used as best practices yet but have potential.
Spelunking Apple’s Open Source | Bitsplitting.org
March 20, 2023
Spelunking Apple’s Open Source | Bitsplitting.org:
Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.
This resource is useful primarily to developers, but may also interest curious technophiles who want to take a peek “behind the curtain” to see how much of the magic just beneath our fingertips is made.
If you visit the page today, you’ll see a new emphasis on Apple’s high-level projects, such as Swift and WebKit. At first glance you might wonder if the extensive list of all the open source projects has been removed from the site.
There’s no need to worry: the whole list, indexed by the pertinent platform and OS release to which they belong, is still available on a separate Releases page. Even better, each of these releases now has a corresponding GitHub repository, hosted in a dedicated organization reserved exclusively for open source distributions.
Daring Fireball: Samsung Responds, Hand-Wavingly, to Fake Moon Photos Controversy:
And that’s my point. What if the moon weren’t the same? What if it gets hit by a large meteor, creating a massive new visible-from-earth crater? Or what if our humble friend Phony Stark blows tens of billions of dollars erecting a giant billboard on the surface of the moon, visible from earth, that reads “@elonmusk”? A photo of the moon taken with one of these Samsung phones wouldn’t show either of those things, yet would appear to capture a detailed image of the moon’s surface. A camera should capture the moon as it is now, and computational photography should help improve the detail of that image of the moon as it appears now. Samsung’s phones are rendering the moon as it was, at some point in the past when this ML model was trained.
Sony Group Portal – Gallery | Sony Design | History of Sony Design:
On this page you can see a wide range of products and services created by Sony designers.
Please take a look at the history of Sony Design.
One item I’d never seen before is the HB-101, which was actually a pretty sexy looking MSX1 Compatible home computer that never went anywhere.
— via Daring Fireball
Pocket Realities 