Kind: Reads

Lessons from Ilhan Omar’s Removal from the Foreign Affairs Committee by Nathan Guttman

The vote was further proof that the question isn’t where to draw the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. It’s all about politics.

Inside the mind of the American voter.

Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in 'The cat sat on the [BLANK]'). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it's still a computational guessing game. ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit generator'. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. The language model has no idea what it's talking about because it has no idea about anything at all. It's more of a bullshitter than the most egregious egoist you'll ever meet, producing baseless assertions with unfailing confidence because that's what it's designed to do. It's a bonus for the parent corporation when journalists and academics respond by generating acres of breathless coverage, which works as PR even when expressing concerns about the end of human creativity.

Managing our colors can truly help people to access our content. In this article, Brecht de Ruyte takes a deep dive into how we can create a high-contrast system while maintaining a balance between designing something accessible and respecting the look and feel of a brand.

Police profanity isn’t just impolite—it poisons the relationship with the public.

Plus: Elon traffics in Russian propaganda

A GOP celebration of a mass-killing machine on the House floor is on-brand for a nihilistic party that prides deadly individualism over problem-solving.

Hooking into the Block Editor’s Post Publish Panel (with Copilot) by Brian Coords

A walkthrough of Copilot and I attempting to add some content to the post-publish panel in the block editor.

You open up a database of pictures used to train artificial intelligence systems. At first, things seem straightforward. You’re met with thousands of images: apples and oranges, birds, dogs, horses, mountains, clouds, houses, and street signs. But as you probe further into the dataset, people begin to appear: cheerleaders, scuba divers, welders, Boy Scouts, fire walkers, and flower girls. Things get strange: A photograph of a woman smiling in a bikini is labeled a “slattern, slut, slovenly woman, trollop.” A young man drinking beer is categorized as an “alcoholic, alky, dipsomaniac, boozer, lush, soaker, souse.” A child wearing sunglasses is classified as a “failure, loser, non-starter, unsuccessful person.” You’re looking at the “person” category in a dataset called ImageNet, one of the most widely used training sets for machine learning. Something is wrong with this picture. Where did these images come from? Why were the people in the photos labeled this way? What sorts of politics are at work when pictures are paired with labels, and what are the implications when they are used to train technical systems? In short, how did we get here?

My hope is that we won't simply replace one monolithic platform with another. That we'll take this disruption in routine as an opportunity to further disrupt a status quo that has needed disruption for some time. That we'll try new things, build new things, find new ways to connect that don't simply replicate the patterns of the past but instead move toward a future that feels better for everyone.

And Republicans should stop treating them as ordinary violence.

Elon Musk Is Running Scared From Mastodon; Cuts Off The Best Tool For Finding Your Twitter Followers There by Mike Masnick

People keep claiming that Mastodon isn’t scaring Elon Musk, but it’s pretty clear that he’s worried about the exodus of people from Twitter. With his bizarrely short-sighted decision to end free access to the Twitter API, driving developers over to Mastodon, some people realized that the various tools that people use to find their Twitter […]

After a college student finally found a treatment that worked, the insurance giant decided it wouldn’t pay for the costly drugs. His fight to get coverage exposed the insurer’s hidden procedures for rejecting claims.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other Democrats are treating red-state culture-warring as a foil.

I have a lot of problems with this news story! And now you're gonna hear about 'em!

After failing to kill the FCC nomination of Gigi Sohn because she'd be too tough on business, opponents have turned to smearing her with homophobic lies.

The normie kabuki dance.

The following thread marks the end of my time on twitter. Multiple issues, such as data failing to update, data being cached in some instances but not others and thus causing weird behavior, etc made me decide I will trust this app no longer. It could lead to life threatening issues. These are the f...

Via Twitter’s Developer Site: “Use Log in with Twitter, also known as Sign in with Twitter, to place a button on your site or application which allows Twitter users to enjoy the benefits of a registered user account in as little as one click. This works on websites, iOS, mobile, and desktop applications.” “Access tokens …