Notices by Pwnallthethings (pwnallthethings@mastodon.social), page 2

So this is interesting. Remember the couple of cases of people shooting at four electrical substations near Tacoma in Washington State, seemingly without obvious reasons on Christmas?

Well, two people just got arrested for it. And it's an interesting story.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/press-release/file/1560621/download

Gonna write this up in longer form, but folks complaining that the $45bn Ukraine costs are high miss two key points:

1. The direct costs in (US) military aid are surprisingly small; in the order of $19bn this year, and $10.8bn committed (so far) for next year

2. The indirect economic costs of the Russian war to the US economy (i.e. to the private sector not via the government) are in the order of $600-700bn per year. To pick a random company, it's nearly $6-10bn in costs to Apple *alone*.

In other words, if the US upped it's spend by, say, 25% and that reduced the length of the war by *just a whole week*, it would *make money*.

It's a good example of how the size of war economics harms get truly insane really quickly, and get you to unintuitive places about just how much of the war costs end up as indirect, rather than direct costs.

Twitter formalizes blocking of accounts and tweets that encourage readers to follow you on other social media sites, including Mastodon.

Specific examples of violating tweets given in the policy:

> “follow me @username on Instagram”

> “username@mastodon.social”

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy

The whole debate over free speech and moderation really always just comes down to "what are the rules, who sets them, and enforces them". Everything else is always just instrumental to that question.

Just like human kids can learn to hate or be biased by growing up in a biased world, AIs can learn to be biased or hateful too by growing up in a biased training set.

And since AIs need vast quantities of data to learn from, they have a tendency to learn from datasets that can't be sanitized away from encoding human biases.

So be careful delegating too much to them in critical decisions affecting humans. Often they are a mirror to society; and can reflect both its best and worst.

What's happening here is two things.

First an assumption that if information is there it must be relevant to the question. Often that's the case, but sometimes it's not! The AI is bad at determining this.

Second, once it has determined it, it's assigning scores to the properties to try and fit the question, and the relative score is (opaquely) based on its training input, since that's usually what you want. But here that's just reflecting the input bias (that is existing social biases) back.

It's one of those things that's sort of true and not true at the same time.

The AI isn't /inherently/ biased. The code itself doesn't act in a way that intentionally encodes obnoxious biases. The programmers didn't do this on purpose.

But the *training set* introduces biases, because it's based on vast sums of human social experience and *that* is systemically biased.

So anyway, be v careful about delegating major decisions to AI or treating it as "unbiased" because it's code.

A final point: these are particularly obvious examples, but real life ones can be much more insidious.

There's been cases where AIs have done cool/horrifying things to circumvent anti-biasing.

One great example was an AI that was "blinded" against race when making life changing decisions.

Horray! We fixed the racism problem!

But alas...

the AI was smart enough to synthesize a proxy for race to implement racist decisions.

That's because race correlated well with the variable it was trying to match in the training data because of underlying racism, but after being "blinded" to race, it discovered that postcode—in this case used as a proxy for race—was a great correlating factor to the system it was trying to replace.

And it didn't *tell* anyone it was doing this. It just derived it itself.

Lots of folks warning that overreliance on AIs can lead to bias.

But that can sound a bit abstract, so let's just leave these examples here.

#CHATGPT #AI #bias

So these AI chats are pretty cool.

One thing that's gonna cause some problems tho is that they sound really really convincing while sometimes being extremely extremely wrong

A zillion ways this revolution is going to be great.

One way that's going to suck tho is in places where human interactions are a *useful* friction / proof-of-work. When it's not, those systems will get really overloaded

Few examples:

1. Online troll bots & fake personalities
It's going to get a *lot* harder to distinguish bots from people and much easier to create entirely fictitious credible online personalities to troll/harass/do crime

2. Persuasive letters by e.g. constituents to regulators.
Volume of (~sensible, unique) letters was a valid indication of sentiment. Soon won't be.

3. Ransomware victim communications & negotiations
Used to be one of the few costly areas in scale. Not for long

No matter how bad you think Twitter is or is becoming, it's like a cute fluffy cuddle version of the absolute trashfire that's trivially accessible there.

Folks thinking Apple and Google appstores are gonna block Twitter gonna have a big surprise when they find out what goes on in Telegram land

>§#Ukraine's leaders will have to be "far-sighted" to secure peace, #Pope Francis said on Friday, suggesting that #Kyiv would have to make concessions to end the war with #Russia.

Maybe missing it, but why are these calls always directed at Kyiv? Russia could put on their big boy pants and be far sighted and offer concessions to end the war too, you know

Why do folks always talk about Russia like its an inanimate force of nature like a hurricane? They have agency too.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-needs-be-far-sighted-secure-peace-pope-says-2022-11-25/

So you're just getting started in Mastodon huh?

Here's a neat thing. On the web interface you can search for a Hashtag.

Same as you can on Twitter.

Something like #Ukraine, for example

But on the search results, see that little user icon on the right? Click it and you'll follow it as if it's a user!

New posts with that tag will arrive in your home page, even if you don't follow the author yet

One thing that's getting a little lost in this mix, is that some of the people desperately holding on at Twitter are because they are trapped by either healthcare or visas.

That there are systemic traps that trap workers in America so they feel unable to move freely to new employers who want them and would have better pay or conditions is *nuts* and deserves a lot more attention than it gets.