Notices by Jonathan Yu (jawnsy@mastodon.social)

"Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users."

"For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54% of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70% of police stops."

https://theconversation.com/police-stop-more-black-drivers-while-speed-cameras-issue-unbiased-tickets-new-study-from-chicago-238170 via @TheConversationUS

This writing is superb:

"Corporate Attribution Error is what happens when a business [...] illogically and systematically attributes a large observed outcome in the world to the intentional and planned initiative of a business."

"Causal thinking is difficult for people who literally spend their entire careers trying to do science about it. So I write this not to castigate, but to contemplate. We live inside of attributions and our errors, always."

https://www.drcathicks.com/post/corporate-attribution-error by @grimalkina

"By turning off your lights all day every day for a month, you conserved about 1 percent of the energy needed for AI to generate a picture of a duck wearing sunglasses. Isn’t he cute? Aside from the fact that he has the feet of a human man, of course."

"By dropping $7K on better, energy-efficient insulation for your home, Google AI was able to tell someone how to prepare chicken incorrectly, and they got, like, super sick—thanks to you!"

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-department-of-energy-wants-you-to-know-your-conservation-efforts-are-making-a-difference

@mcc A wise man, @bcantrill, once told us all not to anthropomorphize the lawnmower, though. I think he was right. Oracle is Oracle, they are very transparent about their model and their approach, and I find that kind of honesty refreshing

"Alone in my kitchen, I am a continent-spanning colossus. I am a cyborg. I have technological systems at my literal fingertips. These are infrastructure utilities: energy, fuel, electricity, water, sewage, telecommunications, the supply chains behind that. These are the systems that make my life, as I know it, possible. And on that typical night, they're basically invisible, at least invisible to me."

https://youtu.be/c_YLAhZpfMI by @debcha h/t @RuthMalan

@maaretp What's the goal of the security testing? It can be useful to get a baseline that you can then work to improve

@ryanc @matthew_d_green @filippo Joking aside, thank you to y'all and everyone else working tirelessly to remove some of the footguns from this stuff. Things have gotten much better in security - there's always more to be done, but I think it's also nice to recognize that the industry has come a long way. HTTPS everywhere, short-lived keys, memory-safe languages. All thanks to people like you!

@matthew_d_green And @filippo is trying to ruin the fun in Go by preventing use of these small keys 😤

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/68762

@GossiTheDog I didn't realize that companies could just.... not comply with GDPR. What lawyer signed off on that strategy??

@GossiTheDog The lower right quadrant is people who would love to cause lots of unavailability, but don't have enough customers to cause a meaningful impact, yeah?

@GossiTheDog Yeah, makes sense. I'm still kinda miffed about the vague "one of a kind issue" and "due to a software bug" language, it's sad that Google is playing it off instead of taking accountability. They've had a number of high profile incidents lately, it seems.

AWS seems more forthcoming in incident postmortems and the like, but maybe that just speaks to their maturity as a cloud vs Azure & Google

@GossiTheDog I don't see anything in this article or anywhere else about deleting data, only a "misconfiguration," though it does stand to reason that the data was deleted since it has taken so long to restore. Did I miss something?

I guess offsite/cross-cloud backups were a saving grace in this case, though I wonder how many companies have this scenario as part of their disaster recovery planning

"The enshittification of the services we once loved and still rely on represents a series of victories for the forces of evil over the forces of good – a victory for the people who want to use the internet to trap us, over the people who want to use the internet to set us free.

As it got harder for users to leave online services, it got easier to abuse users."

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/ by @pluralistic