Notices by Alex Hanna (alex@dair-community.social), page 2

Horrid new report from @972mag on an "AI" system called Lavender and "Where's Daddy?" used by the IDF. Has a 10% error rate, and acceptable "collateral" from 15 to 100 civilians per target.

This is sick and the future of AI warfare for US Empire.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Our local instance is getting absolutely bombarded with spam. Ugh. Can someone else us out? Trying to play whack-a-mole with banning instances but is there a better option?

@pettter @emilymbender It'll just be us for this one. We have *opinions*.

Lying in bed brainworm: why didn't the Arabs also create NULL while also creating zero.

Alternative formulation: what's the history of NULL values

What started as a smack-talking group chat with @emilymbender now has 25 thousand downloads and an amazing producer in Christie Taylor!

Thank you all for listening! If you like the pod, please rate and review us on Apple and Spotify, and donate to @DAIR at https://dair-institute.org/support/

Sigh so I guess Twitter is down

@inquiline it's not clear whether I should waste time here or the blue place or both

When we talk about not relying on machine translation by Big Tech, this is what we mean. When machine translations from Arabic, a language spoken by hundreds of millions of people, still produces dross like this, the necessity of community-oriented tech is made very plainly.

https://www.404media.co/instagram-palestinian-arabic-bio-translation/

New from @emilymbender and I in @sciam on the junk science powering "AI" research and circular citation networks:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-to-focus-on-ais-real-harms-not-imaginary-existential-risks/

Two new episodes of Mystery AI Hype Theater are up! First, episode 9 on the rise of AI Doctors and other quack stories.
@emilymbender

#aihype #salami

https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/cDct9r1KJX7KgpnV8o71R2

@emilymbender Second, episode 10 on AI lawyers with special guest @kendraserra!

@emilymbender #aihype #salami

https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/o6sb7f7RwapWBJd9VC61t4

@sugar we've taught the sand to think. Seems just to allow them to feel despair too

@anildash do elves even have phones? Or Yubi keys?

Got a whole bunch of new followers after Bloody Thursday. So, hi! Welcome to the Fediverse. It's like Twitter, but different, most notably that moderation decisions are conducted by moderators of your instance, rather than by one central company.

There's a lot of good writing on this place as still a very white space, so instead of saying anything about that, gonna point you to follow the writings of @shengokai @hypervisible and @Kishonna

https://techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/
https://www.wired.com/story/black-twitter-social-media/