Hard article to read, but an important one. Here’s the thing: I know two people who own Meta “pervert glasses,” and I think if there is an innocuous use case for these glasses, they’re demonstrating it.

And yet, here’s Ellul on technical ambivalence:

And this technological nexus is characteristically ambivalent. Because the solution of one problem by technological means immediately raises a multitude of others, which result directly from those very means, it is impossible to say whether technique produces good or evil effects. It does both, simultaneously. We are confronted with a system in the strict sense of the word, what I will call the “technological system,” hence ethical issues may only be considered relative to the system as a whole, and not to specific instances.

Cannot overstate how gross this is.

Amazing reporting.

I recently passed the second anniversary of my ordination in Community of Christ, and there are a couple of memories from that moment that feel significant enough to write down—and significant enough for them to affect the way that I think about my ministry. I don’t know that I’m doing great with ministry, but I am trying, and as I continue to try, these memories associated with the actual event of ordination are ones that I want to keep in mind.

This response is such a CEO way to apologize for something:

“It took me maybe longer than it should have to realize the sheer impact of the company,” he says. “I’m still surprised. I got our July update a week ago, and we helped find almost a thousand missing people, over 22,000 stolen cars — in July. That’s crazy. That’s such a big impact on the world. And what I came to realize over time was that the responsibility that bears with it is an obligation to make sure that it’s creating a society that we both, you and I, and everyone around us, want to raise their kids in.”

Because trademark bullying is in the news lately: Did you know that Intellectual Reserve owns the top-level domains .lds and .mormon, presumably for the sole purpose of preventing anyone else from using them?

Oof, this is terrifying.

Lots to like in this post.

I could nitpick some of this, but it’s an important read.

Good work from the EFF here.

Love this kind of work from The Onion.

Love a company response that comes down to “sure, we talked about it, but we didn’t actually do it.”

This comparison crossed my mind, too, and I’m glad for this write-up.

I was reading some Jacques Ellul yesterday, where he noted that in “technical morality,” technology cannot do wrong, only the humans using the technology.

Flock’s response here seems to be a variation on that: The technology cannot be inaccurate, only the humans using it.

Amazing update to a dumb saga.

Look, some of the problem is Flock, but the core of the problem is ALPRs, and merely switching companies doesn’t solve that.

This movie is well done, and Turing is a figure I’d love to learn more about, but I got the sense that these two observations were in tension with each other. In short, I’m so annoyed at how obviously the history has been made (and changed) to conveniently fit a movie that I can’t enjoy what is not a bad film otherwise.

Finally got my July 4th print edition of The Onion, and I don’t know if this fake ad is regular Onion absurdism or an under-the-radar Mormon-adjacent joke.

Missed the original story, but wow.

Some very interesting perspective on fair use and asking permission.

I want to disagree with some of what Doctorow says here, but that’s precisely why I am bookmarking it. I want to make sure that my opposition to generative AI is principled rather than reactionary, and his defense of certain uses of it is something I need to keep in mind.

Hard to pick a single killer line from this one. There’s this paragraph:

Appreciate for a moment the bind Meta finds itself in: Its product allowed customers to behave so objectionably that the company responded with a content ban, as if to say “Stop making us look bad.”

And then this conclusion hits hard:

In saying the company will police the creepiest version of smart glasses content but sidestepping deeper questions, Meta is trying to have it both ways: It gets to tout its enforcement while creating the conditions for this content to exist in the first place.

Looks like the Trump administration is responding to dumb decisions and cynical cuts with pure exploitation:

After withdrawing from the World Health Organization and losing access to its global network that tracks and combats disease outbreaks, the U.S. is attempting to obtain the information necessary to address potential pandemics through a patchwork of deals with individual countries

Flock is gross, but so is this.

I feel like everything I read about the Taylor Farms response to being identified with the cyclosporasis outbreak makes me distrust the company more than just their being identified with the outbreak.