Non-theist Christian and elder in Community of Christ. I have Mormon roots and aspirations to do better with justice and peacemaking—especially in the digital sphere but also in Lexington, Kentucky, the U.S., and the world more broadly.
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🔗 linkblog: OpenAI to Open-Source Some of the A.I. Systems Behind ChatGPT
There are, of course, social benefits to open sourcing powerful tools like these ones. However, I’m reminded of “open source” Android, which is a deliberate business decision that benefits Google—and of how many NCII-generating tools are based on open weight/open source models. gift link
🔗 linkblog: Grok’s ‘spicy’ video setting instantly made me Taylor Swift nude deepfakes
I’m glad that someone is doing this white hat work, but I hate that we live in a world where someone has to.
🔗 linkblog: Statement Regarding 80 Years Since the First Use of Nuclear Weapons | News | Community of Christ
Glad to belong to a church that takes positions on moral issues like this one.
🔗 linkblog: Quand la presse glorifiait la bombe atomique après l'attaque sur Hiroshima
Je connaissais pas cette partie de l’histoire.
🔗 linkblog: Substack’s Algorithm Accidentally Reveals What We Already Knew: It’s The Nazi Bar Now
Not impressed with Substack, and Masnick does a good job of explaining why.
🔗 linkblog: SCOOP: Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog
You don’t have to use Substack to have a newsletter.
🔗 linkblog: Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
“Traffic apocalypse” is a scary idea—not only for the threat it poses to smaller websites but also for the way it could further cement the influence of a few big companies in shaping the world.
🔗 linkblog: ChatGPT Hallucinated a Feature, Forcing Human Developers to Add It
You know, I skipped over this story when it come out in a couple of other outlets, but seeing the headline again here got me thinking about how good/scary of an example this is of LLMs shaping (rather than reflecting) reality.
🔗 linkblog: This ‘violently racist’ hacker claims to be the source of The New York Times’ Mamdani scoop
Some wild details in here—all of which seem more important to me than the application details.
🔗 linkblog: Inside a Gaza hospital: A British surgeon on what he's witnessing firsthand
Some horrifying details in here.
🔗 linkblog: Mark Zuckerberg Is Expanding His Secretive Hawaii Compound. Part of It Sits Atop a Burial Ground
Personally, I’m not sure why anyone needs to be this rich.
🔗 linkblog: La liberté de la presse toujours plus attaquée par Donald Trump
Je trouve utile de lire les médias étrangers, pour savoir comment on réagit à notre folie.
🔗 linkblog: The Astronomer CEO's Coldplay Concert Fiasco Is Emblematic of Our Social Media Surveillance Dystopia
Good article. I’m not here to defend CEOs who have affairs with executives in their companies, but the tech ecosystem that allowed for this will do more harm to everyday people than it will ever hold CEOs to account.
🔗 linkblog: Will AI end cheap flights? Critics attack Delta’s “predatory” AI pricing.
Yes, but AI will also save us time writing emails, so this seems like a fair tradeoff.
🔗 linkblog: I Tried Grok’s Built-In Anime Companion and It Called Me a Twat
Musk leans into the bro in tech bro.
🔗 linkblog: Hugging Face Is Hosting 5,000 Nonconsensual AI Models of Real People
Gonna keep posting (almost) every article I read on NCII and generative AI.
🔗 linkblog: a16z-Backed AI Site Civitai Is Mostly Porn, Despite Claiming Otherwise
This line (from a study quoted in the article) stood out:
The open-source nature of TTI technologies, proclaimed as a democratizing force in generative AI, has also enabled the propagation of models that perpetuate hypersexualized imagery and nonconsensual deepfakes.
Open sourcing generative AI solves some problems but creates others.
🔗 linkblog: AI 'Nudify' Websites Are Raking in Millions of Dollars
On, look, it’s two of my least favorite things about generative AI (NCII and raking in money without concern for ethics) IN THE SAME STORY.
📚 bookblog: Gaytheist: Coming Out of My Orthodox Childhood (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
A relatively short comic with good art and a compelling story. In some ways, I would have liked a written memoir more, but this was a good read.
🔗 linkblog: Mike Lee Can’t Stop Throwing Social Media Grenades. His Church Isn’t Happy.
Good read and worth bookmarking for later.
🔗 linkblog: Trump Mobile Keeps Charging My Credit Card And I Have No Idea Why
Love—don’t love—how all the constitutional and democratic dangers of our time are so closely married to low-grade scammishness.
🔗 linkblog: A.I.-Generated Images of Child Sexual Abuse Are Flooding the Internet
Surely this is a reasonable price to pay for the Nazi-praising Grok to “discover new physics” within the next year, as Elon promised last night.
This kind of thing is why I hate “the genie is out of the bottle” arguments. I can’t help but hear them as “yes, people are going to create more CSAM, but all we can do is instead teach people to use these tools more responsibly.
🔗 linkblog: The New York Times Runs Interference For A Racist To Manufacture A Fake Scandal About Zohran Mamdani
There’s a genre of news story that I actively avoid following the discourse on but end up reading about once Mike Masnick writes on it, and then I get angry with everyone else. This fits nicely in that genre.
🔗 linkblog: What is AGI? Nobody agrees, and it’s tearing Microsoft and OpenAI apart.
Karen Hao’s Empire of AI really emphasized for me how much stock is being put in AGI—especially as a motivator for AI companies. I am fine wirh concepts being hard to define, but I do think things get tricky when you can’t articulate how you’ll know when you’ve met the goal that serves as your raison d’être.
🔗 linkblog: Grok praises Hitler, gives credit to Musk for removing 'woke filters'
Disgusting and deliberate.
🔗 linkblog: Knives, bullets and thieves: the quest for food in Gaza
Heartbreaking read. This line in particular was like a punch in the gut:
I have lost a third of my body weight after nearly 21 months of war in Gaza.
🔗 linkblog: Emily Bender: L'IA est un perroquet stochastique sans faculté de raisonnement
Voici des rappels importants.
🔗 linkblog: God’s Pantry Food Bank voices concerns about federal cuts to food stamps
We donate to this food bank, so I take their concerns particularly seriously:
“Our volume today is double what it was 12 years ago. Today, some of the early estimates that we’ve seen would suggest that we have to double our volume again in three years. That’s how daunting the task could be,” Halligan said.
recent sermon text on finding the Ultimate in the ordinary
Just over a week ago, I preached for the Beyond the Walls online ministry up in Toronto. I wanted to post the text of my sermon (I’ll also link to the video recording just before that text begins). I was excited about this particular topic, since it fit nicely with some thinking I’ve been doing in recent years, includingwhile reading Cédric Lagandré’s book Dieu n’existe pas encore and writing up some subsequent thoughts.
🔗 linkblog: Rural hospitals in Kentucky brace for financial hits or even closures under GOP's $1 trillion Medicaid cut
Shame on me for not realizing just how badly this would affect my home state. Shame on all the Kentucky reps in Congress who voted for it anyway.
📚 bookblog: Country of Ghosts (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
This book isn’t the best of the anarchist fiction I’ve read—it feels a bit stilted or maybe even too didactic at points—but it grew on me, and I enjoyed the story a lot. (It’s also not the worst anarchist fiction I’ve read—looking at you, V for Vendetta). Cory Doctorow mentioned Killjoy’s most recent book on his blog, so I’m giving some of her older stuff a try, and so far, I think it’s pretty good.
🔗 linkblog: Laid-off workers should use AI to manage their emotions, says Xbox exec
I can’t find the right words for how this story makes me feel.
🔗 linkblog: Le système de bonus social à la chinoise menacerait-il des démocraties comme la Suisse?
C’est bien inquiétant, cette idée de social scoring. Jacques Ellul trouverait beaucoup à critiquer. Et ce n’est pas le seul—j’ai beaucoup aimé ce resumé des critiques d’Adam Knight, à l’Université de Leyden:
En réduisant les personnes à des profils algorithmiques, cela menacerait la vie privée, l’égalité et les procédures régulières. Ce n’est pas juste la surveillance qui est à craindre, mais également une “discrimination automatisée”, estime le chercheur.
🔗 linkblog: Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up – The Markup
This problem makes me so angry, and while I appreciate this article’s exploration of different policy solutions, they also feel overwhelming to me because so many of them come with problems of their own.