To my own surprise, I’ve been getting into audiobooks recently, and having listened to Doctorow’s “Walkaway,” I decided to revisit his Little Brother series in audio form. Parts of the first book haven’t aged well (including some language that was bad enough to be edited out of the print version I have), and while I enjoy Doctorow’s opinions, they sometimes overwhelm the story here. That said, to quote TVTropes, some anvils are worth dropping, and the messages about privacy, surveillance, and civil liberties are as relevant as ever, I don’t know if I enjoyed the book as much as I did my first time through, but I still like it enough to give it four hearts.

Interesting reflection here.

Every time I think this acquisition can’t get dumber, it does.

I know Kirby Heyborne as the star of several Mormon B movies, so I was taken aback when he turned out to be the narrator for the audiobook of Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother.” Weirdest Venn diagram overlap of my interests I’ve seen in a while.

Important points in here.

Important to keep an eye on this.

Of all the dumb responses to perfectly legitimate content moderation, this is perhaps the dumbest.

If Elijah can make infinite flour and oil happen, demanding that the widow feed him first really comes off as a jerk move.

Why… why don’t we better anticipate better misuses like this? Are technological “progress” and market opportunities more important than these side effects?

I bounced pretty hard off of Walkaway a year or so ago, but I recently decided to give it another try. I felt like I needed a boost of hopeful thinking, and I’d seen Doctorow post about the book as being hopeful. Did it ever deliver! Walkaway is hopeful on a nearly religious level, and it was exactly what I needed. The book is not naïvely optimistic but rather tenacious in its belief that we can still make this a better workd. The audiobook was excellent, too, which I think made it easier to get back into it—and to read it so relatively quickly.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I am currently giving Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway another try after bouncing off of it a while ago. Because I bounced off of it so hard the last time, I’m surprised by how much it’s resonating off of me as I give it another go. This past week, I’ve been listening to a lot of Walkaway on top of doing a lot of religious reading: assignments for the Ministry of the Disciple class I’m taking through the Community of Christ Seminary’s Center for Innovation in Ministry and Missino, Gérard Siegwalt’s Reinventing God’s name [La réinvention du nom de Dieu], and various scriptures for today’s liturgical readings.

Tonight, I suddenly remembered my sister’s BYU roommate who insisted on calling ketchup and mustard “toppings” because saying “condiment” would require her to say “condom” along the way.

Is there any way to complete a CAPTCHA without providing free labor for ML/AI developers? Makes me angrier every time I have to do it.

Welp, all the more reason to leave birdsite behind.

Glad this story is still getting attention, because it so neatly demonstrates why facial recognition is scary. We shouldn’t tolerate this level of surveillance—by private or public actors.

Looks like the job of AI training is as awful as the job of content moderation.

Ah, the kind of answer that only raises more questions.

Here, as with autocorrect and citation managers, my personal opinion is that any human who knows enough to use the tool critically knows enough to do the job themself. Maybe slower, sure, but slower isn’t always bad.

As I’ve blogged about a couple of times recently, I’m currently reading R. Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions, a graphic novel adaptation of the 2015 iTunes Terms and Conditions document, which no one ever reads.

I was struck (if not surprised) by something stated explicitly in the document, which appears on p. 59 of Sikoryak’s volume:

The software products made available through the Mac App Store and App Store (collectively, the “App Store Products”) are licensed, not sold, to you.

Fascinating read on potential threats posed by AI—and potential solutions.

Ashamed to admit that until this week, I ’d never really thought about the origins of this name. This seems like a pretty straightforward argument, though, and I can’t think of any compelling reason not to change the name.

Libraries are perhaps the most important public institution out there. We can’t afford to cut their budgets.

Hey, look, workplace surveillance doesn’t work.

I’m skeptical of many technologies, most of which I can concede have some real value. In contrast, I have a lot of trouble seeing any value in facial recognition that outweighs the obvious, large-scale harms that can come from it.

Repeat after me: Content moderation is a good thing.