Masnick always makes me think (even when I don’t fully agree with him), and this is no exception. (Though Heather Burns is the one who came up with the most important thing bouncing around my brain now).

Haven’t finished the interview yet, but so far, Hochul isn’t impressing me. Ghost guns terrify me, and I would celebrate Meta collapsing as a company, but I think there are reasonable critiques of these policies, and when confronted with them, she kind of shrugs?

Combined with her seeming celebration of AI and tech companies in general, this just feels a lot like “I am solving a problem” performativity rather than thinking deeper about what the issues are here.

If Andy Barr of all people is removing Trump mentions from his website…

So much going on here. I think Boxer’s comments are some of the most important.

What a wild, frustrating experience.

Glad I went back to read this after originally missing the article. Here’s a heck of a paragraph:

While the sheer amount of data McDonald’s stored over the years caught me off guard at first, the way it was used by the company’s predictive algorithms was what I found most concerning. The company predicted how often I would visit in the next six weeks (2.16 times), what I would spend on average ($13.49), and what I would spend in total ($29.15). One reporter at WIRED joked that McDonald’s had created a Minority Report-style dossier to predict my next snack wrap purchase.

Hell yes. Disappointed in myself for not being one of these people.

This story makes me (even) more highly of 404 and (even) more poorly of Flock.

Nudifier technology is educational technology, and we can’t talk about generative AI in schools without talking about this.

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.

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.”

Oof, this is terrifying.

Lots to like in this post.

Stories like this worry me for the future of scholarship.

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

Good work from the EFF here.

As I’ve said before, there’s something Ellulian in all of this AI/AI detection arms race. The creation of a different climate strikes me as more important than the utility (or problems) of any given tool.

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.