1,081 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2022
    1. we calculate that when you turn on the engine and  step on the gas and go for every inch of highway   you are crunching 20 billion ancient plants  through your car engine

      Number of phytoplankton-turned-oil to move an inch

    2. How Many Fossils to Go an Inch? (ft. Robert Krulwich). Minute Physics. 18-Aug-2022. 6:25.

      Guest video by Robert Krulwich and Nate Milton

    3. how many of those ancient trees are in effect  being harvested to power this home for one month   well it turns out that a thousand kilowatt hours  that's the electricity bill comes from burning   about a half ton of coal which is the energy  equivalent of two ancient trees

      Number of ancient trees of coal used in a month's electricity bill

      For 1,000 kWh—the average electricity usage for a home—the half-ton of coal is equivalent to two 60-foot trees.

    1. we could find a new attack vectors in RCS the fact is that some RCS course can't recognize their users only based on the public IP address and the

      Some RCS core services use weak identity

      If an attacker is on the same local network as a victim, that attacker can spoof messages to a third party without the victim knowing. The RCS core service uses username and IP address to authenticate user—both of which can be read in the open over the network. The victim would not know the spoofed message was sent.

    2. coming back to the attacker would include the user's IP address device model and different information based on that IP address attacker will be able to

      SIP OPTIONS response from the network can be used to roughly locate device

      roughly locate the location of victim based on the IP geolocation databases especially if that IP address is ipv6

    3. let's start giving a bit of a recap of all these vulnerabilities that I talked about and be basically aligned to what we defined as intercept for example

      5 areas of vulnerabilities

      1. Intercept calls and texts
      2. Impersonate user identity
      3. Track users
      4. Conduct fraud
      5. DoS users or network

      For each of these types of attacks, vulnerabilities were found in RCS to exploit them.

    4. so when you make a call over 4G that call goes over IP or has to go over 3G

      Dedicated voice channels disappeared in 4G

    5. Mobile Network Hacking, IP Edition. by Karsten Nohl, Luca Melette & Sina Yazdanmehr. Black Hat. London. December 2-5, 2019. 47 minute video. https://www.blackhat.com/eu-19/briefings/schedule/index.html#mobile-network-hacking-ip-edition-17617

      Mobile networks have gone through a decade of security improvements ranging from better GSM encryption to stronger SIM card and SS7 configurations. These improvements were driven by research at this and other hacking conferences.

      Meanwhile, the networks have also mushroomed in complexity by integrating an ever-growing number of IT technologies from SIP to WiFi, IPSec, and most notably web technologies.

      This talk illustrates the security shortcomings when merging IT protocols into mobile networks. We bring back hacking gadgets long thought to be mitigated, including intercepting IMSI catchers, remote SMS intercept, and universal caller ID spoofing.

      We explore which protection measures are missing from the mobile network and discuss how to best bring them over from the IT security domain into mobile networks.

    1. If this fits your style and you don’t get any value out of having cards with locators like 3a4b/65m1, then don’t do that (for you) useless make-work. Make sure your system is working for you and you’re not working for your system.

      Risks of replicating physical attributes in digital systems

      This article makes so much sense, but this sentence more than any other. As librarians will will know, a physical book can only be put in one place on a shelf...you can't realistically replicate a book and put it in groupings with all like-minded books. The call number was invented to bring organization to the physical space and the card catalog was invented to have a way for representations of the books—cards!—interfiled in many places to help with finding the book. Luhmann's card numbering sequence was the first thing I dropped when reading about Zettelkasten, and those that insist on that mechanism for their digital slip boxes are artificially constraining their electronic systems with a physical world limitation.

    1. Writing about anything – a novel, a historical primary source, an exam question – is at least a three-way dialogue. In the case of this handbook the conversation is between me, the writer; you, the reader; and the material. Similarly, writing about something you have read or researched should serve at least three purposes: to explore the material; to describe your reactions to it; and to communicate with your reader.

      Writing is a three-way dialog

      First, it is a conversation between an author, a reader, and the material. It is also an exploration of your research, your reaction to the material, and what you—as the author—is trying to communicate to the reader. Keeping each component of these triplets in mind as the writing (and likely reviewing of the writing) happens makes for engaging reading.

    2. The way you begin writing notes, observations, and ideas may not resemble the final form of the output you want to create. And the ideas, interpretations, and themes on which you end up concentrating may also not be what you had originally anticipated. Don’t worry about that. Stay open to discovery.

      Note-making is not perfection

      Keep in mind that the notes are not the final output…they are a means to the final output. Polishing will come later.

      This makes me wonder about the email conversation I had with Dan Whaley about my use of Hypothesis. He notes that my annotations were like personal notemaking rather than conversational between community members (as I presume others are using Hypothesis to do). These annotations are feeding into my PKM tool, but I said I wasn’t opposed to conversations springing up from them. (In fact, when that has happened, that has been quite useful.) But I wonder if that is putting pressure on me to make these notes more perfect than if I made them private to only feed into my PKM.

    1. For example, teen boys are more likely than teen girls to say they use YouTube, Twitch and Reddit, whereas teen girls are more likely than teen boys to use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. In addition, higher shares of Black and Hispanic teens report using TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp compared with White teens

      Gender and race difference in the Pew data

      Later: black and Hispanic teen usage of the near-constant use of the internet is significantly higher than for whites.

    2. Since 2014-15, there has been a 22 percentage point rise in the share of teens who report having access to a smartphone (95% now and 73% then). While teens’ access to smartphones has increased over roughly the past eight years, their access to other digital technologies, such as desktop or laptop computers or gaming consoles, has remained statistically unchanged.

      Now near ubiquity in Smartphone usage; desktop and gaming console usage are near identical

    3. The landscape of social media is ever-changing, especially among teens who often are on the leading edge of this space. A new Pew Research Center survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 finds TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey. Some 67% of teens say they ever use TikTok, with 16% of all teens saying they use it almost constantly. Meanwhile, the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Center’s 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.

      Instagram up, Facebook down, TikTok and Snapchat are big

      This echos Meta’s concerns that Facebook was losing ground in this age demographic, and likely also the reasoning to make Instagram more TikTok-like. This may also dovetail with the recently announced change to the Facebook algorithm to be even more sticky and TikTok-like.

    1. I think it leaves social networking, or what will replace it, in a much better place. What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!

      Is the next social network focused on sharing rather than advertising?

      This sounds like what Ethan Zuckerman proposes: re-imagined social media spaces...communities of people owning the rules for the space they are in, and then having loosely connected spaces interact.

    2. "Facebook is fundamentally an advertising machine"—it hasn't been about bringing people closer together in a long time (if that was ever its real mission). And as a better advertising machine comes along—TikTok—Facebook is forced to redesign its user interaction to be more addictive just to stand still. Will a a more human-scale social network...or series of social networks...replace it?

    1. A new idea can simply receive a new number in sequence, allowing notes to easily break free from a strict, preconceived hierarchical organization.

      Fluid, not pre-defined, organization

      This is related to the "Loose Filing and Interconnectedness" concept from Christian at Zettelkasten.de.

      I think about how my own interests have evolved over time, and how I couldn't have come up with a topical organization or ontology beforehand.

    2. Luhmann’s system uses index cards (German=zettel) in a slip box (German=kasten).

      German origin of "Zettelkasten"

    1. Loose Filing and Interconnectedness are Key

      "Communicating" with your Zettelkasten

      This is reminiscent of Google's Gmail "search not sort" philosophy. Use the links between notes as a way of encoding relationships rather putting related notes iin one document.

    1. what we mean by zettelkasten. The word itself is German and means “slip box.” It is literally a box with notes written on slips of paper or index cards. So, a zettelkasten is a thing, a storage device.

      Zettelkasten is German for "slip box"

      Could also be called a card index. Meant to be a portable method for storing knowledge. Representative concepts from sources are written on paper to be stored in the slip box. Each slip is one main idea or fact, and it can be linked to other slips.

    2. “tag briefs” or “topic briefs” and “memos”

      This is an aggregation/map of all notes on a given concept or combination of concepts. Also called maps of content and structure notes.

    3. “memos,â€

      These contain your own thoughts on concepts or combinations of concepts. Also called evergreen notes and permanent notes. This can be a narrative form summary or a description of connections you are observing. The key is that this is your pass at generating new knowledge.

    4. First is to take notes as you read. Whether you take a quote or not, always write a short summary in your own words of the source overall and of any key passages that are of particular interest to you or relevant to your ongoing research.

      How To Implement Zettelkasten Method

      In taking notes, write a summary or summaries of key passages of interest. Include a full citation back to the original so you can get back to it. Include thoughts and reactions to the piece. Link to related notes, concepts, people, organizations, etc.

    5. The goal should be to make a contribution by creating something new.

      A Zettelkasten is a means to an end

      The idea is not to just collect knowledge. The idea is to organize knowledge in a way that generates new knowledge and ideas.

    1. The academic research that was footnoted in the Wikipedia articles was found to be cited more often in subsequent academic publications, as well.

      Academic research used in Wikipedia articles drives more citations

    2. Now comes a new paper from MIT and Maynooth University in Ireland offering yet more evidence of Wikipedia’s elevated status, finding that judges routinely rely on its articles not just for background information but for core legal reasoning and specific language they use in their decisions.

      Thompson, Neil and Flanagan, Brian and Richardson, Edana and McKenzie, Brian and Luo, Xueyun, Trial by Internet: A Randomized Field Experiment on Wikipedia’s Influence on Judges’ Legal Reasoning (July 27, 2022). Forthcoming in Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence, editor Kevin Tobia, Cambridge University Press, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4174200 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4174200

    1. Monasteries and convents served as models for the dorm and for the campus itself. Walled off from a threatening medieval world, they provided security for contemplation and worship while also serving as a place where learning, the arts, music, horticulture, and other cultural activities might flourish.

      College dormitories rooted in monastery and convent styles

    1. actors in the motion capture suits, referred to as zhongzhiren in Chinese and naka no hito in Japanese

      “Person in the Middle” name for virtual environment actors

      It refers to the person at the center of the technology fulfilling the physical aspects of the virtual world — the person in the motion capture suit.

    1. Conservationists opposed to new copper or lithium mines may point to recycling as a solution. It’s not. While a recycling and reuse industry for EV batteries will be needed, it won’t come anywhere close to supplying the necessary metals. If the number of EVs on the road today remained static for the next 20 years, recycling the metals in them might be able to make up the bulk of the demand. But EV sales are growing exponentially. There were 3 million electric cars sold globally in 2020, according to the IEA. That more than doubled in 2021 to 6.6 million. By 2030, S&P Global forecasts there will be nearly 27 million sold annually.

      Recycling won’t be enough

      The availability of recycled components won’t match the demand for new components. Also remember that the industry has reached almost 100% recycling of automotive lead acid batteries.

    2. A battery electric vehicle requires 2.5 times more copper than a standard internal combustion engine vehicle. Much of that is in the electric motor, some in the battery. There simply aren’t enough copper mines being built or expanded to provide all the copper needed to produce the 27 million EVs that S&P Global has forecast to be sold annually by 2030.

      Requirements for batteries

    3. There was enough lithium mined in 2021 to supply 11.4 million EVs, according to the World Economic Forum. If EV sales double again over the next couple of years, the EV market will already exceed the current global supply of lithium, unless new mines and refiners come into production by then. Llithium prices are up 380% from a year ago, according to Kitco.

      Requirements for lithium

  2. Jul 2022
    1. Oil, by the way, is a key ingredient in food. This is something a lot of people don't understand. There's this thing called the haber bosh process, which basically creates all of the nitrogen and all of the fertilizer that is used to grow food.

      Oil is a component of fertilizer

      The effect is that the oil price become a component of the price of food.

    2. A recession is just a lot of people feeling bad vibes at the same time.

      Economic recessions as a popular notion

    3. NBER, the National Bureau of Economic Research. They have this timing committee that looks at the economy as a whole and all of the data about the economy and looks back at where it was. And then after the fact will come out and say, you know what, we had a recession back then. It's not very useful because at that point we're normally pretty sure that there had been a recession in the past. There's no good indicator of whether there's a recession in the present. But there are some okay indicators like, for instance, has the unemployment rate shot up by half a percentage point and no, it hasn't.

      National Bureau of Economic Research determines recessions

      They do this after-the fact by looking at recent historic data. But this is the official U.S. Government statement on when resessions are.

    4. So convenience stores is the active word here, right? What they are is they're convenience store owners. The way they make their money is by getting people into the convenience store and getting them to buy things in the store. The gas is really a loss leader in order to get people in the door of the convenience store.

      Gas stations make money off of convenience store items

      Selling fuel can be a loss-leader to get people into the convenience store.

    5. So the last two recessions this doesn't apply to, but just set them aside for a minute. The rest and almost all the other recessions in Second World War have been caused by the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to bring down inflation or because of other financial concerns.

      Federal Reserve raising interest rates causes recessions

    1. Valerie Peter recalled that, after she followed a bunch of astrology-focussed accounts on Twitter, her feed began recommending a deluge of astrological content. Her interest in the subject quickly faded—“I began fearing for my life every time Mercury was in retrograde,” she said—but Twitter kept pushing related content. The site has a button that users can hit to signal that they are “Not interested in this Tweet,” appended with a sad-face emoji, but when Peter tried it she found that Twitter’s suggested alternatives were astrology-related, too.

      Algorithmic cruelty

      This has echos of Eric Meyers’ inadvertent algorithmic cruelty.

    2. When we talk about “the algorithm,” we might be conflating recommender systems with online surveillance, monopolization, and the digital platforms’ takeover of all of our leisure time—in other words, with the entire extractive technology industry of the twenty-first century.

      The algorithm’s role in surveillance capitalism

    3. Jhaver came to see the Airbnb hosts as workers being overseen by a computer overlord instead of human managers. In order to make a living, they had to guess what their capricious boss wanted, and the anxious guesswork may have made the system less efficient over all.

      working for the algorithm rather than the algorithm working for you

    4. Peter’s dilemma brought to my mind a term that has been used, in recent years, to describe the modern Internet user’s feeling that she must constantly contend with machine estimations of her desires: algorithmic anxiety. Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are.

      Definition of “algorithmic anxiety”

    5. In her confusion, Peter wrote an e-mail seeking advice from Rachel Tashjian, a fashion critic who writes a popular newsletter called “Opulent Tips.” “I’ve been on the internet for the last 10 years and I don’t know if I like what I like or what an algorithm wants me to like,” Peter wrote. She’d come to see social networks’ algorithmic recommendations as a kind of psychic intrusion, surreptitiously reshaping what she’s shown online and, thus, her understanding of her own inclinations and tastes. “I want things I truly like not what is being lowkey marketed to me,” her letter continued.

      Recommendations based on your actions or on what the algorithm wants you to see

    1. You can tap the sign as much as you want, that battle was lost a long time ago. REST is just the common term people use for HTTP+JSON RPC.

      HTTP+JSON RPC becomes known as REST

    2. From there, an API could be considered more "mature" as a REST API as it adopted the following ideas: Level 1: Resources (e.g. a resource-aware URL layout, contrasted with an opaque URL layout as in XML-RPC) Level 2: HTTP Verbs (using GET, POST, DELETE, etc. properly) Level 3: Hypermedia Controls (e.g. links) Level 3 is where the uniform interface comes in, which is why this level is considered the most mature and truly "The Glory of REST"

      Model for determining RESTful-ness

    1. the creator economy had grown into a matured, diversified, $100 billion business.

      Creator economy worth $100 billion

      What goes into defining "creator economy"?

    2. The well-known core of any YouTuber’s income is Adsense—the system that serves the ads before, during, or after videos. This hypothetical channel could expect to earn about $4,000 in Adsense revenue for their million views, based on a typical revenue per mille rate, or RPM, of $4—meaning they earn $4 per thousand views. However, there is wild inconsistency on Adsense RPM’s from creator to creator.

      Example creator income of $4 per thousand views

    1. I think actually the most critical component is going to be leveraging existing security mechanisms that have been built for resilience and incorporating those into these devices, which is actually what I'm building right now. That's what Thistle Technologies is doing, we're trying to help companies get to that place where they've got modern security mechanisms in their devices without having to build all the infrastructure that's required in order to deliver that. 

      Third-party tool for IoT device updates

      Trying to make them as regular and predictable as what we have for desktop devices now.

    1. Compare this amount of compute to a Raspberry Pi 4, a $45 single-board computer which has four processors running at 1.5 GHz.  Each core has 2 ALUs and it will take 4 instructions to perform a 256 bit addition, as the basic unit for the Raspberry Pi (and most other modern computers) is 64 bits.  So each core has a peak performance of 750,000,000 adds per second for a total peak of 3,000,000,000 adds per second.  Put bluntly, the Ethereum “world computer” has roughly 1/5,000 of the compute power of a Raspberry Pi 4!

      A comparison of the compute power of Ethereum versus a Raspberry Pi 4

    2. A distributed system is composed of multiple, identified, and nameable entities.  DNS is an example of such a distributed system, as there is a hierarchy of responsibilities and business relationships to create a specialized database with a corresponding cryptographic PKI.  Similarly the web is a distributed system, where computation is not only spread amongst various servers but the duty of computation is shared between the browser and the server within a single web page.A decentralized system, on the other hand, dispenses with the notion of identified entities.  Instead everyone can participate and the participants are assumed to be mutually antagonistic, or at least maximizing their profit.  Since decentralized systems depend on some form of voting, the potential for an attacker stuffing the ballot box is always at the forefront.  After all, an attacker could just create a bunch of sock-puppets, called “sibyls”, and get all the votes they want.

      Distinction between Distributed System and Decentralized System

      Distributed systems have gatekeepers that can react to bad actors. Decentralized systems rely on consensus voting.

    3. Of course letting arbitrary code potentially run forever wouldn’t work.  So instead any program is run for only a limited number of instructions until it either completes or is terminated. The measure of the amount of compute is called “gas”, with various instructions and operations costing a different amount of gas to process.  The total cost of a transaction is the amount of gas consumed times the gas price.

      Definition of "gas" on the blockchain

    4. So what does the supposed “web3” add to this vision?

      What is different with "web3" technology

      Still need everything associated with "current web" plus added infrastructure.

    5. Currently it will cost me roughly $20 a month to participate in this distributed computing system.

      Description of "current web" technology

      Domain name and DNS operator, hosting provider, server-side program and the reader's web browser.

    1. As such, to ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods. We will also be paying close attention to how blockchain technology evolves over time to ensure that the above principles are withheld and determine whether it will allow for more secure experiences or other practical and inclusive applications in gaming. However, we have no plans of implementing blockchain technology into Minecraft right now.

      Blockchain technologies cannot be integrated into Minecraft client and server applications

      In this statement, Microsoft is holding out the possibility that blockchain technology might evolve into something that is "practical and inclusive".

    2. NFTs are not inclusive of all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots. The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.

      A game long known for creative building, Minecraft explicitly rejects exclusionary tactics...and calls out the speculative pricing and investment mentality surrounding NFTs.

    3. We have these rules to ensure that Minecraft remains a community where everyone has access to the same content. NFTs, however, can create models of scarcity and exclusion that conflict with our Guidelines and the spirit of Minecraft.

      Artificial scarcity is counter to the Minecraft spirit

    4. While we are in the process of updating our Minecraft Usage Guidelines to offer more precise guidance on new technologies, we wanted to take the opportunity to share our view that integrations of NFTs with Minecraft are generally not something we will support or allow. Let’s have a closer look!

      Above-the-fold statement on NFTs in Minecraft

    1. the company is announcing the release of a three-part open source toolkit to quickly get the technology into developers’ hands and out in the wild. Adobe’s new open source tools include a JavaScript SDK for building ways to display the content credentials in browsers, a command line utility and a Rust SDK for creating desktop apps, mobile apps and other experiences to create, view and verify embedded content credentials.

      Implementation of the C2PA specification

    1. If we can rightly identify the seeds (or spores) we will know what type of conditions they will thrive in. In similar ways, some people need different care, handling and environment to thrive. Perhaps with the right conditions, they too can make contributions to the world in small but meaningful ways – and who can truly judge the true magnitude of something?

      Conditions of care are individual

      There will be a range of environmental and supportive measures…perhaps even smoothing like a bell curve distribution with people that thrive in conditions on the long tails on the long tails (or need long tails of support to thrive).

    1. State-level lobbying by Scientific Games in the 1980s was critical to the expansion of the lottery from one state, New Hampshire in 1964, to nearly every state. Scientific Games just sold its lottery business to Toronto-based private equity firm Brookfield Business Partners LP for nearly $6 billion. Future profits will benefit Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt, who is worth $4.5 billion, according to Forbes.

      Private equity comes to state lotteries

    2. Standifer — and millions of players like her — lose about 35 cents for every dollar they spend."Yesterday I spent like $130 and I won like $85," Standifer said, meaning she lost $45.Those losses — $29 billion a year nationally — are why lotteries exist. The losses fund government programs and enrich others, including a Canadian private equity billionaire and a Japanese convenience-store conglomerate.

      Individual losses become part of the state budget

    3. Driven by more than a half-billion dollars in annual ad spending, lottery ticket sales have grown from $47 billion to $82 billion since 2005, according to La Fleur's 2022 World Lottery Almanac. In 10 states, lotteries generate more revenue than corporate income taxes.

      Lottery sales statistics

    1. Many of these services in the West started on PCs. In China, most people’s first experience of the internet was on a mobile device, and users had no expectations about how it should work, says Feifei Liu, a researcher with user-experience consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group. The simultaneous rise of WeChat and the boom in smartphone adoption in China created a different set of expectations for what a single app should be able to do, she adds.

      Affect of first internet experience on mobile versus desktop

      The article quotes a Nielsen Normal Group researcher about how China users have different expectations for the internet because their first use was on mobile apps. I wonder if this holds true for other countries where the internet was introduced later than the US?

    2. Today, WeChat occupies a niche similar to Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store in the rest of the world. More than one million apps are accessible within WeChat. But unlike western app stores, WeChat tries to only make them available when a user needs them, rather than making them easily accessible via a single search interface, says Mr. Shimota.

      WeChat becomes equivalent to Apple App Store and Google Play

      The interesting [[user experience]] note here, though, is that WeChat suggests apps "when the user needs them" rather than making the user search for them. Later, the article suggests that these app stores have characteristics of the "Super App" like WeChat.

    3. The definition of “super app” is fuzzy, but companies and their leaders most often use it to describe a state of cramming ever more features and functions into their apps—often ones adjacent to, but distinct from, their core functionality. So, for example, a financial-tech super app might start with payments and bolt on buy-now-pay-later, cryptocurrency and in-app storefronts. For social media, it could mean incorporating things like shopping. And for a delivery and ride-hailing company, it might mean adding new modes of transportation or other categories of goods for drivers to convey.

      Definition of "super-app"

      Not yet common in the U.S., but exemplified by WeChat in China. This is a response to the decline in mobile app user tracking and the corresponding ad-tech. It is about capturing more time and attention from mobile computing uers.

    1. So Terra Labs concocted the existence of an interesting valuable thing. They wrote a program using their slow database called Anchor. Anchor was an automated program to allow moneylending. There are many of these in DeFi land.

      Terra Labs’ Anchor

    2. In principle, you could use stablecoins as money, like how you use deposits as money. Stablecoins are not used like money; rather than facilitating almost the entire diversity of transactions in the economy, they are overwhelmingly used for a few niche use cases.

      Uses of stablecoins

    1. From society’s perspective, the wide availability of cheap credit is generally considered a good thing, as it allows for productive investment, consumption smoothing over consumers’ lifetimes, and a form of risk-pooling not entire dissimilar to public support or insurance programs. (It is underappreciated that consumer credit is, effectively, one of the largest welfare programs in the United States. Chargeoffs of e.g. credit card debt effectively transfer a private benefit to the defaulting consumer in return for a diffuse cost to the rest of the public, mediated by the financial industry; the net amount of them is almost as much as food stamps.)

      Consumer credit as a form of societal risk pooling

    2. Crypto is a good example, to avoid stigmatizing developing nations. There is an exchange rate, constantly changing, between the stablecoins USDC and USDT, between both of those coins (independently) and the dollars they theoretically represent. Different rates prevail in different places and different transaction sizes. This makes stablecoin-settled commerce very rare relative to money-settled commerce.

      Cryprocurrencies, even those said to represent dollars, have a constantly evolving exchange rate

    3. anything is money if substantially everyone looking at the money both agrees that it is money and agrees at the exchange rate for it

      Definition of money

    4. You don’t deposit a $20 bill. You purchase a $20 deposit, coincidentally using a piece of paper with the same number on it. The deposit is a liability (a debt) of the bank to you. The bill which you gave the bank in return for the deposit is now theirs, the same as if you had bought a cup of coffee from Starbucks. On their balance sheet, it is now an asset.

      How banks view money deposits

    5. Schelling point

      Definition of Schelling Point (in game theory)

      “A solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication. The concept was introduced by the American economist Thomas Schelling in his book The Strategy of Conflict (1960).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

    1. On a conference call, the company reiterated that spam accounts were well under 5% of users who are served advertising, a figure that has been unchanged in its public filings since 2013.Human reviewers manually examine thousands of Twitter accounts at random and use a combination of public and private data in order to calculate and report to shareholders the proportion of spam and bot accounts on the service, Twitter said.

      Twitter claims they use manual and automated review processes to detect inauthentic accounts. They came claimed for a while that less than 5% of accounts are fake.

    2. Twitter (TWTR.N) removes more than 1 million spam accounts each day, executives told reporters in a briefing on Thursday

      inauthentic spam accounts removed from Twitter

      This is the number of accounts removed per day!

    1. One of the arguments that we hear is, oh, well, physical books wear out. And and so that's really a different situation than digital books or scans. And I find that pretty laughable when you look at the costs involved with maintaining digital files. In fact, they're extremely expensive and extremely complicated to maintain the integrity of those files.

      Argument Opposing CDL

      Physical books wear out and it costs money to maintain the digital lending infrastructure

    2. National Emergency Library

      Internet Archive's National Emergency Library

      Also not CDL: no limit on simultaneous use, author opt-out, book must have been published more than 5 years prior.

    3. emergency temporary access service

      HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service

      Not defined as controlled digital lending.

    4. The Copyright Act sets up this balance of rights as between rights holders and users. And one of the things that users get is the ability to control use of particular copies that they buy. So this is where the doctrine for sale comes in.

      First Sale doctrine

    5. some characteristics of how to make CDL as close to that physical, legal and economic situation as possible

      CDL mimicking the status quo

    6. the text of Section 106, those exclusive rights that copyright holders get

      Specified Rights of Copyright Holder

    7. Controlled digital lending is a system that enables a library to circulate a digitized title in place of a physical one in a controlled manner.

      Controlled Digital Lending definition

      From Dave Hansen, the Associate University Librarian for Research Collections and Scholarly Communications, and Lead Copyright and Information Policy Officer at Duke University.

    1. never open the browser without knowing where it's going and i never get caught up in that stupid trick where you know you start going to so you don't need to and you forget why you're on the internet

      Deep inter-app linking to combat unfocused app activation

    1. Who's responsible if the link between the NFT and the reference material breaks? Who's responsible if the blockchain forks and your revenue stream is then cut off? These are bedrock ideas of product liability, on top of which it's not at all clear, from the blockchain itself, that the thing isn't functioning.

      Issues with Product Liability for NFTs

    2. Under this test, a transaction is deemed an investment contract if a person,

      Howey Test for determining if something is a security

      "Invest his money in a common enterprise "and is led to expect profits solely from the efforts "of the promoter or a third party."

    3. Only humans can create art that is copyrightable. So by extension, if a machine is deemed to be the author of a work, no one can exercise a copyright in that particular artwork. And in the context of NFTs, there's untold numbers of works that are touted as being created by computers that's deemed to be a feature, not a bug.

      Generative Art, the kind in most NFTs, is not subject to copyright

    4. If you buy an NBA Top Shot, let's say of a particular clip of something that happened in the NBA, you can't enforce that against someone who is displaying that piece of video somewhere else. And on top of that, the NBA can prevent you from displaying that particular video clip, if you're displaying it in a way that conflicts with the license that was purchased through NBA Top Shots

      NFTs are a limited license of the intellectual property

    5. NFTs do not supplant copyright law, not even close. NFTs are bound by normal everyday rules of copyright.

      NFTs and Copyright

      When you buy an NFT, sometimes you get the copyright, but most of the times you don't. Again, it entirely depends on the original terms of sale related to the NFT.

    6. these smart contracts,

      Code of Smart Contracts are not legal contracts

      these tiny programs are not real contracts, they don't bind the downstream purchasers. And in fact, as we've seen, they can break over time.

    7. if you buy an NFT that doesn't have any sale terms whatsoever,

      NFTs without sales terms are not protected by law

      what have you purchased? The answer is probably nothing. At least nothing that the law can protect.

    8. you can buy a Bored Ape NFT on OpenSea, which is a large marketplace for NFTs. When you do, the Bored Ape Yacht Club says that you get access to certain perks. These include getting access to their discord server of like-minded purchasers of Bored Apes.

      Are off-chain activities offered by NFT seller legally available to secondary suppliers?

      But for the most part, those are perks that are offered off-chain and by the originator of the NFTs. Bored Ape could change their mind because it's questionable whether the terms and conditions travel with the downstream purchasers of every single Bored Ape. If those terms and conditions legally fail, say Bored Ape says they're not in privity with all of those downstream purchasers, and then they decide to cut off access to maybe some bad actors who were spamming the Bored Ape discord. Well, then those purchasers who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, they have zero recourse, because if they're not in contractual privity, there's nothing that binds Bored Ape to provide those things long term. They may in fact provide those things, but they might not legally be required to.

    9. When you initially buy an NBA Top Shot, you get limited rights to use and view the NBA Top Shot, only within the NBA Top Shots platform. But here's the thing. NBA Top Shots is a private marketplace. The NFTs only have any real value when you use the walled garden of NBA Top Shots, you have to use their app or their website

      NBA Top Shot only works on their platform

      for the NFT to have any functionality at all.... Effectively NBA Top Shots is simply a normal Web 2.0 website where you're allowed to buy and sell things only within their specific platform. And the terms of sale travel with the particular NFTs because everyone is buying into the same system.

    10. When you're buying an NFT, the real thing that you're buying is bound by the contract between the buyer and the seller, those are the primary purchaser and seller. There are some times when there is no contract, we'll talk about that. But theoretically at least, the value of the NFT is decided by the contract terms between the buyer and the seller of the NFT. But one of the huge fundamental problems that we'll talk about a lot in a second,

      NFT contract is between initial buyer and seller

      is that in practice, there's rarely any contract between the initial primary buyer and the secondary buyers, and then all of the downstream buyers later on. And on top of that, there is zero contractual privity between secondary buyers and the original issuer of the NFT. That's a real problem when the only value associated with an NFT comes from the initial sale terms.

    11. These programs are called smart contracts, which is misleading because look, here's an example of a smart contract. There's no legal language in there. It doesn't function as a legal document.

      No legal language in "Smart Contracts"

      A lawyer's view of blockchain "smart contracts"

  3. Jun 2022
    1. Feature development typically focuses on improving reliability, performance, or utilization, which often reduces toil as a second-order effect. We share this 50% goal because toil tends to expand if left unchecked and can quickly fill 100% of everyone’s time.

      A kind of technical debt for site reliability engineers.

    2. Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows. Not every task deemed toil has all these attributes, but the more closely work matches one or more of the following descriptions, the more likely it is to be toil

      Definition of “toil”

    1. Cede, as part of DTCC, is the actual owner of pretty much all publicly issued stock in the US. This arrangement was put into place so that stockbrokers didn’t have to send around paper certificates all the time just to trade. The stocks stay at Cede, and brokers exchange rights to those stocks held at Cede. When you buy shares in a stock, you hold an entitlement, to part of an entitlement held by your broker, to stock held by Cede. Cede owns the actual stock, but you have beneficial ownership of your shares — you are the shareholder who can vote at general meetings and receive dividends on the shares.

      How stock trade settlement works

    2. “Smart contract” is a fancy term for small computer programs that run directly on a blockchain. Bridges work by having a smart contract on both the blockchains. The bridge uses a relay to transmit messages back and forth between the smart contracts on each of the two blockchains

      How blockchain bridges work

    1. The nature-of-work factor generally focuses on the degree of expressiveness of the plaintiff's work. Artistic and fanciful works tend to be highly expressive, so it is generally more difficult to win fair use defenses involving such works. Fact-intensive and highly functional works tend, by contrast, to have a lesser quantum of expressive content. Hence, fair use may be easier to establish in cases involving such works.

      Nature-of-work factor is more favorable for fact-intensive and highly functional works

    1. Stoller acknowledged that there might be a “genuine leap of technical capacity” brought about by crypto, but he hasn’t seen it for himself. The rampant and accruing amount of fraud involving crypto is also an indicator of intent to Stoller. “If blockchain proponents want to advance their technology, they would eagerly seek to get rid of the fraud, but I don't see that happening,” he said. “That signals to me the fraud is the point.” Or more specifically, as Kelsey Hightower argues, money is the point: “It’s not like someone looked at blockchain and said, ‘Oh, my God, we finally have a better database for storing transactions!’” Instead, what made blockchain’s big promises so compelling were stories of people turning a small amount of money into a lot. “And in our society, we equate morality to money,” Hightower said.

      “The fraud is the point”

    1. To me, the problem isn’t that blockchain systems can be made slightly less awful than they are today. The problem is that they don’t do anything their proponents claim they do. In some very important ways, they’re not secure. They doesn’t replace trust with code; in fact, in many ways they are far less trustworthy than non-blockchain systems. They’re not decentralized, and their inevitable centralization is harmful because it’s largely emergent and ill-defined. They still have trusted intermediaries, often with more power and less oversight than non-blockchain systems. They still require governance. They still require regulation. (These things are what I wrote about here.) The problem with blockchain is that it’s not an improvement to any system—and often makes things worse.

      Blockchain does not improve monetary systems

      With cryptocurrencies—built on blockchain—we still need: centralization, trust, regulation, governance, and a whole host of other things that are already in TradFi.

    1. In other words, transaction reversibility is not about the ledger, but rather about the transaction rules that a currency uses. A reversible currency requires that someone anoint this trusted party (or trusted parties) and that they use their powers to freeze/burn/transact currency in ways that are at odds with the recorded owners’ intentions. And indeed, this is a capability that many tokens now possess, thanks to the development of sophisticated smart contract systems like Ethereum, that allow parties to design currencies with basically any set of transaction rules they want.

      Transaction reversibility requires trusted party

      In order to mimic the capabilities in TradFi to make business decisions to reverse transactions, cryptocurrencies rely on smart contract systems and an anointed trusted party to achieve the same thing.

    2. Beyond proof-of-stake, there are other technologies in deployment, such as the proof-of-time-and-space construction used by Chia, or more centralized proof-of-authority systems.

      Ah, yes...that thing that was driving up hard drive prices a few years back.

    3. Proof-of-work is not the only technology we have on which to build consensus protocols. Today, many forward-looking networks are deploying proof-of-stake (PoS) for their consensus. In these systems, your “voting power” in the network is determined by your ownership stake in some valuable on-chain asset, such as a new or existing electronic token. Since cryptocurrency has coincidentally spent a lot of time distributing tokens, this means that new protocols can essentially “cut out the middleman” and simply use coin ownership directly as a proxy for voting power, rather than requiring operators to sell their coins to buy electricity and mining hardware. Proof-of-stake systems are not perfect: they still lead to some centralization of power, since in this paradigm the rich tend to get richer. However it’s hard to claim that the result will be worse than the semi-centralized mess that proof-of-work mining has turned into.

      Proof-of-Stake can replace Proof-of-Work

      This is a big caveat here...the nature of the tech leads to a centralization of power that means "the rich tend to get richer." For the sake of removing the environmental consequences of consensus building, does it seem worthwhile to anoint a subset of users to get richer from the use of the tech?

    1. When the digital music industry was getting started, they invented a new form of quantum indeterminacy. When a customer paid $0.99 for an Itunes track, they were engaged in a license. When that transaction was recorded on the artist's royalty statement, it was a sale. Like Schroedinger's alive/dead cat, digital music was in superposition, caught in a zone between a sale and a license.

      Bought from artist, licensed to listener

    2. sex workers are the vanguard of every technological revolution. What gives? Well, think about the other groups that make up that vanguard – who else is an habitual early adopter? At least four other groups also take the lead on new tech: political radicals, kids, drug users, and terrorists. There's some overlap among members of these groups, but their most salient shared trait isn't personnel, it's exclusion. Kids, drug users, political radicals, sex workers and terrorists are all unwelcome in mainstream society. They struggle to use its money, its communications tools, and its media channels.

      Exclusion from communication tools drives some to adopt tech

      Early adopters of new tech are there because they have been excluded from other communication mediums.

    3. The kids who left Facebook for Instagram weren't looking for the Next Big Thing; they were looking for a social media service that their parents and teachers didn't use.

      Example with kids leaving Facebook for Instagram

    1. the creation of an ebook from aprint book falls under the author’s exclusive right to create derivative works. Moreover, printbooks and ebooks have very different characteristics – ebooks can be reproduced and distributedinstantaneously and at minimal cost. Internet Archive has no right to take those benefits foritself without compensating the rightsholders. While Internet Archive claims in a recent letter tothe Court to be “improving the efficiency of delivering content” – as if it is the only entitycapable of delivering ebooks to library patrons – Plaintiffs have invested heavily to create now-thriving markets for library ebooks.

      Benefits of ebook derivatives belong to the publishers

      Where does the court land on reformatting as a "derivative work"? The IA-supplied ebook is a page image duplication with limited dirty OCR search. The publisher, with the source format, has so much more opportunity to create derivative services for the ebook.

    2. We write on behalf of plaintiffs Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins PublishersLLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and Penguin Random House LLC (the “Plaintiffs”) to request apre-motion summary judgment conference pursuant to Individual Practice 2(B).

      Purpose of Letter

    3. Hachette Book Group, Inc. et al. v. Internet Archive, Case No. 1:20-CV-04160-JGK

      RECAP's archive of the docket from PACER

    1. I write on behalf of Defendant Internet Archive pursuant to Paragraph 2-B of Your Honor’s IndividualPractices to request a pre-motion conference on a motion for summary judgment in the above matter.

      A letter from the law firm representing the Internet Archives that summarizes the four-point fair use argument and details the extraordinary circumstances behind the the IA's National Emergency Library.

      Hachette Book Group, Inc. et al. v. Internet Archive, Case No. 1:20-CV-04160-JGK

      RECAP's archive of the docket from PACER

    2. As to the second factor, “the nature of the copyrighted work,” this factor “has rarely played a significantrole in the determination of a fair use dispute,” Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., 804 F.3d 202, 220 (2d Cir.2015), and this case is no exception.

      Nature of Copyrighted Work is rarely a fair use determining factor

      I hadn't thought about this before, but it does seem that the "nature of copyrighted work" is not often discussed. I wonder what the origins of this factor were.

    3. may a nonprofit library that owns a lawfully made andacquired print copy of a book loan a digital copy of that book to a library patron, if the library (1) loansthe book to only one patron at a time for each non-circulating print copy it owns (thus maintaining aone-to-one “owned-to-loaned” ratio); (2) implements technical protections that prevent access to thebook by anyone other than the current borrower; and (3) limits its digital lending to books published inthe past five or more years? This describes Internet Archive’s implementation of a practice known as“Controlled Digital Lending,” or “CDL.”

      Internet Archive's legal definition of CDL

    1. All wireless devices have small manufacturing imperfections in the hardware that are unique to each device. These fingerprints are an accidental byproduct of the manufacturing process. These imperfections in Bluetooth hardware result in unique distortions, which can be used as a fingerprint to track a specific device. For Bluetooth, this would allow an attacker to circumvent anti-tracking techniques such as constantly changing the address a mobile device uses to connect to Internet networks. 

      Tracking that evades address changes

      An operating system can change the hardware address it broadcasts in avoid tracking. But subtle differences in the signal itself can still be identified and tracked.

    1. Dall-E delivers ten images for each request, and when you see results that contain sensitive or biased content, you can flag them to OpenAI for review. The question then becomes whether OpenAI wants Dall-E's results to reflect society's approximate reality or some idealized version. If an occupation is majority male or female, for instance, and you ask Dall-E to illustrate someone doing that job, the results can either reflect the actual proportion in society, or some even split between genders. They can also account for race, weight, and other factors. So far, OpenAI is still researching how exactly to structure these results. But as it learns, it knows it has choices to make.

      Philosophical questions for AI-generated artwork

      As if we needed more technology to dissolve a shared, cohesive view of reality, we need to consider how it is possible to tune the AI parameters to reflect some version of what is versus some version of how we want it to be.

    1. an employee of OpenAI — which created it — asked Dall-E to draw a "Rabbit prison warden, digital art," and, within twenty seconds, it produced ten new illustrations.

      20 seconds to create 10 illustrations. I'm trying to guess what the computing power is behind this, but I can't. Quite possibly because I don't grasp the technique they are using to do this.

    1. Tech isn't a bunch of toys. It's tools to create a world. We all know this is true, and we need to start acting like it.

      Technology in the Public Interest

      Schneier's call-to-action: Build something new. Distribute power. Inhabit government.

    2. distributing power creates a thicker level of civil society. And that's essential to resisting old power.

      Distributing Power Creates a Thicker Layer of Civil Society

    3. Tim Berners-Lee solid initiative

      Solid Initiative

      Solid creates interoperable ecosystems of applications and data

      Data stored in Solid Pods can power ecosystems of interoperable applications where individuals are free to use their data seamlessly across different applications and services.

      Solid Project

    4. Private tech companies have greater power to influence, censor and control the lives of ordinary people than any government on earth
    5. And when corporations start to dominate the Internet, they became de-facto governments. Slowly but surely, the tech companies began to act like old power. They use the magic of tech to consolidate their own power, using money to increase their influence, blocking the redistribution of power from the entrenched elites to ordinary people.

      "Money is its own kind of power"

      The corporations built by white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian people became a focal point of power because of the money they had to influence governments and society. They started looking like "old power."

      Later:

      Facebook took advantage of tech's tradition of openness [importing content from MySpace], but as soon as it got what it wanted, it closed its platform off.

    6. We did not think the threat would come from the inside, that it would look and sound like us. And when I say look and sound like us, I mean exactly that.

      The threat to the internet becomes white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian

    7. Nothing could have confirm the righteousness of our faith or the rightness of our cause. More than the Arab Spring

      Arab Spring as validation of the hacker ideals

      The use of technology to drive the Arab Spring—internet power versus old power—was seen as the embodiment of white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian values.

    8. By moving and changing faster than government could keep up.

      An early defense against "old power"

    9. the real enemy would be government, the bastion of traditional power. Old power. Dark suits. Heavy badges.

      The "real enemy" of the internet

      Governments would want to use the internet to "invade our privacy." Starting in the 1990s with the Clipper Chip.

    10. We were distributing power and not hoarding it. So one of the things we liked about the new tech, our new tech was that it was a powerful tool that traditional power didn't understand. And in many cases, they didn't even know about it. So we were free to do with it what we wanted

      Early hacker ethos: powerful tools that traditional power didn't understand

    11. And that identity, like most of us was white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian. That's how the Internet got personified in those early days. Again, this wasn't everyone If you gathered all of us to talk about those early days, the women, the people of color, they would tell different stories. But it was most of us.

      Early culture on the internet: "white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian"

    1. what humor does with advocacy is it softens the edges

      Humor in Advocacy

      If you have a point to get across and a call to action, use humor as your medium—there is a better chance of your message getting through.

    2. now we have to maintain a level of professionalism because we have a very unique role in society people we have their lives their eyes and our hands and and so we do have a level of professionalism that we need to maintain

      Being real on social media while maintaining professionalism

      ...but it should not come at the expense of being able to show who we are—express ourselves—on social media.

    3. joking helps us acknowledge and integrate painful absurdities

      "Joking helps us acknowledge and integrate painful absurdities"

      Quote by Ted Cohen (philosopher)

    4. what humor does is you can take that rearrange it add humor to it deal with it the way you

      "Joking serves the function of overcoming internal and external obstacles"

      Quote by Sigmund Freud. Will Flanary goes on to say:

      When we're faced with something in life—whether you get sick, a family member gets sick, an accident, something unforeseen—we feel like control over our own lives is taken away from us. And what humor does is you can take that, rearrange it, add humor to it, deal with it the way you want to deal with it, present it to others and have them laugh with you about it. want to deal with it present it to others and have them laugh with you about it

    1. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

      Gall's Law

      Gall's Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from Gall's book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail.

      It reminds me of the TCP/IP versus OSI network stack wars.

    1. the one thing that you have to keep conveying to people about the consequences of surveillance is that it's all very well to say that you have nothing to hide, but when you're spied upon, everybody that's connected to you gets spied upon. And if we don't push back, the most vulnerable people in society, the people that actually keep really massive violations of human rights and illegality in check, they're the people who get most affected.

      "I Have Nothing To Hide" counter-argument

      Even if you have nothing to hide, that doesn't mean that those you are connected with aren't also being surveilled and are part of targeted communities.

  4. May 2022
    1. over the past decade and change a dynamic ecosystem has developed around cryptocurrencies and blockchains. And it’s constantly getting more complicated. We’ve now got non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, unique digital bits purchased with crypto that have mostly been associated with weird pieces of digital art and are an arena that looks very much like a bubble. There are stablecoins, cryptocurrencies that are supposed to be less volatile, pegged to something like the US dollar. There’s also the burgeoning world of decentralized finance, or DeFi, which tries to replicate a lot of the financial system but without intermediaries, and there are decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, essentially internet collectives. Now, much of this is falling under the still-nascent umbrella of Web3, a relatively fuzzy reimagining of the internet on blockchains.

      Putting it all together.

    2. What emerged was a picture that was simultaneously murky and clarifying, in that there’s not one good answer. Some of what it does is promising; a lot of what it does — even boosters admit — is trash, and trash that’s costing some people a lot of money. This probably isn’t the death knell for crypto — it’s gone through plenty of boom and bust cycles in the past. It would be unwise to definitively say that crypto has no chance of being a game changer; it would also be disingenuous to claim it is now.

      Article summary: cryptocurrency isn't all that useful now, but that doesn't necessarily mean it won't be useful in the future.

    1. The effect or “value” of the EJC platform has certainly shifted over time. While it was initially created to solve an access delivery problem, in 2022, the value still lies with the ownership of the content. Because of savvy contract negotiations, if OhioLINK should cancel any packages, members will retain access to the locally stored backfiles. Members would never have to negotiate with publishers/vendors for post-cancellation “access fees” to those resources.

      This is very true...taking possession of the content—as a matter of contract and as a matter of locally storing the articles themselves—was very key to the EJC strategy.

    2. OhioLINK also had the foresight to add a set of core online research databases (which at this time were only indexes).

      The earliest of these research databases used the same public catalog interface as the local library catalog and the central catalog. I think this had a significant usability advantage to promoting these resources even as compromises on sophistication of indexing were made.

    3. Over the next four years, Ohio’s public 4-year institutions, plus University of Dayton and Case Western Reserve University collaborated to develop the statewide consortial lending system.

      The inclusion of U-Dayton and CWRU set a key precedent for OhioLINK—the activities of the statewide consortium were going to lift all boats: public 4-year, private 4-year, and soon the community and technical colleges. All would have near identical access to the same resources, regardless of the student's or researcher's school.

    4. the Ohio Board of Regents (1987) (BOR, now known as the Ohio Department of Higher Education)

      Opinion: the politicization of higher education in Ohio was an ill-conceived and ultimately detrimental decision. Where there was once insulation—the governor appointed members of the board of regents and the regents appointed the chancellor—the ability of the governor to directly appoint the head of higher education in the state injected politics into higher ed, and the higher ed system as a whole lost as a result.

    5. create a book depository system for off-site storage of library materials

      I think the formation of the off-site storage buildings is often forgotten in the history of higher education libraries in the early 1990s. One was built just off the Ohio State campus, one was built originally in a former car dealership in Kent, Ohio (I think), and the third was the one I was involved with: the Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, or S.W.O.R.D. I registered "sword.org" and had an email and website system run off of a Mac Server.

      Ah, good days.

    1. This work is still being done on platforms like Facebook and Reddit. But unlike the sysops who enabled the flourishing of early online communities, the volunteer moderators on today’s platforms do not own the infrastructures they oversee. They do not share in the profits generated by their labor. They cannot alter the underlying software or implement new technical interventions or social reforms. Instead of growing in social status, the sysop seems to have been curtailed by the providers of platforms. If there is a future after Facebook, it will be led by a revival of the sysop, a reclamation of the social and economic value of community maintenance and moderation.

      Being a moderator on a large private social network is different from being a sysop or moderator in "Modem World"—mainly because of the lack of control over the underlying technical infrastructure and the engagement rules baked into the technical infrastructure.

    2. The modem world shows us that other business models are possible. BBS sysops loved to boast about “paying their own bills.” For some, the BBS was an expensive hobby, a money pit not unlike a vintage car. But many sysops sought to make their BBSs self-sustaining. Absent angel investors or government contracts, BBSs became sites of commercial experimentation. Many charged a fee for access—experimenting with tiered rates and per-minute or per-byte payment schemes. There were also BBSs organized like a social club. Members paid “dues” to keep the hard drive spinning. Others formed nonprofit corporations, soliciting tax-exempt donations from their users. Even on the hobby boards, sysops sometimes passed the virtual hat, asking everybody for a few bucks to buy a new modem or knock out a big telephone bill.

      Funding "Modem World"

      A mixture of a personal expensive hobby to small businesses experimenting with tiered rates to donation-driven to non-profit corporations.

    3. In the days of Usenet and BBSs and Minitel, cyberspace was defined by the interconnection of thousands of small-scale local systems, each with its own idiosyncratic culture and technical design, a dynamic assemblage of overlapping communication systems held together by digital duct tape and a handshake. It looked and felt different depending on where you plugged in your modem.

      This is a picturesque description of the loosely linked BBS/Usenet world, where a person's view of the federation was different "depending on where you plugged in your modem."

    4. Forgetting has high stakes. As wireless broadband approaches ubiquity in many parts of North America, the stories we tell about the origins of the internet are more important than ever. Faced with crises such as censorship and surveillance, policy makers and technologists call on a mythic past for guidance. In times of uncertainty, the most prominent historical figures—the “forefathers” and the “innovators”—are granted a special authority to make normative claims about the future of telecommunications. As long as the modem world is excluded from the internet’s origin story, the everyday amateur will have no representation in debates over policy and technology, no opportunity to advocate for a different future.

      "Modem world"

      In addition to being a useful argument for the inclusion of the social aspects of BBS networks, the "modem world" phrase is an interesting shorthand for describing what was happening in the public sphere while NSFnet was growing in the academic and computing research world.

    5. Instead of emphasizing the role of popular innovation and amateur invention, the dominant myths in internet history focus on the trajectory of a single military-funded experiment in computer networking: the Arpanet. Though fascinating, the Arpanet story excludes the everyday culture of personal computing and grassroots internetworking. In truth, the histories of Arpanet and BBS networks were interwoven—socially and materially—as ideas, technologies, and people flowed between them

      Interwoven history between Arpanet and BBS networks

      There is some truth to this statement. The necessary protocol underpinnings were from the Arpanet part of the pair, but the social pieces were derived from BBS interconnections via dialup protocols like UUCP. Is there an evolutionary link between UUCP and NNTP?

      In the calls for loosely linked independent social networks to replace the large, global private social networks, there are echos of loosely connected BBS networks.

    1. The more customers that a cable company served, the stronger their negotiating position with content providers; the more studios and types of content that a content provider controlled the stronger their negotiating position with cable providers. The end result were a few dominant cable providers (Comcast, Charter, Cox, Altice, Mediacom) and a few dominant content companies (Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, Time Warner, Fox), tussling back-and-forth over a very profitable pie.

      Ratcheting power of cable and content companies

    2. Within these snippets is everything that makes the cable business so compelling: Cable is in high demand because it provides the means to get what customers most highly value. Cable works best both technologically and financially when it has a geographic monopoly. Cable creates demand for new supply; technological advances enable more supply, which creates more demand.

      Cable TV service drivers

    3. The aforementioned satellite, though, led to the creation of national TV stations, first HBO, and then WTCG, an independent television station in Atlanta, Georgia, owned by Ted Turner. Turner realized he could buy programming at local rates, but sell advertising at national rates via cable operators eager to feed their customers’ hunger for more stations. Turner soon launched a cable only channel devoted to nothing but news; he called it the Cable News Network — CNN for short (WTCG would later be renamed TBS).

      Origins of national programming

      "buy programming at local rates but sell advertising at national rates"

    4. Jerrold Electronics, meanwhile, spun off one of the cable systems it built in Tupelo, Mississippi to an entrepreneur named Ralph Roberts; Roberts proceeded to systematically buy up community cable systems across the country, moving the company’s headquarters to Philadelphia and renaming it to Comcast Corporation (Roberts would eventually hand the business off to his son, Brian).

      Origin of Comcast

    5. what if Tarlton could place an antenna further up the mountain in Summit Hill and run a cable to his shop?

      Origin story of cable television

      An electronics store needed a way to demonstrate the capabilities of television sets, but was in a valley that prevented line-of-site access to a transmitter.

    1. VIN locks began in car-engines. Auto manufacturers started to put cheap microcontrollers into engine components and subcomponents. A mechanic could swap in a new part, but the engine wouldn’t recognize it — and the car wouldn’t drive — until an authorized technician entered an unlock code into a special tool connected to the car’s internal network.

      VIN Locks and Right-to-Repair

    2. The next time someone tells you “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” remember this. These farmers weren’t getting free, ad-supported tractors. Deere charges six figures for a tractor. But the farmers were still the product. The thing that determines whether you’re the product isn’t whether you’re paying for the product: it’s whether market power and regulatory forbearance allow the company to get away with selling you.

      Nuanced "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product"

      Is your demographic and/or activity data being sold? Then you are still the product even if you are paying for something.

      I worry about things like Google Workspace sometimes. Am I paying enough for the product to cover the cost of supplying the product to me, or is Google having to raise additional revenue to cover the cost of serving me? Is Google raising additional revenue even though they don't have to in order to cover my cost?

    1. In a rush to show growth, Bolt often overstated its technological capability and misrepresented the number of merchants using its service, some of the people said. In presentations to investors, it included the names of customers before verifying whether those merchants were able to use its technology. For a time, a fraud detection product it was pitching to merchants was more dependent on manual review than Mr. Breslow implied, according to a former employee.

      "Fake it until you make it" meets reality

      Over promising and under delivering is a common "tech bro" problem. Theranos, while not lead by a "bro", suffered from much of the same problem.

    1. In July 2021, Wyoming became the first state in the country to explicitly codify rules around DAOs wishing to become domiciled in that jurisdiction. This rule change means that DAOs in Wyoming are considered a distinct form of limited liability company (LLC), which grants them a legal personality and confers a wide range of rights, such as limited liability for members. Without this protection, a DAO could be viewed as a general partnership, exposing its members to personal liability for any of the DAO’s obligations or actions. Each DAO must have a registered agent in Wyoming, and the agent must establish a physical address and maintain a register of names and addresses of the entity’s directors or individuals serving in a similar capacity.

      Distributed Autonomous Organizations as legal entities

      Wyoming grants a [[distributed autonomous organization|DAO]] a legal form of existence akin to a limited liability company. Without this legal structure, a DAO could be considered a "general partnership" that subjects its participants to personal liability for the action of the DAO's smart contracts.

    1. Blockchains are immutable, which means once data is recorded, it can’t be removed. The idea that blockchains will be used to store user-generated data for services like social networks has enormous implications for user safety. If someone uses these platforms to harass and abuse others, such as by doxing, posting revenge pornography, uploading child sexual abuse material, or doing any number of other very serious things that platforms normally try to thwart with content-moderation teams, the protections that can be offered to users are extremely limited. The same goes for users who plagiarize artwork, spam, or share sensitive material like trade secrets. Even a user who themself posts something and then later decides they’d rather not have it online is stuck with it remaining on-chain indefinitely.

      Nothing is forgotten on the blockchain

      Once something is recorded in the blockchain ledger, it is almost impossible to remove (except, say, for a community-agreed-upon hard fork of the ledger). All of the ills of social media become even more permanent when recorded directly in a blockchain.

    1. “The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment”—one’s basic ability to separate truth from untruth—“is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.”

      Discernment as a cause for division

    1. Prasad says that early tests of Nextdoor’s “constructive conversations” reminders have already been positive, though it has led to some decrease in overall engagement on the platform. “We think that it's still the right thing to do.”

      Quality Over Engagement

      A [[private social space]] that says it is prioritizing quality conversation over engagement, according to its chief product officer

    1. Our goal: to encourage neighbors to conduct more mindful conversations. What if we can be proactive and intervene before the conversations spark more abusive responses? Oftentimes unkind comments beget more unkind comments. 90% of abusive comments appear in a thread with another abusive comment, and 50% of abusive comments appear in a thread with 13+ other abusive comments.* By preventing some of these comments before they happen, we can avoid the resulting negative feedback loops.

      Proactive Approach to Handling Abusive Comments

      Interesting that they took a more nuanced approach to this problem. Something more heavy-handed would have added a time delay or limit on the number of comments by a particular user. Instead, they chose to model the conversations and have the app offer pop-ups based on that. Another alternative would be something like [[social credit score]].

    2. This model was tasked with predicting whether a future comment on a thread will be abusive. This is a difficult task without any features provided on the target comment. Despite the challenges of this task, the model had a relatively high AUC over 0.83, and was able to achieve double digit precision and recall at certain thresholds.

      Predicting Abusive Conversation Without Target Comment

      This is fascinating. The model is predicting if the next, new comment will be abusive by examining the existing conversation, and doing this without knowing what the next comment will be.

    3. AUC

      "Area Under Curve"

    4. For somes cases such as misinformation and discrimination, these reports are sent directly to our trained Neighborhood Operation Staff to review.

      Ah, interesting...I didn't know these went to Nextdoor staff.

    5. The multiple dimensions of this conversation created some complexity around how we define each comment’s parent node and traverse along the parent nodes to recreate the conversation thread.

      I would argue that Nextdoor's threaded mode is broken because there is only ever two levels: the parent comment and any replies. I've seen confusion in Nextdoor posts when one person's reply is read as a reply to the parent comment rather than a reply to a reply. I wonder what the implementation decision behind this was.

    1. When fed information about a target individual’s mobile phone interactions, as well as their contacts’ interactions, AI can correctly pick the target out of more than 40,000 anonymous mobile phone service subscribers more than half the time, researchers report January 25 in Nature Communications.

      Citation to research: A.-M. Creţu et al. Interaction data are identifiable even across long periods of time. Nature Communications. Published online January 25, 2022. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-27714-6.

    2. For one test, the researchers trained the neural network with data from an unidentified mobile phone service that detailed 43,606 subscribers’ interactions over 14 weeks. This data included each interaction’s date, time, duration, type (call or text), the pseudonyms of the involved parties and who initiated the communication.

      Graph of Phone Calls/Texts

      One of the tests involved the researcher creating a directed graph of user calls/texts including timestamp, type of interaction (call versus text), and duration. Just based on the pattern of interaction, the AI could be fed the graph of a known individual and be spotted in the anonymized dataset about 15% of the time. Adding the second derivative interactions into the search graph increased the positive result to just over 50%.

    1. those community driven organizations were where a lot of us learned how to do small “D” democracy. We learned how to run a meeting. We learned how to manage a budget. We learned how to host a group discussion. We learned how to get people to work together to do things. We've lost some of that. I think one of the best ways that people are learning those small d democratic skills are doing things like being moderators on Reddit, are trying to figure out how to run virtual spaces that they actually have control over.

      Small Digital Social Spaces Mimic Community Organizations

      How do people learn to interact with each other in productive ways? In the past it was with community-driven organizations. How do we bring that teaching tool to digital spaces?

    2. I don't think you can responsibly run a social network these days, without some way of dealing with things like child sexual abuse imagery. Whichever lines you want to draw, maybe it's around terrorism. Certainly it's around child abuse imagery. There have to be some central resources where you can put up fingerprints of your images, instead of say, "I need to take this down." Even in the circumstances that I'm talking about, there's no way to deal with a community that decides that child porn's a great thing and we're going to trade it back and forth, without having some of the central resources that you can work against. If you really were working for this decentralized world, some combination of the mandatory interop without too high level of it, and some sort of those collective resources that we in a field all work together on maintaining and feeding. With auditability, I understand that all those resources need to be audited and checked, so you don't end up being an irresponsible blacklist.

      Small Social Spaces need Central Resources

      The example brought up is child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Small communities will need to police this. Pretty sure that is a universal understanding.

      What if one person's terrorism is another's political speech. Under who's laws do small communities fall when the participants can cross political boundaries?

    3. The only problem with it is that when you leave Facebook, your data's really only useful if you're going to another Facebook. Leaving is not actually the interesting thing. It's being able to interoperate with each of the small blocks of content.

      Interoperate versus Leaving

      Private social media spaces have tools that let you "export" your data, but that data is only good on the social media space it came from. What we need instead is a level of interoperability between social media spaces.

    4. digital public infrastructure, this idea that maybe our public spaces should actually be paid for with public dollars

      Digital Public Infrastructure

      As an answer to private social spaces.

    5. If we, as human beings are allowed to change and evolve, we have to find some way to be able to outgrow our data doppelgängers. It's not just that these things are creepy. It's that they're literally holding us to our worst selves, even when we try to change and work our way through the future.

      Data Doppelgängers phrase

      This is an aspect of the right to be forgotten here. Should this be just about behavioral advertising? What about the person running for office and having old pictures and old writings coming back to haunt them.

    6. I don't think that hateful speech disappears in the model that I'm talking about.  Will people build horrible hateful spaces within the architecture that I'm trying to design? Yeah, absolutely. My hope is that most of us will avoid them. My hope is that those spaces will be less successful in recruiting and pulling people into those spaces.

      Small Spaces and Hateful Speech

      Hateful speech doesn't go away, but is segregated into smaller spaces where "my hope is that most of us will avoid." This will depend on the software tools that communities have to enforce rules about hateful speech. I want to think this will work, but it is so easy to have bots spin up small communities, and I imagine those bots infiltrating spaces.

    7. We've had three things happen simultaneously: we've moved from an open web where people start lots of small projects to one where it really feels like if you're not on a Facebook or a YouTube, you're not going to reach a billion users, and at that point, why is it worth doing this? Second, we've developed a financial model of surveillance capitalism, where the default model for all of these tools is we're going to collect as much information as we can about you and monetize your attention. Then we've developed a model for financing these, which is venture capital, where we basically say it is your job to grow as quickly as possible, to get to the point where you have a near monopoly on a space and you can charge monopoly rents. Get rid of two aspects of that equation and things are quite different.

      How We Got Here: Concentration of Reach, Surveillance Capitalism, and Venture Capital

      These three things combined drove the internet's trajectory. Without these three components, we wouldn't have seen the concentration of private social spaces and the problems that came with them.

    8. we both want things that are smaller in terms of the manageability of the size of it. But the other thing you said was really important is we want to be able to skip between them. We don't want to all be locked in small little walled gardens where we can't go from one place to another.

      Interoperability of Spaces

      This echos Cory Doctorow's interoperability vision.

    9. Scale's hard. Having a set of speech rules that work for 10 people around a dinner table, that can be hard in it of itself. Everyone can think of a Christmas meal or a Thanksgiving meal with someone who's really politically out of line with everyone else and the Thanksgiving rules of no politics around the table. But that's 10 people. Once you start trying to scale that to India /Kashmir, or Palestinianians/ Israelis, or Rohingya/ Bama you're really wrestling with some questions that frankly, most of the people involved with these companies are not qualified to address. The only solution I've been able to come to out of that is a whole lot of small spaces. All of us moving between them and some of us taking responsibility for governing, at least some of the spaces that we interact in.

      Devolve the rule-making for a space to smaller-sized groups. One set of global rules is not manageable.

      Interesting, though: one set of technical global rules—protocols and other standards—is required for global communication, but the social/interpersonal aspects of global rules defies codification.

    10. She's built a whole company around adding features to Twitter that Twitter, frankly, should have.

      Tracy Chou's company is Block Party.

    11. Reimagining looks at this and says, "Wait a second, why are we trying to have a conversation in a space that's linking 300 million people? Maybe this isn't where I want to have my conversation. And you know what? I don't actually want my conversation moderated by poorly paid people in the Philippines who are flipping through a three ring binder to figure out if speech is acceptable. What if we built social media around communities of people who want to interact with one another and want to take responsibility for governing those spaces?"

      Reimagining Social Media

      This is what Ethan Zuckerman proposes as re-imagined social media spaces...communities of people owning the rules for the space they are in, and then having loosely connected spaces interact.

    12. So we've gone from worrying about government censoring the net, to worrying about platform censoring the net, to now in some cases, worrying about platforms not doing enough to censor the net, this is not how we should be running a digital public sphere. 

      Progression of Concerns about the Private Social Space

      The private social spaces don't make themselves available to research analysis, so we have this vague feeling that something is wrong with only empirical evidence that we can't really test.

    13. I got sober about four years ago, but the internet knows me as an alcoholic and there is in those many records out there, the fact that I have clicked on alcohol ads. I have bought alcohol online. The internet in a very real way doesn't want me to stop drinking. The fact that they know that I like to drink is actually very lucrative for them. When you think about this, this creates a really interesting ethical conundrum. It's not just that these things are creepy. It's that they're literally holding us to our worst selves, even when we try to change and work our way through the future.

      Effects of Behavioral Advertising when the Behavior Changes

      It is said that the internet doesn't forget. This could be really true for behavioral advertisers who's business it is to sell to your behaviors, whether you've wanted to change them or not.

    1. The software trains on 100 hours of footage so each camera can learn “normal” behavior, and then it flags anything deemed out of the ordinary. Each camera can also be configured with additional hard-coded rules. For example, it can be programmed with barriers that people should never cross and zones where cars should never stop.

      AI learns what is "normal" and escalates non-normal things (or hard-coded condition violations) to human operators.

    2. The bulk of Vumacam’s subscribers have thus far been private security companies like AI Surveillance, which supply anything from armed guards to monitoring for a wide range of clients, including schools, businesses, and residential neighborhoods. This was always the plan: Vumacam CEO Croock started AI Surveillance with Nichol shortly after founding Vumacam and then stepped away to avoid conflicts with other Vumacam customers.

      AI-driven Surveillance-as-a-Service

      Vumacam provides the platform, AI-driven target selection, and human review. Others subscribe to that service and add their own layers of services to customers.

    1. We still have scientific papers; we still send them off to peer reviewers; we still have editors who give the ultimate thumbs up or down as to whether a paper is published in their journal.

      To which we should also add, of course, the exorbitant fees and resulting profits for the corporate entities doing the publishing.

    2. Having been printed on paper since the very first scientific journal was inaugurated in 1665

      There is some history here. The first scientific journal was one that published the proceedings of one of the first scholarly society meetings (The (mostly true) origins of the scientific journal - Scientific American Blog Network) and resulting letters.

    1. A platform can use all available signals to judge who should have promotion and privileges on the platform, including giving more access and amplification to those who have shown a consistent history of positively engaging with others. And those who misbehave on the platform would be managed with a community management strategy that's informed by the principles of restorative justice, incentivizing good behaviors while also taking into account a person's history of community contributions on other platforms as well.

      Using Outside Signals to Judge Promotion/Privileges

      The linked "community management strategy" post is about using signals outside our system to help adjudicate the actions on our own network. This seems strikingly close to the "social credit score" that is being tried in some cities in China. And that is pretty uncomfortable.

    2. We're not currently seeing a debate about "free speech". What we're actually witnessing is just a debate about who controls the norms of a social network, and who gets free promotion from that network.

      Private Social Space

      The First Amendment ("free speech") guides what speech the government can control. The social networks are private companies, so the control is over who gets to say what in that private, social space. Is there an analog about who gets to say what in a bar...is it the bar owner? (The bar being an example of another public, social space.)

  5. Apr 2022
    1. Given the difficulty of regulating every online post, especially in a country that protects most forms of speech, it seems far more prudent to focus most of our efforts on building an educated and resilient public that can spot and then ignore disinformation campaigns

      On the need for disinformation educations

      ...but what is the difference "between what’s a purposeful attempt to mislead the public and what’s being called disinformation because of a genuine difference of opinion"

    1. This practice leavespatrons’ search histories, search results, and full content of browsed pages open to covertsurveillance via packet-sniffing applications such as the free cross-platform Wireshark.

      Problems with Unencrypted Web Traffic

      The author limits the extent of privacy issues to illicit scanning of the local area network. A bigger problem—particularly from residential networks where IP address can be closely connected to users—is ISPs gathering behavioral data from DNS and deep-packet-search of HTTP transactions.

    2. This list should be preferred to the lists mostbrowser ad-blocking plugins use, as it is limited only to trackers and doesnot include advertisers and other organizations that do not employtracking techniques.

      Trackers versus Advertisers

      This was a distinction I didn't anticipate. Almost all advertising—at least on the general web—is using past browsing history or clues from the browser IP/context to select advertisements to show. Trackers would capture this information for purposes other than advertising. So I'm not sure why removing advertisers from this analysis is warranted.

    3. the privacy of an e‑resource may be considered physical-equivalent only when apatron using an information-equivalent physical resource would enjoy no more privacythan the same patron using the e‑resource

      Definition of "Physical-equivalent privacy"

      The formulation of the definition assumes patron privacy when using the physical carrier is always better than when using the digital carrier. On its face, I think that assumption holds true. We could construct a scenario—say, visiting a Tor .onion site while using Talis is more privacy protecting than observing a patrom pulling a reference book from a shelf—but those seem so far out of the probable that it can be ignored.

    4. A systematic decrease in the privacy of e‑resource use relative to use ofphysical materials provides neither equitable service nor equitable information access topatrons with little or no choice but to use information in electronic form. These patronsinclude:

      Equity of Privacy Protection for Patrons in Conditions Where Electronic Access is All that is Available

      Article text has category descriptions of patrons who can only use electronic versions of materials.

    5. Dorothea Salo (2021) Physical-Equivalent Privacy, The Serials Librarian, DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2021.1875962

      Permanent Link: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/81297

      Abstract

      This article introduces and applies the concept of “physical-equivalent privacy” to evaluate the appropriateness of data collection about library patrons’ use of library-provided e‑resources. It posits that as a matter of service equity, any data collection practice that causes e‑resource users to enjoy less information privacy than users of an information-equivalent print resource is to be avoided. Analysis is grounded in real-world e‑resource-related phenomena: secure (HTTPS) library websites and catalogs, the Adobe Digital Editions data-leak incident of 2014, and use of web trackers on e‑resource websites. Implications of physical-equivalent privacy for the SeamlessAccess single-sign-on proposal will be discussed.

    1. Redesigning democracy for the digital age is far beyond my abilities, but I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

      Reforms for a Post-Babel Era

      • harden democratic institutions
      • reform social media
      • prepare the next generation
    2. This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.

      Key American Institutions Lose the Ability to Think Critically

    3. Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims.

      Social Media Assholes

      It isn't that social media that made most people more aggressive or hostile; it over-amplified the few that had that nature.

    4. The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.

      Trump Won the 2016 Election Because We Thought We Could Rely on Pre-Babel Institutions

    5. But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

      Democracy Vulnerability to Triviality

      Although social media is called out here, I wonder if there is an aspect of 24-hour news networks' need to fill time that is also drives "frivolous and fanciful distinctions."

    6. This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

      Twitter Engineer Regrets Retweet Feature

      Companies and services are made up of people making decisions. Often decisions that we can't see the impact of...or are unwilling to listen to the wisdom of those that are predicting the impact.

    7. Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

      The Firehose versus the Algorithmic Feed

      See related from The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, except with more depth here.

    8. Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

      Perform rather than Connect

      Social media rewards engagement—performance for "likes"—versus conversation.

    9. Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.

      Thesis: social media has weakened the three forces that social scientists have identified as essential for successful democracies.

    10. Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people.

      Algorithms creating the divide

    11. It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

      Babel as an Allegory for present-day America

      Babel is a reference to the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis chapter 11 versus 1-9). It does indeed seem like the American people are speaking different languages and have been scattered.

    1. The fire hose was like in early Facebook days, when you saw the posts of everyone who was in your network in the order in which they were posted and that was the end of the story. I remember first starting to become clued in to the fact that that wasn’t the way it was working anymore, circa 2011, when I was seeing a lot more stupid stuff, and a lot more stuff that was clearly nudging me in one direction or another, rather than giving me an autonomous view of the landscape of information out there.

      The Firehose versus the Algorithmic Feed

      Social media used to be reverse-time based. When it switched to algorithmic-driven, what we saw as determined by the algorithm and the algorithm was programmed to promote engagement to increase the profits of the social media companies. See related Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.

    2. And therefore, to accept the dictates of algorithms in deciding what, for example, the next song we should listen to on Spotify is, accepting that it will be an algorithm that dictates this because we no longer recognize our non-algorithmic nature and we take ourselves to be the same sort of beings that don’t make spontaneous irreducible decisions about what song to listen to next, but simply outsource the duty for this sort of thing, once governed by inspiration now to a machine that is not capable of inspiration.

      Outsourcing decisions to algorithms

    3. Algorithms in themselves are neither good nor bad. And they can be implemented even where you don’t have any technology to implement them. That is to say, you can run an algorithm on paper, and people have been doing this for many centuries. It can be an effective way of solving problems. So the “crisis moment” comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That’s when the crisis starts.

      Algorithms are agnostic

      As we know them now, algorithms—and [[machine learning]] in general—do well when confined to the domains in which they started. They come apart when dealing with unbounded domains.