Technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/18659491

Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal.

The problem, for Stiegler, is that when we pay too much attention to our tools, rather than how they are developed and deployed, we fail to understand our reality. We become trapped, merely describing the technological world on its own terms and making it even harder to untangle the effects of digital technologies and our everyday experiences.

By encouraging us to pay closer attention to this world-making capacity, with its potential to harm and heal, Stiegler is showing us what else is possible.

archive.org

ghostarchive.org

archive.today

The Podcasts app is just the latest product to go through a process I’ve come to call The Google Cycle. It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists, eventually launches a competitor out of some other part of the company, obviously begins to deprecate it and shift focus to the new competitor, and then, years later, finally shuts it down for real. The Google Graveyard is full of apps like Reader, Duo, Inbox, Allo, Wallet, and countless others that have been through The Google Cycle, and it feels just as bad every time.

https://lobste.rs/s/4pzifd/wi_fi_only_works_when_it_s_raining

"We, current and previous employees of Apple Inc., wish to express our disappointment and shock at the lack of care and understanding this company has given the Palestinian community, not only abroad suffering in Gaza, but also towards our own team members and anyone who supports them within our stores and offices. "

https://archive.ph/VgRlf

Scientists have created a blazing-fast scientific camera that shoots images at an encoding rate of 156.3 terahertz (THz) to individual pixels — equivalent to 156.3 trillion frames per second. Dubbed SCARF (swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography), the research-grade camera could lead to breakthroughs in fields studying micro-events that come and go too quickly for today’s most expensive scientific sensors.

SCARF has successfully captured ultrafast events like absorption in a semiconductor and the demagnetization of a metal alloy. The research could open new frontiers in areas as diverse as shock wave mechanics or developing more effective medicine.

Thus, Project Ghostbusters was born. It’s Meta’s in-house wiretapping tool to spy on data analytics from Snapchat starting in 2016, later used on YouTube and Amazon. This involved creating “kits” that can be installed on iOS and Android devices, to intercept traffic for certain apps, according to the filings. This was described as a “man-in-the-middle” approach to get data on Facebook’s rivals, but users of Onavo were the “men in the middle.”

In the study, the UC Berkeley researchers used a video game called Overcooked, where two chefs divvy up tasks to prepare and serve meals, in this case soup, which earns them points. It’s a 2-D world, seen from above, filled with onions, tomatoes, dishes and a stove with pots. At each time step, each virtual chef can stand still, interact with whatever is in front of it, or move up, down, left or right.

The researchers first collected data from pairs of people playing the game. Then they trained AIs using offline RL or one of three other methods for comparison. (In all methods, the AIs were built on a neural network, a software architecture intended to roughly mimic how the brain works.) In one method, the AI just imitated the humans. In another, it imitated the best human performances. The third method ignored the human data and had AIs practice with each other. And the fourth was the offline RL, in which AI does more than just imitate; it pieces together the best bits of what it sees, allowing it to perform better than the behavior it observes. It uses a kind of counterfactual reasoning, where it predicts what score it would have gotten if it had followed different paths in certain situations, then adapts.