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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

3 Nov

@Polygon

I've been talking to @Polygon's @TashaRobinson about my books for nearly two decades. She was one of the reviewers to dig into Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my debut novel, all the way back in 2003 when she was at @TheOnion's @TheAVClub.

aux.avclub.com/cory-doctorow-…

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She's always had smart things to say about my books (and is never shy about criticizing them) so I was delighted to talk with her about my latest, ATTACK SURFACE, for an interview: "Cory Doctorow on his drive to inspire positive futures."

polygon.com/2020/11/2/2154…

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As the title suggests, the interview digs into the relationship between our narratives about the future and the future itself when it arrives - the delights and perils of dystopianism, a philosophy that I find seductive even as I reject it.

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Read 19 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

3 Nov

@xkcd

Today on @xkcd, an "Election Impact Score Sheet" that turns on the theory that "reminders from friends and family to vote have a bigger effect on turnout than anything campaigns do."

xkcd.com/2380/

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It's a call to action: if you have friends or family PA, ME, AK, MT, NM, WI, MI, IO, NC, NH, GA, NE, MI, FL, KS, MI or CO, drop them a line today - text, call, email - and remind them to vote. Prioritize these calls in roughly that order.

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If the people you reach need help with their plan to vote, refer them to a guide like this one, and help them work through it, figuring it out together.

projects.fivethirtyeight.com/how-to-vote-20…

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Read 5 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

3 Nov

Amazon's ACX is a self-serve audiobook production platform: writers spend thousands of dollars to produce audiobooks of their own work. Amazon strongly incentivizes ACX producers to sell exclusively through Audible (which also distributes to Itunes).

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If you go exclusive, you get a better split of the proceeds - 40%. That's right: though you bore all production costs and Amazon has no costs associated with selling your audiobook, Amazon still keeps the majority of the revenue from it, even if you grant them exclusivity.

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As unfair as that may sound, it gets a LOT worse. As part of its effort to lure customers to Audible, Amazon now grants no-questions-asked returns on audiobooks, and claws back the lost revenue from those returns from the audiobook creators.

susanmaywriter.net/single-post/au…

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Read 10 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

3 Nov

@locusmag

My latest @locusmag column is "Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results," an essay about the limits of machine learning and the reason that statistical inference will not lead to consciousness.

locusmag.com/2020/11/cory-d…

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At its core, machine-learning is "theory free correlation-detection" - that is, it takes training data and finds things that appear together in it. Two things labeled an eye and one thing labeled a nose and one thing labeled a mouth all add up to a face.

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But the classifier doesn't know what a noses, eyes, or mouths are. It doesn't know what a face is. Your doorbell camera doesn't know that the face-like thing in the melting snow on your walk CAN'T be a face, so it repeatedly warns you about a stranger on your doorstep.

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Read 12 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

3 Nov

Schoolhouse Rock (1973), “Sufferin’ ‘til Sufferage” gameraboy1.tumblr.com/post/633723969…

Read 4 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

2 Nov

@stephlepp

"Deep Reckonings" is @stephlepp's art project: she's created three deepfake videos in which three of the current moment's most clueless powerful monsters have a moral reckoning and make a clean breast of their failings.

the.ink/p/breaking-mar…

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First is Brett Kavanaugh, relating the evolution of his understanding of what sexual abuse means and his own history of sexual abuse, apologizing to the survivors of his crimes.

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Next is Mark Zuckerberg, realizing that he's been kidding himself all along about the nature of Facebook, and the intrinsic harm that his business-model inflicts on the people he has imprisoned in his walled garden.

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Read 8 tweets

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