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5 May, 4 tweets, 1 min read
The Facebook Oversight Board is accountability cosplay, and treating it (or its decisions) seriously advances Facebook's goals of being a law unto itself. The fact that lawyers dominate the discussion around Facebook policies exacerbates the problem of lending false legitimacy
The Lawfare crowd is too ready to have a body of Oversight Board jurisprudence to analyze and [lady]beard-stroke over, as if this entity were a branch of government rather than an attempt by Facebook to exercise the power of a state in perpetuity without being beholden to anyone
In unrelated news, the Pinboard Oversight Board (my mom) has decided I should have a raise in 2021, and once again named me Employee of the Month
Large tech companies flood the zone when it comes to funding major philanthropic foundations, especially around open society and journalism. A lot of the people commenting on the Oversight Board today have an unhealthy (if indirect) financial stake in perpetuating the status quo

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6 May
With all respect to @fchollet, I predict that within 20 years every branch of knowledge will be a kind of bookmarking.
In seriousness, though, I'm always surprised at how many people assume that computational medicine (or combinatorial chemistry) has been beneficial, when it's in fact the other way around. We did way better in the 50's injecting random botanicals into mice blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archi…
The cases where technological advances have led to an exponential *decrease* in outcomes are not common, but are supremely fascinating and should probably be something we investigate more deeply before automating the rest of the world. I suggest we study it with machine learning!
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
6 May
Analysts explaining how a digital currency has become so valuable that it might one day be possible to buy things with it. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Image
There's something appealingly retro about the idea of using cryptocurrency to buy goods and services
I realize that the point of cryptocurrency now is to get a Chinese datacenter to digitally sign the bugs in your immutable Lisp program. I'm no Luddite. But I do miss a simpler, more innocent time when you just used it to mail order heroin.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
6 May
There's an underrated scenario where China provokes a crisis with Taiwan, things get spicy, and the world just doesn't have microchips for a few years. I don't get why this isn't more central to our Taiwan policy.
Making every device on the planet dependent on a component that is exceptionally hard to build new factories for was not a good decision, but we're locked into it now because people wanted a blue LED on their toaster.
On the plus side, I hope that owning these crown jewels of the global supply chain helps keep Taiwan free and prosperous for many years to come.
Read 5 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
5 May
Chia storage use is very much on the exponential growth curve right now, and I'm curious when shortages will start being felt in US consumer channels. Image
The total amount of hard drive storage is massive, but the number assigned to retail channels is not, and it is hard to increase. This is doubly true for the high-end SSDs that chia farmers favor for plotting (that is, creating new bingo squares)
What we really need to make the cryptocurrency revolution complete is a popular new coin that requires massive amounts of RAM. Then all components of homemade PCs will be equally unaffordable, and balance will have been restored
Read 6 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
4 May
This is an excellent thread about the fractured media reality that we inhabit, and the fact that most Republican voters are now unreachable due to living in a different epistemic universe from us. Unlike Putnam I no longer have hope that we can fix this, but her analysis is great
A lot of the projects to fix this (and I'm not referring to Putnam here) are some version of "we just need to educate people!", that evergreen favorite of the educated classes, which only makes the divide deeper and more impossible to bridge
The fact that there are no longer one but two public spheres, with very little overlap, and that one of them has become unglued from contact with reality is the great political crisis of our time, because the only way to fix it is to get the now unreachable people to vote for you
Read 4 tweets
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29 Apr
I'm inclined to view the fact that vaccine cards are extremely easy to falsify as a feature, not a bug. If we want a vaccine passport regime, then we should pass an appropriate law. It shouldn't just be rolled out as the bureaucratic side effect of a mass vaccination program.
As far as I know there's also no provision to replace a lost card (beyond nebulous advice to try to go back to the place you got vaccinated, if it still exists). And we're already seeing private employers and universities demand proof of vaccination (which I'm surprised is legal)
At the start of the pandemic, when the tradeoffs were different, I called for mass surveillance. If it turns out now vaccine passports are a lifesaving public health measure, then I'll support them. But it shouldn't be done sneaky and ad-hoc like this idlewords.com/2020/03/we_nee…
Read 4 tweets

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