#1yrago Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook: Unfollow Everything and the need for (good) tech regulation pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unf… 11/
Friday's threads: "Don't spy on a privacy lab" (and other career advice for university provosts); and more!
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, @beaconPressBks et al) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
Happy #SpookySeason! My picture book "Poesy the Monster Slayer" is the perfect read for your little monsters: it's an epic tale of bedtime-refusal, toy-hacking and monster-hunting, illustrated by @McRockefeller.
If you're a @Medium subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
My latest Medium column is "Bankruptcy protects fake people, brutalizes real ones"
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🙅🏻♂️". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
Shelter is a human necessity and a human right. The decision to turn housing into the major speculative asset class for retain investors and Wall Street has made housing a disaster for people *with* houses - and a catastrophe for those without. 1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
America has a terrible, accelerating homelessness problem. Many of us share this problem - obviously, people without houses have the worst of it. But no one benefits from mass homelessness - it is a stain on the human soul to live among people who are unsheltered. 3/
Machine learning's promise is decisions at scale: using software to classify inputs (and, often, act on them) at a speed and scale that would be prohibitively expensive or even impossible using flesh-and-blood humans. 1/
There aren't enough idle people to train half of them to read all the tweets in the other half's timeline and put them in ranked order based on their predictions about the ones you'll like best. ML promises to do a good-enough job that you won't mind. 2/
Turning half the people in the world into chauffeurs for the other half would precipitate civilizational collapse, but ML promises self-driving cars for everyone affluent and misanthropic enough that they don't want to and don't have to take the bus. 3/