CORRECTION: The 5/29 edition of Pluralistic quoted $20k Rebyota; this was the rumored pre-release price; the actual average wholesale price is $10.8k. Thanks to Benjamin Jolley for catching this error, and to Stephen Skolnick for getting to the bottom of it.
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The long, bloody lineage of private equity's looting: Or, if you prefer, "plundering."
#5yrsago Youtubers with millions of followers are dropping out, citing stress and burnout from algorithm kremlinology polygon.com/2018/6/1/17413…
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#5yrsago Leaked document shows Trump officials planning to force Americans to spend $311m-$11.8b/year to keep unprofitable coal and nuclear energy plants from shutting bloomberg.com/news/articles/… wall
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#5yrsago Citing bad publicity and internal dissent, Google announces it won’t renew contract to supply AI for US military drones gizmodo.com/google-plans-n…
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#5yrsago Tax-funded charter schools textbooks deny evolution, teach human-dinosaur cohabitation, endorse slavery and indigenous genocide orlandosentinel.com/2018/06/01/pri…
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#5yrsago Amid wage stagnation, corporate leaders declare the end of annual raises triggered by increased profitability axios.com/2018/05/27/bro…
#5yrsago Stanford prof Niall Ferguson conspired with campus Republicans to do oppo research on students who opposed invited eugenicist speaker stanforddaily.com/2018/05/31/ema…
#5yrsago Governments all over the world buy spy products that let them track and eavesdrop on global cellphones, especially US phones washingtonpost.com/business/techn…
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#5yrsago Amazon bars Australians from shopping on its non-Aussie sites to put pressure on the government to rescind tax rule smh.com.au/business/compa…
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."
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!
Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? You can read my work elsewhere, but it is now a #TwitterCrime to tell you how. Please visit my site, pluralistic.net, for links to find me on less-unhinged places (I can only imagine that my days here are numbered).
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As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes - like space colonization - have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.
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I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor.
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Residents of 21 Utah cities have some of the fastest, cheapest broadband in the country, at speeds up to 10gb/s and prices as low as $75/mo. It's uncapped, and the connections are symmetrical: perfect for uploading *and* downloading. And it's all thanks to the government.
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Of course this is delivered via fiber optic. Fiber is vastly superior to all other forms of broadband, including satellites, but also cable and DSL. Fiber caps out at 100tb/s, while cable caps out at 50gb/s - fiber is *1,000* times faster:
When it comes to AI art (or "art"), it's hard to find a nuanced position that respects creative workers' labor rights, free expression, copyright law's vital exceptions and limitations, and aesthetics.
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I am, on balance, opposed to AI art, but there are some important caveats to that position. For starters, I think it's unequivocally wrong - as a matter of law - to say that scraping works and training a model with them infringes copyright.
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Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.
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Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a "Ulysses pact." That's when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:
The "Tragedy" hoax said that moving land from collective ownership "rescued" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who cared for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":
Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.
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But *unsubscribing* from Prime? That's a fucking *nightmare*. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave.
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