Cory Doctorow: Companies like Tesla, Amazon and Cruise that claim to have replaced human workers with AI are often outright lying. Often, they’re instead replacing local employees with remote workers paid peanuts in India and other developing countries.
So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: “AI stands for ‘absent Indian.’”
Sometimes the remote workers aren’t low-paid—they’re engineers making a lot of money and replacing low-wage workers. That works too; the scam allows technology companies to boost their stock prices while failing to deliver on their promises, Cory says.
Journalists and other critics who attack tech companies for stealing jobs aren’t doing the companies any harm. They’re supporting the companies’ inflated claims and elevating stock prices.
I’m upgrading from a five-year-old iPhone XS to an iPhone Pro Max. Any advice? What should I expect to be different?
I wasn’t planning to upgrade. I was planning to not upgrade. I was proud of using an old phone. No conspicuous consumption for me!
But Julie found us a sweet deal—far too good to pass up.
I had a tough decision whether to go for the 15 Pro or Pro Max. I don’t love the idea of the bigger screen. But I want the better camera, and the additional battery life will be nice too.
Kevin Drum: Congress got to yell at social media CEOs today.
… research really doesn’t support the notion that social media is harmful to teenagers. It seems to have both negative and positive effects, but they’re small and the positive effects overwhelm the negative ones.
Also: As Congress Grandstands Nonsense ‘Kid Safety’ Bills, Senator Wyden Reintroduces Legislation That Would Actually Help Deal With Kid Exploitation Online (Techdirt)
Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Cotton doesn’t know Singaporeans and Chinese are different people. Or he pretends to be unaware of that fact to pander to his ignorant racist base. CrooksAndLiars
Boing Boing: “There is no plan beyond blaming Biden.” Trump’s border plan “consists of moats filled with alligators, fences with spikes on top, bombing northern Mexico, and shooting asylum seekers. Trump only speaks about creating misery at the border, there is no plan to improve anyone’s situation there.”
Taylor Swift vs. the manosphere
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day ties together far-right movements among young men in multiple nations and relates them to MAGA losing its shit over Taylor Swift:
Much of the digital playbook fueling this recruitment for our new(ish) international masculinist movement was created by ISIS, the true early adopters for this sort of thing. Though it took about a decade for the West to really embrace it. But nowadays, it is not uncommon to see trad accounts sharing memes about “motherhood,” that are pretty much identical to the Disney Princess photoshops ISIS brides would post on Tumblr to advertise their new life in Syria. And, even more darkly, just this week, a Trump supporter in Pennsylvania beheaded his father and uploaded it to YouTube, in a video where he ranted about the woke left and President Biden. Online extremism is a flat circle.
The biggest similarity, though, is in what I call cultural encoding. For ISIS, this was about constantly labeling everything that threatened their influence as a symptom of the decadent, secular West.
For our new International League Of Unfuckable Conservative Men, it is, increasingly, about labeling everything that threatens them as feminine and, thus, bad. This is why you only ever see them rant about women journalists — well, usually it’s just The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz tbh. This is also why they’re always angry about whatever wild shit random teenage girls are posting TikTok. And this why they invented the concept of “simping,” the minute sites like OnlyFans began giving direct financial power to sex workers. Because they see masculinity as unquestionable strength and anything that threatens that must be eliminated. And this why they’re all losing their minds over Taylor Swift right now.
Also, from the comments:
I do feel like the mystery of why are women trend so more liberal than men is akin to wondering why didn’t more Jews join the Nazi party. Conservative rhetoric is ever becoming more anti woman.
A Pennsylvania man decapitated his father and posted a video in which the son displayed the older man’s severed head and “claimed that his father was a longtime federal employee who ‘is now in hell for eternity as a traitor to his country,’ and ranted about President Joe Biden, ‘far-left woke mobs’ and the LGBTQ+ community.” huffpost.com
Meanwhile, in Soviet MAGAstan: Transgender People in Florida Face Having Their Driver’s Licenses Revoked
Lawyers Guns Money: “It turns out the whole Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance is just another Democrat conspiracy to defraud White America of its birthright, which for those of you scoring at home is complete dominion over the United States.”
NYTimes: MAGA nincompoops are losing their shit over Taylor Swift dating Travis Kelce—Vivek Ramaswamy says its a conspiracy and a Fox News commentator says its a four-year-old Pentagon/NATO psy-op.
Reading about Yusef Salaam’s traffic stop in both the New York Times and NY Post I can’t see how Salaam (or the police officer) did anything substantially wrong or how Salaam disparaged police. More MAGA bullshit.
Tuesdays, the Savage Love podcast drops and I always enjoy that. But I’m going to listen to the AppStories podcast first today because this week’s topics look interesting.
I guess that means the AppStories podcast is better than sex.
I’m intrigued by Project Tapestry, an app in development from Iconfactory that creates a single feed for social networks, blogs, weather alerts, RSS feeds and more. But it sounds like a feed reader, similar to Newsblur (my current favorite), Feedly, Feedbin, Inoreader, etc. Am I missing something?
Forbes: Google’s AI will read all your private messages—and Apple might do the same.
This is a flagrant violation of privacy.
Via Violet Blue’s Cybersecurity Roundup—thanks!
The National Security Agency (NSA) has admitted to buying records from data brokers detailing which websites and apps Americans use, US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed….
… the senator is calling on all intelligence agencies to “stop buying personal data from Americans that has been obtained illegally by data brokers.”
”The US government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans' privacy are not just unethical but illegal”….
Via Violet Blue’s Cybersecurity Roundup–thanks!.
An 18-year-old British man was acquitted of charges of public disorder after he joked with friends in a private Snapchat conversation about blowing up a flight he was a passenger on. (Via Violet Blue’s Cybersecurity Roundup—thanks!).
Currently reading: The Life of the World to Come by Kage Baker 📚
Finished reading: A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers 📚