buc.ci is a Fediverse instance that uses the ActivityPub protocol. In other words, users at this host can communicate with people that use software like Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, etc. all around the world.

This server runs the snac software and there is no automatic sign-up process.

Admin email
abucci@bucci.onl
Admin account
@abucci@buc.ci

Search results for tag #bigdata

#maine boosted

[?]DoomsdaysCW » 🌐
@DoomsdaysCW@kolektiva.social

These are helping patrons resist and

by Bridget Huber, July 2, 2026

"In recent months, the Town Library has added a new service for patrons: Help in removing AI from their phones and other devices.

" 'A lot of times, it’s just telling people that they have choices,' Library Director said. 'Their phone came a certain way, but they don’t have to use it the way that it came.'

"Brown helps patrons disable AI-powered assistants like Siri or so-called smart features in email and switch from using Google, which doesn’t offer an option to search without AI overviews, to a browser that does.

"A big part of his job as a librarian has been helping people with information technology, he said. He sees helping people think critically about technology and AI as a natural extension of this work.

"While Brown’s long been skeptical of the purported benefits of technology for society, he didn’t start offering the services until this spring, when he attended a webinar presented by , a librarian who has become a leading voice in a nationwide movement of librarians who are working to help patrons understand the risks of AI and other technologies.

" 'I seem to have become the face of — which I’m fine with — in the library world,' Cyrus said.

"Cyrus, a reference librarian at the Bangor Public Library, teaches classes on how to use technology. But that doesn’t mean uncritically embracing and promoting it, she said.

" 'I really try to make sure people not only know where to tap or click to get done what they want to do, but to understand the values and issues at play as they’re using different pieces of technology,' she said.

"Commonly used tools like Gmail and Chat GPT are not neutral, she said. 'These are products created by giant who want your information and want your attention,' she said. “And that has real impacts on our lives.”
The most popular class Cyrus has taught is called , which explains what AI is, some of the concerns around it, and how to disable it and find alternatives. The first time she taught the class in fall of 2025 more than 70 people enrolled. She taught it again this spring, and Brown was one of 20 Maine librarians to enroll. "

Read more:
bangordailynews.com/2026/07/02

Archived version:
archive.ph/HRBPH

!

    AodeRelay boosted

    [?]JuneSim63 💚 » 🌐
    @junesim63@mstdn.social

    Palantir is benefiting from millions of pounds of tax deductions that allow it to pay very little corporate tax in the United Kingdom despite soaring profits.

    Exclusive: How Palantir harvested millions in UK tax breaks
    opendemocracy.net/exclusive-ho

      AodeRelay boosted

      [?]Taran Rampersad » 🌐
      @knowprose@mastodon.social

      In the vein of what i write about. Big tech, advertising and extraction.

      medium.com/enrique-dans/for-ye

        AodeRelay boosted

        [?]Mark » 🌐
        @paka@mastodon.scot

        Switzerland Ends Contract Over Risks -

        ’s decision to discontinue the use of Palantir is not a story.

        - It's a management story. The platform was not rejected because it failed to perform. On the contrary, it delivered advanced data fusion and operational insight.

        It was rejected because the residual sovereignty risk was considered unacceptable.

        [1/2]

          AodeRelay boosted

          [?]Script Kiddie » 🌐
          @scriptkiddie@anonsys.net

          They haven't read Orwell's 1984 - will they ever understand?

          source: citizenlab.ca/research/analysi…

          Key Findings
          • is a global system that monitors hundreds of millions of people based on data purchased from consumer apps and digital advertising. It was developed by Cobwebs Technologies and is now sold by its successor .
          • In collaboration with the European investigative platform , we reveal that Hungarian domestic has been using Webloc since at least 2022 and continues to use it as of today. Webloc customers also include the national police in El Salvador.
          • U.S. customers include , the U.S. , Department of Public Safety, West , district attorneys, and several departments in , , , , and in smaller cities and counties like City of Elk Grove and Pinal County.
          • Based on the responses to 96 of information requests we conclude that governments in and the U.K. are highly nontransparent about their potential use of ad-based surveillance.
          • Cobwebs Technologies has links to the spyware vendor Quadream through Cobwebs Technologies founder Omri Timianker, who now oversees the international operations of Penlink.
          • Webloc is sold as an add-on product to the social and intelligence Tangles. Based on technical and other sources we show that Tangles and other products developed by Technologies are used in many countries across the globe.
          • We briefly investigate another Cobwebs product named that appears to help trick victims into revealing information. Our analysis leads us to believe that Trapdoor can help facilitate the of on devices.

          Location: Matrix

            AodeRelay boosted

            [?]heise online » 🌐
            @heiseonline@social.heise.de

            Phantom Palantir: Bundesregierung bremst bei neuer Analysesoftware fürs BKA

            Zwischen Terrorabwehr und Datenschutz: Die Bundesregierung setzt beim Ausbau der digitalen Überwachung vorerst auf ein modulares System statt auf US-Software.

            heise.de/news/Phantom-Palantir

            0 ★ 0 ↺

            [?]Anthony » 🌐
            @abucci@buc.ci

            Regarding the ideological nature of what's at play, it's well worth looking more into ecological rationality and its neighbors. There is a pretty significant body of evidence at this point that in a wide variety of cases of interest, simple small data methods demonstrably outperform complex big data ones. Benchmarking is a tricky subject, and there are specific (and well-chosen, I'd say) benchmarks on which models like LLMs perform better than alternatives. Nevertheless, "less is more" phenomena are well-documented, and conversations about when to apply simple/small methods and when to use complex/large ones are conspicuously absent. Also absent are conversations about what Leonard Savage--the guy who arguably ushered in the rise of Bayesian inference, which makes up the guts of a lot of modern AI--referred to as "small" versus "large" worlds, and how absurd it is to apply statistical techniques to large worlds. I'd argue that the vast majority of horrors we hear LLMs implicated in involve large worlds in Savage's sense, including applications to government or judicial decisionmaking and "companion" bots. "Self-driving" cars that are not car-skinned trains are another (the word "self" in that name is a tell). This means in particular that applying LLMs to large world problems directly contradicts the mathematical foundations on which their efficacy is (supposedly) grounded.

            Therefore, if we were having a technical conversation about large language models and their use, we'd be addressing these and related concerns. But I don't think that's what the conversation's been about, not in the public sphere nor in the technical sphere.

            All this goes beyond AI. Henry Brighton (I think?) coined the phrase "the bias bias" to refer to a tendency where, when applying a model to a problem, people respond to inadequate outcomes by adding complexity to the model. This goes for mathematical models as much as computational models. The rationale seems to be that the more "true to life" the model is, the more likely it is to succeed (whatever that may mean for them). People are often surprised to learn that this is not always the case: models can and sometimes do become less likely to succeed the more "true to life" they're made. The bias bias can lead to even worse outcomes in such cases, triggering the tendency again and resulting in a feedback loop. The end result can be enormously complex models and concomitant extreme surveillance to acquire data to feed data the models. I look at FORPLAN or ChatGPT, and this is what I see.


              3 ★ 5 ↺
              Kevin Davy boosted

              [?]Anthony » 🌐
              @abucci@buc.ci

              We in the US are living in a eugenic modernity, by the way, when the putative head of "Health and Human Services" is making the kinds of statements he makes about autistic people. This is not just an anti-vaccination meme; it's an attempt to subordinate an entire class of people, suggesting they are subhuman for being who they are. This is a eugenic move. One has to wonder whether the "human services" people in HHS imagine themselves providing has to do with "improving the human stock" of the nation, the services not being provided to humans but instead having humans as an output.

              Rather than get mired in the thought-terminating arguments around political parties or political factions, though, I think we'd do well to reflect on what sorts of other ways of thinking feed into this one: the measured life; standardized testing; the internet of things (sensors); tracking apps of various kinds; electronic health records; data science as a profession and Big Data generally; predictive modeling; generative AI and other optimization-oriented or productivity-promising technology. All of these function to render life as an object of knowledge in one way or another. All of them trace their origins through eugenics and the patterns of thought that led to it, and all of them threaten to enable and enhance further eugenic thinking. This is not to say these things are always all bad; this is meant to be a reflection on what exactly they're for.

              Why read the number of steps your FitBit told you you took today, unless there were some sense in which you want your future self to be better than your present self? It's not an accident that this is called "physical fitness", "fitness" being the Darwinian concept describing which organisms should survive. Why subject children to standardized testing unless there were some belief it made them better students? To what end tends to be left out. Why adopt a technology meant to improve productivity, unless you're of the belief that improvement (optimization) were even possible?

              Generally speaking, if one is able to bring oneself to believe that a human being is made better by a data-informed technical intervention, isn't one playing the same game as these anti-autism anti-vaxxers, just with different terminology? If your answer to this provocation is that your data is better than theirs or that you're more aligned with reality than they are--some variation of "the science is on our side"--you've ceded the territory: this is more of the same optimization logic that brought us to this point to begin with. I think we have no choice but to do better than this.

              That's my reflection anyway.


                2 ★ 3 ↺
                emenel boosted

                [?]Anthony » 🌐
                @abucci@buc.ci

                Looks like a timely read:

                Predatory Data

                Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future
                https://bookshop.org/p/books/predatory-data-eugenics-in-big-tech-and-our-fight-for-an-independent-future-anita-say-chan/21312207

                There's a nearly straight line from 20th century eugenics to 21st century big data and data science. Google, the bastion of big data, was founded by two Stanford graduate students; Stanford was founded by a eugenicist and instituted eugenics principles. Francis Galton--inventor of the regression analysis that forms the backbone of data science--was "hot or notting" London with a counter hidden in his pocket long before Harvard-age Zuckerberg recuperated the same with the favorite quantification technology of our day, computers.

                "The measured life" is a eugenics concept. All these doohickeys that collect data with the promise of making your body a bit more "fit"? Eugenicist in origin. Eugenics is about "optimizing" the physical "fitness" of people. Apps that help you learn, make you more mentally "fit"? Also have origins in eugenics. Eugenics is also about "optimizing" the mental "fitness" of people. Hence the obsession with IQ.

                This isn't to say you shouldn't take care of your body and mind in whichever ways you want. I do think it's important, though, to periodically reflect on, and ask yourself hard questions about, what's driving those efforts and what the goals really are. Part of understanding why eugenics thinking is resurging so hard and fast in the US is understanding its roots, where that type of thinking comes from. It's also important to reflect on where the apps and devices you use to achieve these goals come from. How many come directly or indirectly from Stanford, which was built by eugenicists to achieve eugenic goals, and its offshoots?

                Trump and Musk are literally repeating themes from Francis Galton's eugenics out in the open now. They're confident they can get away with it without pushback because the ground was laid long ago. But eugenics didn't suddenly become bad again because coarse people started saying the quiet part out loud. It's always been bad thinking, bad science, and bad morality.


                  8 ★ 4 ↺
                  Electrojcr boosted

                  [?]Anthony » 🌐
                  @abucci@buc.ci

                  Here's a hot take on Microsoft Recall: it's an attempt to create a new data source to exploit, because the internet as a data source has been squeezed of most of its value to large-language-model-based AI and there is no other ready-to-use, large-scale, human-generated data source. Imagine millions, billions of people generating data every time they touch their computers; that's a big data source with some amount of built-in human curation. High quality for AI.

                  I've written before on here about my favorite metaphor, eating your seed corn ( https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1705679109.757852 ), but I also think there's a decent analogy with peak oil as well. Microsoft Recall is the tar sands and oil shale of the "data is the new oil" era. The internet had the easy fields; now we're moving on to the dirty, dangerous, environment-destroying ones. If the pattern follows that of oil, wells will be drilled closer and closer together over time to slurp out value as rapidly as possible at the expense of long-term field health.


                    about this site - powered by snac/2.86