Many claim that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from theirs.

R sucks, and in this – very opiniated – article, I collect a selection of the various issues I have with this language. Do not get me wrong: R is …

An institutionalist theory of social media and the smartphone

A review of Dan Wang’s new book Breakneck (re: China is run by engineers and the United States is run by lawyers)

Most boomer story ever

Platform decay is the phenomenon of major internet platforms, such as Google search, Facebook, and Amazon, systematically declining in quality in recent years. This decline in quality is attributed to the particular business model of these platforms and its harms are usually understood to be violations of principles of economic fairness and of inconveniencing users. In this article, we argue that the scope and nature of these harms are underappreciated. In particular, we establish that platform decay constitutes both a cognitive and moral harm to its users. We make this case by arguing that platforms function as cognitive scaffolds or extensions, as understood by the extended mind approach to cognition. It is then a straightforward implication that platform decay constitutes cognitive damage to a platform’s users.

Alors qu’on voit un regain du nationalisme canadien, l’indépendantisme québécois refait surface. Mais propose-t-il vraiment quelque chose de différent?

The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can and should be built, researchers are working to create “safe AGI” that is “beneficial for all of humanity.” We argue that, unlike systems with specific applications which can be evaluated following standard engineering principles, undefined systems like “AGI” cannot be appropriately tested for safety. Why, then, is building AGI often framed as an unquestioned goal in the field of AI? In this paper, we argue that the normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI.

The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of a copyright lawsuit after five justices recused themselves.

Spaced repetition systems are a well-known way to efficiently learn material. Recent innovations have applied machine learning to greatly improve their scheduling.

Discover why Nextcloud file uploads for Android app are not working properly, and how Google’s app store rules are hurting Nextcloud users.

Amazing things that can be done in a web browser

Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they’d need to do to not have it.

In ten days, AFRINIC, the continent’s internet registry votes in its new board. But one man has been trying to commoditise its resources, and is pushing for a takeover.

Airlines and airplane manufacturers want to reduce the number of pilots flying a plane

Stop trying to place coherence on a policy that’s really just a mob boss breaking legs and asking for protection money.