Everything [Facebook] does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg's relentless desire for growth. Quiñonero's AI expertise supercharged that growth. His team got pigeonholed into targeting AI bias, as I learned in my reporting, because preventing such bias helps the company avoid proposed regulation that might, if passed, hamper that growth. Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.
In other words, the Responsible AI team's work — whatever its merits on the specific problem of tackling AI bias — is essentially irrelevant to fixing the bigger problems of misinformation, extremism, and political polarization. And it's all of us who pay the price.
At its most benign, purity culture put unnecessary burdens on young men and (especially) young women. In its more harmful manifestations, however, it has enabled abuse, and at the extreme edge the male demand that women save them from their own sin can lead to murderous rage.
[...]
The problem with purity culture is not Christianity. The problem is that its extremes are not Christian at all.
Successfully delivering on long-term engineering projects often requires structuring them around stepping stones that deliver concrete value and illuminate "unknown unknowns" rather than arbitrary milestones that only serve as project checkpoints.
Today, Microsoft and the BBC have teamed up with Adobe, Arm, Intel and Truepic to create the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) to counter deepfakes and develop standards and specifications that will prove the authenticity of digital media.
This YouTube video is a good overview of the problem space and proposed solutions, but don't miss the main site.
There has always been risk in that, the understanding that to get too close to someone else is to risk getting hurt. And yet now the physical threat has usurped the emotional: Instead of risking broken hearts, we are risking broken bodies — theirs, ours and others — when we choose to allow other people into our orbits. And so to protect our bodies, we are collectively sacrificing our hearts, and they break a little every day we do.
This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V, VI) series I expect to roll out taking a historian's look at the Siege of Gondor in Peter Jackson's Return of the King.
Yep, a historian wrote sixty five thousand words on LotR warfare, logistics, tactics, and strategy. Of course I read them all.
The successful two-year deployment of the Northern Isles demonstrates the feasibility of greener, more sustainable power initiatives for data centers, above and beyond the efficiency of cooling the data center itself.
Servers failed at a much lower rate than in a traditional datacenter.
ClearFlame isn't redesigning the diesel engine. Instead, [CEO BJ] Johnson and co-founder and CTO Julie Blumreiter have developed a way to modify the internal components of the engine to alter its thermodynamics to be able to quickly ignite and combust decarbonized fuels. The company's technology means 80% to 90% of the diesel engine parts remain unchanged, according to Johnson.
Hey, that's my friend Julie in TechCrunch!
Every senior person in an organisation should be aware of the less glamorous - and often less-promotable - work that needs to happen to make a team successful. Managed deliberately, glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills. Left unconscious, it can be career limiting. It can push people into less technical roles and even out of the industry.
Another great talk from Tanya Reilly.