Scott Boehmer

Category: Technology

  • The TikTok Ban Has Happened Before

    This is all to say that I’m of two minds about the legitimacy TikTok ban. China has cultivated a national surveillance apparatus so powerful and so efficient that it now exports city-scale surveillance packages to more than 52 nations around the world. Data inside a Chinese company is effectively also inside that national surveillance apparatus. So handing a live nationwide psychological profile on 150 million Americans to a Chinese-owned company is asking for trouble. But we also have shown such callous indifference to the privacy of Americans that specifically wringing our hands about TikTok while giving free rein to the rest of surveillance capitalism rings hollow to me.

    Jacob Ward

    The TikTok Ban Has Happened Before (The Rip Current)

  • Elon Musk, the Right, and Wikipedia

    Similar attacks on speech are becoming only more common throughout the American right, with president-elect Trump’s longstanding hostility to the media escalating at a rapid clip. In recent months, Trump has suggested he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot, threatened to jail journalists, editors, and publishers who refuse to reveal confidential sources, threatened to investigate or pull broadcasting licenses for news organizations that reported on him unflatteringly, and filed SLAPP suits of his own against news publications and pollsters.

    This hostility to information sources outside their control extends far beyond the media. Right-wing groups have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books from schools and libraries, particularly those discussing race, gender, or LGBT topics. They’ve pushed legislation like the “Kids Online Safety Act” that, while framed as protecting children, would require platforms to restrict access to information deemed “harmful” or “inappropriate for minors”, which is likely to include resources for LGBT youth and information about reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare, sexual education, or mental health. And they’ve supported state-level laws requiring internet platforms to implement age restrictions that threaten privacy and are vulnerable to weaponization against content deemed “obscene”. The common thread connecting these efforts is not protecting children or promoting “family values,” but controlling what information people can access.

    Molly White

    Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia (Citation Needed)

  • The LLMentalist Effect

    One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent.

    But there isn’t any mechanism inherent in large language models (LLMs) that would seem to enable this and, if real, it would be completely unexplained.

    LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

    LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.

    There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.

    Baldur Bjarnason

    The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con (Out of the Software Crisis)

  • Never Forgive Them

    The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.

    Edward Zitron

    Never Forgive Them (Where’s Your Ed At?)

  • Why I Shut Off Comments for Millions of People

    Keeping comments up on our site was a guarantee of misinformation, because with an annual editorial budget as small as ours, one shrinking each quarter, we couldn’t afford the personnel required to patrol even one day’s articles for misleading comments, much less those attached to articles going back years that kept finding traction in Google search results. Social media companies, which were clearly replacing the role of magazines like mine, were the only ones with the money necessary to fight what I considered a holy fight against deception. And until recently, the heads of those companies did make some attempt to moderate dangerous misinformation.

    Jacob Ward

    Why I Shut Off Comments for Millions of People (The Rip Current)

  • Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago

    When Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago on the evening before Thanksgiving, he and other guests reportedly stood with hands over hearts while listening to a recording of the national anthem sung by people accused of January 6–related crimes. Whether Zuckerberg knew who the singers were is unclear. But the scene was uncanny given that January 6, when it happened, was a bright-red line for the tech industry. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch banned or suspended Trump, and companies such as Amazon paused donations to election deniers. Now, with the arrival of Trump 2.0, that red line has been erased entirely.

    Lora Kelley

    Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago (The Atlantic)

  • The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”

    By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that I’ve come to see longtermism as an immensely dangerous ideology. It is, indeed, akin to a secular religion built around the worship of “future value,” complete with its own “secularised doctrine of salvation,” as the Future of Humanity Institute historian Thomas Moynihan approvingly writes in his book X-Risk. The popularity of this religion among wealthy people in the West—especially the socioeconomic elite—makes sense because it tells them exactly what they want to hear: not only are you ethically excused from worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and global poverty, but you are actually a morally better personfor focusing instead on more important things—risk that could permanently destroy “our potential” as a species of Earth-originating intelligent life.

    Émile P. Torres

    The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” (Current Affairs)

  • Standard Ebooks

    Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

    Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

    Standard Ebooks aren’t just a beautiful addition to your digital library—they’re a high quality standard to build your own ebooks on.

    Standard Ebooks

  • Why Billionaires Obey in Advance

    The Trump administration is being actively taught right now that it can expect the full cooperation of the leaders of industry. Why are they offering themselves without being asked? Because that’s what they’re trained for.

    The myth of the moral billionaire has dogged me my entire career. For years I’ve been reassured by people inside and outside the power structure of Silicon Valley that the moral judgement of people at the top of major companies was so reliable that it required no real oversight.

    Jacob Ward

    Why Billionaires Obey in Advance (The Rip Current)

  • Writing Down Every UUID

    I’ve been struggling to remember all of the UUIDs. There are a lot of them. So this week I wrote them all down. You can see my list at everyuuid.com.

    Nolen Royalty

    Writing down (and searching through) every UUID (eieio.games)