Yes, and full tracability might come with the CBDC.

Thanks for this. As for my side, I’m afraid my Polish has too much potential to read this 😁 but it’s great that such initiatives exist. We defintitely needed more of them. But maybe I should stop complaining and start my own small blog together with a couple of peers as we have been discussing for some time 😇

History may teach me wrong, but I think that won’t change much. Musk will still make the major decisions. It’s only that it may happen behind tbe scenes.

There’s a good article on Bluesky here.

There is an interview with US journalist Emily Baker-White, a Forbes journalist TikTok also spied on.

That’s a good question. I understand from the article that the decoder must be trained on the individual, so I guess that might solve the problem? I’m not an expert on this, so I don’t know.

I’m not a lawyer, but there appears to be a legal way as Biden’s rival Robert Kennedy says.

Instead of championing free speech, the U.S. actively persecutes journalists and whistleblowers. I’ll pardon brave truth-tellers like Julian Assange and investigate the corruption and crimes they exposed. This isn’t the Soviet Union. The America I love doesn’t imprison dissidents.

Edit for addition: EFJ and its affiliates once again call on the UK authorities to release Julian Assange

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) passed on the initiative [of the Italian journalists’ union] to its affiliates in Europe: 19 of them decided to follow the Italian example and grant Julian Assange membership (or honorary membership) of their organisations. The EFJ and its affiliates once again call on the UK authorities to release Julian Assange.

I wasn’t aware of these sources, thanks for posting. We’ll certainly need to do a lot to combat and detect ‘fake news’, but I’m wondering whether Blockchain-based technologies could help in some cases to prove the provenance and integrity of ‘news’ as a digital asset. It’s not (yet?) used for these kind of things and there is little research about it.

"There was no party-politics in this, we all believed that it was unacceptable and that ultimately taxpayers should not have to pay for it. We managed to get the plenary to see the problems. But we never managed to force the leadership of the parliament to listen,” says Bart Staes, a Belgian ex-MEP [who for 20 years was a member of the budget control committee, who says that the risks were known early on.]

Slightly sensationalized title and article

Yeah, maybe a bit. I tried to make it clear in the body that it’s not yet perfect, but it may also be hard for the researchers to communicate such a technology to a wider audience so that everyone understands.

Edit for an addition: The Guardian wrote about it, citing two experts in the field who are not mentioned in the linked article:

Prof Tim Behrens, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the work, described it as “technically extremely impressive” and said it opened up a host of experimental possibilities, including reading thoughts from someone dreaming or investigating how new ideas spring up from background brain activity. “These generative models are letting you see what’s in the brain at a new level,” he said. “It means you can really read out something deep from the fMRI.”

Prof Shinji Nishimoto, of Osaka University, who has pioneered the reconstruction of visual images from brain activity, described the paper as a “significant advance”. “The paper showed that the brain represents continuous language information during perception and imagination in a compatible way,” he said. “This is a non-trivial finding and can be a basis for the development of brain-computer interfaces.

That’s extremely impressive if I may say so.

… how it could change unless afghan people demand change.

As much as I agree, we are probably not remotely able to fully understand the humanitarian situation the people of Afghanistan are facing every day.

Almost 20 million people – half the population – are suffering either level-3 “crisis” or level-4 “emergency” levels of food insecurity under the assessment system of the World Food Programme (WFP). […] tens of thousands of people in one province, Ghor, had slipped into “catastrophic” level-5 acute malnutrition, a precursor to famine. The WFP has stated that Afghanistan “continues facing the highest prevalence of insufficient food consumption globally.”

And the situation for women and girls is even worse, they are much more effected.

This is a gross over-simplification imho. Inflation occurs when the aggregate demand of goods/services at a given price level increases faster than the aggregate supply of goods/services at that given price level. There are a some factors to consider about inflation.

One major issue especially in the UK is the austerity policies we have seen in the last 40 or so years (that goes back to Thatcher). The problem is the distribution of wealth imo.

That’s particularly important as it has nothing to do with a ‘free market economy’ or any other form of economic policy. For example, we see the same unequal wealth distribution (and capitalist excesses) in centrally-planned economies across various forms of communism.

Maybe it’s not death but transformation? We may end up with a different sort of social media that is more focused on users’ needs and wants, but one that we may also pay for. (If so, we as a society must then find a way to include all those into our communication system who can’t afford the price, as taking part in digital communication should be seen as a human right imho, maybe even as a common good like fresh air and water.)

Someone posted this in an Italian community. Seems intercepting and recording communication can sometimes be illegal …

That’s what I thought, too. It could lead to more reading/listening and mutual understanding rather than just posting and re-posting. And no normal being needs 10,000 likes in the first 20 minutes after posting. It could make people communicating with each other rather than being data points used to sell ads.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (and possibly others) are spending huge amounts for lobbying to bring their tech to schools and universities.

Is this good or bad? 😊

I guess this depends how you define privacy. One solution may be Particl, but I haven’t tried it so far.

This is why we need a trustless system.

It appears to help if you get a new identity when using Tor.

Yes, there are a lot of chances and risks, and we must urgently develop rules how we deal with this new technology legally and ethically. There’s a broad discussion needed across all parts of our society.

Doing nothing in that respect will entail devastating social consequences imo. My personal worst-case scenario: China will accelerate its Orwellian surveillance state. Some US companies will rise and forward all data to the NSA. And the EU will introduce strict privacy rules and then sign new Safe Harbor agreements making sure that exactly these privacy rules will never be truly enforced.

As a result we’ll see a few more billionaires, while the mass of people and small businesses will pay the bill.

Yes, it’s extremely complex but necessary. A lot of decisions in our societies and economies have been influenced by implicit biases based on race, gender, age, etc. which hurt those discriminated against. And with the upcoming rise of artificial intelligence these biases will creep also into the algorithms.

I just stumbled upon that, too, and am wondering how this compares to Librewolf (+VPN) …

Restorative justice, which recognises the role of marginalised groups, is key to enabling people to lead decent and dignified lives. A post-reparations world might acknowledge the complexity of the colonial past in its entirety, including the damage caused by racial hierarchy; it would not be afraid to discuss the ways in which race and ethnicity, class, gender, religion, ableism and age intersect.

I guess “restorative justice” has this broader meaning you’re suggesting exactly because it “might acknowledge the complexity of the colonial past in its entirety”. It’s not just about to pay descendants of slaves a certain amount of money but rather a more holistic approach how we view and live in our society, and therefore it goes far beyond former slavery and race issues and include also gender, age, etc. But that’s just my interpretation.

A probably highly topical question these days: Are computational word-sense disambiguation and computational word-sense induction possible?

Yep, I also hope they publish the entire data set somewhere.

Thanks, I’ll need to look into that.

This is sadly true. There’s a lot wrong with Cloudflare and I also knew they control the on-ramps to bitcoin, but I didn’t know that they have already blocked persons.

I think crypto as a technology is not a very good store of value

I fully agree. That’s why I use it as a means of payment rather than as value investment -:)

Blockchain is revolutionary, but blockchain projects need to have utility

Absolutely, that’s what is missing at 99.9% of blockchain projects unfortunately (but I still hope for the 0.1% :-))