Matti Minkkinen @mmin@scholar.social

#UK #austerity has inflicted ‘great misery’ on citizens, #UN says | #Society | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/16/uk-austerity-has-inflicted-great-misery-on-citizens-un-says

So, google just released a new online 'app' for compressing pictures called Squoosh, I wouldn't use it if you could help it, as it's likely they'll farm all the metadata and actual data from the images that they can.

This is what they do, release tools everyone uses so that they can then use the data you give them.

Don't fall for it :)

I can't wait for the #fediverse to become bigger with new softwares and protocols so we can have MORE tools that can actually COMMUNICATE with one another. I am SO tired of having to literally check DOZENS of platforms every day to keep up with things.

#interoperability #digitalOverload

Pretty ambitious plans by Barcelona! https://www.barcelona.cat/digitalstandards/en/init/0.1/index.html

anonymous github user can no longer
* know who contributes to public repositories
* know email addresses of users
This makes migrating (and giving credit) free software projects out of #nsamicrosoft github harder.

Choose your own #Brexit: An interactive fantasy for all ages - https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/features/choose-your-own-brexit-an-interactive-fantasy-for-all-ages-20180912177209

It's the third Thursday of November, which means it's #WorldPhilosophyDay. A message from Audrey Azoulay (Dir. General of UNESCO) talks about how practising philosophy equips & enables us for understanding & synthesizing knowledge, perceiving meaning & principle, exchanging views, and more. Read it here http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0026/002661/266101e.pdf and UNESCO's page is here https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/philosophyday

It's time to push #Peertube even further!

Write mails, tell #youtube people that google dominance should and could end today! #nogoogle

There are some scripts and tools to ease YouTube clip exports:

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/support/doc/tools.md#installation

http://www.artificialworlds.net/blog/2018/08/15/migrating-videos-from-youtube-to-peertube-inside-a-docker-container/

Make watching internet videos great again!

https://joinpeertube.org/en/

Facebook is in fact, just as disgusting of a company as we thought

(NYT article on how Facebook has done gross shit over the past three years and dozens of scandals)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html

Perceptions of probability, cf.,

- Sherman Kent CIA study https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/art15.html and
- Philip Tetlock's *Superforecasting*.

Ridge plot in Bokeh (#Python plotting library).

❝I don’t believe our species can survive unless we fix this (social media).
We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.❞
— Jaron Lanier

This is terrifying

https://www.professorwatchlist.org/about-us/

Only by providing a counter-narrative, which also deals with the constant burning future shock people are feeling - we can make other perspectives and futures possible.

If you won't create a narrative explaining why you did something, someone else will supply theirs.

No matter how good the software created by the engineers is, no matter how much work the activists put in, the public needs storytellers to tell them why it's important as well.

#HackerNarratives

"Fake videos can now be created using a technique called a generative adversarial network, or GAN.

Although the machine learning breakthroughs in computer graphics are impressive, researchers should be more cognizant of the ramifications of what they’re creating. “It is not clear that the positive implications outweigh the negative.”

“Deep fakes are amplifying the liar’s dividend. When nothing is true, the dishonest person will thrive by saying what’s true is fake.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/12/deep-fakes-fake-news-truth

@aral Is this a Privacy Arena as in "we throw privacy in an arena and watch lions eating it"?