tobbsn @tobbsn@scholar.social

@robertwgehl

This came out the other day: https://components.one/posts/the-new-pornographers-tech-reviews

"This report argues that consumer technology reviewers have failed their basic nominal purpose of critiquing tools. Instead, inspired by values introduced by Apple in the late 1990s, the tech review industry prioritizes aesthetic lust as the primary critical factor for evaluating objects. The reification of these values in their scoring system is transmitted to consumers and manufacturers alike. Like other prurient things, the objects designed within this paradigm are optimized not for usefulness but for photogenic and telegenic properties, a framework that finds its fullest realization in YouTube reviews and unboxing videos. There, even the intimation of critical rigor within tech reviewing vanishes, the smartphone becomes the center of gravity, and manufacturers are even further incentivized to design products for end consumers who are less users than viewers."

@tobbsn "Good news", it appears existing users will be grandfathered in and won't need to get a paid subscription? https://hackaday.com/2021/09/22/firmware-find-hints-at-subscription-plan-for-remarkable-tablet/

Still kind of sucks, especially if non-cloud features are also behind the paywall.

By shutting down Crowdtangle and Adobserver, FB hopes to control the academic findings about the company's role in disinformation, hate, and harassment. The company runs its own research portal where academics are expected to access data about the platform.

But as with the journalists who report on it, FB has heaped abuse on the academics who research it.

12/

We made it halfway through the week!

the delicious irony: creators of industrial language models are now worried about no longer being able to use the web as their "commons" (i.e. other people's labor that they appropriate and commercialize) because their own outputs are "polluting" it (via https://mailchi.mp/jack-clark/import-ai-266-deepmind-looks-at-toxic-language-models-how-translation-systems-can-pollute-the-internet-why-ai-can-make-local-councils-better)

ran across this post about the fediverse from 2010 and remembering how times haven't changed all that much. bluesky who?! lets just wait for the google buzz federation! https://blog.steren.fr/2010/09/27/every-team-needs-statusnet/

"The lifespan of bitcoin mining devices remains limited to just 1.29 years. As a result, we estimate that the whole bitcoin network currently cycles through 30.7 metric kilotons of equipment per year." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/17/waste-from-one-bitcoin-transaction-like-binning-two-iphones