#data capturing

[charlessmithpost]

Unveiling The Benefits of Data Lake

In the realm of modern data management, the term "Data Lake" has been making waves. But why are they becoming indispensable for businesses across industries?

The Benefits Unveiled:

Here are the benefits of Data Lake:

1. Scalability and Flexibility: Data Lakes offer unparalleled scalability, enabling organizations to seamlessly expand their data storage capacity as needed. This flexibility allows businesses to accommodate the ever-growing volumes of data generated in today's digital landscape.

2. Enhanced Data Accessibility: With Data Lakes, accessing data becomes a breeze. By centralizing data storage and eliminating silos, organizations empower their teams to access a wide array of data sources effortlessly. This accessibility fosters collaboration and enhances decision-making processes.

3. Cost Efficiency: Data Lakes present a cost-effective solution for data storage and management. By leveraging scalable cloud infrastructure and open-source technologies, businesses can significantly reduce their overhead costs associated with data storage and processing.

4. Real-Time Insights: One of the most compelling advantages of Data Lakes is their ability to deliver real-time insights. By housing vast amounts of raw data, organizations can harness advanced analytics tools to derive actionable insights promptly, enabling proactive decision-making.

5. Agility in Data Processing: Traditional data warehouses often struggle with the rigidity of data structures. In contrast, Data Lakes embrace the concept of schema-on-read, allowing for on-the-fly data structuring. This agility in data processing empowers organizations to adapt quickly to evolving business requirements.

6. Advanced Analytics Capabilities: Data Lakes lay the foundation for advanced analytics initiatives, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. By leveraging the rich dataset within Data Lakes, organizations can unlock valuable insights and drive innovation.

7. Regulatory Compliance: In an era of stringent data regulations, compliance is paramount. Data Lakes provide robust security and governance features, ensuring that sensitive data remains protected and compliant with industry regulations.

In today's data-driven landscape, harnessing the power of Data Lakes is not just advantageous; it's imperative for staying competitive. By embracing scalability, accessibility, and agility, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data assets and drive success in the digital age.

[bixels]

As cameras becomes more normalized (Sarah Bernhardt encouraging it, grifters on the rise, young artists using it), I wanna express how I will never turn to it because it fundamentally bores me to my core. There is no reason for me to want to use cameras because I will never want to give up my autonomy in creating art. I never want to become reliant on an inhuman object for expression, least of all if that object is created and controlled by manufacturing companies. I paint not because I want a painting but because I love the process of painting. So even in a future where everyone’s accepted it, I’m never gonna sway on this.

if i have to explain to you that using a camera to take a picture is not the same as using generative ai to generate an image then you are a fucking moron.

[alexplantewpg]

what better to fight burnout with than some janky doodles of BEST BOY DATA. THE PUREST CINNAMON ROLL. THE SWEETEST MOST PERFECT BAB.

[alverrann]

Happy belated First Contact Day! Here are the results from a recent art challenge - one where I generated Art Styles and then drew (or attempted to draw) the TNG crew in those styles using this generator.

Picard - Powerpuff Girls

Riker - Voltron

Data - Pokémon

Beverly - Secret of Kells

Deanna - Studio Ghibli

Geordi - Tangled the animated series

Worf - Disney

[mostly-natm]

It was DEFINITELY Wednesday (when this was sent to me yesterday…oops!).

[mostlysignssomeportents]

At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy

This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American surveillance industry's shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable.

Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are credit reporting bureaux and data brokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation.

Remember Equifax, the company that doxed every adult in America and was given a mere wrist-slap, and now continues to assemble nonconsensual dossiers on every one of us, without any material oversight improvements?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/20/equifax-settles-with-ftc-cfpb-states-and-consumer-class-actions-for-700m/

Equifax's competitors are no better. Experian doxed the nation again, in 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

It's hard to overstate how fucking scummy the credit reporting world is. Equifax invented the business in 1899, when, as the Retail Credit Company, it used private spies to track queers, political dissidents and "race mixers" so that banks and merchants could discriminate against them:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

As awful as credit reporting is, the data broker industry makes it look like a paragon of virtue. If you want to target an ad to "Rural and Barely Making It" consumers, the brokers have you covered:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

More than 650,000 of these categories exist, allowing advertisers to target substance abusers, depressed teens, and people on the brink of bankruptcy:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

These companies follow you everywhere, including to abortion clinics, and sell the data to just about anyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

There are zillions of these data brokers, operating in an unregulated wild west industry. Many of them have been rolled up into tech giants (Oracle owns more than 80 brokers), while others merely do business with ad-tech giants like Google and Meta, who are some of their best customers.

As bad as these two sectors are, they're even worse in combination – the harms data brokers (sloppy, invasive) inflict on us when they supply credit bureaux (consequential, secretive, intransigent) are far worse than the sum of the harms of each.

And now for some good news. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, under the leadership of Rohit Chopra, has declared war on this alliance:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/16/cfpb-looks-to-restrict-the-sleazy-link-between-credit-reporting-agencies-and-data-brokers/

They've proposed new rules limiting the trade between brokers and bureaux, under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, putting strict restrictions on the transfer of information between the two:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/15/tech/privacy-rules-data-brokers/index.html

As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, this is long overdue and meaningful. Remember all the handwringing and chest-thumping about Tiktok stealing Americans' data to the Chinese military? China doesn't need Tiktok to get that data – it can buy it from data-brokers. For peanuts.

The CFPB action is part of a muscular style of governance that is characteristic of the best Biden appointees, who are some of the most principled and competent in living memory. These regulators have scoured the legislation that gives them the power to act on behalf of the American people and discovered an arsenal of action they can take:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Alas, not all the Biden appointees have the will or the skill to pull this trick off. The corporate Dems' darlings are mired in #LearnedHelplessness, convinced that they can't – or shouldn't – use their prodigious powers to step in to curb corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

And it's true that privacy regulation faces stiff headwinds. Surveillance is a public-private partnership from hell. Cops and spies love to raid the surveillance industries' dossiers, treating them as an off-the-books, warrantless source of unconstitutional personal data on their targets:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/ring-ring-lapd-calling/#ring

These powerful state actors reliably intervene to hamstring attempts at privacy law, defending the massive profits raked in by data brokers and credit bureaux. These profits, meanwhile, can be mobilized as lobbying dollars that work lawmakers and regulators from the private sector side. Caught in the squeeze between powerful government actors (the true "Deep State") and a cartel of filthy rich private spies, lawmakers and regulators are frozen in place.

Or, at least, they were. The CFPB's discovery that it had the power all along to curb commercial surveillance follows on from the FTC's similar realization last summer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

I don't want to pretend that all privacy questions can be resolved with simple, bright-line rules. It's not clear who "owns" many classes of private data – does your mother own the fact that she gave birth to you, or do you? What if you disagree about such a disclosure – say, if you want to identify your mother as an abusive parent and she objects?

But there are so many stupid-simple privacy questions. Credit bureaux and data-brokers don't inhabit any kind of grey area. They simply should not exist. Getting rid of them is a project of years, but it starts with hacking away at their sources of profits, stripping them of defenses so we can finally annihilate them.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[queen-mabs-revenge]

communist generative ai boosters on this website truly like

[yellowcakeuf6]

I just love the way his profile is accentuated here. So haunting and beautiful...

Photo credit: @data_star.trek_tng on Instagram

[mothworth]

big heart eyes!!!!

[cerealmonster15]

Also I passed on the rf3 special edition at the time bc I have the original I still hadn’t played much but. I see it’s still seemingly available on their site and ugufhehfhfjtjynhg I love collecting bonus soundtrack cds and art books in general and especially for sos/hm/rf….. bideosgame…..

[charlessmithpost]

A data warehouse organizes structured data for analysis, prioritizing schema and processing. A data lake stores structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in its raw format, allowing for flexible exploration and analysis.

[gaytobymeres]

Okay I’ve written the acknowledgements and formatted everything as it should be more or less. Still need to write the abstract, check refs, proofread and then put into a pdf before I can submit it. Also still not sure what to do about the appendix

[uniquesdata]

Outsource Real Estate Data Entry Services to Thrive in the marker

Massive data management is a critical and tedious task in the real estate sector. To ensure accuracy in data, Uniquesdata offers extensive data entry services for the real estate sector for holistic and comprehensive data management that brings accurate results.

[lynns-bonkle-blog]

Been playing Control for the past few hours and now I have an idea for a MNADL side-story...

[mostly-natm]

CACKLING at how ugly Data is turning out in comparison to his identical brothers.

[made-nondescript]

its been two years but every time i see katherine i think about the fact she was excluded from my first attempt at mcc viewer stats solely because i couldnt spell katherine elizabeth correctly.