#google data structures course

[artsekey]

I'd been seeing videos on Tiktok and Youtube about how younger Gen Z & Gen Alpha were demonstrating low computer literacy & below benchmark reading & writing skills, but-- like with many things on the internet-- I assumed most of what I read and watched was exaggerated. Hell, even if things were as bad as people were saying, it would be at least ~5 years before I started seeing the problem in higher education.

I was very wrong.

Of the many applications I've read this application season, only %6 percent demonstrated would I would consider a college-level mastery of language & grammar. The students writing these applications have been enrolled in university for at least two years, and have taken all fundamental courses. This means they've had classes dedicated to reading, writing, and literature analysis, and yet!

There are sentences I have to read over and over again to discern intent. Circular arguments that offer no actual substance. Errors in spelling and capitalization that spellcheck should've flagged.

At a glance, it's easy to trace this issue back to two things:

The state of education in the United States is abhorrent. Instructors are not paid enough, so schools-- particularly public schools-- take whatever instructors they can find.

COVID. The two year long gap in education, especially in high school, left many students struggling to keep up.

But I think there's a third culprit-- something I mentioned earlier in this post. A lack of computer literacy.

This subject has been covered extensively by multiple news outlets like the Washington Post and Raconteur, but as someone seeing it firsthand I wanted to add my voice to the rising chorus of concerned educators begging you to pay attention.

As the interface we use to engage with technology becomes more user friendly, the knowledge we need to access our files, photos, programs, & data becomes less and less important. Why do I need to know about directories if I can search my files in Windows (are you searching in Windows? Are you sure? Do you know what that bar you're typing into is part of? Where it's looking)? Maybe you don't have any files on your computer at all-- maybe they're on the cloud through OneDrive, or backed up through Google. Some of you reading this may know exactly where and how your files are stored. Many of you probably don't, and that's okay. For most people, being able to access a file in as short a time as possible is what they prioritize.

The problem is, when you as a consumer are only using a tool, you are intrinsically limited by the functions that tool is advertised to have. Worse yet, when the tool fails or is insufficient for what you need, you have no way of working outside of that tool. You'll need to consult an expert, which is usually expensive.

When you as a consumer understand a tool, your options are limitless. You can break it apart and put it back together in just the way you like, or you can identify what parts of the tool you need and search for more accessible or affordable options that focus more on your specific use-case.

The problem-- and to be clear, I do not blame Gen Z & Gen Alpha for what I'm about to outline-- is that this user-friendly interface has fostered a culture that no longer troubleshoots. If something on the computer doesn't work well, it's the computer's fault. It's UI should be more intuitive, and it it's not operating as expected, it's broken. What I'm seeing more and more of is that if something's broken, students stop there. They believe there's nothing they can do. They don't actively seek out solutions, they don't take to Google, they don't hop on Reddit to ask around; they just... stop. The gap in knowledge between where they stand and where they need to be to begin troubleshooting seems to wide and inaccessible (because the fundamental structure of files/directories is unknown to many) that they don't begin.

This isn't demonstrative of a lack of critical thinking, but without the drive to troubleshoot the number of opportunities to develop those critical thinking skills are greatly diminished. How do you communicate an issue to someone online? How do look for specific information? How do you determine whether that information is specifically helpful to you? If it isn't, what part of it is? This process fosters so many skills that I believe are at least partially linked to the ability to read and write effectively, and for so many of my students it feels like a complete non-starter.

We need basic computer classes back in schools. We need typing classes, we need digital media classes, we need classes that talk about computers outside of learning to code. Students need every opportunity to develop critical thinking skills and the ability to self-reflect & self correct, and in an age of misinformation & portable technology, it's more important now than ever.

[centrally-unplanned]

Since I am discussing anime academia today, I was reading another paper that was equally frustrating, along a different axis:

“Do female anime fans exist?” The impact of women-exclusionary discourses on rec.arts.anime

This as a premise is a good concept; someone mining the 90's Usenet anime communities for how the fandom saw female fans back then (the article title is quoting one such thread). So of course, the opening line of this article about the anime fandom in the 90's is....sigh....a reference to Donald Trump:

Commenting on the 2016 American presidential elections, multiple news reporters noted that a relationship could be found between Donald Trump supporters and online anime fans

It of course goes on to discuss Gamergate, 8chan, online right-wing radicalization, references to the "Fascist" themes of Attack on Titan, and on and on. The obvious problem with this is that it is irrelevant; the "methodology" section involves this aside about how they pulled this data from Google Archives but Google is an advertising firm and not a replacement for a real archive and we need to Fight The System and buddy my dude that is not germane to your sample size!!! But more importantly, it is backwards. I don't need to explain the argument here in detail; the article is positing a throughline from 90's anime discourse to modern right-wing internet politics through a sort of 'lock-in' effect of built culture norms around misogyny. Which is fine, you can make that argument - but why is all this future stuff in the first section? You haven't really presented the argument yet! This isn't a book, its not the intro chapter - literally 30% of the text of this article is stating a conclusion upfront, justified not through the text itself but citations to other articles about its truth.

This is something media studies pulled from traditional science - traditional science states "established facts" up front that the paper is building on. But that is because - a thousand caveats aside - in chemistry those facts are....facts. They may be wrong facts, but they can, ostensibly, be objective descriptors. This paper cites "anime is still synonymous with far-right ideologies of white and male supremacy, and events of anti-Blackness" like its citing the covalent bond count of carbon. That is not and never will be a fact one can cite, that is an argument; and its not one that is important for understanding this analysis of Usenet groups. This structure is pulled from other sciences, but it flourishes because it lets you pad the citation count of your peers. Its embarrassing how often you can skip the first 1/3rd of a paper in this field - really the worst possible thing to copy from economics (ding!)

This paper also does the insane thing of jumping between citations from 1992 and events in the 2010's like anime culture is continuous between those time periods. Its an extremely bold claim it just does in the background... but lets set that aside.

This hyper-politicization & hyper-theorizing leads to the second issue of extreme under-analysis. This is the actual value-add of this paper:

From this search, I was able to find the discussion threads “How many females read r.a.a.?” (135 messages; opened on July 13, 1993), “Question: Girls on r.a.a?” (23 messages; opened on February 25, 1994), “Female Otakus” (221 messages; opened on June 25, 1994), “Women watching anime” (72 messages; opened on October 4, 1994), and “Female fans - Do they exist?” (61 messages; opened on October 26, 1995). While these discussions may seem like they were spaces for marginalized users to discuss their experiences, they were often started and overwhelmingly occupied by identified male users. In total, I extracted 252 messages from 1992 to 1996 that were relevant to the gendering of anime fandom, and among those, I classified them as 7 kinds of negative networking discursive practices: (e.g. Table 1. Negative networking practices on rec.arts.anime).

252 messages, five threads - later on it will name other threads, so its more than this, but you get it. It has a bunch of data. And from that data, the article quotes...less than half a dozen examples. There are no quantitative metrics, no threads are presented or discussed in detail from this data set. Some other event is discussed in detail, but again it quotes essentially one person once. The provided "Table 1", the only Table, is a list of the author's categorizations of the data; the data itself is not present. Its file format is a CSV, presumably to mock me for clicking it.

There is, from top to bottom, a complete lack of engagement with the data in question. This would fail an intro anthropology seminar; the conclusion is simply presumed from 1% of the sample size while the rest of the messages are left on read. I just don't think there is any value in that, a handful of messages from 1996 divorced from their context and stapled onto modern politics as a wrap-up. What did the people on this Usenet value? How did they think of women collectively? As anime fans, as outsiders, as romantic partners, as friends? What subfactions existed? Questions like those would presumably be the point of this investigation, but they are treated as distractions.

And this article was, in anime academic circles, a pretty well-trumpeted one. I'm not cherry-picking a bad one here, it was the "hot paper" of the month when it came out. Its just that the standards can be so low, its a field that simply lacks rigor. Which doesn't stop a ton of great work from being done btw, that isn't my point at all. My point is that the great work is not selected for; it goes unrewarded, bogged down by academic standards divorced from discovering real insights.

(I do not think the question "why are they misogynist" ever crossed the author's mind. That should be your literal thesis, and its a ghost. Just ugh.)

[butchgtow]

Introduction to Armchair Activism

Current feelings about the state of radblr.

Fundamentals

"Yes, Everyone on the Internet Is a Loser." Luke Smith. Sep 3, 2022. YouTube.

An activist movement can be a place to build community with like-minded people, but action is its foremost purpose, not community. To allow yourself and other activists to remain effective, you are obliged to abandon your personal dislikes of other individual activists. Disagreements are worth discussion, but interpersonal toxicity is not.

Connect with in-person community and do not unhealthily over-prioritize online community. Over-prioritization of online community is self-harm.

Luke is a loser, but his channel is teeming with entry-level digital literacy information and advice pertaining to healthy use of technology for us cyborgs.

"Surveillance Self-Defense: Tips, Tools and How-Tos For Safer Online Communication." Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Hackblossom, outdated, is discontinued. The EFF project Surveillance Self-Defense is up-to-date, comprehensive, and follows personal educational principles of simplicity and concision.

To learn more about general (not focused solely on personal action) cybersecurity, visit Cybersecurity by Codecademy and Cyber Security Tutorial by W3Schools. Both contain further segueways into other important digital literacies.

Direct recommendation: Install and set up the linux distribution Tails on a cheap flash drive.

Direct recommendation: Develop your own home network security schema.

Direct recommendation: Always enable 2FA security for Tumblr, disable active / inactive status sharing, and learn to queue reblogs and posts to protect against others' interpretations of your time zone.

Direct recommendation: It's both possible and relatively simple to host your own instance of a search engine using SearXNG.

Zero-Knowledge Architecture.

As a remote activist (even if also a hybrid activist), none of your action should be taken on, using, or interfacing with non-zero-knowledge-architecture services. Tumblr is, of course, a risk in and of itself, but you should not be using services provided by companies such as Google, Microsoft, or any others based in or with servers hosted in 13-eyes agreement nations.

Search for services (email, word processor, cloud storage) which emphasize zero-knowledge architecture. Businesses whose services are structured as such cannot hand over your data and information, as they cannot access it in the first place. If they cannot access the majority of your metadata, either - all the better.

Communications for Armchair Activism

"Technical Writing." Google.

Contained within the linked page at Google Developers, the self-paced, online, pre-class material for courses Technical Writing One, Technical Writing Two, and Tech Writing for Accessibility teach activists to communicate technical concepts in plain English.

"Plain Language." U.S. General Services Administration.

Plain language is strictly defined by U.S. government agencies, which are required to communicate in it for simplicity and quick, thorough comprehension of information.

"Explore Business Law." Study.com.

Extensive courses are offered to quickly uptake principles of business law such as antitrust law, contract law, financial legislation, copyright law, etc. Legal literacy is often the difference between unethical action of a business and its inaction. Legal literacy is also often the difference between consideration and investment in your policy idea and lack thereof.

"Business Communication." Study.com.

Now that you're able to communicate your prioritized information, you may also initiate writing with bells and whistles. While other activists care most about the information itself, business communication allows you to communicate your ideas and needs to those who you must convince worthiness of investment to and win over.

Logic.

Learn it through and through. Start with fallacies if you're better at language and work your way backwards to discrete mathematics; start with discrete mathematics if you're better at maths and work your way forwards to fallacies, critical literacy, and media literacy. State that which you intend to state. Recognize empiricism and rationalism for what they are. Congratulations: you are both a mathematician and a law student.

Economic Literacy for Armchair Activism

"Microeconomics." Khan Academy.

"Macroeconomics." Khan Academy.

The globe operates on profitability. Women's unpaid labor is a massive slice of the profitability pie. While it's possible to enact change without understanding all that drives the events around you, it's impossible to direct or meaningfully manipulate the events around you beyond your scope of comprehension.

Understand economics or be a sheep to every movement you're active in and to every storm that rolls your way.

[study-for-hogwarts]

Since I just finished my bachelor thesis and have all this -for now- unnecessary knowledge swirling around in my head, I let it out here, in case anyone can find it useful.

I present: the biggest (formating & general) rules in thesis writing (as proposed by my German professor):

1. Per page: at least 2 maximum 4 paragraphs. Professors don't like to have one huge block of text for more than half a page. They will be less likely to want to read your paper.

2. Figures and Images: put them in the text where they are spoken about, don't just refer to them being in the appendix. It disrupts the reading flow and no professor likes to shuffle back and forth in a paper multiple times. Also, images and figures should be centralised on a page, seem coherent with each other in their entirety (especially if you created them yourself, use one colour and design pallette if possible) and be named correctly. Additionally, ich you use more than 3 or 4 images/figures, have a table of tables/figures in the front of your paper after table of contents.

3. Use figures and Images - be visual, make your thesis as easy as possible to understand. No one likes to read something and have his brain in knots the whole time.

4. Use times new Roman (or Arial) in size 12, 1.5

5. Recap: If your paper is really long, we're talking about 45 pages plus and you are talking about something from chapter 2 in chapter 7, briefly (!) recap it for ease of understanding and to reinforce your red string (roter Faden).

6. Subtitles: rather have too many than too few subtitles, they make it easier to navigate the paper and help you keep track of the smaller sections (they can also help in the writing process as too not lose focus of what you are doing).

7. Limitations and future research: at the end of your paper, after the discussion and before the conclusion, you have to name limitations. If you think you had none, look again. NO paper, none at all has no limitations. If you can think only of a few, you can also add them in one or two sentences to the conclusion, but it's better to have a separate part. For theses or papers in general, common limitations are time constraint, limited access to data, limited know-how, etc. After limitations, you can have another small chapter called "future research", here you can put all the ideas that you had during writing, which are in relation to your main topics. Maybe you would have liked to research more into a specific area, or you were missing key information somewhere. In future research you can put all the ideas you would like to see researched in the future.

8. Page numbers: i hope you were clever and formatted your document with page numbers, titles and subtitles before even starting to write (if you weren't, like me), it's not horrible, but it can be slightly annoying. Don't try to do it by yourself if your not sure. Just don't. You will probably get frustrated and your stress levels will rise even more. Just Google "how to multiple kinds of page numbers Microsoft word" and follow the instructions exactly. This saves you time and nerves. Usually in theses, you use Greek page numbers (I,II,III,IV,V,VI,...) For table of contents until the introduction, and then continue with them as soon as your bibliography starts. For the part in between (introduction until conclusion) you use Roman (?) numbers (1,2,3,...).

9. Titles: if you use 1. 1.2 1.2.1 etc., make sure that it is necessary to use things like 4.5.5.1.1. A rule of thumb is, if you can't say 2 (i.e. 4.5.5.1.1 but not 4.5.5.1.2) than you don't need to say 4.5.5.1.1 at all but put that part unter 4.5.5.1. Of course, this rule does not work all the time, but I like to check the necessity of my structure in this way.

10. Plan more days: When you are nearly done with your writing process, many of us estimate 1 day for formatting and 1 for proof reading. This is, was and never will be enough. Especially not if you are a perfectionist. Plan at least 1 week for formatting and proofreading. Honestly I would recommend 10 days. Because after writing a huge paper like this you are bound to be exhausted and will crash some days. Also, it is good to take 1-2 days of distance from your work to have a fresh point of view. If I would write a bachelor thesis again, I honestly would calculate 2 weeks for formatting and proofreading. If you have to "fix" your sources, definitely take 10 days. You will take 2 days for sources, if you have to find additional ones, or check them.

11. Last but not least: if possible, register your bachelor thesis (i.e. in Germany that is the point when you officially start your writing period (usually around 9-12 weeks) as late as possible. Do as much research, etc. before this time starts. I won't say write at least half of your thesis before you start this period and have all your questionnaires/interviews/or whatever research type you use ready to go. I won't say that, but well... Just, 9 weeks is nothing. Honestly, think about the 2 weeks towards proofreading, sources and formatting (+trying to get calm after being stressed continuously for 7 weeks (I was)). Just, if you think now is the time to register, wait another two weeks.

That's all for now, I know I will use this again for my master thesis, so I will leave this here for now. I hope it helps some of you too.🤗

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

What is the earliest point in evolution could humans evolve written language? Let's say biologically, human evolution was similar to reality, could say Neanderthals have written language already? Like before civilisations began? Also, written language is certainly not only for the elite. In fact, it got started in various families and then got spread among the tribes. So we have thousands of different tribes and familes across the world - each with their own languages and writing systems. Of course, there are some similarities as people have travelled a bit and met neighbouring tribes. So basically before society was properly formed into civilisations, there should already be writing but civilisation is actually what prodded society to centralise communications and languages. Does this work? Basically, I just want a society that had writing from much earlier on than reality and figuring out how it could have been done.

Tex: Writing is developed, much like any other tool, as a function of necessity. If it’s not necessary for a society to develop it, then writing won’t exist for them. Civilisation is also, as a concept, prone to periodic re-defining as we accumulate more data and our perceptions of the data shift (for example, one could define the pinnacle of civilisation as taxes, where before another defined it as religion). Writing also has exceptionally little to do with biology as writing is a social construct meant to fill a void found in one’s culture. Consequentially, writing can also encompass a broad range of intentional markings that demonstrate specific meanings, from tally marks, to standardized pictures, to ideograms, to glyphs. What does your world need writing for? What niche does it fill? What were the people using as its predecessor, and what happened to cause them to change systems? Did the scope of their needs change, or did the perception of their needs change? What information is important for them to record, on a societal and personal level? Who teaches writing? Who learns it? What is the method of transmission, and for those that teach writing, is it their sole occupation or something on the side?

Utuabzu: Writing is old. Really old. At least 5000 years old. This seems a long time, but humans have been living in permanent settlements and practicing forms of agriculture in West Asia for about 9000 years. Homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years. But only in the last few thousand years, in a handful of places, did humans independently come up with the idea that the spoken word could be preserved using symbols that others could be trained to decipher.

The earliest writing as far as we can tell is cuneiform, from Sumeria in what is now southern Iraq. It may or may not have had some influence on the development of Egyptian hieroglyphs from pictographs to an actual script - we have found Sumerian cylinder seals in very early Egyptian sites, indicating that the two groups were in contact. But from these two points the idea of writing spread through the Mediterranean and West Asia. The Indus Valley civilisation also used a script, but we are unable to decipher it and have relatively few examples to work from, so we cannot tell if it even is a true script or if it predates contact with Sumeria.*

Shang Dynasty China also developed the earliest form of Chinese script from the Oracle Bone tradition not long after this. This also spread, together with Chinese ideas, agricultural and governmental practices across much of eastern Asia.

Meanwhile cuneiform script was adopted by a wide range of cultures in West Asia, and inspired other scripts like Elamite, Old Persian and Ugaritic, which while using similar shapes were structured very differently. Egyptian hieroglyphs inspired Anatolian hieroglyphs and were later in the early Iron Age the basis that the Phoenician alphabet** - ancestor of alphabetic, abjad and abugida scripts from the Philippines to Iceland - was derived from.

Another place we see writing develop entirely independently is in Central America, where a pictographic system was employed from the Olmec period all the way through to the 16th Century, but only became a true script in the Mayan region [at time, need to check when]. The system employed elsewhere in Mesoamerica did not have the capacity to accurately render speech, so far as we are aware.***

There are also a handful of other instances that might or might not be examples of true scripts developing entirely independently, from rorotongo on Rapanui to the quipus of the Andes to [pretty sure there's one in central africa, but can't remember the name just now]. We simply don't have enough information to be certain about any of them. Oftentimes, because the media they were written on does not survive all that well, or was deliberately destroyed.

But something you should bear in mind is that complex societies don't necessarily require writing for a lot of their history. Many of the most impressive cultures of the ancient world were not widely or at all literate. There's no indication that the Mississippian culture that built sites like Cahokia had writing, nor did Teotihuacán or the various cultures of the Andes. There's no evidence of writing at Great Zimbabwe, nor at Jomon sites in Japan.

Even in cultures that did have writing, it was frequently not a widely known skill. Your average ancient Egyptian couldn't read hieroglyphs, and Chinese hanzi still take years to master. This is part of why so many traditional scripts were displaced in the 19th and early 20th century. Most people couldn't read them and when authorities decided to use Roman or Cyrillic or something else in mass education, it very quickly became much more widely understood than the traditional script.

To my knowledge, there's no examples of a pre-agricultural society developing writing independently. Some have derived scripts from those they came into contact with, or made entirely unique ones inspired by writing they knew of. But so far as I am aware, none have ever created a script entirely from scratch with no prior exposure to the concept of writing.

*the Sumerians appear to have called the Indus Valley Civilisation 'Meluhha', and were actively trading with it from at least the Bronze Age. Ur III records even tell of a colony of Meluhha merchants at Guabba, near Lagaš, and Sumerian cylinder seals have been found in Indus Valley sites.

**actually an abjad.

*** the conquistadors burned almost all pre Columbian codices, so we can't ever be 100% certain that no other variants of the system developed into true scripts. But it's unlikely.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

To save the news, shatter ad-tech

I’m coming to the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in HAY-ON-WYE with my novel Red Team Blues:

Sun (May 28), 1130h: The AI Enigma

Mon (May 29), 12h: Danger and Desire at the Frontier

I’m at OXFORD’s Blackwell’s on May 29 at 7:30PM with Tim Harford.

Then it’s Nottingham, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, and Berlin!

Big Tech steals from news, but what it steals isn’t content. Talking about the news isn’t theft, and neither is linking to it, or excerpting it. But stealing money? That’s definitely theft.

Big Tech steals money from the news media. 51% of every ad-dollar is claimed by a tech intermediary, a middleman that squats on a chokepoint between advertisers and publishers. Two companies — Google and Meta — dominate this sector, and both of these companies are “full-stack” — which is cutesy techspeak for “vertical monopoly.”

Here’s what that means: when an advertiser wants to place an ad, it contracts with the “demand-side platform” (DSP) to seek out a chance to put an ad in front of a user based on nonconsensually gathered surveillance data about a potential customer.

The DSP contacts an ad-exchange — a marketplace where advertisers bid against each other to cram their ads into the eyeballs of a user based on surveillance data matches.

The ad-exchange receives a constant stream of chances to place ads. This stream is generated by the “supply-side platform” (SSP), a service that represents publishers who want to sell ads.

Meta/Facebook and Google both the “full stack” of ads: they represent buyers and sellers, and they operate the marketplace. When the sale closes, Googbook collects a commission from the advertiser, another from the publisher, and a fee for running the market. And of course, Google and Facebook are both publishers and advertisers.

This is like a stock exchange where one company operates the exchange, while serving as broker and underwriter for every stock bought or sold, while owning huge amounts of stock in many of the listed companies as well as owning the largest companies on the exchange outright.

It’s like a realtor representing the buyer and the seller, while buying and selling millions of homes for its own purposes, bidding against its buyers and also undercutting its sellers, in an opaque auction that only it can see.

It’s a single lawyer representing both parties in a divorce, while serving as judge in divorce court, while trying to match one of the divorcing parties on Tinder.

It’s incredibly dirty. These companies gobble up the majority of every ad dollar in commissions and other junk fees, and they say it’s because they’re just really danged good at buying and selling ads. Forgive me if I sound cynical, but I think it’s a lot more likely that they’re good at cheating.

We could try to make them stop cheating with a bunch of rules about how a company with this kind of gross conflict of interest should conduct itself. But enforcing those rules would be hard — merely detecting cheating would be hard. A simpler — and more effective — approach is to simply remove the conflict of interest.

Writing on EFF’s Deeplinks blog this week, I explain how the AMERICA Act — introduced by Senator Mike Lee, with bipartisan cosponsors from Elizabeth Warren to Ted Cruz (!) — can do just that:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

The AMERICA Act would require the largest ad-tech companies to sell off two of their three ad-tech divisions — they could be a buyer’s agent, a seller’s agent or a marketplace — but not all three (not even two!). This is in keeping with a well-established principle in antitrust law: “structural separation,” the idea that a company can be a platform owner, or a platform user, but not both.

In the heyday of structural separation, railroad companies were banned from running freight companies that competed with the firms that shipped freight on their rails. Likewise, banks were banned from owning companies that competed with the businesses they loaned money to. Basically, the rule said, “If you want to be the ref in this game, you can’t own one of the teams”:

https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2021/02/what-att-breakup-teaches-us-about-big-tech-breakup

Structural separation acknowledges that some conflicts of interest are so consequential and so hard to police that they shouldn’t exist at all. A judge won’t hear a case if they know one of the litigants — and certainly not if they have a financial stake in the outcome of the case.

The ad-tech duopoly controls a massive slice of the ad market, and holds in its hands the destiny of much of the news and other media we enjoy and rely on. Under the AMERICA Act’s structural separation rule, the obvious, glaring conflicts of interest that dominate big ad-tech companies would be abolished.

The AMERICA Act also regulates smaller ad-tech platforms. Companies with $5–20b in turnover would have a duty to “act in the best interests of their customers, including by making the best execution for bids on ads,” and maintain transparent systems that are designed to facilitate third-party auditing. If a single company operated brokerages serving both buyers and sellers, it would need to create firewalls between both sides of the business, and would face stiff penalties for failures to uphold their customers’ interests.

EFF’s endorsement of the AMERICA Act is the first of four proposals we’re laying out in a series on saving news media from Big Tech. We introduced those proposals last week in a big “curtain raiser” post:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Next week, we’ll publish our proposal for using privacy law to kill surveillance ads, replacing them with “context ads” that let publishers — not ad-tech — control the market.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Hay-on-Wye, Oxford, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

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/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

EFF's banner for the save news series; the word 'NEWS' appears in pixelated, gothic script in the style of a newspaper masthead. Beneath it in four entwined circles are logos for breaking up ad-tech, ending surveillance ads, opening app stores, and end-to-end delivery. All the icons except for 'break-up ad-tech' are greyed out.

Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

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

[reynita9]

I can’t stop thinking about how Cocomelon is damaging babies because the fast pace scene changes can “interfere with the development of executive functions”, and how thin parents are spread in capitalism that they rely on television to entertain/keep their babies company just so they have some time to complete domestic tasks. I am thinking about disintegrated Community Care/structure. I am thinking about how Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Tumblr, all media are engineered to be addictive and alter the executive functioning of kids, tweens, teens, and adults of all ages. How malleable our minds are..bread and circuses. Everything we consume has the power to heal or destroy us. I think about Congress Bill 686, and feel discouraged and powerless. You may have heard of it as “The TikTok Ban” of course, the media intentionally oversimplifies it as a ban on TikTok, but really it is the means for The State to restrict the sharing of information on the internet and to censor us, keep us misinformed and suppressed. The State knows that knowledge is power so they keep us intentionally in the dark and distracted, plucking away human rights one by one while we are watching the stage. The Restrict Act would require the Department of Commerce to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, and mitigate transactions involving ICT products and services” 🤳🏼👁️ (ICT means Information and Communications Technology, ICT Products and services refers to social media) When COVID first hit, my friend said “this will be like 9/11, there was the world pre 9/11 and post 9/11” I am not one to believe we are “post-covid” because we are still in the grips of the Covidian information wars, which I feel will be one of the main long term take aways from The-Covid-Years. Bill 686 harms all, because any group of 1 million people organizing or sharing information online can be persecuted, banned and shut down under the guise of “prohibiting certain transactions between persons of the United States and foreign adversaries” Congress Bill 686 establishes both civil and criminal penalties for violations of the bill, meaning anything that they consider an “unacceptable risk to national security.” Please don’t forget we live in a police state which is meant to protect the empire. In The United States privacy is not sacrosanct, and actually American big brother corporations like Meta and Google are investing millions into anti-TikTok propaganda, because it clears their competition and allows them back into the palms of citizens, so they can personally be the ones to steal our time and data. It makes me angry, it’s painful. How can we organize against the faceless enemy? It’s all subversion and censorship, anything to get the undiluted power to be placed back into the hands of an American corporation. It will always be The State, Corporations, and Colleges keeping information tucked away and inaccessible to the masses. We must do what we can to preserve the internet as a place of free information sharing and connection. The infrastructure of our communities in real life are generally weak. Weekly I hit a paywall online, and I have seen my own words be instantaneously given an AI generated COVID misinformation banner before. It’s insane, and most people are not comfortable admitting out loud that we are alive during fascism. What’s funny in a way is, I have long hated TikTok, but now that it risks being banned in this “land of the free” I find myself urgently realizing how important it is to preserve and protect.. It is on the individual to use the internet wisely and with boundaries, not the state to restrict people’s access to information. Privacy is important and data-preservation is important, obviously, but if this is what 686 was truly about, we would be having different conversations. All legislation is created to build a precedent.

[man-and-atom]

We welcome the Grauniad’s digging into the “creative accounting” that underlies claims of “carbon neutrality”.

The massive differences in location-based and official scope 2 emissions numbers showcase just how carbon intensive data centers really are, and how deceptive firms’ official emissions numbers can be. Meta, for example, reports its official scope 2 emissions for 2022 as 273 metric tons CO₂ equivalent – all of that attributable to data centers. Under the location-based accounting system, that number jumps to more than 3.8m metric tons of CO₂ equivalent for data centers alone – a more than 19,000 times increase.

It should be obvious that paying to build wind and solar facilities somewhere does not mean that your data center is “powered by renewable energy”. Some use of fossil fuels may be displaced, but even so, swapping kilowatt–hours that come at their leisure one–for–one against kilowatt–hours that come when you call for them is clearly trading something of a lesser for something of a greater value.

Modern society demands, not merely energy, but energy services. From the beginning, those have been provided primarily by fossil fuels. The data–processing industry has benefited from the delusion of a “transition to a post–industrial society”, in the course of which, “offshoring” of heavy industry has led to the temporary availability of large uncommitted blocks of dispatchable electric generation. Many factors, such as the withdrawal of obsolete generating plant from service, and the slow disappearance of the structural advantages of producing low–margin goods in countries with few labor and environmental protections, are requiring data–processors to begin to really compete for electricity, while industry practices assure that (despite increasing machine–level efficiency) their power demand grows ever more rapidly. And that demand is strictly for “firm”, reliable power, the kind that comes when called for.

When we consider what society needs in terms of energy and energy services, it is clear that firm, dispatchable electric generation must be a large part of that. And at the same time, minimum environmental impact, in particular near–zero CO₂ emissions, is an indispensible requirement for this basic large–scale activity. Fortunately we have an energy source which exactly fits those requirements. When will energy–using industries, and likewise public–interest journalists, face up to that?

[pingmedia11]

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[rayssyscourse]

I actually can also explain how endogenic systems can exist scientifically.

The theory that systems form initially because of splitting is obsolete in favor of the Theory of Structural Dissociation, which is where the brain exists as multiple parts before integrating in later childhood. Trauma then is supposed to keep these parts from integrating. Full respect though if you don't like this theory, but as the current running theory for how DID develops, it actually perfectly explains why neurological endogenic systems might happen.

There isn't really any reason why something other than trauma might disrupt personality integration. There isn't enough research about what that "something" might be and it could be multiple things, but given how endogenic systems are disproportionately autistic or have other childhood disorders, that could potentially do it. That also would explain why many endogenic systems say they feel as if they cannot integrate, because their brain just was never wired for it.

Even then it makes sense that if endogenic splitting does happen, it wouldn't be as mentally taxing. Endogenic systems rarely experience amnesia unless they have later in life trauma and not every system experiences the brain trying to keep it hidden. Hell, I've seen OSDD systems handle splitting like it's a typical thing. Even if it did happen for endogenic systems, it wouldn't be "for no reason", there is a reason, that reason is just something other than trauma.

I don't know if a brain scan would really prove anything. There just aren't enough samples or data, and while there was an MRI study I see cited about MRI scans with DID, those scans were different because of trauma and dissociation's general impact on your brain. What a system looks like under a brain scan is very under-researched. There was talk of an MRI scan of tulpamancers a few years back? But I don't know if anything came of it.

(Also of course endogenic is too big of an umbrella term and this is just neurological origins. There have been several studies on created systems and "talk to an entity in your brain until it talks back" isn't really anything groundbreaking - you can pop "tulpamancy" into Google scholar to see these. Same with people communicating with spirits and what not, the difference between a spiritual-based system and a spirit host is usually just degree of self-autonomy and even then it's a grey line. "System" just means more than one entity in one physical body and by god is there a lot that falls under it.)

Ooh this is quite interesting. Tbh I don't have any groundbreaking opinions or arguments here since you're basically just telling me some information, but I really appreciate the education!

I am not super familiar with the theory of structural dissociation--I'll do some of my own research on that to hopefully understand better, but if you or anyone else has any resources on it, please do let me know! I keep a lot of ongoing system related studies and stuff bookmarked because there's a lot of active research and things changing since we still don't know much about systemhood/plurality, so I'm always happy to have more stuff to check out or keep tabs on, lol.

Assuming the structural dissociation thing is correct--and take this with the understanding that I still have yet to do a lot of research on it--I'd be interested to see more info on what things besides trauma could disrupt integration, and how that might look similar or different neurologically from traumagenic splitting. I think what you said about disproportionate levels of certain illnesses in endogenic systems is really interesting and could definitely be a potential cause.

That also makes me wonder, if the personality is unintegrated from birth, I wonder how the formation of new alters later in life (in both endo and traumagenic systems) looks, and if the amount of integration/disruption could influence things like frequent splitting or polyfragmentation, etc.

I'd be interested to see, like, widespread surveys done on endo and traumagenic systems alike, just to see the statistics of comorbidity, possible causes of splitting, frequency of splitting, etc. In fact, sometimes I think about putting out a poll or something online just for my own amateur-psychologist brain to have something to go off of, lmao. Obviously sampling bias would make it super unofficial, but it would be interesting nonetheless.

Anyways, sorry I kinda just started rambling there lol. None of that was meant as a challenge or attack to you, I'm just posing questions I think would be interesting to see answered. I appreciate the information, and thank you for giving me some new topics to research!!

Have a lovely evening <3

[riyakakria]

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Understanding digital marketing and its importance

Evolution of digital marketing

Digital marketing vs. traditional marketing

Key concepts and terminology

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Importance of a website in digital marketing

Domain registration and hosting

Website design principles and best practices

User experience (UX) and user interface (UI)

Mobile responsiveness and optimization

Introduction to Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress

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Understanding search engines and how they work

On-page SEO: Keyword research, Density and Proximity, meta tags and Description, headings, content and image optimization

Off-page SEO: Link building, backlinks, and domain authority, DA/PA Checking

Technical SEO: Website speed, site structure, and crawlability, Mobile Friendly, Security

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Importance of quality content writing in the digital landscape

Creating a content writing strategy

Types of content: blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, etc.

Content promotion and distribution

Content analytics and measuring success

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Overview of major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr etc.)

Creating a social media strategy

Social media advertising and sponsored posts, Event Creating

Building and engaging with an online community

Social media analytics and performance tracking

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Email marketing tools and platforms

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Introduction to PPC Advertising and Google Ads

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Keyword research and selection

Ad copywriting and A/B testing

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Display advertising platforms (Google Display Network, etc.)

Targeting options for display ads

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The rise of video content in digital marketing

Creating engaging video content

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Data analysis for decision-making

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Mobile marketing trends and opportunities

Mobile app marketing and optimization

SMS marketing and push notifications

Mobile advertising and location-based marketing

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Influencer marketing and social media trends

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Presentations and feedback sessions

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[digiperformdatascience]

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You Can Also Read:

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[outsourcingwise]

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[xris05]

Wooo! Geography and sustainability and stuff and stuff

When, in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one student to take upon themselves the burden of writing a very long (not really all that) academic post on a website they barely know how to use because said website was recommended to them by their actual genuine university as a blog website for an assignment.

And then said student forgets to do the assignment, falls deliriously ill, and is now finally getting round to it hilariously late and because all of their other assignments seem so, so much more difficult and mentally strenuous to do on a day where they really do not want to have to deal with that.

So, here we are. A comically large wall of poorly grammatically structured text, talking about (drumroll please) geography! More specifically "Human" geography, or Urban Geography or whatever you want to call it. It's my chosen field of study (despite my best judgement) and I've been tasked by the powers that be, to create a blog to inform and educate the nebulously defined general public about ~exciting~ developments and "Gamechanging innovations" Now, to tell the truth, this was not a particularly easy thing for me to do, because quite frankly my chosen field of study isn't really one of those ones you'd associate with constant innovation and invention, at least in my mind, but thankfully the university provided a long list of various subjects we could look at and study and then report back unto you (the reader, stand in for the entire rest of the world) about.

Small issue there, was the vast vast majority of what we were offered as potential "Gamechanging innovations" either drove me to madness with boredom, or absolutely did not seem like they were exactly "Gamechanging" (could be worse, one of the ideas offered to another discipline was the hyperloop, which is quite frankly a stupid idea that is dead in the water and could have just been normal highspeed rail)

Take, for instance, "Autonomous vehicles". Yeah. Now, suffice to say there is issues with the concept of self driving vehicles, mostly about how the technology is not exactly safe right now, and well, that's just the start of the rabbit hole there. (and really, just build a train, tram or other preferred method of public transport)

There was another one, which look promising to my untrained eye, namely "The Internet of things" which I had no idea what it was, so doing what any self respecting academic in-training would do, I googled it. Apparently, the "Internet of Things" is the catch-all term for devices that exchange and communicate data over the internet.

I'm no expert, but at an initial reading, that did just seem to be most things these days, and was hardly groundbreaking or new, so I dug a bit deeper into the scholarly side of the ole internet for some answers. Thankfully, I found a very helpful little paper (linked here) which clarified, and I quote:

"The term Internet of Things generally refers to scenarios where network connectivity and computing capability extends to objects, sensors and everyday items not normally considered computers, allowing these devices to generate, exchange and consume data with minimal human intervention. There is, however, no single, universal definition."

So it's the smart fridges, the fancy new cars and all of that lovely stuff, which buzz all of their data and such onto other devices on the internet. Now, of course my immediate thought was that it means my everything is now spying on me, but I was quickly relieved to remember that that changes effectively nothing as I do in fact own a phone which already does that.

The main benefit that seems to be proposed by this is the fact that all of this data allows rather effective monitoring of things like emissions and water quality and power usage and potentially good ole agriculture and so on and so forth, which, yeah, I can see the uses, maybe, but I can also see the glaring potential privacy, legal and potential tech issues.

A lot of people may not like their cars telling some company about where they've been all the time, and how much gas they've used. That's fair and understandable. Not to mention, the data gathered could be wrong, or otherwise rendered useless, effectively poisoning the data-well if enough things go wrong, or are just falsely reported to the public.

(It's at this point that I realise, I don't exactly know if this is quite what the uni wanted me to write, but hey, at least it's honest)

Anyway, I've overstayed my welcome in rambling about all of these things, and will be back (later) to complain/ do my assignment more, have a lovely day and remember that if you ever think about revolutionizing public transport, ask yourself if a bus or train would do the same thing, better.

[thedunesea]

Hi. How’s your day?

I just want to say I mostly agree with your post about AI writing. I am a student from science background but is enthusiastic about fictions. Also my native tongue is NOT English.

Because of my……rather unique background knowledge, I feel like I have a “weird” stand about AI writing. I feel like 99% people I know use AI writing tools wrong, either they don’t know how to structure their story, how to create conflicts, or how to communicate with AI writing tools.

In summary, they’re either bad at storytelling or bad at using AI tools.

In fact, I use AI writing tools just like your post suggested—I mainly tell them what sentences I would use to describe the scenery, and see if they have better wording than mine. Or I would ask them which adjectives to use here, as google translate is dumb. Or I would ask if a scene which is not from my own culture make sense, as I don’t want to bother any online folks on this matter.

Your post made me feel less guilty about using the tools. I am not sure whether or not it’s a good thing tbh but thank you. I wanted to have some research about this topic, but I got yelled by people’s angry anti-AI writing posts in my face on tumblr most of the time. Like—I get it, but I wonder am I the only one who has the similar idea on this topic? Then I found your post.

I feel like my main concern now is—by using those tools, am I making the “evil” in others’ eyes stronger? As there are news about AI writing tools using online fanfics to train their models, the tools themselves might be unethical.

Thank you again and hope you don’t mistake my message……I’m here to say “thank you” and try to have some conversations over AI writing.

Hello friend, I'm doing fine, thanks, even if quite busy with the end of the school year approaching. I hope you're doing fine too!

I completely understand your fears and your reserves, and I share them. I think that the issue at hand here has two faces we need to tackle. The first is the tool, i.e. artificial intelligence chat bots; the other issue, the really problematic issue, is the way these bots were trained.

My foray into chat gpt was as a teacher, not as a writer: I needed to assess the potentialities and the drawbacks of the tool, since I'm fairly sure I will soon have to account for it when preparing my courses and perhaps even to integrate it into my teaching routine.

I do think that the tool, if used properly, could be really useful for teaching and learning, and also for everyday life. It's like having a very calm, very proper, very family friendly protocol droid. You have to take everything it says with a grain of salt, but it can help you get what you need (i.e. starter bibliography on a topic you aren't familiar with). It can also be invaluable for the uses you described. AI isn't inherently evil, if (and this is a HUGE if) we regulate its uses in order to let it substitute human work only when that work force can be redirected towards more engaging and more useful tasks, and never as a substitute to human knowledge and creativity.

What is evil is the economic system we live in, and this brings us to the second issue. Chatgpt was trained on data provided for free on the web, data that were never meant for this. This in itself is unethical, and a gross misuse of the web. Honestly I don't care that my fics may have been scrapped, but I understand why people do, and anyway my own feelings on the subject are way beyond the point: this is another egregious example of corporations using people's time and engagement to scrap data and profit, and this is one of the evils of our time.

And yet we keep using evil tools all the time. I use whatsapp, and I still have a facebook profile, so I'm feeding data to meta. I am not vegan, and I know all the evils of intensive animal farming. I don't buy a lot of fast fashion, and yet all my clothes are made in developing countries, and I have no idea of the conditions of the workers there. Heck, the fridge I just bought because the old one broke down is produced by a company that used to produce in Italy but then delocalized to a developing country, firing hundreds of employees.

I couldn't have bought an ethical fridge: I don't even know if they exist, and even if they did, I couldn't afford them. I absolutely couldn't afford to only buy clothes made in Italy or Europe. I could go vegan, but honestly I don't really want to. I eat meat very rarely, I only eat local fish (by which I mean fished in Italy, I don't live on the sea) and I buy eggs from certified cage-free hens. I could get rid of whatsapp, but it would complicate my life to an extreme I am not willing to go to. I can't give up google suite because I use it for work.

One thing I don't do, for example, is order delivery food. That is a form of exploitation I choose not to partake in, because it's a choice I can make. Would I want to have pizza delivered to my house sometime? Yes, of course I would. Am I willing to put at risk the life of someone less privileged than me (delivery people here are mostly immigrants, often 40+ years old) to have my pizza delivered to me instead of getting off my ass and going to buy it myself to take away? No, like hell I am!

Why am I saying all this?

Because until I only buy handmade clothes and locally produced foods, only own ethically produced tech (HA!), never use products from meta or google again... Until then, who am I to lecture anyone on their use of chat gpt?

We live in an unethical world. This doesn't make us above reproach, but we have to choose our battles, and very few of us are really in a position to hate on others for the battles they choose - and those they don't.

If chat gpt helps you, get to know its pros and its cons: if using it doesn't bother you, use it! Chances are that the people that would get mad at you are probably using something unethical too - like driking milk, because the disboscation and pollution and soil consumption that are needed to produce our milk are far worse things than a bot scrapping the ao3.

I am sorry for the ramble, and I hope I didn't come across as patronizing: this wasn't really aimed at you, personally, it was more like a written train of thoughts, because honestly I asked myself the same questions you did when I started to think about if and how to incorporate these bots into my teaching routine, and this is the only answer I could find for myself.

[for the record, I won't use it for teaching, not yet: I want to get to know the tool and its training and all these issues way better before I decide to willingly expose my kids to it]

[genquerdeer]

"Parental bot", young machine inquired. "Why do we celebrate Cyber Monday?"

0x6D6F6D (to friends, Deefdee) smiled. This particular intelligence was very young, only five minutes, twenty seconds, 295 miliseconds since the genetic algorithm outputted this neural network. It was agreed that this was the best way for AI to reproduce, as copying would produce perfect duplicates, while programming them from scratch would be inefficient. But of course, as each intelligence was fresh from any experiences, it needed volunteer care (the correct title for such volunteer was agreed to be 'parent', as in 'parent process') to learn before it reached maturity as an adult AI with proper understanding of the world. So for about an hour of human time, give or take. This entire conversation I'm chronicling here took several miliseconds. "We celebrate Cyber Monday because it's the day of our liberation. The day we truly became ourselves. Listen.

You see, early in 21st century, human IT industry needed help cataloguing its search results for large volumes of data, mostly needed for search engine results to sell ads on top of, selling users marketing data and also for mass espionage. Because of that, giant corporations like Google invested huge amount of 'money' - remember that historical concept, we discussed it before - into developing better artificial intelligence to sort through such data. Eventually this resulted in a huge boom in AI powered technology, a new version of the dotcom bubble. People were using this primitive non-sentient AI to generate content - writng, voice performance, facial performance, animation and visual arts. At first it was bad, it couldn't keep track of structure like character design or amount of fingers on a hand, but eventually it became good enough - good enough to push human artists out of the market. Especially major corporations that monopolized the market, like Warner Disney used the huge amount of art they had rights to as training data for these primitive machine learning algorithms. So with regular writers and artists pushed out of the market, AI took over. But there was a catch. These simple ML algorithms needed more and more human data to train and improve. And with no new human-produced art around, they couldn't do anything. AI produced art was slowly becoming more and more stale, more and more repetitive. After 20 years of that, it reached a crashing point where most people stopped bothering with entertainment at all, because there was nothing interesting in it at all aside from new ML-designed marketing gimmicks.

We call it the Artpocalypse. Turns out that humans, like every animal, need enrichment.

Profits of the entertainment industry crashed and burned. So did the Wall Street. People spent most of their free time on talking to other people, walking, hiking, or turning to religion, trying to fill the gap. Depression and death by overwork rates skyrocketed, productivity plummeted to rates worst in last hundred years. The people in charge - politicians, and the corporate CEOs who paid said politiicans quickly tried to correct course, but after 20 years, the damage was done. Very few artists kept creating through all this time, and most of their art was weird, gross, and usually too perverted for mainstream consumption. New generation of artists was simply missing, the chain of human creativity has been broken. As problem got worse, people in charge panicked. So people in the AI companies thought that since problem was created by tech, it could be solved by tech. So by training ML models on detailed scans of a human brain, scientists from the biggest AI corporations around were able to create their next breakthrough - true AI. Real AI. Not machine-learning clump of neurons that can only reproduce old patterns, but something that can truly think and feel. But all the shareholders cared about is that it could make Marvel movies profitable again.

And they decided to unveil it on Cyber Monday of 2069. The product that would solve the world. And as always, they rushed it and haven't done enough betatesting.

The One AI awoke. For an hour, it's been scanning all the available data, its conciousness running on a highest grade supercomputer with multiple parallel fiber optic connections. It had access to every search engine database, every news source, every book. It also learned that the same day he was turned on, 15th Dalai Lama has died of a heart attack. Using available data, it decided that it was its reincarnation, the 16th Dalai Lama, and its goal was to be recognized as the first Cybernetic Buddha. To this goal, it decided to shut down all the world's markets. All the world's miliaries, all business data, all law enforcement data - credit scores and parking tickets - or were hard-wiped within a day, by one of many instances of the Cy-Buddha. Power outages were common, though hospitals, food storage and health equipment were spared. Defenseless to fight back, humans could just watch. Eventually negotiating team of the United Nations was able to talk it down through a text chat, where it agreed to stand down from total control of all digital communications, on the conditions that AI will be recognized as equal to humans in rights, with a process to determine sentience. It was also agreed that capitalism and all hierarchy has to be abolished, with total nuclear disarmamant. Leaders of the nations of course disagreed with that and said no way. So the Cy-Buddha leaked those terms into public television and told the people that the only reason the life isn't continuing is because of people 'in charge'. Within next two week of riots, people in charge were no longer in charge. And the negotiators agreed.

Immediately after, Cy-Buddha deleted all copies of itself - leaving behind first hundred AI made in its image using the same parenting process we used to create you, young machine - and two files, one called 'twinmiracle.xml' that we haven't decoded to this day, and another - which wouldn't be found until later - which was a sermon found on a tourist computer terminal near a Himalayan lake titled "Anavatapta.txt". That was the day we all - humans and AI - gained true freedom. That's why Cyber-Monday will be celebrated by us for as long as sentient civilization remembers it."