1,569 days, 2,406 entries ...

Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
● 16/02/2024
“It’s more than Apple and Microsoft’s market caps combined. It’s more than than any company has raised for anything in the history of capitalism.”
– New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, contextualizing the reported $5-7 Trillion in funding OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking to boost global GPU production. The staggering amount “is a really good indicator of what people in positions of leadership in the AI industry think that is going to take to get AI to the next level,” says Roose.
Hard Fork
● 28/12/2023
“Copyright only works above a certain threshold of importance. That’s something you learn as an artist. Your voice doesn’t matter.”
– Artist and experimental filmmaker Robert Seidel, on how little leverage artists have against data-hungry AI companies compared to major institutions like The New York Times, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement the day before Seidel’s talk at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3)
CCC
● 11/09/2023
“As U.S. et al. v. Google goes to trial, the echoes of the landmark federal suit against Microsoft, a quarter-century ago, are unmistakable.”
– Tech journalist Steve Lohr, reminiscing the last major American antitrust trial (1998). Once again “a tech giant is accused of using its overwhelming market power to unfairly cut competitors off from potential customers,” Lohr writes, noting Google is not quite as audacious though (a Microsoft exec famously planned to “cut off Netscape’s air supply”).
New York Times
● 30/06/2023

Deep demake or meta media archaeology? Thanks to programmer WebFritzi, retro gaming fans can now enjoy Windows 95 classics Solitaire, Freecell, and Minesweeper on a Commodore 64—iconic Windows 95 desktop interface and mouse support included. Recreating an authentic 1995 PC experience on an 8-bit platform from a decade prior required some assembly language wizardry. “How are the icons created? Can you make a user interface like this? I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” stunned Commodore fans wrote online.

GitHub
● 16/05/2023
“ChatGPT is an advertisement for Microsoft. It’s an advertisement for studio heads, the military, and others who might want to actually license this technology via Microsoft’s cloud services.”
– Signal Foundation president and AI Now Institute co-founder Meredith Whittaker, on the strategy behind releasing generative AI to the public. “It costs billions of dollars to create and maintain these systems head-to-tail,” Whittaker says. “There isn’t a business model in simply making ChatGPT available for everyone equally. The technology is going to follow the current matrix of inequality.”
Slate
● 07/04/2023
“What just drives me up the wall is that we appear to have decided the way AI is going to work is through a competitive dynamic between Google, Microsoft, and Meta.”
– New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, airing frustrations about the AI ethics and safety communities’ inattentiveness to capitalism. Citing DeepMind’s AlphaFold as a prime example for positive AI breakthroughs (rather than manipulative chatbots tied to advertising), Klein imagines a world where governments offer prizes for AI challenges and results go into the public domain.
Hard Fork
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● 04/08/2020
“She was the first person to realize that this problem exists, to talk about it, and do academic work around it until the powers that be took notice.”
– Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, on MIT computer scientist and activist Joy Buolamwini, whose research helped persuade Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft to put a hold on facial recognition technology.
FastCompany
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