"...Businesses, not individuals, have always been the main focus of social credit. Yet the myth of citizen scoring was so pervasive that some observers even coined the term âcorporate social credit systemâ to refer to the real regulatory framework, just to distinguish it from the fantasy."
1/
"Silicon samples" are becoming more and more common in research and polling.
One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.
The updated version of this preprint is now online!
THREADđ§”
arxiv.org/abs/2509.13397
The report's first fix: don't blame users. Blaming individuals for being misinformed is a misdiagnosis. We need systemic reform â better platform design, crowdsourced knowledge (like Wikipedia), media literacy, and fact-checking that actually reaches people.
6/10
Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices
A diagram showing the VDA framework and the Arc of Democracy. At the top, three icons label the essential elements of democracy: Verification (tick), Deliberation (speech bubble), and Accountability (magnifying glass). Arrows descend from each through three horizontal bands representing the arc: Substantial (truth tested, voices included, power constrained), Performative (forms remain but substance is weak, rituals without consequence), and Simulated (appearance maintained but functions inverted: propaganda as verification, polarisation as deliberation, scapegoating as accountability). A vertical arrow on the left marks the arc's direction: improvements, decline, collapse. A column on the right maps counterpublics onto the same three states: functional counterpublics act in a substantial way, hollow counterpublics in a performative way, disordered counterpublics in a simulated way. The bands shift from grey through pink to red as democracy moves toward simulation.
I've set out the framework I'm using here in an earlier thread, on VDA, the Arc of Democracy, and the moral-epistemic stacks idea, what follows applies that framework to the Palantir document directly. skywriter.blue/@eliothiggin...
Need this on a nappy
Exactly how would they know photos are of âyou and your loved onesâ or that anyone other than the direct user would be OK with this?
Post storm potatomaxxing
Not just you
literally every day my wife or I go outside with our daughter people go out of their way to be friendly, offer aid or a kind word, no matter where we've traveled. it's nice to remember that hostility as default mode of interaction is not destiny, much as it benefits some to pretend it is
For generations, programmers have tried their damnedest to follow DRY: don't repeat yourself.
If you need to do one thing many times, make it happen in one place, and then have those many different times use that one place.
This means if you change it, for any reason, you go to that one place.
So at the risk of maybe overreading this and making an educated guess, I think I can guess what specifically Wyden is talking about.
I think it's about use of AI (LLMs) by FBI to surveil American communications without a warrant
Mundus sine reginos
They are cute. Which helps with the rest of it.
"Thanks to its porous border with Italy, millions of migrants from around the world flock to the Vatican every year. In fact, even the year-round population of the Vatican seems to be entirely made up of immigrants, as its birth rate is virtually zero."
The thing that particularly irks me is that line in Pulp Fiction happens in the beginning but is a set up for the final scene, and the point of it is that Jackson said it for years not realizing that *he* wasn't the shepherd; he was the tyranny of evil men. youtu.be/mvy4YH9--Vw?...
Quote post with something good that lasted longer than the Confederacy (1861-1865)
Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974)
faux liberalism (ezra klein) vs actual liberalism (mill)
whatâs funny about this is that tarantino wrote this âezekiel 25:17â for the film. it isnât actually in the bible. publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/hegseth-bo...
And to be excluded from Privacy Act requirements!
"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago."
If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.
Couple of dudes outside my work engaging in what looked suspiciously like a drug deal but upon closer inspection it turned out to be be a feijoa exchange đ«Ą
I wrote up my concerns about the CJEU's Russmedia ruling. This is the first of two posts, it's about the bad results of relying on the GDPR (and displacing laws like the DSA) to define platforms' liability for content.
Post two will review arguments that the case is more limited.
1/
Crouton
I really donât love the data as oil metaphor. If we need a metaphor I prefer something like data as clothing, âcos itâs about specifics and if people are involved thereâs the possibility for chafing if the cut of the cloth is wrong for them.
Weâve been dealing with ai giving out board memberâs personal phone numbers as Qtopiaâs contact numbers, but a hospital is so much worse. We havenât found any mechanism to tell ai tools to stop
For fuck's sake, ChatGPT is not a therapist. Not only is your whole chat history subpoenable, but a tool that sounds like a therapist but is actually designed to tell you what you want to hear is very bad for your mental health and possibly the well-being of the people around you.
Someday, someone is going to make a movie about the tech-bros who recklessly dismantled the professional US administrative state and itâs going to be devastating.
Gripping excerpt from âInto the Wood Chipper,â Nicholas Enrich. h/t @marisakabas.bsky.social
www.thehandbasket.co/p/trump-usai...
Discworld QOTD, from Thud!