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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • They’ve admitted it a lot. Where are you getting that disinformation?

    Well trying to find an actual statement is more difficult than I remember, but that could partially be due to Google ongoing enshittification. I did find this in a TIME article about the “IBM and the Holocaust” book from 2001:

    Of course, not everyone agrees with Seltzer’s assessment — least of all IBM. Last week, the company released a statement: “If this book points to new and verifiable information that advances understanding of this tragic era, IBM will examine it and ask that appropriate scholars do the same.” But company spokespeople insist that Black’s allegations are not new, that historians have long been aware that the Nazis used IBM’s tabulating machines. And, spokespeople insist, the company is paying for its mistakes: IBM Germany, formerly Dehomag, has already paid into Germany’s government-sponsored initiative to compensate citizens forced to work for the Nazis.

    I thought there was a lot more public acknowledgement though, and it’s hard to find. So - 50%?








  • This is getting posted a lot which is too bad because it’s worse than useless.

    Do people not understand how technically useless 80% of users are? They CAN NOT REMEMBER THEIR PASSWORDS. (No, they didn’t write them down. Password management software? lol.)

    I’m saying the height of their technical ability is to remember their password. And we want them to switch platforms, away from a fascist right-wing brainwashing troll factory to- what is it called again?

    Yeah. It needs a guide with this title, but actually useful. Well-written, with the context that people reading it are already well above and beyond in making an effort.

    Why are so many people still on Xitter? I have a fucking idea.










  • In light of Baker’s reporting, Stanford University opened its own internal inquiry into the matter. A panel of scientists concluded that Tessier-Lavigne’s work contained image manipulations in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-2016, and 2021.

    But the panel dismissed any allegations of fraud or misconduct on the part of Tessier-Lavigne himself. Instead, they conclude that the “unusual frequency of manipulation of research data” in the neuroscientist’s lab “suggests that there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management”.

    lol


  • [w/r/t API kerfuffle] In some ways, this makes sense: third-party apps let users skip ads, which hits Reddit’s bottom line. The pricing, however, seems steep. Why?

    Well, the answer is AI. Basically, former Reddit board member Sam Altman, who departed in 2022, admitted his company, OpenAI, had trained on Reddit data. I find it difficult to believe that Huffman didn’t know OpenAI was training using Reddit’s data, particularly since Altman sat on Huffman’s board. Suddenly, Huffman is saying the API is very valuable, especially to buzzy AI companies that investors have lately had the hots for. This seems to position Reddit as being in the shovels business during the AI gold rush.