Archives: Bookmarks
Why We Are Wired to Connect | Scientific American
Whenever we finish doing some kind of non-social thinking, the network for social thinking comes back on like a reflex – almost instantly.
Why would the brain be set up to do this? We have recently found that this reflex prepares us to walk into the next moment of our lives focused on the minds behind the actions that we see from others. Evolution has placed a bet that the best thing for our brain to do in any spare moment is to get ready to see the world socially. I think that makes a major statement about the extent to which we are built to be social creatures.
[2402.07940] LLMs Among Us: Generative AI Participating in Digital Discourse
We conducted three rounds of the experiment and surveyed participants after each round to measure the ability of LLMs to pose as human participants without human detection. We found that participants correctly identified the nature of other users in the experiment only 42% of the time despite knowing the presence of both bots and humans. We also found that the choice of persona had substantially more impact on human perception than the choice of mainstream LLMs.
kaixxx/noScribe: Cutting edge AI technology for automated audio transcription. A nice GUI for OpenAIs Whisper and pyannote (speaker identification)
An AI-based software that transcribes interviews for qualitative social research or journalistic use
Everyone knows your location
This made me come up with an idea to track myself down externally, e.g. to buy my geolocation data leaked by some application.
China’s Techno-Authoritarianism Has Gone Global | Human Rights Watch
The mass surveillance programs in Xinjiang are China’s most visible and intrusive, but they are just one end of a spectrum. Chinese authorities use technology to control the population all over the country in subtler but still powerful ways. The central bank is adopting digital currency, which will allow Beijing to surveil—and control—people’s financial transactions. China is building so-called safe cities, which integrate data from intrusive surveillance systems to predict and prevent everything from fires to natural disasters and political dissent. The government believes that these intrusions, together with administrative actions, such as denying blacklisted people access to services, will nudge people toward “positive behaviors,” including greater compliance with government policies and healthy habits such as exercising.
Chinese State Media’s Global Influence(r) Operation
To execute this strategy, China has assembled a collection of pro-CCP content creators, including its own state media employees moonlighting as lifestyle influencers, foreigners paid by the CCP to toe the party line, and even members of Chinese ethnic minority groups used in domestic information operations. In total, we have found more than 200 such influencers. Partly owing to their sheer numbers, we have classified them according to their backgrounds, target audiences, and the particularities of their recruitment and management. China’s propaganda influencers fall into three broad categories: “honeypots,” “peers,” and “veiled CSM reporters.”
Same targets, new playbooks: East Asia threat actors employ unique methods
Hawk Tuuuah
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This token based on Solana aims to capture the essence of internet culture, leveraging the power of memes to create value and excitement.
FDR master speech files 1898, 1910-1945
“My friends, judge me by the enemies I have made.”