Nasser Eledroos @nasser@heck.town

A complete Rainbow... photo was taken at around 30k ft above the Earth. On the ground, we usually only see the arc half of the circle.
Credit Photo: Lloyd J Ferraro
More details/photos: http://bit.ly/3SvxXbw

My colleagues at the Stanford Internet Observatory have written up our observations on studying TikTok and the issues with their proposed researcher API.

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/tiktok-just-announced-data-its-willing-share-whats-missing

Hilarious and horrifying. Such a well-written post.

Let's build a Chrome extension that steals everything
https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

#introduction

A few weeks ago there was a discussion about the need for a #Mastodon instance dedicated to NGOs, nonprofits, and folks in the human rights space.

So I got to work with @happy and @gillo and created https://mastodon.ngo! We're admin'ing this instance together and we'll be maintaining it for the long term.

If you or your organization or someone you know is interested in creating an account, let me know. You can also request an account here: https://mastodon.ngo/about

Hello #Boston humans! This Friday 2/17, I'll be at Harvard Bookstore! I'll be reading from The Terraformers and in conversation with the amazing Charles C. Mann (author of 1491). The fun starts at 7pm. Come join us for a journey into the deep future and the deep past. https://www.harvard.com/event/annalee_newitz3/ #books #bookstodon #TheTerraformers

@ndiakopoulos made a nifty Jupyter notebook with uses of GPT-3 for journalism tasks.

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1rr0dxKpwK5zjch1V4eKjwwyVW-AzuDTw#scrollTo=AC5QCa-kTXKi

Cool to see my experiments in using it to extract structured data from raw text being improved on.

Maryland has proposed a state-level "Privacy Technology Board," which would act as a watchdog -- similar to Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission.

I think if enacted, it would be the first state-level board of its kind! (Hat tip: @t3chlaw@twitter.com )

https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/sb0583?ys=2023RS

The perfect FCC filing does not exis

God save us from the pundits. The SOTU is the embodiment of “that could have been an e-mail.”

Google used to take pride in minimizing time we spent there, guiding us to relevant pages as quickly as possible. Over time, they tried to answer everything themselves: longer snippets, inline FAQs, search results full of knowledge panels.

Today's Bard announcement feels like their natural evolution: extracting all value out of the internet for themselves, burying pages at the bottom of each GPT-generated essay like footnotes. https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/