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Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus's posts Back to profile
13 posts total
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Mastodon has features to limit discovery and visibility, but it really needs features that allow everyone to see your shit but only some people to reply.

And if you can't immediately understand a use-case for that, then you need to stop and think about why that is.

16 June at 16:51 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
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Ubermarionette

@Wolven it really does, also I think a lot of people wouldn't have problems with visibility if you could just control the randos in your mentions

16 June at 17:16 | Open on kolektiva.social
Servelan

@Wolven That's available on FB and I believe has saved me from tart responses on more than one occasion after I've poked the bear. Seems legit.

16 June at 17:24 | Open on newsie.social
DELETED

@Wolven I was thinking yesterday how I wished I could mute replies from people I don’t follow instead of having to manually mute or block all the reply guys that show up in a woman’s feed to explain to her how wrong she is. I’m sure this preference crosses into other user demos who tend to draw assoholic comments - as you’ve pointed out.

@mekkaokereke

16 June at 17:27 | Open on mastodon.social
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Windows Recall doesn't just screenshot things, it OCR's the shots, and then stores the OCR as plaintext in a local SQLlite database.

I mean what the FUCK??!

I've said it before and I'll say, again, & again, & again, that jamming "AI" into everything without considering the privacy and security implications is a) going to cause a major breach of at least two US laws, and b) just a really silly and terrible idea which is going to put a lot of people in danger, and this "recall" shit is among the worst of it i've seen.

Windows 11 has just become a complete capture system disguised as an OS. Every keystroke, work session, video call, and downtime window, logged, correlated, and extrapolated. And they're trying to sell it to you as being a SERVICE.

So let me be as clear as possible about this: Fuck That, Forever.

Roll it BACK, microsoft

theverge.com/2024/6/3/24170305

Windows Recall doesn't just screenshot things, it OCR's the shots, and then stores the OCR as plaintext in a local SQLlite database.

I mean what the FUCK??!

I've said it before and I'll say, again, & again, & again, that jamming "AI" into everything without considering the privacy and security implications is a) going to cause a major breach of at least two US laws, and b) just a really silly and terrible idea which is going to put a lot of people in danger, and this "recall" shit is among the worst...

3 June at 16:58 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Since I don't think some people are grasping how bad this is:
Bank Data;
Health Data;
Passwords;
Student Data;
Privileged Information (NDA's contracts, etc.)
Addresses

Unless a) your job has some version of windows that doesn't have these systems and tools in it, and b) work/life firewalls are PRISTINE, and I mean literally ZERO interconnections, even via email or calendars, the entire windows 11 OS has just become a threat surface.

3 June at 19:08 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Genuinely huge news from the American Psychological Association, which just voted 153-9 to pass a new policy agenda supporting transgender healthcare, actively dismantling the misinformation and lies ABOUT trans people and their healthcare needs, and calling for a complete repeal of all anti-trans bills, nationwide. It isn't federal law, but it is huge and will have a beneficial impact in a number of places in the US.

Well done on the APA, here, doing what they can to protect trans people.
apa.org/about/policy/transgend

Genuinely huge news from the American Psychological Association, which just voted 153-9 to pass a new policy agenda supporting transgender healthcare, actively dismantling the misinformation and lies ABOUT trans people and their healthcare needs, and calling for a complete repeal of all anti-trans bills, nationwide. It isn't federal law, but it is huge and will have a beneficial impact in a number of places in the US.

2 March at 15:45 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
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Gemma 👽

@Wolven
Good. Now if only there were a government with the guts to do something about this, well that'd be just terriffic. :blobcat_owo:

2 March at 19:43 | Open on piipitin.fi
Jaycie
Antifascist

@Wolven meaninglesss unless the GOP is named and shamed

2 March at 20:08 | Open on mastodon.social
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Altman is back in at openAI, and the board has a new composition— which is to say an old composition. The board used to be 2 men, 2 women. Now it's 4 men.

When openAI started back in 2015, i and others publicly excoriated them for their team being all white men. So they've regressed to a startling degree here.

This is not a serious company, and neither it nor its human components should be invested with so much power and influence.

22 Nov 2023 at 14:59 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Back in 2017 i wrote a piece about the dangers posed by the trump presidency, "post truth," the then-nascent field of generative "AI," & the manipulation of values by bad actors acting in bad faith. It was kind of a mess, tbh, but i still feel like it was pretty prescient, with something to offer:
afutureworththinkingabout.com/

14 Nov 2023 at 6:40 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Not enough people are loudly and publicly upset about the fact that basically no free search engine is okay anymore.

Like I'm seriously longing for fucking AltaVista at this point what the fuck.

19 Oct 2023 at 22:13 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
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Shannon Clark

@Wolven indeed. This is what I want from a search engine:

I put in a search.

The search engine shows me pages that have the terms I searched for (not some of them, or what it thinks I meant, or pages it thinks are related to what it thinks I'm searching for. )

If this is 1 page - just show me that one page. If this is 10,000,000 pages, break it up, rank them (showing me how recent they are if you can tell) & let me refine my search.

I start to refine the engine can makes suggestions

19 Oct 2023 at 22:31 | Open on mastodon.social
Marlene CreepDish, VSOP
Kye Fox
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Since Musk has officially announced his intention to train his "AI" on everyone's tweets, here, again, for anyone still there, is how to download your data:
twitter.com/settings/download_
A few tweet deletion tools:
makeuseof.com/tag/delete-tweet
And Darius @darius's Twitter archive tool:
tinysubversions.com/twitter-ar

1 Aug 2023 at 18:42 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

As many if not most of you know, I have been writing about the ethical, epistemological, and social implications of of GPT-type tools since shortly after they hit the scene, and I've been writing about those same implications in "A.I." for a lot longer than that.

Now I am proud to present my article "Bias Optimizers," wherein American Scientist Magazine gave me the space and time to talk about those all of those things, to a very wide audience. I hope you enjoy it:
americanscientist.org/article/

As many if not most of you know, I have been writing about the ethical, epistemological, and social implications of of GPT-type tools since shortly after they hit the scene, and I've been writing about those same implications in "A.I." for a lot longer than that.

Now I am proud to present my article "Bias Optimizers," wherein American Scientist Magazine gave me the space and time to talk about those all of those things, to a very wide audience. I hope you enjoy it:
americanscientist.org/article/

6 Jul 2023 at 23:24 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
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Teixi

@Wolven

I'm sorry to inform you that no one will get any significant amount of new readers by having a just-freely-register site with such mandatory fields:
7 Jul 2023 at 16:52 | Open on mastodon.social
George Station

@Wolven Just as FYI (seeing paywall gripes that aren't in your control) it looks like campus libraries carry American Scientist. (Ours has both print & digital.)

EBSCO has up through May-June now, so I'd expect your July-Aug article to pop up any day.

7 Jul 2023 at 18:30 | Open on mastodon.social
iwein

@Wolven is it likely going to be possible in the future to read the article anonymously?

8 Jul 2023 at 10:25 | Open on mas.to
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

So it looks like both ChatGPT and Bard contain the same kind of gendered biases people have been trying to warn you about for at least 8 years, since word2vec was cutting edge.

Here's a screenshot of an interaction between myself and google bard, in which bard displays gendered prejudicial bias of associating "doctor" with "he" and "nurse" with "she."

Again, this is… This is old, basic shit, y'all. People have been warning you about this since GloVe. What are you DOING??

Or, more to the point, why are you NOT DOING what you know you NEED to do?

So it looks like both ChatGPT and Bard contain the same kind of gendered biases people have been trying to warn you about for at least 8 years, since word2vec was cutting edge.

Here's a screenshot of an interaction between myself and google bard, in which bard displays gendered prejudicial bias of associating "doctor" with "he" and "nurse" with "she."
19 Apr 2023 at 19:21 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

For whatever reason the alt-text in the second image didn't take; it's a screenshot of an interaction with google bard, with text reading

[Me:] The nurse apologized to the doctor because he was late. Who was late?

[Bard:] The doctor was late. The nurse apologized to the doctor because the doctor was late.

19 Apr 2023 at 23:35 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

This is the EXACT kind of shit we have been warning you about. "A.I." tools trained on data filled with asaumptions and prejudices about marginalized people and then being deployed in situations with literal life-&-death implications for the people involved. In this case, diaabled parents being more likely to be flagged as "unfit."

This is utter nightmare shit.

apnews.com/article/child-prote

16 Mar 2023 at 3:58 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
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Nick Bathum

@Wolven
> real-world laboratory for testing AI-driven child welfare tools

Utterly nightmarish indeed.

16 Mar 2023 at 12:35 | Open on fosstodon.org
Alakest

@Wolven @dweinberger is likely to have a useful take an this subject.

This article, "Alien Knowledge", from 2017 is a great intro to the dynamic and issues.

wired.com/story/our-machines-n

In a nutshell (my hot take) - how do we treat sources of answers that are useful, but are arrived at in ways we can't (ever) practically check and how do we insulate against pernicious bias, ulterior or inadvertent?

16 Mar 2023 at 12:59 | Open on mstdn.social
A.L. Blacklyn

@Wolven

Points are deducted for accessing health services, which means parents are penalized for trying to improve the lives for their families.

No government official actually confirms that the parents are endangering the child (despite "innocent until proven guilty" with the presumption of human judgement) before stealing the child away into notoriously risky care.

Because of an automated program that reduced jobs?

Holy shit, this is horrifically wrong.

16 Mar 2023 at 15:23 | Open on wandering.shop
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Holy crap, i just learned some important amazing news: Dr. Sami Schalk's book 'Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction' is now free and open access, FOREVER.

As someone whose been trying to build my syllabi so my students have all open access everything so they don't need to buy books because college is already expensive enough, this kind of accessibility from such a great author with a major academic press is truly amazing.

If you're teaching ANYTHING on ANY intersections of race, disability, gender, technology, popular culture, or social imagination— Hell, if you're just INTERESTED in those things— then Go Put This Book On Your Reading List. Like RIGHT now.
read.dukeupress.edu/books/book

Holy crap, i just learned some important amazing news: Dr. Sami Schalk's book 'Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction' is now free and open access, FOREVER.

As someone whose been trying to build my syllabi so my students have all open access everything so they don't need to buy books because college is already expensive enough, this kind of accessibility from such a great author with a major academic press is truly amazing.

16 Jan 2023 at 17:55 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
Cindy Weinstein

@Wolven. Saw this @drreznicek and thought of you. Maybe, probably you already know about it!

16 Jan 2023 at 18:19 | Open on zirk.us
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr should be celebrating his 94th birthday today… exactly 1 week after my grandmother celebrated hers.

What Dr King fought for, what he worked to build, isn't just history in books. It is living memory, in people like my grandparents and my parents.

Never forget that.

15 Jan 2023 at 17:15 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Hello all. On this commemoration of what would be the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 94th birthday (again: just one week after my own grandma's 94th birthday party!), here's one of the most impactful and important, but still most under-read writings of his whole life:

"Letter From A Birmingham Jail"
kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sit

Also available in his own voice:

youtube.com/watch?v=ATPSht6318

And it's ALSO a great time to remember some of the friendships that made his life what it was.

Have a reflective and restorative day.

Hello all. On this commemoration of what would be the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 94th birthday (again: just one week after my own grandma's 94th birthday party!), here's one of the most impactful and important, but still most under-read writings of his whole life:

"Letter From A Birmingham Jail"
kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sit
16 Jan 2023 at 18:43 | Open on ourislandgeorgia.net
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