Friday 10th May 2024

Why Southeast Asia became a spyware hotspot

A new Amnesty International report raises difficult questions.

Continued here

Hacking our way to better team meetings

As someone who takes plenty of notes, I’m always on the lookout for tools and strategies that can help me to refine my own note-taking process (such as the Cornell Method). And while I generally prefer pen and paper (because it’s shown to help with retention and synthesis), there’s no denying that technology can help to enhance our built-up abilities. This is especially true in situations such as meetings, where actively participating and taking notes at the same time can be in conflict with one another. The distraction of looking down to jot down notes or tapping away at the keyboard can make it hard to stay engaged in the conversation, as it forces us to make quick decisions about what details are important, and there’s always the risk of missing important details while trying to capture previous ones. Not to mention, when faced with back-to-back-to-back meetings, the challenge of summarizing and extracting important details from pages of notes is compounding – and when considered at a group level, there is significant individual and group time waste in modern business with these types of administrative overhead.

Faced with these problems on a daily basis, my team – a small tiger team I like to call OCTO (Office of the CTO) – saw an opportunity to use AI to augment our team meetings. They have developed a simple, and straightforward proof of concept for ourselves, that uses AWS services like Lambda, Transcribe, and Bedrock to transcribe and summarize our virtual team meetings. It allows us to gather notes from our meetings, but stay focused on the conversation itself, as the granular details of the discussion are automatically captured (it even creates a list of to-dos). And today, we’re open sourcing the tool, which our team calls “Distill”, in the hopes that others might find this useful as well: https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-bedrock-audio-summarizer.

Continued here

How to Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)

If you want to be your best and perform at a high level, fear of people’s opinions may be holding you back. Our fear of other people’s opinions, or FOPO, has become an irrational and unproductive obsession in the modern world, and its negative effects reach far beyond performance. If you start paying less and less attention to what makes you you—your talents, beliefs, and values—and start conforming to what others may or may not think, you’ll harm your potential. If you really want to conquer FOPO, you’ll need to cultivate more self-awareness. Most of us go through life with a general sense of who we are, and, in a lot of circumstances, that’s enough. We get by. But if you want to be your best while being less fearful of people’s opinions, you need to develop a stronger and deeper sense of who you are. You can start by developing a personal philosophy—a word or phrase that expresses your basic beliefs and values. This philosophy isn’t a platitude or slogan; rather, it’s a compass, guiding your actions, thoughts, and decisions.

Continued here

Does the Universe expand by stretching or creating space?

It’s been almost 100 years since humanity first reached a revolutionary conclusion about the nature of our Universe: space itself cannot and does not remain static, but rather evolves with the passage of time. One of the most unsettling predictions of Einstein’s general relativity is that any Universe — so long as it’s uniformly (or almost uniformly) filled with one or more species of matter, radiation, or energy — cannot remain the same over time. Instead, it must either expand or contract, something initially derived independently by three separate people: Alexander Friedmann (1922), Georges Lemaitre (1927), and Howard Robertson (1929), and was later generalized by Arthur Walker (1936).

Right at around the same time, starting in 1923, observations began to show that the spirals and ellipticals in our sky were actually galaxies: “island universes” that were well outside of our own Milky Way. With new, more powerful measurements, we could determine that the farther away a galaxy was from us, the greater the arriving light in our instruments was redshifted, or observed at longer wavelengths, compared to the light that was initially emitted. It was as though the very act of journeying through space altered the wavelength of that traveling light.

Continued here

4 "love-based" approaches to allyship after the DE&I backlash

In recent years, many organizations have realized that the journey towards real allyship and lasting societal change is not as simple as hosting one employee celebration and posting about it on social media. It’s a long and complex path, requiring a concerted and sustained effort from the entire company in a way that underpins their culture and values. 

Many leaders are still committed to this journey but tackling the fatigue in our teams — the “ally-weariness” as I call it — has been made even harder as organizations navigate the growing backlash against DE&I. Movement against progressive policies has seen a rollback of legislation around affirmative action in the US, and many roles within DE&I are being cut as resources are quietly reassigned elsewhere. Vocal pushback on social media has also made business leaders more cautious, afraid to rock the boat and become the next target of negative online attention. 

Continued here

Rum punch, music, and "election cake": How to vote like it's 1799

I kicked Election Day off by making myself a large glass of rum punch from Martha Washington’s recipe (orange juice, lemon juice, cloves, cinnamon, etc.). I did this because, for one thing, day drinking was the norm in the 1790s. Booze was especially common during election season. Voting was much more festive then — at least for the privileged few who were allowed to vote. 

When George Washington ran for the Virginia legislature in 1758, he provided voters with 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and 2 gallons of hard cider. He won the election with more than 300 well-lubricated votes.

Continued here

Art critic Jerry Saltz: A "Francis Bacon of AI art" will emerge, but today's work falls flat

Art produced by or with the help of artificial intelligence is more popular than ever, from the record-breaking $432,000 auction of Obvious collective’s Portrait of Edmond Belamy to the overwhelming success of Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised” exhibit at the MoMA. But one art-world figure decidedly not on board is Jerry Saltz, the seasoned resident art critic of Vulture magazine. Saltz has made no secret of his distaste for AI art, the artists who make it, and the people who flock in line to see or, God forbid, buy it. His scathing reviews have upset many in the tech world, and, in the case of Anadol’s “Unsupervised,” sparked heated back-and-forths on X.

“This kind of work, if it were the scale of a regular painting, would be ridiculous,” Saltz tells Big Think. “You’d just laugh at it. It does not have scale so much as it’s big and takes up room. It keeps crowds interested for whole minutes at a time. It gets crowds in.”

Continued here

The algorithmic ocean: How AI Is revolutionizing marine conservation

Dyhia Belhabib’s journey to becoming a marine scientist began with war funerals on TV. Her hometown, on the pine-forested slopes of the Atlas Mountains in northern Algeria, lies only 60 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. But a trip to the beach was dangerous. A bitter civil war raged across the mountains as she was growing up in the 1990s; the conflict was particularly brutal for Belhabib’s people, the Berbers, one of the Indigenous peoples of North Africa. As she puts it: “We didn’t go to the ocean much, because you could get killed on the way there.”

The ocean surfaced in her life in another way, on state-run television. When an important person was assassinated or a massacre occurred, broadcasters would interrupt regular programming to show a sober documentary. They frequently chose a Jacques Cousteau film, judged sufficiently dignified and neutral to commemorate the deaths. Whenever she saw the ocean on television, Belhabib would wonder who had died. “My generation thinks of tragedies when we see the ocean,” she says. “I didn’t grow to love it in my youth.”

Continued here

TikTok Says it Will Start Labeling AI-Generated Content

"AI enables incredible creative opportunities, but can confuse or mislead viewers if they don't know content was AI-generated," the company said in a prepared statement Thursday. "Labeling helps make that context clear--which is why we label AIGC made with TikTok AI effects, and have required creators to label realistic AIGC for over a year."

The move is part of an overall effort by those in the technology industry to provide more safeguards for AI usage. In February Meta announced that it was working with industry partners on technical standards that will make it easier to identify images and eventually video and audio generated by artificial intelligence tools. The efforts would include


Continued here

New Mexico's Top Prosecutor Blames Meta for Online Predators

The arrests are the result of a monthslong undercover operation in which the suspects connected with decoy accounts that were set up by the state Department of Justice. The investigation began in December around the time the state filed a civil lawsuit against the social media giant, claiming Meta was failing to take basic precautionary measures to ensure children were safe on its platforms.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said during a news conference Wednesday that the suspects communicated and exchanged explicit sexual content through Facebook's messenger app and were clear in expressing a sexual interest in children.


Continued here