Category: Tech

The Children Are Our Future

Children R Our Future Claws of the Panda Tech 32 Comments

And that’s why my retirement plan includes collecting useful recipes.

Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In the US, Britain, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendencies started to rise sharply. Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, noticed a change when students who were brought up with smartphones started to arrive on campus. They were angrier. More fragile. More likely to take offense.[…]

“It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,” he says. “For all human history, millions of years, all mammals play. Anyone who has had a puppy knows it’s all about play. So we had play dates in childhood, up until around 2010.” In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply. Lockdown, needless to say, didn’t help.

“I’m calling it the great rewiring of childhood… It hit the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand in exactly the same way.” Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but “performing on a platform.” Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, “where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people… Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re eighteen. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.”

A.I. Will Save Us All

Tech Tommy Douglas: Not Dead Enough 7 Comments

Read the whole thing.

The Sunday Times- The app that promised an NHS ‘revolution’ then went down in flames

At the time, the “AI” Parsa was selling was a symptom-checker that would suggest possible treatments based on answers to prompts. Behind it, though, was not a complex algorithm but “decision trees written by doctors, put into an Excel spreadsheet”, Harvey said. It was, in short, a zippier way to look up answers in a medical textbook. Harvey was dismayed.

Margin Of Fraud

Margin Of Fraud Tech 4 Comments

I’ve been assured by the experts that this is impossible: Cyberattack on DC election site

RansomedVC claims to have its hands on 600,000 lines of U.S. voter data, specifically records from Washington, D.C., voters, as a result of the breach. They now claim they are selling this stolen information on the dark web, though the exact price remains a mystery.

As proof of authenticity, RansomedVC shared a single record containing the personal details of a Washington, D.C., voter. This dataset includes the individual’s name, registration ID, voter ID, partial Social Security number (SSN), driver’s license number, date of birth, phone number and email. While some voter registration data is public in Washington, D.C., confidential info like contact details and SSNs are off-limits according to election authorities.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Football Tech 12 Comments

Over the weekend, so-called “video-assisted referees” (or VAR) made a major mistake in the Liverpool-Tottenham match that denied Liverpool a goal, which proved to be the difference in the match. It was not the first error made by VAR — Sky Sports has documented 14 instances of VAR errors in the Premier League over just the past 2 seasons, for which an apology was later issued […]

Part of the application of technology to refereeing games is about reducing the uncertainty in judgments, but another part is about legitimacy; that is, the general acceptance of referee judgments and the overall integrity of compe­tition. Technology, it turns out, presents challenges to legitimacy and the key to preserving legitimacy. Let me explain.

The Left’s New Rules: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Baiting The Left Democrats Media Tech 10 Comments

When did it become perfectly okay to convict someone before their day in court? Rumble thankfully still agrees with innocent until proven guilty:

For those who still don’t get why destroying Brand purely on allegations, Styxhexenhammer has some thoughts.

Let That Sink In

CreepyJoeBiden Freespeechers Social Disease Surveillance State 13 Comments

National Review;

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment by pressuring social-media platforms to censor posts about Covid-19 and elections.

The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling says that the White House likely “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” The panel of three judges found that the administration “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”

A lower court previously placed restrictions on the Biden administration’s communications with social-media platforms; those restrictions applied to a number of government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department, Homeland Security, and the U.S. Census Bureau.

After temporarily blocking the order, the Fifth Circuit judges have now modified the order to apply only to the White House, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI.

More here.

Plus, a blow by blow from Tracy Beanz: I want to stop for a second (again) and go over how monumental this actually is. This is the first time ever that a normal “user” or American has submitted evidence of social media censorship and had their concerns ADDRESSED at all by a COURT OF LAW.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Cancelled Tech 5 Comments

Big Brother, take the wheel.

Tuesday was a banner day for censorship in America.

Within an hour of each other, I saw two prominent individuals lose access to major publishing platforms. In one case, Apple removed with no warning and no explanation Glenn Beck’s podcast from their platform, and in the other Scott Adams announced that Amazon has permanently banned him from self-publishing his books on their Kindle platform.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Writing Overlords

Embrace Hollywood Tech 10 Comments

“Democrats need to embrace Hollywood because this is where they need to come to learn how to tell a story.“ – Michael Moore.

The first draft is the most lucrative step in any feature writer deal. A rule of thumb is that a “rewrite” pays two-thirds of a “first draft.” So if you’re being paid $75,000 for a rewrite, you should expect to get $100,000 for the first draft. In practice that gap tends to be a little bigger but for our purposes, two-thirds is a good benchmark (Remember that calculation because it’s going to become very important later on in our discussion of A.I.).

Via Stephen Green.

Fake Women

Tech 23 Comments

Zerohedge- Hollywood Starlets Face Extinction As Sexy AI-Influencers Invade Social Media

Thanks to the advent of AI-powered image and video generators, as well as chatbots, a number of virtual influencers, such as “Milla Sofia,” are posting content that appears to show them living a life of luxury.

Sofia may claim to hail from Finland and post bikini pictures from European trips. And to the untrained eye, her content appears real, but it’s not. A message on the AI bot’s website reads Sofia is a “24-year-old virtual influencer and fashion model.”

AI bots can pump out quality content much faster, at a much cheaper price. Where an Onlyfans model might charge $20.00+ for a subscription to their page, a bot could produce the same photos, videos, and messages for less than half the price.

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