@damonberes.com
Senior editor at The Atlantic, focused on tech // Writing EASY MODE, a book exploring technology, humanity, and the importance of friction, for Scribner SIGNAL: Damon.63 📨 dberes at the atlantic dot com ✴️ damonberes.com
people joke about what experiencing even the banalities of modern society would do to a medieval peasant, but here's a German tourist from a small farming village who says some Times Square salsa verde physically incapacitated him gothamist.com/food/theres-...
I don't know how anybody could forgive this. The stain of these detentions, already quite old—Dilley was opened by the Obama administration—will endure for a generation at least.
"mass job loss, at least for now, is not an inevitability so much as a narrative. Executives are constantly being told that AI cuts are coming, and as pressure grows for them to signal that they are making good use of the technology, layoffs offer one of the easiest ways for them to do so."
"The guy pouring my beer in Anchorage told me that he knew there was no truth to decades-old rumors about a research facility 200 miles to the northeast. Nobody was up there talking to aliens or controlling people’s minds. 'They just do the aurora,' he said" @kait.bsky.social
but also bsky.app/profile/damo...
New: @matteowong.bsky.social talked to a number of legal experts about OpenAI's contract with the Pentagon. It sure does look like mass surveillance of Americans through GPT and autonomous weapons are on the table... and it isn't really up to OpenAI, anyway.
Talked to contract, national-security, and technology legal experts about OpenAI's deal with the Pentagon. They had concerns.
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
To me, this says quite a bit more than any of their blog posts—which they have revised after initial publication—and any of the employee tweets about this, though I'm sure they'd say they're being as transparent as possible. Interesting company.
Also, just to say it: OpenAI had nearly an entire week to respond to requests for comment for this article. They dragged and dragged and finally sent a small handful of bullet points "on background" at the very end of the day today, without making a statement on the record about any of this.
New: @matteowong.bsky.social talked to a number of legal experts about OpenAI's contract with the Pentagon. It sure does look like mass surveillance of Americans through GPT and autonomous weapons are on the table... and it isn't really up to OpenAI, anyway.
Really compelling new episode of Galaxy brain about what Netflix did to da movies, with @cwarzel.bsky.social and @davidlsims.bsky.social
oh my
Definitely one of Spielberg’s best
This is just exceptional.
Great new story by @cwarzel.bsky.social detailing the very big problems with prediction markets—"the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder."
We’re excited to announce two journalists who are becoming staff writers at The Atlantic: @satopol.bsky.social and @jenishawo.bsky.social. More here: www.theatlantic.com/press-releas...
Source describes the failed Pentagon-Anthropic talks: through the end, the Pentagon wanted to use Anthropic's AI to analyze bulk data collected about Americans (Ross Andersen/The Atlantic)
Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
“They should have done it sooner, Michael. They could have made a deal. They should’ve done it sooner. They played too cute.”
NEW: The reason that Anthropic wasn’t okay with simply confining its models to the cloud
New details on the dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic; how the negotiations broke down, and a particular sticking point on AI in the cloud vs inside of edge systems. by @rossandersen.bsky.social / tip @techmeme.com
You really need to hear the audio in this article, it's unbelievable
In happier news, get a load of these seals www.theatlantic.com/photography/...
As far back as 2019, employees had specifically run a test on Instagram to understand how experimental accounts engaging in what the company termed “groomer-esque behavior”—following “teen hashtags” or “sexy teen accounts”—would come across minors. At issue was the app’s recommendation algorithm, which connects soccer fans to pictures of Lionel Messi, for example, or aspiring travel influencers to videos about little-known cafés in Greece. It also seemed to funnel children to potentially dangerous adults with whom they wouldn’t otherwise be connected. “We are recommending nearly 4X as many minors to groomers (nearly 2 million minors in the last 3 months),” the report read, according to an internal document we viewed. According to this test, 27 percent of the recommendations shown to these “groomer-esque” accounts belonged to minors, compared with 7 percent of the accounts recommended to everyday adults. The report continues: “22% of those recommendations resulted in a follow request”—meaning that potential groomers attempted to interact with these minors nearly a quarter of the time. Even so, Instagram waited years before locking down accounts belonging to its youngest users.
Meta knew what the risk was. In 2019, an internal analysis showed that 27% of the account recommendations made to people engaging in "groomer-esque" behavior belonged to minors—"We are recommending nearly 4X as many minors to groomers (nearly 2 million minors in the last 3 months)" an employee wrote
(Yes: one point nine percent.)
