Tag Archives: ethics

href weekly | June 2 – June 8 2025

Bits

mythcloud.eu explores the enduring power of shared stories and their relevance to our everyday lives. It is an open education resource developed as part of Erasmus+ project Digital Mythologies.

“It’s a symptom of a totalizing cultural paradigm in which passive consumption and regurgitation of content becomes the status quo.” https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/

“People are already trusting today’s friendly, patient, often insightful AIs for facts and guidance on nearly any issue, and they will be vulnerable to being misled and manipulated, whether by design or by emergent behavior.” What AI Thinks It Knows About You

“Developing a robust ethics, in other words, is participatory and cultural; rules have to be worked out in the complex context of the human experience, with a lot of trial and error. Maybe we should have known that commonsense rules, whether coded into a positronic brain or approximated by a large language model, wouldn’t instill machines with our every value.” What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living with A.I.

“Deep learning can act as co-pilot. Without the eye of the humanist, though, you don’t stand a chance at decipherment.” https://longnow.org/ideas/the-codes-ai-cant-crack/

Gardening

“No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward .. Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.” https://orionmagazine.org/article/natural-intelligence/

Travel

Love getting updates from my kids – they are working on Bornholm this month

Politics & Economics

Fascinating reporting on the role of shortwave #radio in the rise of far-right militias https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/the-divided-dial-episode-2-you-must-form-your-militia-units

Why You Should Shop at Your Farmers Market This Summer https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/06/02/Why-Shop-Farmers-Market/

href weekly | Feb 11 – Feb 17 2024

Bits

Canada’s intent to ban the Flipper Zero wireless tool over car thefts is, on the one hand, an everyday example of poorly researched government action. https://hackaday.com/2024/02/12/canada-bans-flipper-zero-over-what-it-imagines-it-does/

Replicating our existing capabilities, simply at greater speed and lower cost, is a minor achievement. The most valuable tools complement human capabilities and open new frontiers of possibility. The most pedestrian ones incrementally outperform existing tools. https://www.noemamag.com/how-ai-could-help-rebuild-the-middle-class/

The University of Michigan is selling hours of audio recordings of study groups, office hours, lectures, and more to outside third-parties for tens of thousands of dollars for the purpose of training large language models https://www.404media.co/university-of-michigan-sells-recordings-of-study-groups-and-office-hours-to-train-ai/

Don’t trust corporations, especially those where one egomaniac has all the power. Use and community driven solutions if you can https://nitter.cz/

Comics

American Counterculture, Glimpsed Through https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fculture%2Fcultural-comment%2Famerican-counterculture-glimpsed-through-zines

Politics & Economics

https://thewalrus.ca/the-diminishing-romance-of-train-travel/

“If you want to operate on a private-sector-market-economy level playing field, then you have to be internally consistent and do that to the highways as well.” https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/transportation/privatization-ahead-for-vias-most-travelled-route/