ISSUE 1.12

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Give Us Your Passwords

Privacy invasions, high on the apocalypse, telltale pacemakers, skynet, technology economies, brain drone races, community submissions, and more!

[theatlantic.com]

'Give Us Your Passwords'

The Department of Homeland Security is considering making it possible for border agents to ask for the websites you visit - and your passwords. Scarier still, this practice might inspire other countries to follow suit. Bleh!

[thebaffler.com]

High on the Apocalypse

"A staggering number of our political theorists believe that the only way to make the world better is to destroy it." An interesting read that's ultimately pro-reasoned-utopian, arguing that we should continue to try to make things, better, not worse. Their words gooder than mine.

[theverge.com]

iCloud was quietly storing years of cleared browsing histories

Yeah, I mean, if you didn't already assume this was happening, you need step up your tinfoil hat game.

[arstechnica.com]

Ohio man’s pacemaker data may betray him in arson, insurance fraud case

We're getting way more mileage out of "telltale heart" jokes than I thought we would. The future (of recorded heart data)! Thanks to @__jcbl__ for forwarding this one.

[wired.com]

The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding

The article envisions a world where tons of people are doing basic but useful technology programming for the large middle swathe of technology-driven companies. An interesting idea, although I have my (completely uninformed) reservations about just how many programmers our economy needs (or will accept), especially with more sophisticated, capable open source tooling and platforms-as-a-service for each industry develop. I've found that technology companies like to consolidate their technology and sell it, and the mechanics of software mean that after a certain point the One Service is just good enough for everyone. Of course, though, we'll still need plenty of plumbers - we're not hitting the end of the programmer demand side any time soon. (My advice? Learn devops and get good at it. That's not going anywhere anytime soon.)

[techcrunch.com]

University of Florida held the world’s first brain-controlled drone race

OK, fucking cool. EEG headsets + calibration + drones = brain controlled drone race. Thanks @websterwade!

[wired.com]

The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class

Nothing you probably haven't heard before but a good recap (or intro if you haven't) - very low and very high paying jobs being created, need more education, need more entrepreneurs.

[asimovinstitute.com]

Analyzing Six Deep Learning Tools For Music Generation

Neat little article running through a bunch of different machine-learning-driven music generation tools and software - with audio samples! Some are creating pop songs from generated melodies and harmonies (and then assisted by humans), some directly create audio, others create MIDI data.

Tweets From Dystopia

@0xdeadbabe: probably the best thing to do now that the FBI are monitoring every tweet by every user is to just be shitposting 24/7
@ctrlcreep: AIs raised by humans are considered feral, wild and inarticulate, compared to AIs raised by AI