We have arrived at an obscene inequality crisis, in which wealth is concentrated in the hands of a powerful few, at the cost of crippling hardship, precarity, and compromised well-being for the many. When a single billionaire can accumulate more money in 10 seconds than their employees make in one year, while workers struggle to meet the basic cost of rent and medicine, then yes, every billionaire really is a policy failure. Here’s why.
Les grands enjeux pour wikipédia sont tout autres que ces querelles « woke ou pas woke ». Les préoccupations portent plutôt sur les questions de fiabilité de l’information, avec les multiples campagnes de désinformation, ou encore l’utilisation de l’IA, qui ciblent Wikipédia, mais aussi et surtout les sources utilisées pour écrire des articles sur Wikipédia. En effet, la règle de base est que Wikipédia ne peut être qu’une synthèse du savoir existant, et n’est en aucun cas un lieu de production de savoir inédit. Donc si les sources utilisées sont « corrompues », cela se retrouvera nécessairement sur Wikipédia.
Note : Comme toujours lorsqu'il est question de "wokisme", il est important de se souvenir que ce terme n'a pas de définition précise et est essentiellement une invention des milieux réactionnaires pour attaquer les mouvements humanistes ou progressistes sans avoir besoin d'argumenter, en donnant l'impression de s'attaquer à un phénomène "inquiétant" ou "excessif", et sans jamais avoir besoin d'exprimer clairement les valeurs qu'ils poussent réellement. C'est un épouvantail et une arme de manipulation rhétorique, absolument pas un fait objectif.
Quand le Figaro accuse Wikipédia d'être "woke", la première réponse devrait être une déconstruction de cette affirmation et des valeurs qui la sous-tendent; mettre à jour la vision du monde et le projet politique qui se cachent derrière cette accusation, et réfuter sa légitimité même.
The stars seem to have aligned in Bluesky's favour. But the fundamental tension here isn't about politics - it's about incentives. Venture capital doesn't deploy funding out of altruism or commitment to digital democracy. The standard VC playbook demands exponential growth followed by monetization. Bluesky claims it "doesn't want to rely on advertising," but then what? Subscription models? Premium features? The moment you take VC money, you're signing up for their endgame.
Le contenu de cette vidéo est tellement insensé qu’on croit d’abord à un fake. Mais c’est bien Mark Zuckerberg qui s’exprime ce mardi 7 janvier sur Facebook. Ses propos méritent d’abord un verbatim complet [...]
Facebook built up its Trust & Safety program after the 2016 election debacle. The company’s name was getting dragged through the mud. There was the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the misinformation factories and the political ads paid for in Rubles. Mark Zuckerberg announced he was taking responsibility. It wouldn’t happen again.
He didn’t like it, though. And he didn’t mean it. Zuckerberg’s commitment to Trust & Safety was as deep as Exxon’s commitment to combating the climate crisis. He’ll only commit resources when it seems like he has to.
Despite these ugly attitudes from Trump and his supporters, in the past few months, there's been a deluge of pundits expressing confusion and outrage at straight women who conclude that it's better to be single than waste your one precious life dating — much less marrying — conservative men. Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, famously and repeatedly insisted that such women are "miserable cat ladies," even though it's self-evident that cats make better company than MAGA men. Even the Washington Post editorial board got involved, calling on women to "compromise" by marrying Trump voters.
In 2024, women increasingly responded to these pressures with a "no thank you," though often phrased less politely. After Trump won the election, there was even a spike in interest in the South Korean "4b" movement, where women quit dating, marrying, or having children with men. In truth, this idea was more aspirational than realistic, but the discourse mattered nonetheless. It created space for women to ask the question: Why should they sacrifice their happiness to save the institution of heterosexuality?
This is not to downplay the extent to which Trump is grifting his devotees and those crypto traders looking to make a buck on memecoin speculation. But it is important that we accurately report on his cons and do not contribute to misleading crypto hype for the sake of large numbers.
You don’t have to be a cynic to see a flywheel effect: Crypto has become a meaningful political constituency not because its technology has broad, undeniable utility, but because it has made certain people extremely wealthy, which has attracted a great deal of attention and interest. The industry courts politicians with its wealth, and politicians pander for donations by making promises. Ultimately, the pro-crypto candidate wins, and the price of bitcoin surges, making many of these same people richer and thus able to exert more influence.
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Crypto’s future is uncertain, but its legacy, at least in the short term, seems clearer than it did before November 5. It turns out that cryptocurrencies do have a very concrete use case. They are a technology that has latched on to, and then helped build, a culture that celebrates greed and speculation as virtues just as it embraces volatility. The only predictable thing about crypto seems to be its penchant for attracting and enriching a patchwork of individuals with qualities including, but not limited to, an appetite for risk, an overwhelming optimism about the benefits of technology, or a healthy distrust of institutions. In these ways, crypto is a perfect fit for the turbulence and distrust of the 2020s, as well as the nihilism and corruption of the Trump era.
Musk, the world's richest person, spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars helping Trump get elected president in November. Removing the crash-disclosure provision would particularly benefit Tesla, which has reported most of the crashes – more than 1,500 – to federal safety regulators under the program. Tesla has been targeted in National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigations, including three stemming from the data.
Soupçonné d'avoir tué Brian Thompson, patron d'une assurance privée aux États-Unis, et aujourd'hui devant la justice de New-York, Luigi Mangione a été présenté comme un "bad boy". Pourtant, en ligne, il a été adulé. Une fascination que les journaux n'ont pas cherché à analyser. Entre tentatives ratées de profilage numérique du mis en cause, refus de politiser son acte et de nommer la violence du système de santé privée, mais aussi, les cris d'orfraie moralistes sur la sacralité de la vie humaine, la presse étasunienne a fait l'étalage de sa déconnexion sociale.
There are indeed theoretical approaches to brain function, including to the most mysterious thing the human brain can do – produce consciousness. But none of these frameworks are widely accepted, for none has yet passed the decisive test of experimental investigation. It is possible that repeated calls for more theory may be a pious hope. It can be argued that there is no possible single theory of brain function, not even in a worm, because a brain is not a single thing. (Scientists even find it difficult to come up with a precise definition of what a brain is.)
In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.
In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.
The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.
The mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’, drawing parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain
Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software.
There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases. Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.
When someone tries to sell their tech (step 1 in the chain of reasoning) with massively large claims (step 3 in the chain) look at whether step 2 actually exists in reality. Because if it doesn’t that’d not “disruptive innovation” or “a breakthrough” or “a unicorn”. That is bullshit. It’s not just a waste of your time, it’s a way to infantilize you.
AI can turn some impressive party tricks, but it's unsuited for solving serious problems in the real world. This is true of predictive AI, whose correlations are data-driven conspiracy theories, and of large language models like ChatGPT, whose plausible waffle is always trying to pull free of the facts. The real issue is not only that AI doesn't work as advertised, but the impact it will have before this becomes painfully obvious to everyone. AI is being used as form of 'shock doctrine', where the sense of urgency generated by an allegedly world-transforming technology is used as an opportunity to transform social systems without democratic debate.
[...]
Real AI isn't sci-fi but the precaritisation of jobs, the continued privatisation of everything and the erasure of actual social relations. AI is Thatcherism in computational form. Like Thatcher herself, real world AI boosts bureaucratic cruelty towards the most vulnerable. Case after case, from Australia to the Netherlands, has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor. AI doesn't provide insights as it's just a giant statistical guessing game. What it does do is amplify thoughtlessness, a lack of care, and a distancing from actual consequences. The logics of ranking and superiority are buried deep in the make up of artificial intelligence; married to populist politics, it becomes another vector for deciding who is disposable.
Here’s a sad statistic for you: In the United States, we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country! That’s all you need to know about America. We pay more people to deny care than to give it. 1 million doctors to give care, 1.4 million brutes in cubicles doing their best to stop doctors from giving that care. If the purpose of “health care” is to keep people alive, then what is the purpose of DENYING PEOPLE HEALTH CARE? Other than to kill them? I definitely condemn that kind of murder. And in fact, I already did. In 2007, I made a film – SICKO – about America’s bloodthirsty, profit-driven and murderous health insurance system. It was nominated for an Oscar. It’s the second-largest grossing film of my career (after Fahrenheit 9/11). And over the past 15 years, millions upon millions of people have watched it including, apparently, Luigi Mangione.
Depuis son arrestation, les médias peinent à décrire Luigi Mangione autrement que comme un garçon sans histoire. Le fait que quelqu’un comme lui puisse se transformer en tueur de PDG de sang froid a de quoi effrayer bien des puissants, puisque son geste semblait impossible à prévenir. Et c’est donc cette banalité du coupable présumé qui l’a transformé d’ores et déjà en icône de la culture populaire. Cet engouement n’est pas neutre politiquement puisque ce meurtre a mis les assurances privées et leurs pratiques au cœur du débat public aux Etats-Unis.
One of the first pieces of publicized evidence in the wake of the killing was that three 9mm cartridges left at the scene were found to have been labeled with three phrases: “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.” It was speculated the first two phrases referred to the oft-cited practice of health insurance companies to deny coverage to clients and defend these decisions with legalistic trickery. “Depose,” of course, has multiple meanings, but in this context just two: one might depose a health care company CEO in court, and one might also depose a figure of terrific unaccountable authority, such as a king or tyrant.
Far from triumphantly breezing out of Africa, modern humans went extinct many times before going on to populate the world, new studies have revealed.
We’re drowning in decisions, but starving for meaning. We’ve developed sophisticated frameworks for everything from A/B testing website buttons to optimizing YouTube thumbnails, but we don’t have robust (or anything approaching robust) methods for distinguishing between decisions that matter and those that don’t in our personal lives.
Le protocole AT a été pensé pour être décentralisé. Dans la pratique, Bluesky ne l’est pas. La possibilité de créer facilement un PDS n’est qu’un petit élément parmi d’autres. Même si l’on peut créer des relais, leur mise en œuvre est complexe et sans doute bien trop onéreuse en stockage et bande passante pour être intéressante.
On ne peut pas dire que Bluesky soit actuellement décentralisé, et encore moins fédéré. Il y a bien un centre, et il est géré par l’entreprise Bluesky. Sans son relai, rien ne fonctionne. Chaque serveur de données personnelles ne sert ainsi que comme petit réservoir pour les informations d’une personne, incapable de fonctionner par lui-même.
The only good news about space colonies designed by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is that they aren’t going to happen. Musk will not be launching a million people to Mars in 15 years, not even close (although I do see some fantasy synergy between Musk and Trump’s plan to deport millions of people on day one of his presidency — maybe he’s dreaming of filling his Martian city with Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and South American gang-bangers). Bezos is not going to build an office park in Earth orbit, not as long as he can bulldoze farm land for cheap and assemble giant concrete boxes here on Earth. Those are two professional liars. Don’t believe anything they promise, because all they really promise is controlling you to their benefit.
I have — since March — expressed great dismay about the credulousness of the media in their acceptance of the "inevitable" ways in which generative AI will change society, despite a lack of any truly meaningful product that might justify an environmentally-destructive industry led by a company that burns more than $5 billion a year and big tech firms spending $200 billion on data centers for products that people don't want.
The reason I'm repeating myself is that it's important to note how obvious the problems with generative AI have been, and for how long.
Des batteries collées aux logiciels bloqués, vous payez plus que jamais pour des gadgets qui ne durent pas. Voici pourquoi et ce que l'on peut faire pour y remédier.
Dans les lieux de travail, l’IA apparaît souvent de manière anodine, en étant peu à peu intégrée à des applications de travail existantes. Dans la pratique, l’automatisation remplace rarement les travailleurs, elle automatise très partiellement certaines tâches spécifiques et surtout reconfigure la façon dont les humains travaillent aux côtés des machines. Les résultats de l’IA générative nécessitent souvent beaucoup de retravail pour être exploitées. Des rédacteurs sont désormais embauchés pour réhumaniser les textes synthétiques, mais en étant moins payé que s’ils l’avaient écrit par eux-même sous prétexte qu’ils apportent moins de valeur. Les chatbots ressemblent de plus en plus aux véhicules autonomes, avec leurs centres de commandes à distance où des humains peuvent reprendre les commandes si nécessaire, et invisibilisent les effectifs pléthoriques qui leur apprennent à parler et corrigent leurs discours. La dévalorisation des humains derrière l’IA occultent bien souvent l’étendue des collaborations nécessaires à leur bon fonctionnement.
Un documentaire de 2h sur la conception de Half-Life 2, publié par Valve à l'occasion des 20 ans du jeu.
Dans [son] livre, le sociologue [Antonio Casilli] démontre combien ce travail invisible, qui est lié aux plateformes et aux datas, reproduit une dichotomie nord-sud. Le travail du clic est un job précaire réalisé par des millions de personnes et que l’on retrouve partout sur la planète. Parfois, ce sont des freelances aux États-Unis, des Philippins dans un cybercafé ou des milliers de travailleurs africains dans des fermes du clic. Il y a néanmoins des différences très importantes dans les conditions de travail. Tout en bas de l’échelle, on retrouve les travailleurs africains. Finalement, c’est une nouvelle dimension néocoloniale, loin de l’image épurée de la Silicon Valley. Le fait que les Big Tech invisibilisent ce travail sous-entend que celui-ci n’est pas très important – pourtant, il est essentiel. L’un des travailleurs que j’ai rencontré au Kenya m’a dit : « Il n’y a pas d’intelligence artificielle, seulement l’intelligence africaine. » Ça résume assez bien les choses.
Yes, there is an economic incentive to the election of Trump by those at the commanding heights of Silicon Valley power. But to reduce it purely to materialism is missing a strong part of the story, namely about AI's own operation as an ideological apparatus which encourages power consolidation.
Artificial intelligence is a threat to educational institutions – as deeply flawed as these may be – not because it's some incredible technological achievement that's more powerful that the human mind (hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha); but because it is the manifestation of a series of reactionary political beliefs. AI is inextricably bound up in ideologies and practices that seek to undermine unions, exploit labor, re-inscribe racial and economic hierarchies, and centralize control – of knowledge and knowing ("intelligence" in all its various military and eugenicist histories) – in the hands of a few giant technology corporations. (Folks, that's fascism.)
What should we call a society in which a prominent Conservative party politician – that is to say, not a fascist oddball or some random talking head – calls for "violence against irregular migration", i.e. for shooting migrants at the EU's borders; in which up to 30% believe that it is perfectly ok to vote for a party that is "in parts certified right-wing extremist", for which, read: fascist; in which "climate protection" means protection against climate activists, and "climate adaptation" does not mean building higher dikes, but building higher walls against migrants; in which migrants who, for completely incomprehensible reasons, want to migrate to the parts of the world that are still inhabitable (whereby of course the vast majority migrate to their home or neighbouring countries), are demonised as "criminal gangs of human traffickers", in order to legitimise a "war on migration/migrants"? A society that Anna Becker sums up brutally and but aptly on Bluesky: "First we exploit countries, then we destroy a large part of global livelihoods, and instead of saving people from the consequences of our actions, we seal ourselves off by force and let them die in the Mediterranean. And the voters love it."
Precisely: an asshole-society.
When the world’s on fire, reporting “some say it’s not that warm” isn’t brave — it’s complicit. If journalists can’t bring themselves to point at a full-blown authoritarian and say “this is some bad shit,” then maybe they should switch to weather forecasting, where at least the stakes are lower.
The time for milquetoast coverage is over. Either tell the truth, naked and ugly, or don’t act surprised when your freedom to write anything at all goes up in smoke.
Today I hope to persuade you that the same thing that happened to aviation is happening with the Internet. Here we are, fifty years into the computer revolution, at what feels like our moment of greatest progress. The outlines of the future are clear, and oh boy is it futuristic.
But we're running into physical and economic barriers that aren't worth crossing.
We're starting to see that putting everything online has real and troubling social costs.
And the devices we use are becoming 'good enough', to the point where we can focus on making them cheaper, more efficient, and accessible to everyone.
So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.
Unless we screw it up.
And I want to convince you that this is the best possible news for you as designers, and for us as people.
La semaine de quatre jours a séduit l'Allemagne. 73% des entreprises ayant participé à une étude pilote refusent de revenir à la semaine de cinq jours. Productivité maintenue, bien-être accru : le modèle "100-80-100" fait ses preuves et ouvre la voie à une nouvelle organisation du travail.
In a recent earnings call Sundar Pichai claimed that at Google now 25% of Code is AI generated (“and then reviewed and accepted by engineers”). In the AI boosterism parts of the web (so basically X and LinkedIn) this number was celebrated: Even Google does AI code generation. So if your whole startup is just ChatGPT in a trenchcoat, you’re basically at the industry standard, right?
Let’s not be cynical here and point at Google’s not exactly stellar recent track record when it comes to great products and software, but let’s ask us where that number comes from and what it means.
There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word "bananas" in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence - such as "I chimp, therefore I am" - comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.
Jezz Bezos and Elon Musk emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average human does in their entire life. That’s according to a new report from Oxfam International, a British NGO that fights poverty.
I went to the UX Brighton conference yesterday.
The quality of the presentations was really good this year, probably the best yet. Usually there are one or two stand-out speakers (like Tom Kerwin last year), but this year, the standard felt very high to me.
But…
The theme of the conference was UX and “AI”, and I’ve never been more disappointed by what wasn’t said at a conference.
Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self's weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact – think throwing away the Oreos when you start your diet.
There is no such thing as a person who is immune to rationalization or pressure. I'm certainly not. Anyone who believes that they will never be tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them. A belief you can never be tempted or coerced is like a belief that you can never be conned – it makes you more of a mark, not less.
Saviez-vous que si on parle aujourd’hui français en Suisse romande, il n’en a pas toujours été ainsi ? Pendant des siècles, les Romands parlaient des langues cousines du français, elles aussi descendantes du latin. Comment le français a-t-il pris racine en Suisse romande et éclipsé les autres langues ? Pour comprendre de quelle façon cette transition s’est opérée, il est essentiel de plonger dans l’histoire riche et complexe de la région…
Mais l’élargissement des autoroutes permettrait-il réellement d’atteindre l’objectif souhaité, à savoir réduire les embouteillages? La recherche nous a appris que non. En tant que professeurs et chercheurs dans le domaine des transports et de la mobilité actifs dans les universités suisses, nous souhaitons expliquer pourquoi dans les paragraphes qui suivent.
As OpenAI and Meta introduce LLM-driven searchbots, I'd like to once again remind people that neither LLMs nor chatbots are good technology for information access. [...]
If someone uses an LLM as a replacement for search, and the output they get is correct, this is just by chance. Furthermore, a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous tthan one that is right 50% of the time. People will be more likely to trust the output, and likely less able to fact check the 5%.
But even if the chatbots on offer were built around something other than LLMs, something that could reliably get the right answer, they'd still be a terrible technology for information access.
"Je ne dis pas cela méchamment, mais j’espère vraiment que ce document est tout simplement erroné. Une détérioration rapide du puits de carbone terrestre dans un avenir proche pourrait avoir des conséquences vraiment terribles." Voici ce qu’a déclaré Robert Rohde, directeur scientifique au Berkeley Earth, le jour de la sortie de l’étude.
Voters face an easy but tectonic choice in the race for the White House.
Will they choose the first woman or the oldest man to be the next president?
Will they choose the prosecutor or the convict?
What too many of us don’t know now is that the rise of Nazi Germany and the lead-up to the Holocaust was a slow play fertilized by denialism about what was happening in plain view—not the Final Solution out of the gate. Non-targeted Germans continued their daily lives, even as their kids trained to be hardened and hateful Nazis, and believed the bigoted lies that it was “subhuman” people—which is not a thing—causing all their economic problems.
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
Notre société "obsédée" par la croissance économique subit une crise de la santé mentale dans le monde, qui touche particulièrement les plus défavorisés, a déploré jeudi le rapporteur spécial de l'ONU sur les droits de l'Homme et l'extrême pauvreté.
"What people realized early on, and this is the whole reason Comic Sans took off, is that a paragraph looks different depending on what font you put it in: serious or funny or whatever. You should be grateful to Comic Sans. The one great thing that it did is it introduced people to the debate about typefaces. In a twisted way, Comic Sans contributed to the growth of fonts in general."
Une étude qui circule depuis 2021 montre une surmortalité paradoxale des cyclistes casqués. Mais selon les hypothèses posées, plus que le casque, le type de pratique – sportive ou débutante – serait en cause, car elle est plus ou moins génératrice d’accidents.