FOSS News April 10-14, 2023

WE 32.1 – Bob Lee’s Alleged Killer Collared
Justice is coming for Bob. Here’s a followup on last week’s lead story. It looks like he knew his attacker and the attack was not a robbery or just a random murder. It would appear that the two men knew each other, and had been having a very heated argument in the suspect’s car during the wee hours of the morning last Tuesday morning. It got so combative that it would appear that Mr. Lee exited the car, and the suspect followed him, then pulled a knife on him. The knife, with the suspect’s prints on it was found near the scene. Part of me is curious to know what the argument was about, and why the men took it to such great lengths. I can’t think of many things that could lead to that much of a reaction in me, with someone that I know well. Perhaps more details will come to light, who knows, right?

https://gizmodo.com/cash-app-founder-bob-lee-stabbing-nima-momeni-arrested-1850332225
#Cashapp #boblee #suspectarrested #justice #weekendedition #TechFreedom

WE 32.2 – Former Theranos CEO to Report to Prison
Elizabeth Holmes, who was a party to defrauding Big Money in the US about 5 years ago, is to report to prison as she awaits her appeal. A few months ago, I covered that she and her former partner (multiple senses to that word) had been sentenced to 11 and 13 years for their respective parts in the fraud scheme around the Theranos claims about their revolutionary blood testing technology. The courts are not allowing her to stay free pending the appeal that may take a year to be heard. This is what happens when you defraud people like Buffett and others in the Billionaire class. You get slapped to the stone age. In comparison, if your fraud does not touch the upper crust, your trial will probably drag out further, and while you will likely be banned from ever running a business where you might be able to defraud people again as well as getting fined, and/ or required to refund or return money to those whom you harmed. They are throwing the book at Theranos just like they did with Skrelli and Madoff.

#theranos #elizabethholmes #fraud #payingthepiper #TechFreedom #weekendedition
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65241105
WE 32.3 – Elon & Twitter
A) Elon’s BBC Interview
a. Denies that trolling and other “hateful” content is on the rise on Twitter since he took over. The snowflakes are melting because they don’t have full run of the place anymore. The “journalist” who interviewed him couldn’t provide a single example of how that content had trended upward in the last 6 months. Lame.
b. Somehow I am less than surprised that a big tech guy, even one as seemingly outspoken in certain conservative ways as Elon is, would vote for Depends in the last election, rather than the “Bad Orange Man”.
c. He stands by Twitter’s efforts against bots and “hateful” content, in spite of multiple studies purporting to show how Twitter is worse off since he took over.
i. Terribly shocking that he would stand by their efforts… About as shocking as these Woke-ist studies amplifying all that they claim to hate, so not really at all.
d. Doesn’t believe that TikTok should be banned, as he is “generally against bans”. He doesn’t use the platform, but is not for the ban merely because it might drive content and eyeballs back to Twitter.
e. He would not sell at this point, unless the buyer shared his commitments to free speech and the like. He believes that he can turn it around to actually be profitable, unlike as it was, and he likens the way it was to a non-profit, rather than a business.
f. Twitter will change BBC’s label on the platform to “publicly funded” rather than “government funded” even though 71% of their revenue comes in the form of UK TV license fees, aka, straight from the Crown. BBC had whined about having the same label as RT and other global State media outlets.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65251160
#elon #interview #surprise #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

B) Twitter Labels NPR & BBC as “Government Affiliated Media”
Lol. They chose to call it how it is. Both media giants balked, NPR actually committed to leaving the platform over the alleged mis-characterization, so good riddance to bad rubbish, there, right? The BBC whined, and as I just mentioned in the interview story, Twitter back down and will change the label, from “Government Affiliated” to “Publicly Funded” media, and it would appear that that will be enough to keep the British giant on the platform. NPR is all in a tizzy over it, crying that only 3% of their income is from the CPB, which runs PBS. Both organizations insist that they have editorial freedom and are not beholden to any government entity to make sure that their news stories are non-damaging to the US or the UK. I struggle with that characterization, as we know that ALL MSM, and likely some of the smaller alt-media outlets get their talking points from the Clowns in America or the MI5/6 in the UK. Show me proof that the intellignce communities do not have full control over most of these outlets, and I’ll eat some crow.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65202978
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65226481
#Twitter #NPR #BBC

WE 32.4 – AI News For the Week
A) Big 3 Square Off (ChatGPT vs Bing vs Bard)
You’re probably wondering why I’m bothering with this article at all with the running commentary I have about these tools, but it caught my eye. I am surprised that the Bing AI, which is an implementation of GPT-4 (the tech behind chatGPT) seems to be the middle of the road choice, here, where vanilla chatGPT outshines its competitors in every test. Bard currently sucks eggs, even though it has realtime access to Google Search to craft its responses to things. However, that may change when Google transitions from the LaMDA to PaLM large language model. I think what we are seeing here is just that Bard has not had the billions of user requests that chatGPT has had since it was released for public use back in November, as it is just becoming publicly available. Bing is weird, here though, because where chatGPT shines, it is just kind of so-so. I will repeat my refrain here: I do not trust the the mega-corps that are designing these models, not to give me accurate, relatively unbiased information, and I see these tools as pleas from them for us to give them even more data about us, our interests and the info we want to know or have put together for us. As time goes on, I see these “generative ‘AI’s’” as more nefarious, but not in the same way as people like my wife do. I think that they are designed to lull us into farming out our thinking even more than mass media and the “education” system in most countries do already. Don’t let them take your mind from you through atrophy, people.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/chatgpt-vs-bing-vs-google-bard-which-ai-is-the-most-helpful/
#ughhhh #AI #showdown #weekendedition

B) AWS to Launch Generative AI Competitor
Bedrock is a foundation for other companies to build their own tools with, not a publicly available chatbot like Bard, ChatGPT or Bing. It has a bevy of models to choose from which are all at least somewhat pre-trained, but each implementation will be 100% isolated from others using the same model, so no random company will benefit from the data that another company pours into their AI implementation based on Bedrock. This sounds like a good business move, and Amazon has been training Titan, their in-house AI models, for about 20 years, based on site searches on Amazon.com. Be wise in how you use these tools. I won’t pretend that if you have decided to use them or already have started to use them that you will stop on my account, but please slow your roll on this. Do not be in such a blind rush that you cannot see the problems with these tools.
#weekendedition #AI #Amazon #AWS #Bedrock #interesting #FOSSNews #TechFreedom
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/13/aws-launches-bedrock-generative-ai-service-titan-llms.html

C) AI Gen Images Cause a Stir
Deepfakes had their day in the sun this week, with their faked images going viral because people are either too tired or unobservant to notice the differences between faked images and real ones. Some were innocuous enough, of course, but the fact that people couldn’t tell the difference between real and fake, and the images were caused to go viral (I do not trust virality anymore, as it is too easily pushed via algorithms) and thus made a big stir, in some cases. This article ends with a tepid call for legislation around these issues, which seems to be something of a reaction to the notion that we need to democratize AI tools so that everyone can have access to them, if desired. I echo the call to democratize things, as you can imagine, since the name of this channel is FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) News. I believe strongly that the best, and perhaps only, way forward in terms of not becoming an even more blatant corporatocracy, is to open source as many things in our lives as possible. Speaking of open sourcing things, it is time to play a FOSS game.

#weekendedition #AI #midjourney #imagegenerators #warnings #FOSSNews #TechFreedom
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/tech/ai-generated-images-social-media/index.html