Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

Based upon its number of daily active users (113K and shrinking), Truth Social's crazy $9.6bn valuation comes to a whopping $85K per user, or 155 times that of Facebook.

It would be worth only $62m (still inflated!) if it were valued at the same $550 per daily active user as Facebook ($1.16 trillion capitalization with 2.09 billion users).

Truth Social isn't a meme stock or Dutch tulips - it's money laundering in plain view.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/05/03/media/truth-social-stock-trump-djt

@SnoopJ shoutout to the adobe sales guy who kept trying to convince me that PDF was an archival format in 2004 as I showed him example after example of legacy PDF files that newer Acrobat couldn’t open.

Former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is now selling over the counter sleep aids on TV commercials. Yep.

Same news, two different stories.
The New-York-Times
plays the game well of twisting a positive into a negative.

UT Austin, my employer, beats and jails students engaged in peaceful protest, then manufactures propaganda that deeply misrepresents what the students were doing and had planned to do.

How am I supposed to work at an institution willing to hurt any students I recruit to come here? This is untenable.

#UTAustin #Texas

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2024-05-03/uts-war-on-students/

@mattblaze I keep having deja vu whenever I hear the term "outside agitator". I remember that as the term used to describe people from the north who went to the south to protest civil rights.

The dangerous Kids Online Safety Act #KOSA now has a House version, and some lawmakers are seeking to attach the bill to must-pass legislation. Legislation of this magnitude deserves to pass—or fail—on its own merits. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/us-version-kosa-still-censorship-bill

This cannot be restated enough. Predictive policing algorithms, facial recognition systems, and other carceral tools are, like all under-the-streetlamp key searches and broken windows policing methods, tautologies, self fulfilling prophecies, definitionally limiting justifications.

Cops and the courts decide what they want to look for, do the cop work that justifies that, then that cop work gets fed to these systems as training data, or used as justifications for where— and on whom— to implement these tools.

And yeah, as others said, 90% accuracy is a terrible rate for something that is literally a matter of life and death; but that terrible rate is also not a surprise. To get there, just look up how wrong humans get it, in these situations, then go ask a computer to do what we do, but moreso.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/ai-tool-used-thousands-criminal-cases-facing-legal-challenges-rcna149607

"Enter the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and their client, Ethan Zuckerman, an internet pioneer turned academic at U Mass Amherst. Knight has filed a lawsuit on Zuckerman's behalf, seeking assurance that Zuckerman (and others) can use browser automation tools to block, unfollow, and otherwise modify the feeds Facebook delivers to its users"

@ethanz @pluralistic

Police’s ability to ID protestors with face recognition tech makes people "vulnerable to retaliation for their political speech" and could "chill people’s willingness to engage in constitutionally protected activities,” EFF’s Matthew Guariglia told @FastCompany. https://www.fastcompany.com/91116791/facial-recognition-technology-campus-protests-police-surveillance-gaza

What are the odds police are going to protect student protestors from more violent attacks by “counter-protestors” instead of using last night’s violent attacks on protestors at UCLA to justify violent police intervention against protestors in order to “prevent more violence”?

@tramm @pluralistic the enshittocene. That would be hysterical if it wasn't so pathetically true.

Bipartisan contempt for freedom of expression in new legislation aimed at critics of Israeli actions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/01/antisemitism-awarness-act-campus-protests/

Not sure if there’s such a thing as an untrainable dog — but I do know there’s such a thing as unthinkable evil.

I'm a Tenured College Professor. I'm Quitting. Here's Why.
by Jessica Wildfire

"Most of my professor friends can't support themselves. That includes the fancy tenured professors, even at nice schools. They have sugar mamas & sugar daddies. They're married to lawyers and bankers, or IT managers. If they're like me, they've got a secret side hustle.

Here's an irony:

My university forces everyone to disclose outside income. So if you have a second job or a side hustle, you're technically supposed to report it. You're supposed to ask them for permission. They can say no.

That's right, the same university that gave me a chocolate bar for a raise also says I can't take on a second job to support my family. They're worried it would distract me from all the free work I'm doing for them." https://www.okdoomer.io/im-a-professor-heres-why-im-walking-away-from-my-tenure/

I know weird opinion, but if it’s “Chrome only” it’s not the Web.

It’s Flash, but worse.

@pluralistic and Americans will fight for this death care system tooth & nail! My state insurance is far better than many people’s private insurance, but the propaganda has them so scared. Tying health care to your job is part of americas slave labor mindset.

@CptSuperlative @pluralistic Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Prize in Economics for proving that private, for-profit medical insurance cannot work to deliver health care.

"Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them."

— Bertrand Russell, Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 16: Ideas Which Have Become Obsolete, p. 158.

All three leading #wireless carriers fined by the #FCC for illegally selling customer #locationdata, in this case to Securus for warrantless sale to local law enforcement. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-402213A1.pdf