AlgorithmWatch is a non-governmental, non-profit organization based in Berlin and Zurich. We fight for a world where algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) do not weaken justice, human rights, democracy, and sustainability but strengthen them.
The hierarchical hypermedia world of Hyper-G.
Hermann Maurer, then a professor at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, had been interested in early computer-based information systems for some time, pioneering work on early graphic terminals instead of the pure text ones commonly in use. One of these was the MUPID series, a range of Z80-based systems first introduced in 1981 ostensibly for the West German videotex service Bildschirmtext but also standalone home computers in their own right.
CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing).
I’m proposing a (…) theorem for bot protection, the “BAP theorem”, stating that you can only combine two of the following three properties:
- Bot-resistance
- Accessibility
- Privacy-friendliness
Kaleidoscopico is a microcontroller demo that runs on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2.
Remarks on AI from NZ.
Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned. I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down. Earlier I spoke somewhat derisively of lapdogs. We might ask ourselves who is really the lapdog in a world full of powerful AIs.
Lately I’ve been trying out a few libraries that - in pursuit of perfect type safety - make their typings so complex that it makes them almost unusable, in my opinion. I call this approach hyper-typing, and I worry it’s becoming a trend in the TypeScript ecosystem.
“We can tell you what it will cost, when it will be finished, or what it will do. Pick at most two.” Or, honestly, just one.
But how to get to that European cloud?
One major problem is that businesses and governments are very clear about not wanting to deal with new things. The European Commission, for example, is currently in a ridiculous legal battle against its own privacy watchdog just to keep using Microsoft 365. Or take the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, which shares the IP addresses of all its secret service job applicants with Google because it’s supposedly tens of thousands of euros per year cheaper than European alternatives. These are strong signals.
Relevant: This article is part of a series of posts on (European) cloud challenges.
Passwords are okay, impulsive Internet isn't.
Most of the modern Internet is founded on one simple principle: people have problems with impulse control. It's basic psychology. Most humans receive terrible, inadequate parenting, they end up as malformed adults who do not know how to delay/defer their gratification. Big companies use this emotional deficiency to make money.
The CADT Model (via lobste.rs).
This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.
Embeddings are underrated.
Here’s an overview of how you use embeddings and how they work. It’s geared towards technical writers who are learning about embeddings for the first time.