Lina Khan ā FTC Chair on Amazon Antitrust Lawsuit & AI Oversight
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I heard nothing but good things about Lina Khan when she was announced as the chair of the FTC, and I think she did a tremendous job during this interview with Jon Stewart.
Jon and Lina break down the various lawsuits that the FTC is currently engaged in, not just with big tech companies, but also pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies.
I found it interesting when Jon mentioned that he tried to have Lina on his podcast when he was with Apple TV+, but Apple told him no.
I get it, but also, why would you have hired Jon Stewart in the first place? Youāve seen his show, right? Of course heās gonna call a spade a spade, one of the few reputable media personalities1 who will not hesitate to bite the hand that feeds.
Itās also interesting that the FTC is often outgunned by the legal representation of the companies against which they pursue litigation, sometimes at a ratio of 10:1.
I thought about using the word ājournalistā here instead, but Iām not sure if one can consider The Daily Show journalism. I mean, Tucker Carlson canāt call himself a journalistā¦ is TDS that far off? ↩
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Listening to him name exactly what he liked about the wine turned up the hairs on the back of my neck. Suddenly, my own experience of the wine felt deeper and more satisfying. I wanted to know: How was he able to identify these flavors?
He told me the secret was to blindly smell things and try to label them. You see, the part of your brain thatās responsible for smells is naturally mute. Itās called the olfactory bulb, and itās an ancient fist of neurons just behind your eyes. It has only indirect backroad connections to the parts of the brain that control language, like Brocaās area. So, even though you might have an easy time knowing whether or not you like a scent, itās not easy to label that scent with a word. Itāll feel like groping through a dark closet for something you know is there, but canāt quite find.
I did not know this, and now I will be nerding out on ways to train my taste buds.
But this article isnāt just about developing your sense of taste. Itās also about defining your style.
In much the same way the author describes how he is, for the first time in his life, articulating what he likes as a writer, I am starting to do the same with several areas of my life.
Case in point: I have a huge collection of quotes that you can see on the main page of this site.
I just fed all of them through ChatGPT with this prompt:
Iāve attached a series of quotes which are meaningful to me. First off, tell me the consistent themes you recognize across all of the quotes. Then, tell me what this says about the things that inspire me.
Here is the result:
Across all the quotes, several consistent themes emerge:
Growth and Self-improvement: Many quotes focus on the importance of personal growth, overcoming challenges, and continuous improvement.
Perseverance and Resilience: There's a strong theme of enduring hardship, staying strong in the face of adversity, and the importance of perseverance.
Wisdom and Perspective: The quotes often reflect on acquiring wisdom, gaining perspective, and understanding life's deeper meanings and truths.
Happiness and Contentment: There's an emphasis on finding happiness, being content with what one has, and the pursuit of joy in life.
Community and Relationships: Several quotes highlight the value of community, the importance of relationships, and the strength that comes from vulnerability and connection with others.
These themes suggest that you are inspired by ideas related to personal growth, resilience in the face of adversity, the pursuit of wisdom and understanding, the importance of happiness and contentment, and the value of community and relationships. It paints a picture of someone who values both internal development and external connections, seeking both personal fulfillment and meaningful interactions with others.
:extremely Marge Simpson voice: āWell, duh.ā
(For real though, pretty awesome that we have a tool that is exceptionally good at summarizing large amounts of data and picking out patterns throughout the dataset.)
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This site contains 29257 unique* 88x31 buttons that I scraped from the GeoCities archives compiled by the incredible ARCHIVE TEAM before GeoCities' demise in late 2009.
I shouldnāt go through all ~30,000 images to find the ones I made for Timās World or Thatās Unpossible, right?
Whenever I talk about a knowledge win via robots on the socials or with humans, someone snarks, āWell, how do you know itās true? How do you know the robot isnāt hallucinating?ā Before I explain my process, I want to point out that I donāt believe humans are snarking because they want to know the actual answer; I think they are scared. They are worried about AI taking over the world or folks losing their job, and while these are valid worries, itās not the robotās responsibility to tell the truth; itās your job to understand what is and isnāt true.
Youāre being changed by the things you see and read for your entire life, and hopefully, youāve developed a filter through which this information passes. Sometimes, it passes through without incident, but other times, itās stopped, and you wonder, āIs this true?ā
Knowing when to question truth is fundamental to being a human. Unfortunately, weāve spent the last forty years building networks of information that have made it pretty easy to generate and broadcast lies at scale. When you combine the internet with the fact that many humans just want their hopes and fears amplified, you can understand why the real problem isnāt robots doing it better; itās the humans getting worse.
Iām working on an extended side quest and in the past few hours of pairing with ChatGPT, Iāve found myself constantly second guessing a large portion of the decisions and code that the AI produced.
This article pairs well with this one I read today about a possible social exploit that relies on frequently hallucinated package names.
Bar Lanyado noticed that LLMs frequently hallucinate the names of packages that donāt exist in their answers to coding questions, which can be exploited as a supply chain attack.
He gathered 2,500 questions across Python, Node.js, Go, .NET and Ruby and ran them through a number of different LLMs, taking notes of any hallucinated packages and if any of those hallucinations were repeated.
One repeat example was āpip install huggingface-cliā (the correct package is āhuggingface[cli]ā). Bar then published a harmless package under that name in January, and observebd 30,000 downloads of that package in the three months that followed.
Iāll be honest: during my side quest here, Iāve 100% blindly run npm install on packages without double checking official documentation.
These large language models truly are mirrors to our minds, showing all sides of our personalities from our most fit to our most lazy.
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Iāve owned my own home for close to five years now, and Iām slowly coming around to the idea of making major changes to it in order to make it feel like it is mine.
During the pandemic, we poured a patio in the front of our house and spent nearly every day sitting on it.
In fact, that patio led to the formation of several enduring relationships with my neighbors.
I find it tough to shake the renterās mindset, where I canāt do anything to affect the āresale valueā of my home becauseā¦ well, maybe the next owner wonāt buy it because of the deep purple walls in the basement.
But the more I lean into tweaking what we have, the more I feel comfortable, productive, and happy. Iām incredibly grateful to have property which I can modify however I see fit to improve the wary of life for my family and myself.
This article also made me reflect on how toxic it can be to covet other peopleās homes:
We should always remember that the purpose of a home is for living and that decoration, for many, is a form of self-expression. Media literacy, which has improved with regard to beauty and fashion content, lags when it comes to architecture and interior design. Changing that begins with realizing that most homes donāt actually look like hotel lobbies or real estate listings. They, rather joyfully, look like homesādust bunnies and all.
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Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
If youāve spent much time in the same tech bubbles as me this past year, youāve probably come across this article already.
At a bare minimum, Iām sure youāve seen the phrase āenshittification.ā
Once you understand the concept, you do start to see the pattern unfold around you constantly. 1
While there are countless examples of this natural platform decay within our virtual world, what about the physical world?
Is enshittification simply human nature, an inescapable fate for any collaborative endeavor above a certain size?
And if enshittification is not inevitable, what are the forces that lead to it, and how can we combat them when building our own communities?
Case in point: the Conde Nast-owned WIRED website on which this article was published. Iām using a Shortcut on my iPad to post this article, and while sitting idle at the top of the post, I've seen three levels of pop ups appear which cover the article content. I havenāt even scrolled the page yet!↩
Iām a sucker for this style of post. This one in particular is jam packed with so many great pieces of advice that I had to read it three times before sharing it.
Hereās the very first item on her list. If it speaks to you, take ten minutes and thoughtfully consider the other 100 items.
You are overly obedient. You not only do what people tell you to do, but find it hard to imagine any world other than the one they present to you. Spend more time thinking about what you want, in isolation from the pressures of the world. (Keep this in mind while you read the rest of this very prescriptive document.)
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I hate the internet.
...that's a lie. I love it, but I hate the algorithms.
That's also a lie... I love the algorithms.
I watched this video on the plane ride back from Nickelodeon Resort yesterday, and I have to say, it got me.
Hank's assessment of how the algorithms deployed by social networks come up short in actually giving us what we want is spot on.
It's why I love how many friends are spinning up their own newsletters. And this new newsletter was a no brainer instasubscribe.
Ever since my buddy Paul gifted me a premium subscription to Garbage Day, I've been a voracious newsletter subscriber. They do a great job of filling the void that Google Reader left in my life.1
This website has been my way of curating the internet, sharing things I've found that interest me, but maybe I should start a newsletter myself and do things in both places.
Should I tell my impostor syndrome to shove it and start my own newsletter, y'all?
I do need to find a way to get them out of my inbox, though. I really should move all my subscriptions into Feedbin so they show up in my RSS reader app. ↩
One can of course relate to money in pathological ways. For those whose standard of value resides not in a conception of their fully-lived life (a la the builder), but in the impressions or judgments of others (be it God or society or their parents or some other ādrill sergeantā), money means whatever it purportedly means to those othersāstatus, in some circles, or wicked materialism in others, or in still others, āprivilegeā to be forgiven with obligate philanthropy.Ā
By contrast, a builderās relationship to money is not mediated by any of these external intermediaries. She understands that money is a medium of value exchange, and what she values is set by the life she wants to build and the world she wants to live in.Ā
There are also simpler pathologies, such as when fear or insecurity drives founders to pursue short-term monetary gains over the longer-term health and durability of their business. But such financial anxieties can be diagnosed and remedied by re-orienting toward the overarching goal of building oneās best life, which presumably includes a healthy and durable version of oneās business (or whatever one is building) as part of it.
Quite a useful way to reframe money and its importance to a well considered life.