Privacy

Talk about scummy, Facebook is getting nervous. NYU Researchers @LauraEdelson2 and Damon McCoy were sent a cease and desist letter into their research on how Facebook is targeting political ads. To say the least this is a very hot topic considering all the voter suppression and false information that led to the current Administration. At a minimum, this question SHOULD be asked and it SHOULD be answered to everyone’s satisfaction. Facebook, IMHO has become a tool for propoganda and manipulation. This alone should be reason for everyone to #deleteFacebook. ...

After 5 weeks of self isolation I’ve finally gotten a chance to think about a post Covid19 world. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that our lives, work, and society will change after this. The question is, will it be for better or worse? What follows is my stream of consciousness. Some things will be for the better. Companies that used to not support remote work will amend or change their policies. More workers will move to remote which will have the benefit of cutting commuting costs. A good side effect will be a reduction of greenhouse gases. Of course, this will affect car sales and consumption of fossil fuels but I don’t care. They had a good run, go green. ...

One of my Asian friends recently posted a link to a terrifying use of Machine Learning. This is what I call the “dark side” of this field, the use of machine learning by a government to make you behave a certain way. 1984’s Big Brother China is building its own version of 1984’s Big Brother, a massive scoring system that’s probably a large scale classification algorithm most likely sitting on top of a Big Data structure like Hadoop. I call this an utter and complete abuse of machine learning. ...