Catégorie : Non classé (Page 43 of 615)

Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine

“Our brains evolved this fine-tuned balance over millions of years in which pleasures were scarce and dangers ever-present. The problem today is that we no longer live in that world. Instead, we now live in a world of overwhelming abundance. The quantity, variety and potency of highly reinforcing drugs and behaviors has never been greater. In addition to addictive substances like sugar and opioids, there is also a whole new class of electronic addictions that didn’t exist until about 20 years ago: texting, tweeting, surfing the web, online shopping and gambling.”

Source : Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine – WSJ

An Inconvenient Truth About AI

A chart of Milestones in AI from 1950 to 2020.

“Regardless of what you might think about AI, the reality is that just about every successful deployment has either one of two expedients: It has a person somewhere in the loop, or the cost of failure, should the system blunder, is very low. In 2002, iRobot, a company that I cofounded, introduced the first mass-market autonomous home-cleaning robot, the Roomba, at a price that severely constricted how much AI we could endow it with. The limited AI wasn’t a problem, though. Our worst failure scenarios had the Roomba missing a patch of floor and failing to pick up a dustball.”

Source : An Inconvenient Truth About AI

More details about the October 4 outage – Facebook Engineering

More details about the Oct. 4 Facebook outage

“One of the jobs performed by our smaller facilities is to respond to DNS queries. DNS is the address book of the internet, enabling the simple web names we type into browsers to be translated into specific server IP addresses. Those translation queries are answered by our authoritative name servers that occupy well known IP addresses themselves, which in turn are advertised to the rest of the internet via another protocol called the border gateway protocol (BGP).
To ensure reliable operation, our DNS servers disable those BGP advertisements if they themselves can not speak to our data centers, since this is an indication of an unhealthy network connection. In the recent outage the entire backbone was removed from operation, making these locations declare themselves unhealthy and withdraw those BGP advertisements. The end result was that our DNS servers became unreachable even though they were still operational. This made it impossible for the rest of the internet to find our servers.
All of this happened very fast. And as our engineers worked to figure out what was happening and why, they faced two large obstacles: first, it was not possible to access our data centers through our normal means because their networks were down, and second, the total loss of DNS broke many of the internal tools we’d normally use to investigate and resolve outages like this.”

Source : More details about the October 4 outage – Facebook Engineering

Whistle-Blower Says Facebook ‘Chooses Profits Over Safety’

Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistle-blower, revealed her identity on Sunday and gave an interview to “60 Minutes.”

“While “Facebook has publicized its work to combat misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and insurrection,” Ms. Haugen’s documents told a different story, one cover letter read. “In reality, Facebook knew its algorithms and platforms promoted this type of harmful content, and it failed to deploy internally recommended or lasting countermeasures.””

Source : Whistle-Blower Says Facebook ‘Chooses Profits Over Safety’ – The New York Times

Deep in rural China, bitcoin miners are packing up

“To evade the clampdown, big miners have sent their machines overseas. Mr Su, who also runs a logistics business that transports mining machines, has been chartering Boeing 747s to get used ones out swiftly. Most are going to Russia and Kazakhstan, which together account for about 13% of the world’s bitcoin mining. But there are few data centres abroad with space for lots of new machines, including in America, the second-biggest miner. Building a farm there costs between five and ten times what it does in China, says Mr Su. That is too much for most Chinese miners. More than half of their computers will stay put for now, he says.”

Source : Deep in rural China, bitcoin miners are packing up | The Economist

Ces Afghans qui effacent leurs traces numériques par crainte des talibans

Des talibans contrôlent des conducteurs dans le centre de Kaboul, en Afghanistan, le 15 septembre 2021.

“Lorsque Kaboul est tombée aux mains des talibans, le 15 août, Nilofar Ayoubi a créé, avec ses amies militantes des droits humains, un groupe WhatsApp sur lequel elles échangeaient les dernières informations. « C’est sur ce groupe que j’ai découvert le dispositif mis en place par Facebook pour les Afghans. Je l’ai donc utilisé pour verrouiller mon compte Facebook. J’ai aussi changé la photo et le nom de mes comptes Instagram et Twitter, tout en les rendant privés », explique cette entrepreneuse afghane. Figure de l’opposition aux talibans, cette mère de trois enfants vit aujourd’hui en exil en Pologne.”

Source : Ces Afghans qui effacent leurs traces numériques par crainte des talibans

YouTube Bans Anti-Vaccine Misinformation

YouTube said it was banning the accounts of several prominent anti-vaccine activists from its platform, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s.

“In a blog post, YouTube said it would remove videos claiming that vaccines do not reduce rates of transmission or contraction of disease, and content that includes misinformation on the makeup of the vaccines. Claims that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that the vaccines contain trackers, will also be removed.
Prominent anti-vaccine activists have long been able to build huge audiences online, helped along by the algorithmic powers of social networks that prioritize videos and posts that are particularly successful at capturing people’s attention. A nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, published research this year showing that a group of 12 people were responsible for sharing 65 percent of all anti-vaccine messaging on social media, calling the group the “Disinformation Dozen.” In July, the White House cited the research as it criticized tech companies for allowing misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines to spread widely, sparking a tense back-and-forth between the administration and Facebook.”

Source : YouTube Bans Anti-Vaccine Misinformation – The New York Times

Tessellated TikTok logos against a dark background.

“A member of the Stanford Behavioral Laboratory posted on a Prolific forum, “We have noticed a huge leap in the number of participants on the platform in the US Pool, from 40k to 80k. Which is great, however, now a lot of our studies have a gender skew where maybe 85% of participants are women. Plus the age has been averaging around 21.” Wayne State psychologist Hannah Schechter seems to have been the first person to crack the case. “This may be far-fetched,” she tweeted, linking to Frank’s video, “but given the timing, virality of the video, and the user’s follower demographics….” Long-standing Prolific survey-takers complained on Reddit that Frank had made it difficult to find paid surveys to take on the overrun platform.”

Source : A teenager on TikTok disrupted thousands of scientific studies with a single video – The Verge

La « guerre des étoiles » en entreprise, ou comment les salariés se notent tous, quel que soit le lien hiérarchique

“Mais les dérives et les abus, comme le fort contrôle social de l’employeur et le stress d’une comparaison permanente, sont fréquents. Cela a parfois abouti au « ranking forcé », illicite en France depuis 2013 : cette pratique consistait à volontairement sous-noter un quota de salariés potentiellement « licenciables » pour insuffisance professionnelle.Ce fut le cas chez IBM, qui, dans les années 2000, attribuait à ses équipes une note entre 1 (très bon) et 4 (médiocre), avec un minimum de 3 % de « médiocres ». Amazon et Zalando ont récemment été épinglés pour avoir utilisé la notation à 360 degrés pour faire régner un climat de travail détérioré. « Avec le ranking, on ne demande plus aux salariés de bien faire leur travail mais d’être le meilleur », s’inquiète Yann Decroix.Sous ses apparences de « moyenne objective », la notation porte de nombreux biais. Le jugement personnel est facile, et il est impossible de négliger l’impact des relations entre deux salariés. « Le collègue peut être en rivalité avec no”

Source : La « guerre des étoiles » en entreprise, ou comment les salariés se notent tous, quel que soit le lien hiérarchique

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