Controversial Reads 061723


Artificial intelligence (or, at least, the Chat GPT program) makes stuff up, out of what seems to be a spirit of fun, or perhaps a desire to please.


The ad-tech industry is incredibly profitable, raking in hundreds of billions of dollars every year by spying on us.


This memo contains the thoughts and recountings of events that transpired during and after the release of information about the NSA by Edward Snowden.


If manuscripts were as imperishable as Woland famously maintained, we should have at our disposal more than a hundred tragedies written by Sophocles, instead of the mere seven that have survived the centuries.


According to a recent piece in the futurist publication Neoscope, a growing number of companies in Silicon Valley are “turning towards ketamine as a vibe cure.”


Their thesis is that breach lawyers have lost perspective in their no-holds-barred pursuit of attorney-client privilege to protect the confidentiality of forensic reports that diagnose the breach.


In today’s world, it has become axiomatic that drastic change can occur overnight. One of those cherished concepts at risk is the idea of “One World – One Internet.”


For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally outfitted theaters. But black box is also an important term in the world of artificial intelligence.


As a child of the 1990s, only three possible jobs existed to my young mind: paleontologist, Chicago Bull, and inventor. The last seemed the most practical of the options, as I lacked the height to dunk or the lateral agility to juke velociraptors. Invention seemed practical by its sheer omnipresence.