Luis Villa
@luisvilla
I do a lot of opens, at Wikipedia, Mozilla, Creative Commons, and elsewhere.
lu.isLuis Villa
- it always astonishes me that the New York Times feels the need to store a document considerably larger than War and Peace on my phone. It also astonishes me this document only has one subject – how to target online ads to Dan Davies – and that nonetheless, the New York Times isn’t very good at that.
from to the vector belong the spoils
- Patriotism (as George Orwell noted in one of the few extant essays about its distinction from nationalism) is defensive, while nationalism is aggressive; patriotism is rooted to the land, to a particular country, while nationalism appeals to the myth of a people, indeed to a majority; patriotism is traditionalist, nationalism is populist. Patriotis... See more
Feel this definition of the difference between nationalism and patriotism deeply. Patriotism isn’t perfect either but, at least in the current moment, is a lot more defensible.
From https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/reading-watching-050524
- Any social science that aims to inform (and perform) the function of a complex social organization, like a state or corporation, that enforces even somewhat impartial rules needs to ruthlessly abstract from particularities.
from In Praise of Blindspots by Suresh Naidu
- The most salient reason neoclassical economics became dominant in policy circles is that it was allied with a general revanchist business interest squeezed by late-60s/early 70s crisis. But we should not forget that it also presented the policymakers dealing that crisis something that more heterodox approaches did not: parsimony.
from In Praise of Blindspots by Suresh Naidu
“it presented the policymakers…with… parsimony”
- neo-liberalism succeeded not, or at least not simply, because of Milton Friedman, the Mont Pelerin Society and the rest of it. It came to dominate because it was the only plausible language that people could minimally agree on, at a moment when enormously consequential new policies needed to be enacted.
from Cybernetics is the science of the polycrisis by Henry Farrell
I’ve been wrestling an analogy between open licensing’s minimal set of options and the cash-centric/neoliberal minimalism of Homo Economicus. I think this quote unlocks it.
Can provenance save us from a barrage of synthetic media?
“participants successfully identified manipulated media as less trustworthy and less accurate when provenance was disclosed.”
CIP and Anthropic launch Collective Constitutional AI — The Collective Intelligence Project
CIP’s report on their work with Anthropic
Building Open Models Responsibly in the Gemini Era
I appreciate the attention to detail here, and it’s generally a really careful, thoughtful post, but you then throw away pretty much all the good effort by settling on a term that the vast majority of people are not going to be able to tell apart from open source. “publicly available”, “free to use”… lots of other, non-confusing options right there.
“At Google Research and Brain and DeepMind, we've invented the majority of machine learning techniques we're all using today, over the last 10 years of pioneering work. So that’s always been in our DNA, and we have quite a lot of senior research scientists that maybe other orgs don't have.”