flyingcube

[Alex Turner @Turn_Trout]

I resigned from Google DeepMind bc it broke its founding promise by selling AI to the military without restrictions against killer robots or mass spying.

For months, I worked to stop this but watched powerful ethicists and institutions choose silence.

Here's what happened. 🧵

[Irlandarra @martinez_j7902]

in Aurora Chicago , ICE agents surrounded the car of a U.S. citizen in a parking lot… fire into a vehicle's windshield with children in it, as she screamed that her children were inside.

Agents then dragged her from the car without presenting a warrant or probable cause.

[Davide Mastracci @DavideMastracci]

In June, I wrote a piece outlining how the narrative sold to us about the shootings of synagogues and Jewish schools in Toronto is bullshit.

The narrative claimed the shooters were motivated by antisemitism, but the evidence shows they were youth or young adults motivated solely by profit.

Later that month, a 20-year-old man in Montreal who pleaded guilty to firebombing one synagogue and damaging another said he had no motivation other than profit, claiming he was offered a $15,000 contract for the attacks.

So, an attack that was initially framed as being motivated by antisemitism has again been shown to have been done by a young adult (he was about 18 at the time) motivated by profit.

The question remains: who are paying these people, and who benefits from the attacks?

Read my June article to find out more.
https://t.co/HDFRmJU7Wf

[Michael Gerald Gibbs🏳️‍🌈🍁 🇺🇦 (He/Him) @Mikeggibbs]

Drone footage I took 5 minutes ago.

Here in Ajax we've been hit with a blast of wildfire smoke that's making Southern Ontario and the GTA one of the worst places in the world for air quality today.

Environment Canada issued an Orange Warning that air quality is so bad that it's likely to harm your health, an 8 out of 10 on the air quality index.

So, please stay indoors.

If you must go outside WEAR A MASK to protect your lungs.
#ONstorm

[Alina Cameron 🇨🇦 💉 🔬 @Alina_Cameron]

I live in Northwestern Ontario. Right now, the Boreal forest is burning.

I'm writing this beneath the dark orange plume from the Quetico wildfires.

These are some of the reports coming out as communities fight to survive:

"No fire crews left for new fires."
"We had no warning."
Families are self-evacuating by private boat across lakes because they didn't receive evacuation information. They're fleeing towering flames with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

This is unacceptable in a province as wealthy as Ontario.

I'm calling out Doug Ford. His government has underfunded Ontario's wildfire management capacity by tens of millions of dollars.

@fordnation you want our Ring of Fire, our water, our forests. You want to store nuclear waste in our bedrock and run an oil pipeline through our watersheds.

But you won't work with northern communities. You make decisions for us without us, and then fail to provide the basic public services we PAY FOR and rely on: wildfire protection, health care, education, safe highways and social services.

Northern Ontario deserves better than this feckless leadership.

#onpoli #onted #70KIsNotOK #cdnpolitics #DontLookAwayOntario #ABC

[hasanabi @hasanthehun]

there is no way to reform this. it’s pure lawlessness. we must restore law, order and accountability.

we must abolish ice. we must punish ice.

politicians who have funded and thanked ice should take a cold hard look at what they’ve allowed to take place on our streets.

[Troy Roach @Canal1point5]

1/5 🚨 Ever wonder WHY low-dose nicotine patches help clear Long COVID #BrainFog and fatigue? A major new Lancet study on dopamine system injury gives us the exact biological explanation. Let’s break down the connection 👇 🧵

[Capcom Fighters @CapcomFighters]

My boss was like "pick ONE round for each ad break to promote the stream." But I'm going to risk my job, because you need both of these. Please tune into the World Warrior US Midwest #3 stream so I don't get fired 🥺-> https://t.co/TqnNrZIyxb

P.S. Sorry for breaking the 4th wall

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I run the resume screen for a company you applied to, and I have watched the same person score 90 and 74 in the same afternoon, off the same resume, and I sent the 74 its letter.

I do not read the resumes. That stopped years ago. I run the agent. The agent reads. I read the number the agent prints, and the number is the candidate, and the candidate is the number, and I file everything under the line.

The line is 85. Above it, a person. Below it, a letter that says we went with other candidates whose experience more closely matched.

Here is the thing I am not supposed to know, except the makers open-sourced the agent, so now everyone who reads the documentation knows it, and I read the documentation.

The number is not real.

Unfair would be a relief. Unfair would at least be consistent. You can run the same resume twice and get 90, then get 74, and the only thing that changed between the two is that somebody deleted a few debug lines that were never scored in the first place. Same resume. Same command. Sixteen points.

They ran one resume a hundred times. It came back anywhere from 65 to 99. The technical-skills box, the one that just checks whether you can do the thing, came back 8 out of 10 almost every single time, because that part is a checklist and a checklist cannot have a mood. It was the part where the agent decides whether your projects are impressive that swung 30 points, because that part asks the model what it thinks, and the model thinks something a little different every time you ask.

There is a public ticket where someone ran it six times in a row, no changes, and got 27, 34, 32, 34, 34, 30. They had set the randomness to zero. It stayed random. Zero is a setting the number ignores.

So here is my Tuesday. A resume comes in. The agent gives it an 84. The cutoff is 85. I file the letter. We went with other candidates. If the queue had been one resume shorter, if the machine had been asked at 2:15 instead of 2:14, the same resume is an 86, and the same person is a person.

I do not set the 85. I do not write the agent. I do not pick the model. I am the man who reads the number off the one screen and types it onto the other screen, and the gap between the two screens is the only place a human still touches your application, and I have been told, in writing, not to touch it.

The candidate is a row. Row 1,184 scored 84 on Monday. I know, because I reran the queue Tuesday to clear an error, that row 1,184 scored 87 on Tuesday. The letter went out Monday. I am not allowed to send the Tuesday score. The Monday score is final. Finality is the one thing in this system that does not vary.

The author who took the agent apart, who ran it the hundred times, wrote one sentence I have thought about more than I would like. If your company's cutoff sits at 85, he fails 65 percent of the time. He is the same man in all 65. He is also the same man in the 35 where he passes. We would have hired the 35 version. We sent the 65 version a letter. They have the same name.

People ask why we do it this way, and the answer is the cleanest thing in the building. A human reading resumes is slow, and a human can be asked why. The agent reads four hundred an hour, and when a rejected candidate writes in to ask what was wrong with their application, I copy the same three sentences I copy for everyone, because there is no answer in the file. There is a number. The number does not have a reason. It had a temperature.

I do not know what you scored. That is the part I would tell you if I were allowed, and it is the part that would not help. You did not score one thing. You scored a range. We met you on your worst draw and called it your record.

The screen refreshes. Row 1,185. The agent thinks for four seconds, the way it thinks, which is to say it rolls, and it prints an 81, and somewhere a person who is an 81 today and an 88 tomorrow is about to receive a letter with my company's name on it and not my name, because my name is not on anything.

I type the 81 onto the other screen.

It still came out below the line.

[Don Hughes @getfiscal]

Happy Anniversary Day to the Communist Party of China. Some highs and some lows but always interesting.

[Druthers Haver @6thgrade4ever]

"mark carney" is such a powerful name because it contains a basic human conflict. its like being named "toddler pitbull"

[Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar]

This worrying development takes place in a wider context of debanking for political reasons, against both the right & the left.

Banks have no right to interfere with legitimate journalistic activity. Lloyds must either disclose their rationale, or reinstate the account immediately.

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

A Microsoft employee in Italy has exposed the company for its deep involvement in Apartheid Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

[Anime Outsiders @animeoutsiders]

I don't care what he thinks about video games, Roger Ebert had the ultimate redpill on nerd culture as a whole.

This basically describes every fandom on earth, and once you see it, you can never un-see it.

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

It’s gotta be the Oral History of Facebook from Clickhole

[Toronto Star @TorontoStar]

Canada’s emergency departments are in worse shape than before the pandemic. This is how bad it's gotten https://t.co/TPsn2UPiwz

[Davide Mastracci @DavideMastracci]

NEW: I took an in-depth look at the Zionist narrative on the shootings of Jewish institutions in Toronto, and came to the conclusion that it’s bullshit that has been used to restrict our civil liberties.

Read my investigation to find out why.

https://t.co/QR8GArUdhM

[Joe Wrote @joewrote]

The anti-ICE protestors persecuted by the government just received their sentences. These are the first prosecutions under Trump's directive that Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization.

For the crime of moving a box of leftist magazines, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

For the crime of attending a protest outside an ICE facility, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto, and Meagan Morris were sentenced to 50 years in prison.

For the crime of attending the demonstration and asking her husband (Sanchez-Estrada) to move the magazines, Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years in prison.

For the crime of defending himself with a legal firearm, only firing after a cop raised his gun, a fact that was hidden during the trial, Benjamin Song was sentenced to 100 years in prison.

Americans are being given de-facto life sentences for protesting their government, exercising their freedom of speech, and defending themselves. The fascism you worried about is here.

[Hannah Riley Fernandez @hannahcrileyy]

if you’ve ever worn black to a protest, used Signal, or carried a first aid kit, a federal jury just decided that can all be evidence of terrorism. a quick thread on the Prairielands convictions from last week, and what they mean for the right to protest in the US: