Stuart LangridgeAmanda Brock opens the second day of #stateofopencon24 !
The venue for #soocon24, the Brewery in Shoreditch, is pretty cool. I don’t know how much was staged by the @openuk people and how much is here all the time, but whichever it is they’ve done a good job. And I have started the day with a ginger energy bar, to maintain my essential levels of ginger energy.
Interesting opening keynote from Professor Neil Lawrence at #soocon24: the big AI companies are modern day guilds looking to keep the knowledge and power to themselves, and they’re the sorcerer’s apprentice unleashing the multitude of brooms that they don’t know how to control. We need to empower our society to be open and stop them pushing things in their direction only.
Also quite envious of his ability to speak fluently extempore without slides, I admit
Also quite envious of his ability to speak fluently extempore without slides, I admit
Antonia Kerle from the BBC talking about https://c2pa.org/ which is basically digital signatures for photos so you can tell an image came from the BBC or from ChattyJeeps or wherever. Provenance to help stop disinformation and deepfakes. This is good; I wouldn’t have thought that you could get all the big players to get on board with this, so well done the BBC and Microsoft for doing that. Now they need to create the mindset that unsigned images should be viewed sceptically by default.
knapjack@cubicgarden @sil Thank you for that rabbit hole.
Now running this on my Android cell phone, app is in the Play Store: https://gitlab.com/guardianproject/proofmode/proofmode-android
Colin Rowat@sil here is a blog post from @lawrennd with his keynote: https://inverseprobability.com/2024/02/09/the-sorcerors-apprentice
@sil @lawrennd to me, the interesting question is how to say “Besen, besen! Seid’s gewesen” these days, how to close the gap between a rallying cry and its technical implementation.
I wonder: more functional programming (versus e.g. Python)? That should make code verification easier, reduce 'side effects'. This doesn't put the brooms away, but does help track where they are.
@rowat_c @lawrennd I don’t think that’s an answer. That’s a technical solution, and this is a social problem, and solving social problems with technical solutions never goes very well. The brooms we’re trying to command back into order are the unwarranted enthusiasm of the people, not the thing they’re being enthusiastic about