Silicon Valley’s elite made their billions through luck, not genius. But as the public turns on them, they want to protect their privilege, so they’re trying to convince us they’re inherently superior.

For Disconnect, I explain how billionaires like Elon Musk are bringing eugenics back by promoting effective altruism, longtermism, and pronatalism. The goal is to cement their position at the top, and we need to stop them.

https://www.disconnect.blog/p/why-silicon-valley-is-bringing-eugenics

#tech #elonmusk #inequality

The amazing @mmasnick :

“we went from Taibbi praising Elon Musk for supporting free speech and supposedly helping to expose the evil shadowbanning of the old regime, and refusing to criticize Musk on anything, to Taibbi leaving Twitter, and Musk not just unfollowing him but shadowbanning him and all his Twitter Files.

“In about 48 hours.”

#taibbi #birdsite #twitter #elonmusk

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/10/after-matt-taibbi-leaves-twitter-elon-musk-shadow-bans-all-of-taibbis-tweets-including-the-twitter-files/

This is your periodic reminder that 10 years ago an audiophile forum started debating which versions of memcpy had the highest sound quality.

And that C++ new sounds better than malloc.

https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/

Seit einem Jahr dauert der russische Angriffskrieg gegen die #Ukraine bereits an, der Zerstörung und Leid über die Menschen gebracht hat. Mit unseren Partnern und mit Unterstützung des @AuswaertigesAmt helfen wir KollegInnen in der Ukraine und werden dies weiter tun.

Mit den #KulturGutRettern und gemeinsam mit dem @thw etablierte das DAI ein Logistiknetz für den #Kulturgutschutz. Mit Unterstützung der Hasso-Plattner-Foundation wurden Stipendien vergeben und Forschungsdaten gesichert.

The really remarkable thing isn't just that #Microsoft has decided that the future of #search isn't links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a #chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar - even more remarkable is that #Google agrees.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

1/

Microsoft just released a demo of BigGPT-Large, which they define as "a domain-specific generative model pre-trained on large-scale biomedical literature, has achieved human parity, outperformed other general and scientific LLMs, and could empower biologists in various scenarios of scientific discovery."

Here's the response to the first question that I asked: @ct_bergstrom @emilymbender