Welcome to the eighth issue of Tech Tuesdays!
Here’s what I found interesting this week:
Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.“
U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests
Congress reconvened Wednesday night to certify President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, just hours after the U.S. Capitol was thrust into chaos by supporters of President Trump — an angry mob that breached the complex in an unprecedented violent act at the seat of America's federal government.
WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app
People who object to the new terms and policy should consider using a different messenger. The Signal messenger provides the same robust encryption engine with a much more transparent privacy policy and terms of service. (Those documents are half the length of those from WhatsApp, too.) Besides providing encrypted chats, Signal also offers encrypted audio and video calls.
DALL·E: Creating Images from Text
DALL=E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs. We’ve found that it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images.
Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler
On Friday, Apple gave Parler 24 hours to clean up its app or face removal from its App Store. Parler appeared to take down some posts over that period, but on Saturday, Apple told the company its measures were inadequate. “We have always supported diverse points of view being represented on the App Store, but there is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” Apple said in a statement.
Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
Consumer and environmental organizations have also welcomed the EU Parliament resolution with cautious optimism. “The right to repair was already in the Green Deal of December 2019 as a buzzword,” says Elke Salzmann of the Federation of Consumer Organizations in Germany, referring to Europe’s commitment to become the first climate-neutral continent. “But we have to take care that the promise will be obliging.”
Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump
“We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.”
70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers
The scrape includes user profile data, user information, and which users had administration rights for specific groups within the social network. Twitter user @donk_enby, who first announced about the scrape, claims that over a million video URLs, some deleted and private, were taken.
What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
There's a lot of aspects to differences in how different type of companies approach their relationship to engineers. The biggest one is this, though. "SV-like" companies think of engineers as value generators, and creative problem solvers. Traditional companies think of them as factory workers.
Keeping Wikipedia’s culture healthy means moving with the times. “Wikipedia is a child of the desktop internet,” says Mr Negrin. But “increasingly, when people talk about internet users, they’re talking about smartphones.” So the foundation is improving the site’s mobile-editing tools. Typing long articles on a smartphone is inescapably awkward, so attention has focused on helping users to make “micro-edits”, such as fixing spelling mistakes or correcting dates.
Following Wednesday's violent siege of the Capitol, Stripe will no longer process payments for President Trump's campaign, which continued to fundraise. The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, and confirmed by Axios with a source close to Stripe.
Pfizer vaccine appears effective against mutation in new coronavirus variants
Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine appeared to work against a key mutation in the highly transmissible new variants of the coronavirus discovered in Britain and South Africa, according to a laboratory study conducted by the U.S. drugmaker.
YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
It was terminated for a "violation of YouTube's Terms of Service," according to The Washington Examiner. The ban came in hours after Rudy Giuliani appeared on the podcast.
Reddit bans subreddit group “r/DonaldTrump”
"Reddit's site-wide policies prohibit content that promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals. In accordance with this, we have been proactively reaching out to moderators to remind them of our policies and to offer support or resources as needed,"
Algorithms for Decision Making
“This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.”
Thanks for reading!
If you got any comments or just want to brainstorm, email me at jacob@unhype.com.