In June 2022, a federal appeals court affirmed Donziger's criminal contempt conviction. In March 2023, the Supreme Court declined to hear further appeals.

I'm shocked.

Fuck TMZ for posting his dead body yesterday just to prove they were the ones "breaking the news". That shit was cached my news reader even after they removed it.

Bonus loaf

Considering that Vincke (or another person from Larian) has stated that everyone from WotC they worked with has now been laid off despite the huge success of BG3, I'm glad Larian are focusing on their own IP instead of bringing in money for WotC/Hasbro.

That website asks you to consent to sharing your data with 848 partners, so here's the article text:

Carissa Véliz is an expert in ethics applied to technology. The Spanish-Mexican philosopher, who does not provide a date or place of birth to protect her privacy, is one of the voices that warn us about the growing digital dangers that lurk at every corner and chip away at our individual autonomy. Her first book, Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, encourages developing strategies to not allow ourselves to be dominated by companies and technology. Simple things like using multiple emails to protect the one we really value, or providing companies with a pseudonym instead of our personal data. The essay was selected by The Economist as one of the books of 2020. Last January she published The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance.

Véliz teaches at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford and she has also worked as a private advisor. The meeting takes place one morning in May in an office with plush sofas and a painting of a country landscape at the Rafael del Pino Foundation, next to Paseo del Prado in Madrid, where she has taught a course on Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Véliz, who collaborates with various media outlets, including EL PAÍS, has a fresh, almost adolescent voice.

Question. You consider that surveillance capitalism makes an unacceptable intrusion into our privacy to the point of undermining our autonomy.

Answer. Autonomy is a fundamental principle. To have it, you need space to make your own decisions, to think about what your values are and act in that direction. And when they are watching you all the time, the other’s gaze is oppressive, it seeks your compliance. The simple fact of being observed reduces our impulse to experiment, to ask. Human beings need privacy, intimacy and a certain solitude to discover ourselves.

Q. How does this automate our thinking, as you maintain?

A. It affects how we experience things and how we express ourselves. I recently asked that a talk I was going to give not be recorded, we had not agreed to it. They said okay, they announced it to the public, and the camera was turned off. The conversation was lively, the audience participated a lot. At the end, the organizer told me: “It was the most interesting session we have had, there was a lot of interaction.” We don’t realize how surveillance influences us. If we turned off the cameras we would see that we do not think the same, we do not express things the same way, there is not the same type of frankness in the debate.

Q. You defend a system of anonymity to protect our privacy. Can you explain it?

A. It is a system that works with pseudonyms. If we had not allowed the use of these we would not have the works of John Locke, Marx or Kierkegaard... Anonymity is one of the most important social innovations of democracy, in particular, the possibility of making an anonymous protest, going out into the streets... Today we carry our cell phones with us, which identifies us, and that sometimes means that people do not show up when they need to. I defend a system that protects us, as long as we do not commit a crime. The idea is to have a permanent pseudonym that you can use to interact**online*,* but that protects your identity. The people who suffer the most on social media are women and we are pushing them out of the public sphere because we are not protecting them from abuse. Many no longer want to be on Twitter, in politics, or to be journalists. Having a public persona exposes you to tremendous abuse.

Q. We still have no user age verification system that protects minors.

A. A Zero-Knowledge Proof system is being trialled at the BBC. Imagine that a minor wants to watch a program for people over 18 years of age. Through this system, which provides a verified identity, the chain will know if the person is of legal age or not.

Q. In which parts of the planet has individual privacy already been lost?

A. China takes the lead, it has no pretensions to being democratic or liberal. It is going all out with surveillance, it intends for it to be centralized. The surveillance you are subjected to at work has consequences on your personal relationships in a country like this. It affects, for example, the visibility you achieve on dating applications.

Q. According to my score, do I achieve more or less visibility in a dating application?

A. Yes. And visibility is decided by a centralized system of social credibility. The extent to which it works centrally is controversial and a work in progress, but that is the intention and the trend. If you do something wrong at work and your boss gives you a bad rating, that rating will affect you in many areas. That's part of what it means to have a totalitarian system: one aspect of your life influences everything else.

Q. In the West, to escape the lack of privacy, what do we have? Our individual rebellion?

A. Obviously, we need regulation. Collective problems need collective solutions. It is not up to the individual to change things and yet we have power; When we change our behavior, companies and governments are sensitive to it. It’s not about not using your cell phone. We must try to protect our privacy when we can and it is not too demanding. Instead of using WhatsApp, use Signal. It’s free, it works just as well, it doesn’t collect your data. Instead of using Gmail, use Proton Mail. Instead of using Google, use DuckDuckGo. And if you want to have a good party, ask your friends not to take photos and certainly not to share them.

Q. Confidence in the laws that should stop digital abuse is not at a high point.

A. We are at the beginning of the revolution. This is the Wild West and it is a civilizing process that we have experienced before. Cars in the 1960s did not have seat belts. It took decades.

Q. Ethically, what worries you most about artificial intelligence?

A. That five white men in Silicon Valley are designing it at any price.

Q. What types of decisions should we never leave in the hands of AI?

A. Any decision that can significantly affect a person’s life. AI is not a moral agent, it cannot be responsible for harming someone or denying them an important opportunity. Nor should we delegate to AI jobs in which we value the empathy of a fellow citizen who can understand what we feel.

Leave Jimmy alone 😭 he's suffered enough from the American political complex.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but anyone feel like Apple is slowly having an...over-engineering problem?

The Apple Vision Pro, this... the new iPad Pros with FUCKING M4 CHIPS THAT ARE RUNNING IPADOS (??????)

Like what is happening in their product development department lately?

The hero we needed 🙏

Everyone else has done the in-depth design analysis already, so I'm gonna say what's really on my mind:

They made him less fuckable. I would never put the new Captain Morgan logo on my "hall pass" list.

The allegations from his sister aside (not discrediting them, I’m just not well informed on that atm), it’s been really strange seeing so many comments cheering for Sam Altman and dunking on the openAI board (handpicked by Altman himself btw) for this whole farce. We have no info on what’s happening inside, just 3rd party hearsay and speculation.

Not only that, the guy who allegedly led Altman’s ousting, Ilya Sutskever, signed the employee resignation letter asking to reinstate Altman as CEO.

OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who reportedly led the push to remove Altman, noted on X (formerly Twitter) that he had some regrets about the weekend of chaos inside OpenAI. “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI,” said Sutskever. “I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”

And somehow Microsoft ends up the biggest winner out of this entire situation. I don’t consider myself conspiracy minded…but what the hell is going on here?

Me out here calling them “plus head” and “minus head” like a neanderthal

Elon Musk is a South African who lives and operates in the US. Why tf is he trying chiming in about any German electoral process?

How about Apartheid Clyde stays in his lane.