Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Jono and Jeremy are coming to you direct from the Open Source Summit in France, the word for “full of incitement” is not “inciteful”, Stuart, and:
The good news on copyrights is that, indeed, nothing happened last year, so we in the United States now finally have basically the entirety of 1923 in the public domain. And, with less than sixty days and a lot going on in Congress, 1924 looks like it’s not going to be far behind. Will we hit 1928 for Steamboat Willie? Maybe not, but it’s also possible that Disney could bank on the low price of Disney+ (that they can afford thanks to what’s basically a vertical and horizontal monopoly) making any (ahem) “losses from piracy” irrelevant.
It is odd that we never really got that flood of “Free Culture,” though, to fill the gaps created by copyright extensions. There are the irregular Blender showpieces, of course, but they seem to get less attention with every release. There’s a bunch of non-commercial (so, not really Free/Libre) content and a bunch of opinion-based podcasts (this one appreciated), photography, and music under free licenses, but it feels like the best in the narrative space is still limited to Where Are the Joneses? and Pepper and Carrot. Is there much else that’s ongoing? I know there are a few novels, some of which I’ve started reading, and a handful of other webcomics, but that’s still not much.
As far as Facebook nonsense goes, Breitbart has published “reporting” on many fabricated conspiracy theories, so no, it’s not “people don’t like their politics.” If an outlet spreads what amounts to paraphrasing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or claims that women and minorities who don’t like being harassed should just leave, they’re very much not “reputable news.” And, just like the association with Cambridge Analytica (also associated with Steve Bannon), it kind of gives some indication of what Zuckerberg wants out of Facebook…and reason to use the open source social networks. That’s probably doubly true after Zuck went through that “totally not running for President” phase.
With regard to the Facebook item, I think that they are just keen for people to share as much of their lives as possible on their platforms so they can use that to inform our shadow profile construction. I also believe Facebook have a policy of just collecting all data they can so that they can figure out what to do with it in the future.
I am concerned that Facebook is operating in a space that has no good legal controls and allows them to work around rules. I know that in many parts of the world “Facebook” is synonymous with “Internet”. I think it’s important that we all continue to enjoy using the WWW and not spend too much time locked into pretty walled gardens.
That will be so weird if Mickey mouse gets so old anyone can employ him
As for the AI in interviews piece. I think for interviewers the issue is about risk. If I employ person X will that person poison my company. I think that interviewers need to take the risk of employing people and go with their gut.
In a job a while ago and a colleague tried to get us all to do a personality questionnaire and I refused. It’s not that I’m against having fun or trying new things, but I feel us developers / IT people ought to engage with real scientific peer reviewed techniques for improving our working practices. As a result of my refusal to do the BS questionnaire I got a reputation for being the kind of guy that only cares about logic and being sceptical (really I’m not), but it wasn’t a bad thing – given I was responsible for reading technical docs and fixing things. AI is such a buzz word in the industry for right now!
The first rule about Disney owning the rights to fight club is…
Regarding Breitbart, this seems far more virtuous than the way Facebook typically behaves, but perhaps they are including Breitbart in the initial list of publishers for Facebook News so that they can officially remove Breitbart when it violates Facebook News’ policies? That seems cleaner than trying to hold all previous published content against all publishers at the outset.
Regarding AI interviews, I am not sure about the specific techniques used by Unilever, but I wonder if interviews in general are a case where more randomness might be a good thing – meaning that for a given job there are many qualified applicants and applying specific, rigorous techniques to select one of them might result in the same kind of person being chosen every time when building a more diverse team might lead to a better company overall. The AI likely applies specific techniques but if they are arbitrary enough perhaps they could be effectively random and then lead to better outcomes than biased human hiring managers. This is just an idle thought – not something I am arguing was the case for Unilever specifically. I feel like saying you used an AI that could not explain its choice would be better received than saying you chose an applicant at random.
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