…ever wonder to yourself what it would take to make you walk off the job?

Texas trooper says they were told to push children into Rio Grande and deny migrants water [Guardian]

…I know most of us are, in a sense, slaves to a paycheck

The Hollywood strike can and must win – for all of us, not just writers and actors [Guardian]

…& there’s some unpleasant statistics knocking about concerning the inability of a lot of bank balances to ride out unexpected expenses

What We Learned From the Deepest Look at Homelessness in Decades [NYT]

China real estate giant reveals staggering $81 billion loss amid slump [WaPo]

…but

Algorithms Are Making Kids Desperately Unhappy [NYT]

…damn

When this editor — a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49 on the site — gave the new technology a try, he could see that it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers. But he had no doubts about its potential. “I think A.I.’s day of writing a high-quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later,” he wrote in “Death of Wikipedia,” an essay that he posted under his handle on Wikipedia itself. He speculated that a computerized model could, in time, displace his beloved website and its human editors, just as Wikipedia had supplanted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which in 2012 announced it was discontinuing its print publication.
[…]
Wikipedia marked its 22nd anniversary in January. It remains, in many ways, a throwback to the Internet’s utopian early days, when experiments with open collaboration — anyone can write and edit for Wikipedia — had yet to cede the digital terrain to multibillion-dollar corporations and data miners, advertising schemers and social-media propagandists. The goal of Wikipedia, as its co-founder Jimmy Wales described it in 2004, was to create “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” The following year, Wales also stated, “We help the internet not suck.” Wikipedia now has versions in 334 languages and a total of more than 61 million articles. It consistently ranks among the world’s 10 most-visited websites yet is alone among that select group (whose usual leaders are Google, YouTube and Facebook) in eschewing the profit motive. Wikipedia does not run ads, except when it seeks donations, and its contributors, who make about 345 edits per minute on the site, are not paid. In seeming to repudiate capitalism’s imperatives, its success can seem surprising, even mystifying. Some Wikipedians remark that their endeavor works in practice, but not in theory.
[…]
The new A.I. chatbots have typically swallowed Wikipedia’s corpus, too. Embedded deep within their responses to queries is Wikipedia data and Wikipedia text, knowledge that has been compiled over years of painstaking work by human contributors. While estimates of its influence can vary, Wikipedia is probably the most important single source in the training of A.I. models. “Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist,” says Nicholas Vincent, who will be joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia this month and who has studied how Wikipedia helps support Google searches and other information businesses.
[…]
On a conference call in March that focused on A.I.’s threats to Wikipedia, as well as the potential benefits, the editors’ hopes contended with anxiety. While some participants seemed confident that generative A.I. tools would soon help expand Wikipedia’s articles and global reach, others worried about whether users would increasingly choose ChatGPT — fast, fluent, seemingly oracular — over a wonky entry from Wikipedia. A main concern among the editors was how Wikipedians could defend themselves from such a threatening technological interloper. And some worried about whether the digital realm had reached a point where their own organization — especially in its striving for accuracy and truthfulness — was being threatened by a type of intelligence that was both factually unreliable and hard to contain.
[…]
Back in 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation and its community of volunteers began exploring how the encyclopedia and its sister sites like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, with their offerings of free information and images, could evolve by the year 2030. The plan was to ensure that the foundation, the nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia, could protect and share the world’s information in perpetuity. One outcome of that 2017 effort, which included a year’s worth of meetings, was a prediction that Wikimedia would become “the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”; another conclusion was that trends like online misinformation would soon require far more vigilance. And a research paper commissioned by the foundation found that artificial intelligence was improving at a rate that could change the way that knowledge is “gathered, assembled and synthesized.”
[…]
How Wikipedia uses bots and how bots use Wikipedia are extremely different, however. For years it has been clear that fledgling A.I. systems were being trained on the site’s articles, as part of the process whereby engineers “scrape” the web to create enormous data sets for that purpose. In the early days of these models, about a decade ago, Wikipedia represented a large percentage of the scraped data used to train machines. The encyclopedia was crucial not only because it’s free and accessible, but also because it contains a mother lode of facts and so much of its material is consistently formatted.

In more recent years, as so-called Large Language Models, or L.L.M.s, increased in size and functionality — these are the models that power chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — they began to take in far larger amounts of information. In some cases, their meals added up to well over a trillion words. The sources included not just Wikipedia but also Google’s patent database, government documents, Reddit’s Q. and A. corpus, books from online libraries and vast numbers of news articles on the web. But while Wikipedia’s contribution in terms of overall volume is shrinking — and even as tech companies have stopped disclosing what data sets go into their A.I. models — it remains one of the largest single sources for L.L.M.s. Jesse Dodge, a computer scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, told me that Wikipedia might now make up between 3 and 5 percent of the scraped data an L.L.M. uses for its training. “Wikipedia going forward will forever be super valuable,” Dodge points out, “because it’s one of the largest well-curated data sets out there.” There is generally a link, he adds, between the quality of data a model trains on and the accuracy and coherence of its responses.

…is there a future for “just giving it away”?

Facebook will make its latest AI model free to use [WaPo]

Meta to make new version of AI model available for free on Microsoft [Guardian]

In this light, Wikipedia might be seen as a sheep, caught in the jaws of a wolfish technology marketplace. A free site created in achingly good faith (“Sharing knowledge is by nature an act of kindness,” Wikimedia noted in 2017, on a page devoted to its strategic direction) is being devoured by companies whose objectives — like charging for subscriptions, as OpenAI recently began doing for its latest model — don’t jibe with its own. Yet the relationships are more complicated than they appear. Wikipedia’s fundamental goal is to spread knowledge as broadly and freely as possible, by whatever means. About 10 years ago, when site administrators focused on how Google was using Wikipedia, they were in a situation that presaged the advent of A.I. chatbots. Google’s search engine was able, at the top of its query results, to present Wikipedians’ work to users all over the world, giving the encyclopedia far greater reach than before — an apparent virtue. In 2017, three academic computer scientists, Connor McMahon, Isaac Johnson and Brent Hecht, conducted an experiment that tested how random users would react if just part of the contributions made to Google’s search results by Wikipedia were removed. The academics perceived an “extensive interdependence”: Wikipedia makes Google a “significantly better” search engine for many queries, and Wikipedia, in turn, gets most of its traffic from Google.

One upshot from the collision with Google and others who repurpose Wikipedia’s content was the creation, two years ago, of Wikimedia Enterprise, a separate business unit that sells access to a series of application programming interfaces that provide accelerated updates to Wikipedia articles. Depending on whom you ask, the enterprise unit is either a more formalized way for tech companies to direct the equivalent of large charitable donations to Wikipedia — Google now subscribes, and altogether the unit took in $3.1 million in 2022 — or a way for Wikipedia to recoup some of the financial value it creates for the digital world, and thus help fund its future operations. Practically speaking, Wikipedia’s openness allows any tech company to access Wikipedia at any time, but the A.P.I.s make new Wikipedia entries almost instantly readable. This speeds up what was already a pretty fast connection. Andrew Lih, a consultant who works with museums to put data about their collections on Wikipedia, told me he conducted an experiment in 2019 to see how long it would take for a new Wikipedia article, about a pioneering balloonist named Vera Simons, to show up in Google Search results. He found the elapsed time was about 15 minutes.

…maybe that doesn’t sound surprising to people

Nick Clegg defends release of open-source AI model by Meta [Guardian]

…but

Disinformation reimagined: how AI could erode democracy in the 2024 US elections [Guardian]

…made me dizzy to think about…& the rest of that piece is various sorts of interesting

With A.I., this reuse problem threatens to become far more pervasive. Aaron Halfaker, who led the machine-learning research team at the Wikimedia Foundation for several years (and who now works for Microsoft), told me that search-engine summaries at least offer users links and citations and a way to click back to Wikipedia. The responses from large language models can resemble an information smoothie that goes down easy but contains mysterious ingredients. “The ability to generate an answer has fundamentally shifted,” he says, noting that in a ChatGPT answer there is “literally no citation, and no grounding in the literature as to where that information came from.” He contrasts it with the Google or Bing search engines: “This is different. This is way more powerful than what we had before.”

…but

Almost certainly, that makes A.I. both more difficult to contend with and potentially more harmful, at least from Wikipedia’s perspective. A computer scientist who works in the A.I. industry (but is not permitted to speak publicly about his work) told me that these technologies are highly self-destructive, threatening to obliterate the very content which they depend upon for training. It’s just that many people, including some in the tech industry, haven’t yet realized the implications.
[…]
Several academics told me that whatever Wikipedia’s shortcomings, they view the encyclopedia as a “consensus truth,” as one of them put it: It acts as a reality check in a society where facts are increasingly contested. That truth is less about data points — “How old is Joe Biden?” — than about complex events like the Covid-19 pandemic, in which facts are constantly evolving, frequently distorted and furiously debated. The truthfulness quotient is raised by Wikipedia’s transparency. Most Wikipedia entries include footnotes, links to source materials and lists of previous edits and editors — and experienced editors are willing to intercede when an article appears incomplete or lacks what Wikipedians call “verifiability.” Moreover, Wikipedia’s guidelines insist that its editors maintain an “N.P.O.V.” — neutral point of view — or risk being overruled (or, in the argot of wiki culture, “reverted”). And the site has a bent toward self-examination. You can find long disquisitions on Wikipedia that explore Wikipedia’s own reliability. An entry on how Wikipedia has fallen victim to hoaxes runs to more than 60 printed pages.

…it’s a long one

This apprehension extends not just to chatbots but also to new search engines connected to A.I. technologies. In April, a team of Stanford University scientists evaluated four engines powered by A.I. — Bing Chat, NeevaAI, perplexity.ai and YouChat — and found that only about half of the sentences generated by the search engines in response to a query could be fully supported by factual citations. “We believe that these results are concerningly low for systems that may serve as a primary tool for information-seeking users,” the researchers concluded, “especially given their facade of trustworthiness.”

Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth [NYT]

…& there are a lot of distractions out there

Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne announces his resignation after flaws were found in his research [NBC]

…which…kinda sorta seems like it’s not exactly a coincidence

House GOP seeks billions in cuts to rail, water infrastructure spending [WaPo]

In unrelenting heat, this small Arkansas town hasn’t had clean water for 3 weeks [NBC]

In Earth’s hottest spots, heat is testing the limits of human survival [WaPo]

…&

Trump under investigation for civil rights conspiracy in January 6 inquiry [Guardian]

…a lot of things that you know somebody best be keeping an eye on

Analysis: What prosecutors will need to prove if they charge Trump with trying to steal the 2020 election [NBC]

Donald Trump’s legal problems: where does each case stand? [Guardian]

Special counsel’s target letter to Trump in 2020 election probe cites three federal statutes [NBC]

…after all

‘Gut-Level Hatred’ Is Consuming Our Political Life [NYT]

…some things just aren’t as surprising as they maybe ought to be

Southern California school board rejects curriculum that mentions Harvey Milk [NBC]

…but…when you add them up the consequences have a tendency to loom

Thousands of Ukraine civilians are being held in Russian prisons. Russia plans to build many more [AP]

…& some goals seem as desirable as they do implausible

The concept of zero waste has gained popularity in the past decade, fueled in part by social media. But it has also garnered criticism for requiring a level of privilege to adopt (creating less trash is tough if, say, you don’t have access to eco-friendly products or composting, you don’t live near a refill store or you don’t have time to make food from scratch). Some say that it puts the onus of environmental change on individuals, rather than corporations and policymakers. Still, those who identify as zero waste find it deeply fulfilling and believe it is a moral imperative to at least try to reduce your trash.

The quest to produce less trash [WaPo]

…keeping things in perspective is…a challenge

Where are you at with your five stages of grief for the Holocene? That’s the geological epoch we were living in for the past 11,700 years – the period of time when humans invented agriculture, built cities, invented writing, became “modern”, essentially. All of history took place in this epoch, marked by its congenial, relatively predictable climate, in which ice sheets retreated from Europe and North America, and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were high enough to enable the flourishing of grains, like rice and wheat.

Now we’ve left those Holocene conditions for the uncharted Anthropocene, an age brought about by human activities and characterised by global climate chaos and ecological degradation. Last week, members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) of scientists selected Crawford Lake in Canada as the best site to mark the epoch’s geological start. If their bid is successful, the International Union of Geological Sciences could officially – momentously – declare the Anthropocene in August 2024.

Everyone thinks their own time is significant, but we truly are living in exceptional times. Most geological episodes span millions of years, making the Holocene a relative blink at the end of the Pleistocene’s 2.5m. As for how long the Anthropocene will last … Well, that depends how long humans persist for (and whether what succeeds us has any interest in paleobiology).
[…]
The AWG chose the radioactive metal plutonium as a marker for our Holocene-Anthropocene boundary. Plutonium pollution spiked globally during the nuclear weapons tests of the 1950s until the international test ban treaty in 1963. Undisturbed sediments in the protected Crawford Lake offer a particularly good record of that. The plutonium blip coincides with “the great acceleration”, a surge in all human activity. That activity, said Colin Waters, the group’s chair, is “no longer just influencing Earth’s sphere, it’s actually controlling” it.
[…]
It is the last two stages we need to reach – acceptance and reconstruction – if we are to build a livable Anthropocene. We need to take the controls with purpose, focused on this goal.

Consider the heatwave and floods: can we still save the planet for our children? I think we can [Guardian]

…it’s certainly getting harder to ignore the rising tides by burying your head in the sand

This heatwave is a climate omen. But it’s not too late to change course [Guardian]

…but

The U.S. is about to open a new window into Earth’s mysterious insides [WaPo]

…you know what they say about practice

The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.

Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is cited as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned in a statement with two other scientists that the world was moving towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years, bringing impacts such as stronger storms, heatwaves and droughts.
[…]
“There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts,” Hansen, who is 82, told the Guardian. “These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality – we knew it was coming.”
[…]
“It means we are damned fools,” Hansen said of humanity’s ponderous response to the climate crisis. “We have to taste it to believe it.”
[…]
“This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year. Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.”
[…]
Hansen has argued in a new research paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, that the rate of global heating is accelerating, even when natural variations, such as the current El Niño climatic event that periodically raises temperatures, are accounted for. This is due to what he said was an “unprecedented” imbalance in the amount of energy coming into the planet from the sun versus the energy reflected away from Earth.[…]
“It’s maybe premature to say the warming is accelerating, but it’s not decreasing, for sure. We still have our foot on the gas,” said Matthew Huber, an expert in paleoclimatology at Purdue University.

Scientists have estimated, through reconstructions based on evidence gathered via ice cores, tree rings and sediment deposits, that the current surge in heating has already brought global temperatures to levels not seen on Earth since about 125,000 years ago, before the last ice age.

“We quite possibly are already living in a climate that no human has lived through before and we are certainly living in a climate that no human has lived in since before the birth of agriculture,” said Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.

Should global temperatures rise by a further 1C or more, which is widely predicted to happen by the end of the century barring a drastic reduction in emissions, Huber said Hansen was “broadly correct” that the world will be plunged into the sort of warmth not seen since 1-3m years ago, a period of time called the Pliocene.

“That is a radically different world,” said Huber of an epoch in which it was warm enough for beech trees to grow near the south pole and sea levels were about 20 meters higher than now, which would today drown most coastal cities.

“We are pushing temperatures up to Pliocene levels, which is outside the realm of human experience; it’s such a massive change that most things on Earth haven’t had to deal with it,” Huber said. “It’s basically an experiment on humans and ecosystems to see how they respond. Nothing is adapted to this.”
[…]
“It’s not just the magnitude of change, it’s the rate of change that’s an issue,” said Ellen Thomas, a Yale University scientist who studies climate over geologic timescales. “We have highways and railroads that are set in place, our infrastructure can’t move. Almost all my colleagues have said that, in hindsight, we have underestimated the consequences. Things are moving faster than we thought, which is not good.”

…are we sure she’s not british? …because that is some world class understatement

“But we can’t simply give up because the situation is dire,” Huber added. “We need to say ‘Here is where we need to invest and make changes and innovate’ and not give up. We can’t just write off billions of people.”

‘We are damned fools’: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come [Guardian]

…so…when it comes to listening to the science…there’s no shortage of raised voices

Consumers in the richer, developed nations will have to accept restrictions on their energy use if international climate change targets are to be met. Public support for energy demand reduction is possible if the public see the schemes as being fair and deliver climate justice
by u/Wagamaga in science

…& from time to time we have to re-calibrate our sense of the possible

Two planets sharing same orbit around their star? Astronomers find strongest evidence yet [NBC]

Two-faced star with helium and hydrogen sides baffles astronomers [Guardian]

…not to mention some flipped scripts

We’re Already Paying for Universal Health Care. Why Don’t We Have It? [NYT]

…sometimes…moving on involves going back

Facing a Future of Drought, Spain Turns to Medieval Solutions and ‘Ancient Wisdom’ [NYT]

…which…hopefully…is different from just round & around…any road…here’s to taking thursday for a spin

I approve this message. pic.twitter.com/f1q5giNM8j

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 18, 2023

…& being grateful for friday?