Home | Technical Error Correction Collective
Right to repair laws have now been passed in 26 US states, forcing companies, in general, to make tools, manuals and spare parts available for purchase at reasonable rates to third party repair shops. While the main focus of articles on these laws have focused on mobile phone repair and farming equipment it in fact touches on many industries. The non-partisan activist site repair.org lists seven industries that they and other right-to-repair activists have identified as being a focus of the various legislations.
On a boring Tuesday in June a tech company called Fastly had a hiccup. Hiccups are nothing new nor surprising, especially in the tech industry, and usually go mostly unnoticed… unless they happen at what effectively is critical infrastructure for many thousands of websites, including some of the most popular ones.
In short, enough websites stopped working for long enough, that from the perspective of a regular user the Internet was, in a very real sense of the word, “broken.”
As a tech-advanced generation grows up it has become increasingly chic to worry about encryption and security. Unfortunately the topic is being oversimplified for one-liners. The recent story that the very popular, safety-conscious, Signal has been cracked is no different.
Non-Fungible Tokens are taking the world by storm, bringing together art collectors and financial speculators. Many tout NFTs as the best thing since sliced bread, at least as far as digital art is concerned. As Time.com puts it: “[I]t’s possible to truly “own” and sell digital art for the first time.”
- example:
- rating: 🤔
- tl;dr: This claim is close to good enough, but reminds us that almost nothing is actually perfect when it comes to preventing tracking across the Internet.
Over the years there has been a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding around private browsing, culminating in a recent $5 billion class action lawsuit being filed this last month alleging Google has lied about the use cases of the technology. A federal judge recently decided that the case had enough merit to move forward.
What the case alleges however, is not what the feature was ever designed for, nor what it’s clearly labeled to do.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (or “GPT-3”) is the most advanced language prediction model available as of this writing, and can generate text that is almost impossible to be distinguished from what a human would write.
This prompted questions whether or not GPT-3 can be considered conscious, joining a long philosophical debate about computers and consciousness, and a broader and even longer one on what consciousness actually is (as hard as it is to believe, there is no scientific or philosophical consensus even regarding this crucial issue).