Technology

Across the world, the biggest smartphone manufacturers are Apple (28%), Samsung (24%), Xiaomi (12%), Oppo (6%) and Vivo (5%). However, there are geographic patterns in popularity, with Apple dominating North America and East Asia, while Samsung leads in South America, Europe, Africa and West Asia in addition to its home turf of South Korea. Xiaomi is the most popular phone brand across South Asia, Spain, Venezuela, Ukraine, Madagascar, Kyrgyzstan and Palestine, while Tecno is popular in West and Central Africa. Oppo, Vivo and Huawei lead in Indonesia, Bhutan and Togo respectively.

Been slowly running into more results from DDG that seem to have some "personal parameter" or difference in search results. I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see that the searches aren't 100% matching up either.

I see this as only getting worse, I want to be able to enter a search and it searches for my query. Not based on my personality or whatever info is being collected. Does anyone know a search engine that's reliable and focuses on giving the same results and doesn't try this "personalized" crap?

cross-posted from: https://fed.dyne.org/post/228188

Paris Marx is joined by Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner to discuss the complicity of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and how tech workers are organizing to stop it.

Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner are former Google software engineers and organizers with No Tech for Apartheid.

Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing1,2 to informing hiring decisions3. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans4,5,6,7. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement8,9. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are more positive. Dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences: language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of AAE be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe use of language technology.

Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 -- and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.

Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.

Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.

While he is accustomed to "offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats", he told AFP, "in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed".

Raspberry Pi has confirmed a bug in the new RP2350 microcontroller family, which causes pins to freeze outputting 2.15V when configured as inputs using the internal pull-down resistors — tied, it seems, to changes made by a vendor to an off-the-shelf fault tolerant pad IP block.

"[I] found a silicon bug," Dangerous Prototypes' Ian Lesnet explains of the issue, which has been confirmed as an erratum in Raspberry Pi's official documentation for the newly-launched dual-architecture RP2350 microcontroller family. "When a GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] pin is an input with the pull-down resistor enabled, it acts like a bus hold. We use the pull-down on the button, which connects to 3.3V when pressed. During the self-test pressing the button works, but then it never goes low again, it sits at 2.15V…"

The ideologues of Silicon Valley are in model collapse.

To train an AI model, you need to give it a ton of data, and the quality of output from the model depends upon whether that data is any good. A risk AI models face, especially as AI-generated output makes up a larger share of what’s published online, is “model collapse”: the rapid degradation that results from AI models being trained on the output of AI models. Essentially, the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cascade of bad thinking.

We’ve been watching something similar happen, in real time, with the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology. It’s not just that they have bad values that are leading to bad politics. They also seem to be talking themselves into believing nonsense at an increasing rate. The world they seem to believe exists, and which they’re reacting and warning against, bears less and less resemblance to the actual world, and instead represents an imagined lore they’ve gotten themselves lost in.

Let’s continue once again our magical trip into GUI Wonderland, and leave timesharing behind with the extremely capable Three Rivers / ICL PERQ and its stunning graphical capabilities! If you want to come with us, feel free to check this article out!

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The Chinese expert community is focused on competition between China and the USA for AI domination. China's local AI companies in contrast to country's authorities are skeptical towards achieving global AI leadership by 2030 amid the American sanctions, lack of state support, variety of technologies and lack of staff. Many of the Western countries acknowledged China's lagging from the developed world.

The recent article of China's minister of science and technology Yin Hejun rates highly the AI achievements of China. It mentioned the volume of local AI market in 2023 was 500 billion yuan, the number of AI companies is above 4400, among these companies 108 with capitalization over 1 billion US dollars. About 500 institutes of high education introduced programs to study AI.

The article highlights the 2017 plan to develop the next generation AI to make China the global AI leader by 2030.

But according to the unanimous opinion of local experts, China is still behind the US. Americans are almost monopolized the global AI market by bringing Open AI's advanced ChatGpt to the masses. Fast development of this tool became possible due to the feedback from users, including China where this service is officially banned, and this made the gap between America and China even bigger.

China's local companies responded with creation of series of competitive LLM products that are the basis for generative instruments which are used at least for now only on China's local market. At the moment the technological giants (Baidu, Alibaba, Iflytek) achieved only the level of ChatGpt 3.5 and plan within the year to surpass the actual ChatGpt 4.

However, the Americans also keep pushing and taking leadership on the market of generative AI. OpenAI's text to video Sora was presented in February and has no Chinese analogs and repeats the ChatGpt history.

According to the representatives of IT companies, the pace of AI development in China is on hold by a number of factors. In March the head of Iflytek Liu Qingfeng pointed that technological gap between China and America is not decreasing because of the US sanctions that limited access to the global LLM achievements. He believes the solution is promoting the AI by relying on local projects. As example he mentioned the LLM model of his company Spark that got a push to development after the Western sanctions and by making a contract with another sanctioned Chinese company Huawei.

The head of China Electronic Corporation Zeng Yi also said that the lack of state support of local developers, start-ups and IT companies in the AI race makes the gap between China and the West even bigger. The businessman asks the developers to cooperate with the local producers since the Western technologies may at any moment lose functionality and support.

The representatives of the local IT business believe the uncontrolled development of national hardware base requires too much resources and hinders the pace of AI development. The chairman of JD.com's Technology Committee Peng Cao notes that scattered technical chip solutions make it hard to develop software. This way local companies should consolidate their efforts to create AI platforms and lower their amounts.

At the same time, China's developers are still highly dependent on Western software solutions. This March the analysts of Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence marked in their report to China's State Council Li Qiang the problem of high popularity of Western tools with free access. According to their data the biggest part of local AI developers uses 2023 LLAMA model of American company META, which owns Facebook and Instagram and is among global AI leaders, for their own LLMs.

According to Xiaomi founder Lei Jun the key flaws of Chinese AI ecosystems are lack and turnover of staff. Only 40% represent the qualified personnel while the graduates prefer West to build careers. For instance, in Sora two of thirteen employees are from China. Xiaomi believes the only way to achieve the ambitious aim of overtaking the US and becoming the global AI leader is tight cooperation of state and business to bring back the best and young professionals to work on the breakthrough projects.