I was in route to Zambia when rumbling started happening that the event was in trouble. I boarded a 15 hour flight at JFK and landed in Nairobi with the news that it was done.
You may wonder why they don’t continue online: because transitioning a 5000+ person conference online is a gargantuan task that takes even the most well resourced institutions quite a lot of preparation, five days before is just un feasible.
And then there’s the question of principle: Access Now runs a human rights conference, which is actively being censored, what are they going to do? Kick out the Taiwanese presenters? What leg would they have to stand on if they did that?
Civil society has so few opportunities to come together, learn from one another, and build solidarity at a grand scale. The loss of RightsCon this year is a profound and unimaginable setback.
It is significant that this event was in Southern Africa. The U.S. and other western countries have been quietly exporting advanced surveillance technologies and digital infrastructure to the region, turning these nations into testing or waste grounds, all while treating the continent as an extractive resource for the cheap data and invisible human labor required to power modern AI.
At RightsCon, a researcher from Africa will meet an organizer from India or a well-connected funder from the UK, become friends, trade notes. It’s exactly the kind of innovative, revolutionary place authoritarians don’t want.
It was in Africa because the people there cannot come to Europe, the U.S., or parts of Asia.
Yeah. I feel like I recall Matt Damon or some similarly famous actor saying that the reason there's been such a shift is largely due to the loss of physical media. It would give every movie a second "push" with reach and sales.
Related (a little): I recommend everyone go to a film festival at least once in their lives. Doesn't have to be a huge one, something regional works. It's a great opportunity to experience some of what I'm describing.
I went to the recent re-screenings of the Lord of the Rings movies -- and maybe 30 minutes into the first film, I realized I'd never actually seen it in a theater before. It was glorious.
There seems to be a lot of gloating in this thread from people who haven't been to a theater in many, many years -- lots of disgust at the idea of a movie ever being a communal, social experience. I get the annoyance of other moviegoers talking or otherwise disturbing the movie, but you have no idea what we're missing when big films don't have big individualized social moments to match.
We can't go two hours without picking up our phones. We don't deserve the great experiences movie theaters once gave us.
I like the idea of using vintage LLMs to study explicit and implicit bias. e.g. text before mid-19th century believing in racial superiority, gender discrimination, imperial authority or slavery. Comparing that to text since then. I'm sure there are more ideas when you use temporal constraints on training data.
They also search online and return links, though? And, you can steer them when they do that to seek out more "authoritative" sources (e.g. news reports, publications by reputable organizations).
If you pay for it, ChatGPT can spend upwards of 5 minutes going out and finding you sources if you ask it to.
Those sources can than be separately verified, which is up to the user - of course.
A side project that takes legal documents and uses TTS models to create a narrated read out of the whole document.
Part of the reason I'm building my own solution is that legal documents are often distributed in PDFs which can have all kinds of formatting issues when converted to plain text. There's also specific jargon and formatting that may or may not need to be included, or spoken, or even spoken differently, that I am finding no commercial TTS platform like ElevenLabs really accounts for well. It's all about the pre-processing and chunking.
Also, the commercial models are expensive when you're routinely throwing dozens of pages of text at it.
Completely agree. I jumped back in recently for some electronics work and was surprised to learn that the Raspberry Pi imaging tool allows you to set the root user, WiFi SSID, and hostname right when you're imaging the tool. You never need to connect it to a display like the old days! Makes onboarding a device for a specific purpose super easy. Been using mine to work with a simple LED matrix from Adafruit. But I am sure I will be acquiring more for all kinds of random projects in the time to come.
I think a lot of those offered would understand how people on TikTok would turn on them for selling out. They're not stupid, quite the opposite. I detest how the political landscape of the internet has evolved to such an extent that it now influences our decisions about posting or not posting content online.
You may wonder why they don’t continue online: because transitioning a 5000+ person conference online is a gargantuan task that takes even the most well resourced institutions quite a lot of preparation, five days before is just un feasible.
And then there’s the question of principle: Access Now runs a human rights conference, which is actively being censored, what are they going to do? Kick out the Taiwanese presenters? What leg would they have to stand on if they did that?
Civil society has so few opportunities to come together, learn from one another, and build solidarity at a grand scale. The loss of RightsCon this year is a profound and unimaginable setback.
It is significant that this event was in Southern Africa. The U.S. and other western countries have been quietly exporting advanced surveillance technologies and digital infrastructure to the region, turning these nations into testing or waste grounds, all while treating the continent as an extractive resource for the cheap data and invisible human labor required to power modern AI.
At RightsCon, a researcher from Africa will meet an organizer from India or a well-connected funder from the UK, become friends, trade notes. It’s exactly the kind of innovative, revolutionary place authoritarians don’t want.
It was in Africa because the people there cannot come to Europe, the U.S., or parts of Asia.
This is just an unimaginable loss.