ChatGPT

In a complicated story from TIME, work between OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and Sana, a San Francisco-based firm that employs people in Kenya named Sama. Sama works with some of the biggest companies in the tech industry, including Google, Meta, and Microsoft, on labeling content in images and text for explicit content.

Microsoft already has invested $1 billion into OpenAI, with a possible $10 billion more on the way. Microsoft plans to put AI into everything and reportedly leverage ChatGPT with Bing.

Sama is based in San Fran, but the work is performed by workers in Kenya, earning around $1.32 and $2 per hour. Unfortunately, to keep ChatGPT “safe” for users, OpenAI needs to feed it a lot of data from the internet, which is all unfiltered. So instead of using humans to filter out all the bad stuff, OpenAI (and companies like Meta with Facebook) employ other AI tools to remove that content from the data pool automatically.

Like the 2019 story on Facebook from The Verge, which highlighted the psychological impact of such content on the workers, Sama employees also suffered a similar fate:

“One Sama worker tasked with reading and labeling text for OpenAI told TIME he suffered from recurring visions after reading a graphic description of a man having sex with a dog in the presence of a young child. “That was torture,” he said. “You will read a number of statements like that all through the week. By the time it gets to Friday, you are disturbed from thinking through that picture.” The work’s traumatic nature eventually led Sama to cancel all its work for OpenAI in February 2022, eight months earlier than planned.”

The overall contract with Sama was $200,000, and that contract stipulated it would pay “an hourly rate of $12.50 to Sama for the work, which was between six and nine times the amount Sama employees on the project were taking home per hour.”

Later, Sama began to pilot a new project for OpenAI unrelated to ChatGPT. However, instead of text this time, it was imagery, including some illegal under US law, such as child sexual abuse, bestiality, rape, sexual slavery, and death and violence. Again, workers were to view and label the content so that OpenAI’s systems could filter out such things.  READ MORE...

Tech Companies Must Pay for News in Australia

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia’s law forcing Google and Facebook to pay for news is ready to take effect, though the laws’ architect said it will take time for the digital giants to strike media deals.

The Parliament on Thursday passed the final amendments to the so-called News Media Bargaining Code agreed between Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday.

In return for the changes, Facebook agreed to lift a ban on Australians accessing and sharing news.

Rod Sims, the competition regulator who drafted the code, said he was happy that the amended legislation would address the market imbalance between Australian news publishers and the two gateways to the internet.

“All signs are good,” Sims said.

“The purpose of the code is to address the market power that clearly Google and Facebook have. Google and Facebook need media, but they don’t need any particular media company, and that meant media companies couldn’t do commercial deals,” the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair added.

The rest of the law had passed in Parliament earlier, so it can now be implemented.

Google has already struck deals with major Australian news businesses in recent weeks including News Corp. and Seven West Media.

Frydenberg said he was pleased to see progress by Google and more recently Facebook in reaching commercial deals with Australian news businesses.  READ MORE...

Facebook Monopoly Imploding

Competition, miscalculations, and regulatory scrutiny have all but killed the advertising giant's dreams of diversifying its business and rolling up the digital world into its platform.

For years, the definition of success for many tech employees has been getting a job at a FAANG company (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google). Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, meanwhile, are often the five major companies people think of when they think of "big tech."

But there is evidence that Facebook—once a dominant monopoly rightly blamed for all sorts of societal ills—is on the precipice of dropping out of this group through years of sheer mismanagement, a failure to innovate, setting money on fire in pursuit of a metaverse that seemingly no one wants, a vulnerable business model that Apple is squarely taking aim at, and upstart competitors like TikTok that the company seemingly has no answer for. 

What seemed impossible just a year or two ago—that Facebook will become just another tech company, more or less—now seems like a very real possibility.  READ MORE...

Student Absent in Virginia

A Virginia high school canceled all activities this weekend after almost half of its students called in absent this week due to a flu-like illness.

“Due to the high number of student and staff illnesses reported this week, all Stafford High School activities and athletics scheduled through Sunday, October 23, are canceled,” wrote Stafford High’s official Facebook account on Friday.

The school said that it would follow up on illness levels over the weekend and reassess conditions on Monday.

The Hill has reached out to the Stafford County Public Schools office for comment.

NBC 4 Washington reported on Friday that about 1,000 students were absent from Stafford High School, which is located just outside Fredericksburg, Va.  READ MORE...

Working in a Metaverse

Facebook’s metaverse was always intended to be more than another virtual reality application. It would provide users with infinite space and infinite possibilities, to move around, interact, engage, and even earn in a VR world. One of the key use cases the company has factored in is work.

“By 2030, the new generations of Oculus will allow users to teleport from one place to another without moving from their couch — not only for gaming and entertainment but also for work,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a March podcast. Then, in August, the company introduced a VR collaboration solution called Horizon Workrooms. And now, Facebook has completely rebranded as Meta, with a clear vision for a VR-enabled metaverse.

The notion of the metaverse contains within it several elements: multiple VR worlds, interactive and near-real digital assets, the ability to move around and teleport without restrictions, and problem-solving in 3D. All of these are extremely conducive to work-related use cases.

What Is the Metaverse?
The metaverse is defined as a three-dimensional internet powered by virtual reality and augmented reality. It is persistent (exists regardless of the user’s presence), real-time (users can experience live events), infinite (supports unlimited concurrent users and VR worlds), self-sustaining (users can work for and pay for things in the metaverse), and interoperable (there’s only one metaverse and everything is integrated within it).

Importantly, this definition of the metaverse exists independent of Facebook (now rebranded as Meta). The term was coined in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and there have been several attempts to build the metaverse since then. However, early attempts like Second Life, Roblox, and NeosVR were all limited gaming applications. The new metaverses put forward by Facebook and also Microsoft are geared for work-related use cases – i.e., communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.

Working in the Metaverse: Key Advantages
What are the advantages of working in the metaverse? In 2019, this question might have been slightly harder to answer. But now, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions around the world were forced to switch to digital-only modes of communication and some kind of a virtual workspace. Working in the metaverse takes this a step further to bring you all the capabilities of the real world, with very little of its challenges or limitations.
Overcome the challenges of remote work

This is the biggest advantage of working in the metaverse. When telecommuting, users often complain that they are unable to read body language and communicate effectively. Managers struggle to maintain visibility over team productivity. And, due to the prolonged absence of in-person interactions, there is risk of disengagement. The metaverse creates an immersive virtual workplace where 3D avatars of employees can work together just like in the real world.  READ MORE...

Trump's Truth Social

Former US President Donald Trump's social media app Truth Social became available for download in Apple's App Store on Sunday night, but some people had trouble creating an account. Despite this, it hit No. 1 in the App Store's top charts early Monday.

People who downloaded the app reported seeing error messages when they tried entering a birthdate, e-mail or phone number to create an account. "Something went wrong. Please try again," the message read.

Others reported they were placed on a waitlist after signing up. "Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist," read the message, which included a waitlist number. People who preordered Truth Social had the app automatically downloaded to their iPhones.

The app's release underscores Trump's plans to return to social media after being booted from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube last year. The companies made the rare move to bar Trump, who was president at the time, from its platforms because of concerns that his remarks could spark violence following the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots.

Truth Social, which looks similar to Twitter, is also another example of an alternative social media app like Parler, Gettr and Rumble that conservatives have flocked to because of censorship concerns. Facebook and Twitter have long denied that they intentionally suppress conservative content. The companies have rules against hate speech and inciting violence, but users don't always agree with how they interpret these policies.

The Trump Media and Technology Group first announced it was launching Truth Social in October as part of an effort "to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech."

CEO Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman, told Fox News on Sunday that the app would roll out this week to more people in the Apple App Store. The company has a goal of making the app fully operational by the end of March at least within the US, he told Fox News.

On Feb. 15, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. posted what he said was the former president's first post on Truth Social: "Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!" About 500 people have reportedly started using an early version of Truth Social, Reuters reported last week.

Facebook Apologizes

Facebook users who watched a newspaper video featuring black men were asked if they wanted to "keep seeing videos about primates" by an artificial-intelligence recommendation system.

Facebook told BBC News it "was clearly an unacceptable error", disabled the system and launched an investigation.  "We apologise to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations."  It is the latest in a long-running series of errors that have raised concerns over racial bias in AI.

'Genuinely sorry'
In 2015, Google's Photos app labelled pictures of black people as "gorillas".  The company said it was "appalled and genuinely sorry", though its fix, Wired reported in 2018, was simply to censor photo searches and tags for the word "gorilla".

In May, Twitter admitted racial biases in the way its "saliency algorithm" cropped previews of images.  Studies have also shown biases in the algorithms powering some facial-recognition systems.

Algorithmic error
In 2020, Facebook announced a new "inclusive product council" - and a new equity team in Instagram - that would examine, among other things, whether its algorithms exhibited racial bias.

The "primates" recommendation "was an algorithmic error on Facebook" and did not reflect the content of the video, a representative told BBC News.   READ MORE

Enemy of the State

Award-winning filmmaker and historian Ken Burns said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is "an enemy of the state" who belongs in jail.

Burns joined The New York Times’ "Sway" podcast to promote a new film about Muhammad Ali and was asked if a particular tech figure could be as culturally significant in a few decades as the boxing legend is now.

"I mean, I hope Zuckerberg is in jail by then," Burns said.

"This is an enemy of the state, and I mean the United States of America. He doesn’t give a sh-t about us, the United States," Burns continued. "He knows he can transcend it. He can get away to any place. And so it’s just about filthy lucre, that’s it."

Burns then turned his attention to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

"Because these people — and Sheryl is a complicit — the Nuremberg of this, is if it ever happens, which it won’t, will be pretty interesting," Burns said. "The way that we’ve been able to temporize and say, ‘Oh, it’s okay, we’ll just go a little bit further,’ right?"

Host Kara Swisher answered, "Yeah," and moved on to the next topic.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  READ MORE

Remote Working Employees

All across the United States, the leaders at large tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook are engaged in a delicate dance with thousands of employees who have recently become convinced that physically commuting to an office every day is an empty and unacceptable demand from their employers.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced these companies to operate with mostly remote workforces for months straight. 

And since many of them are based in areas with relatively high vaccination rates, the calls to return to the physical office began to sound over the summer.

But thousands of high-paid workers at these companies aren't having it. Many of them don't want to go back to the office full time, even if they're willing to do so a few days a week. 

Workers are even pointing to how effective they were when fully remote and using that to question why they have to keep living in the expensive cities where these offices are located.  READ MORE

Lesson From LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs. Wikipedia

It was in the Fall of 2003 that a colleague at ITT Technical Institute convinced me to join the social media network.  It was just a bunch of people sharing with each other and oftentimes finding alternative jobs and other business opportunities as friendships and trust grew.

These days, it is still the same but it has leaned more towards Facebook in that it is more or a social network than it is a business  and professional networking platform and has become very conducive for sales people trying to get members to invest in bitcoin or foreign exchange.  And, these sales people do not take NO, NOT INTERESTED for an answer.

MOST but not ALL successful people are like these sales people, they do not take NO for an answer or to put it another way, they do not easily give up.  They have persistence and determination and an internal motivation desire that drives them even if there are other people around who are either "for" or "against" their efforts.

• Self Motivation
• Persistence
• Determination
• Not Quitting

PASSWORDS

In addition to these 4 blogs that I maintain, I have a LinkedIn account as well as a Facebook account.  My Facebook account was hacked and the last time I logged out after posting something, my account belonged to someone else.  I started a new Facebook account under a FAKE NAME and created a password that was composed of letters and numbers, capitals and lower case, as well as special symbols...   and I just not use one of each but several of each making it even more difficult for someone to hack.

Today, I got an email about my LinkedIn account asking for a password reset and the message said that if this is not you, then you should change your password immediately.  The message indicated that the request came from Santa Monica, CA and since I live in TN, I knew right away that I had not make the request...  so I changed my password.

One of the reasons I suppose that someone wants my LinkedIn account is that I have over 17,000 people in my network and it is easier to steal an account rather than build up an account like I had done...  either way it is still a chicken shit move to make.

My point here is this:

• think about using a fake name on your account
• think about creating a complicated password

A complicated password might consist of the following:  !#Fu#!1719$soL$Qq#!

Did You Know?

I maintain 7 blogs on a regular but not daily basis...

On the home page of this blog, on the right hand side, you will notice there are links to three other blogs:
Reflections:  White Scorpion
My Cancer Journey
A Bipolar Scorpion

BUT,
I also maintain three other blogs at:
Facebook
LinkedIn
Tumblr

Note:  There is "X" rated material on Facebook and Tumblr so visit those at your own risk...

Also,
I have added several pages to my Reflections:  White Scorpion blog that I will try to maintain on a daily basis as well.  Being retired, I have plenty of time.

Can You Believe This Shit???

I created a fake profile on Facebook because my original Facebook Profile got hacked and the hacker changed my email address so I was locked as soon as I logged out...  I contact Facebook about it but they did not do squat.

I just looked on my Facebook Profile and I have over 2100 FRIGGIN FRIENDS....  and, I do not know the first one, especially since my profile has been faked...

Where did I get all the friends?

If you have a Facebook account and would like to have some friends, you can borrow some of mine without any kind of financial compensation because I am just that kinda guy.

Write When Wandering

, tumblrI have pretty much been wandering all my life and I guess I will keep wandering until I no longer live...   This blog is not the only blog I maintain...

On this blog, I have links to other blogs I maintain:

Reflections:  White Scorpion
this is where I post all the poems that I have been writing since 1972 and when I stopped concentrating on writing poetry in 2012/2015, I had written over 42,000 of those suckers...

My Cancer Journey
I have been treated for cancer since 2007/2008 and it is only recently that I decided to write about my experiences with cancer over the last decade or so in the hopes that others might benefit from reading about what I endured and continue to endure...

My Bipolar Life
well...  this is mine as well...  sometimes, I think weird thoughts, depressing thoughts, or angry thoughts and so I use this forum to share those with people...  these thoughts happen daily, so I have been posting lately.  I don't if reading my thoughts will help anyone but me but I still need to get them out of my head...

LINKEDIN
I have had an account on LinkedIn since 2001 and created a profile there because it was one of the best and still is one the best business networking forums around.  I used to post my thoughts there daily and still do sometimes but mostly it is every other day or so...  You have to have a profile to see mine.

FACEBOOK
I used to have a profile in my name there for over 5 years but it was recently hacked and my password was changed and I was locked out.  I sent Facebook emails about what had happened but they never responded, so I just created a new profile used a False Name and a very strong password.  In less than a month, I have over 2100 friends...  my name is Alan Catale if you are interested...  You have to have a profile to see mine.

TUMBLR
This blog is not maintained daily and is XXX rated for the most part...  This is where I release my inner devil...   it is listed under Catale2000  Reflections and...  You have to join for free to see this blog...

Anyway, I try to maintain all of these on a daily basis which is not that hard considering that I am retired and don't have anything else to do with my time...