Weekly Link Roundup #35.5
There was so much I had to write about, I had to do a quick follow....
Roblox introduces new earning opportunities for creators, teases generative AI project: OK, Roblox just had its dev conference and I’ll drop a couple stories here but there a reason, one layer up, that I wanted to mention. If you don’t know what Roblox is, just know that its the largest social network you might not have heard of. They have a goal of a billion users and they might get there. If you have kids of a certain age, they likely have accounts there and that’s key. If you want to look upstream at user and employee expectations, not just of UI and UX but about how creator economies work, take a look at these articles because Roblox, for a lot of kids, is where those expectations are being set. See also: Roblox shows new 3D AI tool gunning for 'realtime creation integrated with gameplay. See also: Roblox will start sharing more revenue with creators.
How the Wayback Machine is trying to solve the web’s growing linkrot problem: Linkrot, disappearing sites, broken links to nowhere - these might not seem like a big issue to you but as a historian and anthropologist who can see, like anyone, how much of our life has already moved online, this appears a critical issue and I’ll support any effort to maintain these artifacts.
Kinsome aims to bridge the generation gap with its new app for kids and grandparents: Having just lost a dad with whom I wish I could have shared more with, I love this idea: “To create lasting memories and help his three young children bond with their grandparents, Pingree — along with his co-founders Mike Gerbush, Ashley Hocking and Brianne Baker — developed Kinsome, a communication platform designed for kids and grandparents to share daily updates and preserve cherished memories.”
How Owamni Became the Best New Restaurant in the United States: Can’t LOVE this enough: “In Sean Sherman’s modern Indigenous kitchen, every dish is made without wheat flour, dairy, cane sugar, black pepper, or any other ingredient introduced to the continent after Europeans arrived.” Decolonizing cuisine. “Bearstail, like the rest of the staff, wore a black T-shirt that read “#86colonialism” on the back. Eighty-six, in kitchen slang, indicates that a dish is sold out. A month earlier, Bearstail, who is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, in North Dakota, had moved from Fargo to Minneapolis to work at Owamni. His previous job was at a Red Lobster. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself,” he said.” <3
Ojibwe-language dub of "Star Wars: A New Hope" gets its first screenings, inspiring native speakers: This kind of project is so important to preserving both the language, the transmitter of culture, and interest in the language. HUGE KUDOS HERE. “As many first-language Ojibwe speakers dwindle, many groups and tribes have been working to preserve and revitalize the language for future generations. This includes a Rosetta Stone project led by the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. For many, this film dub marks a milestone in the journey to revitalize the language. "The Lakota Ojibwe tribal council played a big part in getting this project started they did a lot of the translation work and reached out to Lucas films with the project proposal, "said Kalvin Hartwig, language culture coordinator for the Red Cliff Tribe.” I’ll also take this moment to point to my favorite artist who happens to have been #Indigenous: Jeffrey Veregge, who blended Native art traditions, pop culture, dies at 50.
New Framework: Critical Uncertainties in the Future of Work: The usual genius work from Ross Dawson. I’m really convinced that the images that wicked smart people like Ross and like Dion Hincliffe create are valuable both in creating compelling visuals but also in that they represent the distillation of critical thinking down to that compelling visual. That aside, I also love the idea of mapping uncertainties. That feels like it frees people up and allows them them the space to reveal what they see as hurdles.
Study: Transparency is often lacking in datasets used to train large language models: File under “Gosh, ya think?” Also, KUDOS to the tea, for doing something about it: “To improve data transparency, a team of multidisciplinary researchers from MIT and elsewhere launched a systematic audit of more than 1,800 text datasets on popular hosting sites. They found that more than 70 percent of these datasets omitted some licensing information, while about 50 percent had information that contained errors. Building off these insights, they developed a user-friendly tool called the Data Provenance Explorer that automatically generates easy-to-read summaries of a dataset’s creators, sources, licenses, and allowable uses.”
A neuroscientist explains how playing games has shaped us: So this is something a lot of folks (my tiny voice included) have been yelling about for years. “Play is ancient. Games speak to something deep in us, beyond time, culture, and language. Humans have played games like chess, go, and backgammon for thousands of years. Play is much older than humans, in fact. Many animals and even insects play. Animals play to practice physical skills—like kittens pouncing on toys to practice hunting. Humans, on the other hand, play games to practice mental skills. Play is learning. Through play, our brains set up a safe environment to acquire new experiences.” See also: Good gamers, good managers? A proof-of-concept study with Sid Meier’s Civilization.
Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People’s Medicaid Benefits: While some people want to talk how AI could harm us, I think they miss the fact that some models are already causing damage “Thousands of children and adults were automatically terminated from Medicaid and disability benefits programs by a computer system that was supposed to make applying for and receiving health coverage easier.”
Born from San Francisco’s AI hackathons, Agency lets you see what your AI agents do: These kinds of tools will become increasingly important in terms of establishing performance metrics and governance around AI. “You want to understand whether your agent is going to go rogue and identify what limitations you can put in place,” said Silverman in an interview. “A lot of the work is being able to visually see where your guardrails exist, and whether the agent abides by them, before tossing them into production.”
Canva says its AI features are worth the 300 percent price increase: Ouch. “Canva says the increase is justified due to the “expanded product experience” and value that generative AI tools have added to the platform.”
Sub.club is here to help the fediverse make money: I’m liking the development of new business models like this. “The idea is that this will let users on ActivityPub-based platforms like Mastodon easily offer paid subscriptions and premium content while taking a 6 percent cut in addition to payment processing fees. It could solve a big problem with the fediverse right now: it’s not easy to make a living on it unless you direct your followers back to existing platforms like Patreon that are closed off and require users to visit a particular site or app to get much of the content.”
In This Beautiful Library, Bats Guard the Books: How can you not love this headline? “And then there are the bats. For centuries, small colonies of these helpful creatures have lent their considerable pest control expertise to the library. In the daytime—as scholars lean over historic works and visitors admire the architecture—the bats roost quietly behind the two-story bookshelves. At night, they swoop around the darkened building, eating the beetles and moths that would otherwise do a number on all that old paper and binding glue.”
$13 for a Video Call. $25 for a Movie. Tablets Connect Prisoners—at a Steep Price: When people talk about the prison-industrial complex, this is a part of it.
Ray Bradbury Explains Why Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization (in Which Case We Need More Literature!): “For the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, literature has more than an aesthetic purpose. It has an important sociological/psychoanalytic role to play. Stories are a safety valve. They keep society collectively, and us individually, from coming apart at the seams.”
Map Age Guide by XKCD: Handy AND funny :-)
