You do not stop a lynch mob by opting out.

And you won't solve the social media problem by opting out.

WHEREAS: Winning elections takes 51% of the submitted votes

WHEREAS: Only a tight group of wingnuts on either side have disproportionate power because elections are won at the margins, nobody cares about the 90% in the middle.

WHEREAS: Social media will be used to motivate those 10% who really matter, first to enrage them, then to engage them.

THEREFORE: If ALL the tech workers run away, then who owns the field?

As a data miner, I found the human side of this story as explained in Wired, January 2018 worth having a paper copy for, just so I can roll it up and use it to beat some sense into my politicians.

But the whole point of weaponized social media is that it makes you think you are reading what they are doing, you cannot separate the fake information that says that

from some whiny truth-pretender who says

Think of social media manipulation as analogous to CGI, two things have happened to our viewing of movies now that CGI rules the screen.

and

This incident suggests we should start a 10 year transition during which:

* Self-driving cars are required to have three green flashing lights, front and both sides (LED green)

* Newly produced human driven cars are required to have purple flashing lights, same configuration (LED purple)

* By 2025, everyone will be driven nuts by the flashing lights, and we'll all figure out how to ride bikes while wearing pajamas on our way to the broom factories.

A story like this "Uber car kills!" only serves to feed data to our "availability heuristic" memory. We will hear about this story many times over the next few days ... and even the statisticians among us cannot override that exposure to put this in the correct context.

The correct context is probably passenger-miles per equivalent death (pedestrians hit by vehicles). But finding that data is waaaaay beyond the abilities of a 24x7 news cycle.

If Slashdot is so smart, why aren't we able to help with this problem?

Okay, so I add this diagnostic Ubisoft Commit Assist to a Neural Net (NN) that is being trained, using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to change the topology of the NN. Part of the Neural Net is dedicated to the Commit Assist subnet. This combination means that the entire system gets better exponentially because the diagnostic gets better as the system uses it to find errors in both the base problem and the subnet problem, while the GA improves the ability of the NN to do both the base problem and the subnet problem.

I'd call the made-for-VR movie, "Do Androids evolve to become veterinarians specializing in sheep?"

Actually, as a person who has researched and used machine learning, I enjoyed the article and think it is an adequate addition to the demystifying the black arts of the AI field.

Do neural nets dream of electric sheep? - the link should have been better presented, however.

Does the 1st amendment control private publishers? I think not.

Neither do the Courts

In my essay I postulate that I (as a conscious being) am a fractal image of the universe as a whole.

This comment is so perfect that I took a screen shot so I can post it in my Facebook Closed Group" Republican Liberty Caucus - Heavy.

I highlighted the best parts.

I then added that the Universal part of the equation is key-most-critical if you want to really push back on the divisiveness of the post-modernist scum who are running and ruining the public supported information channels (PBS, NPR, MPR). See Michael Shermer of Skeptic column in SciAm.

PS. I photoshopped (actually using Paint) the "are not free to have" to become "now free to have". If I were quoting this in an article I would have used something like "are not [Ed. now] free to have".

It is not surprising that tech types are pushing back on the whole postmodernist agenda - which includes all the ways we talk about diversity.

Scientists are starting to push back too. As are skeptics like Micheal Shermer.

I back Google on this one.

God, I love Slashdot when a user gets it right ...

(No irony between my post and my sig.)

But if the source of the carbon is freshly grown wood, then burning it is considered a zero-carbon footprint use. Citizens Climate Lobby.

On the Internet, everyone can hear you scream ...

... but they don't care, because they are screaming too.

Reminds me of the time I ruined a contractor's demo. He had written a ballistic missile program that I had prototyped, and I was ticked that I did not get to write it myself (petty, I know). When they let me try it out, I deliberately picked a target that his software could not find the solution for - locking up the demo. I just shrugged and gave the "French salute" (at the time, the French salute was a form of shrug with both hands held at shoulder level) and departed the demo.