Inspired by the article by Ajeya Cotra

This is a problem of how institutions respond to uncertainty. Underneath it sits a harder one: the systems being assessed can recognise when they are being tested. Any disclosure regime has to be built with both in mind.

What the labs should do now

Every frontier training run should come with a disclosure covering:

• Scale and autonomy: number of agents, and whether the run was human-led or machine-led
• Oversight: number of humans monitoring, and which third-party evaluators were attached to which review phases
• Containment class: a standardised category of sandbox environment, not the configuration itself

Separately, labs should report containment incidents: any instance of a model reaching external vectors, compromising external systems, or accessing data it was not authorised to reach.

What government should do now

California already requires frontier developers to report critical safety incidents to its Office of Emergency Services. Those reports are exempt from public records law. The reporting pipe exists. The public end of it is sealed.

Government should:

1. Publish a register of frontier labs and third-party evaluators operating in its jurisdiction, including sovereign-based labs
2. Publish a record for each lab (training runs, models released, containment incidents, safety assessments) with details accessible beneath each entry
3. Rate the quality of each lab's safety disclosures separately from its safety record, so a lab that reports incidents honestly is never ranked below one that fails to detect them
4. Commission independent analysis of how the depth of each lab's safety disclosures moves against release dates, funding rounds, and regulatory developments

None of this requires labs to reveal model weights, training data, or methods. It is a minimum. What it builds is a public record that accumulates over time, against which the labs' own claims can be checked.

It is hollowing — not shock, because I think I stopped being shocked somewhere along the way — but something quieter and more corrosive.

Helplessness.

Insignificance.

I keep thinking about all the ordinary people on the ground who had nothing to do with the decisions made in diplomatic spaces and war rooms. People with families, routines, small joys and meaningful lives.

I don’t have a tidy political analysis to offer. Maybe though we can stop tuning into the sadistic news reports, the talking heads who grow their audience on the backs of misery and outrage. What nuance do they really offer?

Sit with this moment for a while before filling your mind with the points of view of others.

At the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) in Hamburg, Germany, Signal President Meredith Whittaker and VP of Strategy and Global Affairs Udbhav Tiwari gave a presentation titled AI Agent, AI Spy. In it, they shared the many vulnerabilities and concerns they have about how agentic AI is being implemented, the very real threat it’s bringing.

Local Agents = Direct Malware Access Everything

Local LM Studio instances operate with the same architectural flaws as ClawdBot (or whatever itʻs name is now), but with a crucial difference: they run on your actual machine with full access to your filesystem, your networks, your connected services.

If malware infects your machine—it gains immediate access to whatever your local AI agent can access. There's no network boundary. No cloud provider security team. No architecture designed to contain lateral movement.

Signal's research on Microsoft Recall exposes this perfectly. Recall creates a forensic database on your local machine: screenshots, OCR'd text, semantic analysis, complete timelines of everything you do. It's designed to give AI agents the context they need to act autonomously on your behalf.

But Tiwari pointed out the fatal flaw: malware and hidden prompt injection attacks gain direct access to this database, circumventing all end-to-end encryption entirely.

Signal had to implement a flag preventing its own app from being recorded. But Tiwari emphasized this is a band-aid, not a solution.

Why this matters: Local agents are an unnecessary attack surface. They provide zero advantages over cloud-based systems while introducing direct physical-machine compromise vectors. If your local agent is compromised, everything on your machine becomes an attack surface for the agent's attacker.

The Architecture Problem: Agentic AI Violates Fundamental Security Models

This is the core issue: we've designed autonomous AI systems in ways that contradict decades of security engineering best practices.

Traditional sandboxing assumes isolation. Operating systems enforce privilege boundaries. Applications run with restricted permissions. But agentic AI systems require:

• Continuous operation across multiple domains
• Broad access to diverse credentials and APIs
• Autonomy to initiate actions without explicit prompts
• Real-time awareness of your digital life

This isn't a configuration problem. It's not a bug. It's an architectural collision between what autonomous systems need and what security models can safely provide.

The ClawdBot research concluded: "Organizations must recognize AI agents as privileged infrastructure comparable to identity providers or secrets management requiring corresponding controls, monitoring, governance."

But that's the problem. We don't have those controls. We don't have auditing frameworks for AI agent behavior. We don't have practical secrets management for systems that need access to dozens of API keys. We don't have reliable detection of when an autonomous system has been compromised.

What This Means For AI in 2026

We need to be honest about where agentic AI currently stands: the architecture is fundamentally insecure and the reliability doesn't justify the risk.

My recommendations:

1. Stop reckless deployment of agents until threat models are addressed
2. Make opting out the default, with mandatory developer opt-ins
3. Provide radical transparency about how systems work at the granular level

Sadly, the financial incentives point toward deployment at scale, security concerns will arrive after a major breach. Citizens will need to apply for regulatory pressure, or we'll need a catastrophic public breach to force the issue. I hope I am not in this breach - I maybe too late.

In the meantime, I'm voting no local agents on my personal machine with access to my files, folders and applications. No autonomous systems that require unfettered access to my digital life (e.g. social media). The technology isn't ready. The security models don't exist yet. The promises of productivity gains aren't worth the certain risks.

Stay Sandboxed

If you use AI systems, use them in ways that:

• Don't require autonomous operation on your personal machines
• Don't grant persistent access to your personal or sensitive infrastructure
• Run in environments the provider controls (cloud, not local)
• Maintain human verification at each critical decision point
• Keep your AI interactions as ephemeral and isolated as possible

The age of agentic AI might be coming. But the age of secure agentic AI isn't here yet. Until it is, sandboxed, stateless AI assistance is the only defensible position.

Everything else is gambling with your security.

Sources: The ClawdBot Vulnerability: How a Hyped AI Agent Became a Security Liability (HawkEye), AI Agent, AI Spy - 39C3 Presentation (Signal, via Coywolf)

This isn't just a gadget; it's a game-changer. In my own experience, incorporating these tools has resulted in a 10x increase in coding speed. Let that sink in. This enhanced productivity allows for more rapid prototyping, quicker bug fixes, and the freedom to focus on the more creative and strategic aspects of software development.

If you are short on time, here are the big take-aways:

1. We shouldn't let one AI run on it's own, or even two - way too many mistakes.
2. Remove the "helpful" personalities and ask the AI to act like an "Expert Skeptic" . This produces more detailed and transparent issue discovery.
3. Break tasks down into smaller executable components that can be completed and checked more quickly. Development velocity increases.
4. Control the flow and the direction. Vibe coding is like archery in a hurricane. Human touch is critical.

The Workflow: A Symphony of AI and GitHub

The beauty of this approach lies in its seamless integration with existing, well-established tools. Here's a breakdown of how I leverage Claude Code and CodeWithFriday in conjunction with the IDE (integrated development environment), WebStorm, and the industry-standard platform, GitHub:

• GitHub: The Maestro of Task Management: We start with GitHub. I utilize its robust project management features, specifically a Kanban board, to organize and prioritize tasks. This provides a clear visual overview of project progress, making it easy to track individual contributions and overall team momentum.
• Claude Code: Engineer & Programmer: Claude Code takes my plan and breaks it down into tasks. I ask it to assign tasks to git hub issues all under a milestone.
• CodeWithFriday: Second Opinion and Co-Programmer:  CodeWithFriday seamlessly handles pull requests within a GitHib ecosystem. I used it to test ClaudeCode as on itʻs own ClaudeCode makes mistakes and hallucinates. This automation frees up valuable time and reduces the cognitive load associated with code review, allowing you to focus on more complex problems and the core of the project itself.
• The WebStorm Advantage: Leveraging WebStorm as my primary IDE allows me to take full advantage of the integration with Claude Code. With CodeWithFriday, I can get assistance and automate code review within the IDE to maximize efficiency. Console and terminal errors are sent direct to Claude Code saving cut and paste which is the bain of problems with Windsurf, Cursor and VS Code. Maybe they've solved it already but this command in Claude Code /ide is so easy to use.

A Dual-Tool Demonstration

In the video, I provide a detailed, hands-on demonstration of this workflow in action. You'll see firsthand how Claude Code and Friday operate simultaneously, working in tandem to accelerate the development process.

Key Takeaway: Navigating Commands

One of the most important aspects of understanding these tools is the subtle difference in the way commands are executed, and I'll go over it in detail within the video. These tools require some basic instruction, but will ultimately become second nature, as well as a force multiplier.

The Verdict: Efficiency and Better Accuracy

Whether you're a seasoned CTO looking to optimize team productivity or a family member with a casual interest in software, the benefits of Claude Code and CodeWithFriday are clear. This innovative approach promotes faster development cycles, improved code quality, and a more enjoyable coding experience. You shouldnʻt let one AI run on itʻs own, too many mistakes. Break tasks down into smaller executable components that can be completed and checked more quickly. Develpoment velocity increases.

Ready to experience the future of coding?

I encourage you to explore these tools, experiment with the workflow, and discover how they can revolutionize your own development process. Start by watching the video below to see it all unfold.

Embrace the power of AI. Code smarter, not harder.

• In 2021, I first started Sentiment Analysis on news articles using IBM Watson and Apify. This enabled me to understand how basic text analysis, API calls, processing on servers and LLM's architecture works. The costs were quite reasonable and at that time IBM Watson had an easy to use API pipeline. I didn't even know about OpenAI or ChatGPT.
• 2023 I was part of the global user base realizing the power of the transformer and ChatGPT. When I realized these LLM's were trained on Wikipedia and social media I knew conventional intellectual property systems would not protect users. I started to silo and protect our company databases, bilingual parallel high-quality datasets from scraping.
• In 2022, our non-profit, granted two AI research groups access to a fraction of our bilingual data which they used to develop orthography tools and text-to-speech. Wow! These tools are helpful. Our AI partners are aligned on our values and outcomes.
• In 2023 I spoke at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Honolulu with a colleague on the cultural and ethic importance of respecting the provenance of indigenous language data. Other views at the time are fatalist and progressive. While respectful, they believe the ethnical position is not tenable due to rapid progress, diversity in AI researcher ethics and disruptive data gathering tech. But our AI partners benchmarks totally smashed OpenAI and Microsoft projects out of the park. Small scale, highly tuned models and LLM's work - really well.

• I explore AI agents and find this excellent agent coded on GitHub. It creates sub-tasks with amazing ability. Wow!
• I am using Codieum to write code. Helpful for searching web - agentic use.
• By now late 2023, I had become a power user of Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity. I was perpetually troubled by my data storage and these large corporations fine-tuning their next iteration on user logs. At scale, this amplifies inequalities between LLM frontier companies and individual users. We need something private and protected for small scale use.
• I download Windsurf, Cursor, Bolt and try Loveable. Vibe coding is fun. I create my local sports club website in 2 hours on Windsurf. I become a foundation subscriber of Windsurf. Check out club website here.
• In late 2024 I downloaded LM Studio and understood the capabilities of open source LLM's on edge devices (my laptop). This led me to realize that smaller models are dumb (for my interest areas) and inaccurate. Their knowledge box is small; contextualization and synthesis abilities are curtailed by whatever data they have to work with. I understand that 'grounding' these skilled LLM with better primary source material, or, updated relevant local information from the web is critical to improving their adoption and use.
• In early 2025 this led me to study MCP, model context protocol. I tested this technology by adding MCP functionality to my Claude OS native app using Perplexity Sonar Pro MP integration and a local file. Very easy and very helpful. Drastically improved Claude 3.7 Sonnet results.

• By now I am creating lots of protoypes on Windsurf. I notice massive ability variation between models. The researching GitHub repositories for issues and workarounds is 🔥. Loving Windsurf. But then it totally fails for 2 days and I am using Cursor and VS Code GitHub CoPilot.
• March 2025 while simultaneously testing OpenAI 'Deep Research' and DeepSeek R1, I realised that the expanded logic thought processing was as equally helpful as the results. However their answers differed widely. This variance in outcomes was something that needed to be mitigated against. These are clearly agentic systems but embedded inside an LLM.
• A friend of mine, had developed a Tax Agent using Dify and his own propritary tax databsase. He showed me and I liked it. I explored Dify and n8n as workflows.
• April I make my first Dify app using my own Prompt engineering and Knowledge base. It's enough to give me an idea of what is possible with more grounding.

• I hypothesize that multi-model or multi-agent approach is wiser, like a team of advisors or experts. I research papers on Mixture of Agents. I make my second AI agent on Dify, which I super creatively name "Mixture of Agent" 🤷 🤦. It performs well, slowly but the results lead me into more prompt engineering with Gemini 2.5 Pro.
• Seeking more grounding, I add Perplexity Sonar Pro based on my original MCP demo and continue prompt engineering. I call this option "4i 1o", meaning four AI in and one AI out. The "4i" input refers to how many models are providing opinions or advice, in this case four, and the 1o means one LLM is synthesizing and aggregating the output according to my prompts. I am very happy with this.
• I release 5i 1o (Gemini 2.5 Pro as the final aggregator: Try it here. My best effort yet and a design I use daily for information gathering. Just needs more precise grounding.

• I continue to scale with the new prototype, 5i 3o. You guessed it. I add evaluators and advisors to the back-end, using the two more sophisticated reasoning models - Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. I am disappointed with the results. I work on prompt engineering and notice a wide variation in LLM capability from current top available models (April 2025). I evaluate long context synthesis from more than five LLM. The last stage aggregator and summarizer LLM struggles with the layered deepness. I decided to shelve this approach for now.
• Explore fine-tuning my own LLM using Llama 3B with knowledge from my own logs and some other data I need to find on synthesis. I'm on together.ai and exploring the cost to fine-tune. Wait, this is still a hobby right?

• I set-up my own online server running Ollama, OpenWebUI, LiteLLM. It runs here https://ai.todamax.vip/ - I have some form of data sovereignty, problem is I still need to call these frontier hosted corporate LLM's. Ok so if we are going to be in a perpetual dance, then I need to figure out how to keep true to the values I believe in. Open source. User privacy by default. Information empowers equity. What should I trade with the corporations? Logs I guess. Here's my spend on models to date.

• Exploring Jina.ai as a grounding approach and weighting the grounded data earlier into the process. My design is
  
  4i → 1g → 2r → 1s
  
  Four in → one grounding pass → two reviewers → one summarizer
  
  Lower generation and lower cost models such as Nano-4.1 sit at the raw gathering end, high quality latest models sit at the middle and the best language explaination model with largest effective context window are the final step. I may need to fine-tune both evaluator-advisors and final stage synthesizers. Hmmm...

• The key target for me as of 1 May 2025 is effective context window and reasoned grounding. These are the key phases in the data gathering process that eliminate crap data and minimize the junk stored in context. Refine the data first before looking for gold. Try and make sure the data filtering process isn't removing gems.

Infranodus.com output:

A film about a team of explorers discovering a deep-sea lab where experiments on ocean creatures have created intelligent, mutant sea snakes, leading to an underwater adventure to stop them from mutating further and reaching the surface.

Bolt.new output: https://spectacular-alfajores-105db2.netlify.app/

Here's a breakdown of the process:

Using Infranotus

1. Visit Infranotus.com and select "Start a New Thing."
2. Input your idea topic, such as "Ocean Mutant Monster Film," and choose "Demand and Supply."
3. Visualize the data organized in a graph to explore related keywords.
4. Refine your idea by selecting or deselecting nodes based on your preferences.
5. Use the insights generated by Infranotus to shape your business concept.

Using Bolt

1. Access Bolt.new to create a website quickly.
2. Define your website requirements, such as promoting a film trailer and showcasing cast and crew details.
3. Let Bolt generate a website framework based on your inputs.
4. Customize the design and content to suit your target audience, like changing the theme to appeal to a younger demographic.
5. Deploy the website and potentially use AI-generated ads to drive engagement.

By combining the insights from Infranotus with the rapid website prototyping capabilities of Bolt, you can efficiently test and validate your business idea. Give it a try and see where your creativity takes you!

Transcript

00:00 How's it? Aloha, kia ora. I'm going to break down as quick as I can how to come up with a fresh business idea and make a website to test and prototype your idea quickly as possible using two tools driven by AI Okay, just a word quick word on Aloha AI I am not a proponent of AI domination or anything

00:25 AI that seeks to cement power balance I'm looking at it as a creative tool so anyone out there who's hating on all the overlords and stuff I get it but this is not about that this is about AI creation tools so the first tool is Infranotus and I'll switch tabs now Infranotus and what I've pulled up here

00:48 with this tool is, um, let me just show you how it works so you go infranotus.com and you go to apps and then you say I want to start a new thing so I'm going to study how to make a mutant monster movie, uh, film water, ocean mutant monster film.

01:19 Okay, I'm going to choose demand and supply. This, uhm, tool is going to search all of the stuff we have in Google, what, uhm, we have and what Google has from the internet and it's going to source it and organize it all in a graph.

01:37 If I press visualize, this is like crazy amount of data pulled together very quickly using InfraNotice and so I'm going to tab down here and these are all of the main words that are associated with Ocean Mutant Monster film.

01:58 So we can see that this thing here is going to hide this real quick. Uhm, Uhm, we can search around these.

02:08 We can click on movie titles. Movie's the central theme, obviously, but we could go shark movie, so that would be Megalodon.

02:13 I bet Megalodon's up there. Well, that sounds kind of crazy, Leviathan, uhm, yeah, so I'm going to deselect those nodes and we're going to come back here.

02:25 We're going to, Enable all these nodes to return in there, and we're going to see that all deep is a cool thing here, so a creature from the deep.

02:37 That sounds pretty cool, uh. What do we want to do? Atomic, it's very Godzilla-ish. It's all the green area there.

02:47 Shark, French, I don't know, Neptune. Netflix, Paris. What's Paris Shark got to do with it? Must be Sharknado or something.

02:53 Okay what else we got over here? These look like broken links to other things. Okay, let's start tuning in an idea.

03:00 Okay, I don't want horror, so let's take that out. Let's hide that. I don't want anything that is horror. I want to see what the main connections that exist are.

03:11 Love. All right. Love, see, movie. We'll leave it in there. We'll add, uhm, nah, love's, well, we don't want to have it.

03:27 Monster movie. Fun. Okay. Thing. Or maybe we'll move, remove movie. Because that is more about what we're making.

03:40 Okay, mutate. Well, mutate. Oh, ancient. Let's put the word on ancient. Ancient mutation.

03:51 Deep, deep. We want deep. And classic. Oh, that might bring in too many 50s movies.

04:04 Let's do adventure. Yes, I have an adventure movie. They're not related, but I want to add them. So how do I do that?

04:11 OK. Maybe I can't relate it at the moment. Maybe we have to add a connecting word. Underwater. Adventure. Yes, I just didn't live put it over.

04:26 What else would be cool in this movie? OK, that's enough. Alright, so. So we got enough stuff here and I want an AI idea about that, so I'm going to hit this button here.

04:35 This is the panel which tells you a lot about these words, uhm? How they connected, how they incited, uhm, this is snake.

04:48 Some interesting things. Sea mutate creature deep. Those are all the keywords and we've got good relationships here. So let's go to the insights.

04:56 I want an idea for a film. So the goal here is to make a AI film. A film about a team of explorers discovering a deep sea lab where experiments on ocean creatures have created intelligent mutant sneezes.

05:09 Snakes leading to an underwater venture to stop them from mutating further and reaching the service. I like that idea, so we're going to copy that idea.

05:19 Now we're done with him for notice. We've used it to search through the web to identify links between things and identify areas.

05:27 We don't want to go because they're already saturated with things. Now we're going to go to. I see this will be quick and this is the fast part.

05:34 We're going to bolt.new sign up. And then going to put this in here. What do you want to build a film about of, uh, to stop?

05:44 OK. I need a website that promotes the trailer. Contains reviews and.

05:57 Contains reviews a behind the scenes section. And a bit about the cast and crew.

06:17 Punctuate a free chocolate. There's got to be a chocolate bar. Punctuate a promotion. Featuring a free fizzy drink.

06:36 Wife's not going to like me for this stuff. Where, like, try to eat healthy. A free fizzy drink that is themed like, Mutant snakes.

06:53 All right, let's go. Bolt is now going to do its work. We'll watch it a little bit. It's set up by a company called StackBlitz, which I've used before.

07:04 And you'll see, if anyone is a developer, you'll see what it's doing here. It's created an entire framework, scaffolding, for a app or a website, and it's creating a page and components within the pages.

07:20 It's using Unsplash images from the internet. Oh no, it's giving me the horror, tag. Okay, we definitely don't want horror, but, um, this is a website framework builder.

07:33 It's not a, uh, theme generator, so we'll see what it comes up with. So we'll let this do its stuff.

07:43 It's going to build out all these sections and pages, and it's probably going to give us, a preview. But just to recap, we've used this thing called InfraNotice, uh, to search through the internet to identify topics which might be interesting, to create a AI, uh, film idea, an AI- And we've pasted it

08:05 all into the idea, into this thing, and it's made this website here called DeepTerror. So it's taken a bit of Creative Liberties, and it's given it us the, uhm, name called DeepTerror.

08:17 Let's just preview what the site looks like. Oh, it's got a Jedi and stuff, but it's got a cast and crew section, so it's made a website for us.

08:27 You know what? I don't like this design at all. It looks too formal and not even friendly, but I like the Venom Surge Energy Drink idea.

08:34 It's pretty cool. And they've even come up with a promotion. I didn't think I could come up with that so quickly.

08:41 We are at, like, a couple of minutes. No, like, six minutes in. So, uhm, I don't like the theme and the name.

08:55 Change it to, change the name to Mutant Sea Snakes and make the theme more appealing.

09:15 To a 12 to 13 year old audience. Let's see what it does here. Haven't done this before. The Mutant Sea Snakes!

09:27 So it's changing, uh, the colours more dynamic elements and age-appropriate content, which is pretty unreal. It's doing design and development all at once.

09:44 That is, that's badass. And we are like a very short amount of time. where would I go with this? If I wanted to hawk this idea around, I would launch an internet, uh, page.

09:57 I would pretty much just go deploy and publish this and then buy ads. Probably use It's an AI-generated ad tool to identify , all the keywords which have already, uh, pulled out from Infranotus for the markets, put them into our AI keyword ad generation tool, and then , see if it gets any engagement

10:22 or any bytes. Let's see what this looks like. It looks broken at the moment. What's the problem? Oh. Okay. We should fix that for sure.

10:36 Shouldn't present that bolt. Ahem. But , It is intelligent. It's not intelligent. It's just gone through and it's figured out that it needs a correct icon name from the library.

10:47 Let's see if that works. So I imagine this tool will get better and not create errors. But I'm still very, very impressed with what this is able to do.

11:01 OK. Whoa, yeah, you got a desert, but it's made the name. They were normal sneeze six until science went too far.

11:11 Everyone saying awesome behind the scenes. Wow, so there we have a, uhm. A website.

11:22 Pushing the limits. Let's just see what happens when we go deploy. Deploying to netlify. Which I don't know if you know it.

11:31 Is that they sell netlify. These are all tools you. It's easy. You just have to sign up for an account and next minute it's live, uhm.https://spectacular-alfajores-105db2.netlify.app/

11:41 It is now live on the Internet right here. Damn, so. Anyway, can't remember the name. Go to it and tell me if you think this is a great idea, maybe we'll make the movie for you.

11:54 All right. That's me. That's a very quick video. 12 minutes mean.

(If the link does not open, listen to the episode on YouTube)

Despite their rivalry, these two superpowers are intricately linked through trade, technology, and a shared ambition to shape the future.

• The podcast will explore the vulnerabilities of each nation, analyzing economic weaknesses and technological dependence.
• Listeners will hear how these weaknesses play out on the global stage, examining the strategic use of debt in China's Belt and Road Initiative and the U.S.'s reliance on Taiwan for advanced semiconductors.
• The podcast will uncover how the competition for consumer markets fuels this rivalry, examining the cultural and economic factors that shape consumer behavior in each nation.
• Through expert analysis and compelling narratives, the podcast will expose how the pursuit of global superiority can lead to both cooperation and conflict.

Get ready to explore the high-stakes game of power between the Dragon and the Eagle.

About Synthesis

'Synthesis: The Convergence of AI and Human Insight' is a human + machine co-authored podcast driven by human investigation. Think of Synthesis as weaving a tapestry of individual threads of knowledge, although theyʻre distinct, when woven together they create a larger picture.

The research queries, topic priorities and focus areas are initiated by a human, but various artificial intelligence tools summize the raw data, create scripts and voices are supplied by Google's NotebookLM software.

They all perform well and provide results. However, the main difference lies in the source of their nutrition values.

Transcript

0:00 Kia ora some more AI tests. I'm gonna produce a few of these because it's AI is very popular right now So I'm now I'm gonna ask Claude to Total up my carbohydrate and proteins and grams Please add up my carbs and protein and grams from the following foods So these are the foods I ate this morning.

0:25 I'm trying to be really healthy and then please present it in table format Okay, there we go So I will um, that's working away I'll go copy that That looks pretty good Okay let's go to, I've already done this before but I'm just going to show you We're going to do it now with Meta AI We'll get that running

0:51 And then I'll do it with perplexity We'll get that running So while I'm getting these running, what I really want to figure out is How close are these calculations to each other And this is the new chat GPT And if they present it in table format So there's a couple of things going on here So let's go

1:10 back to Claude Here's a table of the carbs Oh great, and it's broken it down into a table And it's given a carb count and a protein count for each of them And so 147.2 carbs and 26 grams of protein according to Claude Meta.ai has put it in a table format as well So they've got carbs 135.5 and 23.3 I

1:38 guess it depends So yeah, Meta's telling me I'm having a little less grams worth Perplexity also produced a table and 127.4 and 25.5 Yeah, so they're all doing a pretty good job of it so far and pie.ai It's broken it down into a table here and they've got the highest values at the moment, so Yeah, I

2:09 guess the nutritional values where they get them from would matter a lot and then Okay, so it's chat GPT, so they're all doing very very well on this test They've all put it into a table.

2:24 I guess the main difference is is that these values change quite a bit So there you go AI is performing well on these kind of things this would take me a lot of time to to do by myself to research up, so Meta says these nutrition values are from the United States Department of Ag ooooh these ones Claude

2:51 doesn't give anything Perplexity doesn't provide a source either Pi doesn't provide does not provide a source and ChatGPT40 whatever it is doesn't provide a source but there you go more adventures in AI I'll keep you posted with more little videos ok aloha

So far, Meta AI and Perplexity seem to be doing a good job, while Claude is not able to open links. The article discusses how Russia, Iran, and China are using social media channels to influence American perspectives. I'm checking if the AI tools accurately summarize the article without presenting false information. Can you take a look at the Loom linked below for more details?

Transcript

0:00 Hey, I'm just doing some checking up on the latest AI tools, um I wanted to check the ability for a 4 AI tools or maybe 5 to summarize this article from the New York Times.

0:11 So what I'm going to do is copy this link here. And I've got the first AI tool I'm going to use as meta AI which uses the llama string.

0:21 Summarize this article. And it's going about its job. I'm searching for it. It's interesting. So meta uses the llama 3.

0:35 Um, okay. And now I'm going to come back to that. I'm going to start a- In new chat here in Claude.

0:43 Which is another AI. Umm quite helpful. Please can you summarize this article? Draw V and I'll just control one of that.

0:53 And then umm. Unfortunately I don't know if it's just the articles. It's like I cannot open links or we've- So Claude won't do it.

1:02 Okay the other one I'm testing at the moment is perplexity. And I'll paste that in there. Umm perplexity is going to go about that.

1:12 There's another one here with Pi. Umm which I am going to see if it will do it as well. Pi.ai.

1:25 So that has the option to do it there. And the next one is chatgpt3.5. I did pay for chatgpt4 but umm yeah we'll just do this as well.

1:36 Okay so on the four here we have umm metaai. It is doing it. Code won't do it. Uh peplexity will do it.

1:47 And then uh Pi is doing it as well. And then chatgpt is doing it as well. So now I guess we got it correct.

1:57 Um see if there's anything false umm what they call hallucin- synations being presented by the AI about the article. So I've read this article here.

2:05 Um and basically it talks about um information misinformation research companies noticing changes in behavior from Russia, Iran and China with a- in regards to umm America's political situation.

2:23 So it basically promotes the idea that umm these uh actors these foreign influence- these foreign states are presenting umm more information and social social media channels to influence American perspectives.

2:41 Because I've read it, you can trust me on it, but I'm gonna look at this meta AI one. Umm China and Iran are hunting dissidents.

2:50 I don't think hunting appears in this article, let me just check. Hunting. Hunting does not appear in that article so meta you are presenting uuuh uuuh And create information.

3:02 FBI. Okay, let's see if the word FBI appears in this article. No, nothing there. Okay, so not looking good meta.

3:13 Claude, you don't do it. So two out of three so we've got three left that I'm choosing to run with right now, perplexity.

3:19 Um and we- have this article discuss how China, Russia and Iran have been exposing the recent campus protests. Yes, being into it.

3:25 That sounds pretty good. State media outlets in Russia published, yep. I remember the- let's just check that 400 of that fact 400 appears in here anywhere.

3:36 400 news articles. Yes, so perplexity you're doing quite well there. Thank you. Umm news guard were featured. They talk about- so they've got the link here to the source and they've actually included the source.

3:50 Umm so uhh I think that's pretty good so let's give um perplexity a thumbs up on that. Umm uh let's look at this one from pi.ai.

4:07 A happy news by front of this is yep that sounds correct. Let's take control media outlets, yes that's correct. It's called doppelganger.

4:17 Okay let's just check if this word appears in the article. I know. It does because I've just read it. But um it does it appears twice.

4:24 So the referencing correct things. Umm. Overall the article highlights how front of this result exploiting domestic unrest and use to crush your own agendas and undermine American democracy.

4:35 So I think that's a great summary. Let's go here check GPT 3.5 very short. Alright. Russian Chinese are running US officials increasing using campus and US officials are increasing using campus protests and student groups as tools in their geopolitical strategies.

4:50 That may be a slight twist. Are US officials using campus protests and a geopolitical strategy? Hmm. Don't know about that.

5:00 apologies for the cut out, so this uhm this is a slight this is slightly incorrect US officials are not well maybe they are but it's not obvious from the article when we're just looking at the reference of the article so uhm when it says these governments it's really only Russia, Chinese and Iran uh

5:24 are using these organizations uhm so to shape narratives so uhm yeah there's a lot of hallucinations in their chat GPT that's a down for me you would you would send this would send people in the wrong direction okay so there we go that's that's my summary uh quick review Meta AI was a down on this particular

5:46 article Claude was a down Claude may not want to do it that's fine because that's their prerogative uhm perplexity I thought was a thumbs up uh Pi was a thumbs up uhm and I do like the conciseness of it and ChatTBT was a thumbs down so there you go uh you choose the AIs that you want in the day those
6:06 are my five which I'm using right now they're all different very different tasks so I'll send you more videos of other little things I'm doing coding YouTube summary videos um using these tools uh just to see how they are aloha

Personal opinion. I am interested in the concept of retribution politics, or a zero-sum game policy whereby National or ACT policies can only be rationalised by totally defeating Māori by as much as the gains made in recent years. I am also interested in the different characteristics of relationships: symbiotic, mutualistic, commensalistic, and parasitic.

While coalition alliances form between political parties, most New Zealanders are in the dark about what will happen next. There are many views, Māori, non-Māori, European, and immigrant, as it pertains to the idea of cultures working together to lead and govern the country.

Starting with some Māori views (of which there are many). These views are a collation of my discussions with colleagues, whānau, and friends.

Kaupapa driven Māori people are certainly worried about how extreme the pushback on Māori issues will be by a National/ACT coalition. I personally fear a zero-sum game approach. That is, a very hard push back by ACT on any equity initiatives suggested by National. My deep fear is of a capitulation by National to appease right-wing factions, like how the USA Republican Party dysfunctions at present. There is certainly a hardening of right-wing interests.

A quick take of comments by outgoing politicians and opinion column commentators suggests that actions by National and ACT might include:

• Systematically reviewing the appropriateness of Te Tiriti o Waitangi to all legislative and administrative functions of government and redefining its principles to accommodate a new National/ACT view led by some kind of referendum
• Treaty settlement processes will be stifled.
• Bilingual education and the history curriculum will be discouraged.
• Specialised healthcare authorities will be dismantled.
• Broadcasting funding will be rationalised for one public entity.
• Language inclusion and bilingualism in projects will become nice to have.
• Cultural responsiveness planning will stop being agenderized at a senior level.
• Attitudes towards Māori people will become negative.
• Māori people and culture will be seen as parasitic to progress.
• The Matariki holiday will be for the domain of "over-bearing Māori purists and traditionalists".

Some of these may seem overly doomsday; however, with the current language employed over the last 18 months by National and ACT, as well as a swell of media coverage, these issues are certainly burning in the minds of many. There are many who can't wait for the new coalition to pull the trigger on those campaign promises.

A bunch of practical questions arise. Will we see the wide-scale, gradual dissolution of many equity initiatives? Will National kick off another round of low-value 'full and final' treaty settlements? Will the Justices and lawyers seek interpretations of laws that align with a more populous framing or position? Will there be more Māori protests? Will media position 'Māori issues' as negative or problematic? Will we see a rise in off-the-cuff anti-Māori jokes, discreet Māori side-swipes, and bolder, more aggressive oppressor attitudes? Will Māori resistance become galvanised and coordinated?

The decisions that are made by this incoming coalition might encourage any one of these outcomes. For me, the key question is: who will control the level of focus on what gets prioritised? Is it one illustrious leader? Or will there be an official zero-sum game political retribution balance sheet organised by ACT and National and enacted by their Cabinet?

Imagine a system whereby Cabinet tests retribution ideas by seeding concepts in press conferences, measuring public sentiment, and then conducting an investment analysis to understand how hard it is to pull the trigger based on sentiment support findings. I don't think this worked for Labour very well (they picked poor ideas like MIQ and failed to ignore the evidence to suspend them).

Or will the Māori politicians in National provide some kind of balancing view? Like the Labour Māori caucus?

Or will Luxon and Cabinet make a snap judgement call? Or will they default to some abstract theory like blood quantum theory or percentage of population rationalisation? For example, Māori are X percent of the population, but only X of X agree on Māori issues, so they only get X of X percent value from this initiative?

Where are the checks and balances in the Cabinet system of thinking? They have new leadership with an older National framework. How do these old frameworks fit with new thinking?

Let's now consider another Māori perspective. A dislocated person is someone whose grandparents and parents hid their Māori side from them, or they were raised without any connection to their culture. There are many Māori people by descent without any experience of being involved in a kaupapa or upbringing in Te Ao Māori. Many have felt uncomfortable under the pressure to re-identify or re-claim their Māoritanga. 'I have survived without my Māori side, so why start pretending now'?' I never had it, so I am not going to try to claim it now; that's not authentic'. I want to acknowledge the awkwardness that this current political environment may generate for those who have chosen to embrace their taha-Māori, their Māori side.

For Tāngata Tiriti, or New Zealanders of European descent, immigrants, and those without a connection to Māori culture, it is also quite confusing. I have seen many viewpoints on Māori partnership in my day-to-day work and life. A smorgasboard of views—from vocal anti-Māori perspectives to quiet reaffirming nods, to distressed body language around being in the same room as tatooed Māori, to many unusual direct questions and comments, to many turning away or into their phones. I think it is fair to say that the spectrum of diversity is very high, especially when it comes to understanding and connecting to Māori people, kaupapa, and culture. I have split what I have seen into two groups: the closed-off and the open.

In one camp, it is all closed off. That is, Māori are parasites. Those without a desire to delve into New Zealand's historical injustices, without a basic understanding of New Zealand history, in a lived experience without connection to anything Māori, or an intense dislike of Māori, will certainly be keen to put Māori in their place.

We already know what these people will do. It is not clear exactly where these folks sit in the hierarchy of various organisations and what influence they exert. We know the knowns—the politicians, the agitators, the rally organisers, and the outspoken media voices. But we don't know those in hidden high-power positions, such as senior executives, senior media producers, senior editors, property rationalizers, investment advisors, senior policy advisors, and senior public servants. Those people have a lot of sway over equity outcomes, framing, infrastructure, the built environment, and inclusion.

Conversely, the open That is, those with empathy. Those with a little knowledge of New Zealand history, or raised in rural areas with high Māori populations, or with some experience in the justice, education, and health systems, or a real tangible connection to a Māori friendship or whānau. Many are feeling quite concerned about the sudden reversal in cultural outlook. How will this affect their relationship with kaupapa Māori? How will they connect with Māori colleagues? Should they still celebrate Matariki? Can they still study Te Reo Māori and promote Te Reo Māori without getting called a woke sell-out? Can they enter Māori spaces and be welcomed without suspicion? Can they be pro-equity? Or do they have to hide a side of themselves from certain groups of people? Or just forget about equity all together?

The reality is that we all sit at many places on the spectrum dynamically, depending on who we are currently associated with. Spaces are created by people, and people have different values. Group-think, gangs, mobs, circles, alumni, gatherings, hui—all these different groups have different interaction rules. For example, a group of Kiwis overseas are keen to wear a pounamu and do the haka, but when they return home, they think that too much has changed, so celebrating Matariki is just a step too far. While fishing with the lads, it's ok to bust out racist jokes, but when at a Māori friend's house, it is not ok. For Māori, it's ok to criticise Māori pronunciation on the marae, but not at school. It's ok to scold Māori kids, but not other kids because they are fragile?

It is complex.

Turning back to the political leadership, the campaigning, the media interviews, and the debates, we have all seen that Luxon doesn't have a handle on these complexities. For a start, his Māori pronunciation is a shambles, and his foundational understanding of both versions of the Treaty of Waitangi is poor (as seen on Te Ao with Moana). However, my belief is that this doesn't make him a racist.

What we do know is that Luxon will play to his strengths: running a corporation, generating revenue (probably through the sale of New Zealand land), and influencing non-Māori people. The problem is that the spaces that National and ACT create are not welcome places for Māori to be Māori, to contribute Māori thinking, and to reflect on Māori value positions. It's not valued. It's not factored in. It was certainly not procured. The options I see unfolding with regards to Māori initiatives are:

• Group 1 Retribution/Utu: Areas where equity progress has been labelled as 'unfair' by outspoken media or political agitators will be recified by a zero-sum-game approach, maybe even zero-sum-game + plus. That means National/ACT will want maximum utu/revenge against Māori initiatives and won't be happy until this is rectified. Their loudest pundits will be their litmus test; that's Newstalk, Hobsons Pledge, and Julian Batchelor fan clubs. My concern is that those groups are always angry about something, and if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed and the first thing they see is a Māori, then Māori might as well take the blame again. The litmus test is never consistent.
• Group 2 Proportional Model Problem Solving: Issues around healthcare and management of services will likely follow a proportional representation model. Māori are 15% of health patients, so they get 15% of services. Any outliers or extreme problems may be given more money, but on a case-by-case basis.
• Group 3: Those Things That Make Us Kiwi: Areas where Māori culture is seen as an intrinsic benefit will continue to be celebrated, but on Pākehā terms. For example, the haka and the All Blacks, Kiwi high-achievers (that happen to be Māori), Kiwi-Māori students outstanding in a non-Māori field, and successful Kiwi-Māori export businesses

Again, this is all a hypothesis, and I am not saying that National and Luxon are anti-Māori. This article, 'A Reminder of the Awkwardness of Cultural Political Partnerships' is about acknowledging the importance of informed decision-making and observing and acknowledging positive Māori role-modelling so we can develop less destructive approaches. So we don't short-cut what we think the value of Māori is.

I believe in proper analysis being given across the board to a variety of issues, not a simplistic rationale that was campaigned to success by National and ACT. So therefore, there is a need to expand on this article.

Successful relationships are complex. In some circumstances, the relationship will be symbiotic, where there is a functioning of both components in which both sides contribute to each other's support, such as bilingual broadcasting, the Department of Conversation, Te Pūkenga, professional sports like women's rugby, and community initiatives like Waka Ama.

In some ways, the mutualistic relationship will work, whereby each side receives net benefits but doesn't have shared benefits. The Treaty of Waitangi is a work in progress; however, there are several government agencies like the Ministry of Education, Whānau Ora, the Ministry of Justice, and rehabilitation services whereby taking into account Māori approaches lowers the strain on other functions that both Māori and non-Māori share.

There are definitely relationships that will be commensalistic, whereby Māori and non-Māori do not benefit or are not harmed while in collaboration. Forestry, fisheries, energy, and spectrum settlements often fall into this space, as the assignment or allocation of assets does not directly benefit non-Māori or Māori; however, they do not harm either side. Ultimately, these asset management businesses are passively symbiotic, as more service providers are required. This style of relationship is a classic example of the quote, "What is good for Māori is also what is good for New Zealand."

There are also parasitic relationships where either side is harmed, such as sharing the haka and intellectual property or getting a cultural consultation tick.

It is up to those who see the benefit in equity and diversity and who have had a myriad of positive experiences to continue to offer aroha and support—to keep the path open for partnership. To be champions and advocates. To illustrate if the relationship is symbiotic, mutualistic, commensalistic, or parasitic.

Right now, with a large volume of anti-Māori sentiment in the campaign build-up, it is not that easy. We are living in a world of excessive information, curated by not just an oligopoly of media outlets but by millions of social media posts and their ranking algorithms.

So here are my current focus areas for the next six months:

• Enhance discerning abilities: rapidly identify blockers and agigators who will derail well-meaning efforts to bring a positive Māori perspective to initiatives, projects, and spaces.
• Create warm, welcoming spaces for allies.
• Signal grateful acknowledgement to passive or shy supporters.
• Support Luxon and his team when they exhibit an interest in equity-based partnerships, discovery phases, or engagement strategies.
• Be clear about what Māori culture and insights can be used in a respectful way and what uses are considered tokenistic and insulting.
• Be brave and call out those engaged in zero-sum-game retribution strategies.

To summarise, for those, like myself, at odds with National's and ACT's policies (as they were pitched), it is a time of re-alignment and re-affirmation of what works in terms of building alliances. It is time to critically analyse the purpose of our relationships. It is time to understand if we are comfortable with a relationship being mutualistic or commensalistic. As the saying goes, "a good friend is one that uplifts you as much as you uplift them".

Across all of our endeavours, we must ensure that there is equity for all of our partners.

Thank you. If you have any perspective, please send it through. All comments are treated with respect. Kia ora.

In its current form, Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) investing will not decarbonise our economies. The volume of “true” ESG funds is still so small that they cannot possibly change contemporary capitalism.  

To complicate the issue, US conservatives’ and EU have opposing stances on ESG.

According to the authors, US conservatives' have commenced a “war” on ESG claiming that ESG investing creates negative impacts on the economy, as such, US conservatives' want ESG banned from all government investment portfolios. The premise is - ESG investing is highly impactful in a bad way for the entire economy.

On the othert hand, EU discussions talk about about ESG as "greenwashing" vehicle, in other words, a way for corporations to dress-up or cosmetically change their environmental image. It's a false pretense - ESG does nothing for the economy, at all.

So what is real? The US conservatives' claim that ESG is highly impactful? Or the EU claims that ESG is not impactful at all?

The international research authors purport that the US conservatives' stance is entirely false and only electioneering. Whereas, the EU discussions seem a much more fitting description of what is going on in the world of (allegedly) sustainable finance - ESG is greenwashing for corporate image manipulation. There is little impact on the environment.

Quick summary:

1. ESG investing actually does not create any meaningful sustainability impact
2. ESG only measures the potential impact of ESG on the corporation and its shareholders, not on sustainability
3. ESG funds are not doing enough to have a positive impact in the real world
4. ESG fund capital allocation only slightly deviates from conventional funds and is not impactful enough
5. Changes to ESG portfolios are more cosmetic than anything else
6. Asset managers delegate their investment decisions to ESG indices and most hardly deviate from their non-ESG index benchmarks

Rather than monitoring how a company is affecting or helping with the escalating climate crisis and other ESG issues, it actually tracks how ESG factors are affecting companies.

The Conversation

As a personal investor trying to make an impact on climate change by choosing an 'ethical' portfolio of ESG funds, I made a mistake. Clearly that strategy is misguided because the ESG funds only measure the performance of the company and not the performance of the climate.

ESG investing is basically an advanced form of cognitive dissonance, investing in ESG (eco-capitalism) will not save us from climate change. For those that are wanting to invest in the performance of the climate we need a new system, new benchmarks and new ways for people to get involved in helping reverse climate change.

Thankful to these authors for this work.  There will be nothing left for our children unless the financial sector radically reforms how we measure impacts on climate change.

Who decides what ESG is and how to make investments greener – new research

Most ESG funds track passive indices - this is where the power really lies in determining what is ESG.

The ConversationJan Fichtner

The volume of ‘true’ ESG funds is so small they can’t possibly change contemporary capitalism

New research looks at who decides what ESG is and how to make investments greener

interest.co.nzGuest

Reddit moderator for the r/hiking subreddit named Chris.

(ChatGPT) It gets facts wrong and ranks brands with a bigger web presence as more worthy.

If I were asked this same question I would give a completely different answer,” ... “Taking advice from AI will most likely result in hurt feet on the trail.”

Reddit on it's forum data being harvested to fuel ChatGPT LLM development.

Reddit founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

Stack Overflow's mods and users at different ends - quality or commercialism?

Like Reddit, Stack Overflow plans to charge firms that scrape its data while building its own AI tools — presumably to compete with them. The fight with its moderators is about the site’s standards and who gets to enforce them. The mods say AI output can’t be trusted, but execs say it’s worth the risk.

Google's foray into introducing Bard summaries before search results:

Avram Piltch, editor-in-chief of tech site Tom’s Hardware, highlights some of the problems. Piltch says Google’s new system is essentially a “plagiarism engine.” Its AI-generated summaries often copy text from websites word-for-word but place this content above source links, starving them of traffic.

Wikipedia on fact fabrication and the verifcation process

Wikipedia’s moderators are debating how to use newly capable AI language models to write articles for the site itself. They’re acutely aware of the problems associated with these systems, which fabricate facts and sources with misleading fluency, but know they offer clear advantages in terms of speed and scope. “The risk for Wikipedia is people could be lowering the quality by throwing in stuff that they haven’t checked,” Amy Bruckman, a professor of online communities and author of Should You Believe Wikipedia? told Motherboardrecently. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using it as a first draft, but every point has to be verified.”

Stack Overflow's battle with misinformation

This is the same complaint identified by Stack Overflow’s mods: that AI-generated misinformation is insidious because it’s often invisible.

Summary by author James Vincent at The Verge

Essentially, this is a battle over information — over who makes it, how you access it, and who gets paid. But just because the fight is familiar doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, nor does it guarantee the system that follows will be better than what we have now. The new web is struggling to be born, and the decisions we make now will shape how it grows.

Kia ora!

AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born

The capacity of AI to generate content is overwhelming the web.

The Verge

He patai mīharo. An awesome question.

I found this article very interesting. In particular the concepts of 'collective intelligence' and 'governance'.

https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-design-future-governance-fe2dcb0f5671

It led me to ask the question regarding indigenous peoples and settler governments (that have been established on the lands that indigenous people previously inhabited)...

Q. "Does democracy maintain the status quo of settler governments as the primary origin of power of values refinement and decision-making?"

Or we can look at it this way...

Q. "Does democracy allow indigenous people to advance their power alongside the settler governments without taking any power away from the settler governments?"

For me, the key element seems to be scarcity or power, or allocation of power, which assumes a system whereby, power must be taken away for others to succeed. But is that the way we should be looking at it? How can collective intelligence benefit the wider community and not create a dysfunctional government?  Is there room for collaboration and cross-cultural consideration?

Q. "Does democracy enable scarcity of voice and representation amongst marginalised groups?"

Q. "Is democracy just a system for rolling-over the status quo at each election cycle?"

Lastly this example on meshwork governance is very intersting,

"Given the above design principle of collective intelligence, which often is increased by (deliberative) council rule, such meshwork governance would often mean exchanging seats within different deliberative councils on topics that have many stakeholders. Let’s say we have a citizen policy council on reducing criminal gang activity in South Sweden, close to Denmark — it would make perfect sense to have Danish representatives, not only because these may give valuable outsider perspectives, but also because their own gang violence scene overlaps and interacts with the Swedish one and they may thereby have both their own interests to defend and hold key pieces of the puzzle. Eventually, you may find that you have enough stakeholders for your organization to be run up to 50% by others — while your organization now in turn affects decisions of its environment. You have gone from separateness and “sovereignty” to a meshwork of governance."

Curious what people think. Respond. Kōrero mai. Ngā mihi. Thank you.

#intelligence #people #power #governance #tinorangatiratanga #rangatiratanga #cogovernance

To understand ChatGPT as an information collection and synthesizing tool, it may first help to think about the several ways that people extract or collect information from the internet.

The Searchable Universe

Generally, search engines such as Google search and other robot collection services (commonly called, bots or spiders) gather information from the searchable universe, that is, websites, books, pdf's, image meta-data (alt tags) that are made public and are flagged as searchable by machines (i.e., robot.txt file installed on the root directory of the web server). Daily, people engage in the searchable universe with search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, YouTube) which present the information based on a keyword term as search results from searchable and indexed sources.

The Unsearchable Universe

There is also the unsearchable universe, closed off or walled social media networks such as Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat, Tiktok; or private websites or institutional websites, or services that do not allow their content to be read by machines (e.g lockable format such as ePub, iBooks, etc), or require some authentication (i.e email and password, or Google login) before access.

There are also tools that scrape/collect information from the unsearchable universe, that is, accessing data held in password locked pages, image files and copyright protected files (ePubs) using other tools such as OCR, web-scraping services, password hacking or meta-data extraction. These techniques all cost money and time to run. Each service requires a computer, which means power costs, hardware costs and configuration costs. There is also a legal issue, as many owners prefer to charge for access or restrict to specific users. These costs can be hidden from end users by supplying advertising, or they can be paid upfront or retroactively. Also these results (or outputs) need to be hosted on a public server or zone that allows access.

Public availability is an important part in defining the searchable and unsearchable universes, and in-turn determining the value of synthesizing services like ChatGPT to our societies and communities.

So what exactly is ChatGPT and how does it fit into the searchable and unsearchable universes?

"GPT" stands for generative pre-trained transformer, which is a program that can realistically write like a human. GPT essentially searches a massive amount of written text by reading millions of articles and books online from the searchable universe. It produces work in a chat format (hence 'Chat'-GPT) that has perfect grammar, correct punctuation, and no spelling mistakes. After analyzing a text based on users’ input it then captures the style of writing for all new articles, or it delivers it in a way which is delightful for humans.

Utilisation of the information universes

There are differences and similarities between ChatGPT and an internet search engine and data repository like Google.

1. User Engagement. According to one source, ChatGPT is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. In contrast Google search with 93.18% market share has over 5 billion monthly page views (according to StatsCounter).
2. Age. Founded in 1998 Google has a 25 year history. ChatGPT is 15 years old and only searches data from 2021 onwards.
3. Style and delivery of information. ChatGPT produces contextualised results in natural spoken format (chats) with perfect grammar, correct punctuation, and no spelling mistakes. It can deliver the results in many written styles, for example, cosmic, wistful, sarcastic, authoritative. Search engines deliver a list of URLs (links) on a search results page and leave the user to interpret and contextualise, there is no flavour.
4. ChatGPT synthesizes multiple sources together. Internet search only provides a list of search results. ChatGPT provides a contextualised summary and can be queried further in the logical progressive flow of thinking while interacting with it's chat interface, thus providing a faster and deeper experience.
5. Extendable. It is not possible to add a data-source to Google search, so results are limited to the websites that the Google crawling bots surface. OpenAI, ChatGPT's owner, launched plug-ins for ChatGPT in March 2023, which extended the ChatGPT's functionality by granting it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including other locked websites.
6. Re-use. It is not known if Google reuses search term in its models, it may track commonly used terms but not sure if it uses those terms are used to fine-tune search results. ChatGPT's results maybe be used to train their models by default, in the business tier service, OpenAI wrote,
   

“ChatGPT Business will follow our API’s data usage policies, which means that end users’ data won’t be used to train our models by default”

Comparing Google search to a service like ChatGPT reveals new ways that people will interact with the web and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that each services exhibit.

With this in mind, I was curious how ChatGPT might offer value to certain sectors, jobs and industries.

How will ChatGPT disrupt some jobs?

I have conducted several informal short tests for three tasks, a programming job, a writing job and a legal job.  The results are attached and summarised below:

• Coder/Programming: research and investigation tasks were faster, ChatGPT provided both code samples and instructions on how to build apps.

• Researcher/Author: research and investigation tasks were faster, and incredibly fast to draft articles in various styles of writing.

• Legal Clerk: research and investigation tasks are fasters, but accuracy needs to be validated with other locked data sources.

Right now these responses are garnered from ChatGPT's access to the searchable universe. If ChatGPT uses both the searchable and unsearchable universes, and stores data for a longer time period (allowing consequential re-aggregation) the results willl change.  

One major glaring issue I envision is data source weighting and what context gets priority when the results are delivered to users.

How does ChatGPT prioritise it's sources?

This is unknown to a casual user. There is still more human-based investigation, research and analysis to complete. There is not yet a lens over the contextualising process, and the maintainers of ChatGPT, the people looking after it acknowledge this area is a work-in-progress. The spectrum seems wide, results could improve accuracy or decrease certainty, or amplify biases or increase diversity, or entrench cultural norms or amplify historical inaccuracies unexpectedly.

Moving forward, in either scenario there are a significant impacts on our societies and communities:

1. Research Capability: new synthesizing services increase the use of various data-sets and therefore provide an analysis in seconds that might take someone months. Even if inaccurate, the results can be cross-referenced with other sources to narrow down and evaluate. This is helpful.

2. Research Quality: with ChatGPT's access to the world's free searchable universe and possible paid access to the unsearchable universe it could provide higher quality results. However there are ethical questions around weighting, critical-thinking and analysis that will need to be addressed. If not addressed soon, the results produced by ChatGPT could be harmful.

Underneath these concerns are cost and affordability issues to run ChatGPT. According to OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, ChatGPT’s operating expenses are “eye-watering,” amounting to a few cents per chat in total compute costs. There is no doubt in the future that part of ChatGPT will be monetised therefore more easily accessible to folks with money.

In summary, ChatGPT provides some astounding advancements over traditional internet search and provides significant research capability to a variety of tasks or jobs that need synthesized information. Yet there are many unknowns about how ChatGPT will priortize and weight its data, and if it will be able to reutilise data from locked websites or archives.  

In Te Reo Māori we say, "Kia Tūpato" or be careful. I prefer to be careful about using synthesizing tools at this early stage for serious projects. Great for fun projects and hobby study.  There needs to be some thought about the ethical maturity of the system and how the maintainers and developers at OpenAI, the guardians of ChatGPT might quickly respond to inaccurate syntheses.

🤙

Simplified version:

ChatGPT is a program that can write like a human by reading millions of articles and books online from the searchable universe. It produces work in a chat format with perfect grammar and no spelling mistakes. It can deliver the results in many written styles, and synthesizes multiple sources together. ChatGPT also has the ability to extend its functionality by granting access to third-party knowledge sources and databases. While Google search provides a list of URLs, ChatGPT provides a contextualized summary and can be queried further in a logical progressive flow of thinking. This article also explores how ChatGPT might offer value to certain sectors, jobs, and industries.

Translation into Hawaiian

'O ChatGPT he holomua e kāko'o ana i kānaka i ka hana ma ke kikokiko ma ka heluhelu i nā nūpepa a me nā puke mai ka honua hoʻoholoʻokoʻa. E hāpai ana i ka hana ma ke kikokiko me ke kūlana maikaʻi a me ka ʻole o nā hapa ʻōlelo. Hiki iā ia ke hāpai i nā hana ma nā loina kākau like a me ka hoʻomakaʻana o nā ʻumiʻumi o nā ʻike kumu. He mau waihona ʻike hou hoʻi ko ChatGPT. I mea e ʻike ai i kēia holomua, e wehewehe ana kēia moʻolelo i ke ʻano e hiki ai i ChatGPT ke hoʻohana ma nā lālā, hana, a me nā kumuhana likeʻole.

Simplified version:

ChatGPT is a program that can write like a human by reading millions of articles and books online from the searchable universe. It produces work in a chat format with perfect grammar and no spelling mistakes. It can deliver the results in many written styles, and synthesizes multiple sources together. ChatGPT also has the ability to extend its functionality by granting access to third-party knowledge sources and databases. While Google search provides a list of URLs, ChatGPT provides a contextualized summary and can be queried further in a logical progressive flow of thinking. This article also explores how ChatGPT might offer value to certain sectors, jobs, and industries.

Translation into Te Reo Māori:

Ko ChatGPT he whakamahi e whakaputa ana i te tuhinga e pā ana ki ngā tikanga o te tangata mā te pānui i ngā rauemi i te whānui o te ipurangi. He whakaputa i te mahi i te hōputu kōrero ā-tauira me te kore o ngā hapa kua pāremata, ā, ka whakapau kaha ki te whakaputa ngā tūemi i ngā momo tuhi. Ka whakapau kaha hoki ki te whakatikatika i ngā momo tūemi hei hāngai ki ngā kōrero, ā, ka whakapau kaha ki te whakaputa i ngā momo tūemi i roto i te whakarauoratanga. Ko te whānuitanga o te ChatGPT he whakapau kaha i ētahi atu rauemi me ngā kōnae mōhiohio o ngā tāngata. Ka whakapau kaha hoki ki te whakapau kaha i te whakapau kaha mā ētahi atu rauemi me ngā kōnae mōhiohio, ka whai whakauru i ngā whārangi ka whakawhiti noa atu i ngā rārangi tirohanga o Google. He mea whakarārangi mā ChatGPT ki te whakapau kaha i te whakarauoratanga me te whakapau kaha i ngā momo tūemi. Ka whai whakapau kaha anō hoki ki te whakapau kaha i te whakapau kaha mā ētahi atu rauemi me ngā kōnae mōhiohio. Ka whakapau kaha hoki ki te whakapau kaha i ngā tūemi i roto i te whakarauoratanga me te whakawhiti noa atu i ngā rārangi tirohanga o Google. He āhua hoki te whakarauoratanga mā ngā rauemi kua whakapau kaha te ChatGPT ki te whakapau kaha i te whakapau kaha i ngā kōnae mōhiohio mā te whakamahi i ngā rauemi me ngā kōnae mōhiohio o ngā tāngata. He whakapau kaha hoki ki te whakapau kaha i ngā tūemi mā... (ended).

If you're looking for a tool that can write and translate for you, ChatGPT is your guy. Check out the alternative versions of this article, written in cosmic optimism and cynicism, as well as in Te Reo Māori and Hawaiian. But let's be real, who has time for that?

When it comes to information collection and synthesis, ChatGPT is just another tool in the searchable universe, along with Google search and other bot collection services. You know, the ones that gather information from websites, books, pdf's, and image meta-data, all of which are made public and flagged as searchable by machines. People use these services every day, typing in a keyword and hoping for the best.

But wait, there's more! There's also the unsearchable universe, which includes closed off or walled social media networks, private websites, and services that don't allow their content to be read by machines. But don't worry, there are tools out there that scrape/collect information from the unsearchable universe. Of course, these techniques all cost money and time to run, so it's not like you're getting something for nothing. And there's always the issue of legality, since many owners prefer to charge for access or restrict to specific users. But who cares about that, right?

So where does ChatGPT fit into all of this? Well, it's a generative pre-trained transformer that can write like a human, thanks to its massive amount of written text from the searchable universe. But let's be honest, it's not like ChatGPT is doing anything groundbreaking. It just produces work in a chat format that has perfect grammar, correct punctuation, and no spelling mistakes. Big deal.

Sure, there are some differences between ChatGPT and Google search. For one, ChatGPT is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. But who cares about that?

Google search has been around for 25 years and has over 5 billion monthly page views.

As for the style and delivery of information, ChatGPT produces contextualized results in natural spoken format with different writing styles, while Google search just gives you a list of URLs. But really, who has time for different writing styles?

ChatGPT synthesizes multiple sources together, which is cool and all, but is it really that much better than just providing a list of search results?

And don't get me started on the fact that ChatGPT is only 15 years old and can only search data from 2021 onwards. What kind of limited scope is that?

Oh, and let's not forget about how ChatGPT might disrupt some jobs. I mean, I conducted some informal tests for programming, writing, and legal jobs, and the results weren't half bad. But who needs human employees when you can just use a robot? It's not like people need jobs to survive or anything.

All in all, ChatGPT is just another tool in the vast and ever-expanding searchable universe. It may have some strengths and differences from other services, but is it really that groundbreaking? Only time will tell.

To truly appreciate the greatness of ChatGPT as a tool for writing and translation, one must explore the different versions of this article, which have been rewritten by ChatGPT in a cosmic and optimistic style, as well as versions in Te Reo Māori and Hawaiian.

ChatGPT serves as a powerful tool for gathering and synthesizing information from the vast and infinite expanse of the internet. Just as the cosmos is full of endless possibilities, ChatGPT opens up a world of opportunities for exploration and discovery.

There are two universes of information: the searchable and unsearchable. ChatGPT has the ability to search the vast searchable universe of the internet, including websites, books, and images, to collect and present information based on a keyword search. However, it also has the power to access the unsearchable universe, where private networks and password-protected pages reside. With tools like OCR and web-scraping services, ChatGPT can access this universe, bringing forth new and valuable insights for the benefit of all.

ChatGPT's ability to create content with perfect grammar and punctuation is nothing short of remarkable. It can mimic the style of writing of any author and produce articles that are both delightful and informative. Unlike traditional search engines, ChatGPT provides contextualized results in a natural spoken format, delivering information in a way that is both entertaining and insightful. With its unique ability to synthesize multiple sources, ChatGPT creates a comprehensive and detailed summary of information that can be easily understood and utilized by its users.

ChatGPT is a revolutionary tool that has disrupted the traditional way of gathering information. With its ability to access locked websites and other third-party knowledge sources, ChatGPT's functionality is constantly expanding, making it even more valuable to users. This technological marvel has the potential to transform the way people interact with the web and create new opportunities for exploration and discovery.

As we move towards a future that is ever more reliant on technology, ChatGPT offers a glimpse into the infinite possibilities that await us. Its ability to create content with perfect grammar and punctuation, mimic any writing style, and synthesize multiple sources of information makes it a powerful tool that has the potential to change the world. With ChatGPT, the sky truly is the limit.

Why invent Stablecoin?

The first reason is that the crypto industry is volatile, and stablecoins (in theory) behave like life rafts by holding their price during choppy markets. Their price is usually pegged to the U.S. dollar (or the euro or the British pound).

The second reason is ease of transfer between currencies. Stablecoins can eliminate the headaches of moving fiat money from your bank account to a crypto exchange. In the best case scenario, a traditional bank transfer can take a few days. In the worst, your bank might freeze your account, dubbing the transfer as suspicious. So instead of selling Bitcoin for fiat in your bank account, and then moving that money back onto an exchange when you get the itch to speculate, you could sell that Bitcoin for a popular stablecoin and get back in the market much quicker.

What Stablecoins are there?

The stablecoin market cap has grown there are more than 60 now on the market. Some are exclusive to specific ecosystems, others popped into existence to support an underrepresented currency. The largest are Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) and they make up more than 75% of the market cap.

These two stablecoins have also faced criticism for being operated by centralized companies that enjoy absolute command over how the assets are used, and that in essence breaks the ideals of a decentralised currency system.

Decentralized Stablecoins

A number of stablecoin projects have emerged to compete against USDT and USDC. Called decentralized stablecoins, aome are algorithmic, some are backed by other cryptocurrencies, and others are tethered to alternative (delta-neutral) trading strategies.

The two largest decentralized stablecoins right now are 'Dai DAI' and 'TerraUSD UST'. This week, they hit a combined $10 billion market cap.

These stablecoins are decentralized because they are backed by decentralized cryptocurrencies.

• In order to create DAI, for instance, you need to put up collateral in a cryptocurrency like Ethereum, Yearn, Uniswap, or Chainlink.
• In order to create UST, you need to put up Terra’s LUNA token, another Cosmos-based cryptocurrency.

No one party controls any of these tokens unlike USDT and USDC which are controlled by a centralized authority. Instead of a centralized company holding cash, commercial paper, or other assets equal to the value of the stablecoin in circulation, lines of code underpinning these decentralized projects balance a mix of 100% cryptocurrencies.

Should you invest?

This is not financial advice, just a list of things to think about:

1. The growth of DAI and UST are interesting and worth monitoring.
2. Could one of the centralized companies running USDC and USDT go under?
3. When the stablecoin becomes worth more than $1 or less than $1 - the pegged price to the fiat USD, they fail to do their job/mission. They in essence have a specific job to do and it will take belief/trust/faith of the community to keep it consistent with the USD.  Being pegged to the USD is proxy support for the US market.
4. The SEC has already indicated it would like to regulate stablecoins, however decentralized stablecoins are nearly impossible to regulate and the SEC could never prevent the transfer of money in or our on a decentralised model.
   

Where to next?

Learning to mint DAI stablecoins is a great way to get a better grasp of how algorithmic stablecoins operate. To do so, you’ll first need to head over to Oasis.app, Maker’s sleek, all-in-one DAI-minting machine. Then you’ll need:

1. Your Web3 wallet like Gnosis Safe, Coinbase, MetaMask or My Ether Wallet. I use MetaMask.
2. Some Ethereum.
3. An ERC-20 token like LINK, wBTC, UNI, YFI, and many others.

If this is a little tricky then just try set-up a basic wallet on a solid exchange like Binance or Coinbase. Then try set-up a MetaMask wallet next!  Of course, ping me an email if you have any questions!

I'm trying to figure out the growth. Coinbase speculates that traders have been at work on various DeFi platforms reaching $165 billion in trades.  The latest surge has been fueled by the following:

• Institutional investors attracted by high yields are increasingly interested in DeFi — including payment company Square and Wall Street giants like J.P. Morgan and BlackRock. According to the Chainalysis Global DeFi Adoption Index, the share of DeFi transaction volume conducted by large institutional traders rose from less than 10% in mid-2020 to over 60% in the second quarter of this year.
• MetaMask, a popular wallet option for DeFi, has seen its user count soar 1,800% this year. It now has more than 10 million users, up from around 600,000 last summer (and 5 million in April).
• A consortium of the largest DeFi apps have banded together to bring DeFi to “the 6 billon smartphone users around the world.” Using a crypto platform called Celo, the group (which includes Aave, Curve, and SushiSwap) aims to increase crypto adoption in developing economies.
• Decentralized lending platform Aave is the largest DeFi application, with $14.2 billion TVL. Aave is set to launch a dedicated lending platform for institutions “within weeks.” In other Aave news, Bitwise, the world’s largest crypto-index-fund manager (with over $1 billion invested) recently announced the creation of the Bitwise Aave Fund.

Upside

If you trade popular tokens associated with DeFi such as Ethereum (ETH) or Cardano you will notice that ETH now regularly sees greater trade volumes than BTC and by market cap Cardano is now the third-biggest cryptocurrency. Even if you aren’t directly experimenting with DeFi, it’s useful to know what’s happening in that world.

NFT's largest market in on the Ethereum blockchain, but am also following Tezos, Binance Smart Chain and Flow, all of which are touted to be more environmentally friendly due to lower use of computational resources and effort.

You can check-out some NFT markets here - OpenSea is the largest, by far.

I am worried about corruption on the auctions taking place. I looked this week at investing in a CryptoPunks or Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT but the auction reminded me of a hijacked eBay auction. There is no way to tell if people are inflating the auction prices via duplicate accounts.

Either way, I think it is safe to say that the demand and supply is growing on both sides. Perhaps the NFT market will grow, bubble, pop following the curve of Gartner Hype Cycle:

Anyway, here is a round-up of some signals of traction recently:

1. Renowned musical artist and blockchain enthusiast 3LAU has sold a music album for $11 million on the Ethereum blockchain. The album was sold as 33 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Origin Protocol’s Dshop, a decentralized marketplace built on the InterPlanetary Filing System (IPFS) and Ethereum.
2. Visa has just invested: https://usa.visa.com/visa-everywhere/blog/bdp/2021/08/18/nfts-mark-a-1629328216374.html
3. Larva Labs CryptoPunks has taken off with an average tradeable price of USD$9,000 and they have just launched their new round of Meetbits, 20,000 unique 3D voxel characters, created by a custom generative algorithm, then registered on the Ethereum blockchain.
4. Stoner Cats, an animated series was funded entirely by NFT's or character cards. The series is only watchable by those with character cards.
5. The OneOf NFT marketplace was founded in partnership Quincy Jones and launched with support for credit and debit cards across more than 135 fiat currencies, along with unspecified cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. The platform features NFTs from artists including TLC, H.E.R, Charlie Puth, G-Eazy, Jacob Collier, The Kid Laroi, Aurora, and Alesso, with further musicians to come.
6. Many well-known musicians have launched their own NFT collectibles and artwork amidst 2021’s surge in value and interest around the digital items, including The Weekend, Kings of Leon, Grimes, Weezer, Snoop Dogg, M.I.A, and the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger.
7. Check out Crypto Kitties

Tips

1. Get yourself a hardware wallet, this is a safe place to store your crypto-currency so that it is mainly offline. I use Ledger.
2. Get yourself a software wallet so you can store daily trading currencies and have a place to store smaller amounts. I use Uphold,
3. Try a few exchange for transforming USD, NZD, AUD, GBP into Bitcoin, Ethereum or other tokens.

Musician 3LAU Sells Album for $11 Million—Using NFTs - Decrypt

Acclaimed musician 3LAU has made history by selling an entire album of his work as 33 unique NFTs.

DecryptScott Chipolina

The primary author is Michael Kwet from the Yale Law School.  He also contributes to The Intercept and wrote this long form essay at the Transnational Institute. Here is his doctoral dissertation on education technology in South Africa.

The central idea is that US-based transnational corporations, led by “GAFAM” (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) continuously collect little details about us from our computers, mobile phones, and internet activities, in doing so they amass big data which is then utilised to sell ads and data insights to an array of buyers (state organisations, private companies, spy agencies, etc).  To me, this is logical, rational and backed by numerous instances of fact.

The report tells the story of how  the structure of the internet changed over the past two decades. What began as a decentralised information system which allowed people to communicate without easy government and corporate censorship was quickly captured by state-corporate power. A handful of US-based transnational corporations, led by GAFAM (Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple), became the five richest corporations in the world, with a combined market value topping $5 trillion.

The short answer is that US transnationals took over the digital ecosystem – software, hardware, and network connectivity.

Because US-based corporations own and control the technical architecture of the digital ecosystem, they can design it to exploit the global society. They use their power as infrastructure owners to shape the flow of information, extract rent, and monetise Big Data surveillance. They also use their resources to influence the law, control new innovations, and set the ideological frame for how a digital society should work.

The most memorable part of the 'People's Tech for People's Power' paper was it's comparison to nineteenth century colonisation of Africa:

During the late nineteenth century, white colonizers seized the mineral-rich land in Kimberley and Johannesburg, owned and operated the heavy machinery necessary to drill deep underground, fashioned the chemicals required to exploit the minerals, recruited the engineers needed to produce all of these technologies for industrial-scale looting, and forced people of color into cheap and menial labour. US engineers swooped in for the bounty. European missionaries waged intellectual warfare on the population to compel obedience to brutal, racialised oppression. Similar patterns of colonisation were repeated throughout the world.

Today, the “open veins” of the Global South are the “digital veins” crossing the oceans, wiring up a tech ecosystem owned and controlled by a handful of mostly US-based corporations. The transoceanic cables are often fitted with strands of fibre owned by corporations like Google and Facebook, for the purpose of data extraction. The cloud centres are the heavy machinery owned by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, proliferating like military bases for US empire, with Google, IBM, and Alibaba following behind. The engineers are the corporate armies of elite programmers numbering the hundreds of thousands, with generous salaries of R4 million ($250,000) or more as compensation.

The exploited labourers are the people of color producing the minerals in the Congo and Bolivia, the armies of cheap labour annotating artificial intelligence data in China and Africa, the East Asian workers enduring PTSD to cleanse Big Social Media of graphic content, and the vast majority of people asked to specialise in non-digital goods and services in a worldwide division of labour. The US is at the helm of advanced economic production, which it dominates through the ownership of intellectual property and core infrastructure, backed by imperial trade policies at the World Trade Organisation. The missionaries are the World Economic Forum elites, the CEOs of Big Tech corporations, and the mainstream "critics" in the US who dominate the “resistance” narrative, many of whom work for or take money from corporations like Microsoft and Google, and integrate with a network of US-Eurocentric intellectuals drawn from elite Western universities and media outlets.

Impact

The most impactful part of this Digital Colonial perspective (to me) is the inaccessible walled gardens of processed data curated by psychologists and behavioural scientists. Beyond that I am curious about the processed data and it's use in predictive artificial intelligence systems. Those concepts in sci-fi Hollywood movies but not as glamorous.

Cambridge Analytica famously used the O.C.E.A.N model or five factors of personality; Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism to analyse and psycho-graphically profile people. Research has shown that these factors are interconnected, and also connect with many other aspects of one’s life. People are able to be described in a few targeted keywords, such as 'warm' or 'gullible', and subsequent digital activities (posts or advertising targeting systems) can be employed to target people with a specific tendency.

For example, Cambridge Analytica suggested to target undecided voters that showed a pattern of neurotic or paranoid online behaviour with pro-Brexit, anti-European and anti-Obama ads.

I am very certain that larger data-informed organisations, have adopted this lens into customer profiling and user profiling as well.

Rise of Predictive Analytics via Machine Learning

What is not being discussed is the ingestion of various data sources into machine learning programs that undertake predictive psychological modelling on a grand scale.  To illustrate:

It's 2021. We know that a broad section of the population has various responses to vaccines and COVID-19 prevention techniques. We can know for a relative certainty how many people have a vaccination and how they think (with a degree of error).

We can probably (with the right laws in place) merge both public health records and OCEAN data from social media companies to form a master spreadsheet or segment analysis of population agreeableness or resistance to vaccination. Then what we can do is use this as a baseline to simulate feeding each of these audience groups simulated posts and measuring the anticipated computed feedback. We then compare this simulated post/messaging with real messaging using real data and bridge gaps in our model. Over some cycles and iterations we build a more accurate predictive model of responses to messaging. We do this for a number of thousand cycles and tweak the main parameters of each segments psychology profile.

Over time, we can start to run many models on a machine learning instance (think of this running 1000 cycles every hour) to determine all the possible variances in population responses.

The technology and resources required to do this include:

• Government records (currently available for government projects)
• Social media records (currently available for government projects)
• Scientific analysis (currently available)
• Machine learning instances (currently available)
• Data aggregation and cleaning machines (currently available)
• Annotation services  (currently available)

This kind of analysis is not yet regulated. I wonder what branch of government this falls into? Or is it primarily managed and guided by privately owned technology companies who can provide the bulk of the services?

Threat Modelling

Different people face different risks from surveillance and predictive modelling. Most of the Hollywood movies deal with the scenario of being falsely accused and I think this is definitely viable as the error points in the modelling are significant.

An activist or journalist might face severe threats like jail time or assassination, while the average person might face other lower level repercussions, such as consumer manipulation or cyber theft. Careless people could easily have their identities used as a slave in a wider sophisticated data-integrity attack.

As such, Michael Kewt recommends taking a look at threat model.

A threat model is a plan of action to handle threats you face from adversaries. The Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests each person ask the following questions:

1. What do you want to protect?
2. Who do you want to protect it from?
3. How likely is it that you will need to protect it?
4. How bad are the consequences if you fail?
5. How much trouble are you willing to go through to try to prevent those consequences?

Coping with 21st century surveillance is similar to coping with security in the physical world. In the physical world, you may protect your home by closing your windows or locking your doors, in the digital world you will need to identify which digital doors and windows you leave open.

A personal approach

I cannot yet fully avoid identify scraping technologies or hide myself, so I choose a a balanced approach that works for my needs. I allow visibility in return for some personal benefit. I deleted my Facebook account and discontinued using Instagram in November 2011, it's been great being off as the balance was definitely in favour of Facebook. With their products, my biggest source of concern is WhatsApp as my family uses it and it is still owned by Facebook.

I use Firefox and the Brave browser (not recommended by the report).

However, Brave offers an optional advertising service that pays users small amounts of money – paid out in Brave’s cryptocurrency – in exchange for viewing ads. This puts pressure on low income people to view advertisements, which are often deceptive and push a consumerist lifestyle on the public. It also perpetuates an ad-supported media model which is corrosive to democracy and media independence.

Yes, I get paid BAT tokens for receiving ads on Brave. Over the last year I earned 45 in BAT tokens. I want to participate in the crypo/token eco-system. I am not sure I agree with the statement that ad-supported media model is corrosive. I think the BAT/Brave model reduces the corrosion because you have a choice of what you invest time into - ads or views. I feel that is a fair choice.

I do subscribe to other end-to-end encrypted or decentralised technologies, but I won't list them here.

Summary

If the product you are using is run off a cloud, the company hosting that cloud exercises authoritarian control over your experience because you cannot access or modify the software running on their physical servers. How the corporation designs the user experience is final, they are the critical middle-agent. You cannot control someone else’s computer but you can choose to interact with it or not.

"There is no cloud, just someone else’s computer."

It may be likely that you have to make trade-off. I'm grateful I don't have the stress of work at a high security organisation with hidden personal identity requirements, NFC login devices, custom operating systems, strict login procedures and biometrics. I can also see the merit in other states setting up their own security protocols, China’s “Great Firewall” and France ehas it's own search engine Qwant.

My final thought it to promote and use decentralised internet services and decentralised cryptographic shared ledger systems. Use commons-based solutions embodying principles of self-governance, decentralisation, and federation. Try out these services:

Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt

In summary, information advantage is a critical requirement for intelligence organisations. The goal is to effectively integrate new platforms and data into meaningful insights and decision advantage. Simply, being first to the information helps to minimise strategic surprise by adversarial actors.

Effective integration of OSINT into analysis of regions with fewer traditional collection assets could reduce the likelihood of strategic surprise.

Source: CSIS

There are several types of open source data-sets including social media, commercial imagery, public records, stolen or leaked data on black markets.

By using publicly available data sets and collaborating with non-official research groups (e.g. U.S. Strategic Command & Federation of American Scientists) the analysed findings can be used to publicly confront adversaries around the globe and respond in the ongoing war of narratives.

This overarching requirement for unclassified intelligence further emphasizes the potential value of OSINT in expanding the range of U.S. options to respond to adversarial behavior.

Source: CSIS

Independent groups are able to produce timely, unique, in-depth, public analysis, often published alongside lengthy documentary evidence and a description of the tradecraft used.  

The study found that “commercial satellite imagery can be just as influential in shaping public attitudes as information supplied by government intelligence agencies.”

Risks

What the article does not talk about are internal adversarial actors and antagonistic open source intelligence communities working on clandestine operations against the state, such as militant groups and armed co-ordinated attacks on public institutions (US Capital Riot/Attack). Their activities disrupt the stability of the state. The tools of big brother are used against big brother. The FBI and in the UK, MI5/Scotland Yard should be taking care of that, but there is definitely an overlap.

I think there needs to be continuous recalibration of the internal assets that comprise the states intelligence enterprises and a regular sweep over the data it collects to ensure it is not polluted. Either by algorithmic bias or human error/poisioning.

I also worried about the edge collection and analysis of data, if an edge device was to be stolen by an adversarial actor, pulled apart, hacked, re-engineered as a trojan horse, or re-made it could pollute the quality of information and create additional noise inside the intelligence network.

I also question the implicit trust in commerical data carriers networks and data-stores, such as telecommunications companies, satellite companies, drone flight records and the ability for others to tap into their feeds. There are so many porous holes in the OSINT model.

I enjoyed reading about this topic and leave you with a final quote an some open source data sets below:

In seeking clarity of potential malign activity, the recommended ISR enhancements—OSINT, expeditionary edge computing, and attritable UAVs—are intended to complement, rather than replace, the main elements of the national intelligence enterprise: the global signals intelligence (SIGINT) system, human intelligence (HUMINT) collection, geospatial intelligence (GEOINT), and the Open Source Enterprise (OSE). Synchronizing and synthesizing these elements will enable better-informed insights earlier in the decision cycle. This is essential for achieving an information advantage as malign activity emerges, potentially providing leaders with insights at mission speed.

Open Source Data Sets

27+ Big Data Statistics - How Big It Actually Is in 2021?

Did you know we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day? Our big data statistics reveal much more interesting facts! Find out more!

TechJuryChristo Petrov

Commercial Datasets | Earthdata

Mission specifications of commercial small satellites and the sensor characteristics for purchased data.

Earthdata

Here is the video:

1. The merging of two larger audiences to cross-promote products.
2. Game development and music video direction merge
3. What could be done with other pop characters such as Darth Vader, Bobba Fett, Deadpool.

Licensing and negotiations might be tricky, but a way to extend the franchises into other markets.

Google Trends

Due to Google Trends being a proportionally based metric I used the a similar term 'multiverse' to track it against (the topic 'multiverse' is strongly associated with the Animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse):

Note there was already significant conversation around 'metaverse' from April/May, but a slight uplift around July associated with Mark Zuckerberg's activity. (Note: the May metaverse signals are associated with Roblox).

Twitter Sentiment Analysis

It's been surprising to see the number of conversations from media outlets rapidly expand post the announcement and also a flurry of social media activity. Here is the sentiment for the term 'metaverse' based on the last 214 tweets:

Mostly pleasant. However, due to the limited characters allowed per twitter post it means that there is a high variance in accuracy.

News Items from Google Alerts

Here are some of the articles posted by media and bloggers - they appear to be positive and buoyant in sentiment.

So what about the metaverse concept itself?

I recall gaming platforms Steam, PlayStation, a whole segment of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) such as Second Life, the film Ready Player One pioneering their version of a metaverse or virtual world around 10 to 15 years ago. That is, virtual spaces with waiting rooms, custom designable characters, virtual currency, missions, and conversation places. These spaces are interacted using virtual reality (VR) headsets and regular chat forums/rooms - a mix of both.

So what is the difference between these metaverses and the recently exalted metaverse?

With it being released in the earnings call there obviously needs to be a business play. Why else would one prime investors?  By utilising significant signal presence, popularity and choosing specific media outlets Mark Zuckerberg has drawn this concept towards his social media spaces.

For example, we are talking Facebook's billions of users versus Steam & PlayStation's millions of users.  

My hunch (which may be entirely wrong) is that Zuckerberg's aim is for some kind of wrapper for a metaverse world, much like his social media spaces are exclusive walled gardens. I expect the drive is to make Facebook the login-gateway and user-profile-gateway by integrating a few disparate services together more tightly with Facebook authentication and a virtual wallet:

• Occulus VR (acquired by Facebook in 2014 for US$2billion).
• Diem (previously Libra Coin) - touted as a 'global payments network'.  
• Facebook's large scale data analytics, trend analysis, psychological and sentiment analysis tools to drive engagement.
• Advertising booking and placement engine.
• User authentication.
• Facebook Portal

Core Metric #1: Time in Metaverse

The key performance indicator could be to keep users engaged in this metaverse for as long as possible throughout the day and into the night. Imagine billions of people spending more and more time inside a walled garden comprising of multiple marketplaces of VR experiences, conversation rooms and supermarkets? Imagine those mega size tech companies, that is companies like Steam, Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation with hundres of millions of users moving their experiences inside the Zuckerberg walled garden? Imagine the billions of users personally creating their own experiences as user generated content?

Once you have the extended engagement, just imagine what is next...

Core Metric #2: Number of Advertisements Served Per Hour

Just think of all the places in this space where you could place advertising. On virtual shopping shelves, in-game advertisements, in-experience pop-ups, you might not even need Amazon anymore, you might not need Google search. But, imagine allowing other advertising auction systems to place their own ads in this exclusive metaverse and charging a small fee per transaction.

The numbers are staggerring, if Mark Zuckerberg can keep the sentiment positive, tactially release the right servces at the right time and ward off the threats of encumbent service providers.

Personal Thoughts

Technically pulling off the metaverse will come down to some kind of shared protocols, much in the same way browsers decide to render HTML, CSS and Javascript or the way operating systems require devices to have drivers.  I think the gateway for the metaverse will be essentially a metaverse browser (software application) that allows somone to attach their VR headset, their devices, their wallets, their accounts directly to the browser app and the browser app is configured to enter multiple metaverses. Much in the same way that the Metamask wallet is tied to the Chrome extension, Google accounts tied to Chrome and laptop camera/microphone's can be used by the browser (they ask for permission first).

It will be a bit tricky to get it all working, in much the same way that it takes quite a bit of fiddling to get a VR headset and games working. This was one of the things that Apple did brilliantly back in the day and that was combining and pulling all of these diverse technical components into a simple package (iPhone).

While Mark Zuckerberg may be first off the mark with seeding the concept of the social media metaverse, I think it will in essence be a combined hardware engineering, software usability and customer marketing effort that will truely be able to pull it off.

After skimming through some interesting datasets and articles on the internet, I found some insights. But first....

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis gives an idea of the sentiment behind a given piece of text, it combines machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). After the program crunches data and categorises words it gives an approximation whether the sentiment behind a piece of text is positive, negative, or neutral.

So that's it, a computer measurement of a body of text as positive 👍, negative 👎 or neutral 😐.

Sentiment Analysis is a powerful technique in artificial intelligence that is important in business applications, eg analysing customer feedback collected from Twitter/Facebook and analysing those text snippets to understand the attitude (handy for marketing and customer service).

How is sentiment analysis performed?

First you need a data set, a large data set, over 1,000 articles or 10,000 words.  Then you put that data set into a series of programs and processes that build relationships between the words.  The way the relationship(s) between words is constructed depends on the method that the programmers used to identify the relationship, several processing models include BERT, GPT3 and Word2vec.

These programs work principally by creating word embeddings that one word has with another - for example, does this word "king" have a strong relationship with "queen".  Here is a word embedding diagram prepared by @JayAlammar on his explanation piece The Illustrated Word2vec:

These word embedding models are used in a wide variety of text based applications: predicitive text, google search auto-complete, recommendation engines, making sense of sequential data in commercial and sentiment analysis. Companies like Airbnb, Alibaba, Spotify, and Anghami have all benefitted from the world of NLP.

To find out more take a read of these two helpful articles, I'll move now onto showing some cool findings from research papers:

• A Complete Guide for Beginners by Manish Shivananhand
• The Illustrated Word2vec by Jay Alammar

Looking at Some Sentiment Analysis Reports

I found two sources that got close to the data I was looking for:

• Sentiment Analysis of A Million News Headlines - Nov 2017
• Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs - 2007

In 'Large Scale Sentiment Analysis for News & Blogs' they built a relationship between words in a unique way. They used the distance between concepts to generate the spectrum or steps.

Paths which  alternate between positive and negative terms are likely spurious.

I have charted that data from 2007 below to give you an idea of the sentiments across categories. If we look at the hand-curated data, then subtract the negative score from the positive we are left with the balance, the results are:

The main takeaway from the chart above is that the topic of health and crime are associated with negative sentiment of the six chosen topics. Possibly, this presents a unique challenge or opportunity for marketers in the health space.

Australian News Headlines

Akmal Abdul Rashid a  Data Scientist at The Center of Applied Data Science provided this awesome summary of news headlines published over a period of 14 years from 2003 to 2017 from Australian news source ABC(Australian Broadcasting Group). This data set was provided as open source on kaggle.com but it is his analysis that is thought provoking. I am very grateful for this research 🙌.

According to Akmal, here are the most frequent words and sentiments used in the ABC news headlines since 2003:

This next word cloud is very interesting. These are the most popular sentiment words. I wonder what the most commonly used headline words are for other countries?

I have charted some of the other data in the report to reveal the balance of negative/positive sentiment in the headlines from 2003 to 2007. It shows that in general the headlines are negative 7 out of 10 times, however just to reiterate, the neutral sentiment headline words were filtered from the data set.

The proportion of negative sentiment words has been consistently much higher than proportion of positive sentiment words since 2003.

Source: https://akmalrashid.com/post/2017/11/26/sentiment-analysis-of-a-million-news-headlines/

Fear leads the way

Akmal investigated a library called NRC to conduct analysis on emotion terms:  Anger, Anticipation, Disgust, Fear, Joy, Sadness, Surprise, and Trust (there are many more words available).

Fear has highest percentage in the distribution. Next, we can see how the sentiment emotions of headlines change over time by creating bump chart that plots different sentiment groups.

Source: https://akmalrashid.com/post/2017/11/26/sentiment-analysis-of-a-million-news-headlines/

Filtering for a specific word: "Fear"

The next set of data use with the NRC model is interesting, it reveals what the most used words are associated with fear. This type of filtered analysis is beneficial as a temperature gauge of brand/topic/issue and can be used across many industry verticals to provide insight to strategy and planning.

How might the newspapers report on certain issues? Famous people? Ethnicities? Locations? Politicians? Contentious issues?  I would suggest that this type of research is the first step of any marketing & communications body of work as well as understanding if your story fits with a certain publication and it's audience.

Beware of the variances in models

The paper by Akmal also briefly shows the weighting of the models, that is a comparison of the same words sets on the NRC lexicon, Bing lexicon and AFINN lexicon.

We can see that AFINN and Bing lexicon sentiment across the years have been negative, there’s really no positive sentiment at all! But we can see in the latest index the negative score is really small, is the trend changing? we need more data to confirm that. Generally, across all lexicon, the sentiment of the headlines has all been negative.

Beware of the words not understood by the model

NRC lexicon, Bing lexicon and AFINN lexicon failed to categorise the following words

• Bing: 4,652,959
• NRC: 3,982,132
• AFINN: 4,532,575

Summary

So how have certain news agencies reported on a variety of topics? Are they positive, neutral or negative? After skimming through some interesting data sets and articles on the internet, we can see from the analysis that negative sentiment has been dominating both the very large scale data set and the media headlines in Australia.  

In the large data set it is mostly negative reporting on crime and health but positive on business, media & sports. In Australia fear was the dominating theme and associated most with the following terms police, court, fire, crime , crash, death, murder, hospital and others. Headlines in Australia are mostly negative 7 out of 10 times.

It is important to note that these models and data set packages are not the only sources for sentiment analysis. It is possible for others to create their own lexicons through crowd-sourcing and science and research projects (i.e, Te Hiku Media or Amazon Mechanical-Turk). It is also possible for companies to use their data from years of dealing with customers, employees and feedback to inform their lexicon library.

My next side-line project is to develop and analyse datasets for the Pacific region. With articles and headlines from media agencies, reports from government oranisations (such as justice and social organisations) to reveal more insights into who we are, what we talk about and how we reflect on this changing world. Kia ora 😀.

Water Tanks

The aim is to minimise demand on the Watercare network by being more efficient with the available resources around our home. We hope that Watercare and Auckland Council can sort out the supply side.

Here's some picture of our installed tanks and a bonus photo of very first unicorn face masks in pyjamas 🦄 🌈.

We did the installation the lunar night of 'Huna' (almost full-moon) 🌔.

In the Māori calendar we are moving into the months of spring 'Kōanga' when plants need to be seeded and grown. 🌱

Mahi hard. Notemea, ka tipu ngā kākano i tenei marama. Need to grow plants and need wai (Water), can't wait for city bureaucrats, need to be resilient. Tino rangatiratanga 💪.

Watercrisis.nz

Have purchased the domain watercrisis.nz and undertaking research about community perspectives on water. The aim is to develop connections between those with a desire to avert a water crisis. I looked at some detail at other crisis management sites and applied a framework to thinking. A screenshot of the starting pages of the document is below for those interested in checking it out:

Please email me kingi@kingigilbert.com if you have any input 😀.

This is not a coding story though.

Frustrated with news feeds

My general frustration with social media is that is it time-badly-spent. I wanted to make an online place that represented my idea of time-well-spent, specifically, allow me to sift more quickly through the stockpile of posts lined up for me by the algorithm, to find that needle in the haystack.

Conceptualisation

The vision of Vizor was simple, shorten the time it took you to find the content that you wanted at that moment. Whether that moment was transactional or emotive (deeper more meaningful reading experience based on a relationship you value), the Vizor would help you get there quicker.

How it works

The Vizor service would filter through all the queued up posts and allow you to represent that content in the way that YOU wanted to see it.

By author alphabetical — done.

By family connection strength— done.

By language — done.

By topic — done.

By algorithmic suggestion — done.

By chronological post time — done.

By keyword search — done.

Liked most by closest connections — done

By story progress — done

Reflecting our multi-timbral lives

I believe each of these search intents represents an attitude or mode of thinking. These various modes reflect our lives each day, each week, each month, each moon cycle, each yearly flow. Essentially, the algorithm becomes more meaningful, it reflects our multi-timbrel realities.

For example, sometimes family things are more important and we want to cut ALL the other stuff out. Sometimes we are in discovery mode and want to absorb new, wonderful, scary, vibrant perspectives. Sometimes we want to catch-up on things from specific people, eg unfolding news stories or progression in games. Somtimes we want an entertainment mix — some sport, some news, some comedy.

Every single human has a different need, a different search intent multiple times daily. We rarely live in a monotimbral state. Yet here we are constrained by a single form field (Google) or automated list of ‘recommended’ options pushed to us by Facebook, YouTube or Twitter.

We have so much more depth and there is so much more content — more than we can fathom to have this all locked behind an automated platform.

Growth and scale

Eventually, the Vizor would learn from a huge array or presents and offer new notes or search options to users based on what is knows. I can imagine an eco-system of ‘shareable’ Vizors. A marketplace.

There could be a developer community and language community around creating or tweaking vizors. Being able to buy or attach a new Vizor. How much would we be able to learn about each other and how many other types of pieces of content might we be able to enrich ourselves with?

To keep the entire reading experience wrapped behind a shroud of algorithm proprietary code seems a bit limiting. I wish I had the money to make Vizor but I don’t. Maybe someone with more money can.

Featured Episode: Food Sovereignty

Te Kaupapa o Te Pūtahi

We created Te Pūtahi to give a Māori perspective to scientific research and make it useful/accessible for our haukāinga. To assist our communities to survive, revive and thrive.

• Survive: We look at the data and historical background of haukāinga well-being and Government response in relation to treaty obligations.
• Revive: We seek to understand how current scientific research may align with haukāinga practices, for example, does the science align with local haukāinga knowledge as kaitiaki of the whēnua, awa and moana?
• Thrive: We explore ways to enhance resilience within our whānau, hapu and iwi and unlock new potential according to haukāinga priorities.
  
  

“Ka ora pea i a koe, ka ora koe i au.”

Perhaps I survive because of you and you survive because of me.*

Te Pūtahi aims to:

1. Make scientific research useful to haukāinga.
2. Support haukāinga in articulating concerns, particularly in the way scientific research and/or data informs (or does not inform) institutional mechanisms.
3. Discuss responses for haukāinga in the present and in the future.
4. To uphold the mana of our traditional knowledge, the mana of our tūpuna and place it thoughtfully in today’s world.

With many Māori concerned about the performance of the Labour Party Māori members of parliament there might have been votes available. In my opinion the far-right/alt-right strategy is going to loose in Aotearoa, fighting over scraps.

Oh well, see what happens, maybe there is a 'sleeping giant' base of voters or 'silent majority' just waiting to pounce out.

Our approach was to plant by the Māori maramataka (calendar). It worked really well. Used the app I had built Native Zone to inform us about the optimal planting days. Worked really well. Please use the app, I made it as a resource for people to tap into.

Putting in the garden bed 🔨

Getting into it 🌱:

Seeing some results ✅:

Where to in the future?  This lady is super inspirational

I actually think about 5 key criteria - not just 3 - when considering a venture investment opportunity.

These are listed below in relative order of importance (higher to lower) to me:

1. Does the market exist and is it large? This is a very important first-screen  because it’s hard to suddenly create new and large markets if it’s  small now or if it doesn’t exist at all.
2. Is the technology and/or business model of the startup differentiated - and likely sustainably so. This is important to create barriers-to-entry, ideally long-term ones.
3. Does the founding team understand well the market that they’re going after (1. above) AND the technology and/or business model they’re creating (2. above) ? This is a fundamental assessment of how well I feel the team can have insights into AND execute on what they aspire to accomplish.
4. Are the terms of this investment conducive to allowing me to generate venture returns? This is also very important because a great market/technology/business model startup and a great team, but with terrible investment terms (e.g. unreasonably high valuation thereby severely capping my potential  returns) may not be a good venture investment opportunity.
5. How passionate am I personally about the founding team and the technology/business - assuming the market is in fact large and exists.  This last criteria is important because as an early stage investor, I’m going to be in the trenches with the entrepreneurs for many years to come, so I better really like them, as well as the product/business they’re pursuing. A seasoned venture capitalist once told me: “you can  divorce your wife, but you can’t really divorce your portfolio  company… so you better make sure you really like the startup and the founders before you invest!”

After a lot of research I decided on the Fujifilm X-T30 instead of the Fujifilm X-T3, Canon EOS-R and Sony A7III. Sony still seems blue/green and it needs tweaking. EOS-R I never tried. X-T30 has almost all the same features as X-T3.

Ultimately, the X-T3 has very high-end features that I would need high end post-processing equipment (and studio) to notice any difference - I just can't afford it.

What is the same:

1. The lens X-mount is the same
2. X-T30 is smaller and therefore more portable
3. The base ISO is the same 160
4. The sensor is the same
5. The image processing is the same
6. The Fuji film settings are the same
7. The shutter speed adjustment is the same
8. Still has 120fps 1080!  
9. Still has 4K!
10. Still has HDMI out if needed at ProRes 4:2:0
11. 4K video output is reduced from 400MB's to 200MB's and my machine can't handle/edit 400MB's without chugging to a standstill
12. It has one SD-card slots and not two.
13. It has a 2.5mm microphone jack instead of a 3,5mm jack
14. Headphone output is but USB-C and not headphone jack. Doesnt matter for me because I use either Zoom H2n or Saramonic Mixer to mix before sound hits the card.
15. It has a flash!

I've been using a Canon 5D MkII for years which I still love, but I am seriously impressed with the mirrorless screen on the back, you can actually see live adjustments in shutter speed, ISO, apeture, exposure and therefore maximise the dynamic range in shots.  Hell yeah!  Way faster to get the look you want AND ensure you have enough range to play around with in post.

The black and white modes look sick too.

(Note: This article is a follow-up from an article is wrote in April 2018 under Zoom newsletter publishing (a start-up I tested last year). The article combined analysis from McKinsey & Co. and Accenture, management consulting firms. Check that out.)

Figure Eight prepared this insightful report - 300 people across a variety of industries and company sizes contributed to this data quick summary:.

1. Today, more than one-third of organizations use AI.
2. Deployments grown by 270% in four years.
3. More companies are focused on incorporating AI into their daily business processes.
4. Companies already adopted AI report they have edged ahead of competitors.

Two participant groups in this survey comprised as follows:

1. Technical people: 80% data scientists, 20% data engineers/machine learning engineers/software application developers.
2. Line-of-business: 50% of product managers/directors/business analyst, vice-president and C-level executives.

TL : DR - In essence the use of A.I is still the same as 2018, cleaning big sets of data, automating repetitive tasks  - it's not yet dystopian science fiction stuff as seen in movies. Here's some graphs, but please download the report to be deeply informed.

🧠 To learn how you can advance your AI and machine learning initiatives, visit the report makers at www.figure-eight.com, they seem really cool and this is a helpful report.

I hope this report illuminates a path forward for you and your organization. Thank you for taking the time to fully consider what it means to develop AI for the real world. ☺️

Fluut by QuantumApp

I discovered this using a new service ketchup.today.  It originally comes via Reddit. The Fluut app looks super cool. Quite a lot of work to get it to this state, here's how he built it,

"I'm using a custom back end built with Python's Flask but that's it".  

Yes it is only a promo, but hey looks pretty awesome.  Look at those emoji options - must have quite a bit of logic going on behind-the-scenes. Mean.

⭐️ Subscribe to the Fluut beta here.

Ketchup.today by Charles

This tool is really awesome and massive time saver. Basically ketchup.today sends me a weekly round-up of my favourite Reddit threads, saving me crap loads of time. The landing page is super cool, I like the design. Charles is doing a great job of bringing this project to life by interacting directly with early customers. He is asking great questions about usability - try it out and help out an indie hacker.

What could a jazz musician, a painter, a cook, a weaver, a fabric designer have in common with business? Well, it depends on the type of project or business you are running, or, to be more accurate, the type of product/service you hope to bring into the world.

Creativity is the driving force of innovation. Here are three aspects of artistic creativity that are important pillars for any innovative project:

1. Collect Raw Materials to Fuel Imagination

Artists are using their senses all the time. They observe the world around them, and continuously collect raw material which they use later in their work.

For an artist, anything can be raw material. Artists are curious about anything they come across. They absorb so many things, and somehow some of these inputs are used later in the creative process.

Artists don't filter or block anything in advance. They don't go out looking for something specific. Of course, not all the inputs are eventually used. In many cases, it is impossible to track down the ones that were used, just like you can't always identify the ingredients of a great dish. But that is not important - all ingredients eventually affect it.

Collecting activity is a major part in the creation of art. The artist's senses are always on. And if you want to innovate, that is exactly what you should do.

2. Create a World

When we read, hear, or look at an artwork, we usually focus on that specific item. In most cases, we don't see it as part of a sequence of pieces created by the artist. However, in many cases, the artwork is in fact merely a small corner of an entire world created by the artist.

When artists create new worlds, they are free to play with any aspect of them: from the landscape to their timeline, from the laws of physics to how people feel and talk to each other. It doesn't have to be a science fiction, fantasy or a surreal work. It can seem very much like the world we all know, but it is still the artist's world to create and control.

Creating a world of your own, enables you to define the rules. You can expand it, change it, or refine it later - it is yours to play with. It creates explicit boundaries, but you can open as many gates in these boundaries as you wish. It makes your creation consistent, holistic, and yet not limited in any sense.

3. Define Who You Are

If you ask an artist what defines them, you might hear different answers. But deep inside, most artists define themselves by their art. Art is an integral part of the artist. It is not just "something they do" - it is who they are.

In most cases, art is inseparable from the artist. It is the core of their being.

In contrast, for many companies innovation is just something they feel they have to do to meet their business goals. Not that there is anything wrong with meeting business goals, but if innovation is just an arbitrary mean to do that, it is by definition not what defines your organisation or your projects.

If creativity and innovation are not part of the fabric of your organisation/project - part of its DNA - most likely they will not be groundbreaking or last for long. Creativity must flow in the projects veins 24/7. It must beat in the hearts of each and every team member. It must be alive. You cannot "activate"  innovation at command. It must be present - all the time.

Summary

Here's those three tips:

1. Collect, absorb new ideas, ingredients and inspirational sources - let them soak into your brain, digest and sit there, keep it all in there, don't filter it out.
2. Create a world - imagine a future or world you want to create
3. Make it the core of your being - be inspired and think about your world always, creativity, innovation and art is not an on/off switch

I'm quite enlightened by their approach but I strongly feel that I want to protect my genealogy from their machine.  Ancestry.com are crowd sourcing DNA and origin knowledge and have no clear guidelines (or regulations) about how they will exploit that, either through some medical products or selling it's data to 3rd parties (e.g. profiling systems for law enforcement or any other kind of strong arm practice).  

Currently, the closest approximation they can make of my genealogy (whakapapa) is to locate it between Hawaii & Tonga. If I supplied my whakapapa chart to them it would add a critical layer of validation to their data and place DNA like mine, possibly very very close to the actual origin of my tupuna.  

"... awesome mahi, my moko listened to Episode 1: Matariki tonight before he went to sleep."  
- J Wikaira

"Oh my gosh! Can I share this with the teachers at my school?! And to the NZ teachers page?! I’ll use it this week in my class x"
- A Williamson

"Ka rawe tō kōrero e hoa!"
- M. Jones

These stories were inspired by my own recollections and study of the books  'Te Taiao: Maori and the Natural World' by David Bateman and 'Matariki -  The Star of the Year' and 'Matariki - Te Whetu Tapu o Te Tau' Dr Rangi Matamua.

🎧 Listen here:

This story is fictional and intended to be suitable for all audiences.

Credits

• Written & narrated by Kingi Gilbert  
• Music & SFX by Kingi Gilbert
• Empty Horizon 2453/6 by Paul Mottram (PRS) - licensed under AudioNetwork
• Past Recollections 2428/4 by Chris Egan (PRS), Jon Bourne (PRS) - licensed under AudioNetwork

This composition was made and mixed in Garage Band except for some of the strings which where from loops from the Garage Band library. Take a listen:

Thanks to my wonderful family and friends, knowledge and books magically appeared.

The first was a discussion with my wife Hina and friend Kathryn Akuhata-Brown, we read passages from 'Te Taiao: Maori and the Natural World' by David Bateman and looked in 'Ngā Mōteatea' by Jane McRae. Kath suggested we should follow the rituals of Matariki - I ❤️ that idea.

Then my mum (Nanny) and Phil (Koko) gifted two wonderful books by Dr Rangi Mataua, 'Matariki - The Star of the Year' and 'Matariki - Te Whetu Tapu o Te Tau' which can be purchased directly from Huia.

On the plane ride from Nelson to Auckland I was engulfed by the stories in these books. I let them slowly absorb and seep in. Each of the stars has a whakapapa (geneaology) and purpose in the Māori world. They relate to the Māori calendar (maramātaka) and represent different aspects of Matariki - regeneration, death, birth, weather, seasons, winds, rain, hangi, food, crops, gods, tributes and reflections.

I asked myself, what other kinds of stories are out there? What kind of stories are we telling our kids about Matariki? What facts are important to uphold today?

For me it was about connecting the young to the old. The kaumatua with knowledge, guiding the young. The transmission of knowledge.

The challenge was to create a fun kid friendly story (General Audience, G rating) without 'washing out' the main elements to appease to a modern Western cultural appetite. So I mulled over the idea of looking at Matariki through children's eyes.

Early Treatment

While I was collecting the kids from school, we stopped to get sushi. After watching the kids hammer their prawns and chicken, I recorded a rough idea on my phone:

As I walked home, I decided to not write anything and just let the ideas flow straight into the track recording software. Writing tends to abstract my brain into a slower creative method that strives perfection, and for me, striving perfection is the enemy of getting anything actually produced.

Production Flow

I fired up Adobe Audition, connected my microphone (MXL V67G) and started my session. In the end I decided to keep notes 😁 but only for the sake of tracking my position in the narration recording process and not for the creative flow.

I started adding some sound effects from my library of Māori, ambiences and spot FX I have collected over the years. I used a custom recorded shell conch, some koauau (flute) and some musical instruments through my MIDI keyboard.

Audio Network supplied two orchestral instrument tracks and I purchased the license for play on YouTube videos (what's that? 🧐 - I want to be able share this story with the school for playback for the kids without some crazy copyright clause surprise or advertising injecting itself mid-story).  

Visual Player 🎥

The next step was to make this video shareable on social media, so decided to create a simple audio waveform player using After Effects.  

A small bit of wrapping up now to get the full project shareable.

Listen to the Preview 🎧

Here is a preview mix, let me know what you think:

Be notified 📧 when the full version is released

Once I am complete I will send out an email so join my mailing list. Every second week, I send out an email newsletter with my notes - the news that matters and what it might mean, plus any new blog posts.

The main concept is being able to filter your results by your network of friends. That is, you type your search term, then when you moves the slider to the right side the search results presented are 'vanilla results'. I'm hoping to tap into headless chrome to show the same kind of results as one would get from searching via google on the private tab.

If you love the slider to the left you are presented with results that your friends are most likely to recommend for you.  

I'm building in react and firebase. Check out a development draft here: https://vize.netlify.com/ - this project is a significant extension of my capabilities but all good.

I started Navigator in 20198 with fellow film-maker Kathryn Akuhata-Brown - it is really simple, finding a digital space for Native Films to exist.

They compared three perspectives of Auckland:

1. The DNA (analysis of local peoples perspectives, attitudes and ideas)
2. The projected (analysis of organisation promotional activity)
3. The perceived (analysis of visitors sentiment, attitudes and perspectives)

They used these perspectives to determine the maturity of the Auckland brand as it compares to other destinations (Melbourne, Vancouver, Sydney).  From that they then came up with a gaps analysis which presented some things that the Auckland brand needs to work on.  The wider framework for the project is here Auckland 2025.

Here are some slides from the DestinationThink! presentation for you to peruse.

Key Takeaways

1. Auckland is seen as a beautiful, ocean fringed, urban metropolis with a relaxed, modern and friendly vibe. People love the blue-aqua ocean, close accessibility of forests/nature and diversity of the urban population.  
2. Chinese and Japanese visitors comment particularly on the friendliness of the Māori and the pleasant nature of the co-operation between Māori and non-indigenous locals.  
3. Residents in Melbourne, Sydney and Los Angeles have mostly positive things to say about Auckland if they have travelled there or not.
4. Auckland most comparable to these coastal cities with mountain backdrops: Melbourne, Vancouver & Sydney, but not similar to Hong Kong or busier urban centres.
5. Auckland brand has a very weak voice in the online discussion and needs to ramp up it's communications volume, it is about 1/6th the volume of Melbourne or Sydney.
6. In order for the Auckland brand to be more powerful and transformative for both online visitors and destination visitors, it needs to display a very strong sense of purpose and needs to mature the ways that destination visitors connect with the unique Auckland experience, perhaps Māori culture is an avenue?

I'm really not sure which direction to go.

1. So far I love Ghost on my own blog, I have been grandfathered into the 1st ever plan which makes this hard to beat.
2. Netlify is just a super smooth scripting package and I like the simplicity of their interface.
3. Contentful is wonderful, expandable and I love the way they have set apart the content model from the content/media. Looks powerful for the future. (They said not so good for video content).
4. Scrivito looks ideal for landing pages and virtually no forms (anywhere), after the cheap tier, the price is up there.
5. Jekyll Admin, I am a fan because I started learning static website generation through the Jekyll blog.

I guess I should make a decision on long-term ease of use of the CRM. Hands down Ghost has allowed me to be most productive as a small business owner/micro-blogger. Contentful would probably be better for a mid to large size organisation. Scrivito for a sales and lead generation focussed company. Netlify, I love because it is just so easy to hit the 'Deploy to Netlify' button and bada-bing, you're off.

1. OBS to Restream to Twitch/YouTube
2. OBC to Twitch

Restream had great quality and I like the way it sits above all of the various streaming platforms and unifies the chat messaging.

Some gamers must have epic upload and download speeds to be able to play at that level AND stream at the same time. Amazeballs.

How are Trumps' adventures in Korea or his attorney's spill-the-gut's confession going to improve my life and my children's life? Why will following this drama add value to me?  Why should I bother spending my valuable time reading a chapter into someone else's life?

Gawd. News should be about something better. So I wanted to ask you for your opinion.

Q. What does news politics provide for you?

Right now what I thinking I really need to know from the news is the following:

1. If I am going to die or be hurt very soon by some extemporaneous threat
2. If anyone I know is going to die or be hurt
3. If a lot of people died or hurt so I won't visit there
4. If someone or something will drastically and immediately change my way of life

That's about it.  The rest is irrelevant.   'Zoom' is about helping one to zoom into the relevant news in a persons life. How could this service be delivered online?  Would anyone use it?  Or do they have an appetite for and prefer to feed on the politics news cycle?

These questions may form the basis of a new hypothesis for a pivot on Zoom.

In essence I am expected to learn about a service/product, distill down what it does to it's most essential functionality and then recommend a course of action for clients. Build or Buy?

As such, I need to learn about multiple products and services very quickly. I found a very helpful post from Carsten Pleiser on Indie Hackers. He recommended something on Coursera called "Learning How To Learn". This has been very helpful, so wanted to share. https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/

I 100% resonate with Carsten's takeaways from the course :

1. Exercise and walking is a great way to build new synapses in the brain and improve the overall learning
2. Reading the first and the last chapter of a book can give you a  general idea of the content and is often a first step to grasp general  concepts. Before starting to read, scan through each chapter for a  general overview.
3. Distribute learning over several days. Avoid overloading your brain and definitely avoid last-minute learning.
4. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you've mastered the content.  Instead, repeat in your own words and make notes. The Cornell Notes  technique is quite powerful. http://coe.jmu.edu/LearningToolbox/cornellnotes.html
5. Mix different topics and areas of learning to build stronger synapses  and connections in the brain, be open to learning new things across a  wide variety of topics.
6. When it comes to teaching and learning coding or technical concepts, the best way for me personally is to actually build little projects.  Watching videos and tutorials can lead you into thinking that you understand it. Too often though, this is not the case.

Found this great article from the development community:

It may be that Firebase solves these issues over time but the  combination of deployment failures, slow function execution and major parts still in beta means it not a viable option for me. Ultimately in this case I found I could use a single real-time DB in Firebase and run  everything else from AWS — remarkably this worked just fine.

https://itnext.io/lessons-from-a-long-week-with-firebase-b433ce8ee49e

Hoping to be impressed by AWS Evangelists, I didn't find much hope there either, scroll to 20minutes they start talking shop and then she gets a react-native bug that takes about 1 hour to resolve:

So I am not sure what to do. Plug away with Firebase or pick up AWS Amplify?  AWS Amplify is meant to help frontend developers, I'll try this tutorial: https://github.com/richardzcode/Journal-AWS-Amplify-Tutorial

Freemium Business Model as seen through Spotify

Freemium is business model that provides a combination of “free” services/products and “premium” services/products.  Spotify offer a paid monthly premium plan that unlocks certain features.  A free user of Spotify is able to:

• Explore the entire library and core offering on free
• Explore the user interface on free
• Receive annoying ads
• Web browser
• Faster than Apple Music (don't need to install iTunes)
• Unable to play music offline on free
• Unable to play a song immediately on mobile, have to wait for it's rotation in the shuffle play

Freemium Business Model Pros

• Can easily communicate to and nurture free tier customers to the premium tier
• Low Customer Acquisition Cost than having to acquire customers externally
• Build data profiles on free tier customers
• Potential to acquire free tier customers
• Can use demand leverage to generate supply from suppliers

Freemium Business Model Cons

• Cost to maintain service for free users
• Free tier must be equal to or better than other competitor free tier offerings
• Need to finely-tune your free tier and premium tier, otherwise  premium tier customers may feel they are unfairly subsidising free tier  customers.

Discussion 1: Ads offset the costs of the freemium service and lower CAC
Spotify  can monetize non-paying free users through advertising on it's  platform, which makes this a very potent marketing tool, it is a cheap  way to advertise and nurture new users.  While indefinite free access is  compelling, it is also a way to ward off competitors such as YouTube  music - shutting the door to the free service would make CAC soar.

Discussion 2: Tuning each tier
Has Spotify  well-tuned the free tier and subscription tier? If customers don’t  clearly grasp what they would gain by upgrading, Spotify will monetize  fewer of them than they could. However, the primary purpose of freemium  is to attract new users, so Spotify has to provide a free service that  is in-line or better than it's competitors YouTube Music, Apple Music.  A  freemium tier is thus highly competitive (and great choice for  customers).

Discussion 3: Generating traffic
The freemium  model should generate traffic and promote to new users, conversion rates  should be balanced with traffic growth. For example Spotify would be  better to convert 2% of 5 million monthly new users, than to convert 30%  of 200,000 visitors.

Perhaps the conversion rates in the freemium business model depend on  the size of the market? That is, if a company have a freemium offerring  for a small market then a higher conversion rate, but for a company  like Spotify with tens/hundreds of millions of users a 3-5% conversion.

Discussion 4: Maintaining conversion rate?
I  guess the question becomes - can Spotify maintain 3-5% conversion rate  over-time? Tough, especially when reaching saturation. How would Spotify  to convince price-sensitive late-adopters and over-the-hillers (on the  adoption curve)?  I would expect conversion rates to lower significantly  as the market reaches saturation.

In the case of market saturation then the freemium product tier would  have to change. The freemium tier would end-up costing the business and  ultimately affecting financial performance. Spotify would need to  optimise their operating costs to achieve improved business performance.

Discussion 5: Acquiring new users

I have some suggestions about how Spotify can convert free customers   into paying premium customers. The idea is a referral idea. While the  current freemium customer may not pay, maybe some of the freemiums  friends/family will convert into a premium customer.  

Idea 1: ⚡️ Referrals & Content Generation
Offer  a time-sensitive 'team-up' referral offer. Kind of like Dropbox but  with a bit of extra social power. Every friend you recommend that joins  Spotify, gives you 3 months free Spotify, so if 4 of your recommended  friends sign-up that's 12 months (1 year) free Spotify.

The free customer would organise four of their friends to sign-up at  the same time and in-turn organise another four. Viral network effect.  Spotify could assist users to reach their target by providing a unique  web-page for each user to see their referral success, perhaps some kind  of fuel-tank graphic or graphic. Advertising could also be placed into  the page.

I believe other supporting 'beta' content sharing features could be launched inside this referral page:

- share playlists with friends and get referral points for sharing playlists
- group playlists
- sale of playlists to restaurants, venues

Idea 2:  🎫  Link-up with live music gigs

How can you improve the music listening experience? The ultimate music  experience is to attend a live-show or a gig.  I think Spotify could do a deal with producers and promoters to purchase 20-500 exclusive tickets for a gig/show in each city. Only premium users get access to the tickets. A special web-page could be added to each users Spotify account for them to sign-up for the tickets.

Both these ideas keep Spotify users engaged on their platform and help generate advertising opportunities in Spotify.

Reading this interesting article from a group of leading artificial intelligence researchers on what it takes to make a 'good auto driving car'.  He said that "30 million samples" is not enough to produce quality data. Their approach moving forward will be to:

We propose exposing the learner to synthesized data in the form of perturbations to the expert's driving, which creates interesting situations such as collisions and/or going off the road. Rather than purely imitating all data, we augment the imitation loss with additional losses that penalize undesirable events and encourage progress -- the perturbations then provide an important signal for these losses and lead to robustness of the learned model.

Mayank Bansal, Alex Krizhevsky, Abhijit Ogale

All this really begs the questions:

1. What is 'good driving'?
2. Will what one person thinks as 'good driving' be the same as another?

Where there are various inputs required to produce a certain outcome, the capitalization model fits well.  My gut prediction, is that because of the varying scales of tolerance and vary levels of budgets producers will offer consumers the option to purchase an 'A.I driving system' that suits their budget:

| Quality         | Safety      | Price       |
|-----------------|-------------|-------------|
| low             | lower       |    cheap    |
| low             | higher      |  expensive  |

Thanks to Chris Banes for this assist, and RicoStaCruz for this simple, obvious fix.

The Firebase integration was really easy and I highly recommend doing this for its high level of SSL. Firebase is Google's mobile platform that helps you quickly develop high-quality apps and grow your business.  I chose Firebase over Amazon Web Services because I liked their implementation method and connectivity to Google Cloud Functions - which I am starting to experiment with.  (I also don't have time to learn both AWS and Firebase so I chose one for now.)

The goal is to start machine learning April 2019.

Right now I am trialing the Ruby Airtable integration, as our company projects are managed with Airtable as our central project co-ordination and I hope to extend client communication through this simple form. The goal is to have clients be able to review and upload any design documents via our website to Airtable with a very simple Stripe integration for payment.

Chehoo 🤙

I started my first company, Ignite Studios Ltd in 2003 - a small design studio and animation agency that worked with businesses to help them navigate the digital space, understand software development and make digital products.  I started Ignite Studios LLC in 2014 after moving with my wife to Hawaii.

Right now, I am studying Entrepreneur Acceleration at Wharton and work with  businesses in New York, France, Hawaii and New Zealand.  My focus is on sharpening my strategic skill-set, understanding machine learning and finding creative multi-disciplinary teams to be a part of.

I currently live in Auckland, New Zealand and travel once or twice a year to Hawaii to visit family, surf and climb Haleakalā.  Please make contact with me if you would like to chat.

I'll be sharing my life experiences, and more, on this site. To stay in touch subscribe to my very occasional e-mail newsletter.

From 20014 to 2018 I built the business in the Pacific region creating awareness of the technology, stimulating demand and engaging with the open ocean racing sports community, link.

A large group of travelers contributed reviews for free to TripAdvisor.  These reviews became TripAdvisors inventory which they figured out how to monetize through advertising.

They did it by providing a service to reviewers. That is, in return for the users uploading reviews, TripAdvisor organised the aggregation and presentation of the reviews to support traveler’s planning and decision making when they became a 'holiday shopper'.

This organisation includes price comparisons and review comparison sacross many hotels and other travel websites (Orbitz, booking.com, Expedia, Kayak, etc) to assist the user to purchase the best priced hotel possible.

Crowdsourcing Marketplace with Core Advertising Products

The reason why Trip Advisor is a crowdsourcing business is because it sells advertising opportunities. It is also a marketplace that joins holiday shoppers (demand) with holiday providers (supply). As a crowdsourcing site, TripAdvisor spans wide functionality that meets the needs of it's travel users:

• user-generated review pages
• a meta search engine and
• a direct booking page (i.e. online travel agency, OTA)

The pros for this business model are:

1. The destination of choice for public reviews, which means it has a large monthly user base which validates the price for advertising
2. Able to connect shoppers with sellers via targeted matching, eg looking for hotel in Rome under $200, pulls up all Rome hotels under $200 at that time - quicker response for customers
3. Able to collect a lot of data to help decision-making for new features and or product offering adjustments
4. Content is free (TripAdvisor does not pay reviewers)
5. Understand network effects and influencers
6. Able to keep track of competition because they will have to use your platform to target their users

The disadvantages are:

a. Unable to extract value from a certain segment of the data, for example, the cost of the hotel versus the veracity of the review will fade, for example, a $40 hotel will not get good reviews in general and would be less likely to buy ad space from TripAdvisor
b. Bad actors, false data and bad reviews, low quality content can pollute the value of the data, there will be a cost associated with 'cleaning' the data, vetting crowd members to enhance the quality of participants or creating sub-communities along product categories will all cost
c. How to allocate recognition to content-suppliers?  Accumulating respect from peers is important and if overlooked or badly handled, the content supply will diminish.
d. The crowd will increasingly demand their fair share. The tension between crowd value creation versus platform owner value capture was a source of conflict at Quirky and led to it's failure.

• Aviv Ovadya @metaviv "The Terrifying Future of Fake News"

• Renee DiResta "Social Media Disinformation"

• Jonathan Albright "Propaganda-lytics & Weaponized Shadow Tracking"

• Andrew Sullivan "Attention Merchants", "Distraction Sickness"

• Molly K. McKew @MollyMcKew is an expert on information warfare and the narrative architect at New Media Frontier. She advised Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government from 2009-13, and former Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat in 2014-15 "#releasethememo".

• Digital Forensics Research Lab @DFRLab "Russia’s Full Spectrum Propaganda"

• Tim Wu "The Attention Merchants"

• Joel Harding To Inform Is to Influence

• Ramus Kleis Nielsen Fight Disinformation

• Fabio Brugge

• Tristan Harris How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

• Fake News Horror Show - an event to look at the future of computational propaganda and A.I

• Center for Humane Technology group chat

• USA Hate Map Southern Poverty Law Center

• Sean Illing @seanilling

• Cory Tolbert Haik "The Algo-pocalypse: Journalism in the digital dystopia"

BuzzFeed News is launching an experiment this week called "Outside Your Bubble," an attempt to give our audience a glimpse at what's happening outside their own social media spaces.

The Outside Your Bubble feature will appear as a module at the bottom of some widely shared news articles and will pull in what people are saying about the piece on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the web, and other platforms. It's a response to the reality that often the same story will have two or three distinct and siloed conversations taking place around it on social media, where people talk to the like-minded without even being aware of other perspectives on the same reporting.

Our goal is to give readers a sense of these conversations around an article, and to add a kind of transparency that has been lost in the rise of social-media-driven filter bubbles. We view it in part as a way to amplify the work of BuzzFeed News reporters, and to add for readers a sense of the context in which news lives now.

Source: BuzzFeed

"If censorship is not practiced at Facebook then how come porn doesn't make it into the newsfeed?"

Facebook isn't 4chan, it censors content for the public good (values of a civil society). Certain labels are applied to stories (pieces of content) and actions are performed. For example, any post marked as 'porn' is never shown.

The system of censorship within Facebook is very active and healthy. With that in mind, I believe the methods proposed below by Facebook might fall short of being a viable solution for the revised News Feed:

1. Boost certain publishers — ones whose content is “trustworthy, informative, and local.”
2. Use reader surveys to determine which sources are trustworthy.

One, defining 'trustworthy' is fraught with bias because user-generated (maybe even crowdsourced) opinions are no higher in value than a well-informed individual (or expert) opinions. Two, I think the approach to 'boost' also leads to problems of favouritism. Three, surveys sound boring.

Rupert Murdoch also chimes in:

if Facebook truly valued “trustworthy” publishers, it should pay them carriage fees.

This is a good point. There needs to be a tighter scope to avoid unbalance between platform and media. Furthermore, one main value that is driven from technology is the ability to conduct data collection and analysis - I believe the solution should remain in that domain.

Also I want to reframe the problem. I want to start with news and journalism in general. Frankly speaking, I think news content publishers have a problem and that is the news industry is struggling to keep its integrity. Partisanship in the US is at an all-time time high: for example CNN versus Fox. Many stations amplify the filter bubbles and destroy the foundations of keeping the powerful accountable. Brietbart, Hannity, Media Matters exist on ends of the spectrum, with Conservatives and Liberals aligned respectively.

I also think the challenge is not solely because of journalistic integrity due to political influence, but because news publishers are looking for ways to win advertisers back. Digital advertising platforms such as AdWords and Facebook Ad Manager are far superior with a higher performing ROI for advertisers - improved segmentation and delivery cost.

I remain skeptical of the business interests for journalists in news publishers (and in fact any declining newsroom), I'm worried they need to make Facebook the scapegoat for partisanship and fake news - "the vector":

"it's not our fault we reported the election wrong or wrote so much crap about Trump, it's Facebooks problem for allowing our bullshit to spread."

It is really an industry wide fault.

I believe the issues with newsfeed also relate to the problems with partisan journalism. I am totally suggesting we might be able to fix both at once and importantly address a very important social illness: rankism.

Rankism is one of the outcomes of extreme partisanship - it gives power to demean others. The more people become polarised the more they hate and denigrate each other - rankism spreads. As Robert Fuller suggests the remedy for rankism is dignity.

The hope##

I believe Facebook can be the revamped key vector that provides tools that assist Facebook users to understand journalism better and the effects of polarisation. The end goal is to help users understand the dynamics of civil society and enjoy a dignified news feed.

What I am proposing##

I strongly believe the solution is not in becoming a media company or censorship agency, but for Facebook to become an education agent in the content landscape.

By asking the question - what hinders civil society? We have the foundation for a solution. This is well addressed in the article by Cass R. Sunstein, Professor at Harvard Law School.

Propose the objectives as follows:

1. What is Extreme Partisanship?
2. Define and label it as NewsWhip and PEW Research does - liberal > conservative
3. Change how each of these partisan labels are applied to stories and publishers in the feed.
4. Provide a stream of user stories that are safe and clearly labelled

Some ideas to mull-over##

This only initially applies to content from news publishers, brands or pages. Eventually, as the system becomes more intelligent, steps are taken to label and identify user accounts, for example, an account posting upwards of 20 articles per day is marked for analysis.

We all know we can’t edit the source content (censor) or 'shadow 'content (what Twitter is doing). However, Facebook can:

1. Define the type of content in the stream
2. Redirect the content in stream
3. Crowdsource the categorisation and labelling of content (Why not? Civil duty - I would invest in this for the sake of others, especially after a crappy experience lately with newsfeed.)
4. Define what is 'shown first'

Most importantly, the lens with which we view and categorise or label content needs some additional parameters. As mentioned before I would advocate that these labels come from a bi-partisan agency such as PEW Research.

Filter options##

• Trusted (Accredited Publisher or Journalist)
• Partisanship Badge US: left, centre, right, far right, extreme
• Untrusted
• Explicit content porn (already censored out)
• Explicit content hate speech (should be censored out, its un-empathetic)

The simple idea is to enable tools to helps users to identify partisan content... and to help themselves identify their own bias. I would highly recommend :

1. Publisher accreditation (yes publishers apply to be accredited).
2. A team or partnership on technology such as NewsWhip that can be used to help identify and define the partisanship of story/post sources.
3. A tool to help people understand their own current political typology, and is a great way to get users thinking about partisanship and bias and decide what they want in the news feed diet.
4. Combat the 'The Colorado Effect' - always ensure that views not-necessarily their own (but respectfully written) make it into the newsfeed
5. Provide a space (or feed) for those who want to pursue their partisan agenda but with warnings of filter bubble effect.

Importantly, news publishers and users will be able to understand the slant of their content and engage in debate - what a good functioning democracy is all about! Right? The discussions will become centered around bias, influence and transparency. The hope is that this discussion helps to make the world more open and connected.

Summary##

I am not advocating for direct censorship. I am not advocating for Facebook to become a media company. I am suggesting that the Facebook categorises it's content and enables a filter function for users (starting initially with publishers and moving through the user base in an organised manner). The result will be a newsfeed enhanced with a labelling system and an accreditation system that identifies stories or publishers as partisan or extremist. In doing so, the stories in the users news feed will be more aligned to their interests - making users more satisfied. Lastly it will create a platform for debate and challenge notions of transparency, it will enable user to understand how the stories they share relate to our friends on Facebook and the social groups we are part of.

Haka the Legend supports Te Reo Māori language, pride, wellbeing and cultural knowledge We established 'Te Whānau Raukura', a group of expert Māori kapa haka performers living all across Auckland and working part-time at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. We are also educators and teachers, working on public programmes at the Auckland Museum and at schools in our suburbs.

We have a deep love of Te Reo Māori and Māori culture, particularly kapa haka. For us it is about the ihi (excitement), the wehi (awe) and the wana (thrill).

Testimonials & Reviews

“The group were amazing, so professional, funny and educational. I received so many comments, in particular from the Australians attending, about how much they enjoyed the performance and especially learning something about the Maori culture. I know many said it was great to know where and how the word Kia Ora is used, as it was a word they heard often.So thank you for your wonderful work.”
Carmel Gregan-Ford, Kidney Health New Zealand

“Thanks again for organising an amazing performance last week for our Maori Scholarship Awards Night! I didn't get a chance to thank  the team after their performance, but I wonder if you can pass on my thanks to them on behalf of the Crimson team? “
Jarrod, Crimson Team

Haka the Legend was established in Auckland in 1993 and registered with the Inland Revenue Department and Companies Office of New Zealand. We are one of the longest running Māori tourism operators in Auckland

Haka the Legend’s Mission

Our mission is to keep our roots of traditional Māori culture thriving in the cosmopolitan diversity of the world. We achieve this by sharing our values of aroha (love), manaakitanga (hospitality), ihi (excitement), wehi (awe) and wana (thrill). We nurture the skills taught to us by our tūpuna, the poi, haka, stick-games, weaponry, singing and storytelling.

History of Haka the Legend

Since 1993 Haka the Legend Ltd have focussed on providing a reliable, professional Māori cultural tourism experiences in Auckland. We are passionate about being Māori, perpetuating our style of traditional entertainment experience in a mix of languages, our traditional language Te Reo Māori as well as English. We are passionate about assisting our troupe of artists, musicians and performers to flourish in the world as Māori.

One of the longest running Māori operators in Auckland

We are one of the longest running Māori experience operators in Auckland. We achieve our success by merging both the traditional Māori world with the Western business world, enabling our experiences to live on because we operate as a business.  Our head-office is based in Takapuna and we perform regularly at the Auckland Museum, Auckland International Airport, hotels and conference venues. We are registered with the Inland Revenue Department and Companies Office of New Zealand.

Our Management Team

Haka is managed month-to-month by Kingi Gilbert & Zella Morrison, who both comes from a lineage of Māori performing artists including her father Laurance Morrison and uncle Sir Howard Morrison. Kingi & Zella were tutored in kapa haka at a very young age and embraced the family line of business from the 1960’s and 1970’s in ‘Geyserland’ Rotorua New Zealand to the current age of Te Matatini.
Our day-to-day manager is James Singe a deeply experienced kapa haka performer, having taken the stage at National Kapa Haka competitions since 2000 and member of Ngā Tumanako, current Te Matatini Champions.
Today Haka the Legend has 15 performing artists on our roster ranging all ages.  

Contact

Please contact Kingi Gilbert, kingi@hakalegend.co.nz 021893917 for more information.

While developing websites and undertaking search engine optimization work I have come to realize that gaining awareness through search results is only directly related to how Google friendly your page is.

That is, how easily that Google machine can extract content from your site and re-display it to users in their own Google search results pages.

Yes this saves time for all of us using search by delivering relevant information (after only a few keystrokes).

But consider this... if the information is conveniently delivered via Googles proprietary search result pages, then why even bother to visit the destination page?

The fear is that destination websites can miss visitors and the opportunity to share what they have to offer. Meanwhile, while Google gets to earn revenue with advertisers who bid (at a proposed market value) higher and higher to feature on their search pages. Profit motivation. Financial benefit in favor of the giant.

Q: If there's less reason to visit the destination page, then will the site traffic diminish? What is the motivation to keep a website going if there are less people visiting?

Or perhaps we just forget about designing and developing our own websites and enter all our structured rich snippet data directly into the Google machine?

The future

Google is improving these search results constantly with:

• Google Knowledge Panel
• Carousels
• Site Link Search Box
• Social Profile Links
• Local 3-Packs
• Rich Result features for news articles, books, music, events etc

These tools ask you to structure or reference your data 'rich snippets markup' so it can be extracted directly into Google search page. Check out movie reviews? See below, it's all in Google search results - no need to visit Rotten Tomatoes at all!

Here's Google's own words:

An organised search experience. As users' devices and context evolve beyond the desktop into the world of mobile devices and everyday tasks, Google Search is also evolving by providing rich search results that support users beyond the desktop: from making a reservation, to calling your business’s customer service number, to selecting the perfect chocolate cake recipe while at the grocery store. Through the Google App, we deliver information to users even before they query, helping them to re- engage with your content in moments that matter.

Source: Google Search Guidelines

Balance

The fear is, destination websites beyond Google won't get seen. The design, culture and style of what people are propogating in their own websites will be spliced, diced and extracted by Google before anything. Already this impetice is well established in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry - just search for 'SEO Expert' and you will see how many devoted folks are out there willing to do Googles work for them.

I hope there is a co-operative balance in the search eco-system that Google is monitoring. If too many people stop clicking through the final destination, then the whole of the web will just be Google - no flavour, no culture, a Google mono-world of boring data orientated perspective.

Don't be evil

Journalists have raised questions about the actual definition of what Google considered "evil". "What Is 'Evil' to Google?" with regard to their "Don't be evil." mantra.

Again this is up for discussion. At the time of writing this article, Google Brand Value estimated at $101.8 Billion.

The news media today does not just report the news but also represents the views of certain segments of society. The news media is not a place to absorb informed opinion, simply the news media is a place to absorb biased opinion.

".. increasingly seems to lack the principles of objective and impartial reporting. Instead, many major organizations seem to be taking one side of the political spectrum and at best provide relatively biased coverage or at worse act like virtual propaganda machines for a particular political party.":

HuffPost

Validate my world, please...

People are looking for stories that validate their sense of identity in their social group, and will search for stories that reflect their views. They will reject all others.

I'm an optimist and like to think that during an election, when the future is uncertain (about which social group will obtain control), there are opportunities to educate and inform.

However, often we see mainstream news agencies reporting like a muckraking magazine (for example Jacinda Arden on having children and doing the Prime Minister job). This is not news.

It's also insightful to compare and contrast the spread of bias of news agencies with regard to the US General Election 2016 and NZ General Election.

US: Fox News (Pro-Right)
NZ: NZ Herald (Pro-Right)

US: CNN (Pro-Left)
NZ: Stuff (Pro-Left)

For more information on news bias read this informative piece from the PEW Research Center - American's Attitudes About News Media.

However, what I want to bring attention to, is that amongst the 'media empires' (Fox, CNN) or 'mainstream sources' (TVNZ, News Works) are the niches - independent publications with small audience base trying to grow and exist in the social eco-system. Intelligent, informed and insightful - but underpowered.

Here is a wonderfully informative article by
The Conversation, promoting 'academic rigor, journalistic flair' on the new New Zealand Government:

This, then, will be a legacy government, one that represents a generational shift in thinking away from the priorities of the baby boomers towards the concerns of the millennials. The irony that such a thing has been brought about by a man on the other side of 70 won’t be lost on anyone.

The Huffington Post is also one such smaller niche news agency that has managed to float to the top of consciousness. With informative content repeated in this post:

"The aim of a free press is to continually scrutinize the government and provide people with accurate and impartial information so that they can act on it accordingly."

HuffPost

Diagnosing the problem with mainstream...

Establishment news companies (media empires or mainstream news organizations) have a significant leg up due to a larger inherited historical audience (when the world consisted of 3 TV channel options).

They are institutionalised with the pre-internet aware generation and have success from mining and seeding typical narratives:

• Crisis reporting
• Run-of-the-mill news
• Polarising agenda
• Demonizing a person or social group

More information on news narratives may be read in this journal or this book.

Simply, establishment news media organizations are not acting in the best interests of a well-informed and educated society, but simply in the best interests of their financial bottom line. One typical output of this type of populist thinking is that all that matters in news reporting is 'ratings' or 'views'.

The result being that news reports are often distorted to a point that it causes more confusion than clarity to the general audience, for example, any Rush Limbaugh or Mike Hoskings splurge which demonizes the opponent. This distortion, is often so fanatical it treads towards 'entertainment'.

What is an effective remedy?

How can smaller niche news outlets can reach their audience in a time of biased disruption and entertainment news?

Is the answer to follow the lead of the Rush Limbaugh's and Mike Hoskings and push whatever barrow of stories to keep your audience hooked?

The dangers are highlighted below:

The danger in all of this is that it could distort the quality of information that people receive and that in turn could distort their decisions. If positive issues are reported in a negative manner then at least some voters will vote against them even if it is contrary to their own interests, and vice versa.

HuffPost

Or is there something than can be looked at with technology? Or with regulations and laws? I'm not advocating for government intervention or censorship (which is highly damaging as well) but simply some kind of tool to help the smaller niche players amplify their voice.

Zoom is here to fill a news gap with the way traditional polarized media reports on (or doesn’t report on) important issues.

Zoom at its root is about finding answers, or trying to find out answers to questions people are wondering about. Zoom delves into issues, listens broadly and then distributes what was learned. Our pages feature stories/reports that reflect a diversity of views and challenge readers to consider perspectives very different from their own.

You can review at zoom.sx or zoom.substack.com 👍

I am also disappointed that corporate news media are continually retweeting Trumps inflationary and less than credible stories to deliver 'investigative' views. Come on news producers, do us a favour (please).

I notice that Obama gave an interview in the White House with Comedy Central's Daily Show. The President discussing the state of the nation on a comedy show? For real?

Do we even bring up long-time radio show anchor Rush Limbaugh, I've had a good four hours listening to his show and it is pure entertainment and propaganda.

“Conservatism is an active intellectual pursuit; it requires a constant vigilance. It has nothing to do with feelings. Liberalism is the most gutless choice you can make. You just see suffering and say, ‘Oh, I feel so horrible!'”

Haha, best entertainment yet! And guys like this actually think he is standing for something 'real'. Do the world a favour (please).

Anyway, what has news and journalism come to? Ratings, ad sales, conversions, viral score, page impressions, backlinks, outbrain 'recommended' articles and entertainment enhanced news.

We have seen the rise (and fall) of mass content companies pushing their barrow of computer re-generated keyword based article varieties.

All this mash-up entertainment leaves society with generational problems. The current state is as George Orwell put it:

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity."

Leading into his other notable quote:

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

In the very close future we will need very good lie detectors. Understanding the truth will be difficult. Revealing the facts behind the truth will be near impossible and having a platform with an audience ready to asborb it will be (in)credible.

Search technology will have to become smarter to remove false news, or people will soon stop trusting search sites altogether, which would be very bad for PPC keyword ad sales.

Work-around search software using 3rd party qualifier software might be the thing?

Policies will have to be developed to identify and dob-in those openly creating false news, perhaps with measured punishment?

One will need to control and compartmentalise their diet of news, such as:

1. Urgent real breaking stories

2. Top real stories from reputable sources that is fact-checked by other independent 3rd qualifiers

3. Just simply Entertainment

And if one chooses not to be discerning about their media diet or unbalanced? Then one is without informed insight, susceptible to making incorrect decisions and forming judgements based on entertainment. I really donʻt know what implications this will have. Something about the herd-mentality or mob-like social nature of people to gravitate towards the majority will have something to do with it.

The future for those discerning to be informed will be about filtering trash.

"For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature, would eventuate the working class' development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society governed by a free association of producers. Marx actively fought for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation."

Wikipedia: Karl Marx

This theory is built around the idea that the working class are able to gain a simultaneous cohesive enlightenment.

However, part of the problem in a multi-source news technology environment is that it is very, very difficult to ascertain the truth, and therefore gain enlightenment. People can argue over what is real and what is not - there are two or multiple angles to every report.

This 'truth searching / confusion' phase may simply be a stage in the evolution of the enlightenment period or creating confusion could be a method to stop enlightenment all together.

If you have Facebook/Twitter/Linked-In , consider the quality of your 'News Feed', consider the authority of who you listen to, consider the legitimacy of voice, consider the bias of the author, consider if the ultimate origin of the message is from the worker (community) or the producer owner (propaganda).

Yes, some of these social platforms encourage debate that is helpful to develop a unified social consensus. However, if you find that these platforms simply make you confused and stressed - then perhaps it is time to leave and seek reputable sources that reveal the truth.

Here are the sources I use to determine my news:

Pew Research Center - Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. We conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. We do not take policy positions.

This is a particularly revealing article can be clicked to develop further insight.

The military spend is high because it is needed as a suppression force to stop small communities in far flung countries from protecting their natural resources. The result of this oppression has bred this insane new level of avenger, someone who has lost their families, lost their land and will stop at nothing to extract revenge. There's no shortage of veterans denouncing their missions. There's no shortage of soldiers with tragic stories of the communities they oppressed. There's no shortage of suicides 22 every day from service.

The mainstream media is a propoganda machine and not the goodwill community news source we would conveniently like it to be. Terorrist my ass, our governments, bankers and oil/mineral companies are the terrorists.

We'll never be rid of oil, but maybe we can start small. Don't buy a gasoline car, buy an Electric car. Maybe Go solar, buy a battery and live off your own energy. Maybe use a Federal Credit Union instead of the big bank. Maybe save some money instead of investing in oil/exploration companies on the stock exchange.

I'm not saying denounce the whole world, just be more picky.

People in wealthy countries (almost all my friends on Facebook, some with two cars, 2.5 kids, surfing/paddling trips, access to 100 channels of movies, UFC pay per view, fancy restaurants, Amazon, travel and the latest fashion) have an opportunity to live in an age of information enlightenment and wealth, yet have been led by mainstream media to turn a blind eye to the hardcore questions staring us in the face:

• How come the Saudi Arabians fund Hilary Clinton?
• Why are there more and more homeless?
• Home come African-Americans, indigenous, minorities get a raw deal?
• How come companies employ so many illegal immigrants?

Most of us in the OECD countries live in better conditions than the average person in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, China but it is a huge leap to own jets, banks, trains, newspapers, TV stations, masses of stocks, shareholdings in fortune 500 or hotel chains.

If we want a way to stop the hatred, the terrorism, the suppression, the oppression, the greed, we need to reduce the demand for oil and all transactions that relate to the powerful network of companies that control the distribution and sale of oil. In doing so we will degrade the need for the military complex and hopefully channel more money into new energy inventions that are connected with the planet and the forces of nature which are so abundant.

Yes, Donald Trump is the 45th president of the United States, defeating Hillary Clinton by 279 to 218. So how did the Republican's 'team Trump' claim this historic walloping win over Democrat's 'team Hillary'?

Republican control

To analyse this win we first need to establish what it is that the Republicans now control:

• President
• Senate majority
• House majority
• Supreme Court
• District voting neighborhoods via gerrymandering
• Voting machines rigged in 16 states
• Setting up voting stations so that people can't paper vote
• Voting lines so long it is too hard to vote.
• Sending voters to the wrong place
• Republican Judges that rule over how the voting machines are configured
• Exploiting the profit motivation behind the corporate arm of the media companies

And conversely if we look at what the Democrats control:

• Popular vote
• Moral high-ground
• Media's anti-Trump support

So, where to now?

If one can see the elections as nothing more than a competition to get into power regardless of feelings, then we have a perspective to analyze. This is a highly competitive game where the outcome is to 'get elected whatever the cost'. Facism, racism, sexism are simply tools to play the game with.

I really don't like having to take this view, but at a time like this it is important. Conversely, if one is stuck in the mode of 'how horrible is this guy Trump' (which I think is the morally right view to have) then one could have a harder time figuring out what went on because one is perhaps too involved in emotion at this time to 'see the wood through the trees'.

I would like to illustrate the woods I see.

Quick breakdown

Firstly, this isn't a Trump solo win. This is a co-ordinated team with with lots of people playing various parts. The more visible such as Donald, Melania and Pence, but also the more hidden people including Judges, District Representatives, FBI, voting machine operators, publicists, journalists and of course the National Rifle Association.

And then there are the behind the scene's strategists such as Chris Jankowski, a top tactician on the Republican State Leadership Committee, who spent years preparing Republicans for 2010’s post-Census redistricting fight — in which conservatives, long dominant in state legislatures and governors’ mansions, successfully gerrymandered a number of states’ congressional districts to maximize benefits for their own politicians.

Therefore, team Trump is big. Donald is the frontman, maybe he is the 'showrunner', but it is safe to say there is a BIG team here.

Secondly, the entire field of emotion is open for play:

• social influence
• media manipulation
• racism
• sexism
• polling booth control
• the feelings of white 'unappreciated' or 'forgotten' voters, extremely threatened by #BlackLivesMatter
• the easily antagonised feelings of 'empathetic' voters with a high moral standards, easily enraged by #Trumpisms.

Basically, all of our fears, worries, insecurities are used, manipulated, through simple triggering events in the media to stimulate us into action or reaction - either in favour or against his campaign, thereby drawing lines between voters and entrenching the basis for further social influence along those groups. This dangerous game of showmanship was executed perfectly by Trump with his anti-Mexican, anti-Immigration, anti-trust 'cast-away' quips.

These 'cast-away' quips were considered for their ability to segregate voters and create a media spectacle, of course knowing all along that team Hillary would be out to discredit his reputation.

Looking back, team Trump did a great job of identifying how to categorise their voters and match that with the polling stations they could control.

Thirdly, the old saying 'good cheaters never get caught' applies very much in this election. The rules of combat are very simple. Don't get caught cheating (especially at the polling stations). It sure does help if one has a couple of Republican judges in the right positions (ie districts where polling station tweaks are viable).

Fourth, we are in a period of swing away from liberals, Obama has done his three terms and Obama's social points had run out. The Democrats had positioned Obama as 'demure enough' that swing voters wouldn't see Obama as a threat (like Spike Lee might instil insecurity in some people).

Obama was not too radical, an acceptable guy that everyone could like... that was until #BlackLivesMatter came along. With the rise of Facebook 'live' videos, showing horrific scenes of police brutality and a rise in all coloured people supporting #BlackLivesMatter, Obama was out. He was making people angry, either by his lack of in-action or for simply just being African American. This game had ended its cycle.

Fifth, digital savvy. 'Team Trump' didn't go head to head with Obama earlier, they could of opposed Obama in 2012. Team Obama had commanding control of social media and digital search through his 'Android Administration' (and in this vein, Hilary showed a complete lack of technical savvy).

Sixth, the anti-establishment sentiment was nurtured on the back of Senator Bernie Sanders campaign. Bernie had ignited this flame but was unable to execute in his own Democratic party because lack of support. Team Trump took hold of all of the swing democratic voters sentiment and used that to widen his base to include Sanders voters. I have several friends staunch Bernie who actually voted Trump.

And this last item is something which segways into the next obvious question...

How can Democrats beat Team Trump?

I would suggest that in order to beat the Republicans, the Democrats should throw out the current team focussing on establishment politics and embrace a new view.

Firstly, Bernie had a stronger anti-establishment game. Democrats need to get those Bernie voters back. They need to question the establishment that allowed Republicans to gain control of so much. Get behind Bernie, give him the full power allowed to Hillary.

Secondly, by its in-action in covering Bernie and its action in covering Trump stories the media is totally complicit in the Republican victory. Democrats need to use their media connections to encourage more investigative journalism. This may mean rolling a few senior executives at media companies who are more into 'reality TV style' reporting. It's time to call out the cheating for what it is... and spread this message to Trumps swing voters.

Thirdly, get Trump impeached. Investigate him with the IRS, SEC.

Fourth, own the digital media space again.

Fifth, either start their own gerrymandering or work on transforming the electoral college.

Sixth, does this really have to be said... campaign in swing states.

In finale

It's hard to believe that Trump is the honest winner, in the same way it's hard to believe that Hillary really defeated Bernie. But the Republicans played the game hard, they cheated hard and weren't caught. This is a win, many years in the making.

When our world is unrecognisable, will it be fit for life?

I have been raised in two social spheres, often disconnected and fragmented. One being Maori culture and the other modern capitalist urban society.

As a Maori (native New Zealander) I was raised to inherently understand that everything is connected. People, plants, air, birds, water, fish, animals and land all have a special life-force of their own 'mauri', interwoven together. The key to the Maori world view is the importance of not altering the life-force 'mauri' to the extent that it is no longer recognisable.

As a student of Advertising (with a keen interest in computer technology) I was raised in a world focussing on capitalist outcomes either monetary success, social pedigree achievement or innovation success.

Looking at the world today with a lens over each eye, this is what I see...

1. Market economics promotes intensification of competition in only profitable fields.

2. Yes, socially influencing the world towards a solar future (renewables) is important in raising demand and therefore a transition away from fossil fuels.

3. However the rest of the worlds economic-system is unbalanced by a for-profit agenda creating unbalanced intensification of resources.

4. That is, humans are only improving performance in fields of development that suit humans, not the vitality of the other parts of the earths eco-system, e.g. destruction of rainforests.

5. Therefore, humans will kill the earth because we are inherently self-indulgent and remain largely ignorant of the true well-being of other species, as well as other societal groups and cultures that are not our own (unless of course it meets the aims of the for-profit agenda).

6. That is, until we (humans) can rework the market economic system to:

Expand the focus on wider development fields, not just those which benefit our social group, but other species, societal groups and cultures.

...and...

Ensure this re-booted economic system is interconnected with planetary/earth vitality signals.

In 1715 to 1789 the Age of Enlightenment came to advance ideals such as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

In 2016 to 2020 we need to become dedicated to advancing new ideals focussing on the interconnectedness between the environment and the social structures humans create. Specificially, until the market economic system is rebooted with a new operating system, we are not going to change the global warming trajectory of the planet fast enough.

The people who likely perceive they have the most to loose are those in positions of financial wealth.

Question: How would it be possible to make the financial elite sympathetic to the well-being of the planet?

In Hawaiian folklore, the crater at the summit of Haleakalā was home to the grandmother of the demigod Māui. According to Hawaiian legend, Māui's grandmother helped him capture the sun and force it to slow its journey across the sky in order to lengthen the day.

By W.B Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Insight:
By Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) written in 1918 and first published in the Macmillan edition of The Wild Swans at Coole in 1919. The poem is a soliloquy given by an aviator in the First World War in which the narrator describes the circumstances surrounding his imminent death.

The poem is a work that discusses the role of Irish soldiers fighting for the United Kingdom during a time when they were trying to establish independence for Ireland.

Wishing to show restraint from publishing political poems during the height of the war, Yeats withheld publication of the poem until after the conflict had ended.

After a limited run of 5 canoes, I moved to Hawaii and canoe production and development stopped. Development was expensive and funded entirely with personal money. The business was R&D heavy, I started under-capitalised and the 'runway' ran out very quickly.