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Alison Wilder

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Archives for December 2018

December 21, 2018

‘Kill your foster parents’: Amazon’s Alexa talks murder, sex

So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: “Kill your foster parents.”

Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers’ data, according to five people familiar with the events.

Alexa is not having a breakdown.

The episodes, previously unreported, arise from Amazon.com Inc’s strategy to make Alexa a better communicator. New research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet. However, ensuring she does not offend users has been a challenge for the world’s largest online retailer.

Link to Article

December 20, 2018

One Mouse, Two Cups?

On January 1, 2019, original works from 1923 will move into the public domain. This batch will be the first new public domain works in over 20 years.

Mickey Mouse was born via Steamboat Willie in 1928. That means that, barring further Disney intervention, in 2024, the Mouse can become…anything.

I, for one, am keen to see how many people genuinely want to watch Mickey Mouse porn. I feel certain that the number will be much, much higher than anyone would like to believe.

December 20, 2018

Passing the buck

Shame is now both global and permanent, to a degree ­unprecedented in human history. No more moving to the next town to escape your bad name. However far you go and however long you wait, your disgrace is only ever a Google search away. Getting a humiliating story into the papers used to require convincing an editor to run it, which meant passing their standards of newsworthiness and corroborating evidence. Those gatekeepers are now gone.

“Shame Storm”, Helen Andrews, First Things

This seems disingenuous, since most stories people share are still from major news outlets. If people were writing long, hateful screeds on their personal blogs, and that was the material that was spreading through Facebook and Twitter, I would agree that the gatekeepers are gone; however, every media outlet has editors.

It’s not that there are no gatekeepers. It’s that the gatekeepers are motivated only by clicks, and it turns out that people click on shit-for-brains, hateful language over measured, thoughtful analysis.

December 13, 2018

Hope me, Agatha.

The elements of Christie’s fiction are all already in place: a country house, a finite list of suspects, the outsider detective intruding into a place of order and hierarchy that has been disrupted by a crime. The world of Christie’s books is something like the ‘imaginary’ as described by Cornelius Castoriadis, a mental representation in which this orderly household stands for a whole society as a shared universe of meaning, with values and social roles encoded everywhere we look – and then, into this world comes a murder, and a detective trying to solve the murder. Something doesn’t mean what we thought it meant; someone isn’t who they appear to be; something didn’t happen the way it was said to have happened.

The Case of Agatha Christie, LRB

December 13, 2018

Interest index

Create a list of everything you’re interested in, ever, here. All of it.

  • Sea mammals
  • Global politics
  • Linguistics
  • Micro-timing and latency adjustment
  • Evolution as a heuristic for other things
  • Cultural influence on story-telling
  • See also, folk stories
  • Crimes and how they’re solved
  • Religion
  • Mythology

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