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It’s Twilight of the Mods for Bluesky and Reddit

It’s Twilight of the Mods for Bluesky and Reddit

These are strange days for people who care about trust and safety on platforms. Historically, many people have suggested that either more effective central moderation (a platform owner intervening directly in policing the content of the platform) or better decentralized moderation (allowing users to curate their spaces through community-driven moderation) could pave the way to a better social media landscape—or, ideally, some alchemically balanced combo of the two. But, in true Silicon Valley fashion, one platform is centralizing in the worst way possible, while the other is decentralizing catastrophically.

Of late Reddit and Bluesky are showing how to fail at both—one in pursuit of an IPO that is destroying the very thing that made the site valuable to its users; the other in pursuit of a dream of decentralization that quickly tarnished the site and threw its grandiose claims into doubt.

The problems at Reddit are complex, but, in brief, the company decided to charge users for access to its application programming interface (API), which had been free since 2008. The financial motivations for this, its knock-on effects on the site’s army of volunteer subreddit moderators, and how poorly Reddit has handled the situation all, taken together, comprise a crisis for the site. The original API change prompted a mass “blackout” on the site, where moderators restricted access to their subreddits, blocking off large, popular parts of the decentralized site to users as a kind of strike.

For mods, the stakes were especially high. The API changes threatened to gut third-party applications and bots that had made their jobs significantly easier—popular third-party mobile apps for reading Reddit like RiF or Apollo were especially useful for the visually impaired moderators of /r/Blind due to their accessibility features. Many mobile features for moderation, in particular, are affected. Now, in the words of longtime /r/GirlGamers moderator Jaime Klouse, volunteer mods are “thrown back to 2015 when there were no useful tools and you had to moderate by literally reading every single comment submitted to your communities.”

Reddit has always been a byword for toxicity, but /r/GirlGamers, an inclusive gaming community, was one of several subreddits that provided an alternate model, through careful enforcement of collaborative norms guided by a strong sense of ethics.

With a rather apposite metaphor, moderator Swan Song told me. “We weren’t just volunteer knights, we were volunteer blacksmiths and armorers too, crafting our own powerful tools to aid us in defense efforts,” she said, referring to the various tools that free API access had made possible. Another mod, iLuffhomer, said that Reddit’s saving grace was that it “allowed us to moderate as we saw fit. Now, it feels like Reddit doesn’t respect what we do.”

If a community is to moderate itself, giving its regular users a stake in the day-to-day happenings of their online watering hole, it stands to reason that “empowering” them (that much beloved corporate buzzword for outsourcing responsibility) requires giving them the tools to do so. For the moment, Reddit’s moves seem designed to retain only a veneer of community moderation, undermining the very things that made it, and the site, worthwhile. It’s a warning to other, newer sites that will one day be in search of more money as well.

HydroJug Pro Review: Bigger Is Better

HydroJug Pro Review: Bigger Is Better

I have attempted many times to become a Hydration Queen, all of them futile. I spend my day chugging coffee, realize I’m thirsty somewhere around 3 pm, spend 20 minutes at the sink pouring glass after glass of water down my throat, and still end up dehydrated.

I’ve purchased water bottles in the past, but my ADHD brain never remembers to refill them once they’ve run dry. A few weeks ago, in the midst of a heat wave, my partner and I stopped to grab some new drivers before hitting the disc golf course. There, in an endcap at our local sporting goods store, I saw her. My angel. My savior. My soon-to-be bestie, the HydroJug Pro.

Big Bad

73oz HydroJugs in different colors

Photograph: HydroJug

If I were a water bottle, the 73-ounce HydroJug Pro would intimidate me. By sheer size alone, it makes a mockery of my past purchases from Contigo and HydroFlask. You won’t be putting this bad boy in your car’s cupholder. Filled to the brim, without a sleeve, my bottle weighs just over 4 pounds. It doubles as a weight when I take it with me on walks.

It wouldn’t be ideal for some people, but I like the heft of it. It serves as a physical reminder to keep sipping. And I only have to fill it up once per day!

Many sources recommend that you drink around 8 cups of water per day. That can vary widely, especially since fluid intake from food can count toward your totals. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points us toward studies that show a good amount is about 9 cups per day for women and about 11 cups per day for men.

This number fluctuates based on diet and exercise levels—if you move and sweat more, you should drink more. Urine color is a good indicator of hydration levels—it should be yellow like lemonade, not beer-colored or wholly transparent. I’m happy and not at all embarrassed to report here, publicly, that my pee is always the optimum color now.

But Also a Baddie

73oz HydroJug

Photograph: HydroJug

The HydroJug Pro is cute! It’s available in tons of colors. I’ve been rocking the Pink Sand version. In a utopia where everyone carried around HydroJugs, I’d be able to easily identify mine. There are accessories, too, like neoprene sleeves (with pockets and a carrying strap!) and wide straws for easier sipping. You get all three with the purchase of a Getting Started Kit ($50).

Want to Win a Chip War? You’re Gonna Need a Lot of Water

Want to Win a Chip War? You’re Gonna Need a Lot of Water

The volume required can be huge. In the US, chip fabs use far less water than the agriculture and power generation industries, and semiconductors haven’t spurred political tensions over water resources at national scale, says Chris Miller, a history professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of the recent book Chip War. Still, squeezes have been a concern in TSMC’s home of Taiwan, where droughts have pitted local farmers, who saw their irrigation systems shut off, against the chip maker.

Not just any water will do. Just as the air inside a chip fab must be so free from dust that people must wear all-enveloping coveralls, the semiconductor industry uses a special category of “ultrapure” water to clean silicon wafers throughout the manufacturing process. While standard drinking water might have a purity of 100 to 800 microsiemens per centimeter—a measure of electrical conductivity used as one indicator of contamination—ultrapure water has less than .055 microsiemens per centimeter, according to Gradiant, a water recycling startup based in Boston that works with chip makers. Ultrapure water needs to have an extremely low conductivity, which correlates to only a small number of troublesome ions, or charged atoms.

“If you want to have the highest possible performance of the material, very often you have to go to extreme purity,” says Cornell electrical and computer engineering professor Grace Xing, who also directs a new cross-university semiconductor research center called SUPREME. “That’s one of the reasons the semiconductor industry requires a lot of water.”

Producing ultrapure water is a multistep process that removes a variety of contaminants, including microbes and other microscopic creatures that you might find in oceans and lakes, as well as smaller particles, including even salt ions. One technique used is reverse osmosis, also used in desalination plants, which involves pushing water through a membrane with pores small enough to filter out salts. (Chip fabs also use less-pure water, similar to that which flows from household faucets, for cooling manufacturing equipment.)

Given water’s crucial role in chip manufacturing, recovering and reusing wastewater has become a priority for the industry. The more that can be reused within a fab, the less its need to tap the local water supply. Right now, the proportion of waste water that can be recycled varies between companies and fabs, depending on the manufacturing processes in use and the investment in water treatment. Still, they’re all confronting the same basic problem: As wafers are cleaned, ultrapure water becomes contaminated and requires thorough cleaning before it can be reused by a fab or discharged into a public wastewater treatment system.

Cleaning up the soiled water is a complicated process because myriad contaminants can be found in fab wastewater. Lithography and etching can produce acidic wastewater, and can even contaminate it with powerful hydrofluoric acid. Suspended silicon particles can show up when wafers are thinned down, while the use of solvents including isopropyl alcohol can leave organic carbon residues.

The industry has developed ways to separate out different components of that wastewater, similar to how the general population sort recycling, says Prakash Govindan, cofounder and COO of Gradiant. “The semiconductor industry is actually very advanced when it comes to dealing with wastewater,” he says. “The advanced companies, the American multinationals we work with—but also the Korean and Taiwanese companies we work with—all of them segregate their wastewater into more than 10 kinds, minimum, and some of them into 15 or 16.”

To Save Itself, Hollywood Must Build Its Own ChatGPT

To Save Itself, Hollywood Must Build Its Own ChatGPT

Now, generative AI is the potential kill shot, the one that could cause copyright owners to surrender their library of scripts, created over decades, in exchange for promised benefits that will never arrive.

When it comes to generative AI and video, Silicon Valley only needs to hook one constituency— Hollywood executives. Once studios buy in, they will be at the mercy of the purveyors of that technology. It happened in journalism. It happened in music. Silicon Valley did not kill those industries, but it gained control of the audience and extracted a huge percentage of the potential profits. For studio executives, generative AI is an intelligence test.

The best path forward is for studios and writers to acknowledge four realities.

First, generative AI will eventually be a valuable tool in some creative realms, potentially including script writing, but only if the AI has been built from the ground up for that task.

Second, the flaws of today’s generative AIs make them unsuitable for serious work, especially in creative fields. General purpose AIs, like ChatGPT, are trained on whatever content the creator can steal on the internet, which means their output often consists of nonsense dressed up to appear authoritative. The best they can do is imitate their training set. These AIs will never be any good at creating draft scripts—even of the most formulaic programming—unless their training set includes a giant library of Hollywood scripts.

Third, Silicon Valley is the common enemy of studios and writers. It is an illusion that studios can partner with AI companies to squeeze writers without being harmed themselves. Silicon Valley is using a potential reduction in writer compensation as the bait in a trap where the target is studio profits.

Fourth, there is no reason Hollywood cannot create its own generative AI to compete with ChatGPT. Studios and writers control the intellectual property needed to make a great AI. A generative AI that is trained on every script contributed by a single studio or collection of studios would produce wildly better scripts than ChatGPT. Would it produce the next Casablanca? No. But it could produce an excellent first draft of an Emmy Awards show script. And it would safeguard the business model of Hollywood for the next generation.

If studios work separately or together to create AI they control, the future of Hollywood will be much brighter. Central to this fourth point is a legal strategy of copyright infringement litigation against the major players in generative AI. If copyright is to mean anything at all, Hollywood must challenge Silicon Valley’s assertion of the right to “permissionless innovation,” which has become a safe harbor for law-breaking in domains ranging from consumer safety to public health to copyright.

Some might say that Hollywood does not have the ability to “do technology.” That is ridiculous. Pixar, Weta Digital, and the CGI special effects industry demonstrate that Hollywood can not only master technology, but also innovate in it.

There are many open source architectures for generative AI. Studios and the WGA can license them cheaply and hire a handful of engineers to train their own AI. It will take many years, but copyright litigation will buy the industry the time it needs, and it may even become a giant profit center.

There are serious issues to be resolved between the writers and studios. AI is part of the negotiation, but it is substantively different from the other issues on the table. The tech industry wants to use generative AI to extract profits from film and television, just as it has done in other categories of media. The question is whether studios will repeat the mistakes of journalism and music.

North Carolina’s New Abortion Law Is Also a Weapon Against Free Speech

North Carolina’s New Abortion Law Is Also a Weapon Against Free Speech

North Carolina’s new law banning abortions after 12 weeks not only restricts abortion access in the state that saw the largest increase in abortions since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, but is also the first example since the Supreme Court’s decisionof a state limiting what people can say online about abortion. This speech restriction will create confusion for lawmakers, tech platforms, and users alike, and ultimately undermine online expression.

The North Carolina law contains two provisions that restrict speech. First, the current law provides that “[i]t shall be unlawful after the twelfth week of a woman’s pregnancy to procure or cause a miscarriage or abortion in North Carolina.” After a federal district court judge suggested that the law as written likely unconstitutional because it could cover someone advising another about how to obtain a lawful out-of-state abortion, North Carolina agreed that under the new law these actions would not be a criminal offense.

But the state’s abortion ban also prohibits purchasing an ad, hosting a website, or providing an internet service if the purpose is “solely to promote the sale” of an abortion drug taken outside of a doctor’s office, and this law has not yet faced a legal challenge. The law’s impact will depend on how courts interpret words like solely. An expansive interpretation could prevent platforms from hosting a wide range of abortion-related content and could limit speech rights for people within and beyond the state, since they could face legal liability if their posts are read in North Carolina. That might mean, for example, that a Twitter account with information about how to safely use an abortion drug like mifepristone would violate the law unless it were to block access for all pregnant women in North Carolina. If it doesn’t, Twitter and the account’s administrators could be fined for every piece of offending content.

Courts may find that these provisions are unconstitutional. In 1975, the Supreme Court held in Bigelow v. Virginia that Virginia could not prosecute a newspaper publisher within the state who printed an ad for abortion services that were legal in New York. But the court has since suggested that decision was predicated on a constitutionally protected right to abortion (which no longer exists post-Dobbs) and has given mixed messages about when it is constitutional to restrict truthful advertisements in states where the advertised activity is illegal.

Courts might also find that state abortion-related speech restrictions are unlawful when they conflict with federal law. For example, Section 230 was enacted in part to create a national standard that would prevent tech companies from having to comply with 50 different regimes. But state laws that impose liability on platforms for content they host, like the North Carolina law, conflict with this federal standard.

But whatever courts decide, laws like North Carolina’s that restrict expression will inevitably be mired in legal challenges for years, which will slow down the pace of legislation. Faced with laws that impose penalties for what users say, platforms will be forced to choose between restricting more content to limit their legal risk or restricting less and increasing the odds that they face repercussions. Over time, users will suffer too, since these laws will introduce uncertainty about their rights and corrode the quality of tech products.

North Carolina is the first state to use an abortion law as a weapon in the online speech wars following the Dobbs decision, but it probably won’t be the last. It’s common for model legislation to be introduced in several state legislatures at once. If one state succeeds in developing and passing a bill, it’s likely that the same approach will crop up elsewhere. In Texas and Iowa, lawmakers have already introduced bills that would enable citizens to file lawsuits against tech platforms if they host information that “assists or facilitates efforts to obtain elective abortions or abortion-inducing drugs.” South Carolina entertained similar legislation that would have imposed criminal penalties.

Pure Oxygen Speeds Up Learning. Can It Help Stroke Survivors Recover?

Pure Oxygen Speeds Up Learning. Can It Help Stroke Survivors Recover?

As a physical therapist in Shanghai, Zheng Wang worked with people recovering from strokes after their brains had been damaged by oxygen deprivation. They usually followed a predictable recovery pattern, making lots of progress over the first few visits, then hitting a wall. Patients asked when they’d finally feel normal, and Wang told them that they’d get better with time. “But actually,” he remembers, “I knew from the bottom of my heart that they wouldn’t improve much, no matter how hard we tried.”

Meanwhile, halfway across the world, Marc Dalecki, then an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology at Louisiana State University (LSU), couldn’t stop thinking about oxygen. Dalecki spent much of his early career studying scuba diving and remembers divers using nasal cannulas of O2 to help with everything from hypoxia to headaches. He always wondered whether this simple treatment could help neurological patients in rehab. “I promised myself that I would study it when I got my own research lab,” he says.

For its relatively small size, the brain consumes a ridiculous amount of power: 20 to 30 percent of the body’s energy at rest. To fuel all of its neurons, the brain depends on oxygen. When someone has a stroke or a head injury, the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain gets disrupted. Starved of oxygen, the brain tissue is damaged, leading to a host of problems with memory, speech, strength, and motor control.

Rehabilitation from brain trauma usually involves working with a physical therapist to relearn motor skills, building up the strength and coordination required for daily activities, like making coffee, writing, and brushing your teeth. Many physical therapists already use high-tech devices to help patients recover faster, from robots that move impaired limbs to virtual reality games that simulate aspects of day-to-day life that can’t be easily replicated in a hospital setting. But Wang and Dalecki both wondered whether oxygen could be the simple, cheap, accessible addition to neurological rehabilitation they’d been looking for. If they could give patients a little extra oxygen during early motor rehab sessions, they thought, it might help them relearn old skills faster.

The two of them joined forces in Dalecki’s lab at LSU, where Wang, frustrated as a clinician, decided to get a PhD in kinesiology. In a study published last week in Frontiers in Neuroscience, their team showed that sniffing pure oxygen while learning a challenging motor task helped healthy young people learn faster and perform better. They think this relatively low-cost, low-risk idea could be used to speed up stroke recovery.

For their study, they recruited 40 healthy young adults to each sit at a desk while wearing a nasal cannula. Their instructions were simple: Hold a stylus at the center of a tablet screen, then drag it to a target that pops up somewhere else, as quickly and efficiently as possible. But after a few trials, the relationship between the stylus and the screen shifted, creating a 60-degree difference between the line a participant thought they drew and the line that actually appeared on the screen. While the volunteers adjusted their line drawing to these new, more challenging circumstances, air started flowing through the cannula. Half of the participants got pure oxygen, while the other half got medical air (essentially an ultra-clean version of regular air). It was a quick blast, only during these few minutes of initial learning. Then the air flow shut off and the screen went back to normal.