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Robotic Doom – Did you learn anything? https://www.didyoulearnanything.net An archived blog about education, language, peace, and other fine things Mon, 26 Jun 2023 19:09:19 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.1 [Video/TED] Annals of the Robot Internet: Eli Pariser on Facebook and Google https://www.didyoulearnanything.net/blog/2011/09/29/video-annals-of-the-robot-internet-eli-pariser-on-facebook-and-google/ https://www.didyoulearnanything.net/blog/2011/09/29/video-annals-of-the-robot-internet-eli-pariser-on-facebook-and-google/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:26:11 +0000 http://www.didyoulearnanything.net/?p=1791 Continue reading [Video/TED] Annals of the Robot Internet: Eli Pariser on Facebook and Google →]]> I just watched this fascinating and slightly scary talk about what the Internet has become:

This is one of those things which I kind of knew about but never gave all that much thought. On the one hand, it’s pretty useful that I don’t have to manually sift through things I’m not interested in. On the other hand, an algorithm can’t always tell what I’m interested in, and even if it could, I like to think my interests change and I’d like to be able to see more of what’s going on and choose for myself.

Hmm.

What do you think?

]]> https://www.didyoulearnanything.net/blog/2011/09/29/video-annals-of-the-robot-internet-eli-pariser-on-facebook-and-google/feed/ 2 Annals of the robot Internet: Michael Sappir, Hamas copywriter https://www.didyoulearnanything.net/blog/2011/01/26/annals-of-the-robot-internet-michael-sappir-hamas-copywriter/ Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:06:01 +0000 http://www.didyoulearnanything.net/?p=1204 Continue reading Annals of the robot Internet: Michael Sappir, Hamas copywriter →]]> I woke up this morning to a very strange and unpleasant mention on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/usamasheriff/status/30143794527608832

Of course, it’s always possible the Israeli Right is, well, right, and that like all lefties I’m an unwitting copywriter for Hamas… But it’s unlikely, so I dilligently applied Occam’s Razor and concluded it must be a typo (okay, I mean I took a guess), and followed the link to see what it’s all about. It turned out to be an auto-generated newspaper-esque page of content — powered by paper.li — collected from tweets with the #Hamas hashtag, conveniently called “The #hamas Daily” — which is this case sounds like an official Hamas publication.

Since one of my posts yesterday was about topics related to Hamas and since I apply an excessive amount of tags, which Feedburner selectively-but-automatically turns into hashtags when tweeting my posts (see tweet below), I ended up being an unwitting copywriter for Hamas, who incidentally would like to kill almost everyone I love.

http://twitter.com/msappir/status/29931993890291713

I never used to believe it when they said machines will rise up to destroy us… But now I’m starting to see it… A conspiracy of half-intelligent automatons, interacting on the wild Internet, producing their own newspapers and slanderous tweets… They are the real enemy!!

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