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mariacallous · 8 months ago

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The latest in a series of duels announced by the European Commission is with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Brussels suspects that the giant based in Redmond, Washington, has failed to properly moderate content produced by the generative AI systems on Bing, Copilot, and Image Creator, and that as a result, it may have violated the Digital Services Act (DSA), one of Europe’s latest digital regulations.

On May 17, the EU summit requested company documents to understand how Microsoft handled the spread of hallucinations (inaccurate or nonsensical answers produced by AI), deepfakes, and attempts to improperly influence the upcoming European Parliament elections. At the beginning of June, voters in the 27 states of the European Union will choose their representatives to the European Parliament, in a campaign over which looms the ominous shadow of technology with its potential to manipulate the outcome. The commission has given Microsoft until May 27 to respond, only days before voters go to the polls. If there is a need to correct course, it may likely be too late.

Europe’s Strategy

Over the past few months, the European Commission has started to bang its fists on the table when dealing with the big digital giants, almost all of them based in the US or China. This isn’t the first time. In 2022, the European Union hit Google with a fine of €4.1 billion because of its market dominance thanks to its Android system, marking the end of an investigation that started in 2015. In 2023, it sanctioned Meta with a fine of €1.2 billion for violating the GDPR, the EU’s data protection regulations. And in March it presented Apple with a sanction of €1.8 billion.

Recently, however, there appears to have been a change in strategy. Sanctions continue to be available as a last resort when Big Tech companies don’t bend to the wishes of Brussels, but now the European Commission is aiming to take a closer look at Big Tech, find out how it operates, and modify it as needed, before imposing fines. Take, for example, Europe’s Digital Services Act, which attempts to impose transparency in areas like algorithms and advertising, fight online harassment and disinformation, protect minors, stop user profiling, and eliminate dark patterns (design features intended to manipulate our choices on the web).

In 2023, Brussels identified 22 multinationals that, due to their size, would be the focus of its initial efforts: Google with its four major services (search, shopping, maps, and play), YouTube, Meta with Instagram and Facebook, Bing, X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Amazon, Booking, Wikipedia, Apple’s App Store, TikTok, Alibaba, Zalando, and the porn sites Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat. Since then, it has been putting the pressure on these companies to cooperate with its regulatory regime.

The day before the Bing investigation was announced, the commission also opened one into Meta to determine what the multinational is doing to protect minors on Facebook and Instagram and counter the “rabbit hole” effect—that is, the seamless flood of content that demands users’ attention, and which can be especially appealing to younger people. That same concern led it to block the launch of TikTok Lite in Europe, deeming its system for rewarding social engagement dangerous and a means of encouraging addictive behavior. It has asked X to increase its content moderation, LinkedIn to explain how its ad system works, and AliExpress to defend its refund and complaint processes.

A Mountain of Laws …

On one hand, the message appears to be that no one will escape the reach of Brussels. On the other, the European Commission, led by President Ursula von der Leyen, has to demonstrate that the many digital laws and regulations that are in place actually produce positive results. In addition to the DSA, there is the Digital Markets Act (DMA), intended to counterbalance the dominance of Big Tech in online markets; the AI Act, Europe’s flagship legislation on artificial intelligence; and the Data Governance Act (DGA) and the Data Act, which address data protection and the use of data in the public and private sectors. Also to be added to the list are the updated cybersecurity package, NIS2 (Network and Information Security); the Digital Operational Resilience Act, focused on finance and insurance; and the digital identity package within eIDAS 2. Still in the draft stage are regulations on health data spaces and much-debated chat measures which would authorize law enforcement agencies and platforms to scan citizens’ private messages, looking for child pornography.

Brussels has deployed its heavy artillery against the digital flagships of the United States and China, and a few successful blows have landed, such as ByteDance’s suspension of the gamification feature on TikTok Lite following its release in France and Spain. But the future is uncertain and complicated. While investigations attract media interest, the EU’s digital bureaucracy is a large and complex machine to run.

On February 17, the DSA became law for all online service operators (cloud and hosting providers, search engines, e-commerce, and online services) but the European Commission doesn’t and can’t control everything. That is why it asked states to appoint a local authority to serve as a coordinator of digital services. Five months later, Brussels had to send a formal notice to six states (Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Poland, Portugal, and Slovakia) to urge them to designate and fully empower their digital services coordinators. Those countries now have two months to comply before Brussels will intervene. But there are others who are also not in the clear. For example, Italy’s digital services coordinator, the Communications Regulatory Authority (abbreviated AGCOM, for Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni, in Italian), needs to recruit 23 new employees to replenish its staff. The department told WIRED Italy that it expects to have filled all of its appointments by mid-June.

The DSA also introduced “trusted flaggers.” These are individuals or entities, such as universities, associations, and fact-checkers, committed to combating online hatred, internet harassment, illegal content, and the spread of scams and fake news. Their reports are, one hopes, trustworthy. The selection of trusted flaggers is up to local authorities but, to date, only Finland has formalized the appointment of one, specifically Tekijänoikeuden tiedotus- ja valvontakeskus ry (in English, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center). Its executive director, Jaana Pihkala, explained to WIRED Italy that their task is “to produce reports on copyright infringements,” a subject on which the association has 40 years of experience. Since its appointment as a trusted flagger, the center’s two lawyers, who perform all of its functions, have sent 816 alerts to protect films, TV series, and books on behalf of Finnish copyright holders.

… and a Mountain of Data

To assure that the new commission is respected by the 27 states, the commission set up the DSA surveillance system as quickly as possible, but the bureaucrats in Brussels still have a formidable amount of research to do. On the one hand, there is the anonymous reporting platform with which the commission hopes to build dossiers on the operations of different platforms directly from internal sources. The biggest scandals that have shaken Meta have been thanks to former employees, like Christopher Wylie, the analyst who revealed how Cambridge Analytica attempted to influence the US elections, and Frances Haugen, who shared documents about the impacts of Instagram and Facebook on children’s health. The DSA, however, intends to empower and fund the commission so that it can have its own people capable of sifting through documents and data, analyzing the content, and deciding whether to act.

The commission boasts that the DSA will force platforms to be transparent. And indeed it can point to some successes already, for example, by revealing the absurdly inadequate numbers of moderators employed by platforms. According to the latest data released last November, they don’t even cover all the languages spoken in the European Union. X reported that it had only two people to check content in Italian, the language of 9.1 million users. There were no moderators for Greek, Finnish, or Romanian even though each language has more than 2 million subscribers. AliExpress moderates everything in English while, for other languages, it makes do with automatic translators. LinkedIn moderates content in 12 languages of the European bloc—that is, just half of the official languages.

At the same time, the commission has forced large platforms to standardize their reports of moderation interventions to feed a large database, which, at the time of writing this article, contains more than 18.2 billion records. Of these cases, 69 percent were handled automatically. But, perhaps surprisingly, 92 percent concerned Google Shopping. This is because the platform uses various parameters to determine whether a product can be featured: the risk that it is counterfeited, possible violations of site standards, prohibited goods, dangerous materials, and others. It can thus be the case that several alerts are triggered for the same product and the DSA database counts each one separately, multiplying the shopping numbers exponentially. So now the EU has a mass of data that further complicates its goal of being fully transparent.

Zalando’s Numbers

And then there’s the Big Tech companies’ legal battle against the fee they have to pay to the commission to help underwrite its supervisory bodies. Meta, TikTok, and Zalando have challenged the fee (though paid it). Zalando is also the only European company on the commission’s list of large platforms, a designation Zalando has always contested because it does not believe it meets the criteria used by Brussels. One example: The platforms on the list must have at least 45 million monthly users in Europe. The commission argues that Zalando has 83 million users, though that number, for example, includes visits from Portugal, where the platform is not marketed, and Zalando argues those users should be deducted from its total count. According to its calculations, the activities subject to the DSA reach only 31 million users, under the threshold. When Zalando was assessed its fee, it discovered that the commission had based it on a figure of 47.5 million users, far below the initial 83 million. The company has now taken the commission to court in an attempt to assure a transparent process.

And this is just one piece of legislation, the DSA. The commission has also deployed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a package of regulations to counterbalance Big Tech’s market dominance, requiring that certain services be interoperable with those of other companies, that apps that come loaded on a device by default can be uninstalled, and that data collected on large platforms be shared with small- and medium-size companies. Again, the push to impose these mandates starts with the giants: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, ByteDance, and Microsoft. In May, Booking was added to the list.

Big Tech Responds

Platforms have started to respond to EU requests, with lukewarm results. WhatsApp, for instance, has been redesigned to allow chatting with other apps without compromising its end-to-end encryption that protects the privacy and security of users, but it is still unclear who will agree to connect to it. WIRED US reached out to 10 messaging companies, including Google, Telegram, Viber, and Signal, to ask whether they intend to look at interoperability and whether they had worked with WhatsApp on its plans. The majority didn’t respond to the request for comment. Those that did, Snap and Discord, said they had nothing to add. Apple had to accept sideloading—i.e., the possibility of installing and updating iPhone or iPad applications from stores outside the official one. However, the first alternative that emerged, AltStore, offers very few apps at this time. And it has suffered some negative publicity after refusing to accept the latest version of its archenemy Spotify’s app, despite the fact that the audio platform had removed the link to its website for subscriptions.

The DMA is a regulation that has the potential to break the dominant positions of Big Tech companies, but that outcome is not a given. Take the issue of surveillance: The commission has funds to pay the salaries of 80 employees, compared to the 120 requested by Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton and the 220 requested by the European Parliament, as summarized by Bruegel in 2022. And on the website of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Adam Kovacevich, founder and CEO of Chamber of Progress, a politically left-wing tech industry coalition (all of the digital giants, which also fund CEPA, are members), stated that the DMA, “instead of helping consumers, aims to help competitors. The DMA is making large tech firms’ services less useful, less secure, and less family-friendly. Europeans’ experience of large tech firms’ services is about to get worse compared to the experience of Americans and other non-Europeans.”

Kovacevich represents an association financed by some of those same companies that the DMA is focused on, and there is a shared fear that the DMA will complicate the market and, in the end, benefit only a few companies—not necessarily those most at risk because of the dominance of Silicon Valley. It is not only lawsuits and fines, but also the perceptions of citizens and businesses that will help to determine whether EU regulations are successful. The results may come more slowly than desired by Brussels as new legislation is rarely positively received at first.

Learning From GDPR and Gaia-X

Another regulatory act, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), has become the global industry standard, forcing online operators to change the way they handle our data. But if you ask the typical person on the street, they’ll likely tell you it’s just a simple cookie wall that you have to approve before continuing on to a webpage. Or it’s viewed as a law that has required the retention of dedicated external consultants on the part of companies. It is rarely described as the ultimate online privacy law, which is exactly what it is. That said, while the act has reshaped the privacy landscape, there have been challenges, as the digital rights association Noyb has explained. The privacy commissioners of Ireland and Luxembourg, where many web giants are based for tax purposes, have had bottlenecks in investigating violations. According to the latest figures from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), 19,581 complaints have been submitted in the past five years, but the body has made only 37 formal decisions and only eight of those began with complaints. Noyb recently conducted a survey of 1,000 data protection officers; 74 percent were convinced that if privacy officers investigated the typical European company, they would find at least one GDPR violation.

The GDPR was also the impetus for another unsuccessful operation: separating the European cloud from the US cloud in order to shelter the data of EU citizens from Washington’s Cloud Act. In 2019, France and Germany announced with great fanfare a federation, Gaia-X, that would defend the continent and provide a response to the cloud market, which has been split between the United States and China. Five years later, the project has become bogged down in the process of establishing standards, after the entry of the giants it was supposed to counter, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Huawei, and Alibaba, as well as the controversial American company Palantir (which analyses data for defense purposes). This led some of the founders, such as the French cloud operator Scaleway, to flee, and that then turned the spotlight on the European Parliament, which led the commission to launch an alternative, the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud, which counts among its 49 members 26 participants from Gaia-X (everyone except for the non-EU giants) and enjoys EU financial support.

In the meantime, the Big Tech giants have found a solution that satisfies European wishes, investing en masse to establish data centers on EU soil. According to a study by consultancy firm Roland Berger, 34 data center transactions were finalized in 2023, growing at an average annual rate of 29.7 percent since 2019. According to Mordor Intelligence, another market analysis company, the sector in Europe will grow from €35.4 billion in 2024 to an estimated €57.7 billion in 2029. In recent weeks, Amazon web services announced €7.8 billion in investments in Germany. WIRED Italy has reported on Amazon’s interest in joining the list of accredited operators to host critical public administration data in Italy, which already includes Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. Notwithstanding its proclamations about sovereignty, Brussels has had to capitulate: The cloud is in the hands of the giants from the United States who have found themselves way ahead of their Chinese competitors after diplomatic relations between Beijing and Brussels cooled.

The AI Challenge

The newest front in this digital battle is artificial intelligence. Here, too, the European Union has been the first to come up with some rules under its AI Act, the first legislation to address the different applications of this technology and establish permitted and prohibited uses based on risk assessments. The commission does not want to repeat the mistakes of the past. Mindful of the launch of the GDPR, which in 2018 caused companies to scramble to assure they were compliant, it wants to lead organizations through a period of voluntary adjustment. Already 400 companies have declared their interest in joining the effort, including IBM.

In the meantime, Brussels must build a number of structures to make the AI Act work. First is the AI Council. It will have one representative from each country and will be divided into two subgroups, one dedicated to market development and the other to public sector uses of AI. In addition, it will be joined by a committee of technical advisers and an independent committee of scientists and experts, along the lines of the UN Climate Committee. Secondly, the AI Office, which sits within Directorate-General Connect (the department in charge of digital technology), will take care of administrative aspects of the AI Act. The office will assure that the act is applied uniformly, investigate alleged violations, establish codes of conduct, and classify artificial intelligence models that pose a systemic risk. Once the rules are established, research on new technologies can proceed. After it is fully operational, the office will employ 100 people, some of them redeployed from General Connect while others will be new hires. At the moment, the office is looking to hire six administrative staff and an unknown number of tech experts.

On May 29, the first round of bids in support of the regulation expired. These included the AI Innovation Accelerator, a center that provides training, technical standards, and software and tools to promote research, support startups and small- and medium-sized enterprises, and assist public authorities that have to supervise AI. A total of €6 million is on the table. Another €2 million will finance management and €1.5 million will go to the EU’s AI testing facilities, which will, on behalf of countries’ antitrust authorities, analyze artificial intelligence models and products on the market to assure that they comply with EU rules.

Follow the Money

Finally, a total of €54 million is designated for a number of business initiatives. The EU knows it is lagging behind. According to an April report by the European Parliament’s research service, which provides data and intelligence to support legislative activities, the global AI market, which in 2023 was estimated at €130 billion, will reach close to €1.9 trillion in 2030. The lion’s share is in the United States, with €44 billion of private investment in 2022, followed by China with €12 billion. Overall, the European Union and the United Kingdom attracted €10.2 billion in the same year. According to Eurochamber researchers, between 2018 and the third quarter of 2023, US AI companies received €120 billion in investment, compared to €32.5 billion for European ones.

Europe wants to counter the advance of the new AI giants with an open source model, and it has also made its network of supercomputers available to startups and universities to train algorithms. First, however, it had to adapt to the needs of the sector, investing almost €400 million in graphics cards, which, given the current boom in demand, will not arrive anytime soon.

Among other projects to support the European AI market, the commission wants to use €24 million to launch a Language Technology Alliance that would bring together companies from different states to develop a generative AI to compete with ChatGPT and similar tools. It’s an initiative that closely resembles Gaia-X. Another €25 million is earmarked for the creation of a large open source language model, available to European companies to develop new services and research projects. The commission intends to fund several models and ultimately choose the one best suited to Europe’s needs. Overall, during the period from 2021 to 2027, the Digital Europe Program plans to spend €2.1 billion on AI. That figure may sound impressive, but it pales in comparison to the €10 billion that a single company, Microsoft, invested in OpenAI.

The €25 million being spent on the European large language model effort, if distributed to many smaller projects, risks not even counterbalancing the €15 million that Microsoft has spent bringing France’s Mistral, Europe’s most talked-about AI startup, into its orbit. The big AI models will become presences in Brussels as soon as the AI Act, now finally approved, comes into full force. In short, the commission is making it clear in every way it can that a new sheriff is in town. But will the bureaucrats of Brussels be adequately armed to take on Big Tech? Only one thing is certain—it’s not going to be an easy task.

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emptyanddark · 2 years ago

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what's actually wrong with 'AI'

it's become impossible to ignore the discourse around so-called 'AI'. but while the bulk of the discourse is saturated with nonsense such as, i wanted to pool some resources to get a good sense of what this technology actually is, its limitations and its broad consequences.

what is 'AI'

the best essay to learn about what i mentioned above is On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? this essay cost two of its collaborators to be fired from Google. it frames what large-language models are, what they can and cannot do and the actual risks they entail: not some 'super-intelligence' that we keep hearing about but concrete dangers: from climate, the quality of the training data and biases - both from the training data and from us, the users.

The problem with artificial intelligence? It’s neither artificial nor intelligent

How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms

The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research

Troubling Trends in Machine Learning Scholarship: Some ML papers suffer from flaws that could mislead the public and stymie future research

AI Now Institute 2023 Landscape report (discussions of the power imbalance in Big Tech)

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

Can we truly benefit from AI?

Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart

The Steep Cost of Capture

labor

'AI' champions the facade of non-human involvement. but the truth is that this is a myth that serves employers by underpaying the hidden workers, denying them labor rights and social benefits - as well as hyping-up their product. the effects on workers are not only economic but detrimental to their health - both mental and physical.

OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic

also from the Times: Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop

The platform as factory: Crowdwork and the hidden labour behind artificial intelligence

The humans behind Mechanical Turk’s artificial intelligence

The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

The real aim of big tech's layoffs: bringing workers to heel

The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence

workers surveillance

5 ways Amazon monitors its employees, from AI cameras to hiring a spy agency

Computer monitoring software is helping companies spy on their employees to measure their productivity – often without their consent

theft of art and content

Artists say AI image generators are copying their style to make thousands of new images — and it's completely out of their control (what gives me most hope about regulators dealing with theft is Getty images' lawsuit - unfortunately individuals simply don't have the same power as the corporation)

The real aim of big tech's layoffs: bringing workers to heel

The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence

AI is already taking video game illustrators’ jobs in China

Microsoft lays off team that taught employees how to make AI tools responsibly/As the company accelerates its push into AI products, the ethics and society team is gone

150 African Workers for ChatGPT, TikTok and Facebook Vote to Unionize at Landmark Nairobi Meeting

Inside the AI Factory: the Humans that Make Tech Seem Human

Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon

Amazon’s AI Cameras Are Punishing Drivers for Mistakes They Didn’t Make

China’s AI boom depends on an army of exploited student interns

political, social, ethical consequences

Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be

An Indigenous Perspective on Generative AI

“Computers enable fantasies” – On the continued relevance of Weizenbaum’s warnings

‘Utopia for Whom?’: Timnit Gebru on the dangers of Artificial General Intelligence

Machine Bias

HUMAN_FALLBACK

AI Ethics Are in Danger. Funding Independent Research Could Help

AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are

The Great A.I. Hallucination (podcast)

“Sorry in Advance!” Rapid Rush to Deploy Generative A.I. Risks a Wide Array of Automated Harms

The promise and peril of generative AI

ChatGPT Users Report Being Able to See Random People's Chat Histories

Benedetta Brevini on the AI sublime bubble – and how to pop it

Eating Disorder Helpline Disables Chatbot for 'Harmful' Responses After Firing Human Staff

AI moderation is no match for hate speech in Ethiopian languages

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies are in a 'frenzy' to help ICE build its own data-mining tool for targeting unauthorized workers

Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them

The EU AI Act is full of Significance for Insurers

Proxy Discrimination in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data

Welfare surveillance system violates human rights, Dutch court rules

Federal use of A.I. in visa applications could breach human rights, report says

Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI

Generative AI Is Making Companies Even More Thirsty for Your Data

environment

The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

Black boxes, not green: Mythologizing artificial intelligence and omitting the environment

Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP

AINOW: Climate Justice & Labor Rights

militarism

The Growing Global Spyware Industry Must Be Reined In

AI: the key battleground for Cold War 2.0?

‘Machines set loose to slaughter’: the dangerous rise of military AI

AI: The New Frontier of the EU's Border Extranalisation Strategy

The A.I. Surveillance Tool DHS Uses to Detect ‘Sentiment and Emotion’

organizations

AI now

DAIR

podcast episodes

Pretty Heady Stuff: Dru Oja Jay & James Steinhoff guide us through the hype & hysteria around AI

Tech Won't Save Us: Why We Must Resist AI w/ Dan McQuillan, Why AI is a Threat to Artists w/ Molly Crabapple, ChatGPT is Not Intelligent w/ Emily M. Bender

SRSLY WRONG: Artificial Intelligence part 1, part 2

The Dig: AI Hype Machine w/ Meredith Whittaker, Ed Ongweso, and Sarah West

This Machine Kills: The Triforce of Corporate Power in AI w/ ft. Sarah Myers West

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cryptidsurveys · 6 months ago

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Friday, August 16th, 2024.

Have you had more hot or cold drinks today? I've had something like 20% hot and 80% cold.

What's a name you like that's similar to yours? I don't have any special fondness for names similar to mine.

Where did you get the last plate/bowl you ate with from? It's a giant red mug decorated with gingerbread houses. I bought it at Walmart last year during the holiday season.

How's your mental health today? It's decent. I'm a lot better at bouncing back from stress/overwhelm than I once was. Things that used to crush me are now basically resolved within 24 hrs.

What bands and artists did you listen to when you were a teenager? I listened to a lot of alternative rock/metal on the radio; I don't think I could list out all of the bands I liked because it was more like a song here, a song there, etc. But some regulars (meaning I had their CDs or made mixtapes of their music) were Evanescence, Three Days Grace, Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Creed, Sarah McLachlan, Linkin Park, and J-rock artists/bands like Malice Mizer, Gackt, Gazette, etc.

Do your feelings get hurt easily? They can. I still struggle with my sense of self-worth and the belief that maybe I deserve to be treated badly, like it's my karma or something, but I'm actually starting to get annoyed when people are needlessly rude to me. I know - pick your battles - but maybe I'll finally start sticking up for myself instead of constantly taking it...?

What sort of restaurant did you last eat at? I went to lunch with my parents at Black Eyed Pea a little over a week ago.

Do you have a friend who's always sending you TikTok videos? Do you actually watch them? Oliver often sends me funny little videos, and yes, I do actually watch (and appreciate) them. We have a very similar sense of humor.

Have you ever seen a cougar in the wild? I haven't.

Will you attend a wedding in the next 3 months? No.

Are you good at following instructions? Yeah, for the most part, unless they're ridiculously complicated or dealing with something I know very little about (like car mechanics, for instance).

What's your backyard or outdoor area like? The backyard is fairly large and rather overgrown.

Do you like your boss? Or your last boss if you don't currently have one? Even though I'm just a volunteer, I consider Leslie and Iris my "bosses." I do like them.

When was the last time you took a selfie? Wednesday. It was of me with the new kitten.

What did you have for breakfast yesterday? Oatmeal.

What do you do to entertain yourself on a long flight or journey? I haven't been on a long flight or road trip in years, but I would probably entertain myself with audiobooks, podcasts, music, daydreaming, random snapshots of the scenery, chats with my dad (if he happened to be along with me)…

Where are you right now? I'm at home, in my bedroom.

Have you ever done a hearing test? Yeah.

Do you hate small talk? It can feel a bit awkward. I try my best, but I just don't know what to say.

What's the hottest temperature your current town/city has ever had? 109*F.

What programs/applications do you currently have open on the device you're using right now? Microsoft Edge and Krita (art program).

How many steps per day do you do, generally? I'm not sure. If I'm at the animal shelter, then probably a whole bunch because I'm almost always on my feet. However, when I wore a step counter back when I worked at the pet shop, the total was often underwhelming. Not nearly as much as I would have guessed - again, especially considering I was moving around all day long.

Have you had any snacks today? Yeah. I typically have 3 meals and at least 2 snacks, plus random bits of whatever.

What's the next thing you'll tick off your to-do list? Probably pick out my clothes for tomorrow. I hate rummaging around trying to find things in the morning.

Have you ever had a chia pet? No.

What's your favourite sandwich filling? Lol, probably cheese. I eat primarily cheese-based sandwiches these days.

Do you have any nieces or nephews? I don't.

What was the last reason you saw a doctor? For a check-up.

Do you use light mode or dark mode on your phone? I guess light mode…?

#survey #surveys #personal survey #random survey #survey blog

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mickstart · 1 year ago

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I caught up on the unity shit and all I can think of right now is that Tiktok sound of "ohhhh I fucked up"

Because jfc how do you possibly think that's a good idea?!

What's the bet they backpedal and say some shit like "it's only for developers under X size"?

They absolutely will there's no way they think they're getting a cent out of Nintendo or Mihoyo... but then. Ohohoho THEN. They have to deal with the MICROSOFT lawyers. Because this could potentially cut into gamepass profits because it would discourage unity developers from taking gamepass deals, and thus devalue gamepass.

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breakingarrows · 1 year ago

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Games Media in Review: Ninja

Though Tyler “Ninja” Blevins remains the most followed Twitch streamer on the platform, his active viewership has dropped significantly from the heights of his past. He maintains a consistent schedule streaming Fortnite Battle Royale on every major platform available: Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok. Despite multi-million dollar deals done in the past and a litany of controversies, Tyler shows no signs of stopping doing what he has been doing for the past twelve years as both his Florida and Illinois houses have their own dedicated streaming areas.

Tyler Blevins was born on June 5, 1991 to Chuck and Cynthia Blevins, and welcomed by his two older brothers, Jon and Chris. Chuck Blevins had a love for gaming that was shared by all three of his sons, though Tyler excelled out of all of them from a very young age. At 18 years old in 2009, Tyler joined Major League Gaming competitions for Halo 3. He met his future wife Jessica Goch at a tournament in 2010 and the two began dating in 2013 and married in 2017. Sometime in 2014 Tyler experienced pain in his right eye that led to being diagnosed with a retinal detachment. He recovered after surgeries and continued to stream on Twitch as he had to a modest but unremarkable viewership. Tyler moved on from Halo to H1Z1 and then PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in 2017 due to frustration with the professional Halo tournament direction. This same year he got into Fortnite and began ascending to Twitch stardom, slowly growing over time until he hit 100,000 subscribers on Twitch in March of 2018. This all culminated in a stream in which he played Fortnite with Drake (as well as Travis Scott and JuJu Smith-Schuster) on March 14, 2018, breaking the non-tournament record at 635,000 concurrent viewers. In August of 2019 it was announced Tyler had signed an exclusivity deal with Microsoft’s Mixer livestream platform that potentially earned him between $20-30 million. Mixer was unceremoniously shut down only eleven months later on July 22, 2020 Microsoft would shut Mixer down, transferring all partners to Facebook Gaming, though Tyler chose not to (though he does still sport Mixer merch on recent live streams). Instead he returned to Twitch on August 4, 2020, before announcing on September 10, 2020 that he would be exclusively streaming on Twitch. This deal ended on September 1, 2022 when Tyler announced he was taking a break on Twitter changing up his profile in a dramatic fashion to appear as if it was abandoned before returning on September 9 to announce he would begin streaming on all platforms going forward, which has continued to this day.

Being so popular and streaming for many many hours for weeks and months and years on end also means Tyler’s comments and statements and actions have earned him much criticism over the years. In December 2016 prior to his big blow up he released the address of someone who had donated to his stream and left a racist message. He was only banned for 48 hours and apologized. Both his apology and Twitch deciding to only ban him for a limited time earned a lot of criticism for being lackluster. The same month he streamed with Drake and broke records he later used the n-word while singing along to Logic’s “44 More,” which does not actually contain the word in its lyrics. Blevins apologized claiming to be tongue tied, which of course led to more discourse online about both his behavior and the usage of the word online. Later in August of 2018 he infamously stated he does not play with female gamers on stream to avoid rumors and gossip that might damage his relationship with his wife. In November of 2018 he believed a player to be stream sniping (in which someone watches a livestream of a game in order to hunt down and harass the streamer) and attempted to have the player banned from Fortnite despite the player ultimately being innocent. Another Twitch streamer, Imane “pokimane” Anys was the subject of a hate raid in 2022 by Jidion “JiDion” Adams who was subsequently banned for two weeks by Twitch before being permanently banned for his actions. Tyler supported Jidion, claiming to attempt to intervene with Twitch staff to prevent his ban and referred to Pokimane offhandedly as a bitch. Pokimane sharing this information led to Blevin’s wife Jessica direct messaging Pokimane to threaten a lawsuit over defamation, though that has never materialized and Jessica Blevins stepped down as Tyler’s manager later that year.

What is Tyler, aka Ninja, like now, in 2023? Well he seems relatively complacent and comfortable. These past two weeks he has only streamed for about four hours a day during weekdays, generally from morning to afternoon for his current timezone as he is residing in his house located in Illinois as opposed to his house in Florida. He recently had a team come by his house to redo his streaming room setup and commented about the gameplay feeling much smoother than ever before after they finished. Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 4 just dropped on Friday, August 25 and its additions and changes and returning items were good enough to keep Tyler streaming for almost seven hours as opposed to his average of four. His demeanor was noticeably improved as well while streaming the new season, and he even commented that he was very happy playing the game now as opposed to the previous season.

Tyler’s streams on Twitch in the past month have only pulled in an average of nearly 9,000 viewers, very low when you consider his follower count of +18 million. On YouTube the VOD’s of his stream average 160k views for the past 24 VODs. His regular YouTube uploads average 200k views for the past 20 uploads. There is a noticeable dip in views whenever the game being played is not Fortnite, showing how pigeonholed Tyler is into playing the game above all others, despite his forays into Valorant and Call of Duty: Warzone. These videos are also not edited by Tyler but instead by a third party contractor, though you wouldn't know this or who actually did the edits without looking it up yourself as they are not credited in any form in his uploads. The videos are edited by the group known as Grumbae. I also have to believe he has a social team handling clipping and posting all these YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels and TikToks on his many social media accounts but who knows who is handling that.

Streamcharts.com is reputedly the best Twitch tracker online currently and shows Tyler’s airtime per month has steadily declined as time has gone on. This makes sense as Tyler no longer has to stream for 8 hours a day everyday in order to earn, he has reached the top, and if he was smart with his multimillion dollar deals, can live comfortably for the rest of his life. He has even acknowledged the lack of concurrent viewership compared to his earlier days, speaking to The Washington Post in 2021, ““No one’s gonna stay on top forever, especially when it comes to live-streaming; there’s always somebody new and hot,” Blevins said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “I have no intention of being that guy anymore. I know I’m not going to pull 100,000 viewers on [Twitch] anymore. I don’t have time to do that. I have a wife, I have a family.”” On a recent stream a commenter also asked why he continues to stream if he’s so rich, to which Tyler responded that its because he enjoys it. He has separately commented about not wanting to get back into competitive esports due to both his age and the time required to actively participate and perform, he would rather spend that time with his friends and family nowadays at the age of 32. So he streams for a few hours each weekday, lives his life, and has been doing the livestream career for so long that it is likely a clockwork routine for him to perform, reading out donations, responding to select portions of his chat, spouting out random SpongeBob quotes, and partying up with his brother Jon and other livestreamers. His reading of paid comment submissions can be pretty robotic, and I’m sure years of getting the same questions and comments have grinded away any enthusiasm he has for engaging with his audience, which I think is true for any long standing face who finds themselves in parasocial relationships, from RedLetterMedia to Giant Bomb (pre-2021). Tyler being the subject of attention of so many naturally will lead to a subdued form of antagonism towards your viewers.

As a public figure in 2023, especially one whose income is reliant on active viewership while livestreaming, Tyler can’t be openly antagonistic towards his viewership. He also can’t and doesn’t engage with subjects or ideologies that might cut off a particular crowd of his viewers. He recently talked openly about believing in Jesus Christ as his lord and savior but at the same time downplayed any desire he has to proselytize the viewers. Is this a personal decision or a business decision? Given that his brother whom he often streams with is active in the church and has a masters in theology, I have to think it is purely a business decision to not attempt to convert his audience. Additionally, a good large portion of the New Testament are letters from Paul the Apostle basically talking about going out and converting non believers. Christianity is pretty concerned with evangelizing, though I will admit a good majority of Christians are content to evangelize silently by being a “light on the hill” that doesn't actively engage with the larger non-believing community in any way.

The public, especially the younger public, constantly want to party up, befriend, or use Tyler’s platform to launch their own stardom, all of which I don’t believe Tyler has any interest in engaging with himself. With such a large public eye you also get invasive people who try to get involved in your private life either out of pure social ignorance or malice. On a recent stream Jon Blevins commented that he was getting phone calls from an unknown number followed by a donation to his livestream from someone asking him to answer the phone. This is the kind of privacy invasion public figures fall into, and this is just the male portion of Twitch stardom, the female portion is exponentially worse and more toxic.

All of this has me thinking, expanding beyond Tyler as an individual, but how much grace are we willing to give to individuals who find themselves under a microscope by so many people for so long a time. This isn’t meant as an excuse for Tyler’s many dumb and hurtful actions and comments in the past, but more a general thought on how much time livestreamers devote to being under watch by thousands upon thousands of people at one time, all of their comments and vocalizations subject to being the next top post on r/livestreamfail or some other online forum to be shared and mocked and eventually written up on a more mainstream website. Again, this isn’t as an absolving of using the n-word in a song where it doesn’t exist, but more an acknowledgement of the recurring joke I will find online of people admitting if their group chats were released to the public they would be unanimously executed by the larger public.

During the years prior to this observation, Tyler only came across my view during the Drake stream, and whenever his dumb comments would make the rounds, most notably both the “it’s just a game” tweet and the “I don’t game with women” comments. Then there is also just plain harmless dumb stuff (or cringe), such as his “braless wife” tweet. Taken as a whole, I can’t muster much anger towards Tyler. Out of all of the previously listed controversies the actions regarding Anys remain the worst, but also involve his wife and delves into Twitch drama which is such an abyss that I don’t have the time or interest to get deeper into than crawling r/livestreamfails and corresponding comments to attempt to understand the situation. What he did and said regarding Anys are wrong, and as far as my searching went I could find no real apology ever being offered.

In comparison, something like Cecilia D’Anastasio lying to and ignoring Nathalie Lawhead is something I will continue to be angry about and all those involved: D’Anastasio, Stephen Totilo, all those subtweeting Lawhead on Twitter for no reason than to satisfy their own pride and inability to admit wrongdoing in the press, are forever on my shit list. Patricia Hernandez, whose tenure as editor in chief started with the removal of the article in question, after over two years of requests and begging by Lawhead to have it removed, will forever be highly regarded and respected, even before her firing by G/O Media. This is the kind of online action that I will carry with me and continually remind others of. Taken as a whole, I think Tyler can be very stupid with what he says and does, but I don’t view him as intentionally cruel or hateful, which cannot be said for some of the other larger Twitch streamers.

Watching Tyler is pretty similar to any popular livestream. They are pretty damn good at the game, and generally mistakes are chalked up to: lag (both on OBS and the game), stream snipers, sweaty players, rat players, campers, and cheaters. Despite these complaints towards his complaints, watching Tyler play Fortnite is still probably the best PR for getting into the game itself, something I ended up doing myself and that I’ll talk about. Nothing quite seems to have the draw to play a game yourself as watching someone on Twitch play it. It doesn’t quite work for everything, as I’ll watch plenty of people play whatever the latest big new game is without so much as touching it myself, but the combination of the amount of time I was spending watching Tyler kill people in Zero Build mode, the remainder of Zero Build mode’s existence (which drops the building aspect of Fortnite, something intimidating for older newbies such as myself) and that the game itself is free to play was enough to get me on the Xbox store downloading and booting it up after I thought I would never do it again.

Due to games being something you can control directly, watching someone else play instantly has you thinking of what you would do differently (and superiorly). Movies often cause the viewer to think about what they would do differently were they placed in that situation, and watching someone else play a game causes the same reaction, except with games you can play it and perform differently as you have control and a game isn’t a linear sequence of images. I’ve had this occur before, mostly with watching Twitch people play Apex Legends which would make me want to go home and play Apex Legends myself, as its been the live service game of choice since release for me. Twitch streamers also have their own habits, rotations, and item preferences which you can adapt into your own play style. I know once I booted up Fortnite I was pretty much adopting Tyler’s preferred weapons into my loadouts as they were both familiar in terms of handling as I had watched him use these weapons for multiple hours, and they come with the bonus of likely being some of the best weapons, as someone who has played this game more than I ever will and has a handle on how the game works prefers these weapons, so I probably should stick to them as well. It also helped that my in-laws also play the game quite often, and once they found out I was dipping into the game, they instantly began inviting and playing with me online.

Tyler’s success is symbolic of that American Dream mindset, that if you simply work hard, put in the time, have the required skill, you too can become a multi-million dollar Twitch streamer, though even here, where a Twitch success story seemingly is the individual working his way into massive success and wealth, is a myth. Tyler’s success came after years of toiling away, yes, but the ability to toil away at live streaming for years without any return on investment is not something available to everyone. There is also the issue of whether his momentum at the beginning of 2018, where his meteoric rise began, was potentially aided by a mass influx of bots. Though this is unconfirmed, the fact remains that in 2021 Twitch did admit to taking action against 7.5 million bot accounts, and it was widely acknowledged that these bots long existed within the Twitch community. In 2018, when Tyler received an unprecedented growth of 50,000 subscribers in a little over a week, it was speculated some of this may be Amazon Prime subscription bots utilizing hacked accounts. Not that this ultimately mattered to the bottom line, as streamers would still be paid regardless of whether the subscription was subject to a bot or not.

Another major factor is that Tyler is simply just really good at the game. While some streamers have found success in being mid at a game (TimTheTatman in Warzone), it remains that more people are going to be more entertained by watching someone win than lose, and Tyler regularly wins his matches. Coming from the professional Halo scene set the foundation for his ability in most all multiplayer games, which was furthered by both his participation in tournaments for H1Z1, PUBG, and then dominating most all games in Fortnite. A hard lesson for aspiring Twitch streamers is that much like the battle royale genre, there can only be one winner, and very frequently you will find yourself the loser.

While Tyler’s enthusiasm for the new season may just be the usual, “Last content drop was trash, this new content drop is fresh!” cycle that every live service game audience appears to go through, playing Fortnite myself for about a week before the new season dropped really placed the differences in the light. The changes this season do seem to favor mobility much more, despite the removal of the grapple gloves that let you Spider-Man swing your way from Point A to B. The rechargeable battering ram that shoots you through the air and the seemingly increase of finding shockwave grenades makes moving around much easier and faster than before. Engaging with Fortnite has also reminded me of the game’s status as the seemingly symbol of the End of Games.

By this I mean that video games may very well end with Fortnite. The way this game acts as a black hole for IP, sucking in not only popular brands, franchises, and iconography in everything from its character skins, emotes, and various other cosmetic aspects, it can also be modified to capture popular trends in other games. Among Us exploded post Covid and so Fortnite debuted its own knockoff but official Epic Games-created game mode called Fortnite: Imposters, which came after a fan creation mode called “The Spy Within”. Most recently the success of Only Up, an indie game that found success thanks to Twitch streaming, was also copied into Fortnite as a custom game mode, and became even more popular online than the original.

These examples call to mind one of the earlier criticisms of Fortnite concerning its usage of popular dances as purchasable emotes in-game. Essentially, Epic Games was commercializing and profiting off of dances created by, and whose ownership largely belonged to, the public, specifically the black community. This is a larger problem with copyright and IP law, in that what is ideally supposed to help the original individual creator(s) retain the rights for profits really just favors the larger companies who can exploit it to punish criticism on YouTube or simply continue to own exclusive rights to a media’s existence despite never doing anything to make it widely available to the public.

Much as its replication of dance moves without any accreditation, these new game modes essentially are replications of existing games within Fortnite but lack any acknowledgement of where this idea came from. This sort of game clone is so widespread as to be expected within the mobile game space, in which any successful phone game is instantly copied and reproduced by every other soulless game company looking to make a quick buck off of free-to-play advertisements of their knockoff. For Epic Games to apply the same methodology to Fortnite is just sickening.

Fortnite as the black hole of IP, sucking in anything and everything around it, also ensures players are constantly building their investment within the Fortnite ecosystem as they continually add recognizable skins to their collection and look forward to the next season’s addition of even more opportunities to buy into the game, a perpetual motion machine of Bender the Robot and Ahsoka skins that will seemingly continue forever until there is no more IP.

Ninja in 2023 is a known quantity. He’s not going anywhere, and he doesn’t have a top spot to chase after anymore. He’s achieved all he could likely dream of already before hitting 30. Even if his one Mixer contract was the minimum reported number of 20 million (pre-tax) that is the equivalent of 400 years of my current annual salary (pre-tax) which he earned in less than 12 months. Despite his wealth and consistency at saying/doing stupid things at least annually, I bear no real ill will towards him. I think his former popularity and well recorded mistakes make him an easy figure to mock, but watching him for the past two weeks has been enlightening and entertaining, and pushed me to play the game that has me partying with family members. What little Twitch drama I have followed and looked into after starting this observation has already told me that there are worse figures to follow along with than Tyler “Ninja” Blevins.

#Ninja #Tyler Blevins #Games Media in Review #Writing #Video Games

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theaceofskulls · 19 days ago

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Technically, all of big tech, from Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, etc are all trying to buy it and all of them are going big on the AI boom, but Larry Ellison has been the name that's not cracking mainstream even as he's been appearing more and more in headlines aligning himself with the current administration along with his stance on surveillance.

It should be noted that Oracle's stance is that they currently supply cloud infrastructure to Tiktok as of this moment and are attempting to leverage that for their purchase of it.

Meta also attempted to lure Tiktok users away with cash bonuses for those who would swap platforms (eligible users able to receive up to $5k) which was seen as a sign that they weren't confident they could get the deal in the end.

This seems to have had an impact on their stock not continuously exploding like most other big tech that was considered in the running to purchase it (Musk's companies are odd, with Tesla seeing a noticeable shift downwards while Twitter's has continued to trend up but there's a chance that might be a misleading as its debt is being put up for sale and there's a chance people are trying to position themselves to try to sell on that).

Who knows where things end up but the end result is that while the message that popped up was definitely propaganda, the situation it's in is all about big tech in general attempting to seize ownership of social media to harvest data for one reason or another, and there are a couple of them in there that the reason is surveillance

so the tiktok ban was literally just propaganda for the trump administration. like. we all agree with that right. this is just laughably transparent. the ban wasn't even 24 hours. not even a whole day. to quote my infinitely funnier mutual from Discord, "Misha Collins was bisexual longer than TikTok was banned"

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 5 days ago

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By Mike IsaacCade Metz and David A. Fahrenthold

A group of investors led by Elon Musk has made a $97.4 billion bid to buy the assets of the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, according to two people familiar with the bid, escalating a yearslong, deeply personal tussle for the future of artificial intelligence between Mr. Musk and OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman.

The consortium includes Vy Capital and Xai, Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, as well as the Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel and other investors, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are ongoing.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported news of the offer.

The bid for OpenAI is Mr. Musk’s latest and perhaps most audacious attack on an organization that he helped create almost 10 years ago. It faces long odds: OpenAI’s board of directors is closely allied with Mr. Altman, and the chief executive quickly mocked Mr. Musk’s bid.

“No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Mr. Altman said on X, referring to the old name for Mr. Musk’s social media platform.

“Swindler,” Mr. Musk replied.

OpenAI has not yet seen the bid, according to a person familiar with OpenAI’s potential response. Mr. Musk’s unsolicited offer could complicate OpenAI’s attempt to complete a $40 billion fund-raising deal that would nearly double the high-profile company’s valuation from just four months ago.

The new fund-raising round, led by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, values OpenAI at $300 billion, according to three people with knowledge of the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The deal would make OpenAI one of the most valuable private companies in the world, along with Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and ByteDance, the maker of TikTok.

SoftBank would invest up to $40 billion in OpenAI, with other investors providing about a quarter of the total funds, the people said. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)

Mr. Musk’s bid could slow a company transition that Mr. Altman and other OpenAI executives have been working on for more than a year.

Mr. Musk, Mr. Altman and several other entrepreneurs and researchers founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in late 2015, saying they wanted to freely share their technologies with the world. When Mr. Musk left the organization three years later after a battle for control, Mr. Altman attached OpenAI to a for-profit company so he could raise the enormous amounts of money needed to build A.I. technologies.

But the nonprofit board, in an unusual arrangement, continued to control OpenAI. In late 2023, the board suddenly fired Mr. Altman, saying it no longer trusted him to build A.I. for the benefit of humanity — one of the original principles of the nonprofit. But the ouster lasted only five days.

After he returned, Mr. Altman and his colleagues began exploring ways of severing the nonprofit’s control of the company. He also began to stack OpenAI’s board with his allies, offering a bulwark against other efforts to wrest control from him.

OpenAI’s structure is remarkably complex — and Mr. Musk’s bid shows that he understands its weak points. In order to separate from the nonprofit board, Mr. Altman and his colleagues must compensate it: OpenAI might pay the nonprofit a one-time fee, for instance, or give it a minority stake in the company.

While OpenAI has more than 2,000 employees, the nonprofit that controls it has only two employees and $22 million in cash and other assets. The reason Mr. Musk and his investors would pay billions for it is that it has legal control over OpenAI.

But the nonprofit’s assets have not been given a value — and that’s what Mr. Musk is trying to establish with his new bid. His offer could mean that OpenAI’s for-profit arm would have to spend more to gain independence from the nonprofit.

“If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI Inc. board of directors are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time,” Marc Toberoff, a Los Angeles lawyer who filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Mr. Musk last year, said in a statement to The Times.

The board of OpenAI’s nonprofit has a duty to sell its assets at fair market value, said Ellen P. Aprill, a senior scholar studying nonprofit law at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written extensively about OpenAI. Mr. Musk’s offer now appears to set that value very high, she said. If the nonprofit were to accept a lower price from OpenAI’s for-profit arm, it might have to explain to state charity regulators why it turned away a higher bid.

“It’s an enormous complication for the current plan,” she added.

The proposal to shift OpenAI’s assets from the nonprofit to the for-profit is already under scrutiny from state charity regulators in Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, and in California, where the company has its headquarters.

Mr. Musk, now one of President Trump’s closest advisers, created his own A.I. company in 2023 to compete head-on with OpenAI. While that company, Xai, has slowly been playing catch-up to an array of A.I. start-ups and tech giants, Mr. Altman has been able to outmaneuver Mr. Musk in Washington.

The day after Mr. Trump was inaugurated, he backed a plan by OpenAI, SoftBank and the software company Oracle to spend $100 billion on new data centers. Mr. Trump described the effort as the “largest A.I. infrastructure project by far in history.”

On Monday, when Mr. Musk’s offer letter was sent, Mr. Altman was at an A.I. conference in Paris attended by other tech and political leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Vice President JD Vance.

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