Tags: report

Report: Thinking about using AI? - Green Web Foundation

A solid detailed in-depth report.

The sheer amount of resources needed to support the current and forecast demand from AI is colossal and unprecedented.

Apple announced some stuff about artificial insemination at their WorldWide Developer Conference, none of which interests me one whit. But we did get a twitch of the webkit curtains to let us know what’s coming in Safari. That does interest me.

I’m really pleased to see that on desktop, websites that have been added to the dock will be able to intercept links for that domain:

Now, when a user clicks a link, if it matches the scope of a web app that the user has added to their Dock, that link will open in the web app instead of their default web browser.

Excellent! This means that if I click on a link to thesession.org from, say, my Mastodon site-in-the-dock, it will open in The Session site-in-the-dock. Make sure you’ve got the scope property set in your web app manifest.

I have a few different sites added to my dock: The Session, Mastodon, Google Calendar. Sure beats the bloat of Electron apps.

I have encountered a small bug. I’ll describe it here because I have no idea where to file it.

It’s to do with Spaces, Apple’s desktop management thingy. Maybe they don’t call it Spaces anymore. Maybe it’s called Mission Control now. Or Stage Manager. I can’t keep track.

Anyway, here are the steps to reproduce:

1. In Safari on Mac, go to a website like adactio.com
2. From either the File menu or the share icon, select Add to dock.
3. Click on the website’s icon in the dock to open it.
4. Using Apple’s desktop management (Spaces?) available through the F3 key, drag that window to a desktop other than desktop 1.
5. Right click on the site’s icon in the dock and select Options, then Assign To, then This Desktop.
6. Quit the app/website.
7. Return to desktop 1.

Expected behaviour: when I click on the icon in the dock to open the site, it will open in the desktop that it has been assigned to.

Observed behaviour: focus moves to the desktop that the site has been assigned to, but it actually opens in desktop 1.

If someone from Apple is reading, I hope that’s useful.

On the one hand, I hope this isn’t one of those bugs that only I’m experiencing because then I’ll feel foolish. On the other hand, I hope this is one of those bugs that only I’m experiencing because then others don’t have to put up with the buggy behaviour.

Over the Edge: The Use of Design Tactics to Undermine Browser Choice - Mozilla Research

It’s a dream team of former Clearlefties: Harry and Cennydd joined forces to investigate and write an in-depth report looking into deceptive design practices used by Microsoft to stop people changing their default browser from Edge. They don’t pull their punches:

We judge that Microsoft cannot justify the use of these techniques, and should stop using them immediately. If they do not, we would welcome – where the law provides for it – regulatory intervention to protect against these harms.

How to report better on artificial intelligence - Columbia Journalism Review

• Be skeptical of PR hype
• Question the training data
• Evaluate the model
• Consider downstream harms

How you want me to cover artificial intelligence

Seven principles for journalism in the age of AI

1. Be rigorous with your definitions.
2. Predict less, explain more.
3. Don’t hype things up.
4. Focus on the people building AI systems — and the people affected by its release.
5. Offer strategic takes on products.
6. Emphasize the tradeoffs involved.
7. Remember that nothing is inevitable.

When Women Make Headlines

This is a great combination of rigorous research and great data visualisation.

I just filled out this form on the BBC website. Here’s what I wrote, based on this open letter to the BCC Upper Management and Editorial Staff.

What is your complaint about?

BBC website or apps

Which website or app is your complaint about?

BBC News website

Please give the URL, or name of the app

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-57853385

Are you contacting us about a previous complaint?

No

Select the best category to describe your complaint

Standards of interviewing/presenting

What is the subject of your complaint?

Innacurate reporting and unreliable source

Please enter your complaint

The article is based on a single self selected study of 80 individuals sourced from Get The L Out, a group who, prior to the survey, were already united by anti-trans views.

This study breaks the BBC’s own guidelines about using surveys as sources for claims in coverage, as it is self-selected, with a small sample size and a clear bias held by those self-selected to respond.

The article dangerously frames this as a widespread issue, whilst simultaneously acknowledging that there is no actual evidence to that effect outside of isolated claims and cherry picked individual cases.

The article routinely implies that transgender women are not women, uncritically quoting people who call transgender women men without at any point clarifying that this is ignoring their legal status as women in the UK.

Web Almanac 2020

I spent most of the weekend reading through this and I’ve still barely scratched the surface—a lot of work has gone to the analyses and write-ups!

The sections on accessibility and performance get grimmer each year but the raw numbers on framework adaption are refreshingly perspective-setting.

2019 Firefox Flashback

Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!

Surveillance giants: How the business model of Google and Facebook threatens human rights | Amnesty International

Amnesty International have released a PDF report on the out-of-control surveillance perpetrated by Google and Facebook:

Google and Facebook’s platforms come at a systemic cost. The companies’ surveillance-based business model forces people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human rights abuse. Firstly, an assault on the right to privacy on an unprecedented scale, and then a series of knock-on effects that pose a serious risk to a range of other rights, from freedom of expression and opinion, to freedom of thought and the right to non-discrimination.

However…

This page on the Amnesty International website has six tracking scripts. Also, consent to accept tracking cookies is assumed (check dev tools). It looks like you can reject marketing cookies, but I tried that without any success.

The stone PDF has been thrown from a very badly-performing glass house.

JavaScript | 2019 | The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive

It’s time for a look at the state of the web when it comes to JavaScript usage. Here’s the report powered by data from HTTP Archive:

JavaScript is the most costly resource we send to browsers; having to be downloaded, parsed, compiled, and finally executed. Although browsers have significantly decreased the time it takes to parse and compile scripts, download and execution have become the most expensive stages when JavaScript is processed by a web page.

Sending smaller JavaScript bundles to the browser is the best way to reduce download times, and in turn improve page performance. But how much JavaScript do we really use?

When it comes to frameworks and UI libraries, there are some interesting numbers. Given the volume of chatter in the dev world, you’d be forgiven for thinking that React is used on the majority of websites today. The real number? 4.6% of websites. That’s less than the number of websites using CSS custom properties.

This is reminding me of what I wrote about dev perception.

Why Progressive Web Apps Are The Future of Mobile Web [2019 Research]

PWAs just work better than your typical mobile site. Period.

But bear in mind:

Maybe simply because the “A” in PWA stands for “app,” too much discussion around PWAs focuses on comparing and contrasting to native mobile applications. We believe this comparison (and the accompanying discussion) is misguided.

Malicious AI Report

Well, this an interesting format experiment—the latest Black Mirror just dropped, and it’s a PDF.

Idle Words: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama.

The Decentralized Web

A report by the Digital Currency Initiative and the Center for Civic Media. Download the PDF or read the executive summary.

In this report, we explore two important ways structurally decentralized systems could help address the risks of mega-platform consolidation: First, these systems can help users directly publish and discover content directly, without intermediaries, and thus without censorship. All of the systems we evaluate advertise censorship-resistance as a major benefit. Second, these systems could indirectly enable greater competition and user choice, by lowering the barrier to entry for new platforms. As it stands, it is difficult for users to switch between platforms (they must recreate all their data when moving to a new service) and most mega-platforms do not interoperate, so switching means leaving behind your social network.

Want to feel old? Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report was released fifteen years ago.

It casts a long shadow. For a decade after the film’s release, it was referenced at least once at every conference relating to human-computer interaction. Unsurprisingly, most of the focus has been on the technology in the film. The hardware and interfaces in Minority Report came out of a think tank assembled in pre-production. It provided plenty of fodder for technologists to mock and praise in subsequent years: gestural interfaces, autonomous cars, miniature drones, airpods, ubiquitous advertising and surveillance.

At the time of the film’s release, a lot of the discussion centred on picking apart the plot. The discussions had the same tone of time-travel paradoxes, the kind thrown up by films like Looper and Interstellar. But Minority Report isn’t a film about time travel, it’s a film about prediction.

Or rather, the plot is about prediction. The film—like so many great works of cinema—is about seeing. It’s packed with images of eyes, visions, fragments, and reflections.

The theme of prediction was rarely referenced by technologists in the subsequent years. After all, that aspect of the story—as opposed to the gadgets, gizmos, and interfaces—was one rooted in a fantastical conceit; the idea of people with precognitive abilities.

But if you replace that human element with machines, the central conceit starts to look all too plausible. It’s suggested right there in the film:

It helps not to think of them as human.

To which the response is:

No, they’re so much more than that.

Suppose that Agatha, Arthur, and Dashiell weren’t people in a floatation tank, but banks of servers packed with neural nets: the kinds of machines that are already making predictions on trading stocks and shares, traffic flows, mortgage applications …and, yes, crime.

Precogs are pattern recognition filters, that’s all.

Rewatching Minority Report now, it holds up very well indeed. Apart from the misstep of the final ten minutes, it’s a fast-paced twisty noir thriller. For all the attention to detail in its world-building and technology, the idea that may yet prove to be most prescient is the concept of Precrime, introduced in the original Philip K. Dick short story, The Minority Report.

Minority Report works today as a commentary on Artificial Intelligence …which is ironic given that Spielberg directed a film one year earlier ostensibly about A.I.. In truth, that film has little to say about technology …but much to say about humanity.

Like Minority Report, A.I. was very loosely based on an existing short story: Super-Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss. It’s a perfectly-crafted short story that is deeply, almost unbearably, sad.

When I had the great privilege of interviewing Brian Aldiss, I tried to convey how much the story affected me.

Jeremy: …the short story is so sad, there’s such an incredible sadness to it that…

Brian: Well it’s psychological, that’s why. But I didn’t think it works as a movie; sadly, I have to say.

At the time of its release, the general consensus was that A.I. was a mess. It’s true. The film is a mess, but I think that, like Minority Report, it’s worth revisiting.

Watching now, A.I. feels like a horror film to me. The horror comes not—as we first suspect—from the artificial intelligence. The horror comes from the humans. I don’t mean the cruelty of the flesh fairs. I’m talking about the cruelty of Monica, who activates David’s unconditional love only to reject it (watching now, both scenes—the activation and the rejection—are equally horrific). Then there’s the cruelty of the people of who created an artificial person capable of deep, never-ending love, without considering the implications.

There is no robot uprising in the film. The machines want only to fulfil their purpose. But by the end of the film, the human race is gone and the descendants of the machines remain. Based on the conduct of humanity that we’re shown, it’s hard to mourn our species’ extinction. For a film that was panned for being overly sentimental, it is a thoroughly bleak assessment of what makes us human.

The question of what makes us human underpins A.I., Minority Report, and the short stories that spawned them. With distance, it gets easier to brush aside the technological trappings and see the bigger questions beneath. As Al Robertson writes, it’s about leaving the future behind:

SF’s most enduring works don’t live on because they accurately predict tomorrow. In fact, technologically speaking they’re very often wrong about it. They stay readable because they think about what change does to people and how we cope with it.

The Tragedy/Farce of the Open Web according to journalists – Baldur Bjarnason

Continuous web death.

The modern journalist is not an expert on the web. They and their colleagues have spent a large part of the last twenty-five years dismissing the open web at every stage. They are not the people you can trust to either accurately assess the web or to make usable websites. You can’t even trust them to make sensible decisions about web strategy. Just look at their damn websites!

Gridset · Responsive Report 2014

Results of a survey of over 1000 people working on the web. It’s beautifully put together and the overall trajectory regarding responsive design looks pretty positive to me.

Android Fragmentation Report July 2013 - OpenSignal

A look at the degree of diversity in Android devices, complete with pretty pictures. The term “fragmentation” is usually used in a negative way, but there are great points here about the positive effects for web developers and customers.

You say fragmentation, I say diversity.

Google Transparency Report

Google’s datadump makes for a fascinating—and worrying—bit of data dumpster diving.