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Yesterday, Facebook’s CEO posted a manifesto outlining plans for a seismic shift in strategy—one toward encrypted, private, and ephemeral communication. Instead of focusing on the kind of publicly shared content that 1) made Facebook worth hundreds of billions and 2) continues to haunt you in your “On This Day” feature, Facebook will become a “privacy-focusedcommunications platform.” The motive: People increasingly want to communicate privately or in smaller groups instead of “the digital equivalent of a town square,” Zuck said. Don’t believe him? Poll your 10 group chats. And to adapt to that evolution, Facebook (+0.73%) will rebuild many of its features. How does that happen? Glad you asked, since we’ve got 3,220 of Zuck’s own words to figure it out. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Zuck wrote. All of FB’s messaging platforms will start looking more like WhatsApp—with end-to-end encryption becoming standard. It’ll also consider deleting messages by default after a month or year. Will the changes dent business? Well, private/encrypted messaging tools could breed new business ventures like payments and commerce—which have become Facebook’s “current pet obsessions,” writes The Verge’s Casey Newton. Keep in mind: Zuck told the WSJ he doesn’t “view this as replacing the public platform,” but instead developing more “around the intimate and private communications.” Which, Zuck admits, could use work. “Frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services...But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want.” While this is a big shift for Facebook, money talks and a blog post without any follow through walks. Unless he can actually deliver on his promise of Facebook 2.0, Zuck will be stuck with his bad reputation for keeping data safe.

And your crybaby whinny opinion would be...? This isn't an office. It's Hell with fluorescent lighting. I started out with nothing & still have most of it left. I pretend to work. They pretend to pay me. Sarcasm is just one more service we offer. If I throw a stick, will you leave? If I want to hear the pitter patter of little feet, I'll put shoes on my cats. Does your train of thought have a caboose? Errors have been made. Others will be blamed. A PBS mind in an MTV world. Whatever kind of look you were going for, you missed. Suburbia: where they tear out the trees & then name streets after them. Well, this day was a total waste of makeup. See no evil, hear no evil, date no evil. Not all men are annoying. Some are dead. A woman's favorite position is CEO. I'm trying to imagine you with a personality. A cubicle is just a padded cell without a door. Stress is when you wake up screaming & you realize you haven't fallen asleep yet. Can I trade this job for what's behind door number 1? I thought I wanted a career, turns out I just wanted paychecks. Too many freaks, not enough circuses. Macho Law prohibits me from admitting I'm wrong. Nice perfume. Must you marinate in it? Chaos, panic, & disorder - my work here is done. I plead contemporary insanity. How do I set a laser printer to stun? Meandering to a different drummer. I majored in liberal arts. Will that be for here or to go?

What about “post in their wall or PM them” was not clear?

The plot thickens...

So they denied the abuse when they were young in court..... .hmmm.... And now years later are reversing their statements after he is dead..... hmmm....

Wow!

This true genius never got the benefit of his creations. Sad ending. But he deserves a thank you nonetheless.

It's good.... it's bad.... it's good....

I bet there is a documentary story all about this man somewhere.

Imagine how much life this man has extended to the world since the 1920's..... We need more guys like this in the world

@Equivocation Please refrain from further instigation. If you want such a conversation please PM each other. Not on a public thread. @JOHN BUTLER Please PM people back. You should know by now to start a new topic or hold your conversations on someone's wall rather than go so way off topic

Researchers at the non-profit AI research group OpenAI just wanted to train their new text generation software to predict the next word in a sentence. It blew away all of their expectations and was so good at mimicking writing by humans they’ve decided to pump the brakes on the research while they explore the damage it could do. Elon Musk has been clear that he believes artificial intelligence is the “biggest existential threat” to humanity. Musk is one of the primary funders of OpenAI and though he has taken a backseat role at the organization, its researchers appear to share his concerns about opening a Pandora’s box of trouble. This week, OpenAI shared a paper covering their latest work on text generation technology but they’re deviating from their standard practice of releasing the full research to the public out of fear that it could be abused by bad actors. Rather than releasing the fully trained model, it’s releasing a smaller model for researchers to experiment with. The researchers used 40GB of data pulled from 8 million web pages to train the GPT-2 software. That’s ten times the amount of data they used for the first iteration of GPT. The dataset was pulled together by trolling through Reddit and selecting links to articles that had more than three upvotes. When the training process was complete, they found that the software could be fed a small amount of text and convincingly continue writing at length based on the prompt. It has trouble with “highly technical or esoteric types of content” but when it comes to more conversational writing it generated “reasonable samples” 50 percent of the time. In one example, the software was fed this paragraph: Based on those two sentences, it was able to continue writing this whimsical news story for another nine paragraphs in a fashion that could have believably been written by a human being. Here are the next few machine-paragraphs that were produced by the machine: GPT-2 is remarkably good at adapting to the style and content of the prompts it’s given. The Guardian was able to take the software for a spin and tried out the first line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The program picked up on the tone of the selection and proceeded with some dystopian science fiction of its own: The OpenAI researchers found that GPT-2 performed very well when it was given tasks that it wasn’t necessarily designed for, like translation and summarization. In their report, the researchers wrote that they simply had to prompt the trained model in the right way for it to perform these tasks at a level that was comparable to other models that are specialized. After analyzing a short story about an Olympic race, the software was able to correctly answer basic questions like “What was the length of the race?” and “Where did the race begin?” These excellent results have freaked the researchers out. One concern they have is that the technology would be used to turbo-charge fake news operations. The Guardian published a fake news article written by the software along with its coverage of the research. The article is readable and contains fake quotes that are on topic and realistic. The grammar is better than a lot what you’d see from fake news content mills. And according to The Guardian’s Alex Hern, it only took 15 seconds for the bot to write the article. Other concerns that the researchers listed as potentially abusive included automating phishing emails, impersonating others online, and self-generating harassment. But they also believe that there are plenty of beneficial applications to be discovered. For instance, it could be a powerful tool for developing better speech recognition programs or dialogue agents. OpenAI plans to engage the AI community in a dialogue about their release strategy and hopes to explore potential ethical guidelines to direct this type of research in the future. They said they will have more to discuss in public in six months. [OpenAI via The Guardian]

Neat... although this thing had a nasty reputation for crashing..... Not sure if it is still in use now though.

Probably never thought that one day he would be the Governor of California.....

Time flies... it has now gone from the Military to Corporate use.... Look what just came out from the Mobile World Conference...

We’ll know we’ve made it as a newsletter when a) we become the largest U.S. city by population and b) we get invited to Microsoft’s HQ to demo the HoloLens 2, the updated mixed reality headset it unveiled at MWC yesterday. What is it? It’s a device you wear that overlays digital images (like holograms) onto the real world. And instead of going after individual consumers, Microsoft is selling the HoloLens 2 to corporations with employees who work with their hands—think factories. And because we’re not salty at all, let’s get more insight from tech journalists who actually got the invite to Redmond, WA: Cnet’s Scott Stein: “The best way I can describe it is like Google Maps' turn-by-turn directions for real world instructions—or like a floating Lego manual for reality.” The Verge’s Dieter Bohn points out the HoloLens 2 (a “technical marvel”) reflects Microsoft’s strategy to serve “corporate and enterprise needs instead of trying to crank out hit consumer products.”

I think this new campaign is even worse. It promotes a complete waste of food to the poorest who use the app looking for deals where they end up getting a second egg McMuffin just because it’s a penny. They really just wanted one with a discount. Another bad move for a global corporation misusing the diminishing resources of the planet while fattening up the poorest while squeezing them for every last penny. Sad

That was brutal!!! Did Bonnie and Clyde ever kill anyone? or did they just steal money? Just curious.

Does anyone else feel like this guy is getting upset?

The first MS Surface was a flop in my opinion... The new Surface 2 is a pretty good work laptop. For my home though I still like all Mac stuff.

Umm... hasn't Microsoft been making money off of the US Military since the 1980's? What am I missing?