Cage Fights, Apples & Dark Data
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #161 ❤️
This week, two tech millionaires have agreed to a cage fight, and Apple are trying to trademark apples. No, seriously.
We also bring you concrete ways to reduce the carbon footprint of the contents of your phone, how to ensure your LinkedIn profile is as showing you in the best light.
Plus, how can the creators of AI Large Language Models ensure that they don’t do more harm than good?
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - Mark Zuckerberg Just Invented A New Twitter, And Agreed To A Cage Fight
Meta have confirmed plans to create a text-based social media which can be linked to users Instagram accounts.
A spokesperson confirmed plans to explore a “social network for sharing text updates” saying: "We believe there's an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests."
Hey, that sounds familiar, I think it’s called Twitter?
Leaked images of the app, which has a working title of P92 but is rumoured to be named “Threads” (yes, really, like a Twitter thread) show a social network almost identical to Twitter.
While many, including us, have become disillusioned with Twitter, apps like BlueSky and Mastodon haven’t fully replaced it yet. This may be due to the difficulty of starting fresh on a new social network and rebuilding a community, or following, from scratch.
The Instagram community, however, is enormous. Instagram’s reported two billion users dwarf the 300 million apparently using Twitter, and if even 25% of them can be lured over to the new social network when it launches it’ll already be bigger than its rival.
Meta again taking “inspiration”, in their words, from other products. Like when they stole Facebook and Instagram Stories from Snapchat, and Instragram Reels from TikTok. But the thing is, it usually works, and it brings in more money than the Metaverse.
The announcement prompted Elon Musk to suggest he and Mark Zuckerberg go up against each other in a cage fight, to which he agreed.
The whole thing is so stupid we can’t even be bothered to go into it, apart from asking, are these really the guys at the forefront of the tech world right now? Does having too much money just make you a complete and utter joke?
#2 - LinkedIn Is The Place To Be
While Facebook is dying a death, and Instagram is full of influencers, LinkedIn is having a boom right now.
The platform has gone through some changes since it’s conception in 2002, most recently along with the pandemic.
Once called “Facebook for suits”, the social network has really been living up to that social description since 2020. Experts have posited that this may be because during the pandemic lines blurred between our social and our work lives, and the concrete examples of people sharing photos of their kids and their personal lives confirm that.
Now that everyone is spending more time on LinkedIn, and interacting on the platform in a different way, you might want to think about making sure that your profile is up to date.
This article gives a list of tips on how to ensure your profile dazzles. They include customising your profile URL, which we didn’t even know was possible, making sure your skills are updated and endorsed by other members, and using the summary to really sell yourself.
And for the record, we still don’t think you should be uploading pictures of your family life to LinkedIn, but talking a little about your personal life is certainly in keeping with our new attitudes to work.
Still, do not under any circumstances use a selfie as your profile photo.
#3 - Dark Data Is Killing The Planet
Do you know what dark data is? Well, you should.
Dark data refers to unused and unnecessary data, specifically in businesses and organisations. It’s made up of the 65% of data that is generated but never actually used, and 15% of is already out of date.
Okay, there’s data we don’t use, but so what?
The planet, that’s what. Dark data is a huge problem for CO2 emissions, generating 6.4 million tonnes of C02 in 2020 alone - the equivalent of the global CO2 emissions of 80 countries.
The dark data held by companies makes up a shocking 50% of the world’s stored data, but you’re not off the hook. Have you looked at your inbox or your camera roll lately?
We’ve come up with some tips on how to reduce your own dark data, and don’t worry, they vary from easy to intermediate. Check out our full article for five ways to reduce your dark data CO2 emissions.
From clearing up your old social media posts, to coming off the grid entirely, there’s an option for everyone.
The overall boss level is to unplug completely, but then you wouldn’t be able to read our wonderful newsletter. So, stick around, just make sure to clear out your inbox every once in a while.
#4 Apple Is Trying To Trademark… Apples?
Apple are trying to get trademark rights in Switzerland over the image of an apple.
The “Fruit Union Suisse” is a 111-year-old farmers organization in Switzlerand, and unfortunately for them at some point they decided to use a red apple with a white cross as their symbol.
Apple have submitted a request to the Swiss court to gain intellectual property right over depictions of apples, and while the Swiss court’s decision won’t be known for months or even years, the union say millions are at stake if they have to rebrand.
They’re understandably confused. The union of 8,000 fruit farmers say they have no intention of going into the same field as them – pretty difficult to do anyway right, rebrand from a fruit union to a phone company? – and they’re kind of peed off because, well, Apple didn’t invent apples.
The union notes that they’ve been around for over 100 years, and apples have been around for a heck of a lot longer than that.
This isn’t the first time Apple have flexed their muscles on the subject in Switzerland. In 2010 they got a small Swiss grocers cooperative to agree out of court that they would never add a bite mark to their logo, which was a bright red apple inside a shopping trolley. The cooperative’s president basically said, yeah sure, we don’t even want to.
A 2022 report by the Tech Transparency Project, which is a non-profit organisation that researches Big Tech, identified Apple as having filed more trademark oppositions between 2019 and 2021 than Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Google combined.
Wired magazine notes that Apple’s mad battle to own the rights to literal fruit “speaks to the dynamics of a flourishing global IP rights industry” in which companies are encouraged to obsessively compete over trademarks they don’t really need at all.
Apple, please, calm down and leave Switzerland alone.
#5 - Team Red Or Team Violet?
Red teaming is when an internal or external team push a plan, policy or system to its limits, and Wired magazine spoke to one of the red team members testing out AI Large Language Models.
Aviv Ovadya, an AI governance consultant, was asked last year to “break” ChatGPT. He was given early access along with other researchers and asked to do his best to get ChatGPT to do it’s worst.
They tried to prompt GPT-4 to show biases, generate hate speech, and simply lie, in order to help OpenAI understand the risks posed by the tech, and give them the chance to address them before its public release.
Ovadya praised OpenAI for its willingness to use external experts to test their software, and for their openness in the potential dangers of GPT-4 – they provide a public description of all the potential harm it can do.
However, red teaming can’t catch everything. He describes having tested Google’s Bard and ChatGPT and being able to get them both to create scam emails and conspiracy propaganda on the first try – this wasn’t fixed by red teaming.
He concludes that red teaming alone, then, is not enough, and that systems should go one step further, which he calls violet teaming. This entails identifying how a system may cause harm, and then supporting the development of tools using the same system to defend against that harm.
He says to think of it as Judo. Judo redirects the power of an attacker back onto them to neutralize them, and violet teaming aims to redirect the power unleashed by AI systems in order to defend against themselves.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Sleeping Beauty
Wondering how to make money online, without doing anything weird?
Well, without doing anything TOO weird…
Twitch influencer Amouranth recently revealed her most lucrative stream – filming herself sleeping at night. Every time she streams herself asleep, she earns almost 10,000 dollars.
Who is paying that, and why? Come to think of it, that’s probably a question we’d rather not dwell on.
To find out more on how you can retain your top talent, or how we can help you with digital solutions to your business and marketing challenges, check out our case studies.