Sam Altman has claimed over the years that the advancement of AI could solve climate change, cure cancer, create a benevolent superintelligence beyond human comprehension, provide a tutor for every student, take over nearly half of the tasks in the economy and create what he calls “universal extreme wealth”.

In order to bring about his utopian future, Altman is demanding enormous resources from the present. As CEO of OpenAI, the world’s most valuable privately owned company, he has in recent months announced plans for $1tn of investment into datacenters and struck multibillion-dollar deals with several chipmakers. If completed, the datacenters are expected to use more power than entire European nations. OpenAI is pushing an aggressive expansion – encroaching on industries like e-commerce, healthcare and entertainment – while increasingly integrating its products into government, universities, and the US military and making a play to turn ChatGPT into the new default homepage for millions.

Altman’s long bid to make himself the power broker of a new, AI-powered society has started to look closer to reality as a large portion of the US economy now rides on the success of his vision. There are reports the company is preparing to go public towards the end of 2026 with up to a $1tn valuation in one of the biggest initial public offerings in history.

Good luck with that.

I needed to download a 3k+ playlist from youtube.
It pissed me off how often the music would get deleted from there and the ads...

The best tool for the job was YT-DLP.

github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=r…

Shit ton of options and always working. With linux it comes bundled with GUI automatically so... yeah. Another reason to change from windows to linux.

Thanks to having a GUI to work with, I had more time to work on the settings I wanted on the music. Here are the settings I used:

-f bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-quality 0 --embed-thumbnail --audio-format opus --embed-metadata --yes-playlist --lazy-playlist --embed-chapters --continue --no-overwrites --ignore-errors --compat-options no-live-chat --download-archive My_mix.txt

This "script" will try to download the playlist presented, do so one by one and make a record into My_mix.txt file. So if your power goes out, you can resume, where you stopped. Also it will embed chapters into the file, description and other things.

--ignore-config -o %(uploader)s-%(title).60s-%(id)s.%(ext)s

This part here just outputs a file name with an uploader-video_title-yt_id.extension(.opus)

I also made 2 scripts for downloading videos. One where you download it in best quality possible:
-f bv*+ba/b --embed-subs --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail --yes-playlist --lazy-playlist --embed-chapters --continue --no-overwrites --ignore-errors --compat-options no-live-chat --download-archive archive_list.txt --xattrs

And other where if you want to archive a channel you don't need to necessarily the best quality (4K) video for an essay. 1080p or smaller, I found was enough:

-f bestvideo[height<=1080][ext=mkv][vcodec^=avc]+bestaudio[ext=opus]/bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio --embed-subs --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail --yes-playlist --lazy-playlist --embed-chapters --continue --no-overwrites --ignore-errors --compat-options no-live-chat --download-archive archive_list.txt --xattrs

You might want to change some settings here. That's why you should do several test runs on smaller playlists and tweak them however you like. You will also need a VPN for huge playlists, because you will get throttled by ISP (internet service provider) or Youtube.

I recommend Mullvad VPN:

mullvad.net/de

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/7430878

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2195…

Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICT

Artificial intelligence in Indigenous communities was at the forefront at North America’s largest Indigenous tech conference.

In a world of generative AI used to write better emails or generate funny photos, Indigenous Tech Conference gathered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to discuss how AI can be used to create true impact in Indigenous communities.

“We don’t need more widgets in the world,” said Ryan St. Germaine, Metis, a founder and CEO of Indigenous Tech Conference. “Technology needs to be pointed towards the challenges of our time.”

Some of those challenges are data sovereignty and language revitalization.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, at least 40 percent of the 7,000 languages estimated to be spoken in the world are in danger and a language disappears every two weeks on average.

UNESCO is a UN agency that promotes global peace through international cooperation.

Michael Running Wolf, Northern Cheyenne and Lakota, is a co-founder and architect of First Nations Languages AI reality (FLAIR), an initiative that uses AI to support Indigenous communities in language revitalization and preservation efforts.

While many Indigenous languages have ongoing revitalization efforts, there are languages who have little to no speakers left, making large data collection unrealistic.

The organization’s aim is to reduce the number of data requirements required to build automatic speech recognition for various Indigenous languages.

He told ICT that AI can be used to create an immersive environment to enhance language learning

“You have this dynamic that even if there is funding, there are very few speakers in which to practice and so while every tribe is committed to revitalizing and reclaiming their languages, often there’s some practical barriers,” Running Wolf said. “For instance, you go to class or you go to the movies and camp, but what happens is you go home, watch Wheel of Fortune, watch TV or YouTube and that’s all in English. So what I can do is give you a tool where you can go home and practice saying ‘Turn your lights off’ in Lakota or Diné, and that’s where AI can be useful because it can make your language ambient to your home.”

While FLAIR works to reduce the data required to build automatic speech recognition for languages, other ASR and large language models still require vast amounts of data. Data which Running Wolf said was “unethically gathered.”

“These large language models have been built using stolen data,” he told ICT. “All our data, and the entirety of the internet has been scraped to create these large language models and now these large language model developers have a problem in that the internet is poison. It’s hard to tell if content is actually created by humans, which is the best kind of data And so now this puts a premium upon natural organic human data and what is the largest treasure trove of uninfected data and poisoned by AI? Indigenous data.”

Running Wolf equated data to land, and you wouldn’t give away your grandmother’s land for free.

“We are now in the era where our data is one of the last few reservoirs where we should obviously treat it like land,” he said. “You wouldn’t give away an acre of your grandmother’s land to someone for free. Similarly, with our data, if we treat it as a policy framework, as the equivalent of land, then we need to be very careful about it and guarded with it.”

Michael Running Wolf working remotely

In comes in the conversation of creating effective policy that protects and guarantees the sovereignty of Indigenous people’s data

“I think there needs to be more of an accurate depiction of who Indigenous people are and have our own digital sovereignty,” St. Germaine told ICT.

There are currently no federal or tribal policies that protect and guarantee the data sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.

“We don’t have strong intellectual property rights protection or data sovereignty protection currently. But what if tribes got together and created a co-op, like a data trust, a legal entity whose duty was to protect the data?” Running Wolf told ICT. “If we have strong tribal policy and strong agency over our data, and the strongest thing we can do is actually be the researchers ourselves, tribal research groups working on their own data, creating their own research.”

The post Treating data like land — data sovereignty in the AI age appeared first on ICT.

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The first step of taking on social media companies is to develop much more comprehensive rules that platforms must conform to. Ideally, that process would be done collaboratively with likeminded countries cooperating on a set of enforceable standards that apply across markets like Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, Brazil, and beyond to make it harder for tech companies to wield their leverage against an individual country going it alone. Those rules should be comprehensive, looking at all aspects of platform design and operation. They could include reining in dark patterns that manipulate users, limiting if not outlawing aspects of algorithmic amplification of content, implementing high standards of moderation and larger penalties for breaches, and enforcement mechanisms that allow swift action when rules are violated, leaving the door open to blocking platforms that do not comply — as Brazil did to X in 2024.

The goal of these standards would be to limit the harmful effects of social media platforms, but that will naturally force them to change how they look and operate to conform with those restrictions. Social media companies have long argued that they are platforms, not publishers, to try to avoid accountability and their obligations to their users’ wellbeing. But when they develop complex algorithmic systems that elevate particular content in front of the eyes of their users — including, but not limited to, news content — and even incentivize the creation of certain kinds of content, that is clearly not the case. The standards they abide by must be raised, regardless of the protests that will come from tech billionaires and their allies in the US government.

Reining them in is just the first step. Paired with that must be a serious, well-financed effort to develop alternative means of digital communication that rethink the social media model from the ground up, built on entirely different foundations than the private, profit-hungry platforms that now shape online discourse. This should be approached from many different angles, with the recognition that some of the projects may fail, but that’s acceptable because experimentation in a short timeframe is necessary.