End of year reader, holiday Greetings, the old web

Greetings W3C AI KR CG cc SWIG (FYI),
(you may skip the rant and go straight to the links )

 not sure how many here are in festive joyous mode. Things are tough, a lot
are falling apart everywhere.Incomprehensible, logically inconsistent
layers of data and processes  that cannot be understood let alone verified.
Facts that contradict each other, sources that are not accountable. Things
that do not follow, what is false but said to be true pervades our systems,
our lives. With awful things happening between the cracks.

I am glad we have an AI KR CG because we can maintain and share a long
thread of issues pivotal not only to AI, which is driving scientific and
technological progress across the board. but also pivotal to our cognitive
processes, which are central to maintaining our mental health
https://mhcc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2016.02.17._supporting_cognitive_functioning-_mhcc_version__v._11__.pdf

How long can people continue to maintain their sense of purpose, direction
and orientation  without  KR, in this otherwise flimsical world.

I ll be brief with my season's greetings and just take the opportunity to
share
the xmas holiday reader for those who are still learning (most of us, I
hope)

1. This NYT article
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/upshot/long-covid-disability.html>
mentions that AMERICANS are under a cognitive fog,

Oh Well. Not just americans.

From my perspective, being persistently deceived by the media, and now by
the internet,  presented with fragmented inconsistent logic is designed to
break people's ability to think. It is called mind wrecking and it is a
well established tactic of psychological abuse.  It is easier to break
people when they are disoriented

One the one hand we have been building  open data, the open web, open
standards. the common good, on the other hand we are being consistently
ruled and driven  by adversarial approaches (designed to deceive and being
dysfunctional)

Some think this  cognitive fog is being deliberately inflicted to people by
folks who know what they are doing and their funding agencies and those who
hire them

A talk on psychological abuse (PA)
<https://sites.google.com/view/psyabu/home> points to how misleading and
manipulative information messes up with people and social networks etc .
Things can get complicated. The talk is generic about PA but it ends up
mentioning the role of KR and AI and possibly the web at large


2. The Atlantic makes a good point: Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online
Anymore
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/12/internet-information-trends-virality-tracking/676888>

 SORRY BEHIND PAYWALL BUT READ THE FIRST FREE PARAGRAPHS TO GET A SENSE and
a pointer to 3

3. Follows on from 2, The Verge: AI is killing the old web, and the new web
struggles to be born
<https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773914/ai-large-language-models-data-scraping-generation-remaking-web>
Santa, can we have the good old web back please

Good wishes for 2024

PDM