You may wonder why they don’t continue online: because transitioning a 5000+ person conference online is a gargantuan task that takes even the most well resourced institutions quite a lot of preparation, five days before is just un feasible.

And then there’s the question of principle: Access Now runs a human rights conference, which is actively being censored, what are they going to do? Kick out the Taiwanese presenters? What leg would they have to stand on if they did that?

Civil society has so few opportunities to come together, learn from one another, and build solidarity at a grand scale. The loss of RightsCon this year is a profound and unimaginable setback.

It is significant that this event was in Southern Africa. The U.S. and other western countries have been quietly exporting advanced surveillance technologies and digital infrastructure to the region, turning these nations into testing or waste grounds, all while treating the continent as an extractive resource for the cheap data and invisible human labor required to power modern AI.

At RightsCon, a researcher from Africa will meet an organizer from India or a well-connected funder from the UK, become friends, trade notes. It’s exactly the kind of innovative, revolutionary place authoritarians don’t want.

It was in Africa because the people there cannot come to Europe, the U.S., or parts of Asia.

This is just an unimaginable loss.

Related (a little): I recommend everyone go to a film festival at least once in their lives. Doesn't have to be a huge one, something regional works. It's a great opportunity to experience some of what I'm describing.

There seems to be a lot of gloating in this thread from people who haven't been to a theater in many, many years -- lots of disgust at the idea of a movie ever being a communal, social experience. I get the annoyance of other moviegoers talking or otherwise disturbing the movie, but you have no idea what we're missing when big films don't have big individualized social moments to match.

We can't go two hours without picking up our phones. We don't deserve the great experiences movie theaters once gave us.

If you pay for it, ChatGPT can spend upwards of 5 minutes going out and finding you sources if you ask it to.

Those sources can than be separately verified, which is up to the user - of course.

Part of the reason I'm building my own solution is that legal documents are often distributed in PDFs which can have all kinds of formatting issues when converted to plain text. There's also specific jargon and formatting that may or may not need to be included, or spoken, or even spoken differently, that I am finding no commercial TTS platform like ElevenLabs really accounts for well. It's all about the pre-processing and chunking.

Also, the commercial models are expensive when you're routinely throwing dozens of pages of text at it.