Snippings

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Indonesia’s Bukalapak, an e-commerce platform with more than 150 million users and 20 million business owners, partnered with Standard Chartered nexus to launch its own digital banking service, powered by audax. They have launched BukaTabungan which provides a paperless, digital banking access, serving Bukalapak’s more than 150 million users and 20 million business owners. By August 2023, the latest reported data available, it had 230,000 active users, and 98% of them were new to the bank.

Through audax’s tech solution, Bukalapak is offering current account and savings account services, debit cards and, to its whitelisted users, lending.

From: Standard Chartered Offers Banking As A Service (BaaS) Through audax.

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Mr Khan calls the accounts and sites that plant the story “seeders”. Rather than using hundreds of fake accounts to promote these sites’ material, distribution instead relies on a few so-called “spreaders”—social-media accounts with large numbers of followers. Spreader accounts typically build a following by posting about football, or featuring scantily clad women. “And then they’ll flip,” says Mr Khan: they start mixing in disinformation from seeders, by linking to or reposting their content.

From: Disinformation is on the rise. How does it work?.

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Both the video clips and audio were probably created using artificial intelligence (ai) and posted by a Chinese state-backed propaganda group known variously as Spamouflage, Dragonbridge and Storm-1376. In a report released on April 5th, the Threat Intelligence team at Microsoft, a tech firm, said this was the first time it had seen a nation-state use ai-generated material to sway a foreign election.

From: Disinformation is on the rise. How does it work?.

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The investigation was launched after agents uncovered an operation in New York and New Jersey that laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in proceeds from illicit narcotics through TD and other banks, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter. In that case and at least one other, prosecutors also allege the criminals bribed TD employees.

From: TD Bank Probe Tied to Laundering of Illicit Fentanyl Profits – WSJ.

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In 2004, the former Prime Minister of our United Kingdom, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel  Johnson wrote in a newspaper here if he were ever asked to produce an ID card as evidence that “I am who I say I am” in “any other venue, public or private” then he would “take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded I produce it”. This was before his government introduced (pointless and expensive) mandatory voter ID requriements at polling stations. Which is why I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when he was turned away from his local polling station after forgetting to bring acceptable photo ID.

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Open banking allows digital wallets to leverage bank payments without requiring partnerships with individual banks; boosting access significantly. The report forecasts the ability to quickly and securely access bank accounts through open banking, alongside bank-backed A2A wallets, will increase consumer instant payment transaction volume from 252 billion in 2024, to over 600 billion by 2028.

From: Open Banking and A2A Payment Transactions to Reach 600 Billion by 2028 Reveals Juniper Research | The Fintech Times.

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Most Robinhood Gold Cards are made of stainless steel and weigh 17 grams, making this card one of the heftiest metal credit cards on the market. Top-tier Gold members can even request theirs in real 10-karat gold. Interested applicants must refer 10 or more subscribers to the Robinhood Gold membership to be eligible for the 36-gram precious-metal credit card.

From: Robinhood Launched a New Credit Card, and Some Are Made of Real Gold.

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My American Express Platinum card weighs 17g, so it is clearly not made out of platinum (otherwise it would cost about $500 or something). But 36g of 18 carat gold costs a couple of thousand dollars! Either way, making the cards out of expensive metal for me is a waste of money, since the cards sit in a drawer at home while I use my phone or ring to pay for things. In fact when I went looking for my Platinum card in order to weigh it, I’d forgorten where it was and it took me a while find it (I realised I’d moved it to my travel wallet a couple of weeks ago).

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The key factor for success when working with gen AI lies in training employees in essential soft skills such as critical thinking, judgment, empathy, and bias detection to effectively task models and evaluate their results. It’s important to recognize that gen AI operates based on the most likely arrangement of words or pixels derived from its training data and prompts. It doesn’t possess intrinsic understanding or intent. As AI assumes more responsibilities, the human-in-the-loop becomes a mission-critical step, focused on diminishing the window of time needed for human interaction to still ensure reliable, fair, and useful outcomes.

From: Five Myths About Generative AI That Leaders Should Know – Knowledge at Wharton.

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But stamps aren’t yet entirely anachronistic. Yes, the volume of first-class mail has been on the decline, but the U.S. Postal Service still sells about 12.5 billion stamps annually. Some of this is a matter of taste. “There are certain things where physical mail is still seen as the socially correct way to do things,” says Daniel Piazza, the chief curator of philately at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, pointing to mailing wedding invitations, birthday notes, and holiday cards.

From: Why We Still Use Postage Stamps – The Atlantic.

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Botshit can be produced at a scale and velocity that beggars the imagination. Consider that Amazon has had to cap the number of self-published “books” an author can submit to a mere three books per day

From: Pluralistic: The Coprophagic AI crisis (14 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow.

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