#AI#GenerativeAI#Automation#Unemployment#ViceMedia#Journalism#Media#Apple#iPad: "On the one hand it is really wild to me that Apple would miscalculate on something so drastically — Apple prides itself on its marketing, which is as crucial to the company as any of its technologies — but on the other, I’m thankful. The ad has clarified some things: amid (yet another) week in which human writers and artists were watching their work degraded into content fodder, Apple came along and handed us a perfect visual metaphor for one of our most potent fears about big tech right now — namely, that it is crushing the arts and transmuting them into dull consumer products. And, I might add, they are so content with what they are doing, that they are more than happy to broadcast that intent explicitly via advertising — signed off on by the highest echelons of Apple, and Tim Cook himself tweeting it out — with an exclamation point in the title. “Crush!” indeed." https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/for-artists-writers-humans-big-techs
Been tinkering about with rsync to automatically publish static sites. Found out some useful stuff after much trawling of Stack Overflow et al, so thought I’d write it up. I’m sure that future me will find this useful.
It has already proved useful to do this, as I needed a test site to check if a library upgrade to the newest version of the Lume SSG was working. I was quickly able to spin up a completely separate site to check everything worked Ok after I got the basic build sorted and error-free.
Android Tasker routine to warn if home WiFi is not functioning correctly
Been experiencing a bit of an issue the last month with everything seemingly on and connected, but my Chromecast device would not connect across Wi-Fi today, and sometimes my wife says her phone is not connecting, and I’d have to reboot the home rou ...continues
Can we stop making robots look humanoid already? Make them look weird and machine-like; they’ll probably work better that way anyway. Making things that look humanoid yet violate the physical expectations applicable to humans is an insult to actual humans.
“Boston Dynamics’ new Atlas robot is a swiveling, shape-shifting nightmare”
Please join us April 30th 2pm Central/3pm E. for the Tomash Fellow Lecture w/ 2023-24 Tomash Fellow MIT HASTS' Alex Reiss-Sorokin's "From Research to Search: Legal Research Technologies, 1964-1994." Register now! (free, required)
Do you know what the acronym AILDI stands for? It's the AI Labor Disclosure Initiative, which asks a simple question: What would happen if tech companies were legally required to report the number of human workers concealed behind their automated solutions? On April 23, 2024, I'll be addressing this topic at the ILO in Geneva.
And besides, if you want to automate making burgers and fries, you would redesign the entire kitchen around a simpler system of automation, not create a gigantic ceiling-mounted robot arm that manipulates implements meant for human use.
We recently got a wifi-enabled hot tub. Some enterprising soul had already created a HA addon to work with it, so I set about implementing #observability, #automation and #alerting.
Amongst other things, it now starts heating automatically if there's plunge pricing on #octopusenergy Agile
#AI#GenerativeAI#Automation#Animation#VFX#Hollywood: ""In the good old days," mused DreamWorks co-founder and former Disney CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg late last year, "it took 500 artists five years to make a world-class animated movie. I don't think it will take 10% of that three years out from now."
With Hollywood already replacing staff with generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, people working the industry want rules to govern the new technology and to make sure it does not use images they have created without compensating them.
The U.S. film, television and animation industry employs some 550,000 people and the sector's extensive use of technology makes staff particularly vulnerable to changes wrought by AI.
Automation is the best part of cloud support. Wrote a quick script to change the instance type of a list of server ids. It’ll stop, change, start and all the things in between.
With I be automated out of a career? asks a computer science Ph.D. graduate who's job-hunting. Check out Kode Vicious' answer here: https://bit.ly/43qL17u
#AI#LLMs#Media#Journalism#GenerativeAI#News#BBC#Automation#Audiences: "The appearance of large language models (LLMs) and other forms of generative AI portend a new era of disruption and innovation for the news industry, this time focused on the production and consumption of news rather than on its distribution. Large news organizations, however, may be surprisingly well-prepared for at least some of this disruption because of earlier innovation work on automating workflows for personalized content and formats using structured techniques. This article reviews this work and uses examples from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and other large news providers to show how LLMs have recently been successfully applied to addressing significant barriers to the deployment of structured approaches in production, and how innovation using structured techniques has more generally framed significant editorial and product challenges that might now be more readily addressed using generative AI. Using the BBC's next-generation authoring and publishing stack as an example, the article also discusses how earlier innovation work has influenced the design of flexible infrastructure that can accommodate uncertainty in audience behavior and editorial workflows – capabilities that are likely to be well suited to the fast-approaching AI-mediated news ecosystem." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aaai.12168
#AI#Automation#Work#GhostWork#Fauxtomation: "As anthropologist Lilly Irani observes, labor is not replaced by machines, it’s merely displaced. While stocks surge upon restructuring, few companies achieve this promise of savings and profitability, and “bullshit jobs” soar.
The story of AI distracts us from these familiar unpleasant scenes. Instead, we envision a glistening “future of work” in which we are all miraculously more efficient, our workplaces are populated with relentlessly pleasant robots, and expert automated agents fulfill our every command. Pundits talk loftily about the “ethics of AI” as if it’s a technical question of ironing out its biases or building BB-8 instead of The Terminator.
But the future of work is not a technology: it’s an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. “AI” is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs have already gone – offshore – and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots aren’t “taking our jobs” – people are.
I don't talk about the #Science /work stuff I'm doing, just sheepish really (even if it is pretty cool). But here's a nice article that previews the @CarnegieMellon Cloud Lab that will soon go online here in #Pittsburgh with oversight by the Emerald Cloud Lab. I'm quoted a bit but I like this article mainly because I got the query from a student & it's in the student run paper: the Tartan.
CMU Cloud Lab to bring remote science into mainstream
As the CMU Cloud lab starts up, I'm excited by the possibilities. I got pulled in to contribute to a podcast episode along with a colleague in computational biology, Andreas Pfenning. No advance prep really - it came together at the last minute. We talked about #AutomatedScience