KathyReid

KathyReid, 7 hours ago to Catroventos

Are you teaching or studying #VCE #English in #Australia, or are you a #linguistics student?

Then Dr Isabelle Burke from #Monash would like you to take a short survey about variation in #grammar in #AustralianEnglish #AusE

🔗 https://monash.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0r19RnqsgomeGnY

#survey #Qualtrics #research

KathyReid, 1 day ago to mastodon

Hey Australians!

Tell the #NationalLibrary that you want them to be on #Mastodon:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeU0qddTjTS_j7TG6t9MtuKWk7yWNYtRZZW-z6Ax2x6V7jOfA/viewform

#survey #NLA #GLAM #GLAMR

Unixbigot, 1 day ago to random

The owner of the facility was famous. Well, Meta famous if you know what i mean. Famous for being a famous rich asshole, dedicating his twilight years to outliving all the other famous rich assholes.

Collectively the six trillionaire oligarchs who had built their burrows—each on their agreed post-apocalypse continental domains—had all hired the same experts to design those enclaves. Location: deep in the ancient stable rock of a continental craton. Supplies: Food, water and medicines to last a century, until farming could resume. Knowledge: a full archive of the Internet. Technology: every conceivable machine and the parts and tools to maintain them. Serfs: entirely separate accommodation for necessary technical staff, and hibernation for many more. Security: no, not the armed-thugs-with-shock-collars you’re thinking of; spider drones are what’s in favour with apocalypse consultants this decade.

When the Event came it blindsided even the Six. While everyone was watching the climate fall apart, the brown dwarf grazing the Oort cloud went unnoticed, obscured by the glare of the Starlink Belt. A million comets had their orbits stirred up by the visitor. It only took one, impacting in the south atlantic ocean, to tip the biosphere into chaos predicted to last three to five decades.

The balloon was up, the Six and their families executed the well rehearsed Plan Scram, and settled into their cosy bunkers to wait out the Dark Times. Serfs (sorry, “employees” in this decade) likewise. Human security personnel (unknowingly already inoculated with a delayed death sentence once their mechanoid replacements were online) set about battening down the hatches and bringing up the Evironment (2.0).

“Hey Sarge, this droid won’t boot!”

“Yeah this one too. What does ‘502 License server unreachable’ mean?”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

KathyReid, 3 days ago to ai

Excellent piece in #NoemaMagazine by Professor @ShannonVallor of #UniEdinburgh on the moral and experiential poverty of #AI - and what it means for us if we reduce the meaning of "human" to "producer of economic value".

A nuanced, thought-provoking and beautiful piece that argues for us to restore humanity to discussions of AI.

It provides ways to cut through the current hype cycle of #AGI and "super-human" AI, and leaves us with the fundamental question - "what does it mean to be human?".

I read it while brunching on scrambled eggs, buttered toast and hot coffee while outside on the patio, enjoying the late autumn sunshine - and I thoroughly recommend you do the same.

https://www.noemamag.com/the-danger-of-superhuman-ai-is-not-what-you-think/

KathyReid, 4 days ago to random

If you've been following the #UniSuper #GCP #outage, the Incident report is out, and it's a good read - transparent, detailed, clearly outlines scope, actions, impact.

As someone who used to do this stuff for a living, I'm impressed.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/details-of-google-cloud-gcve-incident

#ITIL #IncidentManagement #ProblemManagement

KathyReid, 6 days ago to microsoft

Why does #Microsoft want to implement #Recall? It's not about images. It's about modelling what workers do on Windows, and then replacing them.

The most expensive part of a computer is the fallible feelings-filled unpredictable meat sack that operates it.

Google has YouTube, Google Photos, Maps, and a bucket load of search data, Google Analytics, advertising, as well as it's #GCP data (e.g. #STT transcriptions). And a bunch of data from Android services. From this data they can model speech, model videos and model advertising systems, and how humans respond to them.

But they can't model what people do on computers.

Amazon has Prime data, and a bucket load of compute. But no operating system data. They can build models based around e-commerce and advertising systems.

But they can't model what people do on computers.

Meta has waves hands enough analytics to model human behaviour in the Metaverse.

But they can't model what people do on computers.

Microsoft has GitHub.
Microsoft has LinkedIn.
Microsoft has SharePoint.
Microsoft has Teams.
Microsoft has Dynamics.
Microsoft has O365.
Microsoft has Windows telemetry data.

Microsoft can model what people do on (Windows) computers. Like fill out spreadsheets.Write emails. Synthesize web pages of research. Interact with colleagues on Teams. Create and edit documents.

Microsoft wants #MicrosoftRecall data so they can model what people do with operating systems.

Then replace them.

Imagine a CoPilot that doesn't just write buggy code. Imagine one that also does spreadsheets. That creates documents on SharePoint. That communicates with colleages on Teams. That has a customer pipeline on Dynamics.

That's what Recall is about - 360 degree surveillance of the worker, to model their functions, make them fungible, replicable - and replaceable.