@FeralRobots@mastodon.social
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

FeralRobots

@FeralRobots@mastodon.social

Following-back because I followed you may not be a good use of your time.

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rephlex00, to random
@rephlex00@beige.party avatar

Kinda crazy that artificial intelligence needs the entire output of a nuclear reactor but actual intelligence can run on Twix bars and cocaine, for example.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@rephlex00 I mean it runs a lot better on good quality protein & high fiber carbs but I get your point.😉

(Reminds me of how I used to describe the reigning philocophy of the dotcom era as "Cocaine Is Nutritious.")

BlackAzizAnansi, to random
@BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to avatar

The fact that business owners fought to keep remote work from being more widely adopted is a fucking tragedy. Remote work solved so many problems i.e. less greenhouse gases, less traffic (which means less strain on infrastructure), more money circulating in smaller towns, less wasted time commuting for employees (which also means less money being wasted on gas) etc. But nope, we gotta justify these buildings somehow.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@BlackAzizAnansi
This is similar to what's happening at my wife's school. Her uni merged with 2 others (her dept merged with one other), but all 3 campuses were kept open - now her dept is being forced to claim they're offering hybrid classes at each of the 3 campuses. (They'll just be old-fashioned "TV monitor in a room"-style remote learning classes, obsolete now for 20 yrs.)

Why? Because they just spent a ton of money on dorms at all 3 campuses.😬

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Over and over AI is being deployed as a way to avoid the high cost of human mental labor.

You'd rather have a bank of servers huffing clouds of carbon into the air than just paying some people to solve the design problem.

I know hiring programmers to work on UI isn't glamorous, and the work is slow, the results aren't flashy, but we just can't keep on skipping this step or wishing that some cocktail-shaker full of matrices and stolen data will paper over the issue.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird
Brutal irony is that "AI labor" is only cheap because it's a market capture gambit. Nobody is paying real cost of using tools.

Once genAI vendors think everyone's locked in on AI-driven business processes they'll jack up prices to closer approximations of what it actually costs. Any apparent* cost savings will have been temporary.
_
*pretty sure imagined cost savings are a human hallucination, resulting from failure to examine the actual business processes being replaced.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

The only reason big tech companies want you to believe in the LLM hype is that they tend to have massive datasets they can mine and that hype creates a path for them to sell this data for a lot of money.

Think about all the messages and conversations on Facebook. Or comments on YouTube. Or code on Github. Or posts on Reddit. Or your tweets. Etc. Etc.

LLMs are a shit technology that has almost no actual use to do anything good, other than make corporations and their shareholders richer.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@thomasfuchs
This is gonna land a lot harder for those of us who've spent a few decades getting pitched "turnkey", "no code" data mining solutions that require heavy infrastructure & which turn out to need skilled operators with lots & lots of training. To the same people who fall for that pitch every time it seems like a no-brainer; to the people who get burned (often not the same people), the tradeoff looks like "so the quality's not as great, at least it's less work." (Obviously both wrong.)

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

They're talking about grade inflation at the Ivies again. And OK, fair. Everyone gets an A. But can we also talk about educator inflation? Educator inflation is a good thing! By educator inflation I mean: the typical educator at a top tier university today, is miles better at educating, than the typical educator at that same institution 50 years ago.

The field of education is not static. There are constant advances in how material is presented, and how students are supported.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@mekkaokereke
The issue's complex but tenure as it currently exists is...problematic. It rarely protects professors from political persecution if their various social statuses (gender, race/ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, social status) don't already do so, & can be excuse to slack off & do as little as possible. (That's probably not the rule but it happens often enough to be a drain on cash-strapped colleged & unis.)

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Random observation: Photos I'm seeing today of American riot cops show them carrying straight-handle batons instead of the side-handle batons that have been more common.

Side-handle batons were adopted because they afforded ways of subduing suspects with reduced force. Also, side handles don't provide as much striking leverage, so are less likely to seriously injure people by striking.

Cops shifting back to straight batons could signal acknowledgement that their main goal is to hurt people.

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

If you want to know why people don't trust or Microsoft or Google to fix a broken faux- , consider that using suicidal teens for A/B testing was regarded as perfectly fine by a Silicon Valley "health" startup developing ""-based suicide prevention tools.

(Aside: This is also where we get when techbros start doing faux-utilitarian moral calculus instead of just not doing obviously unethical shit.)

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9m3a/horribly-unethical-startup-experimented-on-suicidal-teens-on-facebook-tumblr-with-chatbot

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

This should blow people's minds: "White Collar Crime has been so normalized that many of you working in Fortune500 companies are part of criminal conspiracies and don't even know it."

My dad used to characterize this normalization by observing that people seemed to care less about law or their purported ethics than about the aesthetics of how one's meant to do lawbreaking - as he put it, 'they didn't cheat fair.'

https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/112315502158861852

FeralRobots, to Israel
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

This is the kind of shit evil empires do in dystopian science fiction. Like stuff The Capital would do in Hunger Games.

[clip]
On Sunday and Monday night, residents of the northern parts of Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp woke up to the sounds of babies crying and women calling out for help.

When they went outside to locate the source of the cries and provide aid, Israeli quadcopters reportedly opened fire directly at them.
[/clip]

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/disturbing-recordings-crying-infants-played-israeli-quadcopters-lure-gaza-residents-shooting

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Someone asked* why we can't just have good healthcare.

Short answer is that there are several industries which derive much (or in some cases, all) of their revenue from us having BAD health care.
_
*rhetorically; I'm pretty sure she knew the answer & just wasn't willing to give in COMPLETELY to cynicism.

FeralRobots, to ai
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

This 2017 piece from Ted Chiang has aged like the finest wine.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

There are industry observers talking about the need for Als to have a sense of ethics, and some have proposed that we ensure that any superintelligent Als we create be “friendly,” meaning that their goals are aligned with human goals. I find these suggestions ironic given that we as a society have failed to teach corporations a sense of ethics, that we did nothing to ensure that Facebook’s and Amazon’s goals were aligned with the public good. But I shouldn’t be surprised; the question of how to create friendly Al is simply more fun to think about than the problem of industry regulation, just as imagining what you’d do during the zombie apocalypse is more fun than thinking about how to mitigate global warming.

FeralRobots, to RSS
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Whenever you hear someone say " is dead", ask yourself why the speaker wants RSS to be dead.

Put another way: "RSS is dead" is an aspirational claim, not a factual one.

FeralRobots, to TeslaMotors
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

It's so much stupider & more petty than I imagined: "Two sources told Electrek that [#Supercharger head Rebecca] Tinucci was fighting back pressure from #Musk to fire a bigger percentage of her team, and the CEO decided to let go of the entire team as an example."
#Tesla
https://electrek.co/2024/05/01/elon-musk-throwing-weight-tesla-wrecking-ball/

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Earworm of the moment (well the past several days of moments):
"" [Patti Smith version]
https://youtu.be/bPO0bTaWcFQ

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Title's crafted for outrage; what's described is that she viewed the dog as a tool, & when the tool failed because she couldn't be arsed to learn how to use it, she threw it away. (By killing it.)
It's an expression of ruthlessness calculated to make her seem strong to rural-identified* white conservative men.
_
*"rural" is a key cultural indentification in the US these days.
https://www.rawstory.com/kristi-noem-dog/

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

You say "serial entrepreneur", & I hear 'very persistent at taking credit for other people's work & ideas.'
#SamAltman

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Apparently Tesla's promising "better utility than a truck" from the Cybertruck & I can't help but wonder whether they've ever actually seen a truck.

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

"Twitter employees monitored Elon Musk's jet-tracking account to see when he'd be in the office"
So that's why he hated it so much.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-employees-elon-musk-jet-tracking-account-2024-2&post-bottom-piano-recommendations

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Georgia's advancing a bill that allows them to arrest anyone that some random official thinks might be an undocumented immigrant.

It's 2024. If you still think it's hyperbole to predict that Republicans will use laws like this to intimidate opposition voters or jail/discredit opposition figures, then you need to wake the fuck up.

https://toad.social/@KimPerales/112028320569839775

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Jim Wright has a very valid point about booing of Trump: " hate everybody including themselves. They'd heckle their own candidate."
Can support this from my own experience of movement Libertarians. Most of them have no consistent moral system beyond "I should be allowed to do whatever I want."

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Seen people passing around this link to a retrospective by Ian Hickson on 9 years at google:
https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

special thanks to @anildash [https://me.dm/@anildash/111506988791615922] for pointing out something I havent seen mentioned: the paragraph were "Hixie" spends several sentences excoriating a specific black woman for her 'incompetent' middle-management decisions & skills. He won't have to look for another job again, but that's some seriously unprofesisonal & likely racist/misogynoir bullshit.

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

World Sailing is banning trans people from a sport that doesn't segregate competitors by gender.
Help me understand what the rationalization is for that.

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Very few people seem to be dealing with the facts that:

  • services are all being priced as loss-leaders at this point.

  • gen AI is only going to get more expensive, there's literally no forseeable prospect for cost reduction in how AI is produced.

  • Eventually these vendors are gonna be expected to count profits, not revenues, & that's going to mean either fewer services, less service, higher prices, or all of the above.

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

As they say, most American cities are basically Police Departments with some auxiliary services tacked on for appearances' sake.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112372159755886344

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

The cruelty is the point.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2024/03/28/some-of-floridas-sickest-kids-are-losing-medicaid-coverage-on-easter-sunday/

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