drahardja

drahardja, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

Oh hey, the Attorney General of Indiana has published a snitch line for schools that teach LGBTQ+ issues, or make Woke materials available to their students!

Here’s the URL. Use it responsibly. Don’t use it to report Godzilla flying the Trans flag or anything like that, ok?

https://in.accessgov.com/attorneygeneral/Forms/Page/attorneygeneral/education-transparency-form/1

drahardja, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to workersrights

Oh wow no shit, amazing discovery

#labor #workers #fairWages #livingWage

https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-restaurant-chain-better-pay-benefits-helped-staffing-2021-11

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

A study on #UniversalBasicIncome #UBI from 2020 is now peer-reviewed and published. The study gave $7500 cash to homeless people in Vancouver and compared their outcome versus a control group. The result was clear:

“The recipients of the cash transfers did not increase spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, but did increase spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. What’s more, they moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up.”

Further, each person who moved into stable housing one year faster saves the city over $8000 per year, which makes this program cheaper than existing housing programs.

Universal Basic Income works. It sounds so obvious when you say it out loud, but: giving people cash lifts them out of poverty. We need to do that more.

“A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people. Here’s how they spent it.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21528569/homeless-poverty-cash-transfer-canada-new-leaf-project

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

Workers: DO NOT OVERWORK YOURSELF to avoid getting laid off.

• You’re damaging your life and health.
• Your employer doesn’t actually notice (no, really, they don’t.)
• Your behavior enables future mismanagement of resources.
• When layoffs come, you’re gonna get laid off anyway.

Remember that a company’s job is to extract maximum work from you for minimum pay, so your job is to extract maximum pay for minimum work. Somewhere in the middle, both parties find an equilibrium that they agree on. Do not voluntarily modify your side of the bargain to your detriment.

#FridayDevAdvice

drahardja, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

Haha I love this Australian anti-COVID PSA.

AVOID INFECTING PEOPLE YOU DRONGOS

Edit: OK this is making numbers, and I now think it’s more than likely that this is a clever edit of the original. Welp. It’s hilarious anyway. Enjoy it for what it’s worth!

Edit: The numbers seem to have come from this article:

“People who had more than one COVID-19 infection were three times more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die than those who only had one infection. Those with multiple infections were also more vulnerable to other dangerous conditions; they were 3.5 times more likely to develop lung problems, 3 times more likely to have heart conditions, and 1.6 times more likely to have brain changes requiring care than people who had only had COVID-19 once.”

https://time.com/6232103/covid-19-reinfections-effects/

Underlying study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3

There is discussion on the credibility of these numbers here: https://mastodon.social/

drahardja, 10 months ago to fediverse

I am once again encouraging #Fediverse #admins to add a clause to prohibit using their server’s data for machine training into their Terms of Use, because at some point in the near future there is likely going to be a lawsuit against some major company for scraping and exploiting users’ data, and we should make sure we have a legal leg to stand on.

Please ask your server’s admin to do this.

@seb please consider doing this. https://mastodon.world/@Chimaera/110652906429977656

drahardja, 4 months ago to random

The Y2K bug is a great illustration that a well-handled potential disaster looks like “nothing happened” in retrospect. The fact that Y2K seemed to be a non-event is a testament to how seriously people took this emergency, and how everyone buckled down and averted a worldwide infrastructure disaster.

I started working at Honeywell Aerospace (AlliedSignal back then) in 1998, and by that time people were already working on Y2K issues. We were in the GPS navigation business, and there were real issues that would have caused aircraft navigation to go awry unless they were fixed.

People buckled down, found the bugs, ran simulations, got FAA sign-offs, and deployed the fixes to all affected aircraft well before Y2K. Thanks to the effort, “nothing happened”. But I assure you (bad) things would have happened if we did nothing. https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/111670219441506220

drahardja, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to tesla

This is excellent reporting. Reuters somehow got their hands on seven years of internal #Tesla service records, as well as internal communications from service technicians and engineers.

What they found is pretty shocking to me. Repeated catastrophic failure of suspension parts. Power steering suddenly disabling itself. Evidence of denying warranty coverage. Failures that forced a recall in China that continued to be shipped in the US.

Pretty damning stuff.

#cars

“Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective”

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

Ah yes, this is a great way to turn “Can I see your driver’s license?” into “Can you hand me your unlocked phone so I can rifle through it?” at a traffic stop.

Yes, it’s more convenient than having a separate card, and it may serve as a great backup in case your physical card is lost or damaged. But please don’t use this as your only driver’s license, especially if you are an often-targeted demographic.

“Californians can now carry driver’s licenses on their phone as part of pilot program”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-03/californians-can-now-carry-drivers-licenses-on-their-phone-as-part-of-pilot-program

drahardja, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to ai

Here’s a clear example of how aggressive the image processing has become on newer iPhones. This is a comparison between the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the iPhone 11 Pro Max, taking photos of distant text at equal magnification. Note how the 15 Pro Max’s image pipeline has made up all the details.

EDIT: I’m going to drop mentions of “AI” and “hallucinating” here because I think it’s conjuring up the wrong mental models in readers’ heads. What’s likely happening is over-eager noise reduction and sharpening (which may or may not have pattern matching) creating details where none exist. Every phone does some amount of NR and sharpening, but later iPhones are super aggressive in this regard, so much so that the results often depart from what we accept as “reality”.

#apple #iphone #imageProcessing

Original video: https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=885196069752553

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

So #Grindr staff chose to #unionize, and company leaders enforced #ReturnToOffice as retaliation. Company leaders know #RTO sucks, and they are using it punitively.

They started enforcing #RTO of two days a week, and HALF THEIR STAFF RESIGNED.

The response of the CEO is hilarious. “The team will be smaller than where we were before and where we want to be…So that’ll obviously impact margin in a positive way in the near term.”

That’s like saying “The bad news is I lost my entire left leg. The good news is that I finally got my weight under 160 pounds.”

#unionize #unionStrong #solidarity

“Grindr loses nearly half its staff to strict return-to-work rule”

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-09-07/grindr-loses-nearly-half-its-staff-to-strict-return-to-work-rule

drahardja, 7 months ago to random

This is so cool! The engineers at MIT discovered that cement and carbon black (paracrystalline carbon) can be mixed to create a supercapacitor that still behaves like cement. That means you can build cement structures that store energy. They estimate that 45 m³ of this material is enough to store 10 kWh (about a day’s worth of energy for a home).

“New Breakthrough in Energy Storage – MIT Engineers Create Supercapacitor out of Ancient Materials”

https://scitechdaily.com/new-breakthrough-in-energy-storage-mit-engineers-create-supercapacitor-out-of-ancient-materials/

drahardja, 4 months ago to apple

I guess this is how #Apple does #layoffs these days.

First they require in-person #returnToOffice, then they relocate business units from one location to another, and force those who can’t uproot their lives to leave.

The Apple location in #SanDiego isn’t going away. But they intentionally forced 121 people to choose between moving to #Austin, or lose their jobs. Make no mistake, this is a layoff.

Never mind the fact that #Texas is hostile to anyone with a uterus, or is not cishet—why the hell anyone would move to that state? If anything, Apple should be shutting down their Austin office, and paying for people to relocate to a state that better ensures their safety.

“Apple to Shutter 121-Person San Diego AI Team in Reorganization”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-14/apple-to-shutter-121-person-san-diego-ai-team-in-reorganization

Unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/TnOUv

drahardja, 5 months ago to Unions

VW is raising workers’ wages 11% because of competition from unionized manufacturers, even though their workers aren’t unionized. Hyundai announced a 25% wage increase over the next four years, even though their workers aren’t unionized.

#Unions raise wages for everyone, not just unionized employees. Imagine how much greater workers’ bargaining power would be if more would #unionize.

#unionStrong #solidarity

“Volkswagen becomes the latest automaker to hike wages for U.S. factory workers”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/volkswagen-becomes-latest-automaker-hike-151623943.html

drahardja, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

WebMD’s parent company, Internet Brands, released a cringey and abusive internal video threatening their employees to #returnToOffice. “We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point”, the CEO says. “Don’t mess with us”, the video reads at the end. The video features employees dancing and celebrating RTO (at gunpoint? or at least under threat of firing by HR?).

I know corporate videos are all kinda crappy, but this one is…spouse-beating levels of terrible.

#flexibleWork #remoteWork

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-webmd-parent-company-demands-return-to-office-in-bizarre-video

drahardja, 4 months ago to random

Tech workers when everyone is hiring: lol, I don’t need to unionize. Look how well I negotiated for myself!

Tech workers when there are layoffs everywhere: I don’t have time to unionize! I’m desperate to get a job right now!

#unionize #unionStrong

drahardja, 3 months ago to reddit

Just as we all knew all along, #Reddit’s move to charge exorbitant fees for API access was so they can cut lucrative deals to sell user-created material to train #AI models.

I was a redditor of about 15 years when I decided to delete everything I wrote and close my account because I foresaw this hostile repurposing of what is essentially a massive store of freely-accessible, context-rich community-generated content, made by people who didn’t necessarily want their content to be used for training without compensation.

AI training is largely built on top of exploitation of labor for private gain. It’s legal in many cases, but it’s often unethical and immoral.

“Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-16/reddit-is-said-to-sign-ai-content-licensing-deal-ahead-of-ipo

No-paywall version here: https://archive.ph/caW1Y

drahardja, 1 year ago to ai

“The entire case for “AI” as a disruptive tool worth trillions of dollars is grounded in the idea that chatbots and image-generators will let bosses fire hundred of thousands or even millions of workers.

That’s it.”

Yep. Spot on. This is the fundamental reason that #AI is getting so many billions poured into it. It’s the lure of replacing expensive labor with automation. Corporations have endlessly squeezed blood from lower-cost labor and they are salivating at the prospect of getting rid of high-cost labor.

This is unfortunate, because AI has actual uses. As models get more specialized and smaller, I can see AI automating a lot of rote work away at reasonable cost. Unfortunately, the corporate hype is so strong right now it’s muddying all the conversations.

“Google’s AI Hype Circle” by @pluralistic

https://doctorow.medium.com/googles-ai-hype-circle-6158804d1299

drahardja, 10 months ago to random

“Cancel culture” is just what conservatives call “the free market” when it does something they don’t like.

drahardja, 7 months ago to random

No shit, Sherlock.

“Fully remote workers could produce less than half the climate-warming emissions of people who spend their days in offices, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

“Working from home now has another powerful benefit”

#remoteWork #flexibleWork #returnToOffice

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/09/18/work-from-home-carbon-footprint/

drahardja, 6 months ago to ai

Just in case you still entertained the thought that #AI is anything more than super-fancy autocomplete:

drahardja, 3 months ago to random

I’m gonna guess this photo was taken in some tech company’s break room.

drahardja, 2 months ago to random

Me: You can’t gentrify homelessness
Techbro: Hold my beer

Original post (now deleted): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jared-boynton_today-marks-day-1-of-homelessness-for-me-activity-7166172593115377664-geVb

drahardja, 11 days ago to TeslaMotors

Reminder to not work yourself to death for the sake of your employer.

THEY ARE NOT LOYAL TO YOU.

“Tesla Rewards Dedicated Worker Who Showered at Factory and Slept In His Car By Firing Him”

#ev #cars #tesla #employment #workers

https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-worker-showered-factory-slept-laid-off

drahardja, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to ai

#AI #LLM is gunking up the web, especially for lesser-represented languages. Spammers are creating garbage English language content using LLMs, then translating it into multiple languages at the same time, using Machine Translation, presumably to generate clickbait ad revenue in several languages at once.

In English, such gunk accounts for some 9% of total sampled web content. But in languages with less representation on the Internet, the figures could be much higher. In Malay, it’s something like 26%, and in Swahili it’s nearly HALF of everything found on the web.

Paper [pdf]: “A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05749.pdf