[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago

For those that (like me) is out of the loop and don't get it, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:

In one of the advertisements that was particularly controversial, Sweeney says that "genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans [or genes] are blue". Another voice then declares "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans".

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago

FWIW, I think he's wrong in the causation here. During the heyday of the British Empire history was one of the high status subjects to study, and they wrote it in very plain language. Physics on the other hand was seen as mostly pointless philosophy, and in the early 19th century astronomy was a field so low in status that it was dominated by women.

I would say the causation is money giving the field status, and lack of money hollowing out status. Low status makes the untrained think they can do it as well as the trained. You had to study history and master it's language to make a career as a colonial administrator, therefore the field was high status. As soon as money starts really flowing into physics, the status goes up, even surpassing chemistry which had been the highest status (and thus also manliest) science.

If one wants to look at the decline of status of academia, I recommend as a starting point Galbraith's The Affluent Society, that goes a fair bit into the post war status of academia versus business men.

I think the humanities were merely the weak point in lowering the status of academia in favour of the business men.

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 42 points 1 month ago

"We've set fire to a bunch of money - now you need to give us more" - tech companies "investing" in "AI" to their customers.

17

Capgemini has polled executives, customer service workers and consumers (but mostly executives) and found out that customer service sucks, and working in customer service sucks even more. Customers apparently want prompt solutions to problems. Customer service personnel feels that they are put in a position to upsell customers. For some reason this makes both sides unhappy.

Solution? Chatbots!

There is some nice rhetorical footwork going on in the report, so it was presumably written by a human. By conflating chatbots and live chat (you know, with someone actually alive) and never once asking whether the chatbots can actually solve the problems with customer service, they come to the conclusion that chatbots must be the answer. After all, lots of the surveyed executives think they will be the answer. And when have executives ever been wrong?

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 54 points 4 months ago

That was gross.

On a related note, one of my kids learnt about how phrenology was once used for scientific racism and my other kid was shocked, dismayed and didn't want to believe it. So I had to confirm that yes people did that, yes it was very racist, and yes they considered themselves scientists and were viewed as such by the scientific community of the time.

I didn't inform them that phrenology and scientific racism is still with us. There is a limit on how many illusions you want to break in a day.

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 22 points 6 months ago

So Elsevier has evolved from gatekeeping science to sabotaging science. Sounds like something an unaligned AGI would do.

Was the unaligned AGI capitalism all along?

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 22 points 7 months ago

Tech bro ennui, the societal problem.

In this essay I will explore solutions to this problems.

Solution 1. Really high marginal tax rates. Oh, this solves the problem, guess my work here is done.

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 41 points 7 months ago

I found the article gross.

He is a suspect in a murder case, not convicted, and they spend very little space on the case. The cops say he had his fake id, the gun and manifesto on him. His lawyer says he is yet to see the evidence. That is all.

Then they basically go through posts he has made online and ask people he knew about them. There is a public interest in the case, but courts are supposed to adjudicate guilt. What if he is innocent, then they just went through his posting history and showed them in the worst possible light.

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 28 points 7 months ago

I started thinking about when Emma Goldman's partner Alexander Berkman tried to kill a 19th century robber baron who had sent in Pinkerton to murder workers into ending a strike.

One can make an argument about the economic conditions creating the condition's for what the anarchists back then called "the propaganda of the deed". But that isn't where I am going. Instead let's look at the aftermath.

From an assassination perspective, the quality of the assassination was lacking. Also, Wikipedia (my bold):

Frick was back at work within a week; Berkman was charged and found guilty of attempted murder. Berkman's actions in planning the assassination clearly indicated a premeditated intent to kill, and he was sentenced to 22 years in prison.[5] Negative publicity from the attempted assassination resulted in the collapse of the strike.[19]

In other words, today's robber barons gets less sympathy than the O.G. kind. That's a bit interesting.

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 23 points 8 months ago

At work, I've been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that's why it's called work.

The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.

The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.

Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save... (drumroll)... Approximately nothing!

But if we hadn't done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.

We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 23 points 10 months ago

Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it's God's problem.

But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.

17

This isn't a sneer, more of a meta take. Written because I sit in a waiting room and is a bit bored, so I'm writing from memory, no exact quotes will be had.

A recent thread mentioning "No Logo" in combination with a comment in one of the mega-threads that pleaded for us to be more positive about AI got me thinking. I think that in our late stage capitalism it's the consumer's duty to be relentlessly negative, until proven otherwise.

"No Logo" contained a history of capitalism and how we got from a goods based industrial capitalism to a brand based one. I would argue that "No Logo" was written in the end of a longer period that contained both of these, the period of profit driven capital allocation. Profit, as everyone remembers from basic marxism, is the surplus value the capitalist acquire through paying less for labour and resources then the goods (or services, but Marx focused on goods) are sold for. Profits build capital, allowing the capitalist to accrue more and more capital and power.

Even in Marx times, it was not only profits that built capital, but new capital could be had from banks, jump-starting the business in exchange for future profits. Thus capital was still allocated in the 1990s when "No Logo" was written, even if the profits had shifted from the good to the brand. In this model, one could argue about ethical consumption, but that is no longer the world we live in, so I am just gonna leave it there.

In the 1990s there was also a tech bubble were capital allocation was following a different logic. The bubble logic is that capital formation is founded on hype, were capital is allocated to increase hype in hopes of selling to a bigger fool before it all collapses. The bigger the bubble grows, the more institutions are dragged in (by the greed and FOMO of their managers), like banks and pension funds. The bigger the bubble, the more it distorts the surrounding businesses and legislation. Notice how now that the crypto bubble has burst, the obvious crimes of the perpetrators can be prosecuted.

In short, the bigger the bubble, the bigger the damage.

If in a profit driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations profit, in the hype driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations hype. To point and laugh is damage minimisation.

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Having worked in an IT department in 2020, it wasn't just random. Zoom was stable for large meetings and scaled pretty smoothly up to a thousand participants. And it's a standalone product and it had better moderator tools.

MS Teams often got problems over around 50 to 80 participants. Google Meet worked better but its max was way lower than Zoom (250?). I tried a couple of other competitors, but none that matched up (including Jitsi, unfortunately).

So if you were at an IT department in an organization that needed to have large meetings and were looking for a quick solution that also worked for your large meetings , Zoom was in 2020 the best choice. And big organisations choices means everyone has to learn that software, so soon enough everyone knows how to use Zoom.

They were at the right place, had the better product, gained a dominant position. And now they are tossing all that away. C'est la late stage capitalism!

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 61 points 1 year ago

He appeared to be human, but then they counted his fingers.

view more: next ›

mountainriver

joined 2 years ago