#Automation 2019

[socialantleredrabbit]

bashing a cartoon mallet with this on it over everyone

[abigailspinach]

Jimmy went to a table that had only one open seat and set his tray down. Peggy Soong stood behind him and glared at the woman sitting opposite Quinn. The woman decided she was done with lunch. Peggy moved around the table and sat in the still-warm chair. For a while, she simply watched Jimmy fork in piles of rice and chicken, still amazed by the sheer volume of food he needed. Her grocery bill had gone down by 75 percent since she threw him out. “Jimmy,” she said finally, “you can’t duck this. If you’re not for us, you’re against us.” She was still whispering but her voice was not gentle. “If nobody cooperates, they can’t fire us all.”

Jimmy met her eyes, his gaze blue and placid, hers black and challenging. “I don’t know, Peggy. I think they could probably replace the whole staff in a couple of weeks. I know a guy from Peru who’d take my job for half what I’m making. Jeff got a good recommendation when he left.”

“And he’s still out of work! Because he gave the vulture everything he had.”

“It won’t be my decision, Peggy. You know that.” “Bullshit!” Several people looked up. She leaned toward him from across the table, whispering again. “You are not a puppet. Everybody knows you’ve helped Jeff since he got sacked. But the whole point here is to stop them from sucking us dry, not to minister to the victims after the fact. How many times do I have to explain it?”

Peggy Soong sat back abruptly and looked away, trying to make sense of people who couldn’t see the system reducing them to bits. All Jimmy understood was work hard, don’t make trouble. And what would it get him? Screwed is what it would get him. “It will be your decision, to cooperate with the vulture,” she said flatly. “They can give you the order but you have to decide whether to follow it.” Rising, she gathered her things from the table and stared down at him a moment longer. Then she turned her back on him and walked toward the door.

“Peggy!” Jimmy got up, came close enough to reach down and touch her lightly on the shoulder. He was not handsome. The nose was too long and no particular shape, the eyes too close together and set deep as a monkey’s, the semicircle smile and the red curling hair like scribbles in a child’s drawing; for a few months, the aggregate had charmed her senseless. “Peggy, give me a chance, okay? Let me see if there’s a way so everybody wins. Things don’t have to be one way or the other.”

“Sure, Jimmy,” she said. He was a nice kid. Dumber than rice but nice. Peggy looked at his earnest, open, homely face and knew that he would find some plausible, contemptible rationale for being a good boy. “Sure, Jim. You do that.””

[a-bored-writer]

Every time I see a tiktok of someone showing off poetry (theirs or someone else’s) and the fucking I/i isn’t capitalized, I wanna sink into the floor

[techdirectarchive]

How to install WSUS on Windows Server 2022

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) centralises the management and distribution of Windows updates. Instead of relying on GPO or individual computers to fetch updates from the internet, administrators can control and distribute updates within the network using WSUS. In this article, we shall discuss how to install WSUS on Windows Server 2022. Please see how to fix “Windows 2016 Servers do not…

[superm4ks]

Former Haas Performance Engineer Laura Muller is all set to become Esteban Ocon's race engineer from the 2025 F1 season onwards. Muller graduated from the Technical University of Munich in 2015 where she majored in Automotive Engineering. She completed her Masters from the same university two years later in the same discipline.

Laura has been with the Haas organization for years, at least since the 2022 regulations. However, she’s known as a WEC veteran for her work across multiple disciplines and cars: Muller joined the Endurance Racing series in 2019. She moved to DKR Engineering and worked in both LMP2, LMP3, DTM, and GT3 segments until 2021. In 2022, she joined Manthey Racing GmbH and GT2 European Series team under Porsche SE.

Laura Müller is 1 of the most experienced operatives in Motorsport. While completing her master's in Automative Engineering, Muller joined Phoenix Racing as an intern in 2014. She then worked as an Engineer Formula Renault 2.0 at Josef Kaufmann Racing in 2016. After spending two years in the role, Muller moved to Hero Motocorp in Brazil to work as a data engineer.

In 2024, Laura Muller marked 10 years in her motorsport career, starting as an intern with Audi's LMS team and now in F1, she will be Esteban Ocon’s engineer at the pinnacle of motorsport, the first woman to ever take the helm of race engineering through radio since Formula 1 became a sport.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sandra Newman’s “Julia”

The first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has a fantastic joke that nearly everyone misses: when Julia, Winston Smith's love interest, is introduced, she has oily hands and a giant wrench, which she uses in her "mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines":

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

That line just kills me every time I re-read the book – Orwell, a novelist, writing a dystopian future in which novels are written by giant, clanking mechanisms. Later on, when Winston and Julia begin their illicit affair, we get more detail:

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

I always assumed Orwell was subtweeting his publishers and editors here, and you can only imagine that the editor who asked Orwell to tweak the 1984 manuscript must have felt an uncomfortable parallel between their requests and the notional Planning Committee and Rewrite Squad at the Ministry of Truth.

I first read 1984 in the early winter of, well, 1984, when I was thirteen years old. I was on a family trip that included as visit to my relatives in Leningrad, and the novel made a significant impact on me. I immediately connected it to the canon of dystopian science fiction that I was already avidly consuming, and to the geopolitics of a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear devastation. I also connected it to my own hopes for the nascent field of personal computing, which I'd gotten an early start on, when my father – then a computer science student – started bringing home dumb terminals and acoustic couplers from his university in the mid-1970s. Orwell crystallized my nascent horror at the oppressive uses of technology (such as the automated Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear systems that haunted my nightmares) and my dreams of the better worlds we could have with computers.

It's not an overstatement to say that the rest of my life has been about this tension. It's no coincidence that I wrote a series of "Little Brother" novels whose protagonist calls himself w1n5t0n:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm

I didn't stop with Orwell, of course. I wrote a whole series of widely read, award-winning stories with the same titles as famous sf tales, starting with "Anda's Game" ("Ender's Game"):

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

And "I, Robot":

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_I_Robot.html

"The Martian Chronicles":

https://escapepod.org/2019/10/03/escape-pod-700-martian-chronicles-part-1/

"True Names":

https://archive.org/details/TrueNames

"The Man Who Sold the Moon":

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

and "The Brave Little Toaster":

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212

Writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can't get out of your head is a very old and important literary tradition. As EL Doctorow (no relation) writes in his essay "Genesis," the Hebrews stole their Genesis story from the Babylonians, rewriting it to their specifications:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/

As my "famous title" stories and Little Brother books show, this work needn't be confined to antiquity. Modern copyright may be draconian, but it contains exceptions ("fair use" in the US, "fair dealing" in many other places) that allow for this kind of creative reworking. One of the most important fair use cases concerns The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved characters, which was judged to be fair use after Mitchell's heirs tried to censor the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Mifflin_Co.

In ruling for Randall, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that she had "fully employed those conscripted elements from Gone With the Wind to make war against it." Randall used several of Mitchell's most famous lines, "but vest[ed] them with a completely new significance":

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/268/1257/608446/

The Wind Done Gone is an excellent book, and both its text and its legal controversy kept springing to mind as I read Sandra Newman's wonderful novel Julia, which retells 1984 from the perspective of Julia, she of the oily hands the novel-writing machine:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/julia-sandra-newman?variant=41467936636962

Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both Wind Done gone and Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author's throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.

For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a "native" of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his "oldthink" baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she's a naive "girl," who "doesn't much care for reading," and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.

This contradiction is the cleavage line that Newman drives her chisel into, fracturing Orwell's world in useful, fascinating, engrossing ways. For Winston, the world of 1984 is totalitarian: the Party knows all, controls all and misses nothing. To merely think a disloyal thought is to be doomed, because the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnicompetent Party will sense the thought and mark you for torture and "vaporization."

Orwell's readers experience all of 1984 through Winston's eyes and are encouraged to trust his assessment of his situation. But Newman brings in a second point of view, that of Julia, who is indeed far more worldly than Winston. But that's not because she's younger than him – it's because she's more provincial. Julia, we learn, grew up outside of the Home Counties, where the revolution was incomplete and where dissidents – like her parents – were sent into exile. Julia has experienced the periphery of the Party's power, the places where it is frayed and incomplete. For Julia, the Party may be ruthless and powerful, but it's hardly omnicompetent. Indeed, it's rather fumbling.

Which makes sense. After all, if we take Winston at his word and assume that every disloyal citizen of Oceania is arrested, tortured and murdered, where would that leave Oceania? Even Kim Jong Un can't murder everyone who hates him, or he'd get awfully lonely, and then awfully hungry.

Through Julia's eyes, we experience Oceania as a paranoid autocracy, corrupt and twitchy. We witness the obvious corollary of a culture of denunciation and arrest: the ruling Party of such an institution must be riddled with internecine struggle and backstabbing, to the point of paralyzed dysfunction. The Orwellian trick of switching from being at war with Eastasia to Eurasia and back again is actually driven by real military setbacks – not just faked battles designed to stir up patriotic fervor. The Party doesn't merely claim to be under assault from internal and external enemies – it actually is.

Julia is also perfectly positioned to uncover the vast blank spots in Winston's supposed intellectual curiosity, all the questions he doesn't ask – about her, about the Party, and about the world. I love this trope and used it myself, in Attack Surface, the third "Little Brother" book, which is told from the point of view of Marcus's frenemy Masha:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531/attacksurface

Through Julia, we come to understand the seemingly omniscient, omnipotent Party as fumbling sadists. The Thought Police are like MI5, an Island of Misfit Toys where the paranoid, the stupid, the vicious and the thuggish come together to ruin the lives of thousands, in such a chaotic and pointless manner that their victims find themselves spinning devastatingly clever explanations for their behavior:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460

And, as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia is a first-rate novel, expertly plotted, with fantastic, nail-biting suspense and many smart turns and clever phrases. Newman is doing Orwell, and, at times, outdoing him. In her hands, Orwell – like Winston – is revealed as a kind of overly credulous romantic who can't believe that anyone as obviously stupid and deranged as the state's representatives could be kicking his ass so very thoroughly.

This was, in many ways, the defining trauma and problem of Orwell's life, from his origin story, in which he is shot through the throat by a fascist: sniper during the Spanish Civil War:

https://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.html

To his final days, when he developed a foolish crush on a British state spy and tried to impress her by turning his erstwhile comrades in to her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list

Newman's feminist retelling of Orwell is as much about puncturing the myth of male competence as it is about revealing the inner life, agency, and personhood of swooning love-interests. As someone who loves Orwell – but not unconditionally – I was moved, impressed, and delighted by Julia.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

Whenever you hear someone trying to blame kid's poor test scores "post pandemic" on "lockdowns," show them this.

By Dr. Sushama R. Chaphalkar, PhD.

New research shows that mild COVID-19 alters brain structure and connectivity in key areas responsible for memory and cognition, emphasizing the lasting effects on young people’s brain health.

In a case-control study published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cognitive tests to examine brain structure, function, and cognition in adolescents and young adults with mild coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) compared to healthy controls in a pandemic hotspot in Italy. They identified significant changes in brain regions related to olfaction and cognition, with decreased brain volume and reduced functional connectivity in areas like the left hippocampus and amygdala, which were linked to impaired spatial working memory. Notably, no significant differences were observed in whole-brain connectivity, suggesting that these changes were localized rather than widespread.

Background COVID-19, primarily known for respiratory symptoms, also affects the central nervous system, leading to neurological issues like headaches, anosmia, and cognitive changes. MRI-based studies reveal anatomical brain changes in COVID-19 patients, such as reduced gray matter and decreased volume in regions like the hippocampus and amygdala, often linked to cognitive deficits.

While research mostly focuses on severe cases and older adults, a majority of infections with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of COVID-19, occur in adolescents and young adults who also experience long-lasting cognitive symptoms.

This age group, undergoing key brain development, is impacted by changes in spatial working memory and brain structure, which are crucial for cognitive functions shaped by social interactions, significantly disrupted by the pandemic.

Given that this is the largest and most understudied population affected by COVID-19, understanding the brain and cognitive impacts in adolescents and young adults is vital.

Therefore, researchers in the present study compared anatomical, functional, and cognitive outcomes, utilizing a longitudinal design that allowed them to assess both pre- and post-infection differences, in COVID-19-positive and negative adolescents and young adults from Lombardy, Italy, a global hotspot during the pandemic.

About the study The present study involved participants from the Public Health Impact of Metal Exposure (PHIME) cohort, a longitudinal investigation of adolescents and young adults in northern Italy. Between 2016 and 2021, 207 participants, aged 13 to 25 years, were included in a sub-study with MRI scans and cognitive tests. After COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, 40 participants (13 COVID+ and 27 COVID−) participated in a follow-up study, which replicated the MRI and cognitive assessments.

The mean age of participants was 20.44 years and 65% were female. COVID+ status was confirmed through positive reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests within 12 months of follow-up. Neuropsychological assessments used the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) to evaluate spatial working memory.

MRI and functional MRI data were acquired using a 3-Tesla scanner, processed, and analyzed for structural and local functional connectivity using eigenvector centrality mapping (ECM) and functional connectivity (FC) metrics. Whole-brain functional connectivity metrics showed no significant differences between COVID+ and control groups, indicating that the observed changes were specific to key brain regions rather than generalized across the entire brain.

Statistical analysis involved the use of pairwise Student's t-tests, Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, linear regression, two-waves mediation analysis, negative binomial regression, and linear regression, all adjusted for covariates.

Results and discussion Significant differences were observed in the two groups regarding the time between assessments, COVID-19 symptoms, and vaccine status. The research identified five localized functional connectivity hubs with significant differences between the two groups, including the right intracalcarine cortex, right lingual gyrus, left frontal orbital cortex, left hippocampus and left amygdala, which is vital for cognitive functions. Only the left hippocampal volume showed a significant reduction in COVID+ participants (p = 0.034), while whole-brain connectivity remained unchanged, reinforcing the localized nature of the brain changes.

The left amygdala mediated the relationship between COVID-19 and spatial working memory "between errors" (p = 0.028), a critical finding that highlights the indirect effect of amygdala connectivity on cognitive function in COVID+ individuals. This mediation analysis underscores the role of specific brain regions in influencing cognitive deficits, as only the indirect effect was statistically significant for spatial working memory errors. The orbitofrontal cortex, involved in sensory integration and cognitive functions, also showed decreased connectivity in COVID+ individuals, supporting previous findings of structural and functional changes in this region during COVID-19.

The study is limited by small sample size, lack of diversity, potential confounding factors due to the long interval between MRI scans, treatment of certain subjects as COVID-negative based on antibody testing beyond the 12-month threshold, and the possibility of non-significant findings in mediation analysis due to these factors.

Conclusion In conclusion, the findings indicate persistent structural and functional alterations in specific brain regions of COVID-19-positive adolescents and young adults, including changes in gray matter volume and localized functional connectivity, which correlate with diminished cognitive function, particularly in working memory.

Further research is necessary to evaluate the longevity and potential reversibility of these brain and cognitive changes post-infection, enhancing our understanding of post-COVID outcomes and informing future interventions and treatments. The longitudinal design of this study, with pre- and post-COVID data, strengthens these findings by allowing direct comparisons over time, offering robust insights into the impact of COVID-19 on adolescent brain development.

Journal reference: COVID-19 related cognitive, structural and functional brain changes among Italian adolescents and young adults: a multimodal longitudinal case-control study. Invernizzi, A. et al., Translational Psychiatry, 14, 402 (2024), DOI: 10.1038/s41398-024-03108-2, www.nature.com/articles/s41398-024-03108-2

[collapsedsquid]

I have a personal Gmail account which I use for correspondence about a book project I am working on. I woke up one morning in November to discover that I could no longer access it. A message from Google said my access had been “restricted globally” because “it looks as though Gmail has been used to send unwanted content. Spamming is a violation of Google’s policies.” The note said the decision had been made by “automatic processing” and that if I thought it was a mistake, I could submit an appeal. I had not sent any spam and couldn’t imagine why Google’s algorithm thought that I had. That made it hard to know what to write in the “appeal” text box, other than a panicked version of something like, “I didn’t do it (whatever it is)!” and, “Please help, I really need access to my email and my files”. (To my relief, I realised later that I hadn’t lost access to my drive.) Two days later, I heard back: “After reviewing your appeal, your account’s access remains restricted for this service.” I wasn’t given any more information on what I had supposedly done or why the appeal had been rejected, but was told that “if you disagree with this decision, you can submit another appeal.” I tried again and was rejected again. I did this a few more times — curious, at this point, about how long this doom loop could continue. A glance at Reddit suggested other people had been through similar things. Eventually, I gave up. (Google declined to comment on the record.) Among regulators, one popular answer to the question of how to make automated decisions more “fair” is to insist that people can request a human to review them. But how effective is this remedy? For one thing, humans are prone to “automation complacency” — a tendency to trust the machine too much. In the case of the UK’s Post Office scandal, for example, where sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of theft because of a faulty computer system called Horizon, a judge in 2019 concluded that people at the Post Office displayed “​​a simple institutional obstinacy or refusal to consider any possible alternatives to their view of Horizon”. [...] As for my email account, when I decided to write about my experience for this column, I emailed Google’s press office with the details to see if I could discuss the issue. By the end of the day, my access to my email account had been restored. I was pleased, of course, but I don’t think many people would see that as particularly fair either.

Unfriendly AI

[yesornopolls]

The article under the cut

Allies of Elon Musk stationed within the Education Department are considering replacing some contract workers who interact with millions of students and parents annually with an artificial intelligence chat bot, according to internal department documents and communications.

The proposal is part of President Trump’s broader effort to shrink the federal work force, and would mark a major change in how the agency interacts with the public. The Education Department’s biggest job is managing billions of dollars in student aid, and it routinely fields complex questions from borrowers.

The department currently uses both call centers and a rudimentary A.I. bot to answer questions. The proposal would introduce generative A.I., a more sophisticated version of artificial intelligence that could replace many of those human agents.

The call centers employ 1,600 people who field over 15,000 questions per day from student borrowers.

The vision could be a model for other federal agencies, in which human beings are replaced by technology, and behemoth contracts with outside companies are shed or reduced in favor of more automated solutions. In some cases, that technology was developed by players from the private sector who are now working inside or with the Trump administration.

Mr. Musk has significant interest in A.I. He founded a generative A.I. company, and is also seeking to gain control of OpenAI, one of the biggest players in the industry. At other agencies, workers from the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Mr. Musk, have told federal employees that A.I. would be a significant part of the administration’s cost-cutting plans.

A year after the Education Department oversaw a disastrous rollout of a new federal student aid application, longtime department officials say they are open to the idea of seeking greater efficiencies, as have leaders in other federal agencies. Many are partnering with the efficiency initiative.

But Department of Education staff have also found that a 38 percent reduction in funding for call center operations could contribute to a “severe degradation” in services for “students, borrowers and schools,” according to one internal document obtained by The Times.

The Musk associates working inside the Education Department include former executives from education technology and venture capital firms. Over the past several years, those industries have invested heavily in creating A.I. education tools and marketing them to schools, educators and students.

The Musk team at the department has focused, in part, on a help line that is currently operated on a contract basis by Accenture, a consulting firm, according to the documents reviewed by The Times. The call center assists students who have questions about applying for federal Pell grants and other forms of tuition aid, or about loan repayment.

The contract that includes this work has sent more than $700 million to Accenture since 2019, but is set to expire next week.

“The department is open to using tools and systems that would enhance the customer service, security and transparency of data for students and parents,” said Madi Biedermann, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications. “We are evaluating all contracts to assess effectiveness relative to costs.”

Accenture did not respond to interview requests. A September report from the Education Department describes 1,625 agents answering 462,000 calls in one month. The agents also handled 118,000 typed chats.

In addition to the call line, Accenture provides a broad range of other services to the student aid system. One of those is Aidan, a more rudimentary virtual assistant that answers basic questions about student aid. It was launched in 2019, during Mr. Trump’s first term.

Accenture reported in 2021 that Aidan fielded 2.2 million messages in one year. But its capabilities fall far short of what Mr. Musk’s associates envision building using generative A.I., according to the internal documents.

Both Mr. Trump and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. directed federal agencies to look for opportunities to use A.I. to better serve the public.

The proposal to revamp the communication system follows a meltdown in the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, last year under Mr. Biden. As FAFSA problems caused mass confusion for students applying for financial aid, several major contractors, including Accenture, were criticized for breakdowns in the infrastructure available to students and parents seeking answers and help.

From January through May last year, roughly three-quarters of the 5.4 million calls to the department’s help lines went unanswered, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

More than 500 workers have since been added to the call centers, and wait times were significantly reduced, according to the September Department of Education report.

But transitioning into using generative A.I. for student aid help, as a replacement for some or all human call center workers, is likely to raise questions around privacy, accuracy and equal access to devices, according to technology experts.

Generative A.I. systems still sometimes share information that is false.

Given how quickly A.I. capabilities are advancing, those challenges are potentially surmountable, but should be approached methodically, without rushing, said John Bailey, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former director of educational technology at the Education Department under President George W. Bush.

Mr. Bailey has since become an expert on the uses of A.I. in education.

“Any big modernization effort needs to be rolled out slowly for testing, to see what works and doesn’t work,” he said, pointing to the botched introduction of the new FAFSA form as a cautionary tale.

“We still have kids not in college because of that,” he said.

In recent weeks, the Education Department has absorbed a number of DOGE workers, according to two people familiar with the process, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the department’s security procedures and feared for their jobs.

One of the people involved in the DOGE efforts at the Education Department is Brooks Morgan, who until recently was the chief executive of Podium Education, an Austin-based start-up, and has also worked for a venture capital firm focused on education technology, according to the two people.

Another new staffer working at the agency is Alexandra Beynon, the former head of engineering at Mindbloom, a company that sells ketamine, according to those sources and an internal document.

And a third is Adam Ramada, who formerly worked at a Miami venture capital firm, Spring Tide Capital, which invests in health technology, according to an affidavit in a lawsuit filed against the Department of Government Efficiency.

None of those staffers responded to interview requests.

[elwenyere]

I saw a post the other day calling criticism of generative AI a moral panic, and while I do think many proprietary AI technologies are being used in deeply unethical ways, I think there is a substantial body of reporting and research on the real-world impacts of the AI boom that would trouble the comparison to a moral panic: while there *are* older cultural fears tied to negative reactions to the perceived newness of AI, many of those warnings are Luddite with a capital L - that is, they're part of a tradition of materialist critique focused on the way the technology is being deployed in the political economy. So (1) starting with the acknowledgement that a variety of machine-learning technologies were being used by researchers before the current "AI" hype cycle, and that there's evidence for the benefit of targeted use of AI techs in settings where they can be used by trained readers - say, spotting patterns in radiology scans - and (2) setting aside the fact that current proprietary LLMs in particular are largely bullshit machines, in that they confidently generate errors, incorrect citations, and falsehoods in ways humans may be less likely to detect than conventional disinformation, and (3) setting aside as well the potential impact of frequent offloading on human cognition and of widespread AI slop on our understanding of human creativity...

What are some of the material effects of the "AI" boom?

Guzzling water and electricity

The data centers needed to support AI technologies require large quantities of water to cool the processors. A to-be-released paper from the University of California Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington finds, for example, that "ChatGPT needs to 'drink' [the equivalent of] a 500 ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers." Many of these data centers pull water from already water-stressed areas, and the processing needs of big tech companies are expanding rapidly. Microsoft alone increased its water consumption from 4,196,461 cubic meters in 2020 to 7,843,744 cubic meters in 2023. AI applications are also 100 to 1,000 times more computationally intensive than regular search functions, and as a result the electricity needs of data centers are overwhelming local power grids, and many tech giants are abandoning or delaying their plans to become carbon neutral. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions alone have increased at least 48% since 2019. And a recent analysis from The Guardian suggests the actual AI-related increase in resource use by big tech companies may be up to 662%, or 7.62 times, higher than they've officially reported.

Exploiting labor to create its datasets

Like so many other forms of "automation," generative AI technologies actually require loads of human labor to do things like tag millions of images to train computer vision for ImageNet and to filter the texts used to train LLMs to make them less racist, sexist, and homophobic. This work is deeply casualized, underpaid, and often psychologically harmful. It profits from and re-entrenches a stratified global labor market: many of the data workers used to maintain training sets are from the Global South, and one of the platforms used to buy their work is literally called the Mechanical Turk, owned by Amazon.

From an open letter written by content moderators and AI workers in Kenya to Biden: "US Big Tech companies are systemically abusing and exploiting African workers. In Kenya, these US companies are undermining the local labor laws, the country’s justice system and violating international labor standards. Our working conditions amount to modern day slavery."

Deskilling labor and demoralizing workers

The companies, hospitals, production studios, and academic institutions that have signed contracts with providers of proprietary AI have used those technologies to erode labor protections and worsen working conditions for their employees. Even when AI is not used directly to replace human workers, it is deployed as a tool for disciplining labor by deskilling the work humans perform: in other words, employers use AI tech to reduce the value of human labor (labor like grading student papers, providing customer service, consulting with patients, etc.) in order to enable the automation of previously skilled tasks. Deskilling makes it easier for companies and institutions to casualize and gigify what were previously more secure positions. It reduces pay and bargaining power for workers, forcing them into new gigs as adjuncts for its own technologies.

I can't say anything better than Tressie McMillan Cottom, so let me quote her recent piece at length: "A.I. may be a mid technology with limited use cases to justify its financial and environmental costs. But it is a stellar tool for demoralizing workers who can, in the blink of a digital eye, be categorized as waste. Whatever A.I. has the potential to become, in this political environment it is most powerful when it is aimed at demoralizing workers. This sort of mid tech would, in a perfect world, go the way of classroom TVs and MOOCs. It would find its niche, mildly reshape the way white-collar workers work and Americans would mostly forget about its promise to transform our lives. But we now live in a world where political might makes right. DOGE’s monthslong infomercial for A.I. reveals the difference that power can make to a mid technology. It does not have to be transformative to change how we live and work. In the wrong hands, mid tech is an antilabor hammer."

Enclosing knowledge production and destroying open access

OpenAI started as a non-profit, but it has now become one of the most aggressive for-profit companies in Silicon Valley. Alongside the new proprietary AIs developed by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, X, etc., OpenAI is extracting personal data and scraping copyrighted works to amass the data it needs to train their bots - even offering one-time payouts to authors to buy the rights to frack their work for AI grist - and then (or so they tell investors) they plan to sell the products back at a profit. As many critics have pointed out, proprietary AI thus works on a model of political economy similar to the 15th-19th-century capitalist project of enclosing what was formerly "the commons," or public land, to turn it into private property for the bourgeois class, who then owned the means of agricultural and industrial production. "Open"AI is built on and requires access to collective knowledge and public archives to run, but its promise to investors (the one they use to attract capital) is that it will enclose the profits generated from that knowledge for private gain.

AI companies hungry for good data to train their Large Language Models (LLMs) have also unleashed a new wave of bots that are stretching the digital infrastructure of open-access sites like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive past capacity. As Eric Hellman writes in a recent blog post, these bots "use as many connections as you have room for. If you add capacity, they just ramp up their requests." In the process of scraping the intellectual commons, they're also trampling and trashing its benefits for truly public use.

Enriching tech oligarchs and fueling military imperialism

The names of many of the people and groups who get richer by generating speculative buzz for generative AI - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison - are familiar to the public because those people are currently using their wealth to purchase political influence and to win access to public resources. And it's looking increasingly likely that this political interference is motivated by the probability that the AI hype is a bubble - that the tech can never be made profitable or useful - and that tech oligarchs are hoping to keep it afloat as a speculation scheme through an infusion of public money - a.k.a. an AIG-style bailout.

In the meantime, these companies have found a growing interest from military buyers for their tech, as AI becomes a new front for "national security" imperialist growth wars. From an email written by Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad, who interrupted Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman at a live event to call him a war profiteer: "When I moved to AI Platform, I was excited to contribute to cutting-edge AI technology and its applications for the good of humanity: accessibility products, translation services, and tools to 'empower every human and organization to achieve more.' I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government, with the purpose of spying on and murdering journalists, doctors, aid workers, and entire civilian families. If I knew my work on transcription scenarios would help spy on and transcribe phone calls to better target Palestinians, I would not have joined this organization and contributed to genocide. I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights."

So there's a brief, non-exhaustive digest of some vectors for a critique of proprietary AI's role in the political economy. tl;dr: the first questions of material analysis are "who labors?" and "who profits/to whom does the value of that labor accrue?"

For further (and longer) reading, check out Justin Joque's Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism and Karen Hao's forthcoming Empire of AI.

[hiveswap]

SCAMMER ALERT

Today i got an ask from a blog claiming to belong to an animal shelter in the philippines.

I was about to dismiss it immediately. Like... "thankyou so much luv ya" isn't professional fund raising behaviour lmao. but then i saw that they've got a facebook linked....

The facebook has 75k followers and 60k likes, with an extensive post history and reviews dating back to late 2019. I even found an article from 2020 mentioning them. The article has information on them and the work they have been doing as a nonrpofit since 2019. The tumblr is very new. So, what's going on here?

I texted them! (I know i made a grammar mistake. Shut) They haven't gotten back to me yet, but I did get an automated message. The paypal link looks like it checks out right? No! The facebook doesn't say "bachprojectphil" anywhere. It's "bachprojectph" everywhere I looked. Clicking the e-mail from the message opened p@ypal immediately.

However, when I did the same on the tumblr post...

BOTH links opened this. It is a p@ypal site, but it's a profile, not the direct donation link. This link, or this username ending in "phil" appears nowhere else. If it was true that "they've gotten banned" and had to reregister to tumblr, the @aypal would still be the one legit one from facebook.

What I think is going on, is that this scammer took the name of a legitemate animal shelter, made a p@ypal that resembles theirs, and inserted a hyperlink over the actual email address that leads to their account.

I am still waiting on an actual response from a human, will reblog if anything changes but I feel like i've got a good case against the tumblr person as it is.

Support the actual Bach Project Philippines through their facebook.

[bestanimal]

Yooooooooo, I’ve finally finished queuing up Round 2… well, kind of.

It’s taken me all month to queue up Arthropoda and Chordata. Mollusca and Round 2.5 (the redemption round for Cnidaria, Platyhelminthes, Tardigrada, and Ctenophora) have yet to receive their captions, which takes a lot more time than you’d think.

So, on November 1st, we will start with Arthropoda, and instead of having polls every 12 hours, they will be every 24 hours. Probably at 8am USA Eastern Standard Time. This should give me enough time to get the captions for Mollusca and the rest finished, though I will likely need a short break in between. After which, I may go back to having polls every 12 hours. We’ll see how things go. 🙃

As a side note and shameless self-promo, I’m also gearing up for this year’s Archovember. That is also taking up a considerable chunk of my free time. Archovember is an annual paleoart drawing challenge that I’ve been hosting every November since 2019. It focuses on dinosaurs, pterosaurs, pseudosuchians, and other archosauromorphs, giving less popular or lesser known species a chance to shine and get drawn. Paleoartists from beginners to professionals have joined in the past, and even if you don’t draw along it’s also fun to just learn about a new prehistoric reptile every day! It’s usually not that big on Tumblr tbh (oddly enough) but gets a lot of traction on Instagram. You can check it out on my paleo account here on Tumblr @saritapaleo, or on Instagram under the same username (you’re also likely to see a lot more people participating on Instagram.)

Anyway, shameless self promo aside, this is also a heads up that my attention will be divided between these two events in November, and I’m likely to prioritize Archovember. 🫠 I’ll still be here to answer asks and share propaganda, but everything will be a little more automated and I might not be as quick to respond!

Oh and on that note, I’m very sorry if you’ve sent an ask and I haven’t answered it. I wanted to save asks and spread them out over time but apparently Tumblr is eating them. At this moment it is telling me I have 6 asks in my inbox, but when I click on it it says “no message found.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All that aside, I am looking forward to seeing how Round 2 goes, even if it will happen a bit slower. Stick around as we further narrow in on Tumblr’s favorite animal!

[mariacallous]

“So many people are convinced [that Musk] is a miracle worker,” says auto journalist Ed Niedermeyer, author of the 2019 book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors. “People see his wealth on paper and assume there’s nothing he can’t do. As the world constantly rearranges itself in his favor, they keep believing in him. This cannot keep going forever.”

When it comes to his car business at least, Musk seems fully aware of what’s at stake. Perhaps this is driving his never-ending FSD optimism? My “overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving,” he said during a June 2022 interview with three Tesla fanboys. “It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”

Earlier this year, Kelley Blue Book reporter Sean Tucker wrote: “Elon Musk is fond of telling investors that Tesla is now an automation company, not an automaker. But the company’s signature products are cars. Unless it can change its strategy to develop new products with widespread appeal, its high watermark as an automaker may be in the past.”

With plummeting sales and increased scrutiny, Musk may soon come to rue the fact that he hasn’t managed to make good on so many assurances since 2006 when he wrote, in a foundational pledge, that Tesla’s goal—still not delivered, and supposedly finally starting production next month—was to produce an affordable family car. Maybe next year?

There’s a Very Simple Pattern to Elon Musk’s Broken Promises

[steppingonyourshadow]

Selected excerpts from Elle September 2024

Right now, in his dressing room after the shoot, Xiao Zhan is holding his grain salad and doing a pitch perfect impression of his meeting with Legend of Zanghai director Zheng Xiaolong.

"I was a little unsure, so I asked him if he wanted me to be a little thinner or a bit more buff. He said thinner, of course thinner, looks really good, sharp." When he met Zheng Xiaolong again for the costume fitting shoot, "he said, aiyo, you did it." During that time, he lost more than 10 jin [around 6-8 kgs].

In the second half of 2019, when he was shooting The Oath of Love, Xiao Zhan would shoot during the day, and record the variety show Our Song at night. Both were challenging. The former was his first male lead role in a modern urban drama, he didn't have much experience and was under a lot of pressure; the difficulty with the latter were the harmonies, "[I] had to memorize all the harmonies that differed from the melody, and not be led stray."

"Back then I didn't mind, I'd sleep a couple of hours and wake up a new man. But now even if the spirit is willing, the body will raise complaints."

Earlier this year, while shooting in Hengdian, he got tonsillitis. Swallowing hurt, but he went to work as usual. It wasn't until the director came over to ask him what was going on with his eyes that he looked in the mirror and realised they were swollen. He kept going until the afternoon, "until I fully resembled a frog."

He then had to go to hospital. Getting sick is normal and he got better after taking medication. What he can't do is what the doctors always say: you have to rest.

More importantly, "you might become less perceptive, that's what I'm really afraid of - becoming more mechanical and automated." When he said this he emphasised "really". When he speaks with seniors in the industry, "they also say you have to experience life."

Actually, a life in the spotlight is more or less incompatible with normality. But that's what the work of an actor requires of him - to stay in touch as much as possible with the wrinkles of an ordinary existence.

Recently he watched a segment from a variety show depicting the ordinary working life of today's youth. Before he entered the industry, Xiao Zhan opened his own studio and had an ordinary job, so he can still relate to the difficulties associated with working life, but new terminology and tools which had appeared [since he left] weakened his sense of connection. He realised that to a certain extent he had gradually lost touch.

At the beginning of June, Xiao Zhan had a short holiday, and he took a trip back to Chongqing. He really likes going for walks, and one evening he wandered for hours, down old alleyways, to the Liberation Monument, and went past the place where he used to work.

In 2014, the 23 year old Xiao Zhan graduated from university and began working at a design studio as a designer. Every morning at the beginning of each work day he'd change from the second line to the third at Niujiaotuo Station, make his way through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, squeeze onto the light rail. Many times it was so crowded on the train he'd have his face pressed up against the glass window.

Since he was stuck anyway, he'd look down at the Jialing River, the strange rock formations revealed at low tide and various groups of people, those doing a winter swim, running, fishing, in the spirit of an optimist.

He still really enjoys observing humanity around him -

"Why are you still here so late?"

"The ones walking really fast definitely just finished work and are hurrying to get home. Their expressions and behaviour is just like when I used to have to try and make the subway, it's the last train of the day and you have to run for it, all flustered. Some delivery guys rushing forward with no regard for their own safety. And some very relaxed folks sitting there drinking beer, scattering home after getting to the bottom of their bottle, and then the next day begins."

"All of them going through their own compelling stories, and their lives together make up our society. It's really marvelous, they're all protagonists in their own biographies. In which direction will the story go tomorrow?"

At that moment, he was like any other person who'd spent a long time away, busy with work, and finally had a chance to go home, who finds that "it's been a long time, a lot has changed".

"It's not like I was overjoyed and sentimental [about being home]. I'm just living my life, that's all."

After two and a half days, Xiao Zhan had to go back to Beijing because of work commitments, and then he hurried on to Shanghai to head to France. This time he took his parents along. This was the first family trip for a long time. In a single week, they went from France to Switzerland and then back to France. Every detail became magnified during the trip - they were happy, they bickered, or just went for an ordinary walk - "it was all very vivid".

The day they were due to part, after having a meal together in a restaurant in the south of France, a car arrived for him - he had to leave first. Before he left his mother hugged him and told him to take care of himself. Unusually, his dad also gave him a clumsy hug.

The taste of life is in the details.

"Before I used to think work was everything and life wasn't that important, beyond having a place to sleep and then getting up, going to work, coming home from work, and resting. But now, with my parents getting older, after not living with them for a good while, you'll feel like your lives are getting further and further apart, even with family." He really doesn't want to see that happen.

The way to avoid losing touch and regain a sense of reality doesn't sound difficult, "take time whenever possible to go out and see the world. The important thing is to experience life, experience this world. Even if it's something upsetting, something cruel, that's still life, and will still turn into energy when you need it."

Halfway through the interview, Xiao Zhan suddenly said that he felt conflicted about doing long interviews. On the one hand he worried about not having matured enough and showing timidity during the conversation, and on the other hand he wants to use the conversation to excavate some subtle emotions, because he's no good personally at describing them in words.

Observation, feeling, understanding, describing - these are the key to an actor's creative expression.

"Conversation is also a form of muscle memory," Xiao Zhan says. "Although I'm very introverted, I'm not anti-social. Because I think actors need to learn to express themselves, their inner thoughts, and internalise what the other person is transmitting to you."

Before Sunshine By My Side started shooting, he met up with the main creatives and had a few script meetings in order to deepen their understanding of each other and the character. In the early days of Legend of Zanghai, the producer mentioned that Xiao Zhan would engage in in-depth discussions of the script; he'd have a lot of his own thoughts about any scene.

Xiao Zhan isn't an actor by training. When he first started acting in Battle Through the Heavens and The Wolf, he had strong doubts and asked himself: am I suited to this? Repeatedly negating and overturning his sense of self caused him to lose confidence.

Sometimes he'd be asked if he hadn't auditioned at 23, debuted, joined the industry, what would he be doing now? He's thought about it, but he won't look back.

When he couldn't give a good performance, he put in extra time doing acting classes, watching the monitors, asking seniors for advice. Taking it seriously plus putting in the work slowly led to improvement.

Later, when he started shooting Where Dreams Begin, Xiao Zhan's character Xiao Chunsheng was a Beijing compound kid, very different from him, right down to the accent. He didn't feel comfortable. Before many scenes, the director Fu Ning would run over and whisper, don't be afraid Zhanzhan, just come out and say it, if you feel it then you can say it, the audience can actually feel your emotions and what you want to express.

He gradually became more self-aware: "technique is perhaps not my strongest suit, I rely more on feeling. When I feel it, that's when I have the confidence to act it out. If I rely purely on technique, I think that's not sufficiently moving."

It's been 8 years since Xiao Zhan's first acting experience. Going through his credits, one can see male protagonist roles of many different genres across TV and film. But he still thinks of himself as a newcomer. Given the opportunity, he still wants to work with more and more veteran creative teams.

[aishavass]

The growing use of smart home automation in the development of smart cities, coupled with government regulations related to energy use and emissions aid...