#with automated systems

[askshivanulegacy]

THIS. And this is exactly the problem even in countries with "good" public transportation.

I hate driving to and from the airport. It's only an hour and some change, but it sure would be nice to relax after a long flight, and it would also be nice not to pay ridiculous parking prices. But the train takes 2 hours. They might or might not be doing work on the line, which means I need to take a longer route, and I might not be able to make it back to my departure point because the routes each way are different. On top of that, the train only runs at a certain frequency, and not even regularly through the day - there are gaps in service that are hours long. That means I have to be super extra ultra early when I start my travel, just to be sure I can reliably make the flight. And when I return, depending on my flight and whether it was on time, I might have to wait an hour or more before I can even start the train ride back.

So I'm going to drive.

I have rarely EVER looked at public transportation and thought it was better than driving. It's not. Between infrequent schedules, unreliability, line work, and the public transit system failing to take responsibility for making people miss connections (like flights!), it's not worth it as anything more than a novelty.

If you are thinking about it on paper, the bus running every half hour doesn't sound so bad, until you're waiting at the stop and you miss a bus or it's delayed. Then you're waiting a very, very long time. To people who never take transit, that's probably fine. Why do you care. To people who only take transit, they're expecting it, it's baked in their lives. But the important part, what really impacts our cities, is what happens to people for whom transit is an option.

The spiral goes like this. You go to take the bus instead of driving, thinking "I'm going to o have a couple drinks" or "I don't want to worry about parking where I'm going." So you take bus. First bus is right on time. But then you transfer from your neighborhood line to the line that takes you where you actually want to go. And your bus is delayed. And it only comes every 30 minutes. And then you're waiting, 40 minutes later, wondering where your bus is, knowing you could have driven there in 20 minutes.

Why would you ever chose to take a bus again? The bus made you waste precious time on your day off just sitting there. So next time you drive. Ridership goes down. When the transit authority asks for more money for more buses and more drivers, people point to the ridership numbers and say "why should we pay for this instead of paying for our schools/police/baseball stadium/parks/police again (let's be real that's who's taking all the money)?" If we want to increase ridership we need to actually design and fund functional transit networks. If we want people to actually ride the bus we need to make it a better option than driving, which means reliable service, which you don't get with a bus every 30 minutes.

Every 15 minutes, everywhere, all of the time.

[compactdiscinteractive]

P.A.W.S.: Personal Automated Wagging System (Domestic Funk/Digital Garden/Organa, Mac/Windows/CD-i, 1995/1998)

Posted using PostyBirb

[lonelyslutavatar]

I've met a lot of nice people from this fandom and I'm glad I decided to explore my own identity through Jon and Martin instead of following whatever was fanon but I think the greater fandom as a whole has made me colder and more cynical. For a fandom that seems to desperately want to be seen as open and inclusive, it's ironic that I encountered the worst kind of acephobic ("you're depicting ace people wrong. Ace people should never experience sexual feelings."), racist ("Your Jon is the wrong race./You're drawing pocs wrong. His skin is not dark enough."), and transphobic ("you're not giving Martin dysphoria. All trans people should feel dysphoric or else they're not really trans.") policing just for drawing fanart. I mean, any fandom has its weirdos but I think tma has (or at least had) a high concentration of them.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm used to it now because people on youtube are 100x worse (though I think I can withstand outright bigotry than whatever the hell I experienced in this fandom)

[bixels]

As cameras becomes more normalized (Sarah Bernhardt encouraging it, grifters on the rise, young artists using it), I wanna express how I will never turn to it because it fundamentally bores me to my core. There is no reason for me to want to use cameras because I will never want to give up my autonomy in creating art. I never want to become reliant on an inhuman object for expression, least of all if that object is created and controlled by manufacturing companies. I paint not because I want a painting but because I love the process of painting. So even in a future where everyone’s accepted it, I’m never gonna sway on this.

if i have to explain to you that using a camera to take a picture is not the same as using generative ai to generate an image then you are a fucking moron.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI can’t do your job

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/amid-job-cuts-doge-accelerates-rollout-of-ai-tool-to-automate-government

If you pay attention to the hype, you'd think that all the action on "AI" (an incoherent grab-bag of only marginally related technologies) was in generating text and images. Man, is that ever wrong. The AI hype machine could put every commercial illustrator alive on the breadline and the savings wouldn't pay the kombucha budget for the million-dollar-a-year techies who oversaw Dall-E's training run. The commercial market for automated email summaries is likewise infinitesimal.

The fact that CEOs overestimate the size of this market is easy to understand, since "CEO" is the most laptop job of all laptop jobs. Having a chatbot summarize the boss's email is the 2025 equivalent of the 2000s gag about the boss whose secretary printed out the boss's email and put it in his in-tray so he could go over it with a red pen and then dictate his reply.

The smart AI money is long on "decision support," whereby a statistical inference engine suggests to a human being what decision they should make. There's bots that are supposed to diagnose tumors, bots that are supposed to make neutral bail and parole decisions, bots that are supposed to evaluate student essays, resumes and loan applications.

The narrative around these bots is that they are there to help humans. In this story, the hospital buys a radiology bot that offers a second opinion to the human radiologist. If they disagree, the human radiologist takes another look. In this tale, AI is a way for hospitals to make fewer mistakes by spending more money. An AI assisted radiologist is less productive (because they re-run some x-rays to resolve disagreements with the bot) but more accurate.

In automation theory jargon, this radiologist is a "centaur" – a human head grafted onto the tireless, ever-vigilant body of a robot

Of course, no one who invests in an AI company expects this to happen. Instead, they want reverse-centaurs: a human who acts as an assistant to a robot. The real pitch to hospital is, "Fire all but one of your radiologists and then put that poor bastard to work reviewing the judgments our robot makes at machine scale."

No one seriously thinks that the reverse-centaur radiologist will be able to maintain perfect vigilance over long shifts of supervising automated process that rarely go wrong, but when they do, the error must be caught:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

The role of this "human in the loop" isn't to prevent errors. That human's is there to be blamed for errors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/#is-also-a-human-in-the-loop

The human is there to be a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The human is there to be an "accountability sink":

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

But they're not there to be radiologists.

This is bad enough when we're talking about radiology, but it's even worse in government contexts, where the bots are deciding who gets Medicare, who gets food stamps, who gets VA benefits, who gets a visa, who gets indicted, who gets bail, and who gets parole.

That's because statistical inference is intrinsically conservative: an AI predicts the future by looking at its data about the past, and when that prediction is also an automated decision, fed to a Chaplinesque reverse-centaur trying to keep pace with a torrent of machine judgments, the prediction becomes a directive, and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

By firing skilled human workers and replacing them with spicy autocomplete, Musk is assuming his final form as both the kind of boss who can be conned into replacing you with a defective chatbot and as the fast-talking sales rep who cons your boss. Musk is transforming key government functions into high-speed error-generating machines whose human minders are only the payroll to take the fall for the coming tsunami of robot fuckups.

This is the equivalent to filling the American government's walls with asbestos, turning agencies into hazmat zones that we can't touch without causing thousands to sicken and die:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#dirty-data

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/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

Image: Krd (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DASA_01.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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[cubbihue]

So.... why'd Peri get assigned Dev as his first godchild?

Jorgen’s usually not the one in charge of assigning godchildren. There’s an entire department that weighs and classifies potentail Godkids to the right Fairy. Although it’s on strike at the moment.

So Jorgen has to do it by hand, until the union negotiations are resolved. Turns out trying to use paperclips is very hard. Itty bitty paperclips. Big muscular biceps. Not a good combo.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

Peri's Assignment: [Previous] > [Next]

[wan-deringperson]

its two months till june but wk has me by the throat i had no choice im sorry. this is like the best person-shaped thing i’ve drawn ever i don’t know how i feel

[olessan-lokenosse]

🫡 old skin system where we constantly swamp the skin approval admins with an endless stream of skins and accents that must be manually approved and reprinted for the last decade

[compactdiscinteractive]

P.A.W.S.: Personal Automated Wagging System (Domestic Funk/Digital Garden/Organa, Mac/Windows/CD-i, 1995/1998)

Posted using PostyBirb

[khytal]

I've never worked in retail or fast food but I think any job that involves regularly being contactable by/in the presence of the general public is the worst

[super-cool-taxi-service]

(returns again with an even longer beard, visibly decrepit) FUCKING FINE. HAVE IT YOUR IMPOSSIBLE WORD-SEARCH WAY. GIASFCLFUBREHBER. i spent EIGHTEEN YEARS in the WORD SEARCH DESERT FOR THIS

[angy-brows]

I’m stuck in the DMV because they never sent me my drivers license and I almost had a panic attack driving here so if anyone has asks to send I might need them so I don’t crash out in this chair

[veevil]

Real talk, I never made an AO3 account and I wasn't aware of the waiting list function.

I was planning on publishing the first chapter of the siren cherik AU tonight, but you'll have to wait for another 2 weeks apparently :')

[i-will-physically-fight-you]

how i feel having to make phone conversations in the year of our lord and savior 2025

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Japan’s simple, elegant and super complex underground bicycle parking system — a bicycles' matrix.