TechTakes

And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and

Many thanks to @blakestacey and @YourNetworkIsHaunted for your guidance with the NSF grant situation. I've sent an analysis of the two weird reviews to our project manager and we have a list of personnel to escalate with if we can't get any traction at that level. Fingers crossed that we can be the pebble that gets an avalanche rolling. I'd really rather not become a character in this story (it's much more fun to hurl rotten fruit with the rest of the groundlings), but what else can we do when the bullshit comes and finds us in real life, eh?

It WAS fun to reference Emily Bender and On Bullshit in the references of a serious work document, though.

Edit: So...the email server says that all the messages are bouncing back. DKIM failure?

Edit2: Yep, you're right, our company email provider coincidentally fell over. When it rains, it pours (lol).

Edit3: PM got back and said that he's passed it along for internal review.

New piece from Brian Merchant: Yes, the striking dockworkers were Luddites. And they won.

Pulling out a specific paragraph here (bolding mine):

I was glad to see some in the press recognizing this, which shows something of a sea change is underfoot; outlets like the Washington Post, CNN, and even Inc. Magazine all published pieces sympathizing with the longshoremen besieged by automation—and advised workers worried about AI to pay attention. “Dockworkers are waging a battle against automation,” the CNN headline noted, “The rest of us may want to take notes.” That feeling that many more jobs might be vulnerable to automation by AI is perhaps opening up new pathways to solidarity, new alliances.

To add my thoughts, those feelings likely aren't just that many more jobs are at risk than people thought, but that AI is primarily, if not exclusively, threatening the jobs people want to do (art, poetry, that sorta shit), and leaving the dangerous/boring jobs mostly untouched - effectively the exact opposite of the future the general public wants AI to bring them.

fix the year! we're back in the present! out of the time traveling cybertruck!

neil turkewitz coming in with a wry comment about AI's legal issues:

And, because this is becoming so common, another sidenote from me:

With the large-scale art theft that gen-AI has become thoroughly known for, how the AI slop it generates has frequently directly competed with its original work (Exhibit A), the solid legal case for treating the AI industry's Biblical-scale theft as copyright infringement and the bevvy of lawsuits that can and will end in legal bloodbaths, I fully expect this bubble will end up strengthening copyright law a fair bit, as artists and megacorps alike endeavor to prevent something like this ever happening again.

Precisely how, I'm not sure, but to take a shot in the dark I suspect that fair use is probably gonna take a pounding.

check out this jumpscare suckerpunch mashup

some of the details are so on point I’m almost left pointing and mouthing “art”

Just remembering this banger from back in the day.

Oh look! Human horrors ~~beyond~~ regrettably within my comprehension

https://x.com/haveibeenpwned/status/1843780415175438817