theluddite

From that same article stub:

The nonprofit DataKind has a partnership with John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where 44% of students are Hispanic, to run a predictive AI program that helps identify students — especially those from low-income families — who are in danger of dropping out because of grades or other factors.

This is a very dangerous path. I recognize it thanks to Dan Mcquillan, who writes about this a lot. Governments using algorithmic tools to figure out who needs special services ends up becoming automated neoliberal austerity. He frequently collects examples. I just dug up his mastodon and here's a recent toot with three: https://kolektiva.social/@danmcquillan/111207202749078945

Also, the main headline is about automated text translations for calls, which is now AI. Ever since ChatGPT melted reporters' brains, everything has become AI. Every time I bring this up, some pedantic person tells me that NLP (or machine vision or LLMs) is a subfield of AI. Do you do this for any other field? "Doctors use biology to solve disease," or "Engineers use physics to to build bridge." Of course not, because it's ridiculous marketing talk that journalists should stop repeating.

Computers aren't people. AI "learning" is a metaphorical usage of that word. Human learning is a complex mystery we've barely begun to understand, whereas we know exactly what these computer systems are doing; though we use the word "learning" for both, it is a fundamentally different process. Conflating the two is fine for normal conversation, but for technical questions like this, it's silly.

It's perfectly consistent to decide that computers "learning" breaks the rules but human learning doesn't, because they're different things. Computer "learning" is a a new thing, and it's a lot more like creating replicas than human learning is. I think we should treat it as such.

Copyright is broken, but that's not an argument to let these companies do whatever they want. They're functionally arguing that copyright should remain broken but also they should be exempt. That's the worst of both worlds.

😘

Ha, thank you. Fortunately for me, I'm a dual citizen, with family happy to have me anytime. I suspect that day will come, though I really , really love the life and community I've built where I am and will be devastated to leave it.

I wish you many years of good health, friend!

We are usually not given a good example of how bad things actually happen. We imagine the barbarians storming the gate, raping and pillaging. That does happen, but more often, things getting worse is more complicated, and it affects different people at different times.

For the one in five (!!) children facing hunger, our society has failed. For a poor person with diabetes and no medical insurance, our society has already failed. For an uber driver with no family support whose car broke down and missed rent, facing an eviction, society is about to break down for them. I'm a dude in my mid thirties that writes code, so for me, things are fine, but if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and lose the ability to use my hands, society will probably fail for me.

More and more people are experiencing that failure. Most of us are fine, but our being fine is becoming incredibly fucking precarious. More often than not, society collapsing looks like a daily constitution saving throw that becomes harder and harder to pass, and more and more of us who have a stroke of bad luck here or there fail.

Understanding society this way is important, and it's why solidarity is the foundation of leftist politics. I march for people without healthcare because I care about them, and also, because there but for the grace of god go I. Bakunin put this beautifully almost 200 years ago:

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.

lmao thank you. That's slightly strange but extremely nice to read.

I was in tears of laughter while making it. I couldn't believe when they accepted it except part of me always totally expected it because they're fucking clowns.

Hey thanks so much friend. You should submit a hall of shame entry! We rarely get submissions and I agree it's such a fun part of the site.

What client are you on? There's a known bug in some lemmy clients that break some URLs.

If you paste the URL into a browser it should work fine: https://theluddite.org/#!post/google-ads

It's not that this article is bad, but it is what frustrates me about tech journalism, and why I started writing about tech. None of these people have any idea how the internet actually works. They've never written a line of code, or set up a server, or published an app, or even done SEO, so they end up turning everything into a human interest piece, where they interview the people involved and some experts, but report it with that famous "view from nowhere."

Some blame Google itself, asserting that an all-powerful, all-seeing, trillion-dollar corporation with a 90 percent market share for online search is corrupting our access to the truth. But others blame the people I wanted to see in Florida, the ones who engage in the mysterious art of search engine optimization, or SEO.

Let me answer that definitively: it's google, in multiple ways, one of which isn't even search, which I know because I actually do make things on the internet. SEO people aren't helping, for sure, but I've seen many journalists and others talk about how blogspam is the result of SEO, and maybe that's the origin story, but at this point, it is actually the result of google's monopoly on advertising, not search. I've posted this before on this community, but google forces you to turn your website into blogspam in order to monetize it. Cluttering the internet with bullshit content is their explicit content policy. It's actually very direct and straightforward. It's widely and openly discussed on internet forums about monetizing websites.

Paul Krugman is an innovator in this field. The other day he had that one about how inflation is under control if you remove, food, energy, used cars, and everything else normal people use. That's basically all my stuff!

Also, obligatory GDP joke that's been bouncing around the internet for a while now:

As they're walking, they come across a pile of dog shit. One economist says to the other, "If you eat that dog shit, I'll give you $50". The second economist thinks for a minute, then reaches down, picks up the shit, and eats it. The first economist gives him a $50 bill and they keep going on their walk. A few minutes later, they come across another pile of dog shit. This time, the second economist says to the first, "Hey, if you eat that, I'll give you $50." So, of course, the first economist picks up the shit, eats it, and gets $50. Walking a little while farther, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $50 to eat dog shit, then you gave me back the same $50 to eat dog shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate dog shit for nothing." "That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $100!"