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I grew up in a town where there were several Aboriginal deaths in custody in the ‘80s. The final report of the RCIADIC was released 34 years ago.
Nothing’s changed.
Western Sydney University students and alumni emailed to say their degrees had been “revoked”. These incidents are damaging because they mirror the officious and depersonalised tone of so much comms. If acting in more human and humane ways was the norm, these incidents wouldn’t be so harmful.
I’m proud to announce my new role as Chief Content Officer for SlopApp and I look forward to the many challenges of the role.
“OpenAI Is Preparing to Launch a Social App for AI-Generated Videos”
A small way of showing your support for students and staff at UTS:
Petition · Save UTS Public Health – For Students, Communities, and Equity
Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review
The ever-diminishing set of use cases for LLMs…
A Croakey post by me: Calls for action to stop public health cuts at University of Technology Sydney
Me 🫴 The Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers 🦋 is this real? (It’s very well done)
Three influential policy groups that together receive almost $20m in donations a year refuse to reveal their key donors, including those whose commercial interests may overlap with their public advocacy campaigns. The progressive Australia Institute, the right-leaning Centre for Independent Studies and the conservative Institute of Public Affairs argue they cannot reveal their donors without exposing them to attack from political opponents.
Slack. Good on Grattan, CEDA and Per Capita for being more honest about their funding.
Reported by Henry Belot for _The Guardian _
Prof Michelle Arrow is one of the finest writers on Australian society and how we’ve ended up where we are. In this piece for The Conversation she tackles a timley issue: what are Australian universities for?
David Stratton’s impact
Very sad to hear about David Stratton’s death, he had an outsized influence. I read his words almost every day via the David and Margaret - At The Movies Letterboxd account, which lovingly documents their reviews of almost 9,000 films (thanks to user Beaver for this amazing reference).
‘Giant in his field’: Legendary film critic David Stratton dies aged 85 – ABC
Leaked Treasury advice focuses on cutting red tape and “green tape” as outcomes of Labor's upcoming productivity round table - ABC News
This is in contrast to the measures that might actually boost productivity rather than simply returning companies to operating profits (not that they ever left).
The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius
I think of the carbon emissions of each plane that lands here. The emissions of each of our 106 hotels. Air conditioning units struggling to cool rooms in peak season. Tourists pouring themselves a bath, cleansing themselves of their 12-hour flight. Ignorant that the rest of us have to live on only four to eight hours of water flowing through our taps most days in high summer. Tourists, their sunscreen-coated bodies plunging into the lagoon, leaving a film on the water, poisoning corals. Tourists, delighting in our bathwater lagoon, look it’s so crystal-clear you can see the bottom, a dead zone framed in buoys, cleansed of most of its creatures.
The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius by Ariel Saramandi for The Dial
Deskilling through A.I. use a real issue, and probably occurs more quickly than we perceive as users.
Erin Cook’s _Flat White, Kopi Susu_ newsletter is fantastic.