Links
Gigwork is a lie
Shawnta’s story exemplifies one of the reasons people turn to gig work: she lost her good union job at UPS as a data entry clerk because she had too many family health appointments to attend to. Her younger brother is autistic with a brain aneurysm. Her mother has problems with her knees and circulation. Her sister, after a bad accident, has a knee injury. She also sustains scoliosis and is currently managing an addiction to opioids. Shawnta herself has health issues to manage; she has Grave’s disease, a thyroid condition that causes her weight to fluctuate and brought on early menopause at the age of only thirty-three. While juggling medical appointments for four family members, including herself, it is no wonder that Shawnta cannot hold down a full-time job. That’s why she turned to the gig economy—though the twelve-hour warehousing shifts she picks up through the apps could hardly be called part time.
The Gig Is Up logicmag.io
From respected science journalism to LLM-generated click farming, an interesting analysis
While this is factual information (note: it’s actually rather hard to find the most up to date details about this) and so slightly harder to write in any other way, it raises another important issue: For what purpose are these explainers being written?
What business case is there to flood Google with new explainers when that information already exists, except to try and boost your website’s ranking? And if you’re trying to boost your website’s ranking with AI-generated content… let me tell you, you’re already tackling the problem the entirely wrong way.
Already 67 higher education institutions are undertaking redundancy and restructuring programmes. This number is expected to rise as softening demand from international students and high debt servicing costs risks put the sector under even more pressure.
Phillipson has said the government will not step in to prevent insolvencies and refused to commit to raising tuition fees for domestic students, which have, in effect, been frozen for more than a decade, despite pressure from the sector lobby group Universities UK.
UK universities regulator plans for looming insolvencies - Financial Times
"…phones are connectivity tools rather than attention-consuming blackholes, and people actually talk to each other."
“While everyone in Sunny seems to carry around a phone, for instance, they’re a lot different from modern smartphones. Inspired by the design of Japanese lighters from the 1960s, the devices are curvy rectangles that can flip open to reveal a screen. But hardly anyone on the show uses them that way. Instead, they pop an AirPods-style headphone in one ear (the phone doubles as an earbud case) and do almost everything via voice.”
I’ve watched the first three episodes and the different vision for communication is striking.
Apple’s Sunny imagines a cozy future where screens fade into the background - The Verge
Exciting new frontiers in ̶s̶c̶a̶m̶s̶ ̶ academic publishing
A new step has been added to the mind-boggling scam that is academic publishing:
- Conduct research (publicly funded)
- Write up research (publicly funded or academic volunteer)
- Peer review (academic volunteer)
- Publish for profit (corporate publishers)
- Pay for access (the public, universities and academics)
- New! Sell papers to train large language models (corporate publishers)
The process for open access is pretty much the same. The public pays or academics self-fund usurious open access article processing fees at Step 3.5.
Taylor and Francis Sells Authors’ Work to Microsoft for AI Training
“We are talking about thousands and thousands of kilometers of infrastructure between Europe and the United States and Asia. This is a network that is extremely hard to surveil, to monitor and to protect. This is infrastructure that is highly vulnerable to sabotage.”
A subsea cable went missing. Was Russia to blame? - Bloomberg
Fucking TikTok.
“In a similar vein, some posts featured a sycophantic, yet comedic, admiration for fascist leaders, presenting them as cute and loveable. In general, such memes seek to trivialise extremist content, not least by drawing from the comparative mainstream of meme culture. In the process, this content contributes to the broader memetic struggle waged by factions on the extreme right.”
Beyond Hitler and Mussolini: TikTok and the Adoration of Minor Fascist Ideologues
I’ve had two printers that outlived operating system support for them. I didn’t expect it would happen to sneakers.
It's the competence, stupid
Sharp observations from Ian Dunt:
“The trouble was that the government had no basic competence. It did not have the organisational proficiency to deliver on its stated aims. So Afghans were encouraged to send emails documenting their case which were simply never read. The tiny haphazard team of civil servants who did read some of them were not equipped with the specialist skills required to assess them. They did not even have a rudimentary understanding of Afghanistan’s ethnolinguistic groups. The men in charge - Dominic Rabb and Boris Johnson - did not have the kinds of minds which could handle the matter. So people were betrayed. They were left to the barbarism of the Taliban. They died. And all that is most admirable about this country and what it represents died with them, in the dust of Afghanistan.
This was by far the most shameful episode of the last 14 years of Tory government, but it is replicated in one form or another across the policy landscape: health, criminal justice, transport, you name it. The same process with the same outcome: incompetence followed by failure followed by national shame.”
14 years of Tory rule: Some shattered conclusions from a broken brain
Liquid3, an “urban photo-bioreactor” that a Serbian startup has developed to replace trees.
I, for one, welcome our new green slime overlords.
On "blood quantum", indigenous identity, and federally recognised tribes in the U.S.A.
Defined as the degree of “Indian blood” one must prove to their tribe in order to be considered a member of a tribe, this measure was historically (and still remains) crafted by colonial powers to regulate and ultimately reduce the populations of Native American Nations. Today, blood quantum is the most widely used way to record “membership,” affecting not just personal identity but also political and social rights.
I’ll Show You My Indian If You Show Me Yours esquire.com
Archiving...