Ben Harris-Roxas

“For Weizenbaum, judgment involves choices that are guided by values. These values are acquired through the course of our life experience and are necessarily qualitative: they cannot be captured in code. Calculation, by contrast, is quantitative. It uses a technical calculus to arrive at a decision. Computers are only capable of calculation, not judgment. This is because they are not human, which is to say, they do not have a human history – they were not born to mothers, they did not have a childhood, they do not inhabit human bodies or possess a human psyche with a human unconscious – and so do not have the basis from which to form values…

Seeing humans and computers as interchangeable also meant that humans had begun to conceive of themselves as computers, and so to act like them. They mechanised their rational faculties by abandoning judgment for calculation, mirroring the machine in whose reflection they saw themselves.”

Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI - The Guardian

European colonies became the frontiers of exploration, extraction and production of tropical plants. They also became captive markets for exports, where colonial states were able to establish monopolies and manipulate import-export taxes. The botanical sciences aided the colonial enterprise and were, in turn, organized by it. The Long Shadow Of Colonial Science

An interesting and worthwhile piece. I’ve been increasingly concerned that social research remains largely colonial in its outlook: an obsession with frontiers; ongoing extractivism (usually, but not solely, in terms of data); deep-rooted and largely uninterrogated beliefs that there should be a power imbalance between subjects and investigators.

We talk a big game in terms of decolonising and ethical practices but reality still falls a long way short.

In 2019, a Financial Times investigation declared the London underground “the dirtiest place in the city”, with parts of the Central Line between Bond Street and Notting Hill Gate having more than eight times the WHO limit for PM2.5s. Tube dust is particularly high in iron oxide from the metal brakes and rails, but it’s not only mechanical. “A lot of the dust in this environment is coming from the passengers themselves,” Alno Lesch, operational manager for track cleaning, told the Financial Times, pulling out a black tangle from under the train platform. Human hair. Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world - The Guardian

All I can say is yikes.

On the enshittefication of fonts.

That optimism, however, will likely be tested as Monotype begins dabbling with AI. The company already owns WhatTheFont, an app that uses deep learning to identify fonts from photographs, and it’s added an AI-powered font-pairing feature.

Monotype says it plans to use machine learning and AI to improve how users discover new fonts on its platform — an innovation that will undoubtedly affect foundries, though it remains to be seen exactly how.

Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly - The Hustle

Official figures from that day indicate that of the roughly 1,700 migrants who attempted to cross the border, 133 were able to claim asylum; 470 individuals, like Basir, entered Spanish territory, but were forcibly returned to Morocco. At least 37 people died, and 77 people remain unaccounted for. The event quickly came to be known as “the Melilla massacre”.

The Melilla massacre: how a Spanish enclave in Africa became a deadly flashpoint - The Guardian

“With remarkable humility and a relatable sadness Wang confronted the fact that it is much harder than he had thought to get a handle on reality and to improve it, especially in the face of political ambition. He wrote in 1979 that “the ideal of a ‘strong country with rich people’ needs to be combined with socialist ideals so as to avoid the pitfall of saving the country without saving the people and to achieve a society that is both prosperous and equal.” Wang’s faith in Marx and Mao was political, personal, and intellectual, and all three strands are woven through his philosophical work and his automated logic in ways that are deeply tied to his lived experience of being a Chinese logician in America navigating the cleavages of the Cold War. In this way, Wang proves his own point: reasoning, even in its most formal mode of logical inference and formalism, is not universal but is, rather, the product of the history of one’s mind and body.”

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/725135 journals.uchicago.edu

USyd’s ties to the Australian gambling industry honisoit.com

University of Sydney establishes Centre of Excellence in Gambling Research sydney.edu.au

austgamingcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2023-08/226A1503.PDF.pdf austgamingcouncil.org.au

AMA tells University of Sydney to ‘read the room’ over research funded by gambling industry theguardian.com

There’s a fair bit of human resources nonsense in this article (quiet quitting, leadership jargon, etc.) but the racism described is real.

“Jobs are built on social capital. We could miss out on those happy hour opportunities,” Barton said. But he’s willing to sacrifice the in-office networking. “Honestly,” he said, “I would trade that in for my peace of mind.”

Throughout the pandemic, survey after survey showed what some workers of color have known for years: Workplace politics and discrimination can make the office an undesirable place to be.

latimes.com

“Bhutan hopes to be next great baseball country”

This is interesting, and highlights the dizzying pace of change in Bhutan. These sort of scenes would have been unimaginable when I was last there in the pre-COVID era.

It also makes me a bit sad because darts and archery were so dominant in Bhutan, and so different to the forms of those sports in other countries.

One of the key markers of Web 2.0, in retrospect, was not the adoption of mobile, though that is certainly part of it. It was, instead, the intermediation of most interactions by algorithm.
— Read on www.theverge.com/2023/7/22/23803538/google-facebook-myspace-internet-culture-web-dot-com-crash

Across the globe, thousands of coal fires are burning. Nearly impossible to reach and extinguish once they get started, the underground blazes threaten towns and roads, poison the air and soil and, some say, worsen global warming. The menace is growing: mines open coal beds to oxygen; human-induced fires or spontaneous combustion provides the spark.
— Read on www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fire-in-the-hole-77895126/

The largest twenty-one companies analyzed would disburse $5,444 billion over the period 2025–2050.
— Read on www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(23)00198-7