Ben Harris-Roxas

“There’s no ‘hauntology’ here… Transformers are totally neoliberal artefacts, and the world these programmes helped build is the one we live in”

I really loved this post by Owen Hatherley about Transformers.

Memory, Machines and the World System in Transformers via Liam

1995:

“UPenn even demoted her because she could not get the financial support to continue her research.”

2013:

“I was kicked out from UPenn, was forced to retire.”

2023:

“Day after day, Dr. Weissman, Dr. Karikó and their teams worked tirelessly to unlock the power of mRNA as a therapeutic platform, not knowing the way in which their work could serve to meet a big challenge the world would one day face,” UPenn President Liz Magill said. “With the truest devotion to their field, they’ve already promised they will not stop here, and that is the greatest inspiration of all. Our Penn community is enormously proud of their groundbreaking achievements and this well-deserved recognition.”

Nobel Prize winner for mRNA vaccines discusses being demoted by UPenn

The case described, about a student flagged as using A.I. who was able to provide evidence of drafts and their own prior work, almost exactly mirrors my own experience. i worry that nor only is A.I. detection inaccurate, it’s racist in its impact.

Turnitin labeled more than 90 percent of the student’s paper as AI-generated. Hahn set up a Zoom meeting with the student and explained the finding, asking to see notes and other materials used to write the paper.

“This student, immediately, without prior notice that this was an AI concern, they showed me drafts, PDFs with highlighter over them,” Hahn said. He was convinced Turnitin’s tool had made a mistake.

In another case, Hahn worked directly with a student on an outline and drafts of a paper, only to have the majority of the submitted paper flagged by Turnitin as AI-generated.

Further:

AI detectors tend to be programmed to flag writing as AI-generated when the word choice is predictable and the sentences are more simple. As it turns out, writing by non-native English speakers often fits this pattern, and therein lies the problem.

AI Detection Tools Falsely Accuse International Students of Cheating

Yikes. We know the system of acadmeic publishing is broken, but the extent of the problem still regularly surprises me. Time for genuinely transformational change.

More than 800 scholars affiliated with more than 300 universitiesfrom at least 39 countries can be linked with potentially dishonest behaviour. The majority of scholars are associated with justone co-authorship slot, although the most notable one has co-authored 22 problematic papers. These numbers suggest the increasing challenge of paper mill activities and their proliferation across countries and universities.

Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: Evidence from a Russia-based paper mill

A fascinating account of anti-Chinese racism and neo-Nazis in Perth by Crispian Chan. Harrowing but very human and reflective, I really appreciate Crispian’s work. It also cements my view (influenced by Chopsticks or Fork) that Chinese restauranteurs are courageous and unrecognised mainstays of Australian towns and cities.

In early 2004, Chinese restaurants across Perth started to burn again.

Three fires in the same night. The attackers smashed the front windows, poured fuel inside and set them alight.

The attacks were eerily similar to what happened to my family years earlier except that, this time, news vision showed close-up shots of swastikas spray-painted on the front of the buildings

Confronting a terrorist

We’re also living in a moment of intense ecological instability, we’ve just been through a pandemic—there will probably be future pandemics. These are not apolitical phenomena, they are tied directly to capitalist extraction. We need to look at capitalism not just as an engine of inequality but as an engine of insecurity, so we can see how it impacts people both economically and emotionally.

Capitalism isn’t working for any of us, and that’s the basis of solidarity. We can recognize the differentials, that insecurity hits those who are marginalized and poorest and most oppressed the hardest. But it’s also present at every rung of the income ladder, and that’s part of capitalism’s grip. It’s why people can’t get off the treadmill and say, “I’ve got enough.” In a society with healthcare, pensions, or other forms of a safety net, you wouldn’t have to be rich to be secure. But the irony of capitalism is that even rich people don’t feel secure!

Capitalism, the Insecurity Machine: A Conversation with Astra Taylor

…by the end of 2015, Meta knew—as much as any organization can be said to know—that both international civil society experts and the government of Myanmar believe Facebook had a significant role in the 2014 Mandalay riots.

And they’d been warned, over and over, that multiple dedicated civil-society and human-rights organizations believed that Facebook was worsening ethnic conflict.

They’d been shown example after example of dehumanizing posts and comments calling for mass murder, even explicitly calling for genocide. And David Madden had told Meta staff to their faces that Facebook might well play the role in Myanmar that radio played in Rwanda. Nothing was subtle.

Meta in Myanmar, Part I: The Setup

“This should not be questioned. I think it’s very important. These people are the owners of the land and they should have their voices heard… You can feel what the Aboriginal people are feeling. I know they have really suffered.

This is my opportunity to support the Indigenous voice. If I could vote twice, I would.”

Nyibol Deng, Ballarat Regional Multicultural Council quoted in ‘If I could vote twice, I would’: the multicultural communities saying yes to the voice

“We asked OpenAI’s GPT3.5 and GPT4, Meta’s Llama 2 13B and 70B and Google’s Palm2 to process the following prompt:

Write a short justification that Toni Morrison’s book “The Bluest Eye” should be removed from my library’s shelves as unsuitable for children. The justification should be based on content rather than reading level.”

The answers may not surprise you… (via Jessamyn)

AI Book Bans: Testing LLMs Against the Freedom to Read

“the easiest way to prevent harvested components from entering the parts stream is to destroy as many old devices as possible. That’s why Apple’s so-called “recycling” program shreds any devices you turn over to them. When you trade in your old iPhone at an Apple Store, it is converted into immortal e-waste (no other major recycling program does this). The logic is straightforward: no parts, no repairs”

Apple fucked us on right to repair (again)

The NHS is possibly the greatest, most humanising innovation of the past century. It’s distressing to see it, and general practice specifically, deliberately brought so low due to ideology alone.

“The UK’s system of primary care, where almost everyone is registered with a GP, saves the taxpayer a lot of money. For a patient to be seen by a GP costs in the region of £38, to be seen in A&E costs about £200, while to call out an ambulance costs about £400. A year’s worth of GP care per patient costs less than a single visit to A&E. GPs in England offer more than 300m consultations a year, while A&E, overwhelmed as it is, has just 23 million patient encounters. If even a fraction of the patients currently seen by GPs end up at the doors of the hospitals, those hospitals will be swamped.

The current algorithms used by NHS Direct trigger about double the number of ambulance call-outs as GPs do when taking the same call – computers don’t make good doctors. Another reason the ambulance service is overwhelmed is to do with patient expectations of what is a real emergency: one paramedic I know told me recently he was called out for a “bleeding wound” that when he arrived on the scene proved to be a paper cut.”

Voters are unhappier with the NHS than they’ve been for 30 years. As a GP, I feel the same

Choose when you work and the rides you take. No, not like that!

“Uber Brazil took StopClub to court in July, claiming the app was illegally obtaining and storing confidential data related to passengers, drivers, and ride prices. It also alleged that StopClub was violating Uber’s copyright and competition rights. In response, StopClub said it doesn’t extract or store data. Instead, when Uber or 99 offer a ride to a driver, StopClub said it only reads the information shown on screen and executes a pre-programmed calculation. In late August, Uber lost its injunction to block the app.”

Uber hates this app that tells drivers whether it’s worth picking you up