Tell me your favourite blogs and why, briefly. My collection of RSS feeds needs pruning and replanting to encourage new (mental) growth
🌱 🧠
"It’s a name that speaks to contemporary forms of neocolonialism and climate profiteering, like the real estate agents who have been cold-calling Lahaina residents who have lost everything to the fire and prodding them to sell their ancestral lands rather than wait for compensation."
Why was there no water to fight the fire in Maui? | Naomi Klein and Kapuaʻala Sproat theguardian.com
Links on the links between the gambling industry and USyd research
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
A rogues gallery of investors, ranging from Binance to Andreessen Horowitz to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud to… Jack Dorsey (why?)
Here’s who helped Elon Musk buy Twitter - The Washington Post
Worthwhile piece in Rolling Stone about the many women and people of colour who have been warning us about the dangers of AI for a long time.
"Researchers — including many women of color — have been saying for years that these systems interact differently with people of color and that the societal effects could be disastrous: that they’re a fun-house-style distorted mirror magnifying biases and stripping out the context from which their information comes; that they’re tested on those without the choice to opt out; and will wipe out the jobs of some marginalized communities.
Gebru and her colleagues have also expressed concern about the exploitation of heavily surveilled and low-wage workers helping support AI systems; content moderators and data annotators are often from poor and underserved communities, like refugees and incarcerated people. Content moderators in Kenya have reported experiencing severe trauma, anxiety, and depression from watching videos of child sexual abuse, murders, rapes, and suicide in order to train ChatGPT on what is explicit content. Some of them take home as little as $1.32 an hour to do so.
In other words, the problems with AI aren’t hypothetical. They don’t just exist in some SkyNet-controlled, Matrix version of the future. The problems with it are already here. "
These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI rollingstone.com
“We’d invited the Prime Minister and the opposition leader to accept the Uluru Statement as a bark painting, like politicians always have. But our old people said, ‘No, they're going to take it and put it on the wall in Parliament House and they're not going to implement what's in there. We have to go out on the red dirt, stare down the camera and invite Australians to walk with us, like they did in 1967, in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.'"
Remote work as a break from workplace racism
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.
🖖 While I like it, Strange New Worlds has jarring tone shifts between episodes.
Alternating hijinks and PTSD is a very 2020s version of mythos and monster of the week.
Brave New Word? A fun little web game when you guess when neologisms were coined, via waxy.org
Not from the game, but I’m always amazed the phrase “only Nixon could go to China” predates him actually going to China.
Baseball in Bhutan
“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.
