ceoln @ceoln@qoto.org

@futurebird Over on Facebook there's a group devoted to "liminal spaces", and the group seems divided between people who are freaked out by them and people who find them comforting. I think some of the comfort of liminality, when it exists, comes from the lack of stress, that feeling that you're in a place where nothing is expected of you and nobody cares that you're there, so you don't have to perform.

I think we're focused on the wrong thing when we look at what tech works for a company like Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.

We should be looking at what tech works when you *don't* have a small army of staff engineers optimizing it. I want to know what I can scale *without* paying someone a half million dollar salary to do it.

There should be more case studies on things that don't have a billion-dollar company propping them up, humming along quietly on a cheap-ass VPS somewhere.

Doomscrolling? That’s silly. Put that phone away, go outside and EXPERIENCE the doom!

Tip of the to Dr. Timnit Gebru and Dr. Émile P. Torres on their paper: https://www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/

Broad, deep, and one of the most important pieces of research completed this decade—an essential read for anyone who seeks to understand not just the underpinnings of AI but also a significant percentage of modern technologies and the people who drive them.

The TESCREAList notion of technology's "purity" and associated eugenics-driven ideas of AI are already impacting the everyday lives of billions

As tax day gets closer, reminder that Republicans cut taxes for corporations and the wealthiest Americans in 2017.

Since then, the wealth of the obscenely rich has nearly doubled.

But over half of the rest of us are living paycheck to paycheck.

Because there is not gender parity on Mastodon and I exceeding get the impression the balance is way off, I am going to remind men that throwing the term “rape” around casually in my comments is unwelcome.

A rare off-topic post, but this one's important. To all of you that lived through this in the 80s and 90s, the end is finally in sight. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/hiv-cure-cell-test-dna-b2515169.html

Behold the pyramid scheme known as cryptocurrency mining. Man allegedly consumed $3.5 million of computing resources from Amazon and Microsoft to generate $1 million worth of digital coin.

The real crime here is all the energy consumed.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/nebraska-man-indicted-multi-million-dollar-cryptojacking-scheme

I've never had a discussion about education with a working scientist who was not painfully aware of the lack of the teaching of *how* science is done at most schools, and in many college-level courses. The fact is, that to do this well would require extensive retraining of teachers; I also don't think it is compatible with the current goal of basic education in most countries, which is to raise standardised test scores.

"What is apparent from the surveys is that a better explanation of the nature of science—that it is revised as new data surface—would have a strong positive effect on public trust. Because scientists are so aware of this feature, it is often taken for granted that the public understands this too."

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp7153?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_content=alert&utm_campaign=SCIeToc&et_rid=33954923&et_cid=5173502

This is nice.

I swear, in the long term the most useful part of my tech education—which includes a master's degree in computer science from 1990—has turned out to be reading comp.risks religiously since the late 80s and watching every new grift and scam and dark design pattern and type of malware on the internet emerge in realtime.

I hate that in this century everyone needs the paranoia and skill set of a 90s network security administrator.

@Cvwarren @loren

That one has 16 legs. Isopod packages tend to be logic gates which have 14 legs.