Dave T-W @davoloid@qoto.org

(The general lesson I've learned is that when customers tell you that they want to give you money for something, it's definitely worth listening. The answer should not always be YES because sometimes what they want is a total distraction. But listening is always a good idea.)

good morning and welcome to 2023

#Finnish lesson of the day: hosua. It is a verb that means moving in a frazzled and disorganised, frantic fashion, producing lesser results or accidents.
"Lopettakaa tuo hosuminen!" could be translated as "stop fucking around, calm down and do it properly!"

Furthermore: it's a synonym for hätäillä, the verb form of hätä. Hätä means many things depending on context, but also conundrum, dangerous deficit, state of risk, alarm, etc. Nälänhätä means famine, hätätila means general alert, kusihätä means a desperate need to pee.

But also! If you say "juosten kustu" it means something that was done terribly in a rush, but also literally "a thing that has similar results to peeing while running" which is quite expressive when talking about code, managerial decision making or household chores

Just seen a Voter ID ad on TV, didn't realise it was actually happening

"It is a grave #mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. #Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, #survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage."

- Ian McGuire, The North Water

#quotes

@freemo So... a website that lets you build a circuit diagram and then simulates the circuits including oscilloscope output? That's freakin' crazy! My dad would have thought he died and gone to heaven. Except, well, he DID die, but he worked for Howard W. Sams and likely could see it coming someday.

Ah, the tools with which I would torment question asking curious children if we had them! Only I'd actually spend time with my kid and encourage finding and discovering answers. I see tools like this with the wonder of memories so long ago of my dad's tools to do this for real with a bread board.

You don’t become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool. This is called the Geezer’s Paradox

So the people at Koko— an online mental health intervention laminate that licenses itself out to other platforms to make use of (Tumblr, facebook, etc.) have apparently just admitted that they tested gpt-3 assisted mental health interventions on some 4,000 people in mental health crisis, without said people's informed consent.

See here: http://web.archive.org/web/20230107210632/https://twitter.com/RobertRMorris/status/1611450197707464706

And followup "Clarification" thread here: http://web.archive.org/web/20230107191117/https://twitter.com/RobertRMorris/status/1611775514590740480

Now, at this point, I really shouldn't have to explain to people why this is… very very bad on a number of levels, but to those who maybe still don't get it, and to anyone ever even THINKING of doing anything like this, PLEASE read the "Digital Futures in Mind" Report:

https://automatingmentalhealth.cc/recommendations

This report was funded by the @mozilla foundation, and coordinated by Piers Gooding, with further authorship by Jonah Bossewitch, Lydia X. Z. Brown, Leah Harris, James Horton, Simon Katterl, Keris Myrick, Kelechi Ubozoh, and Alberto Vásquez Encalada (and by way of full disclosure, i wrote the foreword).

It covers the promises, pitfalls, and outright depredations of the Existing interventions in the "AI" assisted mental health space, while also examining and interrogating the proposed use cases and laying bare their implications.

There are several things in the references you should take in, too, but if nothing else PLEASE take the time to read the report itself.

This is a mess that didn't need to happen, and definitely doesn't need to be repeated.

Want to play a game? It's a choose-your-own-adventure story about a leader facing a series of challenges. You, dear people of Mastodon, will determine the path that the story takes based on the choices you make in the polls. I'll leave each poll up for about an hour (longer overnight my time). The story will probably take 20 or so toots to tell, so it will likely take 2-3 days.

Interested?

JONATHAN'S ANNUAL SPACE SUMMARY:
https://planet4589.org/space/papers/space22.pdf

Rev 1.0 (because I am sure there will still be errors to fix..)

It's pretty remarkable how much Elon's Twitter takeover is a textbook fascist takeover: leftists immediately purged, censorship regime imposed behind the scenes, secret police rooting out enemies, right wing terrorism supported by the state, etc and how uncannily similar the mainstream liberal response of pretending nothing is wrong is, even with *very low* costs of walking out the door and refusing to collaborate.