mneme @mneme@qoto.org

"ExxonMobil CEO Depressed After Realizing Earth Could End Before They Finish Extracting All The Oil"
https://www.theonion.com/exxonmobil-ceo-depressed-after-realizing-earth-could-en-1829656820
Satire, but I do often wonder what goes on in such people's heads. On the one hand, I think that very few people are self-consciously #evil - most bad things are done by people who somehow believe they are doing the right thing. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that you can become CEO of a massive oi company without being an extremely smart person. #climatechange

"Amazon built an #AI tool to hire people but had to shut it down because it was discriminating against women"
http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-built-ai-to-hire-people-discriminated-against-women-2018-10?r=US&IR=T

Pretty sure there is something missing from this article: presumably the system was discriminating against #women because Amazon was discriminating against women. Systems like this learn by example - if it was wrongly classifying women's CVs as "no hire" this was because the training data it was given did the same. The number of women at the company seems like a distraction - this isn't normally something that causes problems with these systems. If women's CVs were all labelled as "hire" in the training set, the system would learn that and mimic it, even if they were rare.

(Note that, I'm not pillorying Amazon for this - I have no reason to believe that employment #discrimination is particularly worse at Amazon than anywhere else. This is proving to be a hard problem to crack even when companies do try.)

"There Are People Who Think The West Invaded Iraq Over a Stargate"
https://www.vice.com/sv/article/533gxx/there-are-people-who-think-the-west-invaded-iraq-over-a-stargate
Wake up, sheeple!

It succeeds on two counts. First of all, it successfully imagines a near-future tech revolution in a relatively believable way, which I think is difficult to do. The details of the tech require some suspension-of-disbelief, but this is very neatly contained - everything that builds on top of that is very well painted, even for a slightly nit-picky geek like me. Secondly, the portrayal of life in a (fictional), poverty stricken developing country near China is fascinating. I'd love to hear from someone who has more experience of similar places than I do, as I wonder if it's as lifelike as it seems to my naive mind. Perhaps a one or two of the subplots felt a bit unnecessary and misplaced, otherwise this would have been a 5-star book (hard to go into without spoilers). ★★★★☆

"Coding is not ‘fun’, it’s technically and ethically complex"
https://aeon.co/ideas/coding-is-not-fun-it-s-technically-and-ethically-complex
Some very odd framing in this article. We shouldn't oversimplify #coding, but saying that coders need to be superhuman is more damaging than saying it's easy. The comparison to structural engineering is silly. Plenty of structural engineers cut their teeth on lego, which is fun and simple. Being a good professional coder *is* hard (but not superhumanly so!) - the reason the structural engineering analogy fails is because the easy and fun version of coding is still coding - it's just coding with less rigour and bureaucracy. That aside, I very much like: "#Programming is not a detail that can be left to ‘technicians’ under the false pretence that their choices will be ‘scientifically neutral’. Societies are too complex: the algorithmic is #political."

There's an increasingly bold mouse living in my house, which I caught antagonising my pet rats this morning. That's really not meant to happen, mice are supposed to avoid areas that smell of rats. So much for that theory.

"Girl, 8, pulls a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in Sweden"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45753455
Act of desperation I know, but can we assume that this is some sort of sign and put this girl in charge of everything? Our other attempts to govern the human race seem to be ending is complete failure.

I feel like a ridiculously simple creature sometimes. All of my tasks for today were very short, so I get to move a lot of tickets to the "Done" column. This makes me feel far more pleased with myself than is remotely rational.

"#Trump mocks Christine Blasey Ford at Mississippi rally"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/02/trump-mocks-christine-blasey-ford-at-mississippi-rally
Ashamed to belong to the same species as this creature.

Despite increasing concern about #climatechange, we continue to burn more and more #oil each year.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-oil-demand-peak/now-near-100-million-bpd-when-will-oil-demand-peak-idUKKCN1M01TC

Are half the population of the Western world working bullshit, pointless jobs that contribute nothing to human society?
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/bullshitjobsandtheyokeofmanagerialfeudalismopenfuture
My intuition says, "Probably yes". But I'd like to see some better evidence. Is there some more objective way we can measure the value that someone's #work contributes to #society? The current metric is "If people will pay for it, it has value", so if we can't improve on that we have to accept that these jobs are not bullshit.

@rixx I like what you have to say about #scifi so I'm going to follow you! Your profile requests an introduction upon follow, this is it. I read Roccannon's World recently and really enjoyed it. City of Illusions is close to the top of my to-read pile, which I see you quite enjoyed in August. #amreading Air by Geoff Ryman at the moment.

Does antimatter fall down or up?
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/09/22/physicists-investigate-why-matter-and-antimatter-are-not-mirror-images
Spoiler alert: Probably: down... but maybe: up
#science #physics #cern

Now begins another week of hard labour down the #cloud mines.

Difficult #meditation session today after a heavy weekend, and skipping a day yesterday. Kept flipping between chattering mind and nodding off, but never managed to catch the sweet spot in between. Managed to sit poorly and suffered some discomfort as a result, which I tried to explore productively but was tempted to give up many times. Pushed myself through the full 39 minutes I'd set, but only just. This is why I shouldn't skip days, tomorrow will almost certainly be much easier! #DailyMeds