
2025-06-30 14:27:47
Dallas Cowboys' major NFL offseason change could be 'better fit' than expected https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-major-nfl-offseason-change-could-be-better-fit-than-expected
Dallas Cowboys' major NFL offseason change could be 'better fit' than expected https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-major-nfl-offseason-change-could-be-better-fit-than-expected
The woman who could impede RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda
The public would be better-off with a serious person such as Susan Monarez at the CDC’s helm.
The Senate should confirm her, and fast.
Monarez, meanwhile, needs to recognize the burden she is accepting.
Being CDC director is not an easy job, even in less contentious times.
Having to report to Kennedy makes it incalculably harder.
Lives will depend on whether Monarez resists Kennedy’s efforts to …
Calamus 45 Full of life, sweet-blooded, compact, visible
A remarkably effective poem for the end of the cluster. Whitman talking directly to us, the reader, about the import of his poems. And with some ambition: "To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence".
But even better, he's horny for us:
Now it is you ... seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and become your lover
The poet is imagining us, his future readers, thinking about how we will want to be his lover. What a lusty man! Whitman is not modest.
I love it. And it's a fitting end to this series. I've greatly enjoyed reading them. Over the past 45 days I've learned better how to read Whitman, to understand his poems. And to relate to them in at least one simple way, teasing out the gayest and sexiest parts of these poems. Making them fun for myself.
I'm not quite done yet. I hope to identify my favorites of the group. I may also try my hand at reading one or two aloud.
Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and this more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of manservant caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.
Hello!
I have a happy favour to ask.
Last year, I had a US intern working with us and she now is looking for help that you- good reader of this account- could give.
(She needs academic survey participants)
Check out her flyer below, click the link, and please RT
http…
Richard Murphy provides an excellent characterisation of where western society was at its best (for most people, but not everyoe), and how it fell into the increasingly horrible situation it's in now... and how we could return to a 'better way' - what he refers to as 'mixed markets'. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lrQh0_B…
rant on software dev practices
What is it with P5js and virtually all its ecosystem (like Q5js) that, still today, didn't manage to _properly_ package their libraries to be distributed and used via package managers?
Same with their insistence to push global resources and state everywhere... and of course virtually not documenting any of the truly delicate details, just the trivial stuff that could be auto-discovered by relying on auto-complete tools.
I kind of understand wanting to keep the vanilla experience alive, making it "easy" for novices... but that shouldn't be at odds with more "professionalized" production pipelines, at least *not that much*.
For example, with Q5js:
- The NPM packages could be mentioned in their documentation (they are not, even though they are official)
- The NPM packages could define proper exports (same for the JS modules themselves), not forcing us to rely on relative paths to files in node_modules... 🤦
- Globals could be at least namespaced... of course, it would be much, much better if they didn't exist at all.
I'm writing this in 2025, not 1993... and I'm... "triggered".
At this point I'll have to check if I have any other neuro-condition beyond ADHD that makes me "obsessed" with technical flaws, because it seems to be a "me problem" when either virtually nobody sees that as a huge collection of fatal design flaws... or they see it and don't care at all.
“What AI sells is vastly different from what it delivers, particularly what it delivers out of the box.”
The post gives some great context on the study of “the difference between work-as-imagined (WAI) and work-as-done (WAD),” and says:
“If what we have to do to be productive with LLMs is to add a lot of scaffolding and invest effort to gain important but poorly defined skills, we should be able to assume that what we’re sold and what we get are rather different things. That gap implies that better designed artifacts could have better affordances, and be more appropriate to the task at hand.”
5/
So farewell then Pinetime Watch 🪦.
It isn't showing any signs of charging. even after a completely-flat battery reset. Last hope gone.
Now nobody at all is running my custom software I think, and I have no way to fix the bugs.
Could replace it, but I'm not really paying any attention to the things it measures anyway. Heartrate is too unreliable to be useful and steps seems likely to be counting my leg-jiggles since I tend to hit 10,000 most days without trying or leaving the flat.
The software which tracks my time and mood is probably better running on the phone really. Easier to add notes and detail. Can't really input text from a watch. Location data can be added in ways the watch couldn't.
So back to not wearing a watch at all I think. Who needs it now we all carry pocket watches with internet and telephony.
#pineTime #smartWatch
Burnout leave, day negative 13:
‣ Half of me wants to rip myself to shreds with self-criticism for things I could have done better
‣ Half of me resents that, through my life so far (independent of recent events), the world hasn't been the best place for me to grow and be the best person I can be
‣ Half of me wants to accept both of the above and find the most realistic (and inevitably imperfect) path forward (ACT therapy style)
‣ Half of me is grumbling that these are…
I've been a sportsball coach for a few years now. The kids can be maddeningly distracted, but for the most it's fun getting them to see things in the game they hadn't seen before and helping them get better. But holy shit I could do without the parents (and the opposing coaches) who take it all way too seriously. This is a game. These are kids. Can't we just shut our traps and let them enjoy it?
The Netherlands is having it's third complete shutdown of all passenger trains tomorrow in the entire country.
The strikes are caused by the employees wages having a big gap with inflation. The NS management doesn't want to pay this gap. The government will not help.
I'm sure there is some huge car project somewhere in the Netherlands that could be killed to invest in better train service. But it will not be.
I dread because I don't have a lot of hope that th…
@… yeah, you’re right — the numbers are aria-hidden. I could modify the component to have the line content embedded in the `<ul>` (but not visible) and hide the primary element from screen readers — that would be better for `<pre>` maybe but not textarea!
Last year, we bought a collection of 17 Georgia paintings by 19th- and 20th-century artists, many of whom are lesser known. Even the ones who are better known, like #NellChoateJones, aren't exactly _well_ known. We're excited to start studying these works and learning about the Georgia scenes many of them show.
It is a week until the grand Kim Jong Un, oops I mean FFOTUS imperial parade.
(How could I conflate Kim Jong Un's parade with the FFOTUS one? - North Korea does a much better job of putting on mass tributes.)
Anyway, I do hope that DC Metro workers and Uber/Lyft drivers take a sick day off as many of the parade goers will be anti-vaxers with active, infectious Covid or Measles.
Don't forget that on the 14th you should arrive mid-day to your local Metro stop, park in…
Cycling question: trying out saddles, in the UK
UK cycling people, is there somewhere you'd go to sit on different saddles to test if they're comfortable? Is that a thing?
I've worked out that my (default came-with-the-bike) saddle isn't the right shape for me: it's giving me an achy tailbone, as well as I think being a bit too narrow for optimal sit-bone comfort.
For context, I'm an "occasional cyclist for pleasure and/or practical reasons", shall we say. No ambition to be super fast.
Looking around online, I think I want something more like the Rido R2 or one of the Selle ones, shaped to have air under the tailbone area. Or maybe even a noseless one like the Spongy Wonder, though I don't like the look of how the metal frame sticks out at the front of those.
What's the chances a shop would have more than one of those and a willingness to get them out for a test sit? Or, better still, is there a loan scheme anywhere, so you can actually "test drive" them for a bit? Or do people usually just buy and be willing to sell again?
I'm in Nottingham, and I know there are bike shops I could get to, but I'm not seeing "come in and try all these saddles, we'll help you to find the right one" kinds of messaging.
Could also potentially travel elsewhere at some point if it turns out there's some kind of "best place in the country for that question".
Advice welcome!
#cycling #BikeTooter #AskFedi #UK
Me: if I go through Września, I'll be 5 minutes earlier in Poznań, and I'll have a better chance of catching a transfer. But I'd have to run to catch the train to Września.
Me a minute later: the Września – Poznań train is delayed. No point in running, let's just go straight to Poznań.
Me at Poznań Wschód station: oh, the delayed train from Września goes straight to Leszno, so it is my transfer.
Fortunately, our train went first, so I could easily transfer at the main station.
Speculative Design in Spiraling Time: Methods and Indigenous HCI
James Eschrich, Cole McMullen, Sarah Sterman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10229 https://
I was bored and I made this. It could be better.
Everything is made with #inkscape except the logo 'The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening'.
#nintendo #linksawakening
You know what would be really cool? A #quantifiedself person influence monitor. Say I have a #Fitbit and Joe has a Fitbit, we could have them detect when we are in proximity (if both people agreed) and then it would let us know over time how being around the other person influenced us - e.g. did heart rate variability increase or decrease (do they relax us or cause stress), did we burn more calories (maybe we usually go on hikes together), did we sleep better that night, and so on.
There are definitely people in my life who I'm pretty sure have significant effects on me in both directions, it'd be awesome to quantify them.
It would also be cool if one could do this without data sharing - e.g. maybe one presses a button on ones device to indicate one has entered x's presence and again when one has exited...
Honestly, I'd totally forget to do this...so something passive would be better - e.g. when you want to start tracking the next time you are around someone you press a button and it scans for electronic signatures and identifies Bluetooth etc. uniquely so that when you are around then it auto knows and can record...
The latter raises issues of #consent and #privacy...I'm not sure how/if one could do this in an ethical manner...but I'd like to have it 😂
Jagmeet Singh deserved a lot better than he got from Canada considering what he endured.
"Singh told reporters in April that police had advised him in the winter of 2023 that his life could be in danger. They did not tell him who was behind the threat but he said the implication was that it was a foreign government.
He said he stayed in his basement, avoided windows and considered quitting politics over fears about his family’s safety. He decided to carry on but was forced to lead the NDP for a period under police protection.”
I hope Carney brings this up with Modi next week, but now with the tragedy of the air crash…
#canPoli #CdnPoli #elxn45 #NDP #India #Modi #G7
https://globalnews.ca/news/11229198/jagmeet-singh-indian-agent-surveillance/