Tootfinder

I’m getting requests to fill out dev surveys weekly, with results of older surveys coming monthly or so. I fill them out, but I’m wary of their biases, barriers, and objectives.
Some disjointed thoughts…
https://adrianroselli.com/2025/08/my-thoughts-on-the-sta…

My Thoughts on the State of Surveys
Every few months there’s another State of Something survey. As of this week, the State of CSS 2025 survey results have just become available and the State of HTML 2025 survey is wrapping up. This post is skewed to those, touches on more, and is rather disjointed. “2012 Oregon City…

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
An addendum to this: I'm someone who would accurately be called "anti-AI" in the modern age, yet I'm also an "AI researcher" in some ways (have only dabbled in neutral nets).
I don't like:
- AI systems that are the product of labor abuses towards the data workers who curate their training corpora.
- AI systems that use inordinate amounts of water and energy during an intensifying climate catastrophe.
- AI systems that are fundamentally untrustworthy and which reinforce and amplify human biases, *especially* when those systems are exposed in a way that invites harms.
- AI systems which are designed to "save" my attention or brain bandwidth but such my doing so cripple my understating of the things I might use them for when I fact that understanding was the thing I was supposed to be using my time to gain, and where the later lack of such understanding will be costly to me.
- AI systems that are designed by and whose hype fattens the purse of people who materially support genocide and the construction of concentration campus (a.k.a. fascists).
In other words, I do not like and except in very extenuating circumstances I will not use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, etc.
On the other hand, I do like:
- AI research as an endeavor to discover new technologies.
- Generative AI as a research topic using a spectrum of different methods.
- Speculating about non-human intelligences, including artificial ones, and including how to behave ethically towards them.
- Large language models as a specific technique, and autoencoders and other neural networks, assuming they're used responsibly in terms of both resource costs & presentation to end users.
I write this because I think some people (especially folks without CS backgrounds) may feel that opposing AI for all the harms it's causing runs the risk of opposing technological innovation more broadly, and/or may feel there's a risk that they will be "left behind" as everyone else embraces the hype and these technologies inevitability become ubiquitous and essential (I know I feel this way sometimes). Just know that is entirely possible and logically consistent to both oppose many forms of modern AI while also embracing and even being optimistic about AI research, and that while LLMs are currently all the rage, they're not the endpoint of what AI will look like in the future, and their downsides are not inherent in AI development.

Very glad to finally see this issue being addressed in a major publication. The headline is a little confusing. It’s not about engineering, it’s about all disciplines.
Even as we have made gains getting women into post secondary now young men are not coming, aside from a few specific traditional areas. Especially in Arts and Humanities, there is a huge gap. I see it every day at my university.
We need to reverse this. We need men and women in every field and discipline. We need men and women learning critical thinking, learning history, learning biology, learning engineering, together, collaboratively, in ways that speak to all genders.
I blame a large part of the gap on a notion that is still perpetuated by both regular people and government, that “trades gets u a job” with implicit and explicit bias toward those trades being male dominated. The manosphere often degrades traditional “thinking” degrees as not masculine enough.. or have been “woke” and a threat to stereotypical male roles. Plus there remain biases against teaching and healthcare as “women’s” work in those influential spheres, and not helped by general society either.
TLDR: we just need to stop devaluing post-secondary every other moment of the day and make it free and easy for absolutely anyone to walk in and expand their minds!
#viu #university #postsecondary #canada #education #gendergap #men #manosphere
https://archive.ph/NhuKo