@macandi@social.heise.de2026-07-02 06:04:00
@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-07-03 05:39:00
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-02 00:45:58
Scott Pelley, a veteran 60 Minutes correspondent,
called out CBS News management in a heated meeting on Monday morning,
attacking the network’s decision on Thursday to fire the show’s executive producer, executive editor, and two fellow correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega,
as part of a broader overhaul of the show, sources tell the Guardian.
During a meeting of the show’s staff and Nick Bilton, its newly appointed executive producer,
along with the C…
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-06-03 09:54:03
The whole #LLM ROI thing reveals something interesting. It's basically impossible to figure out the ROI of an LLM. That makes it impossible for bean counters to make a comparison between human work and LLM work, or human work without an LLM and LLM-assisted work, to determine if the incredibly high price is worth it. But it's also impossible because you can't measure the ROI of a human, especially for skilled labor.
You can't measure the ROI of a human, because managers have no idea what people do. There's an eternally expanding amount of work designed to address this problem. But no matter how closely people are surveilled, interrogated, analyzed, there's never any real answer.
I've talked in the past about in relation to medical care. One of the dirty secrets of hospitals is that they have no way to figure out how much individual treatment costs. It's easy to understand at scale. You can know exactly how much something costs society. You can even identify patterns, using public health models, and decrease costs for society by trying to get people to avoid risky behavior (stop smoking, use protection during sex, etc). But it is absolutely not possible, at all, in any way, to figure out how much a single visit costs. This is similar to the problem of predicting climate change vs predicting the weather tomorrow in Amsterdam at 15:00. One is possible, the other is simply not.
But what is becoming painfully clear now is that this is true *everywhere*. It's trivial to know how much an industry costs. It's possible to figure out it's ROI for society. It is not possible to figure out how much value any individual worker provides. LLM ROI and cost comparison is an instance of this larger problem.
This is a problem for capitalism because it shows that the fundamental assumptions behind capitalism, that product value and labor value are quantifiable, that people can actually make comparisons between competing products, etc, are completely bullshit. The capitalist apologetics that makes up so much of economics, the lies that are told that hold this system together, are crumbling before our eyes.
If you make a lot of money, it's because you've been lucky. You have the right social networks, you have become good at convincing people to give you money. There is absolutely no way to connect that to actually providing value to society. If you make a lot of money, internalize that. Understand that you are not special, and things can change. If you don't make a lot of money, it's not because you don't provide value. Don't forget that. The system is a lie built to destroy you. Don't let it.
The ideology is sick, something something time of monsters and all that, we are together in this dying machine. We need to understand the lies. Your value can never be quantified. The way we have always figured out how to do the right thing for each other is through each other. Social connection has always guided us. But now the most socially disconnected people on the planet have hijacked the system. They direct the resources of the world, and game the system to avoid personal responsibility.
We have to build a system where everyone is accountable. We can't use abstract numbers and lies to figure things out for us. We have to build systems around people and accountability. There is no other solution.
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io2026-06-01 23:29:38
This is a Pioneer Stereo Receiver SX-850 from just about 50 years ago.
It’s not spying on you.
It doesn’t need firmware updates.
There’s no subscription.
It’s widely compatible with other audio equipment from other manufacturers.
It won’t suddenly decide you can’t listen to explicit lyrics anymore.
It won’t “autocorrect” you, interrupt you with notifications or get hijacked by a botnet.
If a component breaks, it’s pretty easy fixable, even by amateurs.
It still works great, sounds great and looks great and it will probably do so for another 50 years. It’s a piece of useful electronics that you can hand down for literally generations.
Can you do this with modern technology?
Why is modern technology considered “better”?
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.it2026-05-02 17:16:50
I couldn't care less about a bunch of rich people in Brooklyn, I just read the article for the delicious drama. However, about halfway through the article, I started to see so many #FreeSoftware parallels.
1) Volunteers spend countless unpaid hours creating/maintaining something to better their community.
2) For-profit business packages it up as part of their offering.
!["It wasn't an option for us to continue the status quo, which was, I guess, [Elite Minds teachers] had a key and would come and go as they pleased," he said. "For organizations, it's a separate process, and it's not something community gardens have to do, but we chose to do it. It's been an enormous amount of work to try to get the process put together." Stead told Hell Gate that Urban Meadow and GreenThumb have been trading a draft of the new policy back and forth, but that due to time constra…](https://mastodon-usw-cache.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/116/506/113/345/509/029/original/71aa9447307cd8f7.png)
@markhburton@mstdn.social2026-06-02 07:51:18
While I wouldn't support all the Spanish government's economic policies, given that like everywhere else, they are GDP growth oriented, it is interesting to see how unemployment, including youth unemployment, in all sectors, keeps falling. And it's not done by limiting workers' rights
El paro se reduce en todos los sectores en mayo y el empleo marca nuevo récord
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-07-03 00:28:54
Just finished "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. A fascinating and epic science fiction novel with fascinating ideas about technology and also future societies. As I'm delving into a lot of sci fi looking for social imagination it's a good find in some ways but disappointing in others. The Qeng Ho culture is interesting, but their society is uninspiring; Vinge's rosy view of "trade" is not one I completely share, and their hierarchies and wealth accumulation are less compatible with their freedoms in my imagination than in Vinge's. That said, his perspective on the possibilities of galactic-scale civilization and the idea of the "age of failed dreams" are fascinating, especially right now, and his detailed ideas about programming, AI, automaton, and "Focus" are extremely relevant right now. Ultimately I didn't love some parts of the dénouement, and there's a lot of "great man theory of history" going on, including (only somewhat ameliorated) a focus on men over women. Vinge's damsels in distress have a lot more agency than usual for the role, but with the exception of Victory Sr. and Jr., the damsels are very much in distress, and Victory Sr. gets overshadowed a lot by Underhill.
It definitely helps one expand their imagination of what long-term and large-scale human existence could look like, which is great and no easy feat, and both the technologies that are written in and those written out are extremely convincing. The only thing I didn't find compelling was the transposition of capitalism onto such space and time scales. It's a very standard feature of sci fi from the last few decades, and I'm sure most readers don't question it, but I've become someone who can no longer imagine "capitalism across the stars" without questioning how realistic it is that its self-destructive tendencies could possibly last even a few more centuries, let alone succeed at interstellar travel.
One last extremely fascinating thing: how closely the strengths and weaknesses of Focus track with the strengths and weaknesses of modern generative AI. That, and the way that the "age of failed dreams" idea can help people imagine beyond generative AI in a positive way.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon
@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-06-03 07:26:01
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-02 03:12:07
Now, inevitably, half of my Bluesky timeline is like:
oh, we need a service that’s resistant to this sort of shit,
something that’s not beholden to capitalist pressure,
something that’s queer-friendly and furry-friendly
-- quickly followed by "but don’t say Mastodon!"
Sorry, I’m saying it.
Mastodon. We want fucking Mastodon.
It’s run by an actual non-profit foundation,
none of this “public benefit corporation” bullshit.
It’s not s…