This thread is an excellent example of why inserting into public grants to do scientific research an assessment criterion of ‘immediate economic contribution’ or the like is such a bad idea.

My "There's no catch" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

This is so fucking disgusting.

Just got the Auckland Council cut of the HLFS stats, South Auckland raw NEET is above 26%, 25% on moving annual average. I had to extend my vertical axis. It's 3 points above the GFC peak.

Getting really sick of companies breaking ot entirely removing basic existing functionality and then telling you to use their AI as a replacement.

One day we need to have a real conversation about business guys’ actual connection to reality! It’s very strange to read this. It’s totally unmoored, supported by mythology. The AI bubble is the great dunce mask off moment. An epoch of chaos will follow!

#nzpol IMHO, this is political corruption on display. We need to change the campaign donation laws because these big donations are all coming from the wealthy and sorted who want to buy the govt so it will do their bidding to make them personally richer no matter what the damage is to Aotearoa.

Uber’s COO has said that it’s getting “harder to justify” its AI costs because there was no way to show a link between AI spend and any meaningful increase in useful features. This is the first time I’ve seen a company say this directly. www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-and...

Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue.) isaiprofitable.com

This is a truly preposterous assertion. SpaceX is perhaps one of the worst examples of ‘free market’ enterprise in modern times, as are all of Musk’s ventures. It only exists because of gargantuan subsidies from the US government, even despite continually missed deadlines and rampant fraud.

This is very bad. Much worse than this article depicts. It could seriously require very serious changes to the court system. This is kind of the DDOS attack theory of AI.

I think this is a key insight about the AI psychosis we are seeing exhibited by big tech CEOs. The further you are away from the work, the more you assume it’s trivial for Claude or ChatGPT to replace the worker.

DDG also has a noAI site: noai.duckduckgo.com. You can add it as a search engine using: noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s

I must be super evolved then because I understand very well that Google is trying to build an agentic wall around the entire internet with the ultimate goal of users paying to access it and data owners paying to contribute to it.

I wish I could remember where, but I saw a quote somewhere recently that was effectively: "Would you let random commenters on Reddit make your company's key business decisions? Because that's what is happening when you outsource core work to LLMs"

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This is so fucked www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

What was that line? When a measure becomes a goal it ceases to be a good measure? And is really expensive to boot?

LMAO EVEN

Adopting an AI for everything strategy like amateur hour idiots, means we are committing to paying ever more licence fees and profits offshore. Doubling down the wn in stupid. Put simply, we can't afford it. (3/3)

This is a rose tinted view of Fonterra. They have been plagued by restructures, high turnover & job losses, recently including offshoring of IT & finance roles to cheap contractors, closure of Canpac/Brightwater sites, as well as plants at Waitoa/Te Rapa, & right now its research centre in Palmy.

Sending unsolicited emails with veiled threats of ADA lawsuits is a great way to get me to never use your accessibility compliance service.

one of the major clues that social housing tenants haven't in fact won the lotto is that they need social housing

so has anyone worked out what policies he has that *aren't* exactly the same as Starmer? vote for me, I'm going to do everything the bloke whose job I want is doing

National’s public housing reform ‘cuts costs’ at the expense of our most vulnerable. The Green Party is warning that the Government’s changes to public housing will see more public housing tenants evicted and driven deeper into poverty.

It seems genuinely pretty embarrassing for the government that they're so vague about this technology they're asserting will deliver savings and efficiencies. But it's also totally reflective of the way AI is promoted. It's modern snake oil.

I’m in 2 minds about posting this. It may already be obvious to everyone. Just skip over if it is to you. National is going to campaign on being good economic managers, on the basis of cutting public spending and jobs. Austerity is supposed to convince you they are ‘prepared to make the tough calls’

Have they done a thorough proof of concept for AI in public service? No. But are they using it successfully themselves? Also no. But do they have clear plans for how AI will be deployed? No. This article would be hilarious if it wasn't devastating. www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

Situation 1: dev A thinks approach X is correct, dev B thinks Y is the right way. They argue and try to convince each other. Situation 2: dev A thinks approach X is correct, tells the LLM to implement it. There is SO MUCH learning in Situation 1, lost when using LLMs....

We must action real clean energy solutions Aotearoa #nzpol

"According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite." lol, lmfao

State media is a component of LLM training data. A new Nature study says this material is laundered into what presents as objective chatbot text. LLMs also give more pro-regime answers when prompted in the official language of low-press-freedom countries than in English.

The OECD had some home truths for NZ about energy policy. 1/ Fossil gas makes electricity more expensive. 2/ Breaking the dependence on fossil gas will make electricity cheaper 3/ Breaking the dependence on fossil gas will increase energy security www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/sto...

You may or may not be bothered, but now Palantir have been given the go ahead to access NHS data, you can opt out giving them access to yours using this link. your-data-matters.service.nhs.uk

i say i am apprehensive about eg llm summaries because they have a tendency to get them wrong, and the typical response is "well they're a lot better then they used to be" or "but humans get it wrong sometimes too", and like to me the point of having a human do it is that they're accountable for it…

So when you get LLM output with links or citations to scholarly work: those citations aren't there because the model consulted them and they actually represent the source of the information. They were included because they look like what should appear near that kind of text.

As high-profile websites vanish, it’s a reminder that the web has no built-in archival layer. But some publishers are now blocking the Wayback Machine. What’s at stake if the web stops being archived? Our new FAQ explains: preserving the public record matters. 🌐📚 help.archive.org/help/faq-pub...

frankly I have come to believe techies are illiterate. science fiction isn't about the future, stupid. it's about the current political situation but set in space so no one gets mad. duh!

people overthink post editing tbh. For all its faults, Mastodon has had unlimited editing (with version history and “edited” label) for ages and it’s ok. It’s nice to have when you need it and otherwise nobody cares. I’ve never seen it people abuse it in any meaningful way.

Last week's OECD Country Report on NZ was harshly critical of the Govt's energy policy. The NZ Govt backing of fossil fuels fails on the three test of security, cost and sustainability. Luxon gets an "F". The Greenpeace energy policy gets an "A"! www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/sto...

The head of the OECD’s New Zealand desk has bluntly told an audience at the Commerce Commission’s Competition Matters conference that the keys to turning around the country’s economy lie in reducing bank profits and fixing power market.

Can’t stress enough how ChatGPT connecting to bank accounts is a hacker dream come true.

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

I’m sorry but “everyone is going to use AI to code their own apps” sounds like “everyone is going to learn HTML and code their own websites.“ like … have you met people? no they’re not

Insane dystopian shit here, totally unacceptable. I expect politicians and commentators to be outraged by it, regardless of their opinion of the crimes these people were convicted of.

"The Luxon Govt is callously saddling more students with more debt to pay for tax cuts for the super-rich. And that's not good enough 📚 See you THURS 14 May at Vic Uni for our first rally in the fight back! ✊💚" @greens.org.nz @fran4dunedin.bsky.social #nzpol NZ Green Party petition is in next post ⬇️

Them: why is AI so unpopular with people? Also them: www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Journalists, let’s be careful about the language we use when writing or talking about AI. Here’s a thread — @emilymbender.bsky.social, I know you pay attention to this, too, so feel free to chime in. (1/x)

This is par for the course in terms of what is happening to legal residents of the US, who have literally done everything by the book. Is the Big Fat Nothing that the NZ govt is doing to help her - other than letting Winston lie about it - par for the course for what we can expect of our own govt?