Friday’s Finds

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Rights aren’t rights if they can be taken away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: A bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that the list gets shorter and shorter” —George Carlin

“GenAI sits at the intersection of fascism, capitalism, labor, climate change, and environmental degradation. It is the quintessential technology of our time, the epitome of our current struggles. Defeating it is the key to defeating capital.” —Ben Lockwood

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

RETRACTED: Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans

via @Jan Wildeboer

The article’s conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, which have failed to demonstrate tumorigenic potential. The handling (co) Editor-in-Chief also became aware that by the time of writing of this article in the journal, the authors did not include multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies, that were already done at the time of writing their review in 1999. —Science Direct [undated retraction but assumed to be recent, after 25 years since original publication]

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor Frankl

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.” —Bonni Stachowiak

“America putting most of its eggs in the generative AI basket, China going hard into green tech. When history looks back on this period, someone is going to look awfully stupid.” —Nicholas Grossman

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Little men in lofty places throw long shadows, because our sun is setting.” —Walter Savage Landor

“AI isn’t just like an intern, but like a *dishonest* intern. With careful supervision it can be productive enough to be useful. But you have to know what it’s doing better than it does, and watch it like a hawk And unless there’s something specific it offers that saves you time or gives you access to information you wouldn’t have otherwise, it probably isn’t worth that effort. I’m starting to wonder if the necessary skill for the AI age is going to be knowing where those lines should be drawn.” —tokyo_0

“It helps to understand that LLMs are basically machine learning programs for finding statistical relationships in language use. It’s an advanced form of the sort of ML that digital humanities researchers have used to, say, chart the incidence of sexist language in English literature over time. So there are logical uses for LLMs, but a) they’re mostly limited to the study of language, and b) they don’t necessarily justify the costs piling up around commercial startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.” —@lrhodes

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. Please ignore last month’s post ;)

“The [Canadian] Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] is not just a law, it is an expression of Canada’s most basic and deepest values. ‘Notwithstanding’ the Charter means ‘I don’t share these values’. Any and every politician or government that proposes its use should face such an extreme backlash that no one would dare consider it.” —@DavidMitchell

“It is WILD that we now live in a time where my job as an astrophysics professor has gone from ‘learn cool things about space’ to ‘try to get someone to hold billionaires accountable for dropping shit on us from orbit'” —Prof Sam Lawler

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After many years of publishing my Fridays Finds, I have given up. Even Mastodon has made their user interface so opaque that after an hour I could not find the favourites I had marked for the last month. They were available on my phone app but I cannot be bothered trying to transfer each favourite from the phone to the desktop, where I usually write my posts. So it’s the end of an era. The first Fridays Find was posted in 2009 and there have been a total of 458, all in the archives.

Perhaps a listen to Who broke the Internet would be appropriate. I am writing much less here in public because I do not want my work scraped by the large language models that feed the likes of Chat GPT.

Here is a lovely photo shared on Mastodon to close this series.

Au revoir mes amis.

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble

The Magnificent 7 stocks — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta, Tesla and Amazon — make up around 35% of the value of the US stock market, and of that, NVIDIA’s market value makes up about 19% of the Magnificent 7. This dominance is also why ordinary people ought to be deeply concerned about the AI bubble. The Magnificent 7 is almost certainly a big part of their retirement plans, even if they’re not directly invested …

… In simpler terms, 35% of the US stock market is held up by five or six companies buying GPUs. If NVIDIA’s growth story stumbles, it will reverberate through the rest of the Magnificent 7, making them rely on their own AI trade stories.

And, as you will shortly find out, there is no AI trade, because generative AI is not making anybody any money.

“via Science Direct — Ceiling fans changed the particle trajectory downwards and reduced aggregated concentrations of particles in the breathing zone were reduced by 87%. Ceiling fans strongly affected the indoor airflow pattern and also showed a potential to reduce the exposure risk to horizontally directed coughs.” —@AugieRay

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Look, I know AI is controversial, but just for a moment, let’s set aside our preconceived notions, our biases, the environmental impact, the massive cost to train and run models, the labor exploitation, the intellectual property theft, the inaccuracies, the mania it causes in users, the destruction of search, the deskilling of professionals, the devaluation of creative work, job losses, and lack of economic value from enterprise implementations.

Wait, what were we talking about?”
—Max Leibman

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“they called it trickle-down economics because ‘financial waterboarding’ didn’t poll well with focus groups” —JA Westenberg

“If you aren’t using AI, you run a very real risk of falling behind in the race to produce voluminous mediocrity while slowly forgetting how to do your own job.” —Max Leibman

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The internet didn’t make us stupid. It made stupidity scalable.” —J.A. Westenberg

“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” —George Orwell, ‘1984’

“you can give someone a fish and then teach them to fish. It’s a lot easier to learn how to fish when you’re not starving.” —ebel aurora

“Employers: Everyone must return to the office, because we work best when people collaborate face-to-face.
Also: We’re going to replace everyone with AI.”
—Jeff Johnson

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