Friday’s Finds

On the last Friday of each month, without any assistance from Generative AI, I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters. Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.” —Ursula Franklin (1989) The Real World of Technology, via @cornazano

“I’m grateful for Mastodon. I have very mixed feelings about social media, but a social media platform that:

• Isn’t controlled by billionaires
• Has no advertising
• Doesn’t harvest your data, and
• Doesn’t algorithmically promote anger and hatred is a precious thing.”
—@Bodipaksa

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On the last Friday of each month, without any assistance from Gen AI, I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Working from home 1 day a week cuts carbon by 2%. 2-4 days up to 29%. Full-time 54%.” —Anthropocene Magazine

“German is so efficient. You say ‘Fachkräftemangel’ for ‘Companies not paying enough to attract suitable candidates and then complaining to the state to worsen the work environment for everyone so their shitty jobs find candidates again.’ what a beautiful language.” —@kaia

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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.

“At this rate ‘Luddite’ is going to become a term that means, ‘Person that knows when something is a scam’” — @Amy Dentata

Overheard: “If the cloud is someone else’s computer, AI is just someone else’s labour.” — @jk

“Journalistic organisations in Canada with official accounts on the #Fediverse [e.g. Mastodon]” — @M. Gregoire

“So, we’re obviously using these rare earths for vital purposes, right? Absolutely! Seven rare earths are used to make your screen more shiny and brilliant. Three rare earths are absolutely needed to make your phone vibrate. Now, what could be more important to the future of life on Earth than a vibrating phone?” — @Gerry McGovern

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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. Last month’s post was called Welcome to Hell, with a photo of the smoke-filled sky over New York City. Last Friday night we were in the middle of a torrential rainstorm that dumped 250 mm of water on us. It’s one Hell of a climate catastrophe.

“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, via @c.justc

“hiding from Threads. can we stop finding new capitalist billionaire toys to be enthralled by? we are boiling ourselves like frogs, literally & figuratively” —@BonStewart

“We have the science to stop the climate crisis and end pandemics. Why are we failing? —‘Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital, and is often ignored when it does not.’ —Jason Hickel.” —@LuckyTran

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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.

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift, via @dyckron

“Ignoring warnings about submarines that billionaires assure you are « innovative » is a lot like ignoring warnings about climate change that people assure you will be fine, with green tech that doesn’t exist.” —@LALegault

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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.

“Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’, I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit.” —Wanda Sykes

This is the best advice ever —”Live so that if your life were turned into a book, Florida would ban it.” —@GigidiGranat

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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 ability to learn from experience in the present — from moments, not models — is what is needed when the past has become a hindrance and the future is unclear.” —Gianpiero Petriglieri via Shaun Coffey

“The kind of intelligence [AI] we’re developing is very different from our intelligence. So it’s this idiot-savant kind of intelligence.” —Geoffrey Hinton

“The great merit of the capitalist system, it has been said, is that it succeeds in using the nastiest motives of nasty people for the ultimate benefit of society.” —E.A.G. Robinson (1941) via QuoteInvestigator

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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.

“You don’t get to be a VP or CEO of a major corporation by being meek. You get there by being a polite sociopath.” —Dave Rahardja

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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.

“I set out to write a letter to friends who know Twitter and are Mastodon-curious. As I worked on it, I thought: What if the letter could serve as a starting point for anyone explaining Mastodon?” —Lee Lefever

“society: damn misinfo at scale is getting a bit out of hand lately. seems like a problem.
tech guys: i have invented a machine that generates misinformation. is that helpful?” —@Jacqueline

“The more I think about what went wrong with web search, it comes down to this: the internet companies did not ever come up with a workable definition of truth, or fealty to reality, or anything like it. What are the markers of fact in some text? They never figured that out. You cannot organize all the world’s information without that core concept. The chatbots are just making this failure plain (and weird).” —Alexis Madrigal

The boss has been pestering me to attend a leadership conference so I, completely jokingly, said, “A true leader would never sit in a audience being told what to do” and now half this office is in existential crisis. —Elle Gray

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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.

“It’s very funny to me that the dominant Twentieth Century conception of AI was a slightly awkward nerd with an inhuman mastery of facts and logic, when what we actually got is smooth-talking bullshit artists who can’t do eighth-grade math.” —Adi Robertson

“ChatGPT gets treated like technological magic, but that ignores the humans behind the curtain that make it function. OpenAI paid Sama to hire Kenyan workers at $1.32 to $2 an hour to review ‘child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest’ content. Their work made the tool less toxic, but left them mentally scarred. The company ended the contract when they found out TIME was digging into their practices”. —Paris Marx

“There is no such thing as a ‘job creator’. There are employers, who hire employees, *because they need them*. And then employers pay the employees less than the value they generate. That’s the system. How did we get to the point at which people behave as if the wealthy are giving a gift to working people? I realize it’s not a new attitude, but it remains proudly f’d up.” —Mark Sumner

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