Huh, I never imagined Wikipedia would have such a thing. Thanks!

Money represents the aggregate value of the intersection between human labour, ingenuity and scarce finite resources. Human lives are routinely rendered down, ground up and consumed by the drive to generate this representative value. Entire ways of living, forms of self perception and our understanding of what makes a human worthy of existing is inextricably wrapped up in this value generating process.

As a society we have declared that these people are best placed to decide what to do with that value. They chose anime.

Good to see some reporting that continues to gloss over Srinivasan’s obsession with culture war “woke ess” and writing that veers a little too close to the idea of purging undesirables. Also missing out on my favourite: the open musing that the next best steps might be to corrupt the police force through financial incentives so they can have them as their own private security force to take over San Francisco.

To be fair I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time looking at stuff on the Internet that doesn’t interest me. Especially since my workplace moved their employee training online.

Man I feel this, particularly the sudden shutting down of data access because all the platforms want OpenAI money. I spent three years building a tool that pulled follower relation data from Twitter and exponentially crawled it’s way outwards from a few seed accounts to millions of users. Using that data it was able to make a compressed summary network, identify community structures, give names to the communities based on words in user profiles, and then use sampled tweet data to tell us the extent to which different communities interacted.

I spent 8 months in ethics committees to get approval to do it, I got a prototype working, but rather than just publish I wanted to make it accessible to the academic community so I spent even more time building an interface, making it user friendly, improving performance, making it more stable etc.

I wanted to ensure that when we published our results I could also say “here is this method we’ve developed, and here you can test it and use it too for free, even if you don’t know how to code”. Some people at my institution wanted me to explore commercialising but I always intended to go open source. I’m not a professional developer by any means so the project was always going to be a janky academic thing, but it worked for our purposes and was a new way of working with social media data to ask questions that couldn’t be answered before.

Then the API got put behind a $48K a month paywall and the project was dead. Then everywhere else started shutting their doors too. I don’t do social media research anymore.

These people aren’t real nerds.

Promptfondler sounds like an Aphex Twin song title.

The learning facilitators they mention are the key to understanding all of this. They need them to actually maintain discipline and ensure the kids engage with the AI, so they need humans in the room still. But now roles that were once teachers have been redefined as “Learning facilitators”. Apparently former teachers have rejoined the school in these new roles.

Like a lot of automation, the main selling point is deskilling roles, reducing pay, making people more easily replaceable (don’t need a teaching qualification to be a "learning facilitator to the AI) and producing a worse service which is just good enough if it is wrapped in difficult to verify claims and assumptions about what education actually is. Of course it also means that you get a new middleman parasite siphoning off funds that used to flow to staff.

John Ganz did a good coverage of the ideological side of tech, particularly using Herf’s book Reactionary Modernism that looks at the role of engineers in building Nazi ideology.

You can read Reactionary Modernism for free on the Internet Archive