Sasha Akhavi @sakhavi@social.cleverlibre.org

deploying LLMs to production be like

Florida Students Walk Out of School to Protest DeSantis Education Policies https://www.teenvogue.com/story/florida-students-walkout-learn

SCIENTIST: climate change is real

MAD SCIENTIST: climate change is real you fucking ignorant piece of shit

I decided to muse about the future of work, Madeleine Elish's "moral crumple zones," and the broader challenge of deskilling on the job. Enjoy! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/deskilling-job-danah-boyd/

In New York Times guest essay, Brown University president asserts danger of threats to free expression https://www.brown.edu/news/2023-04-21/essay

PEN: First half of school year, 1,477 book bannings (874 titles) mainly against stories of people of color & LGBTQ, mainly in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina.
https://pen.org/report/banned-in-the-usa-state-laws-supercharge-book-suppression-in-schools/

The Gravest Threats to Campus Speech Come From States, Not Students https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/opinion/free-speech-campus-states-not-students.html?smid=tw-share

Important reporting by Davey Alba and Julia Love on Google's rush to compete with OpenAI and sloppily pushing things out via a "code red", ignoring the weak ethics review guidelines already in place.

In particular, I'm glad they gave prominent attention to @Mahdi and the way they've censored his work on LLMs. Leadership did everything they could to stop this paper from being published, while lavishing praise on silly Medium posts by senior VPs.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-04-19/google-bard-ai-chatbot-raises-ethical-concerns-from-employees

♪♫ we believe that children are our workforce

treat them tough and give them quarter pay

show them all the hours they can work at niiiiight

give them a sense

of fright

let the children’s labor

remind us how it used to be ♪♫
https://who13.com/news/politics/iowa-politics/iowa-senate-passes-child-labor-bill-in-pre-dawn-session/

getting older means seeing past the stories of what our society is about.
Learning systems can be a source of despair.
This is what I try to do about it: https://jessitron.com/2023/04/15/when-the-world-feels-wrong/

I think we tend to overestimate the importance of software design as the main factor in explaining why social media feels “good” to us while underestimating the importance of good people posting good things. This comes to mind as folks wonder if Bluesky or Substack Notes or whatever new platform might be more “user friendly” than Mastodon and then therefore definitely “better.”

"Don't make me think" is only half of the story.

It's a #UX sin to assume that your app is the most important thing in your user's world, and add to their cognitive load unnecessarily. But sometimes the user *is* focused on your product. They don't want a low-touch, automagic experience. They want to be in control. Let them.

Don't *make* me think - but *let* me think.

This is part of why "reduce friction" is misleading. Friction is texture. Without it, there's nothing to grab on to

#UXDesign

Got a new opinion piece out in @globeandmail today: "Yet another subscription fee: Twitter, Facebook, Netflix are desperate and dying"

#BigTech #digital #digitaleconomy #netflix #twitter #facebook

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-subscription-fees-twitter-meta/

So many conservative complaints boil down to "the people we oppress are treated like heroes, but we, the people who oppress them, are never treated like heroes, wah."

Spider-Man Particle Man

🤝
doing things their species
in particular can

You like bad boys?

Real poor-quality guys with failing organs and paper-thin skin?

Faulty, low-grade, broken-brained men who are literally falling apart?

Just shoddy, defective, garbage-shit male humans?

Want some decrepit Earth dudes?

maybe you recognize me from the cover of Thriving magazine