Let’s just call this what it is …
From RestOfWorld, The hidden labor that makes AI work:
This industry has been called by many names: “crowdwork,” “data labor,” or “ghost work” (as the labor often goes unattended and unseen by consumers in the West). But this work is very visible for those who perform it. Jobs in which low-paid workers filter out, correct, or label text, images, videos, and sounds have been around for nearly as long as AI and the current era of deep learning methods has been. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t have the current wave of “AI” if it weren’t for the availability of on-demand laborers.
… Modern slavery.
You too can read the sycophantic babbling of a rotten politician (nor a good one), as he brown-noses Zuckerberg the Immoral.
Why live in reality when you can convince yourself the world out there (the one you don’t live in) is not real?
Makes me sick.
You can tell a lie a thousand times, but that does not mean it is true.
You can tell it a million times, with the same result.
You may convince all the people around you that the lie is a truth, but still, it is only a lie.
You can dress it up in half-truths, cherry-picked evidence, anything. But still. It. Is. A. Lie.
This immutability will be revealed.
The truth will out.
Let’s see what the Empire announces tomorrow.
8 June 2025 — French West Indies
The datacenters are the Achilles’ Heel
You’ve probably heard about Vibe Coding by now. The method by which a person creates an application through the use of AI, in a most Dunning-Kruger manner.
It leads to poor code, poor maintainability, poor security, and misaligned outcomes that create more problems than it solves.
The next big thing coming is Vibe Hacking. And like its sibling, it will enable those with a hacking bent to mount cyberattacks at a frightening scale. However, unlike Vibe-Coding, the fact that the code is poor is a feature, not a bug.
If there is one thing that is becoming clearer to me when thinking about big tech, it is that the datacenters are the next target.
They will be attacked both digitally and physically, and I fear that physically will bring the most disruption to the services that we all rely on for our daily lives.
The datacenters are the Achilles’ Heel.
4 June 2025 — French West Indies
Rebel Alliance
At some point, your scrappy Rebel Alliance gets so big that it becomes the Empire.
7 May 2025 — French West Indies
Meta, as in data
Finally, I’ve changed my mind. Meta is a completely appropriate name for the organisation. Meta, as in metadata.
They are only interested in the metadata around what is on their products. Number must go up.
The minutiae, the details, the wellbeing, the mental health, the privacy, the collapse of democracy, the genocide; these are all things that ‘they’ have no interest in, specifically Mark Zuckerberg and the management team.
It will catch up to them one day. That day cannot come soon enough.
30 April 2025 — French West Indies
Adtech is a cancer. It will eventually eat and destroy a business and more often than not its morals. You will only notice when it is too late.
It is disheartening to hear of a wildly successful business focusing more and more on ads and not on the products that made it a good business in the first place.
It will destroy this company.
19 April 2025 — French West Indies
Any online-only survey on the economy that asks how people are fairing is inherently flawed and cannot be taken too seriously.
The ones suffering are the ones that have no access to the internet and smartphones to be able to take part. So these surveys totally miss possibly the most important cohort in their analysis.
29 March 2025 — French West Indies
Blockchain is still a solution looking for a problem. Why are we still talking about it?
From Ars Technica:
“It feels like a fake technological solution for a problem that doesn’t exist,” she says. “I don’t think we were ever able to find an instance where people were using blockchain where they couldn’t use existing tools.”
From a technology consultant helping large-scale humanitarian organisations adopt technology.
I’ll say it again, blockchain is a slow, wasteful database that at best is a curiosity and not GDPR compliant.
It’s like inventing a “new” combustion engine that is both slower and 100x less efficient.
26 March 2025 — French West Indies
“Ireland is Apple's second home” - Tim Cook
VIa Apple Insider.
When mere mortals have homes, they pay taxes.
Pay your taxes, Tim.
17 March 2025 — French West Indies
In defence of Stage Manager
Judging by public reactions, this is not a popular perspective, but I, for one, am grateful that Stage Manager exists, and I use it almost exclusively. To be clear, I only use it on macOS and don’t go near it on an iPad as it is not fit for purpose on that platform, sadly.
On the Mac, it is a tool that I use to help me with distractions, helping me concentrate on the task at hand and avoiding the distractions of the constantly updating timelines, documents open that require edits, or the myriad of other distractions presented by modern computer interfaces.
With ADHD, it is a constant battle to stay on track and to keep enough focus on the current task alone, that any assistance is helpful. For me at least.
It is not without its problems, however. Some applications don’t behave well. Excel is a good example. If you have two workbooks open in two different Stages, operations like undo jarringly flip you to the other stage and the undo is ignored completely. I’m sure that Microsoft are totally on top of this, and it’ll get fixed in about ten to twenty… years!
For now, I’m sticking with it and I turn it off now and again when I don’t have the need to focus as much.
While I think of it, one good example of this is when I present. Presentations don’t sit well with Stage Manager and simply and quickly turning it off makes the presentation work fine.
There are other improvements that could be made, like remembering groups of apps between sessions and reboots. I’d like to be able to designate what goes with what in which Stage to always open the apps concerned like that.
As I said, in defence of Stage Manager.
17 March 2025 — French West Indies
Until I can switch off Apple Intelligence Smart Replies, this setting is going to remain off.
I’d be happy to give it a go on a couple of things —mostly writing tools— but the fact that it suggests replies for my personal text messages to friends and family and that I can’t turn it off is a line I will not cross.
They are so incredibly poor in quality that it is laughable and something that Apple should be ashamed of, rather than promoting and forcing upon its users.
It is such a lack of respect for its user base and something that hints at the start of its demise as one of the world’s leading computing platforms.
One year check in on Apple Vision Pro.
Incredible technology still looking for a problem to solve.
Something the AI boosters are ignoring and working hard to ignore, is that humas intrinsically don’t like liars.
When they have an interaction with a genai chatbot that patently lies to them because “hallucination”, it deeply degrades their experience and devalues your company, product, or service.
The problem is that there is no fix for this. Telling the model not to lie is useless.
28 January 2025 — French West Indies
You’re standing in line.
Believing the lies.
Bowing down to the flag.
You’ve got a bullet in your head.
Apple users, if you haven’t already done so, you should seriously consider turning on iCloud Advanced Data Protection.
You cannot trust Apple to be good custodians currently.
Share your private key (encrypted and password protected) with a friend, or store in a couple of physical secure locations.
/ #technology #tech #privacy #BigTech #surveillancecapitalism
Mark Zuckerberg has recently said that he’s taking Meta back to its roots.
As one commentator pointed out, presumably that means a platform for rating the fuckability of college girls? Or, perhaps it means how he calls everyone “dumb fucks”.
18 January 2025 — French West Indies
I hear all the time about how Meta’s products allow millions of micro and small businesses develop around the world.
If this is true, then that alone should be reason for this platform not to exist in its current form, given that one man has the power to determine who can and who cannot exist.
He is currently showing that if your business is not ‘with us’ then it’s ‘against us’.
18 January 2025 — French West Indies
I remember when the Internet was good. No. It was amazing.
The first time I used the Internet, we could count the number of nodes on the network as less than a 100 000. The web hadn’t been invented yet and as soon as I experienced it myself, through some scrappy tools running on a university Unix box, I was hooked.
I knew it would change our lives. And it did.
I didn’t anticipate it becoming what it is today.
We’ve got all the stuff we dared to dream about, but naively, we believed it would come with none of the mess that humans seem to bring to the party.
I’m not sure how I feel about the Internet today.
I sometimes think that we should switch it off now and again to reset it.
We can’t, of course. And we won’t.
The Internet might switch us off, however.
16 January 2025 — French West Indies