Yeah, that's my sense too, as someone within low-level academia. Bibliometrics and other attempts to quantify research output have been big in the last few decades, but I think that they have made the problem worse if anything.
It's especially messy when we consider the kind of progress and contribution that Nobel prizes can't account for, like education and outreach. I really like how Dr Fatima explores this in her video How Science Pretends to be Meritocratic(duration: 37:04)
Ha, I didn't get it, but now I do. That is quite a funny joke now you've explained it. Comedy is indeed hard
I agree, this is great. I really liked:
"Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it's usually the fault of the interface. You've forgotten how many ways you've learned to adapt to bad interfaces."
and
"Whenever they start to blame themselves, respond by blaming the computer. Then keep on blaming the computer, no matter how many times it takes, in a calm, authoritative tone of voice. If you need to show off, show off your ability to criticize bad design. "
I honestly find it impressive how Reddit continues to find new ways to enshittify the platform
Though I wonder if even besides adding an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) (writing acronym out for anyone else who would've had to Google it), this might be a useful exercise recovering from outages in general. This is coming from someone who hasn't actually done any self hosting of my own, but you saying you're still finding down services reminds me of when I learned the benefit of testing system backups as part of making them.
I was lucky in that I didn't have any data loss, but restoring from my backup took a lot more manual work than I'd anticipated, and it came at an awkward time. Since then, my restoring from backup process is way more streamlined.
I've seen a weird aspect of it from the science side, where people writing grant applications or writing papers feel compelled to incorporate AI into it, because even if they know that their sub-field has no reliable use-cases for AI yet, they're feeling the pressure of the hype.
Specifically, when I say the pressure of the hype, I mean that some of the best scientists I have known were pretty bad at the academic schmoozing that facilitates better funding and more prestige. In practice, businessmen in boardrooms are often the ones holding the purse strings and sometimes it's easier to try to speak their language than to "translate" one's research to something they'll understand.
I think having pets (and being good at it, because not everyone gets this next part) can be really useful for understanding and internalising the fact that animals can have personalities and preferences and all these things we attribute to agency, but also, they're not humans. They don't think like we do, and to value them properly, we need to not anthropomorphise them.
An example of a pet owner who doesn't do this is someone I knew who was getting frustrated with her pet for peeing in her bed. She talked about it as if her cat was maliciously doing it, in retribution for not being allowed out of the house due to illness related stuff. She was so angry and because she felt frustrated at not being able to communicate this to her cat (fortunately, at least having the decency to not physically abuse her pets), gave her cat "the silent treatment" for a day whenever it happened. I tried to explain that if a pet is sick in your bed, it's probably because they felt sick and went somewhere they felt safe, and also that her cat wouldn't understand this "punishment", but she didn't get it. She insisted on seeing an intentionality that wasn't there
I think a big obstacle to meaningfully using AI is going to be public perception. Understanding the difference between CHAT-GPT and open source models means that people like us will probably continue to find ways of using AI as it continues to improve, but what I keep seeing is botched applications, where neither the consumers nor the investors who are pushing AI really understand what it is or what it's useful for. It's like trying to dig a grave with a fork - people are going to throw away the fork and say it's useless, not realising that that's not how it's meant to be used.
I'm concerned about the way the hype behaves because I wouldn't be surprised if people got so sick of hearing about AI at all, let alone broken AI nonsense, that it hastens the next AI winter. I worry that legitimate development may be held back by all the nonsense.
An interesting point that I saw about a trail on one of the small, London Tube stations:
most of the features involved a human who could come and assist or review the footage. The AI being able to flag wheelchair users was good because the station doesn't have wheelchair access with assistance.
when they tried to make a heuristic for automatically flagging aggressing people, they found that people with the arms up tend to be aggressive. This flagging system led to the unexpected feature that if a Transport For London (TFL) staff member needed assistance (i.e. if medical assistance was necessary, or if someone was being aggressive towards them, the TFL staff member could put their arms up to bring the attention onto them.
That last one especially seems neat. It seems like the kind of use case where AI has the most power when it's used as a tool to augment human systems, rather than taking humans out of stuff.
Using Google products is starting to feel like watching season 1 of a Netflix produced show - I don't want to invest energy into something that'll just get cancelled.
I appreciate people drawing my attention to rarely used phrases
I wonder whether it doesn't have any inherent meaning. I mean, we all get the sense that it's an insult.
I say this because one of my favourite insult formats is "you [multisyllabic adjective] [random noun]. Stuff like "You incorrigible spade" or "You abominable turnip". They're next to meaningless, but my intention is clear