Historian of technology, professor, former sysadmin, current rabbit owner. I write books about labor and technology. I also tell dad jokes. They/them. Chicago.
Spoke to a former colleague recently. Their employer monitors employee AI use and wants to see number go up.
Since the obligatory AI nannying, multiple product teams have fallen apart and they’ve stopped delivering new features of value while users are leaving.
A whole layer of middle management are destroying good products to make a Potemkin village of fake automation to justify their bosses buying crap enterprise software. It’s as if the entire industry had their heads kicked in by a donkey.
@emma @tommorris good question. There's been minimal work by historians on the working conditions of rank and file programmers, developers, software engineers.
But judging by the treatment of women in the early computer industry, I think we can fill in the blanks ourselves.
Edit: that's @histoftech summarising their book #ProgrammedInequality.
One of the strangest, most dangerous things that #RFKJr seems to believe is the claim that #HIV doesn't cause #AIDS, and that maybe germs don't really matter. My colleagues at Defend Public Health walk you though the deadly implications.
https://www.defendpublichealth.org/opinion/whopper-week-rfk-jr-has-plainly-stated-his-belief-falsehoods-aids-denialism
#impeachRFKJr
I haven't seen this variation of XKCD 2347 yet. Received from a friend, source unknown.
@KathyReid yeah :/ definitely not going to be fair or free or unencumbered even if they are held
Ugh, sorry, I neglected to notice the date on this—it happened in 2020.
The sixteen food banks Mastodon for Hunger Relief is supporting are listed in the photo below, see alt text which also has the list. 9/
It’s hard to function around people whose main way of dealing with big problems is to shrug and ignore them.
Yes, this is a subtoot about the USA. Particularly how people are sleepwalking through their days hoping things change “with the 2028 election”
Some good news!
“Boston City Council has voted unanimously to ban its government from using facial recognition technology, including the police department, making it the largest city on the East Coast to do so.”
https://www.builtinboston.com/articles/boston-bans-facial-recognition-software
“How do you evaluate a city based on the number of billionaires and corporations. To me, if you want to see a world-class city, you look at the state of your weakest, poorest and most vulnerable people. That has got to be the measure of our society.”
What’s the opposite of formaldehyde?
casualdejekyll.
#OtD 28 Jul 1879 Lucy Burns, suffragist and women's rights advocate, was born. While living in the UK she joined the Women's Social and Political Union, and later in the US she and Alice Paul formed the radical Congressional Union for Women's Suffrage https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10013/lucy-burns-born
Missionaries have been secretly and illegally placing small devices on the lands of isolated indigenous peoples in the Amazon in an attempt to convert them to their faith
The 'In Touch' devices - made by a Baptist group in Atlanta, Georgia USA - play out passages of the Bible. Weatherproof and fitted with solar panel, they run indefinitely.
The devices have been found scattered throughout the Javari region, near Brazil's border with Peru.
National Wolfing License
only 15¢ from Johnson Smith and Co (1951)
