General IT/Tech Technology

Does anyone want what big tech is selling?

AI can do some cool things. But is anyone measuring the quality of the output vs the real costs (I mean real total costs, not just your investor and environment subsidised free tier or small subscription) and effort of the input? Is it real inteligence, or just like a plastic doll that says “I love you” when you pull it’s string? Just good enough for small kids to suspend their disbelief for entertainment, companionship, and help in learning social skills.

Watch: AI Overlords Are Engineering a Broke Society ft. Ed Zitron

General IT/Tech Technology

A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator

“We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit” – Cory Doctorow. First platforms are good, then they abuse their individual users to make things better for their corporate users, then they abuse the corporate users for profit, then they die. It’s destroying the internet to ensure better short-term shareholder returns.

General

Lemon-Aid

When a seemingly innocent lemonade stand materializes in a suburban front yard, the once tranquil neighborhood descends into chaos as mysterious and unsettling events unfold.

General

Speed Limit Adherence – UK map data

https://speeding.hasp.ac.uk

On this site is shown speeding behaviour data collected from goods vehicles (LGVs and HGVs) in UK cities, across a month in October 2023. This data was collected by Compass IoT, and made available to the Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service for research purposes. All data is non-identifiable and aggregated, and no personal data is collected as part of this project.

The Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service is part of the Smart Data Research UK family of data service

General

The Fascinating Map of Fungi

Fungi are one of the most diverse organisms on Earth and contribute to many aspects of life as we know it. They’re the most populous kingdom on the planet – an estimated 3.8million fungi exist worldwide – and yet, more than 90% of them are currently unknown to science.

A characteristic that places fungi in a different kingdom from plants, bacteria, and some protists is chitin in their cell walls. Fungi, like animals, are heterotrophs, they acquire their food by absorbing dissolved organic molecules, typically by secreting digestive enzymes into their environment. Fungi do not photosynthesize. Growth is their means of mobility, except for spores, which may travel through the air or water. Fungi are the principal decomposers in ecological systems. The video below from “Domain of Science” goes through a lot in short time.

IT/Tech

The AI bubble

A great article by Ed Zitron explaining the stupidity behind the current push for Genrative AI/LLMs into our everyday lives and organisations:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

The main tech companies are sinking tens of billions of dollars on the success of generative AI. But what if it isn’t the next big thing? What if it’s failing in almost every way? AI companies burn obscene amounts of money with little return. How long can that last for? AIs dispense useless and sometimes dangerous advice. A recent study showed that tech companies have run out of new training data to improve their AI models. If AI is really so costly, unreliable, and limited, what happens to the industry that has bet so big on it? And what happens to the economies depending on the stock prices of that industry (and your pension)?

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