@helloyorick.fightins.online
your ghost girlfriend, with nonsense about baseball when seasonally appropriate. (also an academic librarian in digital scholarship, but like- don't expect a professional, and a Canadian in the US with random observations about the experience)
AI companies are paying screenwriters, lawyers, and other white-collar professionals to produce the training data needed to automate their jobs. I spoke with more than 30 workers about conditions inside this fast-growing and extremely secretive new gig economy.
We're now in the period of capitalism, with the advent of digital technologies, where the outsourcing has very much come home, to white collar positions.
Let's be clear: generative AI is a class warfare technology.
Karen Hao discussed this dynamic in Latin America.
www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/20/1...
A tweet from Karen Hao which says "Update: This is worse than I thought. Workers in Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa are also reporting that they are being blocked from the website or cannot create an account. It's possible that Scale AI suspended Remotasks far beyond just Kenya." The original tweet she is quote tweeting is her own, which she says : "For years I’ve been interviewing data annotation workers who are the lifeblood of the AI industry. For years I’ve heard the same story: the platforms they work for wield total power, leaving them precarious & vulnerable to exploitation. A horrible example of this just happened 1/"
The precarity is not new. Data workers talked about how Remotasks pulled out of Africa with no warning years ago.
restofworld.org/2024/scale-a...
Workers began posting complaints on Mercor’s subreddit, only to have their posts quickly deleted by the Mercor representatives who moderate it. In response, two unsanctioned Mercor subreddits were created, where workers could freely express such sentiments as “CHILDREN RUN THIS COMPANY, THEY WILL SOON HAVE THEIR DAY OF RECKONING.”
This reporting by @joshdzieza.bsky.social is harrowing. The arbitrary, precarious, and piecemeal work done by professionals to train generative AI systems.
The data work contractor, Mercor, founded by 19-year olds, pull contracts and change working conditions at the drop of a hat.
What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition?
In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture
can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
I had gone to the local ER, expecting a run-of-the-mill gallbladder removal that would have me back at work by Monday. Instead, they shipped me down to the big regional hospital in Fargo, North Dakota, where an MRI showed a gallstone, yes, but also a 9.5-centimeter tumor wrapped tightly around the main bile duct and several major blood vessels in the liver. The gastrointestinal specialist was in the room with my wife and me when the radiology report came back. I watched his face drop and his entire demeanor change as he read through it for the first time. He was an affable guy roughly the same age as me. “We just don’t see this in guys our age,” he said. I was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, or cancer of the bile duct. As far as cancers go, it’s an especially brutal one: The five-year survival rate is around 10 percent, and most people diagnosed with it are dead within a year. That was going to be me. Cholangiocarcinoma is deadly in large part because it is so rare: There are only about 8,000 new cases in the U.S. each year. Cancer treatment advances patient by patient, clinical trial by clinical trial. Each patient is a new data point. When there are few data points, the science advances very slowly. “There are some chemo and radiation therapies that can slow it down a little bit, maybe buy you some extra time, but nothing that can kill it,” the GI doc explained. “The only way to cure it is to cut it out completely, either by surgically resecting the liver or doing a full-on transplant, but by the time most people are showing symptoms, it’s too late for either of those.” “Is it too late for me?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said.
For Slate, I wrote about what it's like to get a terminal cancer diagnosis when you're 42. slate.com/life/2026/03...
Today in luxury surveillance.
“When you toggle on the option for Sassy in the Alexa mobile app, you’re warned that the Sassy style uses explicit language, which is why it requires a security check. On iOS, this involved a Face ID scan.”
today is the 6th anniversary of the official start of the COVID pandemic and I am concerned we have taken many wrong lessons from it
If the only way you can feel transgressive and alive is by being a massive bigot, buddy you’re going to the wrong parties.
I meant it when I said Kacey was back to making relatable af music for millennial women disappointments bsky.app/profile/hell...
Sigh. I have once again hit the "no one meets your search settings" wall on feeld. My search settings are "60 mile radius" and "23-50yo." Things are grim out here. I feel like a video game character trying to get past the edge of the map a lot these days.
this phrasing of it gave me a good laugh 😂
And that's how you get monstrous fuckups like Grammarly's.
Only one or two folks on the team with IP knowledge can't catch everything. If whoever handles product review doesn't spot the issue then you get "We're excited to release our new feature, Right of Publicity Violation As A Service!"
A.I. is taking jobs at Oracle—because the data-center buildout has been so expensive that the company is potentially looking at laying off 30,000 people hrexecutive.com/oracles-pote...
my experience has been that this is shockingly common - especially on smaller in-house legal teams, IP background is often lacking.
And in doing so, they’re reinforcing the power of the trad wife myth. There’s an implication that women changed (via feminism), so men changed too.
It’s just not accurate.
Anyone who is implying that old misogyny was safer has bought into the myth that men are benevolent in their domination of women, so long as the women are sufficiently submissive.
They’re promoting an image of chivalry, not domestic violence.
If you look to feminist studies that used consistent definitions of rape no matter the law, the rate of sexual violence has stayed shockingly consistent since we began measuring it, despite a lot of changes in women’s material access to power in society.
When people glorify old misogyny in comparison to new misogyny, I think they forget that marital rape was legal 40 years ago.
It literally wasn’t legally considered violence and that’s a big part of why today’s conservative home can be cast as “more violent” now.
I know they'd text me if they actually wanted to. I don't need my nose rubbed in the knowledge that they don't want to 😭
I really need co-star to stop sending me push notifications that are basically pull quotes from He's Just Not That Into You, the book my mom drove me to the book store to purchase for me 15 years ago after I told her my feelings had been hurt by a guy leaving me on read more often than not.
DIY > AI
A Canadian journalist documents a group of white nationalists who’ve been meeting at a gym in Montréal, unbeknownst to the owner of the business.
What happens after the story comes out? thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026...
I don't know why these people have a beaver in their house, but I think we can all agree that beavers are so fucking good.
NEW: Under Trump, mental health care for vets is getting squeezed
VA is bleeding shrinks & *not replacing them*
One told me she's so overloaded her sessions can be *16 mins*
She's had to online sessions w/ 35 vets
How is that therapeutic? It's not, she said
www.propublica.org/article/vete...
"How a country controls measles can be viewed as a proxy for how well it would control many other diseases."
Oh dear...
theconversation.com/we-study-pan...
lol the fact that he reposted himself
