Eponymous Laws🙉🙈 Sinclair's Law: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
xro#AI will never make people more productive
because as long as people are using AI, people are the bottleneck!
No, No, to improve productivity we need AI to make all the decisions and take humans out of the loop.
Only when AI makes decisions for AI, things will finally be more productive for AI.
senAround two decades ago a friend asked me what I thought of SEO work, I called it was "morally bankrupt twiddling with no societal value." It astounds me to think of how many other tech " innovation " since have been even worse. #LineGoesUp #PerverseIncentives
From: @kim_harding
https://mastodon.scot/@kim_harding/115576460521921213
From: @kim_harding
https://mastodon.scot/@kim_harding/115576460521921213
kim_harding ✅ (@[email protected])
How Jeffrey Epstein used SEO to bury news about his crimes https://www.theverge.com/report/822311/jeffrey-epstein-emails-google-search-seo-pr Documents released by the House Oversight Committee shed light on Epstein’s day-to-day, largely via email — including his preoccupation with his Google presence.
Jennifer Moore 😷If I recall correctly, it was Tony Blair's lot who altered the landscape to create the "everybody has to ring at 8" phenomenon.
They introduced measuring surgeries on what percentage of people were able to get an appointment within the next 24 hours. So then the surgeries started gaming the ratings, by eliminating or drastically reducing the ability to book an appointment which _wasn't_ within the next 24 hours.
I remember seeing TB on a talk show (maybe it was Question Time?) where somebody in the audience pointed this out, and he was like "oh oops, we didn't know".
Never mind the fact that for some people, it's _better_ to book an appointment a few days ahead! (e.g. for transport, or getting time off work, or because you need to bring somebody with you.)
Kevin Karhan 
@JessTheUnstill @GreenRoc Personally I wish for #RightToRepair to be mandated including access to #schematics, #parts, #firmware and #tools needed so #manufacturers would be forced to actually give a shit and build #RepairableTech...
- Then again the #PerverseIncentives of #capitalism punish #HonestMerchants and #RepairableDesign because manufacturers don't give a shit about supporting their devices and work against their interests of the buyers!
Remember: Most folks are mere #consumers, not #owners and espechally not #tinkerers!
- THIS is why #RaspberryPi were able to basically monopolize the #ARM - #SBC market for tinkerers because they are the only one's that actually build devices that just work out of the box and have #documentation, whereas all the competitors just fart out some PCBs and some hacked-up images and then tell people to 'go fuck themselves' when they don't want to just buy but do something with it!
Jess👾 (@[email protected])
And then you complain about it and some replyguys show up with a WeLl AkShUlLy you can build it yourself by taking this microcontroller and loading this specific software, and soldering it together with these various components and 3d printing a case and oh but the out of the box OS doesn't work right so you have to change these configuration and tweak the driver settings and ... @[email protected] @[email protected]
skryStrava’s #geolocation causes yet another national security incident this week as bodyguards in #Sweden map their run performances for the world to admire.
This problem has happened before, with the #PerverseIncentives of the #gamification and #privacy permutations that violate the least-surprise #ux principle. Here’s how to turn these privacy leaks off: https://lifehacker.com/health/stravas-heatmap-privacy-problem
Heatmaps cause problems
https://www.bicycling.com/news/a44150917/report-strava-heatmap-privacy-loophole/ https://mastodon.cloud/@slashdot/114830114766299781
Why Strava Is a Privacy Risk for the President (and You Too)
Strava is a hugely popular, and really nicely featured, running and cycling app. It’s oumyr pick for the best running app, despite its flaws. But it’s always had serious privacy issues, including the one just reported by French newspaper Le Monde—it allegedly revealed the locations of world leaders via their bodyguards’ Strava accounts.
“One of the many problems with allowing user posts to be used for AI training is that companies want their products and brands to appear in chatbot results. Since Reddit forms a key part of the training material for Google’s AI, then one effective way to make that happen is to spam Reddit…in the hope that the content will be regurgitated by chatbots.”
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/26/reddit-is-being-spammed-by-ai-bots-and-its-all-reddits-fault/
Hacker NewsThe Perverse Incentives of Vibe Coding
https://fredbenenson.medium.com/the-perverse-incentives-of-vibe-coding-23efbaf75aee
#HackerNews #VibeCoding #PerverseIncentives #TechCulture #SoftwareDevelopment #HackerNews
Proto Himbo EuropeanI'm not an "organizer" and I have spent 50 years avoiding "leadership," but I do think about it sometimes. I often think about the pitfalls and hurdles of #organizing for any positive social change. On my mind lately is how personal motivations and incentives can interact with systemic/structural things to make change difficult.
Because I'm in #higherEd, I'm thinking about two things rn:
#University administrators (deans, provosts, presidents, directors, etc.) consistently act like Republican Senators or corporate CEOs when they make policy decisions and interact with "underlings". They can be seen as filling spots that might otherwise have been filled by people who would act in the public interest; they frequently prevent public-interest actions. The #profit-driven US system has installed them there, blocking change from the #faculty and #students from going "higher," and blocking information, resources and also possibly change from coming "down" to the students and faculty. Administrators, I think, have crippling career expectations, often unwritten, that lead them to act almost according to a script, while also clinging to their positions with a deathgrip and often developing a bad case of chip-on-the-shoulder #authoritarianism while doing it.
The #facebook group "the professor is out" (TPIO) is for faculty in toxic situations wanting advice and support in #leavingAcademia. Great. However, within a year or two of the group's formation, it was very popular so the creators (apparently) quit or lost their day jobs and seem to have made TPIO their entire income stream. They started selling #merch, coaching, workshops, etc. And they started blocking messages threatening their income, like offers of help from "competing" entities and posts questioning the wisdom of guiding all fleeing academics into doing #dataScience or #UX for the companies that fund the politicians defunding higher ed. The mods gotta pay rent, and now the only way they do this (not to mention staying alive if they get sick) is to generate income from this group.
That's all. It's just a tangled, not always helpful #system. It has evolved to protect itself, in interesting (and frustrating) ways.
Pete Bleackley#ArtificialIntelligence has a #PerverseIncentives problem. Current models require vast amounts of hardware, energy and data to train. But this is what enables big tech organisations to maintain their market dominance. More efficient models would make it easier to compete with them. So they have no reason to make models better, only bigger.
@DAIR
@DAIR