Another excellent talk by Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) on why #Facebook, #Twitter / X and similar for-profit #internet platforms suck so much and are getting even worse. And what to do about it.
DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4
Ben Myers: Statement on Generative AI
"**Technology is not neutral.** Leveraging and normalizing generative AI is not a neutral act."
"Instead, I'd offer an alternative mental model: generative AIs are tools, devised and deployed by corporations to operate at scale, laundering content the corporations generally do not own with the active intention of reducing the need for, and the value of, human labor. Whether machine learning is like human learning is irrelevant to the real-world impact of its use."
For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings forward etc. And there are of course a […]
I'm in the theory part of my experimental systems development course (PD/HCI/CSCW/SE). In the next weeks we read and discuss:
Schmidt & Bannon: Taking CSCW Seriously
Bossen: The Parameters of Common Information Spaces
Heath & Luff: Task coordination in London Underground
Engeström: Activity theory as a framework for analyzing and redesigning work
They fit nice together in cases and theoretical ideas -- it's a joy teaching the texts and ideas (my joy, I'm sure the students often go WTF)
Moving my personal site from a self-rolled Golang thing hosted in the cloud to Quarto + Github pages was one of the best decision this year (so far).
I particularly like how well Quarto integrate with Graphviz, Mermaid and Observable JS! For fun: https://henrikkorsgaard.github.io/notes/annual-rhythms-in-electricity-consumption.html#fig-radial-annual
Now I can focus on the hard stuff like writing, spelling and making sense....
New Paper from @rmrahal and many other: a concept to improve research quality by ending the short-term contract mania in science:
High-quality research requires appropriate employment and working conditions for researchers. However, many academic systems rely on short-term employment contracts, biased selection procedures and misaligned incentives, which hinder research quality and progress. We discuss ways to redesign academic systems, emphasizing the role of permanent employment.
I keep coming back to the "Things Could be Better" paper (https://psyarxiv.com/2uxwk/). The clarity and straightforwardness of the paper also create more transparency. Slap on a related work section as an appendix, and this is how we should all be publishing...
I also think writing that focus on clarity, transparency and straightforwardness as key strategies, is a better bulwark against chatGPT-generated papers. Sure, you can train a bot to write like that, but I suspect it would be easier to spot
Eryk Salvaggio
Jure Repinc 
David Gerard
RenkeSiems