Nima Boscarino

129 Followers
135 Following
82 Posts

Yes, like the fish. Science Studies & Communication PhD student at UC San Diego.

Previously AI Ethics Engineer at Hugging Face.

PronounsThey/He
Websitehttps://n11o.com
GitHubhttps://github.com/NimaBoscarino
Alternate Accounthttps://fedi.n11o.com/@nima

This Thursday Jan 25th join #DWebYVR for the first Tech Social of the year!

I've got these scheduled until March on third Thursday monthly, and we've gathered other meetups including VanTechies, Novus, and #CoSocialCa

We've got space right downtown #Vancouver at The Permanent's Pretend Wine Bar popup.

We'll start at 5pm and go for a couple of hours. No talks, we'll have some time for community announcements to the group.

Let us know you're coming by registering here: https://lu.ma/techsocial-jan2024

Tech Social @ PWB (January 2024) · Luma

Come out for an after work community social and meet other people in tech in Vancouver. No agenda, no speeches, just come out and meet other interesting people. Bring some out of town visitors...

Every evening, crows commute from Vancouver, British Columbia to nearby Burnaby. I have frequently enjoyed watching them gather before sunset and then take off in large numbers. Here is a news story with a nice short film about it (around 5 mins). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/short-film-follows-crow-migration-1.7084151
Thousands of crows flock to Burnaby every day. Witness their spectacular journey | CBC News

A new CBC Creator Network film features the journey thousands of crows make each day to Burnaby.

CBC

💥 THE BATTLE BEGINS! 💥

2023 is winding down, so it’s time to choose the WORST PERSON IN TECH!

🗳️ ROUND 1 VOTING OPEN NOW: https://forms.gle/xqcDPSXB98gA4udn9

#WorstPersonInTech #tech

Worst Person In Tech 2023 - Round 1

The end-of-year contest from Tech Won’t Save Us to let YOU choose the worst person in the tech industry is back! For the next five days, we’ll be working our way through 32 standout figures in the industry to see which deserves the crown for biggest ghoul of them all. It's tough competition! Here's how it will work: Every day I’ll post the matchups and you'll have 12 hours to vote. That will give me time to tabulate the results and get everything ready for the next round. Then, the winner will be announced live on our end-of-year livestream for Patreon supporters on December 17 — with a public announcement across our social media channels to follow soon after. This round ends at 8:30pm ET. You don't have to vote in every match if you don't want to. Let the voting begin! A couple notes: Yes, we're using Google Forms. It's not a ploy to collect your email address, as the little icon below this should indicate. I haven't turned that option on. We're using it for two reasons: Twitter's user base has splintered so using its polls wasn't a good option (not to mention not wanting to do any more than necessary on the Musk platform) and because every other option was just prohibitively expensive for some year-end fun. So this is how it is. Enjoy!

Google Docs

It tries to hide among the trees on the south shore of Burnaby’s Deer Lake, it’s too beautiful for that.

How did this modernist gem end up on a public body of water in Burnaby?

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2023/11/22/Glass-House-Deer-Lake/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial

A Peek Inside the Mysterious Glass House on Deer Lake | The Tyee

How did this modernist gem end up on a public body of water in Burnaby?

The Tyee
After reviewing my ~100th GPT-generated cover letter I am ready to write an essay on the literary style of the GPT cover letter.

The framing of what a Threads account *is* strikes me as a funny thing.

Meta is saying "Threads is the fastest growing app in history with 100M users in five days". This doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider that a Threads account *is* an Instagram account.

If you accept that Instagram has 2 billion active non-EU users, the story could easily be "Only 5% of eligible Instagram users opted in to Threads in five days".

The current obsession on AI's supposed "existential risks" has been a real head-scratcher for me, but it's made more sense once I reframed it as Western men's fear response to facing extraction and exploitation... Baby's First Colonialism, if you will.

In this little blog post I suggest that Western men are grappling with their first experience of colonialism in the only way they know how – assuming they're the first ones here!

https://acsweb.ucsd.edu/~nboscarino/blog/2023/ai-colonialism/

🚫📲 Mark Zuckerberg has begun blocking Canadian news providers — including The Tyee.

So we ask you, readers: Will you help us gauge the scope of the blast radius?

Our editor in chief David Beers writes. #CdnMedia #BillC18

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2023/07/12/Meta-Blocked-The-Tyee/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_content=071223-m&utm_campaign=editorial

Well, Meta Went and Blocked The Tyee. That’s a Big Deal | The Tyee

We posted (as usual) on Instagram and Threads and got told to pound sand. What this means for journalism, democracy, and you.

The Tyee

I know that a lot of people have left the bird app in favour of Threads, but I'm still struggling to agree with (what I see as) jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. @thetyee has now been blocked on Threads and Instagram because of Meta's tantrum over Bill C-18. I hope I don't need to explain how ridiculous this situation is.

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2023/07/12/Meta-Blocked-The-Tyee/

Well, Meta Went and Blocked The Tyee. That’s a Big Deal | The Tyee

We posted (as usual) on Instagram and Threads and got told to pound sand. What this means for journalism, democracy, and you.

The Tyee
Curious what @huggingface folks got goin on at #FAcct2023 ? Thread of stuff! 🧵