mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Media/Tech scholar @USCAnnenberg researching perception and persuasion effects in emerging media forms. Will sometimes write comprehensible stuff too, bylines in Slate, NBC, Vice (US) Politiken and Rec (DK).
Recovering startup upstart and tech schmo. Also recovering from acute political operator syndrome with co-pathological stratcommitis.
I have a neurodivergence and I'm not afraid to use it!
The secret's out: My #ICA2024 paper won the Top Faculty Paper award in the Philosophy, Theory, and Critique division.
If you're at ICA, I'm presenting it on Sunday at 3pm in Southport 1(Star L3).
I'm deeply honored and grateful. Given that full-time academic or research employment still seems to elude me, this was also an encouragement I really needed right now. I was honestly about to give up. This will help me keep up the pursuit a little longer.
When I teach students about how bad we are at predicting future tech, I point to how no one expected 2024 to have electric scooters cluttering up our sidewalks.
I just peer-reviewed (and firmly rejected) an article that:
1. Proposed an app affordance that would only work under a totalitarian government.
2. Subtextually proposed the eradication of LGBTQ+ people (and childless couples)
3. Was based on shoddy literary sources and filled with inconsistencies.
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE???!!!
#Academicchatter #commodon
This is one of the most tone-deaf and entitlement-blind things I have ever seen.
All I can hear in this clip are people in an ivory tower going "Who are all those people and why are they carrying torches and pitchforks?"
Me, arriving late yesterday evening:
Why would the organizers of #ica2024 choose a touristy beach resort town with no cultural history for this year's conference, other than it's cheap because it's winter in Australia right now?
Me, this morning: Oh.
DID YOU KNOW? CLAUDE CAN'T COUNT!
Given that computers are basically just counting machines that have been sped up a little bit, it is quite mind-boggling that GenAI bots like Claude can't even count the number of rows with entries in a spreadsheet correctly....
Because, you know, Apple are "the good guys" in tech, who respect people's privacy 🤮
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/02/2024/employee-lawsuit-accuses-apple-of-spying-on-its-workers
Yesterday, Elon Musk said that the future would be an age of abundance because robots will provide cheap labor.
I'd like to know how this eliminates competitively pricing the materials FOR the robots by using cheap human labor? Like the children currently extracting conflict minerals in the DRC?
I just saw on the incomparable Don Ihde's Wikipedia page that he appears to have passed away. But the page doesn't give any date of his passing or any details.
Does anyone know anything? I'm really sad regardless if it's true.
@grammargirl@zirk.us Unlike Claude, you are in fact, correct :)
It even did it several times before that particular instance.
The irony of AI software messing up the core function of a computer - to calculate - just cracks me up.
@grammargirl@zirk.us I'm just about to post this one: