the curious case of broomclosetkink

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills

where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*

I hate learning about instances of "oh yeah we know how to do that, we just don't".

Oh. Shit.

The amount of slavery in Ancient Rome was legitimately terrifying tbh

Y’all know that I’m into ancient Roman history and I do a lot of research on it but even though I should be used to it by now sometimes I read an anecdote about how an individual slave was treated and I’m hit with the realization that like a third of the population was living like that and I just need to put my head in my hands for a second

When you study ancient history you’re reminded that slavery has never once been kind or justified. It just takes on different forms of evil in every time and place that it infects.

Lurking under this is also the fact that most Roman mining operations were done by slaves in conditions that were far more brutal than those of household slaves, to the point that sending a slave to the mines is a threat I’ve read leveraged multiple times in separate texts

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on Project Gutenberg sifting through forgotten old fiction and lemme tell ya. a lot of that stuff sucks ass.

Tremendously comforting, really.

You ever get a comment on a fic you wrote (or piece of art or a craft or anything you've managed to create) that you forgot even existed and think, "The person who made this was good. They worked hard and this... this work... it's lovely and smart and makes me want more. Whatever happened to that person, and why does she feel as useless and untalented as she does now?"

‘You’re just a child, in a mask.’

Not that "Victorian disease" is any less ominous, let's be real...

Ah, yes, a "Victorian disease" because that was the last time it was killing Londoners at the same rate as Southeast Asian people this very day :) totally not a white supremacist thing or anything, we just only care about diseas when it can potentially effect mostly white people :)

Well there were some abnormalities on my mammogram, a spot in each breast. I'm going for further scans on the 17th.