⚙️ Work

• My last full week of work before The Break.

🔗 Links

AI

• Audrey Watters @ Second Breakfast: 12 Years and 60 Minutes Later

  Go read the whole thing. All of it. And especially:

  For all the talk I hear about ed-tech revolutions – AI or otherwise – the only example I think the mainstream media consistently talks about is Khan Academy. On 60 Minutes. On Oprah. There is no “endless possibilities” for AI in education. This is it. This is the vision of the future of education that’s backed by the world’s most powerful people, not because it is good but because, for them, it is expedient and it is profitable. We’re supposed to dream of a future where AI “could one day change the way every student is taught” as Cooper puts it, and not confront the realities of classrooms today.

• David Wiley @ improving learning: Where Open Education Meets Generative AI: OELMs

  To paraphrase: Big AI companies are gonna AI their shitty AI all over education, so it’d be best if we beat them to it by shittifying education with our OWN AI first!

• Stephen Downes’s note about Wiley’s AI thing has an interesting suggestion that might - might - be a less-shitty way to pre-shittify education?

Trifecta: AI, Graft, and ‘Berta

Say, hypothetically, you want to build the “world’s largest AI datacentre”. What kinds of things would you be looking for? Probably access to plentiful and cheap energy (ideally, renewable, to help with the environmental impact of AI). Probably situated near a major urban centre and international transportation hub, so you’d be able provide services for a highly skilled workforce. Probably located near other major datacentres and IT hubs, for economies of scale.

Not so! The Second-Shittiest Dragon™ aka The Shittiest Shark™ just announced a graft of epic proportions - even, impressively, putting the proposed monorailHyperloop between Calgary and Edmonton¹ to shame. A (definitely 100% actually going to happen) $75B new datacentre district, with O’Leary as the face of the graft, and shiny AI-generated images that show that nobody involved with the “project” has any idea what a datacentre is.

You can tell it’s a serious and certainly-legitimate proposal because it’s named after “Mr. Wonderful” - a new datacentre called “Wonder Valley”.

So, back to the things a successful and legitimate project would be looking for:

• Energy source: Petro-energy all the way down.
• Location: rural Alberta, near Grande Prairie, 500km from the nearest sizeable urban area, with no international-capable airport.
• Tech hub: Also, nope.
• But, “permit-friendly” and has ready access to natural gas pockets that will fuel this thing if it actually happens. Thankfully, this is square in the middle of a Designated Ugly Zone, safely away from the pristine viewscapes that we are so desperately protecting.

The UCP have been signalling for some time that their “reset” of AIMCo will let them better direct where our pension funds will be “invested”. This sure looks like a juicy target for them - rural alberta, propping up petro-energy in the face of inevitably-decreasing-demand, and funnelling money to Conservative grafters.

Jesus Christ, this province is exhausting.

🧺 Other

The best thing I’ve done lately is create a playlist that contains every album that I’ve owned. Vinyl, cassettes, CDs. Everything that I’d bought in a store, before The Infinite Shuffle of streaming made nothing matter anymore. (Only) 2+ days of music, and the only algorithm is “stuff I decided to spend money on back in the day”. Ironically, the playlist is in Apple Music, and most of the albums are streamed. But there are a few that I’d ripped back when iTunes was a thing, that don’t have Apple Music equivalents.

Of course, these albums were there all along, but were buried by algorithms and novelty. “Surely, you want to hear this new thing instead of that old thing!”

And yet, hearing albums that I’d played over and over and over on cassette when I was a teenager, to the point where the tape stretched and it sounded shitty but I didn’t care because it was what I had, I haven’t felt this happy listening to music for a long, long time. This playlist has become my insomnia soundtrack.

Which connects to - holy shit am I tired. Just existentially, brain-turned-to-goo, inside-of-my-skull-feels-sunburned, eyes-can’t-focus-anymore tired.