• 0 Posts
  • 690 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • We used to have a print news sheet for job listings in the non profit sector, which is very large in my home city. It would have one or two articles as well but was mostly job classifieds. Wish I could give you a specific recommendation, but I guess I’m saying just find another job?

    It sounds like you want to be in that job sector, but you experienced a disastrous turnover in management at one organization. To be candid it’s a mild story compared to many I have heard. Tyrannical EDs or crazy founders with too much authority, big funding swings, politics up the wazoo… the non profit sector seems to be particularly drama-laden. I’m not sure why. But take the hit and move on. It doesn’t sound like it was about you personally.








  • I agree with you that education is not primarily workforce training. I just included that note as a bit of context because it definitely made me chuckle to see these two posts right together, each painting a completely different picture of AI: “so important you must embrace it or you will die” versus “what the hell is this shit keep it away from children.”

    I fall in between somewhere. We should be very cautious with AI and judicious in its use.

    I just think that “cautious and judicious” means having it in schools - not keeping it out of schools. Toddler daycares should be angelic safe spaces where kids are utterly protected. Schools should actually have challenging material that demands critical thinking.


  • It did that, but we had an overly rosy view of what “democratize” meant. We thought that citizen journalists would leaven the bulky corporate media of the time. And they did. But there was also a torrent of bullshit. We have no excuse for not seeing this. The Greeks and Romans spent a great deal of thought on what would happen if the rabble were given a voice. We dismissed their ideas as gatekeeping oligarchy, but it turns out that populism is moatly a dirty word.


  • When the first dotcom bubble burst, I predicted that big companies would buy up all the major websites for fire sale prices and put them behind subscription paywalls. “Pay $30/month and get access to all 400 sites in the Yahoo network.”

    I underestimated how easy it is to spin up alternative sites. Most of the media brands I thought of as valuable then are shit now, or gone.

    And, like everyone, I didn’t anticipate social media. Even Google was still nascent at the time.



  • We need to be able to distinguish between giving kids a chance to learn how to use AI, and replacing their whole education with AI.

    Right under this story in my feed is the one about the CEO who fired 80% of his staff because they didn’t switch over to AI fast enough. That’s the world these kids are being prepared for.

    I would rather they get some exposure to AI in the classroom where a teacher can be present and do some contextualizing. Kids are going to find AI either way. My kids have gotten reasonable contextualizing of other things at school, like not to trust Google blindly and not to cite Wikipedia as a source. Schools aren’t always great with new technology but they aren’t always terrible either. My kids school seems to take a very cautious approach with technology and mostly teach literacy and critical thinking about it. They aren’t throwing out textbooks, shoving AI at kids and calling it learning.

    This is an alarmist post. AIs benefits to education are far from proven. But it’s definitely high time for kids everyone to get some education about it at least.