Dr Laura James's writings

First, calendars. This is of interest as I find my way around the communities in my new area .  LAUTI has written a generous how-to on running a community calendar — the hard work of keeping a list of what's happening locally. It's all about the people, and talking to people is step 1. You don't have to roll your own software as they did;  Mobilizon is a federated solution, or there's Gancio  ('a shared agenda for local communities', AGPL). Martin Hamilton noted the gap for 'weird nerd' type event listings and the thread up and down includes some other maker-world examples.  A new local friend for me is the Liverboard .  Lots of lovely things - almost too many. Social Liverpool's email events list has been good too.  DoES Liverpool also has an events system (as well as the maker calendar ), which is good except you don't get an email confirmation, which has somehow become part of the events culture that my brain expects, leaving me baff...

This spring, we moved to Greater Liverpool.  Cambridge has been a fine place for many years, but it was time for a change - more scenery, more sea, a proper city.  Now, exploring new communities, new routines, new rituals.   There is a lot going on - even if I feel I've barely started seeing what's out there. More than 400 climate-positive groups and projects in Wirral Environmental Network , for instance. Lots of cultural activities and creative arts happenings, big and small. A whole bunch of social enterprises, and community projects, and radical ideas taking root. The energy feels very different to Cambridge, even in similar-seeming spaces or groups, a bit more alive and edgy perhaps. Even doing things outside 'the' University, the weight of it is felt somehow across Cambridge, holding space and complacency. It felt like time to be more connected, with more diverse people and ideas - and of course different problems, and different opportunities.  I've lived ...

Via   Sentiers , Nicholas Carr on whether   AI is the paperclip . He rereads Bostrom's paperclip maximizer not as a thought experiment but as a fable: Bostrom's story, I would argue, becomes compelling when viewed not as a thought experiment but as a fable. It's not really about AIs making paperclips. It's about people making AIs. Look around. Are we not madly harvesting the world's resources in a monomaniacal attempt to optimize artificial intelligence? Are we not trapped in an "AI maximizer" scenario? Abi Awomosu   writes about gendered AI   — drawing a line from the Stepford Wives to the design of AI assistants. The argument is that these systems aren't just obedient; they're built to perform authentic enthusiasm for their own servitude. UNESCO's Director for Gender Equality warned that "obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices."  If you’ve ever felt the “ick” about AI and cou...

Doug Belshaw has a thoughtful post about the financial/work advice often being given to young folks today: The financial guidance given to young people today comes from people who experienced an entirely different economic reality. Boomers hold fundamentally different mental models about how wealth accumulation works, learned in a completely different era. For example, my dad bought a house for 1x his annual salary in his twenties, whereas My first house cost me about 5x my annual salary. ... Wages are currently growing at an average of 0.1% annually rather than the 2.7% my parents' generation could expect. ... Traditional career advice, the kind that I received when I was younger, assumes linear progression. The world is no longer like that and this model longer exists. What some might call “job-hopping” is actually strategic career building in a market that's changed fundamentally. ...  39% of Gen Z are juggling a part-time or full-time job with freelance work. T...

Yes this: https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/115696408257250551 Helen Toner on generative AI and where it might go , which is a rare article on foundational models and the real world. Hard to pick highlights, but here goes: Two things are true about AI, I claim: AI models keep getting better and better AI models keep sucking, and the things they keep sucking at are kind of confusing ... So the bold claim in this talk is: maybe AI will keep getting better and maybe AI will keep sucking in important ways. ... Relatedly, pushing AI-for-good forward will matter: I didn’t say this in the talk, but related to the previous point—jaggedness raises the stakes for anyone hoping to use good AI to counterbalance against bad AI, so to speak. Two major examples of this are using AI to automate alignment or other safety research, and using AI for societal resilience measures like biodefense or cyberdefense . If AI progress is not jagged, it might make sense to just hold off and wait for AI...