Notes for May 18th 2024

Song of the week:

Notes

  • Slack, in all of it's wisdom, is now going to train AI on whatever you produce in your instance. To opt-out (yes, it's opt out), the instance admin needs to send an email somewhere. The content (DMs, files, and private or public channel messages) will still train an AI, it'll just be isolated to your instance. It's almost like Slack is desperate to offload both communities and corporate enterprise users at the same time.
    • I'll return to my semi-tireless opinion that we should return, en masse, to IRC or IRC-adjacent technologies to distribute our chat/social environments a bit better.
  • As companies like Slack trot shit, not well-thought-out AI features to users who didn't expect or want such features, it's probably worth remembering the uproar that folks felt when iPhone users got a free U2 album once.
  • This week Bohs, my local football team who emulate a community spirit project as much as a football club, launched two really exciting things. One (linked below) is a community farm project to bring veggies from a farm through the year in a subscription box collected at the Bohs office/stadium/somewhere in Phibsboro. The second, probably more significantly, was a friendly game with the women's Palestinian national team. Even friends of mine who are die-hard Pats (Bohs' natural predatory enemy) fan had a warm heart for the event, which was also attended by President Higgins.
  • I have a subscription to openAI and the new GPT4o model and accompanying features are genuinely stellar. I'm not sure what I would want it to do, but if this was an assistant a-la Siri, with privacy baked in, I'd be delighted. Right now it's a bit of a toy, but I can totally see this applying to an enormous amount of tasks and work in future.
    • Last night I passed my phone to my wife to chat to GPT 4o about Irish indie film stuff and the conversation was flowing. They got onto comedy horror (a genre my wife has made a 10-minute high budget short in) and the AI was able to recommend film festivals to submit to, etc.
  • Someone had initiated a poll on mastodon that asked what folks first operating system was. I voted for DOS, I think it was 3.11. What a time to be alive. And what a morbid reminder of age!
  • I linked below to a Deloitte white paper retort and it's hilarious. But it's so, so common to see absolute garbage like that crop up in enterprise business environments. I see it all the time, and I come across as abrasive or a little weird in some of those rooms because I'm blunt, straight-to-the-point and transparent about what works or doesn't. That is, sadly, not normal.
    • Loved this as a primer for the thread: "We find the critical role of technology in supporting business growth is increasingly being recognised." I, too, have a computer at work.
  • An aunt of mine died last week. It was sudden in so far as no one expected it, but she was quite ill over the last year or so. But her death is more of a wake-up call than it should, and I hope it is for my parents. My parents tend to hibernate on their own laurels and, in my opinion, are not living. My dad retired a few weeks ago so is still wrapping his arms around that stuff. But money isn't an issue, ideas shouldn't be much of a barrier either. Instead they frustratingly do almost nothing. I hope to retire early and stay just as busy as I am now, just on other things. Her death should be a reminder that ill health and the ultimate end state of all humanity is coming. There's no avoiding it. Enjoy it while you have it!

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Published on: 18th May, 2024

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