Izabella Laba

@ijlaba.bsky.social

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Mathematician, does not like limits.

Posts Replies Media

In Daejeon,

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Izabella Laba

Historian @gabriellehecht.bsky.social knows things. (Really.)

Ok but so called renewables are devastating parts of the planet not seen by the wealthy world (speaking from lithium and copper rich northern Chile). No such thing as truly environmentally sustainable large scale energy production. Downscaling is the only way to sanity.

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Izabella Laba

Journalism, please, more trolling like this and less logrolling

Jeffrey Katzenberg was such a dick about trying to block access that the LA Times printed a map with instructions about how to legally park in front of his beach house and cross his land to get to the beach, which was hilarious.

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Izabella Laba

We spent $365 to build an AI news site that publishes 50 times a day, plagiarizes directly from our original reporting, uses services like Fiverr and popular WordPress plugins, is SEO optimized for Google and Adsense & breaks the rules of none of them www.404media.co/i-paid-365-6...

I Paid $365.63 to Replace 404 Media With AIwww.404media.co Paying a freelancer on Fiverr to create a plagiarizing ChatGPT-powered news site revealed an industry of middlemen and services trying to game Google Search.

I grew up with Stalinist "art" around me. Derivative. Soulless. Imitation of popular past trends with no understanding of why they worked. Displacing real human art. AI "art" is pretty much the same. Totalitarianism always wants people to stop making art. Always.

excellent investigation, beautiful visualisation, and scary findings. tech corps are burning our planet down so people can stop making art www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

AI Is Wreaking Havoc on Global Power Systemswww.bloomberg.com New artificial intelligence data centers are coming online so fast that the electricity demand is straining global power grids and threatening clean energy goals.

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Izabella Laba

I'll come out and say it. AI feels very abuse/sexpesty. I don't want it, I didn't consent to it, it causes harm, wastes massive energy, has gigantic fuckboi red alerts, and produces only bullshit and pain while thieving our time.

At what point do we lock those fucking things in a capsule and send them off into space?

Apple, Microsoft and Google say AI smartphones and computers will automate tasks like editing photos and wishing a friend a happy birthday. These companies need something from you to make that work: more data. Our tech columnist breaks down what to know.

What the Arrival of A.I. Phones and Computers Means for Our Datawww.nytimes.com Apple, Microsoft and Google need more access to our data as they promote new phones and personal computers that are powered by artificial intelligence. Should we trust them?

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Izabella Laba

What everyone wants for their birthday is a happy birthday message their friend didn’t bother to write.

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Izabella Laba

Reply to

Tyler King

The thing statements like this are hiding is basically every LLM from the major players has already reached the end of the training data universe. They’ve absorbed everything there is to scrape. They’re in desperate need of new data to build larger models. That data isn’t being created fast enough.

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Izabella Laba

It would be super cool if the tech media would simply stop credulously repeating every value-juicing statement C-Suites make like they’re the in-house PR department. The only difference between these hollow promises and the guy crying, “The end is near!” on the street corner is funding.

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Izabella Laba

The Federal Trade Commission, of all entities, is out here writing absolute bangers about AI snake oil. www.ftc.gov/business-gui...

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Izabella Laba

Dear lord how I love my tribe of aging Xer feminists. I see us all over the place, all wearing their sudden, dramatic loss of fucks in different ways, but it’s impossible to miss, and it’s glorious.

More from Revelstoke. The place is gorgeous and it's really hard to choose just a few pics.

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Izabella Laba

i think we should stop giving our ai bots female names (alexa, siri) and give them names from the old white boys club (john, james, chad) in honor of how overconfident and annoying they are even when they’re completely wrong or making stuff up

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Izabella Laba

gotdamn if this isn’t EXACTLY what destroys relationships of every kind between men and women—family, platonic, workplace, romantic no amount of love can withstand being shot down every single time she opens her mouth

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Izabella Laba

Back in grad school, I was out running when a pickup rolled through a stop sign and knocked me down. I was fine except for a few cuts and bruises. With a truck today? Probably dead.

A 5 yr Belgian study showed the BIG impact of increasing vehicle weight on road deaths & injuries. When a person on a bike or walking is hit by a pick-up, the risk of serious injury increases by 90% compared to a car. The risk of death goes up by 200%. www.vias.be/fr/newsroom/...

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Izabella Laba

Awful. For years when police and media said “less/non lethal weapons” I’ve reminded folks of journalism student Victoria Snelgrove who Boston cops shot with a “crowd control projectile” in 2004 causing her to bleed out from her eye and brain. And now another journalist, one many of us know, will die

Journalist Linda Tirado is dying from the "non-lethal" bullet cops put in her eye. She needs money to cover hospice care necessary because of TBI-related dementia. Venmo: Linda-Tirado-3 PayPal: Bootstrapindustries@gmail Zelle: 806.433.6075 lindatirado.substack.com/p/story-thir...

Story Thirty-Ninelindatirado.substack.com This time, it’s for Linda.

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Izabella Laba

I doubt I know a woman who could not have authored this post, myself included

I have been tremendously lucky in my career, but I have absolutely seen men get paid more for the same or less work with the same or fewer qualifications and I have seen men praised as geniuses for behavior that gets me called a bitch.

Look at my shocked face right here. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Apple punishes women for same behaviors that get men promoted, lawsuit saysarstechnica.com Apple could owe thousands in back pay to 12,000 female employees.

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Izabella Laba

Young people need to know what the management class doesn't want them to learn.

UNC Asheville is going to close its drama, philosophy, religious studies, French, and German depts because financial consultants recommend this. These consultants only count the number of majors, not the number who take and are influenced by courses from depts other than their major. Shame!

A random road stop along the Icefields Parkway.

More pics with reflections coming up.

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Izabella Laba

This, but also, not everyone can tolerate being bad at something for long enough to develop skill. Tolerance for failure is an underappreciated requirement for getting good at something.

I think, if you never sat down to learn the skills of a particular art, that art seems mysterious to you and it's easier to think that someone with those skills must just have "talent" cause you can't imagine yourself being able to do those things. Like, a long time ago on an online writing workshop

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Izabella Laba

It's not harmless. It's not "just an innocent thing" to be fooled by AI. You NEED to be able to discern and differentiate reality. You NEED to know how the world works on a basic level. Because fooling you with baby animals and flowers is just the start of something much worse.

Let's see what's on my big* camera :) (Not that big, but bigger than the phone)

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Izabella Laba

As the 21st century progresses, we're not going to need the population to have *less* knowledge of physics. Or high-level math like the programs just cut at WVU. How do all those 1's and 0's keep getting squished into smaller and smaller spaces? It's done by people who know physics. And not b.s.

AUGH shiiiiit. UNC Asheville's Physics program is on the consultants' radar for reduction/elimination. this freaking timeline mountainx.com/news/14-unca...

14 UNCA academic programs highlighted for potential reductions, eliminationmountainx.com An outside consultant recommended the University of North Carolina Asheville examine 14 of its 35 academic programs for potential course reductions or program eliminations.

Took a small detour yesterday.

Chilling out by the river

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Izabella Laba

Reply to

Alan Richardson

This is an astonishing sentence (p 57): “Group interviews were held with five groups: students, deans, Senate Office professional staff, vice provosts, and the Office of University Council.” Notice anyone missing? Maybe the most important group within the UBC academic community—faculty??

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Izabella Laba

Huh, UBC Vancouver Senate had an external review! Here’s the report. I wonder why, as a faculty member and former Senator, I didn’t know that this review was happening. Here is the link: scs-senate-2021.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/Final-...

scs-senate-2021.sites.olt.ubc.ca