One of the great environmentalism cons was convincing the public it was their responsibility to save the earth, when the corporations who are 99% of the problem still do whatever they want
The trend marks the latest example of tech development outpacing governance.
At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.
One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.
Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”
The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”
The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.
That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.
Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.
But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.
“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“
The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”
One of the parties in a grievance mediation had Otter.ai installed on his computer for a previous meeting. He thought (and, honestly, had been led to believe by the company) that he was the one triggering when it was used, and had wanted it to provide captions and a transcription for another meeting. He intended to use it once. Unbeknownst to him, it activated on EVERY MEETING. The worst part is no one noticed, so it is actually unclear how many meetings he'd been in that the AI had been activated on, but for this particular meeting, it sent the meeting host (my colleague) an email saying that it was RECORDING (which is illegal in this line of work, highly illegal, there's hearings in Congress right now on someone recording a negotiations meeting) the proceedings.
The goal of the email was for her to see how "helpful" of a tool that it was so that she could download it as well and enable it in her meetings. It sent her 1) an attendance summary (private); 2) a transcript of the meeting so far (illegal) and 3) a snippet of audio from the meeting (highly illegal). They had to stop the mediation entirely, switch to old school phones to see where the issue was and who had this enabled on their computer. The man was horribly embarrassed, and had to get help from his IT department to get the program uninstalled from his computer.
Genuinely, these AI tools are viruses. Because of this, we've been asking external people at the start of meetings if anyone else is present off-screen (a different story) or if anyone has AI programs installed on their computer. But most people don't KNOW because Copilot is now installed behind their backs, and it's being sneakier than other programs (like Microsoft isn't going to email someone and say "Hey, by the way, we've been listening into your meetings"), but that doesn't mean it isn't doing the same things.
If you are downloading and using these programs, please be aware of this and please fucking uninstall them.
This is something you have to be very aware about, as (the article notes), this can be illegal in many cases, and you have no idea what these companies are doing with this data they scrap from you.
Puritanism is getting worse around the globe and conservatives and fascists will absolutely be first going harder against porn, then use that against queer people. You HAVE to realise this and oppose anti porn measures and laws, be in solidarity with sex workers, and listen to them when they call this shit out. It's going to be vitally important.
Reminder that keeping porn legal means that pornstars have legal protections that they will lose if porn is made illegal. Reminder that keeping porn legal means there are legal standards that can be put in place and enforced which results in better safety for all who are involved in porn's creation.
Reminder that porn will never stop being a thing. It just won't. If it's made illegal, then it will continue to be created and distributed - its just that it will now be done under the table, and with no safety regulations or protections for anyone.
Yes, the hard-right's ultimate plan is to use porn as a gateway from which to attack queer people, but even if that wasn't their plan, you should want to protect the legality of porn anyway.
Keeping porn legal means that the chances of sexual assault on those who work in the industry are reduced, and means that victims of assault are able to pursue legal action against their attackers. Keeping porn legal means that human trafficking is decreased, and it gives victims of human trafficking a legally supported escape route that would be lost if porn were made illegal.
Keeping porn legal means that anyone who is involved in making it - regardless of whether theyre making it simply because they want to, or because they're financially desperate -- is granted a measure of protection that they otherwise would not be. People love to raise the "but porn is made by desperate people who sell their body to survive," but a) some people make porn because they like it, and b) someone who is desperate enough to sell their body will do so regardless of whether it's legal or not. But when it's legal, that desperate person has far more protections and is less likely to be taken advantage of than when it's illegal.
Keeping porn legal protects people. Making it illegal will harm people. It's that simple.
That's a you problem. No, really - it's your opinion is that sex work is demeaning, but I've had some really demeaning jobs that were legal and "proper". Just because a job involves sex doesn't mean it has less value than being a salesperson, or an accountant.
Every single point above is accurate and important. But we also need to remember that if they get their way, these dipshits will define porn in the loosest, vaguest, most nebulous ways possible in order to be able to criminalize Anything They Do Not Like.
To the people who want to make porn illegal?
Fanfiction is porn. (It's just in prose form.)
Fanart is (often) porn.
Queer people's existence is porn.
Even if you are not personally a sex worker, this is absolutely your fight too.
"But they're selling your body" ....do you think a warehouse worker isn't selling their body? The retail worker who has knee and hip problems from having to stand all day, the barista with carpal tunnel, the office worker with migraines from the screens and fluorescent lights.
All of us- ALL OF US- are selling our bodies to our employers and our clients, just different parts.
being an adult is just saying to yourself “this is the weekend i’ll clean my [x]” and then proceeding to not do that because it’s the weekend and you deserve to relax, goddamnit
fun fact: butt-cheeks are one of the things that make us superior to other animals okay note that other apes do not have butt-cheeks
okay don’t quote me on this because I only did sixthform-bio and I’m sure of forgotten loads of stuff but here’s the down-low
back when we were evolving from ape to human, one of the most important things that happened was when our spine started meeting our brains at a sort of 90 degree angle instead of like 45 degrees, which meant that we could straighten up and walk on two legs which was a pretty rad development
except alas oh no our muscles weren’t built to allow us to walk around on two legs because that requires a sort of twisty motion of your hips as opposed to whatever the fuck it is everything else does AND SO ape-people started evolving with longer, narrower waists so that our bodies could twist with every footstep and we could strut along the fashionable catwalk that is neanderthal evolution
but then once this had happened, people realised that we had an advantage over other animals and we would be better at chasing and killing them but we weren’t very good at running
so that’s when we developed the glutenus maximus which is a really badass-sounding name for the muscle in your derriere which helps us to support our spine in an upright position so we don’t get tired, and helps the legs to rotate nicely so that we can run, and has a nice big fat storage around it to help us get energy so that we can run
and that, basically, is the butt-cheek
tl;dr - butt-cheeks were the result of thousands of years of natural selection so that we could run fast and slaughter things
fun fact: that fat on the cheeks? Incredibly useful source of energy to that muscle during endurance exertion, when glycogen is more or less depleted; carries the advantage of being right there and also serving to pad the important muscles in case of injury and provide a comfortable cushion on which to sit. Fat pads do things, and while we’re most used to thinking of individual fat pads in terms of their structural uses, often they function by providing easy sources of local power for sustained use.
Humans actually have quite a lot of intramuscular fat relative to some other species–I’m used to mice, which don’t bother, for example; neither do rabbits, which are so infamously lean that dining too heavily on them can be bad for human health. Of course, neither species relies much on endurance. Fast twitch muscles, which are good for sprinting and darting, tend to be powered by glycogen availability even within species; by contrast, slow twitch and highly oxidative muscles that are used over sustained exercise are generally powered by intramuscular fat.
(I am reading an interesting thesis tonight that also notes that relative to horses, dogs have more intramuscular fat in hindquarter muscles–exactly what you would expect to see in the context of intramuscular fat as a local fuel for endurance running, since dogs are–like humans–adapted for long distance persistence hunting.)
Next time you slap that jiggly ass, stop and reflect on how important and useful ALL its components are! In a very real sense, humanity’s ass defines us nearly as strongly as our heads.
So what I’m hearing is that having a dump truck ass is literally Evolutionarily Advantageous. Even great-great-great-grandma Ungalug back in the Pleistocene woulda been hunting for a slice of that Cake. Help I’m a Miocene megafauna trying to escape predation but these Hominid ass-cheeks are dummy thick and the resonant clapping of their fatty pads keep driving them onwards beyond the limits of my exhaustion
computer i don't know how much more i can explain to you that i would rather let a blue ringed octopus handle my appendectomy then ever touch the horrific unending nightmare that Microsoft "Shit Idiot" Copilot ai would surely be
my brain contains multitudes of the english language that i am unfortunately incapable of escaping. watch this i'll put some words together right now. Egg Lobotomy. did you see that shit i'm linguistic as fuck
In case someone is furious and wants to remove this thing, I got to remove it using Registry editor. You can try using the other methods too, but I just tried the one I prefered the most out of all of them.
Remove Copilot from your Windows 11 computer using one of these two methods, depending on your Windows edition.
Window Copilot is great, but it's not for everyone.
When I talk about the value of work vs. the wages the worker gets, this is exactly what I’m talking about. And today, more of that value winds up going to the shareholders than even the business owners.
The fact that Tesla autopilots abort self driving 1 second before a crash so the company can state “self driving wasn’t active during the collision” should be grounds to dismantle the entire company.
Like, seriously, if you’re making 4000 pound death machines, and you program this shit to work on a technicality? Your company should be dismantled. Gone. No recourse. Just terrible shit dude
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