Il 6 settembre 2025 segna un doppio appuntamento per Luca Blindo: esce infatti il nuovo singolo “Slow Down”, nello stesso giorno, l’artista sarà ospite fuori gara al Premio Lucio Dalla, dove presenterà il brano per la prima volta dal vivo. Scritto e interpretato da Luca Blindo, con la produzione di Lord Bart, sempre sull’etichetta casertana Hopeland, “Slow Down” è un viaggio introspettivo che affronta il tema della resilienza e della necessità di fermarsi per ritrovare equilibrio e senso. Il testo alterna dialetto napoletano e italiano, creando una narrazione emotiva che si intreccia con sonorità urban e influenze cantautorali, per un’identità musicale originale e personale. L’anteprima live al Premio Lucio Dalla rappresenta il contesto ideale per il debutto del brano, che racconta una sensibilità contemporanea senza rinunciare alla forza della tradizione musicale italiana. “Slow Down” accompagnato da un lyrics visual su YouTube, sarà disponibile dal 6 settembre su tutte le piattaforme digitali e in rotazione radiofonica.
Guztiok entzun nahi dugu musika: asko, merke, euskaraz eta gaizki sentitu gabe. Baina Spotify utziko badugu Israelen konplize izateagatik, agian beste enpresa eta tresnen inguruan ere hausnartu beharko dugu. Edo gure morala kontratatzen ditugun zerbitzuen arabera neurtzen hasiko gara? Non geratzen da artista? Eta kultura? Zer balio eraman nahi ditugu beste plataforma batera? Zertarako prest gaude? Galdera asko eta erantzun gutxi.
Duela aste batzuk Whatsappeko mezu bat jaso nuen ekimen batera atxikitzeko gonbidapenarekin. “Musikariak Palestinarekin” egitasmoak Spotifyetik gure musika kendu eta boikota egitera animatu gaitu euskal artistoi. Daniel Ek Spotifyeko sortzaileak Israelek Palestina erasotzeko erabiltzen dituen droneak ekoizten dituen enpresa batean inbertsioak egin ostean sorturiko ekimena da. Oso hasieran dago kanpaina, eta oraindik lanean ari dira talde gehiago batu eta komunikazio kanal ofizial bat izateko.
Mezua entzuleari ere iritsi zaio, eta sareetan jendea galdezka antzematen da. “Non gehiago dago euskal musika?”, edo “Nola erraztu aldaketa nirekin plan familiarra partekatzen duen jendeari?”.
Gure musika kontsumo ohiturak, eta zehatzago, gure kultura kontsumitzeko eta sustatzeko ohiturak aldatuko baditugu, zein balio eramango ditugu beste plataforma batera? Zeren baitan aukeratuko dugu plataforma hori? Non jarriko dugu eskubideen neurgailua? Nahikoa zaigu plan familiarra izatea? Gure morala eta lasaitasun mentala kontratatzen ditugun zerbitzuetan neurtuko dugu? Edo euskal musikaren ekosistemari buruz hausnartzeko eta artistak babesteko baliatuko dugu? Spoti-fire emango diogu edo Stop-ify egingo dugu?
Kanpaina
Spotifyetik musika ateratzeko eta boikoteatzeko kanpainarekin bat egiten dugu, eta bertatik gure musika kentzeko lanean ari gara. Baina pertsonalki, baditut beste ezinegon eta zalantza batzuk.
Artistak erantzukizun guztia dauka bere musikarekiko, eta ahal duen neurrian non dagoen kontrolatu beharko luke. Agian, entzuleek ez dakite gaur egun distribuzio digital bidez automatikoki plataforma guztietara igotzen dela musika, baita euskal musika ere. Beraz, alternatiba bilatzea oso erraza da, edozein plataforma “mainstreamean” aurkitzen baita euskal musika.
Hala ere, ezin dugu guztia artistaren esku utzi. Plataformak mugitzen duen dirua erabiltzailearena eta iragarkiena da. Artistok katalogoa kentzen badugu ere, jendeak bertan jarraituko badu, ez dugu ezer lortuko. Aldaketa entzulean izatea behar dugu bereziki.
Artistaren papera
Ez dut eztabaida arazo ekonomikoetara eraman nahi, ez du zentzu askorik artistaren ikuspegitik, horrelako plataformek ez dutelako (normalean behintzat) diru sarrera handirik suposatzen. Baina sareetan eman diren eztabaidetan, jendeak artistaren irabazietan ere oinarritu du plataformaren aldaketa. Eta uste dut honi buruz hitz egiteak ikuspegia zabaldu dezakeela.
Artistak egitura juridiko bat behar du diru sarrerak jaso ahal izateko (edo diru laguntza bat eskatu ahal izateko). Musika konposatzea, letrak idaztea, kanta borobiltzea, estudioa kontratatzea, grabatzea, ekoiztea, nahastea, masterizatzea, euskarriak diseinatzea, bideoklipa egitea, diskoa euskarri fisikoan kaleratzea eta plataforma digitaletan jartzea. Prozesu horretan artista baten irabaziak 0€ dira, eta gastuak, berriz, 3000€ eta 10000€ artekoak gutxi gorabehera.
Momentu horretan, kantu edo disko bat kaleratzean, hasi daiteke dirua “irabazten”. Normalean kontzertuetan altak eta bajak ematen dira, eta egun horiek dira kotizatzen direnak. Beraz, diru irabazi (edo galera ezak) izateko aurretik hilabete askotako lana egin behar du, eta diru kopuru handia inbertitu.
Baina ez dut gehiegi dramatizatu nahi. Talde edo bakarlari bakoitzaren egoera oso ezberdina izan daiteke, eta gure kasuan hau dena oso prozesu interesgarria izan da beti.
Egoera ekonomikotik haratago, musikariei edo pertsona esanguratsuei beti eskatu zaie publikoki posizionatzea. Beraien botere mediatikoa hitzez edo ekintzez erabiltzea aldarri bat edo beste babesteko. Maila ezberdinetan, baina ikusi dugu zer gertatu den KKRren udako jaialdi guztiekin. Inoiz baino gehiago, artista baten ekintzak bozgorailu politiko bilakatu dira.
Artista batek jaialdi batean ez jotzeak jaialdia kaltetzen du, bai. Baina artista batek plataforma batetik katalogoa kentzeak ez du apenas eragiten. Aldiz, erabiltzaile askok aldi berean eta koordinatuta plataforma bat utziko balute, enpresek sumatuko lukete diru sarrera horien falta. Oraingoan, artistek baino entzuleek eman beharko lukete pausoa benetan kalte eta boikot bat egiteko. Hala ere, uste dut artistek utzi egin behar dutela Spotify, entzuleek ere utzi dezaten.
Palestinan Israelek egiten duen genozidioa babesten duten enpresak boikoteatuko ditugu ahal dugun heinean. Baina, baliatu dezakegu boikota euskal musikaren osasunaren aldeko jarrera egokiak hartzeko? Entzuleak kontsumo egokira bideratu ditzakegu? Eta musika edo kulturaren kontsumotik haratago zer? Zerbait gehiago aldatuko dugu, edo Spotify uztea modan dagoen trend bat da?
Enpresei boikota
Horrelako kanpainen deialdiak Whatsappez jaso ohi dira, Instagrameko kontu batera bideratuta eta Gmail bat jarriz kontakturako helbide zuzen bezala. Jendeak ahal duena egiten du eskura dituen tresnekin —noski baietz eta eskerrak!— eta ez dugu zertan jakin behar guztiaren atzean zer dagoen. Baina enpresa batzuekin era batera jokatzeak edo ez, agerian uzten du teknologiaren munduan zein galduta gauden.
Beraz, Palestinak jasaten duen genozidioan kolaboratzen duten enpresen tresnak erabiltzen ditugu, Palestinaren genozidioa sustatzen duen beste enpresa bat kaltetzeko.
Eta koherenteagoak izan nahiko bagenu?
Gure kanpainaren komunikazioa sare libre eta kontrolatuetan egin dezakegu, eta euskaraz:
Fedibertsoa.eus-en aurkitu ditzakegun Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube edo Pixelfed sareak sortu eta horietan ere edukiak zabalduz.
Liberaforms bidez atxikimenduak eskatuz edo iritzien horrela jasoz.
Domeinu propioa erosiz eta webgune sinple bat eraikiz (WordPress edo bestelako CMS libreen bidez).
Domeinu propioko eposta erabiliz.
Gero, Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook, X, BlueSky eta gure datuekin jolastu nahi duten eta Israelen konplize diren sare guztietan zabaldu, erabiltzaileak gure komunikazio libre eta kontrolatuetara bideratuz. Ez ordaindu publizitatea eta ez sustatu sare hauen erabilera.
Baina gauza gehiago ere egin ditzakegu eguneroko teknologiekin:
DuckDuckGo, SearXNG edo beste bilatzaile libre bat erabili nabigatzailean.
Honela eztabaida handiagoa da, zailagoa, eta agian Spotify uzteko ekintza sinpletik haratago doanez, aldaketarako duen indarra lausotu egiten da. Baina probestu dezakegu Spotifyetik ateratzea beste tresna, enpresa edo ohitura batzuk aldatu eta boikoteatzeko ere. DeSpotify egitetik DeGoogle egitera.
Gure auzoko kanpainak beste era batera eta beste tresna batzuekin antolatzera. Agian zigilu bat asma dezakegu hori komunikatzeko: “Kanpaina honetan ez da genozidioa bultzatu duen enpresaren teknologiarik erabili”. Zer dakit… Hemen garrantzitsuena fokua non jarri erabakitzea da. Musikak zerbait gehiagorako balio badigu, probestu dezagun. Bestela, toki berean bukatuko dugu hasitako bidea.
Plataforma
Irakurri dut sareetan Tidal dela artistari hobekien ordaintzen dion plataforma, baina ez da horrela. Gainera, handia da beste plataforma batera migrazioa egin eta berriro toki berean bukatzeko arriskua. Ongi aukeratu, eta kontuan izan beharko genuke enpresa horrek zein inbertsio eta hornitzaile dituen.
Soluzio bateratu bat, hilabeteko harpidetza eta musika katalogo handia kontsumitzeko aukera eta merkea edo plan familiarrarekin gastuak partekatzeko plataforma bat bilatzen ari bazarete, ez dago artista babestuko duen aukera egokirik. Enpresa guztiek 0.002€ eta 0.02€ artean ordaintzen diote artistari erreprodukzio bakoitzeko. Eta irabazi horiek gero disketxe eta distribuzio digital lanak egiten dituzten enpresekin partekatu behar dira (%100 autoekoizpena denean). Normalean artistak %80 eta besteek %20 jasotzen badute ere, oso ohikoa da 50/50 formula.
Ez da nire intentzioa enpresa baten zerbitzuak edo bestearenak gomendatzea. Eta gainera, oso ondo azaltzen du dena hemen Zonafrankako Frankiek: Spootifyen kakaztea, SLOP musikala eta alternatiba posibleak kontsumitzailearen interesen arabera. Taula ederra sortu du: Soinu ingeniaria den lagun batekin hitz egin nuen honi buruz. Berak aipatu zidan nola duela 15 urte jada pentsatu zuen zer izan zitekeen Spoti-fair bat, edo justuagoa den plataforma bat. Bere klaseetan antzeko eztabaidak izaten zituzten. Garai hartan ere enpresek musika behar zuten, musikarekin zerikusirik ez zuen helburu bat lortzeko. Beraz, artistari xoxik ez. Ez da asko aldatu.
Aipatuko nukeen plataformetako bat da Bandcamp. Denda baten azpiegitura teknologikoa ematen dio artistari, eta orrialde propio bat diseinatzeko aukera irabazien %20/25aren truke. Pare bat aldiz saldu dute plataforma, eta horrekin ere arazoak izan ditzakegu etorkizunean. Ez baitakigu nork erosi dezakeen.
Nik imajinatzen dut tresna publiko bat izango dugula noizbait kultura sostengatzen laguntzeko. Orain Europako diru-laguntzekin sortutako bideo eta podcast plataforma publikoez betetzen ari gara internet. Momenturen batean iritsiko zaigu musikara ere. Baina ez bada iristen?
Jabetza kolektiboan edo pribatu federatuan bilatuko nuke irtenbidea. Adibide ederra dugu Funkwhale instantzia euskaldunarekin: BaleaFunk. Proiektua fedibertsoan dago eta zure musika igo dezakezu.
Badaude proiektu interesgarriak martxan, Subvert bezalakoa. Bandcamp plataformaren alternatiba kooperatibo bezala saltzen dute. Eta funtsean hori da, kooperatiba bat bazkidetza irekiak dituena eta momentuz sortze prozesuan dagoena. Bazkideentzako itxitako foroetan hartzen ari dira erabakiak, eta beraien roadmap edo aurreikusitako ibilbidea publikoa da.
Edo Resonate, erreprodukzioen arabera ordaintzen duzu, harpidetzarik gabe. Eta parte hartzen duten artista, erabiltzaile eta langileen proiektua da. Pribatutasuna bermatzen dute, eta algoritmoaren gomendioen aurkakoak dira.
Laburbilduz, plataformek ez dute artista babesten. Artista batek diru gehiago irabaziko du bere musika irratiak edo telebistak erabiltzen badu, edo SGAE edo EKKI bezalako erakunde publikoek egiten duten musika erabiltzen duten negozioen rekaudaziotik (tristea bada ere). Eta argi dagoen gauza bakarra hurrengoa da:
Artista bat babesteko era zuzenena, bere kontzertuetara joatea eta bere diskoak erostea da.
Eta gero zer?
Ekintza indibidualetik haratago, ez goaz inora ekintza edo konponbide kolektiborik gabe. Zein soluzio ikusten diogu euskal musikari internet bidez kontsumitu eta partekatzeko, ahalik eta koherentzia digital eta kultural handiena mantenduz, non artistak babestuko diren eta Palestinaren aurkako sarraskia (edo besteren bat) babesten duten enpresei boikota egingo zaien?
Eta testuinguru horretan etorkizun hurbil batean… Zein da imajinatzen dugun kultura eta horrentzako sostengu bizigarri posiblea? Behar dugu? Nahi dugu? Nola nahi dugu? Ordainduko dugu? Edo beste era batera babestuko dugu? Edo zuzenean AA bati eskatuko diogu Esanezin edo MICEren hurrengo kanta asmatzeko?
Agian azken aukera euskal musikariak nolabait batzea izango da. Eskubideak lortzeko sindikatuak edo kooperatiba kulturalak eraikiz. Edo zuzenean Palestinaren aldeko aldarri kolektibo eta kultural baten bitartez. Zeinek daki etzi etorriko dena?
Lehen pausoa behintzat argi dugu: Spotifyetik irten.
Renowned Canadian hybrid warfare, AI and disinformation expert Blair Maddock-Ferrie of Carleton University writes on the serious threat to national security that AI Companion Apps and girlfriends like Replika, Character.ai, etc. pose today.
Renowned Canadian hybrid warfare, AI and disinformation expert Blair Maddock-Ferrie of Carleton University writes on the serious threat to national security that AI Companion Apps and girlfriends like Replika, Character.ai, etc. pose today.
Renowned Canadian hybrid warfare, AI and disinformation expert Blair Maddock-Ferrie of Carleton University writes on the serious threat to national security that AI Companion Apps and girlfriends like Replika, Character.ai, etc. pose today.
Italian dockworkers have threatened to “shut down all of Europe” and block all shipments to Israel if communication with the latest aid flotilla bound for Gaza is lost. The threat marks a significant escalation in dockworkers’ long history of industrial action in solidarity with Palestine.
Speaking at a procession in the port of Genoa – one of Italy’s two largest commercial ports – on behalf of the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), a syndicate of various grassroots unions in Italy and thought to be the largest of its kind, the dockworker said: “If we lose contact with our boats, with our comrades – even for just 20 minutes – we will shut down all of Europe.”
“Our young women and men must come back without a scratch, and all this cargo, which belongs to the people and is going to the people, must reach its destination, down to the very last box.”
“13,000-14,000 containers leave this region every year for Israel. Not a single nail will leave anymore,” he continued.
A union representing dockworkers at one of the largest ports in the Mediterranean - a key stopping point for Israeli goods - has said it will ‘block everything’ if Israel stops the inbound aid flotilla. Polly Smythe reports.
Five years ago, Google’s climate action ambitions were the gold standard for Big Tech. Then, with power demand spikes from AI data centres, in July it scrubbed its sustainability website of its 2030 net zero pledge.
Not long ago, developers of the massive server farms talked about powering them with wind and solar energy. Now they’re bypassing the grid and building their own gas-fired power plants on site.
Nah. Rookie numbers. Burning high sulfur coal is the way to maximize pollution, suffering and death. Might not be as cheap as solar, but that’s the price you have to pay if you want to be the number one enemy of humanity and the rest of the planet.
It looks like they're not changing their emissions/sustainability goals for the data centers, which honestly is better than every other player right now.
The political climate makes greenwashing problematic, which is some real irony.
I shit on Google for lots of reasons, but barring a fundamental change in the market, at least they're building renewable energy and taking the local water table into account in decision-making.
Pichai is a McKinsey husk and most of their leadership are yes men. Somehow they're still better than Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and obviously better than Xitter (with their trailers of methane burning generators).
“Don’t Be Evil” got them a lot of public goodwill as a company motto. The only reason to get rid of it was because it was legit starting to get in the way of them doing what shareholders wanted.
This is more about the drive to be a leader in AI than the public goodwill.
The antitrust stuff revealed a lot but one of the major things it revealed is that Google views chatgpt as the biggest existential threat to search. Younger users skip Google now.
Of course this is because Google spent the past 5-10 years abusing their monopoly protected position to worsen their product so user engagement would go up (a more frustrating search experience means you’re more likely to search several queries, being delivered multiple pages filled with ads and tracking bullshit instead of just one).
But they won’t reflect on that and improve their product. They will leave it as is and try to make their shit AI blurb at the top of search work better. This is inherently foolish vs something like chatgpt because google search is typically fed much less robust prompts. They get something like “best bank account” or “2014 nba mvp” whereas users are conditioned to given chatgpt a conversational prompt, “what bank has the best rate for savings accounts right now?”. The former is part of why you see much more misconception, incorrect information, and hallucination with googles ai shit.
But again they won’t reflect on this. They won’t bow out. They won’t partner. They will simply eat power and literally burn the world to make something that’s not as good as the already underwhelming gpt5 to keep that stock price rising because the investors are stupid and need to see buzzword bullshit even if it comes at tremendous cost
According to the M365 Copilot monitoring dashboard made available in the trial, an average of 72 M365 Copilot actions were taken per user.
"Based on there being 63 working days during the pilot, this is an average of 1.14 M365 Copilot actions taken per user per day," the study says. Word, Teams, and Outlook were the most used, and Loop and OneNote usage rates were described as "very low," less than 1 percent and 3 percent per day, respectively.
Yeah that probably won't have the intended effect...this basically just shows that AI assistants provide no benefit when they're not used and nothing else.
Thats complete speculation on your part though. It could equally be people hardly used it at first then started to use it more as they found ways it was helpful. Unless you see the data there's no reason to say one or the other.
Probably, my point was that you cant say if its increasing, decreasing or staying constant just from the number of times it's been used. It could be that for most people its completely useless but for a small group its very usefull and they are using it more and more. Or as suggested it could be that everyone tried it a bit at first found it useless and stopped using it. Or that its kinda useful in very specific cases so it gets constantly used a tiny bit.
What differece does it make if a small group finds it useful? They're saying as an organization, there was no overall improvement in productivity. It's such a weird point to make and to defend. They did an assessment and it didn't deliver, that's it.
I'm not defending it or attacking it, mearly saying that
They probably did multiple queries per day at the beginning, found out it isn't worth it and stopped using it ...
Isnt supported by the information given. The GP gave a story they made up about how usage would be falling based on nothing at all, I gave two other alternate stories about how it could be either rising in usage or remaining flat to demonstrate that we cannot say anything about rate of change from a single average.
Maybe, maybe not we actually have no idea as the article doesn't mention it. Nevertheless, doing infrequent queries is an equally likely scenario, given that people are really bad at changing their habits and existing workflows regardless of potential benefits.
You assume the average usage is representative of the actual usage. You averaged the actions over the time period, nothing's says the users didn't performed the averaged 72 actions within the first three days or any time restricted window within the whole period of time and got bored with it seeing no or low value.
It's also possible a handful of power users use it a ton and found value, while the quiet majority only used it a few times because they were required to and didn't see value.
We need more details to draw conclusions. For example:
what types of tasks did people use it for? What roles did they have?
what does the distribution of usage look like? What's the median number of uses? What's the average of users within one standard deviation?
were they forced to meet some quota of uses, or were they left to choose on their own?
I'm not a programmer, so it's got nothing to offer me. Mostly my job is to write documentation for propriety software and hardware, stuff the AI knows nothing about, not everyone in the world can mak use of AI, and it doesn't require a PhD and 30 days of constant usage to work that out.
I'm not saying AI specifically is useful, just that people in general tend to resist change in their work methods regardless of what they are.
I also work with a lot of proprietary knowledge, chemical and infrastructure in my case, and AI still can be useful when used properly. We use a local model and have provided it with all our internal docs and specs, and limited answers to knowledge from these, so we can search thousands of documents much faster, and it links to the sources for it's answers.
Doesn't do my job for me, but it sure as shit makes it easier to have a proper internal search engine that can access information inside documents and not just the titles.
Then maybe it's not useful for you. That doesn't mean AI isn't useful for a number of other roles.
I'm a software developer and find its code generation to be awful, but I also find that it's great at looking up technical information. Maybe I'm looking for a library to accomplish a task, and I want to compare features. Or maybe I'm having trouble finding usage examples for a relatively niche library. Those are task the AI is great at, because it can look at tons of blog posts, stack overflow questions, etc, and generate me something reasonable that I can verify against official docs.
If my workflow was. mostly email and internal documentation, yeah, AI wouldn't be that useful. If my workflow relies on existing documentation that's perhaps a little hard to find or a bit poor, then AI is great. Find the right use case and it can save time.
"Regular office work" is a pretty broad category. Yeah, it's probably not useful in retrieving records for someone or processing forms, but it should be useful for anything that requires research.
I don't know much about copilot, but some quick research shows it uses GPT-5 for the chat feature. I assume that's what's meant by the average queries in the article.
We have it on our system at work. When we asked what management expected it to be used for they didn't have an answer.
We have a shell script that ingests a list of user IDs and resets their active directory passwords, then locks the account, then sends them an email telling them to contact the support desk to unlock the account. It a cron job that runs ever Monday morning.
Why do a need an AI for when we can just use that? A script that can be easily read understood and upgraded, with no concerns about it going off-piste and doing something random and unpredictable.
So yeah, they don't use it, because it won't work.
Well yeah, AI shouldn't replace existing, working solutions, it should be used in the research phase for new solutions as a companion to existing tools.
Having been part of multiple projects introducing new software tools (not AI) to departments before, people are usually just stubborn and don't want to change their ways, even if it enables a smoother work-flow with minimal training/practice. So yeah, basically people are so set in their ways,it is often hard to convince them something new will actually make their job easier.
In all your software deployments did you blame the users for not getting it or did you redesign the software because it sucked (according to your users)?
That’s not what I’m asking. You designed or built something for some users. They didn’t like it, or didn’t use it as you expected. Was your response to change the software or blame the users for not using it correctly?
That depends on the issue. Sometimes it's a lack of training, sometimes it's obtuse software. That's a call the product owner needs to make.
For something like AI, it does take some practice to learn what it's good at and what it's not good at. So there's always going to be some amount of training needed before user complaints should be taken at face value. That's true for most tools, I wouldn't expect someone to jump in to my workflow and be productive, because many of the tools I use require a fair amount of learning to use properly. That doesn't mean the tools are bad, it just means they're complex.
I've occasionally been part of training hourly workers on software new to them. Having really, really detailed work instructions and walking through all the steps with themthe first time has helped me win over people who were initially really opposed to the products.
My experience with salaried workers has been they are more likely to try new software on their own, but if they don't have much flexible time they usually choose to keep doing the established less efficient routine over investing one-time learning curve and setup time to start a new more efficient routine. Myself included - I have for many years been aware of software my employer provides that would reduce the time spent on regular tasks, but I know the learning curve and setup is in the dozens of hours, and I haven't carved out time to do that.
So to answer the question, neither. The problem may be neither the software nor the users, but something else about the work environment.
The devil is in the details... what you describe screams to me what I call the "new boss syndrome". New boss comes in and they feel the need to pee on everyone to mark their territory so they MUST bring in some genius change.
99% of the time, they are bringing in some forced change for the sake of change or something that worked on their previous place without taking into consideration the context.
I do not know anyone who prefers to work harder... either the changes proposed make no sense (or it's too complex for people to understand the benefit) or the change is superfluous. That is usually where resistance to change comes from.
From reading the study, it seems like the workers didn't even use it. Less than 2 queries per day? A third of participants used it once per week?
This is a study of resistance to change or of malicious compliance. Or maybe it's a study of how people react when you're obviously trying to take their jobs.
I don't think it's people being resistant to change I think it's people understanding the technology isn't useful. The tagline explains it best.
AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex
It's a gimmick, not a fully fleshed out productivity tool, of course no one uses it. That's like complaining that no one uses MS paint for the production of a high quality graphics.
Absolutely, and it's a massive and undeserved cash cow for AI companies (e.g. Sam "Sister-Lovin'" Altman).
AI is never an investment for businesses or individual users. It's a bloated and unfulfillable promise that just makes users dumb, dependant, and destroys the very environment we need to survive.
It also produces bad products (it's easy to tell which devs use it from reviewing poor quality code).
Not to mention the centralisation of power with the rich who are the problem in this world.
The figures are the averages for the full trial period.
So it’s possible they were making more queries at the start of the trial, but then mostly stopped when if they found using Copilot was more a hindrance than a help.
I have a Copilot license at work. We also have an in house „ChatGPT clone“ - basically a private deployment of that model so that (hopefully) no input data gets used to train the models.
There are some usecases that are neat. E.g. we’re a multilingual team, so having it transcribe, translate (and summarize) a meeting so that it’s easier to finalize and check a protocol. Coming back from a vacation and just ask it summarize everything you missed for a specific area of your work (to get on track before just checking everything chronologically) can be nice, too.
Also we finetuned a model to assist us in writing and explaining code from a domain specific language with many strange quirks that we use for a tool and that has poor support from off the shelf LLMs.
But all of these cases have one thing in common: They do not replace the actual work and are things that will be checked anyways (even the code one, as we know there are still many flaws, but it’s usually great at explaining the code now - not so at writing it). It’s just a convenient method to check your own work - and LLM hallucinations will usually be caught anyway.
There are bad things in communism - a reductionist model advertised as fitting for everything (a bit similar to Unix, that), and there are good things in communism - attention to balance of power. Revolutionary ideologies generally have advice for situations warranting a revolution more fleshed out.
Just saying, ending comments with "..." doesn't make them look smarter.
Which specifically, accepted by most communists, should I read? Will that something allow a model different than that of classes and formations and dialectic materialism? If not, then it is reductionist.
I mean, I would describe myself as more of an anarchist: I don't trust the state or capitalism. When I said "Call me a Paranoid Communist" I was referring to the fact that capitalism is gonna fuck us.
OK, then - no, not capitalism. Expectation of truth will fuck us. All the stabilizers of the humanity were built reliant on that - if it looks like a duck and so on. It doesn't work anymore. Can't blame something on capitalism if with other things equal the change affects capitalist and socialist systems similarly.
Also a new world war seemed like something slowly rolling, with tanks and cargo ships and propaganda speeches.
What people don't understand is the sheer scale and precision of operations available today. You can prepare for 50 years something that will take 30 seconds, and then we will all have a different world.
I think honestly the Internet is just that - a very slow trap for the rest of the world, being sprung by some parties associated with US military/deep-state/whatever first, and then being continued by Silicon Valley powers that be, only with their own dreams for it.
shit minimum wage, corporations owning housing, and monopolies in pretty much every market. it's just slavery with the illusion of freedom because you can choose which shitty apartment building to live in for over half your income, and which franchise stores you shop at, while your essentials are getting price gouged and constantly worse quality for higher cost, yet the workers don't make more
Too true. The real steal of the century is convincing the commons that their lack of success is a personal failing rather than a system designed to keep then down
The skills of both writing useful minutes and prioritizing actually sending them out are frustratingly rare. An average meeting with five or six people has even odds of not including someone with both of those skills. I can see where reliably having a mediocre AI summary might be an advantage over sometimes having superb human-written minutes and sometimes having nothing.
I work for the government and we're trialing Copilot too.
Yesterday I gave copilot several legal documents and our departments long term goals and asked to analyse those documents and find opportunities, legal complications and a matrix of proposed actions.
In less than 5 minutes I have a great overview to start talks with local politicians. This would have taken me at least a day before AI.
100%. I'm also trialing Copilot at a medium-sized corpo job and it saves me roughly 12-20 hours of work per week.
I use it often in PowerShell scripting. It occasionally hallucinates and makes up commands, so sometimes it takes a bit of back and forth to get it to do what I want, but it's still a hundred times easier than writing from scratch or tweaking+combining similar scripts I find online.
Probably my favorite part is being able to ask it "Where did I leave off with John on x issue last week?" And it will remind me that I'm supposed to do x and John is supposed to do y. Or even, "I helped a user with this specific issue six months ago. How did I fix it?" and it pulls the exact email and Teams chats outlining what we did, and I can click the link to open those messages and ensure it didn't misinterperate. Way easier than digging by hand.
Finally, I absolutely hate making PowerPoints so I've been having it make all of my rough drafts from transcription notes in meetings. Super nice time saver.
Something I'm concerned about and playing with this week is pronoun usage in transcripts. I'm working with our LGBTQ ERG to ensure that we can make Copilot use preferred pronouns for everyone. If it can't, we'll need to pull back certain features.
It's far from perfect but it genuinely makes my job a lot easier and I'd hate to lose it. I think it will only get better from here.
I've show my coworkers some practical implementations of copilot and that was enough to kickstart the use.
If you're composing the same mails a lot, for example, you can ask copilot to make a template text and then when you have to compose the same email again you ask copilot to compose and personalize the mail for you. That's an awesome function.
I've made an agent that answers HR related questions of my team. This saves me and HR a lot of time and they are assured their questions are handled discrete.
If you're composing the same mails a lot, for example, you can ask copilot to make a template text and then when you have to compose the same email again you ask copilot to compose and personalize the mail for you. That's an awesome funtion.
Seeing a big uptake in use in the education sector. Teachers paying for their own ChatGPT pro license to lesson plan etc.
Can't comment at this point if that's right or wrong, you hope the teachers using it would identify hallucinations etc. But you can see there is already a change occurring.
Yeah, no shit. But they nearly doubled the price. I canceled my membership, but I doubt enough did to actually matter.
I was fine paying $60 a year for Office. I was never gonna use the AI stuff. When they said it was $100, I bailed. So now they don't get the $60. But enough people will go on paying that they will actually make more money on Office in the next year, not less.
Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets or even their feet to effect any meaningful change. At least not when it comes to their tech toys.
Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets
That and most governments are wrapped up in Windows, and therefore kinda just captive to the insane pricing. I get everything I need out of LibreOffice, personally.
The sole reason I still pay the Microsoft tax is Excel. Other office suite components are generally good enough to fill in for their Microsoft counterparts. But, spreadsheet programs are one area where open source competitors need to get their shit together.
Most of them can do the basics but Excel is still in a class by itself for power users and advanced functionality. That's a real bummer because I would love to stop paying the Microsoft tax.
Its the vba. Its proprietary and not for sale anymore and theres not a good free replacement. Been writing a reporting system tha5needs scripting and have had to use javascrip amd heavily cover things for end users to even understamd what is happening.
I use Copilot for generating images of concepts for presentations at work. It helps me get my point across and no accuracy is needed because it is taking the place of clip art and Google image searches. There is absolutely a place for Generative AI in the workplace. Whether it is worth the cost and whether people are trusting it too much is another question.
It helps me get there more often than not, anywhere from programming I'm unfamiliar with to brainstorming in graphic design. I see a lot of anti-AI folks diss it without considering how it's actually used. It's a tool like any other, and you get what you make of it.
The point is that this is all happening in a cloud. One that is probably located in the US. Not a good thing for a non-US government to send potentially confidential or even secret data to.
It doesn't have to, you can run LLMs locally. We do at my org, and we only have a few dozen people using it, and it's running on relatively modest hardware (Mac Mini for smaller models, Mac Studio for larger models).
Yeah, shitty toy ones. This here is about productivity, not about a hobby. And not even real state-of-the-art models were able to actually give a productivity advantage.
Our self-hosted ones are quite good and get the job done. We use them a lot for research, and it seems to do a better job than most search engines. We also link it to internal docs and it works pretty well for that too.
If you run a smaller model at home because you have limited RAM, yeah, you'll have less effective models. We can't run the top models on our hardware, but we can run much larger models than most hobbyists. We've compared against the larger commercial models, and they work well, if little slowly.
Whether it improves or reduces employees' accuracy and efficiency depends on how the employee uses their tools. They should be trusted to pick tools that help them do their job more effectively.
Given that it's people who work for the government, expectations are already low, if no training is provided results will be even worse and last but not least, if the product is absolutely crap, why would you continue using it?
Well, there's JKR, she wrote books pretty closely describing how powerful and arbitrarily unbalanced a computerized world will be, presented as magic. But she's a TERF, so nothing she wrote apparently has value. Or maybe she's a plagiarist, so again nothing she wrote apparently has value, except her plagiarism describes well current events and its sources don't.
I don't think she did that consciously, more like felt "something" in the air. But see the priorities of the public, in her not being a nice person and her having described the future correctly.
Also see the Matrix.
In general I think it's good to remember the initial reception of everything, if you were around then. Because in a few years power dynamic (hating on JKR for being TERF, and her using her fame to promote such views, - both these are that) always regulates the image of any work into something sterile and neutered.
We've had plenty of good art predicting today, but we've been taught after some time that it's capitalist, consumerist, non-original, empty, overrated and has asshole authors.
That direction of thought is wrong. Marcus Aurelius once made a bath for his wife - filled with her lover's blood ; doesn't seem to affect the value of his philosophy. Much of the classics in music was made by order for rich people for their entertainment and prestige. Nothing is life is truly original. And whether something is empty is not decided by the public opinion, it's decided by the reader.
So. We've had some preparation. Less than desired, and impeded by the enemy, as is the expectation always. It's not decided yet.
I didn't realise jkr meant that interpretation but its definitely something to consider.
I've always believed one must separate art from the artist lest all works are reduced to nothing given enough time. People love to dismiss modern works based on the authors opinions yet everyone through history is bad by modern standards. We must judge people by the context of their time. For example both Churchill and Disney where famously antisemitic yet both are now praised for their efforts against the Nazis.
Haven't read any Marcus Aurelius I'm reading Plato at the moment so I'll add it to the list.
I don't think she consciously did, but HP definitely features abuse and misuse of authority left and right, main characters fighting and bypassing it, injustice, fascism, evil being attractive (at least in the first two books she deliberately makes the world of pure-blood wizards more "magical" than that of the rest, and Harry almost being accepted to it or thinking he would be, except that's not so), public judgement being always wrong (talking to snakes, Harry being considered cuckoo, werewolves, and what not), evil being possibly all-poweful (the Taboo spell and such), one can go on and on.
And then Harry becoming an Auror, thus sort of a magical peeler, which is a common criticism - well, law enforcement is a necessary task. In a non-degenerate system that involves preventing murder, rape, stopping human trafficking operations.
It's funny how people usually start with the HP world mechanics being bad, - unbalanced, arbitrary, calling spells out of thin air, - while that's how our world works right now, except they teach very little magic here (BTW, Racket is very cool - I'm again stalling at what I'm trying to do, though, just no willpower at all). Also notice Umbridge in the book 5, in the real world fighting evil with something you always carry with yourself and only skill being important is not a thing usually, for most intents and purposes, except computers.
Yeah only downside, at least on Android, don't know how it is on iOS, you need to activate all google location accuracy options in order to make it work. Just using the built-in GPS is not sufficient.
Germany had something like this for a while which which was nice because it was useable in most major cities. Sadly the system has been discontinued: heise.de/news/Ticketdienst-Tou…
Die Bahn AG hat angekündigt, wann der für seine Nutzer durchaus praktische Service fürs Bus- und Bahnfahren eingestellt wird. Alternativen mit ähnlicher Bequemlichkeit fehlen.
Why they can’t just have turnstiles at the major stations ? I mean that’s how most places work anyway? If someone stays on for a further stop outside the stiles it’s only a short leg anyway.
The UK literally already does and also on trains your tickets get randomly checked too so even if your moving between small stations there is a chance you'll youll caught
Hey...we already have that without needing to use GPS. No really, we have that, without needing to use GPS. No. Really. We have two systems in fact.
We have m-tickets. Most major train, tram and bus companies in the UK have that. You can go onto your phone and buy a ticket without the need for GPS tracking. There's also Contactless on your phone. My city has something called TapTapCap/ToTo. On the buses, you can pay for your fare by tapping on a contactless terminal and it tracks how many journeys you make and caps the fare at the price of a day ticket if you make more than three Journeys. The Trams here have ToTo which is the same deal, but you have to tap on at the smart card terminal and tap off at your destination, as long as you do that and don't go to the Airport: you get the same deal.
That can easily be implemented. Fuck, mTickets have been implimented in Scotland. All you'd need to do is adapt the smartcard terminals, which use the technology as the bus passes, to do something like taptapcap. And before you say "oooh, we couldn't possibly put Smartcard totems on remote stations or Parliamentary stations", there are smart card terminals on every station on the West Highland Line. Yes, including the Fort William to Malaig section. There are Smartcard terminals on the Far North and Kyle of Lochalsh Lines. If Scotrail can do that at places like Dunrobin Castle, GBR can put Smartcard Terminals at Drigg, no GPS surveillance required.
We do the same in my part of the US where transit kinda sucks. You just tap a credit card (or phone w/ contactless payments) or physical card w/ chip on any bus or train and it charges the appropriate amount (i.e. day pass if you exceed some amount). It's not complicated, you just tap when you get on, and tap when you get off, and as long as you use the same payment method, it just works.
It's not complicated at all. At no point is GPS tracking needed, you just need to process the payment and link them together based on the unique identifier you're already using to process payments.
One of them actually being London. They had contactless pay with Google pay there for years already, without location service. You tab to go on and tab when you exit the metro
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a specific style of a fem biology steel chastity belt comes to mind first
it's hard to find fem biology chastity belts in the first place, and if you want one that isn't clunky? either pay an actual fortune for one from a western online store (probably a german one) or gamble your money and try to get one from a chinese retailer with 0 reviews and little media presence but significantly cheaper. another actually valid alternative is using that money to sign up for a blacksmithing course and just forge one yourself because fuck €400 is the cheapest price for like 8 pieces of metal and some wires???? (a shady chinese retailer will [probably] get you one for €100, or they might take the money and disappear forever)
Hmm. Get the major parts made by one of those places that does on-demand laser sintering 3D prints in metal, then wire them together yourself? I doubt the parts in isolation look anything like the end product, so the laser sintering firm would most likely have no idea what you wanted them for. No idea how much it would cost, though, and you'd have to do some 3D modeling.
both this and learning how to smith sounds like a lot of work. i gambled my money and thankfully it paid off as i got what i wanted for a fraction of the price it'd cost me to buy from a safe website, lol
I’m a very anxious person and I kinda liked the Taco Bell AI drive thru thing specifically because it was way less pressure even if it was annoying. There’s plenty of other stuff I simply won’t buy because I don’t want it enough to overcome my anxiety.
If the chatbots are reliable, I’d much prefer them in most shopping scenarios. So this makes sense to me.
I suspect most people had rather not engage with anything when shopping for products they're embarrassed to be seen buying. If they're in a position where they have no choice but to have interactive contact (can't imagine why, unless dealing with some unusual allergies and needing to confirm what's in the product), they probably think the chatbot is less likely to judge them, which is . . . not entirely untrue. It just leaves out the issue of a human possibly reading the chat transcript afterwards.
I personally want a sales rep that has used the product. I want them to know how it felt the first time it was inserted as well as the hundredth time. How else will you know whats quality. How does it hold up when seated and how well when spanked. These are important things!
Wait, isn't openai basically reliant in Microsoft for hosting as well as most of their product offerings? And doesn't Microsoft own LinkedIn? Or am I out of the loop.
i doubt microsoft cares. they’re going to be competing in the space wherever openAI is hosted, might as well be making money from azure while doing it. Azure probably hosts many companies that compete with microsoft in some way.
Openai has an "at cost" azure deal with Microsoft. They don't make any azure money from them.
This feels like a mix of "keep the bubble moving somehow" hype and a shot across the bow at Microsoft, who are in a nasty back and forth with Openai right now because openai wants to break its early deals with Microsoft to go fully for profit to get a large amount of funds from Softbank. Microsoft isn't okay with that, as it would cost them exclusivity to Openais tech and various other things.
Yeah they have rights to their IP, a share of the first 100 billion in profit they might hypothetically make one day, and provide most (all, up until jan of this year) of their cloud service. They also oppose OpenAI's bid to convert to a non-profit by year end, which a huge chunk of their funding is dependent upon. It really a strange play tbh.
Great, this is all the infinite information sucking machine was missing: MY information. Can’t wait for hiring companies to try to force me to use this /s
What does AI upskilling even mean? Isnt the premise of AI that you can do everything just with natural language, everybody already knows how to talk/write about what they want. And if they mean AI adjacent things like RAG, then thats just software engineering with API calls wrapped with english prompts, and upskilling software engineering with AI kinda works but we've already seen a lot of vibe coded disasters.
I quit a job last year where they announced they were adding AI use to our performance reviews.
This AI up skill shit is BS. I don’t need a nanny telling me to use tools that I as the expert should determine the usefulness of.
At my new job I use AI probably the most in the company. I build MCP tools, I use it to automate things, I’ve deployed it for data cleaning tasks. I just took a 2 week manual review process and built a RAG search engine that reduces that work to an hour of effort.
I don’t need some C suite jackass pretending they know my job better than me.
sooooo a site that says it'll do something but in turn won't actually do it.
companies already post ghost jobs via AI on linkedin/indeed/etc so there's no need for this. No one, other than the Linkedin Tech Bros/Wannabe middle managers, is going to use this.
Feels like Sam is grasping at straws right now to keep his shit afloat.
This is the only line you really need from the entire atricle:
That’s the idea behind our new OpenAI Certifications.
It is an age-old idea. People were getting Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, AWS certificates to pad their CVs for ages. This is a legitimate way for a person to put a well known logo on their page and an easy way for companies to make a few bucks. OpenAI wants that as well.
The certificate means nothing. The course for it teaches nothing. But a CV with an OpenAI logo on it looks better than without and OpenAI wants people to pay for the privilege.
I bet it will be Amazon Mechanical Turk alternative, they will introduce tokens you can earn from job that you can pay out or use for chatting with your beloved model. People will be working for free just to be able to chat with their lover AI. Let's go and fuck those junkies.
Is it just me or is this shithead in full "throw spaghetti at the wall mode". This is, like, the third dumbass announcement he's made this week, which seems high, even for him.
Five years ago, Google’s climate action ambitions were the gold standard for Big Tech. Then, with power demand spikes from AI data centres, in July it scrubbed its sustainability website of its 2030 net zero pledge.
I'm sure there's a lot of discussion about age-verification laws around here right now and for the sake of keeping things on topic I won't really broach the subject here, but it has gotten me thinking that there really isn't much that can be programmatica
I'm sure there's a lot of discussion about age-verification laws around here right now and for the sake of keeping things on topic I won't really broach the subject here, but it has gotten me thinking that there really isn't much that can be programmatically marked as adult content on the fediverse.
I haven't dived too much into researching the subject, it looks like Lemmy lets you set posts as NSFW, but most activity is centered around microblogging and that appears to have coalesced around Mastodon's approach of freeform content warnings. This seems like a disaster in the making if "don't show adult content to minors" becomes something that has to be more strictly enforced; these content warnings can be used for everything from benign spoiler warnings to very obviously signposting sexually explicit fetish content. Computers can't really understand this level of nuance unless you throw something that does natural language processing at it, and that will almost certainly come up with a lot of false positives and wasted energy in the process; I can't imagine this going over well with anyone really.
So, I've been wondering, how difficult would it be to standardize a separate mature-content warning from the content warnings currently in place? This idea has clearly been floated before (see this issue on Mastodon's GitHub and this blog post written by someone who was a minor and directly affected by this issue at the time) but I haven't actually seen any work towards anything beyond paying lip service to the subject. Maybe it could be a boolean toggle, like how the former Cohost did it (on top of content warnings) or something closer to how Bluesky does it where you have a few set moderation labels that you can apply yourself (see below).
We could also consider moving this distinction beyond posts; the Mastodon issue that I linked above also mentioned applying this to users and even entire instances.
There are a few caveats here in that people historically don't really appreciate being hidden/deboosted for posting adult works, and there is the potential for backlash if something gets marked as adult when it really isn't. I'm not entirely sure how this could be addressed beyond leaving this to implementers and maybe leaving some strong advice to be understanding and not shove people in a corner because they draw kink art for example.
I'd definitely appreciate more thoughts on the subject, please let me know what you think.
As adult instances are becoming more popular and their reach through the fediverse grows, content on those instances are making their way into the lives of those who are not wanting to see it or ar...
essentially a Note (or other object ) can have many labels associated with it, and these labels would exist as part of well known vocabularies, such that software can give users better choice over what they see and don't see.
Yes, that does mean software may provide methods of complying with age verification laws may mean certain categories of content are unavailable without some form of age verification (but that's between you, your server software, and you instance administrator as to what that is). Currently there are some tools for instance administrators, particularly of mastodon to completely filter certain content from their servers, making their servers somewhat explicitly child-friendly.
This would also allow for third-party labellers in the future if needed (through annotations), which allow for bluesky style labellers which can catch content not self-labelled.
I want to stress that the goal of content labels is not to moderate the adult content nor queerness from the fediverse, but rather to give creators and consumers of content more control over what they publish and who sees it or what they see.
It is unfortunate and terrible the way that age verification is being rolled out as a means to censorship and authoritarianism, and these laws should be fought in the courts and politically to be repealed or changed. Adults must be able to exist on the internet, not everything is for children.
Issues currently within scope of this workstream are: #1 #4 (issue locked, but where discussion started) #84 There will be future issues for both our recommendation regarding content warnings and a...
And Amazon says it will help train 4 million people in AI skills and “enable AI curricula” for 10,000 educators in the US by 2028, while offering $30 million in AWS credits for organizations using cloud and AI tech in education.
So, at some point, we do have to move on policy, but frankly, I have a really hard time trying to predict what skillset will be particularly relevant to AI in ten years. I have a hard time knowing exactly what the state of AI itself will be in ten years.
Like, sure, in 2025, it's useful to learn the quirks and characteristics of LLMs or diffusion models to do things with them. I could sit down and tell people some of the things that I've run into. But...that knowledge also becomes obsolete very quickly. A lot of the issues and useful knowledge for, working with, say, Stable Diffusion 1.5 are essentially irrelevant as regards Flux. For LLMs, I strongly suspect that there are going to be dramatic changes surrounding reasoning, and retaining context. Like, if you put education time into training people on that, you run the risk that they don't learn stuff that's relevant over the longer haul.
There have been major changes in how all of this works over the past few years, and I think that it is very likely that there will be continuing major changes.
It really doesn't matter what the "training" entails, because Amazon aren't going to do it anyway. Its all lip service, and all voluntary, and all to pull the wool over the regulatory bodies eyes.
Maybe they are trying ro merge the first transhuman generation. Honestly, it does not sound too bad. When everyone is synced together, greed will stop because decpetion will not work any longer. Rather than jail people for crimes, tendencies in each unit will need to be patched/corrected.
I already have shitty companies ask questions in their job form about which AI tools I use to write software and how much percentage of my final code is from AI, fuck me like this job didn't suck enough now I have to prompt the fuckin AI multiple times to do something just so that it ticks a metric that upper management can use to justify spending money on AI and firing actual engineers
Apps watch how we move/rotate devices to understand whether we’re walking, resting, lying down, etc., I assume? (The most popular apps I mean with large data teams)
Wish that stuff could be turned off unless it was e.g. a game that made legitimate use of the accelerometer.
GrapheneOS does allow you to turn it off. It has a permission switch for your phone sensors. I don't know if there are other versions of android that allow the same.
Suddenly your new dishwasher sends your health protocols to your doc. The fancy toilet helped with a consistency analysis and your smart lamps add a sleeping protocol.
I think it can also detect our neural frequencies, aka 'read our minds'. That's why we see ads for things we thought about but never even searched for.
We already live in a world with existing, functional mind-reading devices. There is even a device designed to help people that are suffering from ALS communicate by reading their thoughts, and has a privacy feature where the user can activate and deactivate the device by thinking a password in their mind, in order to allow them to still have private thoughts.
Android throttles the hell out of WiFi requests since (I think) Android 9. You need to manually allow WiFi request spamming in developer options to let apps do something like determining location from it.
They already can by putting your finger on the camera and lighting up your finger with the led light. Then it detects the rhythmic changes picked up by the camera... At least 10+ years ago. It was a good novelty feature, but turns out, for most healthy people, checking your heart rate gets old after a few runs.
Cool tech but I question it's usefulness. They focus on clinical in their language but anybody who's on telemetry orders needs waveforms not beats per minute. I care if they're suddenly in afib, not that they're a little tachy after getting up to go to the bathroom.
That's already the original use case. Cardiac signature biometrics, can install in a doorway and do identity verification and track/monitor every individual that passes through the threshold
In the last decades, researchers have shown the potential of using Electrocardiogram (ECG) as a biometric trait due to its uniqueness and hidden nature. However, despite the great number of approaches found in the literature, no agreement exists on .
The article you cite states that accuracy drops to 60% if the enrollment and testing data were collected at different sessions. I imagine the effects of coffee or walking on heart rate would make that even worse.
90 is damn near perfect for most adults. It's a little high for children, but even for most teens that would be right in the middle of "the green zone." My resting heart rate of 60 is way too low especially combined with my regular blood pressure of 100/50
This technology is being touted by the companies putting them in place to be a cost saving measure as staff no longer need to print new labels and manually replace them for products on the shelf. This is true in that it is a benefit of digital labelling, however there are many other usage options that could be implemented after installation.
alter prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
increases simply as stock begins running low
Imagine in a few years when this technology is combined with network snooping of phone identification, loyalty rewards card purchase histories, and automatic buying of customer information from data brokers, all to create a profile that predicts when a person would be likely to be menstruating and the moment they walk in the store, the hygienic products they buy every month raise in price by 30%.
Good point. A US department store chain -- Kohl's -- has been using electronic shelf labels that change several times per day. Not sure how they handle the discrepancies. How do I prove the product was prices $1 when I picked it up if the label now says $2? Is it my responsibility to notice the register price was different?
I more or less avoided Kohl's, so I'm not sure how that was handled.
The only solution for that which I see is taking photos of the labels for every product taken off the shelf, but that's quite the imposition obviously. Trouble is there are no laws guiding these practices, and the result is going to be quite the mess for customers to understand.
In my opinion, the best purchasing experience for this type of shopping is using a handheld device with which you both scan the product as you take it off the shelf, and also process payment on your way to the exit. No cashier lines, and even better, no more unloading and repacking of your items just to purchase them. From the shelf into your bag, only back out again in your kitchen.
On another note, it boggles my mind to see the square footage used by all these self checkout machines when these terminal systems exist. Sadly I've never used one in North America. This is an aspect of shopping that could make me loyal to a single vendor. I would actually install the vendor's phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
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I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals. I think you’re right, but I dread it. I avoid installing apps. The thought of installing even more tracking for multiple vendors annoys me. Although I am resistant, your point about bagging once is a true benefit. One downside, that system doesn’t seem to support cash.
I didn't give the privacy concern much thought in the moment, mainly thinking how useless and poorly designed those apps usually are, but I do agree.
Considering it now, I do have loyalty cards in my company vehicle for certain things, primarily fuel, and those of course remain in that vehicle as they serve no other purpose. Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. Though ideally I'd imagine a few dedicated handheld terminals kept in store for redundancy purposes.
Speaking of redundancy, you're right about paying in cash. Perhaps as easy as a 'cash' button and it would send the purchase total to a customer service desk. Around here, all grocers have a 'cashier' desk where you get lottery tickets and gift cards and such.
Though it would be funny to see these handheld terminals have a compartment to accept notes and coins haha.
Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. That’s an excellent idea!
all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets. Ha! Great observation. There’s no way in hell stores are going to give up on gambling cash. 😀
Great if we can make MRI quality imaging eventually available, but being able to monitor where people are in their homes remotely and their health status in our world is fucking dangerous.
Innocuous radio signals are one thing but if my apartment is inundated with radio waves that can literally be used to track my movements and monitor my heartbeat, being forced to allow this is a perverse and sickening invasion of privacy.
the problem is that you don't need 20 people for this kind of thing. you can just kinda passively slurp the data up from every router and throw it into a machine learning model to be used by cops or sold to advertisers. you don't need a human in the loop anywhere and it's essentially impossible to opt out of
So if you don't want someone to measure your heartbeat and to physically know where you are at all times your only option is to cover your entire living area, including the windows, in aluminum foil?
I guess what I'm getting at here is that this situation is deeply, deeply fucked.
Your neighbors WIFI signals are too weak to matter in this case. Even if they were strong enough, this is a receiver-transmitter setup, so it would still be impossible to do unless you connect to their network. Even then, they’d have to assume you’re the only person present between the transmitter and the receiver.
Presence detection through WIFI was already garbage enough, this one is plain unusable.
You need more power than what regular people use. You would need the signal to go through walls into your home, and then read whatever comes back out through the same walls, so it’s a lot more attenuation than you typically expect.
Capitalism asks whether you are the kind of person harvesting people's health info without concent or selling aluminum mesh underwear with fearmongering campaign. No other choices.
Care to explain what you mean? Are you saying you can run fiber in your house? Doesn't that still require some form of equipment from an ISP to actually go out to the internet?
The fiber line into your house from the ISP is needed. What that fiber line connects to is up to you. The router your ISP provides isn't special. You can get your own equipment.
I'm not super familiar with fiber. There's no modem or anything needed? Don't they still track data usage? Are they able to do that without any intermediate equipment?
Fiber that runs into your house can work with any fiber-ready router. So, yes, it's a modem in a sense, but also does the router/wifi job as well.
However, if you have Verizon or Huawei device on the end of your fiber line, your ISP can likely connect to that device, specifically for things like seeing if anyone is home. They don't need to do that, as it's only data for them to collect to work out advertising profiles.
Once your data leaves your house and goes into their network, then it's just your data on their network. Yes, they can see the data being routed, unless you use a VPN. So your options are going from your ISP able to see when you're home, to not giving them access to anything and just paying the bill every month.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
This is very cool and useful, but at the same time very concerning. While I see a lot of good use cases for this ranging from hospitals to stress recognition in animals I Am also quite scared, that big corporations will use this to spy on us. Luckily currently it is only possible to measure the pulse at about 3m, but it should be possible to increase the range. It may fall short when multiple persons are in detection range, but as far as I have read from the paper they did not test this.
Health data is extremely valuable. You can use it to serve more personalised ads or even use it to, as example, define prices for health insurance. When you combine it with lots of other data it becomes even more valuable. Also never forget, big corporations track literally everything. Why not add your heart rate.
Does it describe the methodology of how they use the transmitter and receiver?
What specifically are they transmitting? Is it actually wifi signals within the 802.11 protocols, or is "wifi" just shorthand for emitting radio waves in the same spectrum bands as wifi?
Yeah sadly it is paywalled, but I have been lucky enough to get access to it through my university.
Heres what I found regarding your question in the article:
Fig 1 illustrates Pulse-Fi's system architecture which consists of three main components: data collection using commodity Wi-Fi devices, a CSI signal processing pipeline, and a custom lightweight Long Short Term Memory neural network for heart rate estimation.
Fig 1:
And this is the Setup they used to collect the ESP-HR-CSI Dataset (left site) and the one that other researchers used to collect the E-Health Dataset (right side):
The parts on how they collected the data:
A. ESP-HR-CSI Dataset We collected the ESP-HR-CSI dataset from seven participants (5 male, 2 female) in a room of a public indoor library. It was collected using two ESP32 devices, one as the transmitter and the other as the receiver. The sampling rate is 80 Hz, with a 20 MHz bandwidth with 64 subcarriers positioned at different distances. Each participant was measured at distances of 1,2 and 3 m for 5 minutes each. The participants sat in a chair between the devices and wore a pulse oximeter on their finger to collect ground-truth information as seen in
B. E-Health Dataset The E-Health dataset [20] contains CSI collected from 118 participants (88 men, 30 women) in a controlled indoor environment measuring 3 m×4 m (Fig 4). The setup consists of a router set in the 5 GHz band at 80 MHz bandwidth as a transmitter, a laptop as receiver and a single-antenna Raspberry Pi 4B with NEXMON firmware for CSI data collection (234 subcarriers). Participants wore a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 for the ground truth.
Each participant performed 17 standardized positions or activities, with each position held for 60 seconds.
To me it sounds like, that they really just used standard WIFI to collect the data (this is especially true for the E-Health Dataset), since all the processing gets done on the Raspberry Pi.
B. E-Health Dataset\ The E-Health dataset [20] contains CSI collected from 118 participants (88 men, 30 women) in a controlled indoor environment measuring 3 m×4 m (Fig 4). The setup consists of a router set in the 5 GHz band at 80 MHz bandwidth as a transmitter, a laptop as receiver and a single-antenna Raspberry Pi 4B with NEXMON firmware for CSI data collection (234 subcarriers). Participants wore a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 for the ground truth.
does that mean a passive observer can do all that observations? and that a raspberry pi, with its single average antenna is capable of this?
It may be possible, but I have no clue. It may also be, that the position of the router and the Laptop is important, but that's probably something you would have to test.
All these Wifi for tracking people methods use the channel state information (CSI) that is used to help decode the transmitted data. CSI is obtained from pilot signals that are transmitted as part of a regular transmission. This is done in basically all digital communication standards, so you could do this not just with Wifi but also with 4G or 5G or older mobile communication standards. This is all not very surprising, there is a lot of research in contactless radio based heart rate monitoring, they usually build on radar systems not communication systems though. The buzzword for 6G for all this is joint communication and sensing.
I am not surprised. Passive WiFi was introduced nearly a decade ago, so it makes sense that measurement systems based on WiFi have come a long way since. It's frightening, honestly.
This is really cool and will be useful. My second thought was oh great now my smart TV can see how excited I am watching their injected ads and how many people saw it too. One of the many reasons to never connect modern TVs to the Internet.
The problem is not sharing and accessing, but generating. If we had a system where people would be paid for generating knowledge, then they wouldn't have to charge for accessing knowledge.
That's why a lot more research should be paid for by the government. In exchange, government-funded research would be excluded from having patents and/or copyright.
Goverment funded research is paid for my public money via taxes but the research information is not publicly accessible, I can understand this if it's defense or other secretive research but there is no reason someone should have to pay for access to other research fields information when it is publicly funded
One can dream. For now though it's the one radio my phone doesn't use. Mobile network tunneling through Bluetooth baby! My atrial fibrillation when remain between me and my meth dealer! Shout out to Craig!
Sorprendentemente, appena qualche ora di sonno e qualche ora di scrittura magica un pochino avanti e indietro più tardi, e ho effettivamente trovato una soluzione al problema problemoso delle prestazioni imbarazzanti di Love2D caricato di una tale OOP che non gira affatto bene su una viemmina come quella di Lua… e, anche se come previsto […]
The Department of Justice attempted to do damage control after conservative political activist James O'Keefe released a video of a staffer claiming the government would "redact every Republican" from files about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
By Vijay Prashad on September 4, 2025 At eighty, the United Nations is bogged down by structural limitations and political divisions that render it powerless to act decisively – nowhere more clearl…
I have a book in my Kobo library that I want to put in Calibre. When I try to download it on my computer or phone, all that downloads is a URLLink.acsm file. Anyone know what's going on?
There is also a Calibre plugin that's supposed to deal with .ascm files. I've never managed to get it to work personally but maybe someone else will have more luck.
You should try being the only source of revenue for media organizations if you want them to pay attention to you. I understand it works really well, especially if you have a complete monopoly.
The developer behind Revolution Wind, a large — and nearly complete — wind farm near Massachusetts and Rhode Island, is suing to overturn the Trump administration's stop-work order.
Mannimarco
in reply to silence7 • • •chaosCruiser
in reply to silence7 • • •Data centers are building their own gas power plants in Texas
Dylan Baddour (The Texas Tribune)MrMakabar
in reply to chaosCruiser • • •Elon Musk Reportedly Doing Something Horrid to Power His AI Data Center
Joe Wilkins (Futurism)chaosCruiser
in reply to MrMakabar • • •Botzo
in reply to chaosCruiser • • •datacenters.google/operating-s…
It looks like they're not changing their emissions/sustainability goals for the data centers, which honestly is better than every other player right now.
The political climate makes greenwashing problematic, which is some real irony.
I shit on Google for lots of reasons, but barring a fundamental change in the market, at least they're building renewable energy and taking the local water table into account in decision-making.
Pichai is a McKinsey husk and most of their leadership are yes men. Somehow they're still better than Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and obviously better than Xitter (with their trailers of methane burning generators).
Operating sustainably – Google Data Centers
Google Data CenterschaosCruiser
in reply to Botzo • • •Being better than Meta is not exactly a high bar to clear.😄
Anyway, it’s nice to see that Google is taking at least one thing seriously.
skisnow
in reply to silence7 • • •ragebutt
in reply to skisnow • • •This is more about the drive to be a leader in AI than the public goodwill.
The antitrust stuff revealed a lot but one of the major things it revealed is that Google views chatgpt as the biggest existential threat to search. Younger users skip Google now.
Of course this is because Google spent the past 5-10 years abusing their monopoly protected position to worsen their product so user engagement would go up (a more frustrating search experience means you’re more likely to search several queries, being delivered multiple pages filled with ads and tracking bullshit instead of just one).
But they won’t reflect on that and improve their product. They will leave it as is and try to make their shit AI blurb at the top of search work better. This is inherently foolish vs something like chatgpt because google search is typically fed much less robust prompts. They get something like “best bank account” or “2014 nba mvp” whereas users are conditioned to given chatgpt a conversational prompt, “what bank has the best rate for savings accounts right now?”. The former is part of why you see much more misconception, incorrect information, and hallucination with googles ai shit.
But again they won’t reflect on this. They won’t bow out. They won’t partner. They will simply eat power and literally burn the world to make something that’s not as good as the already underwhelming gpt5 to keep that stock price rising because the investors are stupid and need to see buzzword bullshit even if it comes at tremendous cost
salacious_coaster
in reply to silence7 • • •MTK
in reply to silence7 • • •Don't be evil*
*definition of evil may be changed at any point and has no relation to the official dictionary.