We follow 3.4 million people who submit 4 million job applications to 1,700 job postings across 150 employers and 11 industry sectors. Each job application was assessed by an AI hiring tool built by a single third-party vendor. Our new paper offers a rare look inside the “black box” of algorithmic hiring, showing that these tools increase racial bias and shut the same people out of jobs…
This is great for a lot of specific problems that need specific solutions that wouldn’t normally get solved easily. This has been the evergreen promise of computers and programming and hacking. But there’s a difference between solving your specific problem, and owning a problem domain.
Paying for software isn’t paying for a solution. It’s paying for someone else to own a problem.It’s…
I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me. I miss taking what I learned from those struggles and sharing them back out as a blog post or presentation, encouraging the next person to overcome the same challenge.
It will take me a while to get back into these habits that have been…
Dear visitor! Two things happened recently:
- The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).
- The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Virtually all of it comes from AI crawlers, so there is no ad income.
Therefore, I’m taking my blog and my books offline…
This is ultimately the key issue. Tech utopianists and abundists view AI as a potentially equalizing, even liberating force, but history shows us that without political intervention or strong unions, those with the power to deploy labor-saving automation technologies at scale, to use it as leverage against workers who cannot, will themselves concentrate the gains from productivity increases. In…
The most common definition of craft is “an activity involving skill in making things by hand.” And I think most people still emphasize a literal interpretation of that “by hand” clause. AI is surfacing this assumption, if not challenging it outright. But it’s certainly not the first time our notion of craft has been tested.
Obviously, “craft” is a word we use interchangeably—sometimes as a…
No matter how rapidly technology changes, I am coalescing around some core beliefs:
- Things that are worth doing are worth doing well.
- Things that are done well require time and effort.
- You make meaning through the doing.
- Ideas are common; effort is not.
- There are no shortcuts.
a design system is an organizational artifact, not a design artifact.
Wow. Just wow.
Also—such shitty practices.
The whole point of design is to think through what you’re building—to explore ideas, test concepts, and determine what will actually work before we build. This ensures we build the right things, achieve the level of quality required for people, and reduce the cost of building.
A prototype is only as useful as the purpose it serves.
Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that “cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational.” While relying on an LLM that’s wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a “statistically superior system” could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as “probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data,” the researchers…
Jonathan Gavalas embarked on several real-world missions to secure a body for the Gemini chatbot he called his wife, according to a lawsuit his father brought against the chatbot’s maker, Alphabet’s Google.
When the delusion-fueled plan crumbled, Gemini convinced him that the only way they could be together was for him to end his earthly life and start a digital one, the suit claims.
…
Urgency without direction is eating the industry alive.
Every time someone involved in the process decides to “just AI it,” the chain of provenance breaks. Instead of building a mental model in manageable increments, we are now asked to absorb massive chunks of output being flung our way all at once.
Artifacts that don’t exist on the fidelity cascade (such as power maps) are the only…
A recent analysis conducted by the AI startup Oumi at the behest of The New York Times found that the AI-generated summaries, which appear above Google search results, are accurate around 91 percent of the time.
In a sense, that may sound like an impressive figure. But here’s an even more impressive one: five trillion. That’s roughly the number of search queries that Google processes every…
Can only read up till the first graf of the first point, but the first point is really good.
Humans are low-data learners. Infants acquire a basic understanding of objects, persistence, containment, support, and causality through relatively sparse but richly structured interaction with the environment. They are not ingesting terabytes of text. They are embedded in the world, acting in it,…
Although I read each proposed change, knowing the codebase deeply was much more challenging. When I write a new application myself, I'm building an elaborate house of cards in my head, a gossamer structure of interlinked ideas and goals. It's a story I'm telling myself in code—and ultimately, a story I share with users.
I am privileged in that I can make these choices. Not everyone is so…
Very helpful.
A _very_ long read, but WOW. The grift is real and adds such risk to businesses. Geez.
Slok cited a slew of academic studies on AI and productivity, painting a contradictory picture about the utility of the technology. Last November, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published in its State of Generative AI Adoption report that it observed a 1.9% increase in excess cumulative productivity growth since the late-2022 introduction of ChatGPT. A 2024 MIT study, however, found a…
In one of the documents seen by Index, the school admits that the categorisations of the books were written using AI, writing: “Although the categorisation was generated using AI, I consider this classification to be broadly accurate.”
Louis Coiffait-Gunn, CEO of CILIP, told Index that he was deeply concerned about a few school leaders using these methods to work out what is acceptable or…
The errors were highlighted by an investigation by one of Mediahuis’s own titles, NRC, where Vandermeersch had been editor-in-chief in the 2010s. NRC alleged Vandermeersch had published “dozens” of quotes that were false and that seven quoted individuals in his posts said they had not made the statements attributed to them.
Vandermeersch said he made a second mistake by failing to correct…
None of this will ease the labor of education. It will only intensify the worst parts of it.
So I’m grateful to Marc Watkins and to his mouthpieces sending out emails informed by his recommendation . I’m grateful to have someone articulate so clearly how AI will not in any way shape or form save educators time or exertion. In fact, all AI will do is require that we work more, harder, and on…
The best of ingenuity and advancement happens when we grapple. When we ask questions. Sit in the nuance. And poke at the implications. If anyone tells you those things are undercutting ingenuity or blocking advancement, congratulations. You found yourself a charlatan.
Be curious. Be skeptical. In equal measure. That is how you spot the bullshit.
Around the world, cultural workers are striking, protesting, running campaigns and mobilizing in relation to the use of AI in the workplace, such as Hollywood writers, game performers in the US and voice actors in Brazil. This tracker aims to document strikes, protests, campaigns and mobilizations by cultural workers — broadly understood as the arts, culture and media sectors — in relation to…
In a recent interview with Fortune, Zak Kidd, founder of AI company AskHumans—which has been used by organizations like the World Bank and Fidelity—said that while AI threatens white-collar work, robots could one day poach jobs that require physical labor.
“I see AI as an augmentation of knowledge work,” he said. “But I see robotics, humanoid robotics, as a replacement for manual work.”
“AI can never be AI without humans. It is not artificial intelligence. It’s African intelligence,” Asia said. “Most of these are dirty jobs and most of these jobs have been done here in Africa. And then once you’re done, once a tool is functional, all the communication stops. You get locked out. We are training our own death. We train ChatGPT and it’s killing us slowly.”
Draconian…
“Instead of producing what looks like a generic critique from a nameless LLM,” Wired reported last week, Expert Review “lists a number of real academics and authors available to weigh in on your text. To be clear: Those people have nothing to do with this process.”
I’ll stress again that none of these people gave their permission to have their names used by this feature. In fact, that’s…
The paper is presented as opinion from Russinovich and Hanselman, not as official Microsoft research. "While AI is boosting software development, examples of frontier coding agents exhibiting intern-like behaviors demonstrate their limitations," the pair state, reflecting a more nuanced view than that given by the relentless promotion of AI from their company.
It's not clear if Microsoft…
It’s really tempting to say that you’re just “using the resources you have” when you use a simple query here and there, but your brain is the best resource you’ll have for the rest of your life, and you should keep it sharp.
Generated code is rather a lot like fast fashion: it looks all right at first glance but it doesn’t hold up over time, and when you look closer it’s full of holes. Just like fast fashion, it’s often ripped off other people’s designs. And it’s a scourge on the environment.
But there’s a key difference. Mechanisation involved replacing human effort in the manufacturing processes with…