endlessly ironic when your employer has mandatory environmental awareness training while also being all in on AI. The choice was between a stable ecosystem and chatty bot, and we chose chatty bot. everything else is green washing.
Remote
ramblingsteve
@ramblingsteve@floss.social
mastodon 4.7.3Experienced interdisciplinary life sciences researcher turned research software engineer, leading projects to put research to work. Looking for new opportunities in the UK.
48 Followers
96 Following
43 Posts
Joined February 19, 2025
£5m telescope trashed to save £50k, while they pump hundreds of millions into cloud credits for AI venture capital bro's. UKRI has lost it's mind. https://www.zmescience.com/science/astronomy/hipercam-camera-funding-cut/
Replying to
@Savagejen@mastodon.social I once heard this described as "glue work". so many organisations literally exist on this while rewarding none of it.
"all your skills are super interesting, and the stuff you build is amazing. oh, but your h-index score is not high... oh well, I think we will end it here." if i had a world leading h-index and millions in grant funding, would i be applying for a technician job in a company? will they give me 50% of my time to do academic research if I work there? this is why the stem industry is a cluster fuck. industry != university.
Replying to
@Remittancegirl $1.5m is a rounding error on Google's books. They made $109bn just in Q1 and plan to spend $1tn on AI bullshit. The fine should damage them sufficiently that they rethink their entire approach, otherwise all our lives are just roadkill.
Replying to
@cmccullough alternatively, if everybody on earth with an internet connection maxed out their free tier every day, I wonder how long openai and anthropic could last?
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@JulianOliver@mastodon.social I love the logic of pivoting to slop, stock tanks, lay off all the writers to cut costs, stock tanks harder, go bust, move to launching slop startups 🤦♂️ they just can't see the common denominator.
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@jimbob it's so great. i had to explain to a chatbot that it couldn't retrieve data because it hadn't created an API end point. eventually it agreed. apparently this is the new super productive way to work.
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@jack the official ninja webpage, which has never changed for the entire life of the web. https://www.realultimatepower.net
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@parismarx the joy of conflicting business metrics. Theirs is to serve slop at increasing volume, while for users its to make use of the slop at increasing volume. Errors are downstream of the token spend and they own the legislators, so it becomes a you problem for big tech.
Replying to
@lightweight and yet they still seem to default to all the AI settings on. 🤮 They're all in on the grift and to hell with their users.
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@tshirtman@mas.to @jani@floss.social this is true. The risk is enormous compared to the days of "bring your own device". I've seen myself people on calls with deepseek, chatgpt, claude etc bouncing across the free tiers with proprietary code. IT security is still running way behind in many places.
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@ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club so long as all their staff can write fizzbuzz in 1 line of code while inverting a binary tree it's all good :)
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@knowmadd@mastodon.world gpt-oss also recommends walking. I asked if I should buy a 50m hosepipe to take with me and it rightly reminded me: "No. A 50m hosepipe is excessive for washing a car 50m from your house — you don’t need to stretch it that far. A 25m hose is sufficient and more manageable." Can't argue with 120bn in logic. 🤡💦
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@rasterweb I dread almost everything I own breaking down at this point because everything new is either prohibitively expensive or considerably worse in both quality and functionality.
The original tech bro of life sciences https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01226-z
Another example of why AI is just part of the surveillance state. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98r4e594p7o
So Anthropic marketing has become "if you don't buy this its gonna p0wn your business, and you don't wanna get p0wned now do you boy?". They graduated from cheap grifter to protection racketeering. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2ev24yx4rmo
this is nuts. rock on 🤘 https://codewithrockstar.com
bbsrc decided that our project modelling hepA disease transmission coming into the UK wasn't worth funding. Let's see how that worked out for them. Oh... Oh well, I'm sure investing in quantum AI is paying off. https://news.sky.com/story/parents-told-to-check-childrens-handwashing-after-south-wales-hepatitis-a-outbreak-13540843
Embrace, extend, extort. https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/28/microsofts_github_shifts_to_metered/
https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/20/palantir_nhs_break_clause/ "All the rights to any know-how are explicitly retained by the supplier and not passed across on termination of the contract. The contract delivers no software – not one line – just a subscribed service; a permanent lock-in; a single point of failure" <- that should be unforgivable for whoever set up the contract in a public service. instant dismissal of the entire management team. it's absolutely astonishing how little technical rigor was on display.
Replying to
@savetheAI@mastodon.social I also love how the entire industry is still predicated on the magical thinking that anytime now "something" is going to happen that reduces model hosting and inference costs to zero, instantly sending profits to the moon. Sunk cost fallacy on a planetary scale.
Replying to
@savetheAI@mastodon.social they could get away with denying humans cost of living rises and starve them during economic crises, but when the workforce is all chattybots, any costs for your upstream service provider are immediately past on with a spoonful of profiteering for the lulz. They can't gaslight a server rack with "challenging economic times" to squeeze cheaper tokens and longer context windows.
my recent project has become a demented mess of broken code and undeliverable features, so I have asked for a slowing down of the delivery until just after I leave. sorted now. 👍
Replying to
@tshirtman@mas.to @jani@floss.social I was in a discussion recently where somebody pointed out that the technology is even creating division in work, where employers are not paying subscriptions and more wealthy staff can produce faster output than poorer staff who can't afford to self fund their own subscriptions to the best models, so even with a job it's fueling disadvantage.
There's a fine line between satire and reality these days. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/in-our-glorious-ai-future-there-will-be-no-such-thing-as-money-for-you
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@Mikal@sfba.social @joeposaurus@chaos.social the boosters all believe in the imminent arrival of a magical MacGuffin that will reduce hosting and inference costs to zero. they've no idea what it is, or how it works, but it's going to happen "soon" and "this is the worst it's ever going to be". just believe harder.
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@tshirtman@mas.to @jani@floss.social but imagine a company that can cheap out on the kit if the peer pressure forces staff to buy it themselves. It becomes your problem to meet your targets and your LLM armed colleagues set the bar. Career progression becomes a pay to win game.
You had one job, gpt! 🤡 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j4z27n8xyo
insert your own ironic statement. I could begin listing them but I respect the storage costs of the server admin. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/meta-spins-up-ai-version-of-mark-zuckerberg-to-engage-with-employees/
This seems to fall apart bit by bit every day. https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/20/europe_picks_4_sovereign_cloud/
and so VR remains exactly where it was since 1995; just around the corner 😂 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8m1113ym1o
I see a bit of a return of job applications with the old jingle: "B.Sc, M.Sc, PhD preferred". Like those are just a continuum of qualifications for the same job. 🤦♂️
Upon leaving the court, the judge was dismayed to find that everybody present had somehow purchased a non-refundable WatsonX subscription and a mainframe contract. https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/14/ibm_dei_settlement/
Another actually useful stream of features for Vivaldi 8.2 - doing all the things that Mozilla should have been doing with Firefox. If they could migrate from Chrome they could own the browser space right now.