J Lee

Love “god has been chewing / the crayons again”. Great image.

Anyone else doing #30in30 for poetry month?

I am a rush of bubbles and I am a mermaid and I am lungs full of water when / you, godfather, rip the black meniscus with your hand, grab my neck / and save me from drowning.

Meta argues its AI needs personal information from social media posts to learn ‘Australian concepts’ Tech giant said posts from Australian Facebook and Instagram users were ‘vital learning’ about ‘concepts, realities, and figures’ Meta has urged the Australian government not to make privacy law changes that would prevent the company using personal information taken from Facebook and Instagram posts to train its AI, arguing the AI needs to learn “how individuals discuss Australian concepts”. In a submission to the Productivity Commission’s review on harnessing data and digital technology, published this week, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp argued for a “global policy alignment” in the Albanese government’s pursuit of privacy reform in the AI age. Continue reading...

Meta argues its AI needs personal information from social media posts to learn ‘Australian concepts’

On days like this I miss the live disaster information and observations that used to be available on Twitter.

You know, if enough of us say on the internet that it's important to wash your cybertruck with saltwater and lemon juice to preserve the finish, eventually ChatGPT will start telling cybertruck owners that.

Sydney Writers Festival will program year-round, partnering with State Library of NSW. Is this ‘Sydney’s Wheeler Centre’? Sydney’s new year-round program of literary events is budgeted at $1.5 million, creating over 300 paid opportunities for writers over 12 months.

The funding for the new literary programming, a SWF and SLNSW partnership, is $1.5m ... or nearly 20 per cent of the total literature budget for Creative Australia in 2023-4. It's a boon for Sydney lit-lovers, as I say in @theconversation.com
With thanks to @jocaseau.bsky.social for the edit.

And at that moment, the Sears Tower entered my nightmares.

Poem flood.
Poem drought.

.

a cartoon character says that 's okay still got my positive attitude . ALT: a cartoon character says that 's okay still got my positive attitude .

Education is worthless and art is useless and universities are toast but nevertheless I'm off to my PhD confirmation of candidature tomorrow afternoon so yeah, here's hoping!

Illustration of a squirrel carrying a pile of books, walking towards a tree hollow full of books.

Me after saying I wasn't gonna buy any more books for a while

What Moo Deng own is not transactable. It is the ineffable joy of being Moo Deng.

saw a pair of these guys today in suburban Wellington. Not so long ago they were crucially endangered. #parrots

Is it a midlife crisis… or are you just listening to the Smiths?

A child whose world is lost when politicians reject science. A baby sent across an ocean of stars to seek the safety of another land. A refugee embraced by America who uses his great power to help everyone on Earth. A kind and humble hero who challenges a cruel and narcissistic billionaire. A man who can be anything who chooses to be a journalist for truth and justice. A symbol of hope pushing back against fear. A smile. A friend. This is the time for Superman.

This is the time for Superman.

McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’ Basic security flaws left the personal info of tens of millions of McDonald’s job-seekers vulnerable on the “McHire” site built by AI software firm Paradox.ai.

McDonald's uses an AI bot called "Olivia" for hiring. A pair of hackers found they could access every conversation job applicants had with it—including all the personal info they shared—by exploiting security vulnerabilities as basic as using the password "123456". www.wired.com/story/mcdona...

Work is crowding out poems. Two months ago, it had been years since a poem came out; I never dwelt on it. After the relentless productivity of the last two months, the sudden absence of practice is omnipresent and aggravating.

Both X and Threads have far more users than Bluesky. But X is a Nazi pit and Threads is exceptionally boring—and if you're looking to drive traffic, Bluesky outperforms both. So don't feel anxious that you're missing out by using this smaller platform. If you enjoy it, happily continue to do so.

X seems like a bad place.

Have begun reading The Hobbit to the 11 yo grandson & 6 yo granddaughter listening in. First chapter - 6 yo's doodle listening to the dwarves telling the story of Smaug/plan for the burglary.

This is an extraordinary story.

The answer to your question about how the treechange is working out is cold. It is a cold answer, as grey as the sky and also my bones.

Jesus tells a crowd “take memes personally and argue with strangers”

The Gospel According to Reply Guy

should a brown man be mayor? We asked a eugenicist

It’s so much crazier than that. A woman appealed a lower court ruling for her ex-husband, pointing out the court’s order relied on 4 hallucinated or real-but-irrelevant cases. Ex-husband’s lawyer then files a reply to the appeals court with ELEVEN hallucinated or irrelevant case citations!

*POEM OUT*

‘Only in art can empires cheat oblivion‘

Tom Stoppard was born on this day in 1937.

ME: I have much to do
POEM: and yet, and yet

What shocks me is how many professors, administrators and students who blithely use LLMs do not know this