 I am dead, I can’t believe this AI intro text I just got. If you thumb through it, there are all the usual suspects like breadth-first search and probability. Then you open the first chapter and it goes HARD on the current state of things. Then it’s back to mathematical notation like nothing happened. 56 comments
@mishtake_zone @vicki That is dark, and should have been hidden behind a CW.
 @vicki I recognize that this would be a lot of text to transcribe here, but I encourage you to think of our vision impaired users and write an image description for each of your pictures, so that they too can understand and enjoy what you're sharing, and feel included. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/#attachments Don't worry about it this time (although you may be able to edit your toot once we install the next version of Mastodon), just please keep it in mind going forward. @skyfaller sure thing! Do you have any recommendations for how best to do it for longer snippets from books? Is a short summary sufficient? @vicki So in theory the Mastodon web interface has an automatic OCR option, but I've never gotten it to work. If you're working from your phone, it may have an OCR option built into your OS, such as Google Lens. But ultimately alt text / media descriptions are an art, and what you write for them will depend on what you consider important and what you wish to communicate. I probably wouldn't write the same descriptions as you. If all the text would be necessary for understanding, include it all Maybe these could help .. Windows Mac @vicki when you said "current state of things" I totally thought it was going to be about the many problems with AI as it's currently implemented/deployed in the real world  @vicki Nice! I would have loved to boost this. Unfortunately the pictures are missing descriptions. Those descriptions are really important for accessibility. Would you mind adding them, so that everyone can participate in the conversation? In this case, since you can’t just copy & paste the text from the book, a quick summary of a few words would be enough. @vicki Btw, if your instance is running a recent version of Mastodon, you actually can edit your posts. The function is probably called „delete and reinstall-draft“. (I love this, since I make a lot of typos 🙃) @vicki the author is a prof but also a climate activist with Scientists for Future, eg:  @vicki it feels like a boring old professor talking about graph theory. At some point he suddenly jumps on top of his desk with a raised fist, giving a short speech about class struggle and workers' alienation, and then he just goes back talking about first-order logic as if nothing happened. Better not show this to anybody on the alt-right. They may be even more convinced that the academia is a trove of communists that need to be silenced :D @vicki we shall seize the operators of propositional logic from the capitalist AND economist classes @vicki In the near future, I suppose that commodity AI and robots will be much better at literally everything than any humans. So we will need some sort of generous welfare to keep us humans alive. I'm not so worried about that, more concerned that we might not have much reason to live. I guess we will still be able to watch movies, and learn stuff to amuse ourselves. @vicki this is amazing. more CS textbooks should be like this. idk, sth like "By the end of this book, you should have a solid foundation for efficiently implementing network protocols. Monitoring and optimizing such systems require careful accounting of data and of the surplus value of your technical labor." @vicki nice. now if only the author knew how to write the past tense form of “lead”! lol #petpeeve #notagrammarnazi 😅 @vicki - I've considered buying that book like 1000 times but never get around to it somehow. Would you recommend it? @mindcrime It depends on your goals. For me, some of the sections were helpful but I definitely wouldn't qualify it as an "intro" @vicki The number of times I’ve told people researching automation that they should read Bullshit Jobs. We’re never going to get free from work. :( @vicki there might have been a longer discourse on ethical issues, but the editors, said or the author said to himself: "dude, this is a CS how-to book, not a public service announcement." Alas. @vicki Prof. Ertel saß auch schon auf Bäumen - insofern nicht ganz überraschend ... @vicki https://www.informatik-aktuell.de/autoren-cv/prof-dr-wolfgang-ertel.html look at the guy it's amazing  @vicki That is quite a sneaky way to introduce some politics into your academic audience 🤪 @OCRbot @catboyslim  @dazinism @vicki Pictures of a Book, first picture, book cover: Introdution to Artificial Intellingence. second picture, a book page : Thus it is obvious that we should abandon this path of growth fe of a livable future. But how? @vicki path is one of the central inherent complexities, this problem can not be fully dealt with in an introductory AT textbook. However, I would like to provide the reader with a little food for thought @vicki Instead, part of the profits is spent on investment and thus on further growth and the rest is taken by the capital owners, while employees work the same hours for declining real wages [Pik14). This leads to ever-increasing capital concentration among a few rich individuals and private banks, while on the other hand increasing poverty around the world is creating political tensions that result in war, expulsion and flight. @vicki How can this be achieved? Politicians and economists are continually trying to optimize our economic system, but politics has not offered a sustainable solution, and too few economists are investigating this highly exciting economic question. Obviously the attempt to optimize the parameters of our current capitalist economic system has not lead to a more equitable distribution of wealt @vicki got the ebook just now. the change of contents is not so rapid, there is one chapter about the societal implications, and then he goes on with other topics. but the way you present it is a lot more entertaining @vicki haha, love it. The author just couldn't help himself, he just HAD to throw in a not-so-subtle political rant. Makes for a nice change of pace, no? |
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@vicki every textbook should do this. Fundamentals of Nutrition Science: "Incidentally, landlords
contain complete protein and several essential micronutrients"