Alex Hanna / is on Nostr

Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute.

Roller derby athlete/announcer at Bay Area Derby.

🇪🇬⚧

Residing on unceded Lisjan (Ohlone) land. Pay your Shuumi Land Tax if you live in the East Bay. https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/

Last Notes

2024-08-26 18:14:12

Amazon is suspending MTurk workers AGAIN. According to Turkopticon, there has been an influx in account suspensions this weekend. If you have been suspended, please fill out this form:
https://blog.turkopticon.net/?page_id=653

2024-08-14 16:56:07

New preprint! Ellen Berrey, Kristen Bass, Nathan Kim, and I present some trends from our new dataset of higher ed protests from 2012 to 2018 in the US and Canada. Some initial findings...
1. Higher ed protests concern university governance, anti-racism, and labor.
2. US protests are often national in nature, but take local instantiations, esp. wrt to racist police violence.
3. Canadian protests focus on public tuition and anti-austerity measures by provinces.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qv7yf

2024-08-03 01:01:58

So is the "AI" part of Microsoft Recall just... OCR?

2024-08-02 00:28:08

People complaining about Imane Khelif don't actually give a shit about women's sports, non-normative women, or having international sporting competition in which non-white people can win.
It was the same with Caster and with Dutee.
Transphobes and racists fuck all the way off.

2024-07-29 19:59:04

Hilarious that someone from a queer-centric instance reported me for transphobia and ableism for calling out white trans women and right-wing tendencies.
A brown, neurodivergent trans woman calling out your bullshit means y'all are part of the problem.

2024-07-28 19:51:15

Going through our instances mod reports and, while there's not a lot of common instances, nearly all of them have white woman anime avatars.
This platform really does has a white-trans-woman-cosplaying-as-Nazis problem.

2024-07-25 22:05:45

A fairly nerdy request: what are your favorite books on survival/event history analysis?
The Box-Steffenmeier and Jones book is out of print.

2024-07-25 13:05:05

What kind of residue will the AI bubble's popping leave behind? New newsletter post from me.
https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/the-grimy-residue-of-the-ai-bubble/

2024-07-10 14:11:59

Thanks to Dara Kerr for talking with me about the high climate cost of generative AI, Google's reneging on its climate goals, and the real existential crisis facing us on NPR Morning Edition today.
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/10/nx-s1-5028558/artificial-intelligences-thirst-for-electricity

2024-07-05 21:02:37

Oh my gosh.
"Recent construction connected to data centers... has damaged Black cemeteries in the Manassas area... which have historically been the burial place of free Black people, formerly enslaved Black people and Indigenous Americans."
These companies really have no problem ingesting literal Black and Indigenous bodies as grist for the AI mill.
https://www.insidenova.com/headlines/black-leaders-say-development-infringing-on-historical-cemeteries-in-prince-william/article_4a75e8f8-349d-11ef-894f-43fd29f4c462.html

2024-03-11 15:08:00

I've been sitting on this essay for a few months. I wrote the bulk of it closer to December, but the twin griefs of loss still remain.
"the times i don't feel grief"
https://alex-hanna.medium.com/the-times-i-do-not-feel-grief-8761ac947d46

2023-08-04 17:38:09

""One of the biggest threats from these technologies is how they will be used to discipline workers directly.. AI’s advocates risk creating a two-tier system where artificial facsimiles will be deemed good enough for those without means—but the well-to-do will hire actual humans."
New from @npub1e0a…eww0 and me at Tech Policy Press.
https://techpolicy.press/ai-hurts-consumers-and-workers-and-isnt-intelligent/