🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access. In turn, that sensitive material is viewed by more Alpha School employees than students and parents may realize.

    Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I’m gonna stop you right there with a huge huge WHAT the FUCK. That is an incredible decision to have made. Stunning.

    I saw that Alpha School maintains a spreadsheet which contains a list of student names, their grade, and an archive of their recordings which shows what’s happening on their screen, their remote tutor, and a video of the student taken via their webcam. This spreadsheet is not only available to anyone at the company, but is also shared in such a way that anyone on the internet who has the link can access the spreadsheet and the videos of students.

    “If I wanted to, I could go there and just watch students. Anybody who worked in this capacity could watch the videos of students working on their laptops,” one Alpha School employee told me. “So many hours of just students’ faces […] I’m not sure parents understand exactly what’s going on with that data […] I don’t think that this is clearly communicated, because I’m sure there’d be a lot more opt outs if it was.”

    Wonder how many pedos work for the company.






  • Text truly is a difficult medium. It doesn’t help that many statements that would have definitely been sarcasm a couple of decades ago are legitimately said by fascists these days.

    I’ve been on the internet since 1994, and I was on BBSes before that from 1987, so that along with my ADHD means I tend to over-use emoticons to indicate the light-hearted tone of most of the things I write. heh.

    Also I also overuse “lol” and “heh” and “meh” for those purposes, too.

    I know some rail against the usage of “/s”, but really, it’s no bad thing. Sure it may identify some jokes that the author intended to be subtle, but in the days where these things are said by some people… it’s just necessary, alas.








  • I suppose the real issue is paying for the servers. There’s already pushback against the datacenters needed to power LLMs as it is. I suppose the capital to build would have to come from somewhere.

    It’s a pity we don’t have a good government for a project like that. That would truly be a public service.

    Did some calculations recently. If we took the cropland on which we grow corn strictly for ethanol production and put solar on it, something like 5% IIRC could power enough EVs to replace ALL vehicles in the US. Which means we could use a little more land for solar to power datacenters designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. A government-run LLM run for the public.

    It’s a pipe dream because in our current reality, it could never happen. But like universal health care and a living minimum wage, it should exist.

    I know, I’m straying from the topic again. ADHD gonna ADHD. heh

    I suppose as long as we were able to regulate AI companies to make sure they were forced to be upfront, honest, useful… it would be a sufficient compromise. But I’m sure we can’t even have that little.