Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else.

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. The MeToo movement messed up female academia

Yes, it's good ultimately that there was mass movement to talk about unwanted sexual advances from men. But as with any act that has the best of intentions, there are always unforeseen circumstances.

In academia, there are a lot of collaborations between researchers, but after MeToo, there was a noticeable drop in the number of male academics who were willing to collaborate with female academics. Not that they were all lascivious creeps scared of getting found out, but rather they were typical anxious geeks who were worried about their behaviour being misinterpreted as predatory.

Before MeToo, junior women academics started 1.6 new projects per year on average. After MeToo, this number dropped to 0.9, a 44% decrease. Rather than opening doors, the movement’s aftermath has meant fewer growth opportunities for some of the very people it aimed to protect. Long-term, it could widen the gender gap between women and men in academia, effectively worsening a different problem women have.

2. Adding AI has been pointless for most businesses

A recent study (sent to me by a reader - thank you!) has shown AI is completely failing to make any real impact in businesses. Yes, a tiny 5% are getting something out of it, but most companies who try to implement AI don't have very impressive results and it's basically been a waste of time and money.

If you’re thinking, ‘I knew AI was all a waste of time!‘ then you’ll also enjoy gloating over the recent news about Anthropic, the company that makes the LLM Claude. They’ve just settled a legal case for billions of dollars, basically admitting that they were pirating the world's books.

Interestingly, the result of the case implies that if you buy a book, you are allowed to feed it to your AI models. That was the only bad thing they did legally, copyright be damned. To be fair though, Claude is purportedly the best LLM when it comes to writing so I guess it was totally worth all that pirating?

Meanwhile, another company is really trying to get people into smart glasses again (remember Google Glass from like 10 years ago?). This latest attempt at smart glasses reputedly retails for just 249 dollars, which has made people actually interested in it, but it does seem completely based on a particularly famous Black Mirror episode from 2011 since the glasses will creepily bring up information about people whenever you look at anyone.

I’m sure the UK police are getting ready to bulk buy these glasses - the UK is apparently now the most prolific user in Europe of the kind of facial recognition technology that the Chinese government loves so much. And yes, they do lead to wrongful arrests depressingly often, how did you know?

But before this AI roundup gets too depressing, here’s some good news: it looks like we are about to get more efficient batteries. Hooray!

3. Machine learning has figured out a new diet to prevent Alzheimer’s & dementia

It was a mere ten years ago that researchers were touting the MIND diet for mental health, but since then technology has advanced and made some new discoveries. Enter the MODERN diet. It has been proven to reduce dementia risk by 36%.

It's early days yet, especially since the initial findings don't seem to show certain foods like grains and nuts, but I expect soon enough there will be new cookbooks coming out with all sorts of ways of cooking your maximum of one egg per day. I have to admit though that I for one will continue eating more than one egg per day - I’m sorry, brain.

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 simple tip to overcome laziness

Think about the outcome instead of the work to get there.

I wrote a mini-essay about this last month as part of the Ship 30 for 30 challenge, so I’m going to be lazy and just repost that below instead of explaining it again. Irony, huh?

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff

Sent this by somebody else?