This is the last teaching week of the first semester for us. Next week is ‘study week’, no irony intended, the quotes are just to signal that that’s the real name. Then we have two weeks of exams, which involves the last bit of work for the semester. This is a long sentence to say that I am tired; well, everyone is tired: both students and colleagues.
OK. So I am tired and then get a suspicious looking email, saying that I can now join whatever group for the university. Right-click, report email, yay! now I get another email saying that I correctly identified a phishing attempt planted by the university security group. If I want to do research with human subjects I have to apply to the Human Ethics Committee and provide all sorts of explanations. It seems that University IT does not need to consider those niceties. By the way, I had to use multifactor authentication (MFA) for the third time today so I could read that email. Why is the software experience so broken?
Google tells me that I have been selected to start using AI with all my files in Drive and photos, etc. I opt-out and make a mental note “move all your stuff out of Google Drive”. I am helping a colleague with a manuscript and MS Word keeps on underlining words that are correct but that are not recognised by its dictionary. There is a Grammarly icon, but I have to login if I want to use it. Of course I could use AI, say Copilot which is the preferred one by the university, but I have to login and need to use MFA to do so. Again. I just want to check my use of prepositions. Should I use in, on, at? Despair.
Left work earlier than normal to go for a very slow 6 km run. Target heart rate: 130-140 bpm. It was the best part of the day, looking around, listening to an audiobook, looking at the trees while thinking of their architecture and L-systems, and aerial LiDAR, and how the tree positions do not quite fit in a nice grid when reconstructed from LiDAR, even when we plant them like that, and how genotypes do not differ in several physiological parameters although grow differently, and how I got lost on the story and need to go back 30 seconds because I was thinking of trees.
Weird thing is that my running watch (Coros) talks to my phone, and then the data is ready to be sliced and diced, presented in an app. No need to login to anything, no MFA, no AI. The thing just works. How come that we cannot get that from enormous megacorporations which are paid to provide a service at work? I have not asked for AI or broken MFA. I don’t want AI agents, don’t want vibe code, don’t want assignments or manuscripts to review with fake references. I want software that works and let me work without having to enter numbers from an authentication app dozens of times per week.
I hope the AI companies run out soon of investors’ money to burn and, please, Microsoft, fix your #$! software.
