07/31 - Loafing Friday

Have a great weekend, you beautiful turking sons of Grinches.

 

I'm guessing the changes at MTurk have something to do with this announcement made in May:
https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/sunsetting-mturk-toolkit-cloudresearch/

It would be nice if Amazon could rebuild MTurk without all the fuckery of CloudResearch, or whatever they call themselves today. At least keep up the batchwork. Not everyone gives a shit about surveys.

 

There's likely a single digit number of people at Amazon who even know/heard of MTurk. I'm sorry, but no one's going to be rebuilding anything lmao. There's virtually no interest atm at major tech companies to do anything other than AI and AI-adjacent products. As sad as it is, it will probably stay online for a while longer until some time in the future some general manager at AWS notices there's this weird unknown thing called "Mechanical Turk" that shows up on their quarterly report that brings in almost no money but is a potential liability risk, and decides to axe it.

 

The last person over there who was actually doing something and who genuinely cared was the Account Specialist, and @Tripsa assassinated him in cold blood after the recent account suspensions fiasco. So I guess we can all blame @Tripsa for everything MTurk-related from now on.

 

Maybe the real Mechanical Turk was the friends we made along the way...