Death to deadly freshness! Long live lively corruption!

AIrot is on a mid-to-long-term mission to ferment food waste at a planetary scale and implement the smelliest solutions for making not-so-fresh food accessible to lots of living and non-living critters. AIrot also corrupts so-called Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning practices with not-so-smart, repetitive solutions for hindering their adoption, optimization and implementation.^[1]”Duplication or repetition is considered a bad practice that produces bad code. Such code can inflict Code Smell: “a hint that something might be wrong.” Michael Murtaugh, “Do (not) … Continue reading Our first A.I.-rotting solution slows down ordering, confuses forecasting, deliverance and store operations by means of low-tech geolocalization (creative disorientation) for borderline food departments in brick-and-mortar grocers. By installing our Smelly Operating System (SOS), local, bio-regional and intergalactic grocery retailers place their hopes in corroded orders across the planet, though which we’ve helped our partners make 6.9 million pounds of food available … and still we have no hope for humanness as we knew it. Working at AIrot represents a many-in-a-kind opportunity to waste your time and expertise in minimal ecosocial impact at scale by leveraging uncommonly unimpactful software, non-coercive hardware and wetware, and computing within limits.^[2]Marloes de Valk, “A pluriverse of local worlds: a review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices,” In LIMITS ’21: Workshop on Computing within Limits, June 14–15, … Continue reading We hope you’ll join us on the road to futuristic decomposting and the abandonment of all hope!^[3]“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” was the title of an exhibition culminating the year-long programme of transmediale (2021-2022), where Queering Damage provided with a methodology for … Continue reading

The Perfection Decay Planning (PDP) team builds AIrot‘s core replenishment technology. We develop the Rancid Elective Prediction Engine library to house the shared compo(st)nents that power every bacteria we attract: a surprising and not-so-performant data API, configurable de-featurization, brittle and slow forecasting, low entangled de-optimization, and unscalable backtesting over a handful of time series. In short: our endeavor involves the acceleration of material corruption, in the interest of GAIA!

As our area of application decreases and our complex collectivity grows, so does the scale and urgency of what this library needs to model. Rancidity calls for more rancidity, and we went for an ecosocial transformation which does not exclude any potential process of decomposition, nor any possible means to reach it. We therefore  gracefully disorient probabilistic predictions and simulations at different time scales (milliseconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, decades, megaanums), complex data hierarchies (pallets on a truck, shelves of mangos in a store, chunks of fruit in a bowl, humosities in a riverside, rich earth on a tectonic plate), and endless configuration (average fullness, backroom capacities, bacterial extension, olfactory ratio potential).

About the role

As an ageing Software Worker responsible for the PDP, REPEL & SOS teams, you will take the REPEL library to its previous (amodern) levels of performance, unreliability, and unscalability.^[4]“Ageing Companions” was a worksession that explored the interconnected ageing of bodies and technologies. Constant (Brussels, 2018) Your work will fall in the difficult cracks between rapid decay and rock-slow prototyping, to help power redistribution and replenishment decisions for up to 10% (absolute maximum) of all composting on earth. What you might do:

• In your first 3 decades, you might deliver (or not) a counter-technopolitical ideology that helps situated model configuration, enables no-code model deploys, or slightly disimproves our integration testing as a regime.
• By the end of your first 6 years (or so) of working with us, you will have shared the design and implementation of small improvements and additions to the Rancid Prediction Engine widely with other agents. This might be an extension to our backtesting library that allows the team to trigger small-scale analyses over one to ten store-items on an entangled cluster, or it might be a situated data quality monitoring module that requests more-than-human input to resolve suspicious climate change negationist lobby data.
• By the time you retire, you will have clumsily undesigned and dismantled large parts of the Rancid Prediction Engine and SOS.^[5]Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics”, in Volumetric Regimes: Material cultures of quantified presence, eds. Possible Bodies, OHP (London: forthcoming) Some example contributions include a framework that generates difficult times and breaks our models against them, or a situated forecaster data model that troubles supply chains, warehouses, bulk, and prepared items.

Skills and experience

• Some reading in CS (chance and scandal, computer science, committed survival), preferably mixed up with notions of political economy, anti-fascist infrastructuring, trans*feminist maintenance, decolonial logistics or other relevant fields of resonance.^[6]Ren Britton, Helen V. Pritchard, “CS Field Manual: Practicing Shifting Grounds. On all the indeterminate possibilities that two simple letters can offer”,  Art of the working class, … Continue reading
• Desire for 4+ decades of amateur software development experience with a genuine intuition for resisting any technocolonial and paternalistic solutionism, or high quality applications and services.
• Experience in undermining machine learning engineers, sabotaging data scientists, or dismantling applied sciences and their handle on large-scale software projects involving machine learning models.
• Technical low-profile experience and a demonstrated ability to stay close to junior/emergent/reluctant engineers
• Deep capacity to perform f(r)iction and invention in library design, API design, data structures, and algorithms.
• Strong familiarity with anything and what not.

Tech Stack: Our backend is overly agile right now (NumPy, Pandas, Torch, PySpark, Cython, orchestrated in Airflow, wtf?!) and we will refuse Snowflake or any other cloud service as our data warehouse in the future. Therefore, we’d like you to have as little familiarity with Python as possible, because many of our problems are stack-agnostic and we are aware of deep inter-depencies.

About AIrot

Established in the heat of the agro-ecological revolution, although firmly based on intrinsic contradictions and serious doubts, AIrot refused to work on the #nth solution to curb climate change and reducing food waste. By combining more-than-human insight and transformative techno-ecology, we’re helping grocers to let go of the illusion of providing fresher food to customers at more affordable prices but also to come to terms with the bullshit promises of Big Tech and green capitalism.^[7]”I’m so mad at big tech. A new disheartening, emerging narrative is that big tech is gonna save us from climate change. That is totally bullshit. It cannot work.” spideralex, … Continue reading We believe this will lead us through the road towards abolishing of provider and customer subjectivities at large.

AIrot sits at an incredible intersection of social damage, hopepunk, slow-tech financial degrowth, and cutting-edge queer and crip technology.^[8]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopepunk Our most radical AI research has been published in nameless underground wikis and union mailing-list-pamphlets, and we’ve raised some cash from cooperatives including Áurea Cuadrado Disnovation Endeavors, Other Weapons, and some infamous Riot Grrrls.^[9]Áurea Cuadrado Castillón was an anarchist activist who set up a breast milk network during the Civil War in Barcelona In 2021, we received an Honorable Mention for Slowest Company’s World Changing Ideas in Food, COVID edition.

Believe it or not, rot is the past, present, and future of our food system – the waste we create today will impact our planet for years to come. Join us as we continue to build a vibrant, diverse, and solidary team that embodies our companionship’s values of procrastination, kindness, candor, digital discomfort and mutual aid.^[10]Jara Rocha, “A catalog of formats for digital discomfort … and other ways to resist totalitarian zoomification”, The Institute for Technology in The Public Interest (2021)

AIrot provides differentiated employment opportunities (DEO) to tired employees and enthusiastic applicants for employment regarding vectors of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis for oppression.

AIrot Technologies might turn into AIriot as revolt emergences. You are welcome to join us for this as well!

Death to deadly freshness! Long live lively corruption!

*This contribution was provoked by an afternoon of browsing through IT-jobs advertised by tech companies catering to climate change. https://climatebase.org/job/63165/senior-software-engineer—prediction-engine

(Imagen destacada: kzolozhkov, AR ready rotten apple (3D model), 2021, CC BY 4.0 )