I think I earned some kind of dad achievement today by twisting my beard up in a screwdriver trying to take the doorknob off my son's bedroom door, which he locked from the inside and for which we had no key
A lone quintillionaire cannot enjoy the outputs of the fully automated luxury capitalism machine if there is no surrounding human world to luxuriate .
Re: https://social.freebitcoin.gay/users/drew/statuses/01KY7HAXB9R8BZ60CXWB3P2B7YI think the most important question is: why does anyone comply with what one incurious, self-centered, and self-important man, Linus Torvalds, says?Why is that most important? Because Linux does not belong to Linus Torvalds. It belongs to the world. Torvalds only gets to dictate if the people who are best-positioned to take that power from him fail to do so. From where I sit (as an outsider), he should have been removed from the project, or at least have his dictatorial power removed, long ago, and the primary problem is that there is no structure or will to actually do that.Under these conditions Linux is a hierarchical, and therefore right-wing, project. The project allows a single man to dictate the future evolution of a global good. Let's drop the illusion that it is "free" or "open" till that changes.#dev #tech #FOSS #FLOSS #LOSS #linux #kernel #AI #LLM
The USA is engaged in a war of choice to defeat itself. It certainly is a special moment.https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-20-each-day-the-us#USPol #USWar #TrumpWar #US #Iran #geopolitics
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-20-each-day-the-usOpen linkView original on buc.ciRe: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/116961677110890384I've taken part in numerous computer science research projects that involved IRB review. I believe the system work, even for cases like the above post. But Google and Stanford are bad actors that are taken at their word, and no system, IRB based or otherwise, is going to function properly if it cannot appropriately metabolize this reality.I was once in a meeting where a Google X person gushed about a project that used smartphone sensor data to detect earthquakes. The calculus being set up here is that detecting earthquakes is a social good that outweighs any particular individual's right to privacy and even outweighs their right to know that their smartphone is being used in this way, let alone consent to it in any meaningful way. () Let me be clear and say I reject this framing, but it does appeal to a lot of people, even well-meaning ones. A mess.#Google #IRB #ethics #EthicsReview #ComputerScience #research #ResearchEthics #tech #dev() I assume there's some contortion involving EULAs whereby Google X can pretend that anyone using Android consented to having their smartphone's sensor data used for any future purpose Google et al. cooks up.
Today, extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from nowhere. The trick of conjuring this unearned wealth is, in fact, the key to understanding capitalism’s origins and a clue to why the catastrophe of climate collapse is upon us: value is created by consuming the future.The Alibi of Capital explains how this came about through the imperial expansion of the West, encumbering today’s generations with repayments on earlier extractions. Timothy Mitchell identifies the forms of capitalisation, credit, and coercion that turn prospective assets into present income. Rejecting the common idea that claims on the future create only financial or fictitious capital, he traces the terraforming projects – the destruction of rivers, the colonising of territory, the expansion of infrastructure, and the burning of carbon – through which the future has been squandered. Terms such as finance, technology, the economy, and growth function as alibis that conceal this devastating form of extraction.https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-alibi-of-capital-how-we-broke-the-earth-to-steal-the-future-on-the-promise-of-a-better-tomorrow-timothy-mitchell/b9d75f1021d88989#capitalism #extractivism #colonization #tech #technology #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #EnvironmentalDestruction #EcologicalDestruction #MortgagingTheFuture
Nobody who noticed DeepSeek and is able to reason is surprised by this.https://apnews.com/article/kimi-k3-china-ai-0d8a5e268deb11a673f4d444fc597cc5See the attached chart for trend. It plots weekly token usage by US firms.#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Claude #ChatGPT #DeepSeek #China #US
It's interesting () to me how sex robot/sex chatbot vendors pivot to classrooms and students in a climate where the so-called grownups in the room are regularly screaming about CSAM and introducing all manner of surveillance in response.Replikka: https://theluddite.org/post/replika.htmlRealDoll: https://neuromatch.social/users/jonny/statuses/116939614764592845 (and the links)#AI #education #SexBots #SexDolls() I'm using "interesting" as a tepid stand-in for a mix of emotions I'd prefer not expressing here.
Wildfire smoke in the forecast today for Maine. "Unhealthy for sensitive groups". It should clear out overnight. I guess we'll be getting our yellow skies back for a bit.#maine #wildfires #QuebecWildfires
Microsoft hates Doom, creates doom.#computer #games #gaming #id #IdSoftware #IdTech #Microsoft #XBOX #Doom #Quake
It's like having a second brain.#fungus #LeafyBrain
Regarding that last boost: no one's ever built a "1 GW" data center anywhere. It's also absurd to use a measure of power for a computing system when what matters computationally is throughput, latency, and storage capacity.
Re: https://social.wildeboer.net/users/jwildeboer/statuses/116860157329810170I realize this is beside the point, but personally I view the fact that code review is not considered interesting as a serious failure of computer science education. I'm invested in the latter, so it stands out for me.On the whole writers tend to love to read. I think they love it in part because their education led them to realize that learning to read well is both a good in itself and helps you become a better writer. Programming languages were designed to be human readable so that humans could read them. Yet we have a couple generations of people writing code most of whom were never explicitly taught how to read it, let alone learn to love reading it.#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #ComputerProgramming #ComputerScience #ComputerScienceEducation
A bit of a rant: the US culture wars have made it difficult to find reasonable, helpful parenting advice online.#US #USPol #CultureWar #parenting
It's odd to me that people talk about data centers in terms of megawatts, a measure of electric power. For one example among many, a Bloomberg article from March about Microsoft cancelling data center plans began:
Microsoft Corp. has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence.
"Data center projects that...amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity" is a nonsensical statement. The (technical) capacities of a data center have to do with storage, compute, transmission, and latency. I understand there's probably some Fermi calculation along the lines of converting electric power to compute capacity using the TDP of NVIDIA's latest GPUs or something like that. Nevertheless, it's misleading to speak this way, not to mention lazy. It is oversimplifying in a bad way, treating data centers as utilities that supply a commodity when that is just not the case (at least not with AI, where prices for services still fluctuate fairly wildly).
My debit card's "fraud protection":
Whatever they're doing to detect potential fraud, it has a large false positive rate and does not seem adaptive (at least in my case). It's especially odd to me that this bank asks if I've authorized transactions it flagged as potentially fraudulent, I indicate no, this is not fraud, and yet the system continues to flag transactions with the same vendor as potentially fraudulent. I'm giving it a reinforcement signal that couldn't be more clear!
#DebitCard #banking #fraud #FraudProtection #FraudDetection #cybersecurity #InfoSec
It is conspicuous that the core of the tech right—Musk, Thiel, Sacks—consists of South African expats for whom skepticism about multiracial democracy was mother’s milk.
Oh, your service logged me out for my security? Great, I'll just open up the vault that contains my private keys so that I can open up the password manager with the master password of my other vault, which has the credentials I'll use to log back into my account. And then to finish the login process you'll send me a one-time password in clear text through SMS or email because those are the only options you offer for a "second factor". I feel much more secure now thank you.
(For clarity this is a sardonic post).
Nowadays programming in a programming language I don't use daily seems to always require an upgrade cascade of editors, tools, plugins, dependencies, libraries, my DNA, ??? I put some effort into keeping my environment static but all it takes is one autoupgrading thing I missed to kick off one of these cascades, and it feels like whack-a-mole trying to find and lock down every possible cause. This time it looks like a newer version of scala metals might have stopped supporting Java 11 and somehow got updated without my knowledge (maybe? I'm guessing).
P.S. This is not an invitation to post critiques about any of these technologies or recommendations about what I should be doing instead.
