Bálint 🎭 @szbalint@x0r.be

Ok, so this is important, pay attention: if you see a sudden hard drive shortage that goes on for a couple of years and no natural disasters in hardware producing countries, then it means precisely one thing.

We have found a way to tap into the galactic quantum communications network. And it's full of 32k alien porn. We need to buffer the unimaginably large amounts of data to be able to filter out the alien smut and sample even a fraction of the useful data.

Before AI happens, we should see lower-level viruses/internet based organisms.

I mean something that mutates and evolves on it's own, without human coding or intervention.

The computing ecosystem becoming rich and varied enough to support life.

Do you think in a couple of decades recently deceased people’s brains will be scanned and any data will be harvested from them?

And some US court ruling will say what Google is doing is ok because dead people don’t have a right to privacy anymore?

There is still very little awareness in the US that their vaccine nationalism is one of the causes of why "the world" has a vaccine shortage.

Eg this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/14/global-vaccine-supply-johnson-johnson-astrazeneca/

...talking about how the US will export in the second half of the year. Yeah, people are dieing now, you don't need to vaccinate under 30s in the US.

What does the barista say about his equipment to onlookers?

“Noli me tampere”

Journalists are in a bit of trouble about what to write about Prince Philip, as the only thing he seems to have contributed to the world are a bunch of racist, classsist quotes in his 99 years.

What an anti-aspirational story

I'm getting slightly irate seeing people in the US write

"4m vaccinated in a day, new record"

and knowing that this is because the US exports close to zero of their vaccine production.

(EU exports close to half.)

These days I have little patience for people proposing technology in isolation.

“But what problem does it solve? How does it help people? How does it make things better for users?”

Proponents of new tech should have answers to these questions, good answers.

Wading through a bunch of broken tech, like dnssec, gpg or XMPP should have taught us that real solutions to real problems of real users matters.

Boris Johnson was in lockdown so long, he forgot how to behave like a person

Hahahah nah.

Fuck. It took me years to come across a comment that said “whom” is just a remnant of dativ from old english, hearkening back to the anglo-saxon roots.

Finally I understand when to use it.

It’s an interesting feeling to update a device just so it boots far enough that I can factory reset it, to remove any lingering accounts on it before it goes to the recycling center.

Crap. I just realized something: I went into IT because it’s easy for me, I navigate structure and abstraction better than most people - not because I find IT that interesting in terms of the problems that we try to solve day-to-day.

I’m much more fascinated and motivated by issues outside the broad IT world, the mix between sociology, psychology, economy and politics. In other words: what really makes a large impact on the world.

So, we need defensive machine learning, a couple of ideas:

- machine learning to haggle with online marketplaces about the best price AND/OR the most environmentally and labour friendly source
- machine learning to break news consumption into it’s own separate thing outside social networks, where truthfulness, trust, and following-up topics is prioritized, this could be as simple as a glorified feed reader
- machine learning to manage email on the client side based on priorities set by the user

It does not have to be perfect, it just has to be more efficient than a human trying to haggle with an algorithm when it comes to a shoe.

A good early example is: ad-blockers. While most ad-blockers do not use machine learning, it’s unequivocally one of the best personal agents anyone has.

No wonder Google has been trying to wage a war on ad-blockers not just from a business but from also a trust perspective.

A large corporation trying to gaslight people into believing “they care more”

Defensive machine learning.

We’re in the midst of a huge shift in power where corporations use machine learning to exploit more and more people.

There are countless examples: harmful social media algorithms, gig economy workers managed by arbitrary, shadowy machine learning driven tools, the disappearance of uniform pricing and the return of haggling (Amazon, Zalando etc set price based on machine learning).

We need defensive machine learning that gives people a chance to shift power back.

TIL: Firefox relay exists:

https://relay.firefox.com/

It’s a good thing for giving services that I don’t particularly care about an email address

These days it’s hard to distinguish Google from Oracle

...where youtube is planning to hide dislike counts on a video is:

“Youtube furthers extremism with recent tweak”

Or “Youtube makes it even more difficult to spot unreliable content”.

They display ridiculously little trust or reliability information at this point and they are planning to decrease it even further.

Disappointingly it comes across as “oh but we’re preventing negative review bombing”

Yes, that happens but loss of trust signal is worse