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@davidgerard@circumstances.run
Columnists who presented Huang as the AI hype industry’s sanity backstop have reverse-ferreted into pontificating about systemic governance failures.I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of reverse ferrets.
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Looks like Outlook is back for me here in NE US.
#Microsoft #cloud #infosec #internet #Office365 #MicrosoftOutage
Still down! I'm tempted to boot the Windows 10 VM I keep around that has a licensed version of MS Office 2003 and launch it for the nostalgia experience.
#Microsoft #cloud #infosec #internet #Office365 #MicrosoftOutage
@yoginho@spore.social I haven't explored this at all, but it seems Holling, who I take it is credited with the notion of adaptive cycle you outline, also coined "panarchy" to describe the structure of systems with many interdependent adaptive cycles. This term pops up sometimes in discussions of resilience, including of socio-technological systems. Holling's 1985 paper is subtitled "Local Surprise and Global Change", which seems apt in more ways than one.
The real pisser is that in computer science/computer engineering we've developed lots of techniques for avoiding the pitfalls that arise when a system evolves "organically". "Evolved organically" was frequently used pejoratively or accusingly. I guess when your company is valued over a trillion dollars those ideas seem quaint and passé.
In Latin, invidia is the sense of envy, a "looking upon" associated with the evil eye, from invidere, "to look against, to look in a hostile manner." Invidia ("Envy") is one of the Seven Deadly Sins in Christian belief.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidia
@novet@infosec.exchange @zzt@mas.to I already acknowledged that different people have different tradeoffs. If it works for you, good for you. I am only reacting because all of a sudden I've seen a dozen people evangelizing for Typst, and for me that's a red flag.
Open source does not protect you from slopification. We are experiencing the folly of that belief with countless open source projects right now. It is infeasible to fork a complex piece of software and take up developing it on your own if the corporate masters go in a direction you don't like. Therefore by committing to Typst one takes on a risk, and personally my tolerance for this shape of risk is very low. YMMV
@novet@infosec.exchange @zzt@mas.to Typst is being developed by a corporation for corporate purposes. LaTeX is for all practical purposes "done", and has been for a long time. It's 2026 and yet people are still willing to give corporations the benefit of the doubt when they try supplanting an existing and proven technology with shiny features. I realize not everyone has the same tradeoff surface I do, but personally I'm tired of waiting in fear to see whether a corporate entity decides slop is on the menu and splash damages something I spent months or years getting used to using. I'm tired.
CloudFlare implements the digital analog of someone arbitrarily stopping you and demanding to see your papers as you go about your business.
@davidgerard@circumstances.run @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org @zzt@mas.to It's a footgun dressed up in a cyberpunk fantasy. Use the inscrutable black box to spew inscrutable firmware into your inscrutable black box for great ownership. Don't think through any of the downstream implications of any of this, which include further erosion of anything resembling actual ownership.
@swib@openbiblio.social Your AI policy draft includes this recommendation:
Make sure that you prioritize tools that are resource-friendly, locally hosted, open source (or at least open weight), were created under ethically sound conditions, for the public interest, preserve data privacy and ensure transparency and reproducibility.In my estimation, when it comes to generative AI there is no such tool that would be known to non-specialists. I suspect only a bespoke tool could satisfy all of these criteria in a meaningful way. For this reason I think you need to list examples of the tools you have in mind.
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@knowprose@mastodon.social I read about that yesterday and just shook my head. It's about as predictable and stupid as you could imagine but here we are I guess.
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The "open weight" "local" models are largely coming out of the AI labs that are making hackable hardware inaccessible to many peopleis what I said originally and wish I'd stuck to. China's industrial policy, which has also given rise to open weight AI models, is at best unconcerned with widely-available hackable hardware, but nevertheless results in a restriction of hardware availability. I don't know enough about this aspect of the industry to comment, but I can say with some confidence that the US hyperscalers in particular are actively militating against such access (and I suspect China's large companies will follow suit if they have not already because this is how the economic model works).
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@knowprose@mastodon.social Part of my point was that most of the open weight LLMs people are talking about come from the very same hyperscalers that drove up the prices of Raspberry Pis. Both phenomena are part of the same business strategy; if you embrace one, you are embracing the other.
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@elana@babka.social A kind of fun in this space I haven't had the opportunity to indulge in lately is the asking a sequence of questions that ends up making it undeniable that using the LLM was a net negative. E.g., "Didn't you feel like you had to double check every output, given what was at stake?" "Oh you did. Didn't your checking take almost as long as if not longer than just doing that bit without the LLM?" Etc.
Re: https://mastodon.social/users/404mediaco/statuses/117592857554097967
This is incoherent. The "open weight" "local" models are largely coming out of the AI labs that are making hackable hardware inaccessible to many people, and many have this outcome as one of their goals. The future of hacking your devices is having devices that are accessible.
Emoji reactions:
I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by demonstrating a machine that would never be expected to be able to do X actually cannot do X.
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@aud@spectre.asta.lgbt @glyph@mastodon.social @xgranade@wandering.shop Freedom For All People (some restrictions may apply)
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@zzt@mas.to The "free as in beer" kind of freedom the FSF was explicitly not supposed to be about. "Freedom from all consequences" seems to be how an alarmingly not small proportion of the American population interprets the word.
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@davidgerard@circumstances.run
“The reason is not that people are Luddites . . . it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid. It has become a political symbol,” said Vik Bajaj, co-chief executive of the Jeff Bezos-backed AI start-up Prometheus.Uh. It's not even the tiniest bit like that? Are these people really this dull? Frankly I'd resist anything they want to do solely on the basis of how profoundly incurious they appear to be.
@riverpunk@defcon.social I would like to see open source throw off the legacy of Tim O'Reilly and return to its roots in notions of political freedom. In particular this means divesting completely from corporations, since those are structured hierarchically and will always militate against an egalitarian community. One way to see the conflict here is in terms of the future. Capitalist systems depend on technology for durability: good technology, to them, makes certain kinds of futures reliably predictable, which is what allows for investment, extraction, and profit here and now. But free software has, or I think should have, an egalitarian aim, to liberate people from the horrors of capitalist and other oppressive systems. This is a different vision for structuring the future, and technology plays a different role in it. That's nice to say at an abstract level, but what does in mean on the ground for a particular open source project? I don't know, and it's not really for me to say unless I'm involved in the project. But I do think it's important for projects to actively engage and center such issues.
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@ghosttie@mastodon.gamedev.place Very interesting. Thank you for sharing this. It's illuminating.