@eob@social.coop
@eob@social.coop avatar

eob

@eob@social.coop

Managing engineering team enhancing user-facing #privacy, fairness, and #AI compliance at #Google Search

Opinions here are strictly my own — I’m not speaking for Google

Formerly Bell Labs, HP Labs, and various startups

Have worked on chip design software, Internet collaboration software, IoT, computational aesthetics, search engine UI, and privacy

#EU citizen, from #Ireland

Have lived in Dublin, London, Princeton, San Francisco, and Calistoga

https://eamonn.org

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

aparrish, to random
@aparrish@friend.camp avatar

testing out a bit of code to display text on the gameboy by rendering 3px x 8px characters to VRAM tile data and tile maps, as needed at runtime. I like that the density of this allows more information on screen, but i'm worried that in practice it would be difficult to read—both because of the small size on an actual hardware screen, and because of the letters that don't take well to being rendered at 3px width, like Ms and Ws

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@aparrish Are you restricted to 1 bit per pixel (on or off)?

If you could have multiple grayscale levels per pixel then you could use anti-aliasing to make the glyphs more readable

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@aparrish Oh yes, now that I zoom in on the image I see the grey pixels.

Nice!

eob, to random
@eob@social.coop avatar

Powerful graphic for a story in the May 27 New Yorker about abortion, the courts, and the people

technicallymims, to random

feels like AI has done something to some tech journalists akin to what crypto did to some investors

RE: https://www.threads.net/@kylie.robison/post/C7PefkyvycB

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@technicallymims Become irrational?

molly0xfff, to ai
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

"it's all stored locally" is not a panacea for these alarming privacy-invading products!

what exactly is stored locally? what data is extracted from that local data and sent to the company's servers? is that local data being backed somewhere?

#AI #privacy

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@molly0xfff Yes, you're right. Having personal data stored on your device is not a panacea. It replaces one threat model for another

It's going to vary for different people whether the threat of unwanted access to server data is worse than threat of their device being seized or subverted

Still, for the majority of people in most contexts, on-device personal data storage seems clearly the lesser privacy threat

(Even safer of course is to not participate, and avoid giving up any personal data)

eob, to random
@eob@social.coop avatar

As Ellen Ullman observed, we build computer systems the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins

All software development is iterative

All software plans are wrong

The only way we advance is by learning from failures

carapace, to golang
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

Is this a bug in Go's regexp package? This program should print false instead it prints true:

package main

import (
"fmt"
"regexp"
)

func main() {
r := regexp.MustCompile("^1|0$")
fmt.Printf("%v\n", r.MatchString("00"))
}

I checked against Python's re module and it works as expected:

>>> import re
>>> r = re.compile('^1|0$')
>>> print(r.match('00'))
None

#go #golang #google

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@carapace Maybe your regex is being interpreted as

(^1)|(0$)

So it matches anything beginning with 1 or ending with 0

if you change it to

^(1|0)$

does that work as you expect to match either a single 0 or 1?

eob, to random
@eob@social.coop avatar

Well, it lasted less than a year

OpenAI had a much vaunted team working to make sure that AI would remain aligned with what humanity wants, even if the AI becomes smarter than humans

The leads and other team members have left, and Leike has expressed criticism about lack of support for this work

eob, to random
@eob@social.coop avatar

I remember an Ireland of poverty, clerical control, and stifling conformity

Today, the country took to the Eurovision stage, represented by a non-binary witch dressed in the trans flag

This is the New Ireland I celebrate / Éire Nua abú !

BrodieOnLinux, to random
@BrodieOnLinux@linuxrocks.online avatar

everything based on SGML sucks, HTML is a bloated markup format that should have been phased out decades ago

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@BrodieOnLinux What's the alternative? LateX? Haml?

wongmjane, to random

Andy Ng (Lib Dem), a former Hong Kong district councillor, was elected as a Wokingham Borough councillor in the UK :)

Congrats!

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@wongmjane Let's try this democracy thing again. Maybe this time it will stick!

sarahjamielewis, to random
@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social avatar

I would really appreciate, and be willing to pay for, a news source that restricted itself to covering legislative, judicial, and corporate machinations at the local/regional/national level while staying away from reporting on press conferences / inane social media statements / speculation / punditry.

i.e. reports on what people are doing, rather than what they are saying.

Would appreciate recommendations along these lines.

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@sarahjamielewis

Politico is not bad

And their European branch at politico.eu is good if you're interested in European politics and regulation

Patricia, to random
@Patricia@vivaldi.net avatar

I need you modern webdev folks to teach me (again) the magic transpiling mechanism that fuels this universe.

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@nsa @Patricia I would say it depends on the scale. For larger developer teams you probably want to write in Typescript. For single-developer projects it's better to just write in plain JavaScript using ES6 modules sent directly to the browser with no transpilation (but you still want to run a linter).

Lana, to random
@Lana@beige.party avatar

YOU GUYS WE TALKED ABOUT THIS

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@Lana The map is telling too

eob, to random
@eob@social.coop avatar

India has taken a significant step towards protecting consumer rights by banning . These manipulative design tactics undermine user choice and are now illegal under new regulations

https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/dark-patterns-are-now-illegal-in-india-6b3c35c5ce50

This development signals a growing awareness of the need for ethical design practices.

Patterns banned include:

False Urgency
Basket Sneaking
Confirm Shaming
Forced Action
Subscription Trap
Interface Interference
Bait and Switch
Disguised Advertisement
Nagging

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@ModelMakerVille The EU has some regulations against deceptive UIs, and the EU is democratic, so I don't see any evidence that these types of regulations are related to any lack of democracy.

eobrain, to random

OK, I just turned on sharing to the Fediverse.

Now, I'll pop over to my Mastodon account at @eob to see if I can see this post there.

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@eobrain Yep it worked, but it took 20 to 30 minutes to propagate

eob, to privacy
@eob@social.coop avatar

I mean, it's good that the US Congress is at least doing something to rein in the data brokers, even if they are motivated by xenophobia

If only they would expand this to be comprehensive legislation

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/20/lawmakers-privacy-bill-tiktok-00148070

eob, to privacy
@eob@social.coop avatar

Industry think tank proposes Federal law that would do none of the things that a privacy law should do, and would preempt state privacy laws that actually protect privacy

https://itif.org/publications/2022/01/24/looming-cost-patchwork-state-privacy-laws/

eob, to random
@eob@social.coop avatar

War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength, and Trust Is Lies

(Actually proud to prove Musk wrong and work in a team that has "Trust" on its name and is full of people dedicated to meaningfully improve trust by building improvements in safety, fairness, and data protection)

eob, to mastodon
@eob@social.coop avatar

Do any administrators know how long a server needs to retain IP addresses for moderators to be able to counter ?

Apparently, my -motivated proposal to shorten retention from 1 year to 2 days would hamper spam moderation

GDPR says retention should be “no longer than is necessary”

To reduce legal risk for Mastodon administrators I think we should determine what is the minimum IP retention period necessary to counter most spam

1 month? 2 months?

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/22393#issuecomment-1986971489

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@thisismissem @ilumium One technique I've seen is, after some period, zeroing out some number of the lowest significant bits of the IP address

So the process could be something like:

  • Keep full IP address for two days
  • After two days zero out the n lowest bits of the IP address
  • After six months delete the IP address completely

This would reduce (but not eliminate) privacy concerns, while presumably still allowing range blocking

What size of range do you typically want to block?

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@tellyworth What do you think of the idea I proposed in another response of replacing the IP address with an IP range (the IP address with some bits zeroed out)?

Would that be sufficient information for spam-fighting purposes?

If so, what size range would you want preserved?

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@olives I'm not an administrator, but based on the replies in the PR and here, it does seem like blocking IPs is something that administrators depend on for spam protection

It may be, as you suggest, we need better spam protection by other means, such a captchas

But sometimes more nuanced anti-spam also wants IP addresses

For example only suspicious IPs might get a captcha, or data from suspicious iPs could be dropped from analytics to avoid polluting the analytics

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

Update: in deference to the thoughtful input in this thread from people with experience in countering spam, I modified the pull request to set the default IP retention period to six months

It's not as good for privacy as two days would have been, but it's an improvement over the current retention of one year

Hopefully someone in the Mastodon dev team will review the PR

eob,
@eob@social.coop avatar

@soop Well, it looks like, based on other responses in this thread from people who have experience fighting spam, that they really need to keep IP addresses around for months to effectively fight spam

Hopefully, we will eventually figure out a way to keep this ability to fight spam without keeping IP addresses for more than a day or two, but in the meantime it looks like changing the retention period to anything shorter than several months is unlikely to get approved

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