fenneladon

@fenneladon@todon.eu

PM Community Lead @ F-Secure | cybersecurity, privacy, software speaker | Embarrassment-Driven Product Management | English & Python writer | he/him | opinions = mine, ofc! 💜🖤🤍🖤💜

Avatar image description: me on Belgian TV being interviewed on IoT security. White man (beard, formal shirt/jacket, smiling) talking to a TV microphone in front of advertising panels.
Header: Split between avatar and me talking at an ENISA event with title slide "There is no security without privacy" behind me.

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fenneladon, to random

ESG and "AI" are fundamentally incompatible.

DEI and "AI" are fundamentally incompatible.

Honesty and "AI" are fundamentally incompatible.

Ethics and "AI" are fundamentally incompatible.

Reliable information and "AI" are fundamentally incompatible.

Democracy and "AI" are fundamentally incompatible.

Decent people have known about all of these problems with "AI" for years, sometimes decades.

Decent people have been warning about these problems with "AI" for years, sometimes decades.

Decent people have been trying to stop and mitigate these problems with "AI" for years, sometimes decades.

The moral vacuums in leadership of our tech industry don't care, they never pay for the many different kinds of pollutions they knowingly cause and accelerate. Leaders like this will continue to profit from everyone else's suffering, they will continue to fail up leaving a trail of damage in their wake that others have to try to clear up.

All solidarity with these and all workers quietly trying and loudly blowing whistles.

https://grist.org/accountability/microsoft-employees-spent-years-fighting-the-tech-giants-oil-ties-now-theyre-speaking-out/

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

Honest question for white people that don't consider themselves racist:

White nationalists have been vocal about their attacks on DEI. These are literally the same people that talk about Charlottesville, Jan 6th, and ethnic cleansing.

They've laid out exactly how they plan to destroy DEI.

  1. Make false claims that DEI is about giving unqualified Black people an unfair advantage

  2. Work with racist politicians to use this as a pretext to make all DEI programs illegal.

1/n

fenneladon,

@mekkaokereke 1. Yes, publicly, not 1 on 1.

  1. Because it matters to me and my position means I can. Because I'm not going to let the bastards win without a fight. Not 1 on 1 because I don't think that will be welcome - it seems too much like asking for a cookie and making it their problem, rather my fubar "family"'s problem.

  2. Honestly, I don't think it makes much difference. I think they are rightly suspicious of the workplace and of me, if they even think about it/me at all. They don't know me, they don't know if/when I will betray my public positions when they are privately inconvenient, as so many like me do all the time.

fenneladon, to random

Every app and site should have a "never show me synthetic content" default and option. Instead every app and site is trying to force us to prioritise their low quality unreliable literal-in-the-philosophical-sense-bullshit synthetic content. As a product manager, I'm beyond embarrassed for everyone involved in these actively user-, society-, and environment- hostile choices. 🙄 #GenAI

fenneladon, to random

Anyone else struggling with concentrating on work & other needed things in a genocide in a pandemic in a far-right resurgence in a climate disaster in a pyramid scheme running out of world to devour?

No? Just me then. 🤷🏻‍♂️🙄

fenneladon, to Software

Many people are out here on these streets are making the extraordinary claim that adding glorified chatbots (literal "automated bullshit generators" using the philosophical definition of bullshit *) to every random product, app, website, object, organisation, process, and more will help people better understand the world, know things, and therefore take efficient and effective actions.

While we can assume there is a heavy dose of marketing insincerity and follow-the-crowd-leadership behind most of these claims, like with any grifter-driven hype cycle, at least some people do sincerely seem to believe glorified chatbots are really going to help their victims to access knowledge.

For this last group, I have to wonder if people are aware of and have considered the philosophical definition of what "knowledge" is? Knowledge is a justified true belief, with all three elements being crucial. [🧵 1/2]

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his classic text On Bullshit, explains that the bullshitter “does not reject the authority of truth, as the liar does […] He pays no attention to it at all.”

fenneladon,

With a chatbot, if you are credulous enough, you can certainly create beliefs based on the text they vomit up.

If you are lucky, the statements and beliefs you take from your chatbot may even be true - they are true at least some of the time, maybe even slightly more than 50% of the time depending on which self-serving metric is used. Not nearly enough of the time for my comfort, but others seem to not care as much about the built-in error / randomness rate.

What you can never have from a chatbot is the "justified" part - a "GenAI" chatbot is randomly mixing up a large (but still very limited) set of inputs of dubious provenance into a structure that looks enough like the shape of language (or art or whatever output type you've chosen) to fool enough human to make money for the owner.

This process by definition removes any connection to the (stolen) sources, and thus the justifications and evidences, for whether we can consider the "knowledge" generated as "true", and thus whether it makes sense to have a belief.

This short video is a good intro to this philosophy 101 concept that the whole tech industry seems to be obtusely 🙊🙉🙈 pretending doesn't matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXhJ3hHK9hQ

[🧵 2/2]

fenneladon, to random

You know how little boys are made of snails and puppy dogs' tails?

"AI" is made of lies, sci-fi absurdity, climate destruction, and eugenics.

timnitGebru, to random
@timnitGebru@dair-community.social avatar

As the year closes, I have written some reflections on 2 years of DAIR, what our space means to me and others who can't quite fit into other institutions, how we organize our research and advocacy, what type of technological futures we want to see, and my trepidation about being in the nonprofit industrial complex. LMK what you think.

With thanks to @alex @emilymbender and @meg for feedback.

https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/second-year-anniversary/

fenneladon,

@timnitGebru @alex @emilymbender @meg Repeating from LinkedIn: Your org is one of the few things in tech that gives me any hope. As you rightly said a while back, "Why should we always be cleaning up after harmful tech rather than thinking about the technological future we want that actually serves us?". Thank you and your team for keeping alive some hope of a tech future that is not just more mass harm, scams, and mediocrity. 🙏🏻

fenneladon, to Software

"I can't see the chat because I'm presenting", "I can't see hands up because I'm presenting", etc.

Depending on how you define the start date, we are now at the end of year four, or already into year five, of a global pandemic where we all had to learn how to handle remote meetings if we weren't already doing that before.

So why do we keep hearing this nonsense from people whose job includes key requirements of being excellent at meetings and presentations?

A key part of managers' and sales people' job is to read the room, to listen, to watch, to respond, and to adapt to their teams and their customers.

How is it acceptable to be this embarrassingly incompetent at the basics of your job? How is it acceptable to publicly repeatedly refuse to do a few minutes of learning to handle the basic tools of your job?

And then afterwards many of the same people turn around and absurdly cherry-pick data to claim only work in noisy highly distracting unventilated locations after exhausting travel is productive. [1/2]

timnitGebru, to random
@timnitGebru@dair-community.social avatar

"What If Sam Altman Were A Black Woman? Tech Twitter Weighs In On The OpenAI Debacle"

I mean the dude who fired me was waxing poetic about the "small research community" and empathy for his colleagues and stuff so we know the answer.

https://peopleofcolorintech.com/articles/what-if-sam-altman-were-a-black-woman-tech-twitter-weighs-in-on-the-openai-debacle/

fenneladon,

@timnitGebru Mediocre white guy in tech fired for lying in a role where that can bring criminal charges = hysterically throw money at him to avoid the awful situation of him being on the job market for more than a day

World authority Black woman in tech fired for telling the truth = run a harassment campaign against her, continue to take jabs at her years later despite everything she said being proven true over and over again

Makes sense. 🙄

fenneladon, to random

One of my favourite things to do on LinkedIn is report corporate ads about AI as "fraud or scam". I know it's pointless, but it's 100% accurate, and feels good. 🙃

fenneladon,

Always be repairing your environment if you can 🤷🏻‍♂️

fenneladon, to random

Is still happening? 🤞🏻🙏🏻

Here's some silky smooth, funky 1974 soul 🎶🕺🏻 from Billy Preston to help with what has been very trying week for many I care about on here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj5DccgBYeM [no cc, lyrics here: https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/23072042/Billy+Preston/Nothing+from+Nothing]

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Do you have a "decaying digital media" drawer or box?

Old USB stick disks, SD cards, TF cards, maybe an old portable hard drive or two.

Of course you have removed all the files you really care... but those old drives are full of ... stuff.

Photos, old projects, digital paintings, half written stories, audio books... as time goes by some of them rot away and fail.

how do you organize it all?

Simply having a pen that could write on a TF card would help!

fenneladon,

@futurebird I have a years old nesting doll of saved TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt files from previous iterations that get saved to next arrangement of volumes when I upgrade to bigger/more stable USBs. Not all of the oldest ones open with the passwords I have saved for them in my manager. 😂🤷🏻‍♂️

fenneladon, to Software

Three sporting events, two very recent & one very old, have me thinking about the organizations I'm a part of and my role in them.

Read here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/football-chess-software-fennel-aurora/

Or as a 🧵 below 👇🏻

fenneladon,

Two recent sporting events have me thinking about the organizations I'm a part of and my role in them.

The first event is probably very familiar to most people. A shitty boss committed a violent sexual assault on camera in front of millions of people, and for now remains in his job, still supported by his board. Rubiales is even absurdly trying to claim he is somehow a victim. 🧵

fenneladon,

The second event is probably less familiar. The chess governing body, FIDE, jumped on the latest cruelty-is-the-point fashion trend for arses in power - claiming the right to say who is and isn't a certain gender. This brings up the question for many who had never thought of it before: why does women's chess exists in the first place?

No, it's not because women are "innately" bad at chess as far too many eugenics-pilled arses claim. It's because men are bad at humanity. 🧵

fenneladon,

Despite numbers and talents being evenly distributed up to around 10 years old, there comes an age where boys start behaving awfully towards everyone else, and those in power (parents, teachers, tournament officials) largely tolerate or actively model and encourage it.

For some mysterious reason, many of the targets of this behaviour don't stick around, instead moving onto other activities that wouldn't have been their first choice, but where at least they are safer. 🧵

fenneladon,

So womens' and girls' chess events are made to allow them a rest from men's lack of humanity - the usual way we magnanimously gift our most vulnerable people with a better-than-nothing worse option, rather than fixing the actual problem.

Why do I bring this up? Not only do we have the recent misogynist and transphobic arsery from FIDE, but a few years ago there was another untouchable arse in power in chess. 🧵

fenneladon,

Garry Kasparov is arguably the best chess player of all time. You might have seen him over the last years doing his second career of talking nonsense on TV on subjects he knows less than nothing about.

Kasparov is also an open (as in there are many on the record quotes) misogynist, as many at the top of chess are (again, so many on the record quotes). In 1993 Kasparov cheated on video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkb7IqihJ0g) during a major tournament. It will shock absolutely no-one that the time he gave himself permission to do this was when he was playing against a teenage girl, Judit Polgár. 🧵

fenneladon,

At the time, he was world champion and undisputable head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest best in the world, but he had just buckled under the sustained pressure she had been applying and made a serious mistake that would likely lose him the game. So he cheated and took his move back.

You can see a similar shocked freeze from Polgár in the video as you see in the video from the player being assaulted by the Spanish boss. 🧵

fenneladon,

Kasparov went on to "win" this game. All of his colleagues knew he cheated, it was on video. They were there sitting a few metres away. All of the organizers knew he cheated, it was on video. They were there, watching all the games.

Nobody spoke up, Kasparov never faced any consequences. The game he should have automatically forfeited is still recorded as his win. Polgár had to just shut up and take it as so many have to, despite her holding the (much later broken) title of youngest ever grandmaster and being a top 10 player for many years. 🧵

fenneladon,

30 years on, as far as I know, none of the much older men involved have ever as much as apologized for their silence and active inaction, let alone publicly stated the simple fact that Kasparov cheated.

Most bosses and "stars" like this aren't so brazen or foolish as to do their criminal, unethical, and abusive behaviours on camera or in front of people who might show them consequences. But everything else about these cases could have happened in any of the organizations we are a part of and not much would be different. 🧵

fenneladon,

It is very unlikely that these examples caught on camera are the first or only time for these men. It is very unlikely that these examples caught on camera are the first or only time these women/girls have had to deal with something similar from other men.

I hope it is obvious why these examples make me think of our corporate world and our software organizations - our organizations are not better and our problems do not in any way come from any lack of a pipeline or shortage of talent. 🧵

fenneladon,

I hope it's obvious why I think of my role inside this. Cases like these are mundane because so many of us ignore, shut up, and actively give support to the arses. Many times I have done all three.

We can't undo the times we have participating in this culture in the past. We can't undo the times we have seen something like this and stayed silent. 🧵

fenneladon,

We can start to actively pay attention and look out for signs of trouble, rather than keeping our heads down.

We can stop our absurd lies that we are unaware or never saw/heard things like this.

We can learn what to look out for, as there are so many many stories out there to learn from.

We can make clear to our friends and colleagues that we won't be the one to stand by and laugh along.

We can prepare ourselves with a plan on how to confront the next time.

We can do better.

/end 🧵

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