mark

mark, 2 months ago

@lauren Google (and Lycos, and AltaVista etc.) got started by crawling and indexing other people's content without their consent.

I think there's a serious culture clash between the original sin of the Internet ("why did you put it up in public-readability if you didn't want people to access it and use it?") and traditional ideas of copyright and exclusive monopoly on ideas.

mark, 2 months ago

@lauren I am reminded of the damn-near mutiny inside Google when engineers found out that the company was soliciting contracts to use Google Cloud to train object recognition AI with the Department of Defense.

... what would you bet the odds are that a private company used Cloud to train this system?

mark, 2 months ago

@mcc "I was told there'd be a lot more determinism in this deterministic system."

mark, 2 months ago

@SmallOther @mcc The tricky part is that increasingly, nondeterminism is The Way.

Whether we're talking about the way a multilayer datacenter service handles user queries or the way a modern CPU ekes out performance by lying to us about writing software for a fancy PDP-11 while it slurps up opcodes by the kilobyte and pipelines them, the machines themselves are more and more rarely deterministic.

By analogy and extrapolation, I'd suggest this is where things are headed in general. You look at what biology has built with millions of years of evolution to work with, and organisms are, broadly speaking, distributed, decentralized, and massively redundant (with the serial pipes and centralization points generally being weak points that can kill the whole organism when they fail).

I suspect I am already too old to reframe my thinking in a way that will be ready for the next stage of computer engineering.

mark, 2 months ago

@RickiTarr Hey now, that's highly inaccurate.

... You're talking about (mostly) the South. It was also built by religious zealots who got kicked out of their home countries for being too weird / angry / witch-burny to get along with their neighbors! 😉

(This is why I'm fond of saying that the First Amendment's protections of religious freedom are less like high-ideals of the human condition and more like the pirate's code... Nobody wants America to have a national religion because it won't be your religion).

mark, 2 months ago

@RickiTarr (you're correct; I forgot to put a /sarc tag on my post, my bad.)

mark, 2 months ago

@mentallyalex I'll take the risk that this is an elaborate social networking phish that I can't recognize and give an honest answer. 😉

Top games are:

• Minecraft
• Kerbal Space Program / Kerbal Space Program 2
• Helldivers 2
• Satisfactory
• Deep Rock Galactic

mark, 2 months ago

@gsuberland @mcc One almost wonders if the end-game is to stop pulling and try pushing.

Maybe instead of trying to claw back data we've made publicly crawlable because "I wanted it visible, but not like that" we ask why any of these companies get to keep their data proprietary when it's built on ours?

Would people be more okay with all of this if the rule were "You can build a trained model off of publicly-available data, but that model must itself be publicly-available?"

mark, 2 months ago

@emaytch @mcc So there's a lot of stuff that Paul Graham says that I don't agree with (these days; used to be pretty bought in), but I think the point he made about the nature of copyright and patent protection ages ago rings true.

Paraphrasing without citation because I'm not going to go crawling around to find it right now: the alternative to IP protection isn't a magical utopia of shared ideas... It's guilds and secret knowledge protected with violence. We already tried society without intellectual property protection.

mark, 2 months ago

@eniko Sooner or later, one concludes most people don't actually care.

(... and for the record it's not like private mode on Firefox "fixed" this issue. None of the "client doesn't record you" modes ever modified what the server does).

mark, 2 months ago

@travisfw @oblomov @eniko If getting up to speed with unfamiliar technology is a roadblock, I wouldn't anticipate people to switch to Firefox.

mark, 2 months ago

@lauren @jbqueru @timbray

To be honest, I find it interesting that people are framing the entire thing as a failure of the process.

Somebody tried to maliciously backdoor an open source project and the problem was identified by a third party, communicated to the maintainer, the community was able to investigate because the entire project is open source, and the open security vulnerability was resolved quickly.

This sounds like a success story for the philosophy "many eyes makes all bugs shallow." And think of how expensive this attack was for the relative lack of success; 2 years of active penetration work and social engineering to get busted out in two minor versions?

I suspect no major sweeping ecosystem changes are necessary here, and perhaps the only cautionary tale is to remind everyone that xz is key security infrastructure and should be funded as such.

mark, 2 months ago

@jbqueru @kkeller @lauren @timbray Trying to hold people legally liable for how other people use software that was clearly licensed AS-IS will be a great way to kill publicly-provided free software.

Is the EU's goal to smother the open source ecosystem?

mark, 2 months ago

@chucker NGL, the numbers turned out to be much bigger than I had assumed when I looked them up.

I imagined a container vessel might be in the ballpark of the weight of a bridge, but "A fully-laden ship is about a quarter the weight of the Golden Gate" was not what I expected.

mark, 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum Is there an alternative that can be implemented at scale?

mark, 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum That's an ideal, not a system of government or a mechanism for preserving that system.

It's a good ideal and I think we should strive for it, but I see few "hows" that I think would work. UBI is the closest idea I've seen (because it basically takes our greatest strength---saving labor via automation and organization---and distributes, rather than consolidates, the benefits).

Maybe there's meat on those bones. I'm not quite sure yet whether we can separate UBI from a capitalist engine to generate the resources that are then distributed, and past attempts to do so seem to have collapsed into autocracy (give the government enough authority to distribute resources, and there seems to be high risk of a few taking charge of that government)... But some of the modern experiments look promising.

mark, 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum It's one way of organizing the value generated by changing things to fit people better. And organizing people to do that work faster / better / larger than if they worked alone . And, in a larger tribal sense, giving people a sense of purpose and obligation.

Possibly not the best way; much room for improvement. But I don't see the bridge yet from "human freedom" to accomplishing those goals (which, in their absence, leave us more vulnerable to another large organizing structure).

I think i'd have to know more about what human freedom looks like to you before I could see the bridge. Does it look like "people just do whatever they want free of coercion?" Because I don't have a solution for just wishing coercion away, not while there's more than two people in the story.

mark, 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum With several key differences. Most notably that you can walk away from a job and not a slave plantation.

... but, of course, it's hard to walk away from the system itself. It's pretty endemic and there's few places humans aren't; where there are humans, there's a method of organizing them, almost always.

The exceptions are rare and seem to put up a lot of "KEEP OUT" signs because, I have assumed, they don't scale.

mark, 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum What about self-employment?

mark, 2 months ago

@RD4Anarchy @HeavenlyPossum It's a nice aspirational goal but I've seen no evidence that full-voluntary organization can defend itself against semi-voluntary organization, or that (in the large) heavily-distributed non-hierarchical structures can hold a status quo against centralized structures.

History seems mostly to come down on the side of centralization, with some exciting counter-examples mostly centered around turning centralization against itself (such as the checks and balances of a multi-branch republic, the rule of law over the will of the ruler, or the parliamentary process). Capitalism isn't these; best analogy I can give for it is it's a "pirate's parliament" where everybody is acting extremely selfishly but there is some meta-stability in the selfishness bending back to check any one actor from becoming too strong. And, notably, that correction often breaks down and needs external force to keep established; the whole system tends to over-centralize (as is easy to see in this billionaire era).

I hold out the possibility that there's something I haven't seen, but when the folks with guns show up... You gotta have enough volunteers to meet 'em and draw a line.

mark, 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum So is there no room for exchange among peers here?

mark, 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum @RD4Anarchy If you do, it would make a nice blog post and you could just link folks like me to it.

I would appreciate it, because from the outside looking in anarchism is a little impenetrable. It sounds an awful lot like "capitalism is awful," "yeah it's definitely got problems what should we do instead," "have everyone be less selfish."

I've never been able to wrap my head around how we get there from here. I'm glad there are people putting the hard work in to figure it out!

mark, 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum @RD4Anarchy

(And, hey, meta comment...

I didn't intend to drag a long conversation out of either of you going into this. I have some leftover bad habits from other social media that I'm still trying to shake, and sometimes I just forget "It showed up on your feed doesn't imply you own the conversation."

I appreciate your patience with me and willingness to help me understand where you're coming from. I imagine that you get scrubs like me from outside the community being ignorant at you like, all the damn time when a post gets reshared on someone else's server. It was very cool of you both to provide me so much of your time.)