If you've been following the #UniSuper#GCP#outage, the Incident report is out, and it's a good read - transparent, detailed, clearly outlines scope, actions, impact.
As someone who used to do this stuff for a living, I'm impressed.
Why does #Microsoft want to implement #Recall? It's not about images. It's about modelling what workers do on Windows, and then replacing them.
The most expensive part of a computer is the fallible feelings-filled unpredictable meat sack that operates it.
Google has YouTube, Google Photos, Maps, and a bucket load of search data, Google Analytics, advertising, as well as it's #GCP data (e.g. #STT transcriptions). And a bunch of data from Android services. From this data they can model speech, model videos and model advertising systems, and how humans respond to them.
But they can't model what people do on computers.
Amazon has Prime data, and a bucket load of compute. But no operating system data. They can build models based around e-commerce and advertising systems.
But they can't model what people do on computers.
Meta has waves hands enough analytics to model human behaviour in the Metaverse.
But they can't model what people do on computers.
Microsoft has GitHub.
Microsoft has LinkedIn.
Microsoft has SharePoint.
Microsoft has Teams.
Microsoft has Dynamics.
Microsoft has O365.
Microsoft has Windows telemetry data.
Microsoft can model what people do on (Windows) computers. Like fill out spreadsheets.Write emails. Synthesize web pages of research. Interact with colleagues on Teams. Create and edit documents.
Microsoft wants #MicrosoftRecall data so they can model what people do with operating systems.
Then replace them.
Imagine a CoPilot that doesn't just write buggy code. Imagine one that also does spreadsheets. That creates documents on SharePoint. That communicates with colleages on Teams. That has a customer pipeline on Dynamics.
That's what Recall is about - 360 degree surveillance of the worker, to model their functions, make them fungible, replicable - and replaceable.
@KathyReid it's an incredibly awful reflection on us that most of corporatopia is absolutely ripe for this - it's the perpetual Colony in action, even with meat robots pushing keys.
We could have done almost anything, and we chose to do this :/
Apart from being egregiously out of touch, it's also a huge power move, one that I don't think people grasp.
The polarisation of society into those deriving an income from return on capital - capitalists - and those deriving an income from labour - workers - has been driven in large part by venture capital and their hunger for new asset classes.
Housing is an asset class, it's no longer social infrastructure.
Stocks are an asset class - they're no longer a way to ensure survival of the best organisations - because many companies with little revenue have high valuations.
Compute is now an asset class. It allows organisations to gain advantage, and create a moat from their competitors. Compute is an asset.
By substituting compute for money (another asset class), Altman is trying to substitute compute for currency more broadly.
And who creates currency?
Typically, the state. Who now creates currency, sorry I mean compute? The MAANGs that have taken the place of the state.
Compute is currency.
Replacing currency with compute is a form of wrestling control from the state.
@KathyReid spot on again - fuck these people trying to turn computers into an asset like they did with houses! i'm sick of altman and his kind perverting what should be a liberating technology into something used to control us
In the most glorious "fuck you" I have seen in a while, you know the book that Cumberland City Council banned because they're homophobic bigots - Holly Duhig's "A focus on Same Sex Parents"? Well, the publisher, BookLife Publishing, have made a PDF version of the book available for free.
Sure be a shame if it was shared far and wide now, wouldn't it?
Every time you ban a book filled with hope and kindness, and care and love, we will resist.
@KathyReid Thanks for the heads up, I just downloaded it and read it. It is a great book, the quotes from the kids are the best!. (Sorry for any typos, I think I've got something in my eye 😂)
Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the content was licensed CC-BY-SA - meaning that it was a public good. It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug.
Now that a deal has been struck with #OpenAI to scrape all the questions and answers in Stack Overflow, to train #GenerativeAI models, like #LLMs, without attribution to authors (as required under the CC-BY-SA license under which Stack Overflow content is licensed), to be sold back to us (the SA clause requires derivative works to be shared under the same license), I have issued a Data Deletion request to Stack Overflow to disassociate my username from my Stack Overflow username, and am closing my account, just like I did with Reddit, Inc.
The data I helped create is going to be bundled in an #LLM and sold back to me.
In a single move, Stack Overflow has alienated its community - which is also its main source of competitive advantage, in exchange for token lucre.
Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow's former instantiation, used to fulfill a psychological contract - help others out when you can, for the expectation that others may in turn assist you in the future. Now it's not an exchange, it's #enshittification.
Programmers now join artists and copywriters, whose works have been snaffled up to create #GenAI solutions.
The silver lining I see is that once OpenAI creates LLMs that generate code - like Microsoft has done with Copilot on GitHub - where will they go to get help with the bugs that the generative AI models introduce, particularly, given the recent GitClear report, of the "downward pressure on code quality" caused by these tools?
While this is just one more example of #enshittification, it's also a salient lesson for #DevRel folks - if your community is your source of advantage, don't upset them.
I feel your disappointment, but it's best to find a non-commercial community, and there's reason to put effort into making them; it seems Mastodon is a good place to start looking.
When stripped bare, #Stackoverflow is a profit-making software company that runs a website encouraging people to improve its product for free. The strategy of these companies seems to be to take over public-interest websites and pretend it's business as usual. However, whilst they are paying lip service to the altruism, they want to increase profits and market share. This is exemplified in their self-serving PR statement about attribution from back in February: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/02/29/defining-socially-responsible-ai-how-we-select-api-partners/
In that statement, they use the word power a lot. That's what's really important to them.
Strong agree. A lot of Elinor Ostrom's work around governance of the commons - where we get the phrase "tragedy of the commons" - relied on mechanisms of co-operation between institutions.
One of the key challenges I see here is that corporations like OpenAI now have a lot more power than even groups of institutions - lawmakers, governments, civil society. We've seen that recently with the way Meta has influenced government policy around paying to share content from commercial news agencies.
There's also a paradox here - an increased production of work in the Commons is good for OpenAI - because it provides them with more data. However, the way in which the Commons is used - to create for-profit products like #GPT, serves as a constraint on people donating creative material to the commons.
I just issued a data deletion request to #StackOverflow to erase all of the associations between my name and the questions, answers and comments I have on the platform.
One of the key ways in which #RAG works to supplement #LLMs is based on proven associations. Higher ranked Stack Overflow members' answers will carry more weight in any #LLM that is produced.
By asking for my name to be disassociated from the textual data, it removes a semantic relationship that is helpful for determining which tokens of text to use in an #LLM.
If you sell out your user base without consultation, expect a backlash.
@sean Good questions. The way I see a RAG being constructed / or other knowledge graph would be to associate Contributors with Questions and Answers - so you need the Question Answer relationship to generate plausible answers, but the Contributor Answer relationship lets you rank Answers higher from higher rated contributors:
See something like this:
He, Xiaoxin, Yijun Tian, Yifei Sun, Nitesh V. Chawla, Thomas Laurent, Yann LeCun, Xavier Bresson, and Bryan Hooi. "G-Retriever: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering." arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.07630 (2024).
Super interesting piece from @sjvn for #ZDNet about the 60th anniversary of the #BASIC programming language - and how it paved the way for other developments at Apple and Microsoft.
@KathyReid honestly i don't think that's going to bother them as much as you might think. Look at the US where politicians have put forward bills to criminalise being a member of the national library association there
Folks, I'm starting my post-#PhD job search low-key on the side while I write up my #thesis.
I have an odd collection of skills - #Linux, #Python, #Jupyter, #pandas, #DevRel, and I've done a lot of work in team leadership and management, and have led a multi-million $ not for profit in the past. Keynote speaker.
I'm looking for something that harnesses all of these skills - and it will be a senior role with senior pay, given my experience, qualifications and proven capability. I have time and will be discerning about my next step.
Job titles that might fit here would be Senior Research Engineer, Engineering Lead, Lead AI Engineer or similar.
Looking for fully remote work, with one day a fortnight max in #Melbourne, AU. If you don't believe in #RemoteWork or #WFH, we're not a good fit.
Super keen on something full time rather than splitting my attention over multiple part-time roles.
Looking to start around August, so a fair amount of lead time.
Keen on organisations that have strong values alignment - #FAIR and #CARE data use, #EthicalAI, AI for social good.
In which I propose an integrated #academic#conference team to be established at #universities, to make the process of organising and running academic conferences much easier - and reduce the workload on #academics - who don't usually have event management as a core skill.
I'm humbled and awed to be in the company of so many accomplished artists, researchers, practitioners, guardians, technologists and designers as part of the Fantastic Futures Conference #FF24 Key Speakers lineup - presented by #NFSA on behalf of the #AI4LAM community.
Peter-Lucas Jones, and the work of #TeHiku Media in preserving and protecting Indigenous speech data of #TeReo is an effort I have long admired. Associate Professor Kirsten Thorpe's work at the Jumbunna Institute at University of Technology Sydney also centres on data sovereignty for Indigenous data, from an archival perspective.
Kartini Ludwig's use of creativity at Kopi Su Studio to empower artists runs counter to the prevailing norm of scraping the internet to build #LLMs and #diffusion models.
And Associate Professor Sydney Shep's trans-disciplinary work in book history and print culture, as well as her practice as a letterpress printer and bookbinder, is a fascinating exploration of how our cultural histories shape our futures.
Together, we hope to convene conversations that help shape the future of #AI and #ML within the #GLAM sector.
Huge thank you to Keir Winesmith and @ingridbmason for the opportunity, and to Ashlinn H. who I know is doing incredible work behind the scenes.
Question for other #researchers and #ResearchSoftwareEngineers - if you are submitting supplementary materials to a conference, such as a #github or @huggingface repo, how do you anonymize the repo so that the name of the repo or the repo owner does not violate the anonymity requirements?
@KathyReid shorting doesn't destroy value, it indicates a high confidence that value will be destroyed, and that can influence others, but if it was enough, tesla and others would have been dead in the water long ago.
It's also both hard and very risky, to tell short, someone needs to lend you shares, you pay interests on that, and to avoid the risk of being unable to give them back, if the price increases too much for your margin to cover it, your position is liquidated, taking all your money.
@KathyReid so even if you are ultimately right that the value is going to be destroyed, you can lose all your money by being right too early, before the rest of the market agree with you.
Of course, having trillions of dollars in the bank solves that problem (nobody is going to call your margin), but it doesn't necessarily solve the problem of people being unwilling to lend you shares, even if you are ready to pay very high interests on them (which would make it difficult to be profitable).