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tommorris

@tommorris@mastodon.social

Eternally damned techno-priest heretic, curly brace balancer, and pesky citation requester.

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tommorris, to random
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Webcams being described as being "mirrorless" is a delighftul level of tech marketing bollocks.

Like, imagine the opposite. A webcam with the mirror from an old Nikon F2 or whatever bouncing up and down 30 times a second while you discuss sprint goals and KPIs.

At least nobody would complain about mechanical keyboard clickiness on calls after that experience.

tommorris,
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@andypiper Fancy high end webcam is advertised as having a "mirrorless camera sensor". Which sort of implies something like the same quality of sensor as you'd find in one of the Sony or Fuji or Leica high end mirrorless cameras, though literally every webcam has a "mirrorless camera sensor" because it has a sensor and doesn't have a mirror.

tommorris, to random
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According to Andreessen's silly "techno-optimist" manifesto, slowing down AI development is murder since it'll deny people medical benefits.

(That's not legally murder, obvs, but it is Bad.)

  1. Failing to do something that causes people's lives to end prematurely amounts to morally unjustifiable killing.

  2. Not developing AI technology causes lives to end prematurely.

  3. Ergo, not developing AI is morally unjustifiable killing.

Now run the argument again but point (2) is paying taxes.

tommorris, to random
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Inputting and editing text on a touchscreen: still the absolute worst.

They're just about usable for sending a quick text message or a social media comment but the experience of using on-screen keyboards is atrocious. And it seems to get worse not better.

It utterly baffles me that people willingly write out pages and pages of text on phones when computing devices with keyboards exist.

tommorris, to random
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Next time someone tells you that London doesn't produce innovative startups, remind them about Babylon Health, the British Theranos.

It's got all the hits:

  • shitty health tech that didn't work (chatbots!)

  • responsible professionals trying to warn people

  • lack of meaningful regulatory oversight

  • hype from politicians who think iPhone apps, Big Data, and AI are substitutes for training doctors, replacing RAAC in hospital buildings, and other equally unsexy things

https://sifted.eu/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-babylon

tommorris,
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@rhysmorgan The economics of that were wild and unsustainable. Mostly the people who are going to use an app are younger and healthier, so the per-patient payments go to Babylon, while older, sicker patients stick with traditional GPs. The traditional practices then lose out on the the younger, healthier patients subsidising the patients who need more care.

I'd love for technology to make healthcare better, but in a way that's socially equitable rather than using gimmicks and accounting tricks.

tommorris,
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@rhysmorgan They needed VC investor returns though. If you've bullshitted yourself into thinking the tech is actually magic, there's theoretically a lot more money to be made licensing a platform to health insurers and governments around the world than there is in being a slightly more cost-efficient network of GP practices.

tommorris, to random
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The Future of Life Institute's argument for how superintelligent AI will come about starts with this opener:

"AI is already superhuman at some tasks, for example numerical computations, and will clearly surpass humans in others as time goes on."

Apparently, computers adding numbers together is now "AI".

There may be good reasons to think superhuman machine intelligence might come into existence but "computers are very fast at doing arithmetic" is an incredibly rubbish argument for it.

tommorris,
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

Imagine someone said fully autonomous self-driving vehicles were inevitable. Why? Well, we've already made "superhuman" vehicles—cars, planes, boats and trains are all capable of moving much faster than humans.

Like, we may still get fully autonomous vehicles, we may not. (I've got the already existing alternative: a city with a good public transport system.)

But "a car is faster than a human" is as irrelevant to the point as how many teraflops a CPU can do is to the likelihood of AGI.

tommorris, to random
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Someone really needs to explain to web designers that a small viewport is not the same as a mobile device or a touch-based interface, then very gently introduce them to the idea that on most popular desktop operating systems windows are resizeable.

You'd think people would have picked this up from using a computer every day to do their job designing and building websites, but apparently many still haven't quite figured it out.

tommorris, to random
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Today's prize for worst blockchain idea—a company that wants to store user's GDPR consent status and other privacy preferences on an immutable blockchain.

I mean, it's a great idea right up until you read Article 7(3) of GDPR which states that a "data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time".

Immutable public blockchains will totally fit data privacy obligations if we jam the round peg into the square hole with sufficient force, right? Right?

tommorris,
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@jonty their answer would be that it's encrypted and to 'delete' data they just destroy the per-record key for the individual user.

At which point, the fact the data is on a public blockchain becomes somewhat pointless—a central authority still does the key management to grant/revoke access.

Except if the cryptography they use has a vuln (better hope it's post-quantum), at which point you have a very big headache.

simon, to random
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Anyone know if any of these T&Cs about not training new models on the output been explained publicly by expert lawyers, or tested in court yet?

Feels like a huge elephant in the room, especially given the vast number of models fine-tuned on generated data

Yet another part of the AI space that seems to be running on "vibes" - I'm not sure "OpenAI train on crawled data so they can't complain if we train on their stuff" is a robust legal argument, but maybe it is?

tommorris,
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@simon as @luis_in_brief said: probably enforceable but only against the OpenAI user who has agreed to them not against the world. Given the arbitration clause, and the fact that all that is in dispute is access to the API, it would be rather unlikely to ever be litigated.

It’s just a variation of a pretty standard “you can’t use access to our product to build a competitor” clause and the fact that the class of product is ML models doesn’t really change much.

tommorris, to random
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"Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable." (Milton Friedman)

On that note, people outside the small bubble of the indieweb world are now talking about POSSE.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon

tommorris, to random
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

What would be really useful right now is if we could get as much content off corporate platforms and onto boring, advert-free static websites without tracking and spammy SEO bullshit as possible.

https://boingboing.net/2023/10/22/reddit-reportedly-plans-to-block-googles-search-crawler.html

tommorris, to random
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If you do not tell us how well the lady who sold you the iPhone did or the guy in Tesco who sold you a sandwich did on a scale of 1-10, and whether you'd breathlessly tell all of your friends and family about it, we will notice.

We will text you.

We will email you.

We will chase you to the ends of the earth.

We will never stop.

If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine turning every interaction with another human into an integer and storing it in a database, forever.

tommorris, to random
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Just re-read this.

Regulators of implanted medical technology should be demanding that all source code, design docs and other technical material be lodged in escrow.

If the company ceases to make support available, make it all public.

It's one thing for movies or TV shows or video games to disappear "into the vault", but prioritising protection of completely unused IP rights over the the health and wellbeing of patients is criminal.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

tommorris,
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@Sparky Ideally, absolutely yes. Code and design docs in escrow with the regulator is the absolute bare minimum though.

tommorris, to random
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A good piece on the misinformation spread during the Australian Voice referendum, wherein many lies were spread by both politicians and media outlets, politicians didn't correct said lies, and media rebuttals were published too late after public attention had moved on.

With the exception seemingly of Ireland's abortion and same-sex marriage debates, referendums in the Anglosphere really have a habit of bringing out institutional epistemic inadequacy.

https://theconversation.com/how-did-the-media-perform-on-the-voice-referendum-lets-talk-about-truth-telling-and-impartiality-214961

tommorris, to random
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Oh no, I tried to read the EU .

Scoping such legislation to hardware/software that can connect to a network is a reasonable drafting goal.

But a "logical connection"—a "virtual representation of a data connection implemented through a software interface"? Wild stuff.

Given pipes and 'everything is a file' in Unix-land, the drafting might be vague enough to cover any software that does any I/O at all.

e.g. in curl SOME_URL | less - does less have a "logical connection"?

tommorris,
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

The defintional looseness of some EU tech law is amazing.

The proposed AI legislation includes in the scope of potentially regulatable AI systems those which use "inductive (logic) programming", "Statistical approaches" and/or "Bayesian estimation" (Annex 1).

That's a lot of things.

We sorta know what we mean by an "AI system" but conjuring up a sound legal definition of "things that are kinda like ChatGPT but not, say, basic email rules in Outlook": turns out to be kind of difficult.

tommorris, to random
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My mobile operator seems to have decided that 1.9 MB of roaming data (that downloaded in the moment between me turning on my phone and disabling roaming button) cost £9.47.

They've now kindly rescinded it after I pointed out that's a completely silly amount of money.

You could hire a very posh English butler to fly business class with an envelope full of gold-plated SD cards for less per megabyte than the mobile networks still charge for roaming data, for absolute fuckssake.

tommorris, to random
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

macOS Containers Initiative is interesting right up until this point...

"Disable System Integrity Protection."

Nope, not gonna.

https://macoscontainers.org/

tommorris,
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

@rhysmorgan It's remarkable how much more satisfying containers are when running on Linux and not paying the macOS VM tax, even though said tax has reduced quite substantially in the Apple Silicon era compared to Intel.

(It'd just be nice if Debian didn't accidentally ship systemd bugs that break my container setup...)

tommorris, to random
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

Today in hilarious and almost certainly unenforceable consumer contract terms:

We won't honour your statutory consumer rights if there's a problem with our product and you've used it in a country other than the country you reside in and where you bought the product.

What's great is they have multiple promotional blog posts hyping how said products are great to use if you're travelling abroad, and recommending particular products from their range as well suited for frequent travellers.

tommorris,
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

@sldrant yeah it isn’t something they can rely on in the UK, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try

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