Everything that provides any service or assistance to normal life has been sold off and rented back to us at enormous cost, often with many of extra financial scalping included in the systems we are forced to rely on.
And a percentage of the extracted wealth is used to push political and public narrative to incentivise the selling off more.
Local authorities are forced to sell off assets and fire direct employees, then get charged a fortune to provide basic services and child and adult social care.
And for contracts and outsourcing, the ownership of the contract itself is the thing that gives value, not providing the actual service. Creating a whole set of perverse incentives.
A council should look at a pot hole in a road as a massive opportunity. Here is a chance to provide good quality work for local people and local resources, but the opposite happens.
We have a whole layer of service retailers e.g. for electricity and gas and communications, who are not more than a spreadsheet speculating on long term prices, a call centre and a web site. Their entire business model being based on a) not messing up the spreadsheet calculation b) enough people being lazy and not renewing or switching their contract every year.
Our financial services industry has massive positive PR, seen as a net good for the country. When in reality it is focused not on basic things like providing banking and direct insurance, but in attracting our best and brightest individuals from around the country and instead of having them put their talents to something productive. Instead reward them for creating and maintaining complex systems to move wealth around, asset strip regions, hide it from tax and create a layer of gambling and financial products on top of these systems.
The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency.
Since trade is conducted largely in USD, that means other governments must purchase USD to trade. This is the core of trade deficits. Foreign countries buy US dollars so they can trade with other people. That guarantees the deficit since they give us something in exchange for USD, which they do not then spend on goods we make.
If you no longer want the trade deficit that means payments of fealty by those who trade in dollars, which countries aren't likely to tolerate, or abandoning the USD as a global reserve currency, which would be disastrous, truly disastrous. Our debts would suddenly become existential because inflating our currency to pay for them could result in functionally not being able to import goods required to run our economy. I don't think many truly understand just how disastrous it will be.
This isn't America's liberation day. This is Russia's and China's liberation day. While America was once able to check their power, America is no longer in a position to do so, we will barely be in a position to satisfy our own military's logistics requirements.
This is a decapitation strike (Timothy Snyder: Decapitation Strike -- https://archive.is/1xkxK) on America by our enemies. It is not only a de facto soft blockade of American trade, but it is an attack on the mechanics of American hegemony. Politicians already ask for money instead of votes or actions. That means if foreign governments spend money, they can elect their preferred candidates. America's own government was a result of french support. We institute regime change in other counties, and I see no reason to believe we are immune.
If trade stops occurring in US Dollar, which is a consequence of the stated goal of our current ruling regime, that would be the coup de grace on this country's hegemony. It is the definitive end to it, and the birth of Chinese hegemony.
> they are significant because Nix can be used to create a fully featured OS instead of just a VM
Look up Bootable Containers project by RedHat [0]. Fully featured OS built from a Containerfile, bootable on bare metal.
I agree that Nix design is much better than Docker, and has a bunch of features that OCI ecosystem doesn't (e.g. remote builds[1], partial downloading of the build tree, non-linear build process[2], nix store import/export, overlays, I/O isolation, much better composability), but "creating OS instead of VM" [did you mean container?] is not one of them.
[1] You can use DOCKER_HOST, and I'm happy that this option is there, but Nix does it better.
[2] Perhaps with BuildKit it's no longer true, I haven't checked what happens if you have multi-staged build with one stage depending on multiple previous ones (which are otherwise unconnected). I think Earthly can parallelize this scenario https://earthly.dev/
Embeddings are the only aspect of modern AI I'm excited about because they're the only one that gives more power to humans instead of taking it away. They're the "bicycle for our minds" of Steve Jobs fame; intelligence amplification not intelligence replacement. IMO, the biggest improvement in computer usability in my lifetime was the introduction of fast and ubiquitous local search. I use Firefox's "Find in Page" feature probably 10 or more times per day. I use find and grep probably every day. When I read man pages or logs, I navigate by search. Git would be vastly less useful without git grep. Embeddings have the potential to solve the biggest weakness of search by giving us fuzzy search that's actually useful.
So CrowdStrike is deployed as third party software into the critical path of mission critical systems and then left to update itself. It's easy to blame CrowdStrike but that seems too easy on both the orgs that do this but also the upstream forces that compel them to do it.
My org which does mission critical healthcare just deployed ZScaler on every computer which is now in the critical path of every computer starting up and then in the critical path of every network connection the computer makes. The risk of ZScaler being a central point of failure is not considered. But - the risk of failing the compliance checkbox it satisfies is paramount.
All over the place I'm seeing checkbox compliance being prioritised above actual real risks from how the compliance is implemented. Orgs are doing this because they are more scared of failing an audit than they are of the consequences failure of the underlying systems the audits are supposed to be protecting. So we need to hold regulatory bodies accountable as well - when they frame regulation such that organisations are cornered into this they get to be part of the culpability here too.
Colonizing Mars makes absolutely no sense and it's fascinating to watch otherwise rational people with decent science educations contort themselves into believing otherwise just for the sci-fi trope of living on Mars.
Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere. It's just enough to complicate landing and to cover all your equipment in dust when there are planetary-wise dust storms. The ground is poison. Energy production is an issue. Low gravity is a problem. It's a long way from Earth. Terraforming Mars is a fantasy.
Now compare this to the Moon. Inhabitants can remain in real-time contact with Earth. Getting there is far easier and quicker. You can cover large areas with solar panels that will generate way more energy and won't get covered in dust. There's evidence of extensive lava tunnels that can be pressurized and inhabited without the need for massive excavation.
The only real issue with the Moon where Mars actually wins is day length. Mars has almost a normal Earth-like day length. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth on a 28 day orbit so has... a 28 Earth day "Moon day".
You see this same psychology at play every time some fringe scientist comes up with another completely unworkable idea for FTL travel (warp drives,, wormholes, etc).
But really living in another gravity well doesn't mmake much sense in any case. It's further compolication for not a lot of gain. I firmly believe humanity's future is in orbitals (aka an incremental Dyson Swarm). This approach has so much more going for it, except perhaps the added protection of living deep underground on a planet or Moon.
So AI companies take all the world's text and knowledge for free, use openly available research, take massive private funding and generate immense economic value using that, and want to make it illegal for anyone else to do the same?
I don't get the 'harm can be done by individuals' argument. Sticks and stones. Every discussion forum on the internet is moderated to some degree, and every human being has the ability to post hurtful or illegal content, yet the system works. Moderation will only get more powerful thanks to AI tools.
Reading this article by Rebecca Solnit [0] posted on HN here [1]
absolutely helped me make sense of the Garry Tan story, and what is
going on in Californian politics.
It's well worth reading, but is a long and initially tedious article
bemoaning the passing of a gentler, humane culture.
Then about halfway through it grew some balls and teeth, and frankly I
found it shocking. I had no idea California was this degenerate.
And for those too close to it, no, this isn't just how every country's
politics is. It reads like Chicago in the 1920/30's, or perhaps more
like Mexico or El Salvator, with billionaires instead of drug lords.
Read alongside "The Californian Ideology" [2] it's eye opening and
paints a great picture of the slow trajectory of San Francisco and
California from a left-liberal counter-culture to extremist far-right
billionaire technofascism.
Maybe - just maybe - Tesla should just give in instead of destroying their brand in the Nordics, which is what they are doing.
The workers are in charge, and they are also the ones buying Teslas (Yes Americans, in Sweden/Denmark/Norway Teslas are affordable enough for normal people who are in unions because they are paid correctly).
Maybe it's a good idea not to destroy your entire market while also destroying the means to facilitate the market.
Maybe Tesla is the problem here.
Maybe the rest of the world needs to catch up to the societal norms of Sweden when it comes to worker's rights.
I've had the 'chance' to work with some deeply manipulative persons in the past, the kind who goes to your desk and say 'Hey, I noticed you started to speak to X again, and your performance seems to suffer as a result", where X is a friendly colleague that opposed some plan of that person. It is incredibly difficult to keep those people in check as all that behaviour is off the record and impossible to prove. When people complain it's a 'you said, he said' situation where the manipulator inevitably wins. Wether those persons are positive or negative for the company is not all that clear, but they create an incredibly unpleasant work environment.
The media and the VCs are treating Sam like some hero and savior of AI. I’m not getting it. What has he done in life and/or AI to deserve so much respect and admiration? Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support? It looks like one should strive to become product manager, not an engineer or a scientist.
I am baffled how we went from a liberal "free" democracy to this ersatz of a totalitarian regime where all our conversations/messages/photos need to be dissected, catalogued and approved by un-elected bureaucrats.
I mean you can literally go to eastern Europe to see the vestiges of the Stasi where they used to listen to the conversations of their citizens while trying to find dissidents among them. This isn't some kind of distant past, this is almost like yesterday and yet here we are again.
How come we end up here again? Why can't the powers that be just leave the people to live their lives in peace without being snooped on by the surveillance apparatus?
And then to turn around and seeing the EU wanting to give lessons of democracy to China or NK? What a joke.
The future is grim and to be honest I would just rather they came out in the open and acknowledged the fact that democracy and privacy as we know it is dead. Then each and everyone can decide to accept this fact or fight back.
Instead we get this grandstanding about civil liberties but in the background they are ever so working on diminishing our individual freedoms.
The conclusion to this article should have been: it's important to study the past, and find out what the truth is. Memory is fallible, and people often misunderstand or lie. But by investigating -- going to more people, consulting more sources, you can get closer to knowing what really happened.
Finding and preserving the truth about the past is more important than ever. Truth is under attack from all sides, with politicians moving the Overton window on lying, LLMs, the decline of centralized news, fake reviews and comment farms.
If the author meant to say "History is often wrong and surprisingly easy to set right with a bit of investigation," great, but "The past is not true" is an absurd and harmful statement. How would you feel if I hit you with my car and ran, or tried to overturn an election and then said "I'm not guilty because the past is not true"?
1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate
2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate.
3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.
The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or change in zoning laws. Entire countries seem to be perfectly okay with watching its young people be priced out of cities and areas they work in as long as "number go up".
All the hand-wringing about political gridlock is just a cover for basic greed. Detestable.
> Corporations may be viewed as special kinds of artificial intelligences whose building blocks (humans) are cogs in the machine (who for the most part may not always perceive the consequences of the corporation’s overall behavior)
> Now imagine AI systems like corporations that (a) could be even smarter than our largest corporations and (b) can run without humans to perform their actions (or without humans understanding how their actions could contribute to a nefarious outcome)
Wait - but it’s those very corporations who currently control the most powerful AI on the planet - so in a sense this is an argument that we already have rogue AI. Corporations with goals that are not aligned with society, not controlled by any individual and outside the effective control of government entities, who now provide essentially unlimited compute and human researcher/programmer resources to improve the AI. Who’s in control? Nobody.
1. You don’t get to decide if another human’s feelings are valid or not. You only get to decide if you care. You have decided that you don’t care about lonely people’s feelings who had found a way of feeling less lonely. How do you feel about that? How would you feel if something you really cared about got broken, and you complained about how that made you sad, and random strangers on the internet then said you were a “sad fucker” for caring about it in the first place? Practice empathy and sympathy - you don’t sound smart when you do this thing you just did.
2. You’re testing the software after the update that people said made it crap, and saying you can’t believe anybody liked it before it was crap, because it’s now crap. Can you see how inept your experiment design is, now I’ve pointed it out? Had you considered it may have been better before the software was crippled, and the effect you’re seeing now, is the exact problem the article is describing?
3. A basic tenet of building a human relationship is developing empathy and finding things to agree on. This is how relationships - particularly close relationships - work. What would you expect it to do when you started lying to it, start an argument? Do you think that would be a great product decision for a product that aims to develop a friendly relationship with the users? What answer would you have preferred it to give, given the design objective is to develop a friendly relationship?
4. Have you ever been asked by somebody you were really keen on if you’d read a book or heard of a band that you’d never heard of? Did you try and look a bit cool and do a “no, but I’ve heard good things”, to try and avoid burning that connection by looking completely out of touch? Are you not even slightly impressed an AI chat bot has managed to replicate that very common aspect of human cringey behaviour? I think it’s interesting it has that very common, very human, slightly amusing behaviour.
Christianity was the north star for our societies, it organized people, align them to work together, put the future(love) before personal interest(excess pleasures, sins)
Without religion we are going to fail. There never was a working society without religion. Yes we are in a different time, we have to update our stories, but if we throw them out we are going to collapse.
Ex: does a doctor does what is good for him or for his patient? What about a regulator in the government or a scientific working at Pfizer, Twitter a bank or Google?
If people stop putting truth and love on top(christianity) and put personal gain higher not much of what we have will keep on working for long.
Personal side: we have never been more materialy comfortable yet we are more depressed, more anxious, more medicamented.
Family: We no longer have enough kids or manage to keep a couple long enough to bring kids into adulthood. Kids to single parent household do worse in almost every metric yet we don’t care or don’t look.
On the flip side a lot of people are looking for the missing pieces, are trying to reintegrate the wisdom that we had in an modern framework: Jordan Peterson, Verdake, Jonathan Pageau and others.
It’s very hard to reverse. If people no longer believe to higher power (truth and love) we default to a lower version of ourselves, our animals instincts and we don’t know how low we will go: should successful men have only one woman? Why not? People are free to do whatever they want. Could a billionaire have a huge harem of thousand of women ala Genghis Khan? If not, why not?
There is no rules anymore (beside obvious immediate harm). We have discarded our ancient wisdom as useless, so we create all the harms that are on a longer timescale: trust, family, society.
Regardless of how "real" the wealth is, my property value went up, and with it, my tax bill. In the same time period, household total income went down. Property values rise because the richest among us can make money flipping houses. I'm getting poorer because the roof over my head is a financial plaything. Technically, I could sell my house and profit, but I need a house and in terms of what I can afford, the entire market has moved too so my quality of life would diminish.
"Binance has said it holds more than $60bn in assets, enough to honour withdrawals. The company’s disclosures do not include its liabilities, which makes it difficult to ascertain its financial health."
Having followed a lot of the SBF discussion since he keeps giving interviews, here's the FAQ--
1) How did you lose $5ish billion of customer deposits?
- They were deposited to Alameda, a totally independent hedge fund run by an unrelated party (my ex-girlfriend who lives with me). We credited Alameda without properly debiting Alameda on FTX.
2) Why didn't you track them?
- There was a bug in the dashboard. I made a boneheaded mistake. Oopsies.
3) What happened in the days leading up to the collapse?
- It was an attack from Binance, they're the bad guys. They cashed out and broke FTX.
4) Wait but they cashed out their assets, how would that effect people who had cash and other assets at FTX?
- Well we didn't comingle margin and non-margin customer accounts/assets if that's what you mean. It's more that we had this terms of service that was really complicated. Yes there's a part of the terms of service that says we won't lend out your assets, but there's this other part somewhere that says we will that applies to everyone even though it says it only applies to margin accounts. It's because of complex accounting. This is all actually just really complex and I don't remember all of it.
We still operate as the primitive creatures we are. People are more terrified if they see some people potentially dying of hunger vs. many people losing digits in some computer. The first one can trigger panic. Prosecution being as primitive as we are will hurry for the first case.
Another point: $10bn+ is a lot of money and probably caused lots of damage (ie: suicide). But if someone pulled a knife in Time Square, the police will be quick to apprehend him and the prosecution very willing to charge him. There was no harm done and yet resources will be deployed. But SBF might be even more dangerous yet no one is panicking yet (except some people here who might appreciate how dangerous he is)
Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to run society, at least culturally. The bad ideas and behaviors are not kept in check, they're rewarded, leading to the normalization of things deeply questionable.
Imagine being a youngster right now. You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input. Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points. Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you. Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity. The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you. The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
Comparing social media to smoking is a comparison that needs re-evaluating. It's frankly shocking how this untold harm goes unchecked. Then again, intervening can lead to creepy authoritarian legislation. As seen in China, but let's at least credit them for recognizing the harm.
The only scenario where I see this being an even remotely reasonably request is if you think someone is a severe risk for harming your systems should they be laid off. In every large company I've worked for (including ones involving high security systems) the standard was that you'd give people a week notice, maybe two weeks of an impending layoff along with a decent chunk of severance. This way those people being laid off could do a knowledge transfer and ensure that their domain experience wasn't lost and that you maintain a good business relationship with your employees.
To me, the way y'all present it is not the norm. It's working for a company that clearly does not trust its employees and treats them poorly. If you find yourself working for those kind of places frequently then please realize that it is not the norm and you should not try and normalize it.
I haven't read the paper either, but I must say the operation of
parasites as elements in complex biological super-systems is
absolutely fascinating. Ants that march to the top of trees under the
influence of fungus spores trying to be eaten by birds. Fish that
commit suicide by swimming toward predators as part of a parasitic
lifecycle.... evolution is truly miraculous.
Another apocryphal story is cats carrying Toxoplasma Gondii make some people
really like cats. So maybe mad cat lady syndrome is treatable with drugs :)
Who knows what super-systems we are unwittingly a part of. That seems
an interesting area for big-data + AI hypothesis synthesis - we may
find new explanations or even whole new branches of behaviour in
psychology.
- On Google Search, Google refuses to unlist websites that are clearly promoting adware, spyware and violating the brands of Open Source projects (VLC is not the only one impacted).
In addition, the ads reported are never deleted.
- On Google Chrome, the safe browsing team refuses to flag some websites, even after long explanations about what the binaries are doing. One of the reason is that "the binaries are too big" (sic.). The other reason, is that they scan only the installer, and of course, the installer downloads other things.
This has been going on for years, at least 10.
One of the most egregious one is VLC.de which inundates the German web.
The thing is that it's not that they steal traffic (why would we care), it is that they install spyware, adware or other rootkits, all the time.
This is why I say that Google Safe Browsing is a total joke, and that Google does not care about its users security.
Is anyone really surprised? All of American society was based on the mythos that if you worked hard, you can succeed. We can debate to what degree this was ever true, but it's been obvious for decades that it's not true and that it's getting worse.
With housing becoming an investment increasingly dominated by cynical corporations with no empathy, only greed, even hard workers have to spend every cent they have with no source of significant savings (other than the death of a relative, not available to most) and not even the illusion that they will ever afford a home or be able to raise a family in a middle class lifecycle.
Massive corporations have been built off American workers and American infrastructure - the regulations and taxes that provide us roads, utilities, clean water, safe food, safety, and more. Since at least the 1980s these corporations have abandoned the belief that they need to give back to or invest in these communities and have gone to great measure to slash worker pay, fight regulations, and tear down the educational systems and social safety nets that enabled America's growth in the twentieth century.
Even safety is far from guaranteed - minorities have known forever that the police are not there to protect them, but it's increasingly apparent to everyone that they're an organized crime protection racket, refusing to discipline or remove abusive cops, refusing to do their jobs and throwing hissy fits at the slightest suggestion that they be subject to any accountability. In cities across the country, the mere suggestion that officers not be allowed to physically abuse people leads to a refusal to go on patrol and no consequences.
Meanwhile, at the very top billionaires accumulate more and more wealth and face no consequences for their actions. Whether it's manipulating financial markets (and being fined far less than you profited) or blatantly stealing and mishandling classified documents and not even being charged, the fact that there are different concepts of "justice" for different classes has rarely if ever been more evident.
Hard work isn't rewarded and is often punished with higher expectations (whether that's an increased quota or a 'manager' title) with no increase in pay. Long gone are the days of joining a company as a janitor with the dream of working your way up; upper and even middle management is an incestuous club who would rather hire someone externally than train someone internal.
Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?
I agree and think strong emphasis should be on how a knowledge base saves its files, which should be very interoperable.
I build my own little DSLs and have my own experimental
knowledge base studio going, where I can edit things using
my editors (Sublime, VSCode and Vim), view/query/visualize
in my web browser, and also view/edit in a spreadsheet web
interface using Handsontable.
The secret trick is all the DSLs use a thing I work on
called Tree Notation (some use an even dumber version
simply called Grid Notation). It's a plain text notation
that just defines lists of words (aka cells) on a line (aka
a node or row) and if you indent a line it becomes a child
of the parent line (like python) providing support for tree
structures and scope. That's the basics, and then on top of
that you can design all sorts of DSLs with types and very
different parsing strategies than traditional languages.
But that's still a relatively traditional language. I have
some languages which generally you want to use a spreadsheet
interface to write programs in, where you can just plop a
tree anywhere on the sheet, and then start writing trees.
Those ones are kind of like having a canvas for your project
instead of a folder with files. Makes for a good base for
building DSLs for simulations.
Sorry, I digress, but my purpose in bringing this up is that
if anyone is working on personal knowledge base software
like the OP, Tree Notation is a pretty useful thing, if you
can figure it out. I've got it figured out but not very good
at explaining it.
Local authorities are forced to sell off assets and fire direct employees, then get charged a fortune to provide basic services and child and adult social care.
And for contracts and outsourcing, the ownership of the contract itself is the thing that gives value, not providing the actual service. Creating a whole set of perverse incentives.
A council should look at a pot hole in a road as a massive opportunity. Here is a chance to provide good quality work for local people and local resources, but the opposite happens.
We have a whole layer of service retailers e.g. for electricity and gas and communications, who are not more than a spreadsheet speculating on long term prices, a call centre and a web site. Their entire business model being based on a) not messing up the spreadsheet calculation b) enough people being lazy and not renewing or switching their contract every year.
Our financial services industry has massive positive PR, seen as a net good for the country. When in reality it is focused not on basic things like providing banking and direct insurance, but in attracting our best and brightest individuals from around the country and instead of having them put their talents to something productive. Instead reward them for creating and maintaining complex systems to move wealth around, asset strip regions, hide it from tax and create a layer of gambling and financial products on top of these systems.
I could go on.