Notices by Bob Mottram :debian: (bob@epicyon.libreserver.org)

The sabotage of undersea cables is another reminder that a lot of the very centralised #internet infrastructure is highly vulnerable to disruption. Any emergency system which assumes "the cloud" to be always available is likely to fail.

I have invented a new development methodology: Cat Coding

It's core tenets are as follows:

- Be indifferent to buzzwords and trends, like "big data", "serverless", "10X" or "AI"

- Take frequent naps

- Chase bugs and pounce on them

- Ignore "thought leaders"

- Stretch

- Become hopelessly entangled, then claim innocence

- Sit in a high location, passing judgement upon lesser methodologies

- Coordinate when desirable but otherwise remain aloof

I often see people claiming to be burned out on computer stuff, and if you work for a megacorp I can understand that. Computer #software isn't worse than it was in the past, it's just worse in different ways, and there is a lot more lock-in now which nobody talks about because they are so locked in that they don't even realize it.

In the old days computer software was bad mainly for technical reasons. Blue screen of death. Bugs and glitches. It was hard to obtain working device drivers for anything (modem, sound, graphics, webcams, printers). Realplayer and Flash existed, and they were a total PITA. In the mid 1990s, now considered a golden era, MS Windows was installed from about 20 floppy disks, any of which could develop a bad sector at any time, and there was always messing about with long serial codes.

Now computer software is bad as a business model. There are still bugs and wotnot, but that's less of an issue for the average user. So typically the software is spying on you with telemetry and trying to push adverts onto some percentage of your screen and trying to get you to have endless subscriptions to things rather than a one time payment. Typically antifeatures are being pushed on you against your wishes via web browsers or other systems, because of the business model. And no techbro in Silicon Valley understand the concept of consent, again because of the business model. Practices which would have been considered outrageous and unconscionable in the 1990s or 2000s - such as constantly spying on users, and then using the data for to gain leverage by exploiting individual weaknesses - is now completely normalized.

News reporters: "I would imagine that" or "I suspect" is not the same as "we have evidence showing that".

Pay close attention to the wording of what appears to be "news".

On fake #AI demos, there is a decades long history of fake AI demos. But in the past they weren't usually called fake, they were called highly choreographed or staged. Like the robots doing apparently impressive things, but it mostly turns out to be theatre with every move exquisitely planned in advance and any snafus edited out.

The OpenAI bot is very hungry and is busy gobbling up a lot of randomly generated trash, which has a similar statistical profile to English language. #AI #poisoning

Imagine making your airlines and railway systems critically depend on...Microsoft #Windows.

It is possible to make reliable Windows systems, because I did it decades ago with Windows NT Embedded. The target designer was a hellscape of bad UX, but with an enormous amount of wranglimg it worked. I also now appreciate why people in factories never wanted to have their production lines connected to the internet, even though that would have been more convenient for updates from the software engineer perspective.

If they “don't want to escalate tensions” then why are they lobbing missiles at each other?

#Linux is still great. If it wasn't for Linux I would be using BSD, and if that didn't exist then I expect that I would be trying to invent my own operating system.

There are always some amount of corprate agendas going on in the background, but at least running Lunix I can keep that to a minimum such that it hardly has any impact on me. I don't have to deal with the kind of crap which goes on with Windows. Adverts in the operating system, random reboots, telemetry, "antivirus", etc.

It“s worse than people like Musk merely being shitty individuals running a downmarket Nazi forum and whose children disown them. It that capitalism makes people behave in shitty ways whether they want to or not. The belief system in general as a structure of rules animating the living creates harm, despite its superficial abundance for a few.

With all the things going on, it can be easy to believe that people are inherently bad and that the world is scary and broken. This path leads to the narrow solidarity of conservatism, and eventually fascism.

When people are doing evil shit it's often because they have been manipulated or tricked by cynical politicians or other sorts of hierarchies (eg religious or corporate) to act against even their own interests.

It's not that climate change is entirely responsible for the rise of fascism, but it does literally and figuratively turn up the heat on existing issues in a manner where elites are pressured. And the usual response of pressure on elites is some version of despotic rule.

The thing to remember about Google is that it's primarily an advertising company, so of course any #AI demos are going to be a sort of advertising and not necessarily a completely honest depiction of the real capability of the product. Most advertising is to some extent embellishment.

And of course the whole history of AI, even before Google, is littered with exaggerated claims and inflated expectations and highly choreographed demos.

Free software is all well and good but I think that I also need an additional policy of moving away from using anything backed by venture capital and towards using only community run projects without profit motive being a factor.

It's very obvious to me that #Microsoft is angling towards EEE via a combination of Github, Visual Studio and Copilot. All that stuff will become increasingly integrated into one lump where you can't use one without the others, because this is always what they did in the past. It will all be very convenient if you don't mind being locked in.

Listening to Sunak going on about #AI, these machine learning technologies are fundamentally conservative in that they assume that the future will be like the past. The predictions they make are remixes of the past, or at least follow the same logic as occured in the past.

The problem with that is that although history may repeat it is not usually a literal replay of the past. The media of now - if it's any good - is not just strictly a remixed regurgitation of media from previous decades. The material conditions, assumptions and technologies of now are not just a clever algorithmic blend of the 1960s with the 1990s.

EU certificate spying thing.

Wait doesn't the government of China do exactly this, shipped in all browsers? And has been for years.

On the fediverse the real cultists self-select out, because they just don't get the big crowd of adoring followers and there isn't much of an algorithm to game. Unless they're an instance admin, perhaps. #ShowerThoughts

Whenever comms blackouts are deliberately imposed by governments it's always an attempt to cover up their crimes. Cover of darkness in the info space.

It's one of the reasons why independent communication systems and media need to exist. Things which are hard to centrally shut down or jam. Things which are not convenient to set up, and not convenient for the ruling class to put down.

@luckytran I think it's not only about real estate. It's about control. Being able to intimidate an employee in an office is far more effective than sending them a shitty email. The email also creates a trail of legally actionable evidence which can backfire.