Recent Chris Hayes interview on Marc Maron podcast namechecks RSS, “Really Simple Syndication,” web pages, and open protocols. My girlfriend: “how’s it feel to hear your arguments parroted back to you?” Roughly 50 minutes in. #IndieWeb#RSShttps://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1621-chris-hayes
@johnzajac I'm not sure this is really true? Training can be relatively power-intensive, though this varies a lot. Usage is increasingly not that power-intensive, especially when efficient caching is in place, and overall the average consumer's impact is roughly in line with other activities that we don't generally critique, like video encoding or high-res video streaming. I agree with you about consent on content, but again... same issue with streaming content on (e.g.) YouTube.
Okay, after *years* of over-hype about AI, does the DeepSeek moment and the deflation of the AI bubble mean we can finally be normal about AI and treat it like any other tech, evaluating it on its pros and cons, and its actual utility? I wrote about how we might actually do that in our day jobs: https://www.fastly.com/blog/can-we-be-normal-about-ai-now-that-deepseek-happened
I’ll just add that if this story moved you, I hope it moved you to action. Some of my former coworkers are looking for jobs, if you’re hiring or know someone who is. Otherwise, at the bottom of my post there are some resources I’ll try to keep updated.
Ahead of Kendrick’s performance today, here’s a look back at the greatest halftime show ever, including the political, cultural & social messages Prince sent through his choice of songs and the story he was telling about Black music, ownership and creative control. https://anildash.com/2021/02/05/how-prince-won-the-super-bowl/
@mgs I’ve always built dev tools. I am going to have to play ball with Microsoft’s monopoly on that space whether I want to or not, if I ever want to build in that market again. And there is _zero_ chance the Trump administration is allowing any winners in any Musk-adjacent markets through any mechanism other than corruption. It’s textbook strongman authoritarianism. Same goes for anti-competes, any worker rights are already being gutted. (And unions, though that’s not Khan’s purvey.)
@mgs think you’re off on this, and misreading some of this stuff in a way that only VCs seem to be doing. Zuck spent an hour on Rogan arguing that the government won’t let him innovate on AI, you say it’s very easily possible to make new AI startups right now. She’s countering his bullshit. Maybe you’re mad at him, not her? The industry is not better for every market being pre-decided by which big player can spend the most, either hyper-investing or tying & bundling.
It mentions that a 19 y/o man who's assisting Musk's team and who has access to sensitive government systems is Edward Coristine. Wired said Coristine, who apparently goes by the nickname "Big Balls," runs a number of companies, including one called Tesla.Sexy LLC
"Tesla.Sexy controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains. One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market.While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review."
The really interesting part for me is Coristine's work history at a company called Path Networks, which Wired describes generously as a company "known for hiring reformed black-hat hackers."
"At Path Network, Coristine worked as a systems engineer from April to June of 2022, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn resume. Path has at times listed as employees Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a well-known former cybercriminal and member of the hacker group UGNazis, as well as Matthew Flannery, an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group LulzSec. It’s unclear whether Coristine worked at Path concurrently with those hackers, and WIRED found no evidence that either Coristine or other Path employees engaged in illegal activity while at the company."
The founder of Path is a young man named Marshal Webb. I wrote about Webb back in 2016, in a story about a DDoS defense company he co-founded called BackConnect LLC. Working with Doug Madory, we determined that BackConnect had a long history of hijacking Internet address space that it didn't own.
Incidentally, less than 24 hours after that story ran, my site KrebsOnSecurity.com was hit with the biggest DDoS attack the Internet had ever seen at the time. That sustained attack kept my site offline for nearly 4 days.
Here's the real story behind why Coristine only worked at Path for a few months. He was fired after Webb accused him of making it known that one of Path's employees was Curtis Gervais, a serial swatter from Canada who was convicted of perpetrating dozens of swattings and bomb threats -- including at least two attempts on our home in 2014. [BTW the aforementioned Eric Taylor was convicted of a separate (successful) swatting against our home in 2013.
In the screenshot here, we can see Webb replying to a message from Gervais stating that "Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors."
Wired cited experts saying it's unlikely Coristine could have passed a security clearance needed to view the sensitive government information he now has access to.
Hey! If you care deeply about the open web, I hope you’ll consider joining our team at Fastly. We get to support open source and good internet projects ranging from Scratch to Kubernetes, Watch Duty to Mastodon, Python to Perl, Ruby to Rust, and many, many more. We’ve committed nearly $100M in resources to making the Internet better, and helping to build healthy, sustainable communities. And we haven’t wavered one bit in our inclusive hiring policies. https://www.fastly.com/about/jobs/apply?gh_jid=6523073
@timbray yeah, I’m skeptical of that too. But I think planting a flag in the ground on the larger goals is interesting and useful, and the larger sense of there being many projects pushing these parallel goals forward is great.