Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)

And not to put too fine a point on it, but Facebook is happy lighting billions of dollars on fire whenever their boss finishes an early Gibson novel while moving his lips. Every embalmed corpse in the Google Graveyard was entombed with a level wealth that'd make a Pharaoh cringe.

They've garnered tectonic wealth from software they got for free, and for them to turn around and say, someone's dropped a cigarette in this world we've built out of tinder and kindling, you owe us?

No. Tap the sign.

Because someday, somebody's going to come to you and say, I'm from Apple, I'm from Amazon, I'm from Project Zero and you need to drop what you're doing because heartbleed or Log4j or who knows what happened and the world is falling over and if that psychological offramp isn't there, if you haven't laid out clearly what PROVIDED AS-IS means and how you're going to act about it ahead of time, saying "no, I'll be at my kid's recital" or "I'm on vacation" or just "no" is extremely difficult.

But here's the thing: you may have heard the line that disability is the one underrepresented minority you can be forced to join against your will, and it's extremely true. But if mental health is just health, if moral injury is just injury, then you ultimately need to think about building these accessibility aids - creating this social permission to say no - not just for other people but eventually, on the bad day, for yourself.

One of the things I learned doing community management at the old gig - the "abuse" vs "admin" tag story, you can read it here: https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/109359361836400210 - is the importance of deliberately engineering _social accessibility_ into your processes.

People generally _cannot bring themselves to do_ things they don't feel safe or permitted or right doing, whatever the docs say. To create real human safety in stressful situations you need to deliberately build a culture where _"no" is accessible_.

I've been sitting on this for a while, and it's not much, but in light of Wellnhofer's contribution I'd like to propose the following:

"Maintenance Terms", as distinct from licensing terms:

https://github.com/mhoye/maintenance-terms

One of the roads not taken in Linux land was a brief time we were experimenting with large shared screens and keyboard-mouse pairs - that is, you’d have one huge shared visual workspace, and keyboard input would follow its paired mouse click, so - with one machine - you could hand windows to other people, grab them and pull them to your side of the space, etc. whole new kinds of collaborating we never explored. Pair programming is weak sauce in comparison.

“Five Guys are zero-indexed” is probably the most trivial technical fact I will learn today.

Proposal: A “yes but only if there’s an agenda” option for meeting invitations.

I want the calendar equivalent of “come back with a warrant”.

They get on stage and say, proudly, that this thing is writing a third of the software at Google now.

They expect you to work with this shit.

They expect you to pay for it and believe what it says.

Whenever I see surveys about what anyone thinks about any particular political mobilization, I think about what popular sentiment looked like during the civil rights protests of the sixties.

https://www.crmvet.org/docs/60s_crm_public-opinion.pdf

I don't see a way through this that doesn't involve education doubling down on its ideals and abandoning its present structure: discarding transactional certification in favor of a system that can't, to the absolute best of our capacities as a society, be gamed. Not by stochastic technologies and not by naked privilege. Those two things are, to borrow an infosec term, leveraging the same attack surface, and that is what we need to fix.

If you had some certification process where one candidate in, say, twenty turned out to be wildly unqualified, somebody whose dad had bought them their law degree or forklift certification or who cares what without doing the reading or training, without passing the tests, what value would we - or should we - put on that certification?

Relatedly: of the the _30%_ of Harvard freshmen who count as "legacy admissions", what fraction of them do you think wrote their own applications?

The rich, privileged kids have always been able to pay somebody to do their homework.

It's impossible for me to read all these articles about AI in education without believing that the fundamental problem is not that lazy students can and do cheat, but that access to cheating has been democratized; that it is now accessible to the unprivileged.

Education should be non-transactional; a system that _can't_ be bought out or gamed. But that - in cost, and in outcomes - would rebuke that privilege.

Isabel J. Kim's "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" has won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and it's well-deserved.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

@dalias A response that the model calculates best aligns your future actions with its business model.

Without tagging in the writer, because I think that would be unfair: there are real perils of language in talking about stochastic repetition machines. This well informed, well intended and written piece of criticism _still_ falls into the reflexive description of ML processing as “thinking” even as it’s making the point that you shouldn’t anthropomorphize the software.

Software doesn’t think, it only processes.

"Technology can't solve social problems", first of all: bullshit. Iodized salt and fluoridated water, they count and they are miracles. Vaccines count and they are miracles. Modern logistics are a miracle, tap water is a miracle and all of these things are technologies.

Technology can't solve problems _when powerful people don't want them solved_. But technology in the hands of the people can absolutely solve social problems, the questions are only about who's in the way.

You have to assume there's a lot of this look going around in the F-35 program office this morning.

(To specify: ~120 drones, reportedly, at a ballpark $5k apiece, that maths out to "a third of Russia's long range strategic bomber fleet grounded or destroyed at a hardware cost of one tenth of one percent of the cost of one F-35.")

This person made it to the final boss of the Canonical process, to their credit. I bowed out at the "Talent Science Partner" step; the digital phrenology was ridiculous enough, but being interviewed for a senior role by an undercooked twentysomething who was half-focused on a pet and hadn't done any of the reading first was when I decided my time was better spent with people who take hiring people seriously.

https://dustri.org/b/my-experience-with-canonicals-interview-process.html