Tag: tech

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AI firms are on the ropes, having spent way too much money building infrastructure for tools that are valuable, but not nearly valuable enough to support the money already spent, let alone what they’re planning to spend over the next two or thee years. This is bound to come to a bad end.

As Jerry Holkins puts it:

They can only loan each other money for so long. Then, they’ll socialize the losses through nationalization.

Source: Cyberbullies – Penny Arcade

At least, that’s their plan. Oliver Jutel and Gil Duran have a name for this plan: “exit through the state.”

Because I’m at heart an optimist, I like to imagine a more hopeful solution—one where this plan fails. And I legit think it might.

If Congress changes hands, and Trump becomes even more toxic (two things that seem very likely), there might not be anybody in a position to lead the charge for socializing the losses. A toxic Trump trying to hand another bunch of taxpayer money over to billionaire tech bros might actually be very unpopular. And if a Republican minority in Congress can’t get it together to come up with a plan that a significant number of Democrats will support, socializing the losses just might not happen.

But it has to “not happen” right then—with a Democratic (or divided) Congress.

If the AI firms can hold things together (with circular financing, SPVs, and the like) until there’s a Democrat in the White House, that guy will probably not be able to resist the pressure to “do something.”

If—as I hope, and kind of expect—it comes to a head before that, the Republicans might well not be able to come up with a plan that meets the demands of all their different constituencies, while the Democrats refuse to join in any plan that a large subset of Republicans will agree to. The result might just be that we just let the sucker go down.

Letting the sucker go down is what George W. Bush wouldn’t do in 2008. Except, of course, he kinda did, as far as homeowners were concerned. Banks, investment firms, and insurance companies got saved. Homeowners got hung out to dry.

My point being that the government is totally willing to let some suckers go down. The Republicans would like those suckers to be ordinary investors, computer users, and (in particular) tax payers. But I like to imagine that there’s at least some chance that the politicians will simply be unable to cobble together an arrangement to accomplish that, with the result that the AI firms go down, a bunch of AI firm executives get prosecuted for investment fraud, and all that infrastructure (data centers and large language models) gets sold off in bankruptcy, ending up in the hands of people with a certain amount of rationality (and much less debt).

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I’m using “AI” here in the older sense, rather than the newer sense where it’s just another way to say LLM.

In this older sense, I don’t have anything against AI (even though I generally try to avoid LLMs). So, I thought I’d talk a little about the things I actually object to, when it comes to what people call AI these days. Specifically, what I object to (in order of objectionableness) are:

  • Using them to generate anything that looks like creative output. (It isn’t creative output, but it resembles it enough that I can waste a lot of time realizing that. That’s what I object to.)
  • The copyright theft at the base of LLMs. (I think half the profits (perhaps 40% of the gross revenues) of every AI company should be distributed to holders of the copyrights that were violated in the generation of the models).
  • The resource usage needed to run the inference engines. (Also the resource usage that went into doing the training, but that’s already sunk, so there’s no more point in complaining about it than there is in complaining about the resources that went into building your house.)
  • The fact that AI is unnecessarily used to do stuff that used to be better without it (such as web search).

I do also have some good thoughts. Generally speaking, there’s all kinds of stuff that (I hope) is going to get a lot better. Here’s an almost random sampling of ideas I’ve had. This list is most definitely not comprehensive. It’s not even the most important stuff. It’s just a few things I have been thinking of, because they’re things I want.

I would like an AI to keep track of everything I read (including whether I finish reading it, or give up part way through), and then (insted of trying to sell me something), guess what I’d like to read next. I’d pay money for this. (Not much money, but a little.)

I’d like an AI that picked up domain information what what I read. When I read an economics or finance article, I’d like it to put a little note over on the edge of the screen that I could click on, and then it would apply the information in the article to my situation. “That article, and three others that you’ve read in the past two weeks, suggest that European stocks might do better than U.S. stocks over the next year. Your portfolio is 43% U.S. stocks and only 16% European stocks. Click here for steps you could take to boost your European stock holdings.”

Of course, it should also track future results of each of those hypotheticals and compare them to both what I had before and what I actually did.

I’d like an AI to look at a blog post I’ve written and then from the taxonomy of categories and tags I’ve already created, suggest which ones I should use for that post. (There have long been “tag recommending” plugins for WordPress, but the last time I checked, none of them preferred the tags I’ve already got. Most of them seem intended for a completely different purpose from supporting your own internal tagging system. It seemed like maybe they were intended for finding keywords for maximizing ad revenue?)

I couldn’t think of a good picture for this post, but didn’t want to post it without a picture, so I thought I’d use this picture of my dog. It’s been hot here.

A dog panting, sprawled out on the carpet

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Turns out Cory Doctorow and I think a lot alike about the AI bubble, but he also has stuff to say about how to speed along the popping of the bubble, which would be a good thing. (Bubbles that pop sooner do less damage when they do.)

so I’m going to explain what I think about AI and how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: “How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm.”

Source: The Guardian

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Playboy magazine and Helen Gurley Brown. That’s what last week’s New York Times opinion piece, Barstool Conservatism, Revisited (on the weird agglomeration of libertarians, crypto- and tech- bros, and incels who ended up voting with social conservatives) made me think of.

My thoughts draw on a book I read about Hugh Hefner, Playboy, and Helen Gurley Brown. The basic thesis, as I recall it, was that Hefner wanted a society where young men could enjoy an extended youth. The best way to make that work, he thought, was for women to be able to support themselves—so that they’d be willing to sleep with men, rather than feeling that they had to hold out for a man who would marry them.

To that end, Playboy magazine was very active at promoting equal rights for women—so they could earn money, own property, etc. Because only when they were able to support themselves without needing to get married, would they be willing to sleep around. And women willing to sleep around, were what the Playboy demographic wanted.

That social experiment played out pretty much just the way Hefner wanted through most of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Women could earn enough to afford an apartment, food, clothing, and the other necessities, which meant that they didn’t have to get married just to survive.

However (and this was key, even though I don’t think Hefner really thought about it much) men earned more than women.

The result was perfect for men. They had enough money to buy fancy cars, fancy stereos, fancy watches, expensive liquor—all the sorts of products that advertised in Playboy—with enough left over that they could afford to take women out on nice dates and buy them little gifts. The women earned enough less that, although they could get by, they couldn’t have really nice things, except when men bought them.

Things began to change the 1990s, when women’s incomes grew to the point that they could afford nice things. That produced two changes. First, women that could afford not merely a tiny apartment, but their own house, weren’t so reliant on men to make them comfortable. Second, with so many women taking top jobs, there were fewer top jobs for men. That meant that more and more men found it tough to earn an income that let them improve a woman’s standard of living.

This situation is what has the incels so unhappy. For decades, even after women weren’t legally subservient to men, men generally had enough money that they had something very tangible to offer a woman. Now that’s only true for the top few percent of male wage earners.

Of course, any man with either ambition or good sense could work around this situation. Becoming one of the 1% is hard, but simply having enough ambition to get into, let’s say, the top 50%, means that you have enough of a surplus to be able to raise the standard of living of a woman. And good sense is all it takes to do a bit of an analysis and realize that following the strategies of the pick-up bros isn’t going to lead to what you want nearly as well as coming up with things to offer to women besides cash. (Different things for different women, but: getting fit, wearing nice clothes, learning about the arts or science or history—whatever any particular woman is interested in, paying attention to them when they talk, being supportive of their efforts, are all things that might work.)

But incels as a group don’t seem to want to make even that modicum of an effort. They’d rather blame women.

The other groups I mentioned are broadly similar. Even the rich, successful tech bros are often dysfunctional to the point that they have trouble attracting women. Libertarians are often attracted to the movement specifically because what they yearn for is a world where people have minimal legal protections from the wealthy (and for no good reason, they imagine that they’ll be wealthy enough to take advantage of that). Crypto bros are the same, except they have a specific (rather than vague) notion of where their money is going to come from, even if it’s a fantasy.

So I understand that article. I think that is why all those disparate groups came together, even when their actual interests are pretty disparate.

The big question is, will these groups hang together going forward? Or will the fact that they have nothing much in common except a fantasy of enjoying being on top, lead to infighting and failure?

I’m hoping for failure, but it’s still too soon to say.

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Fabric that’s comfortable all the way from kinda cool to slightly warm!

“keeping the wearer comfortably warm in temperatures as low as 11°C. Yet if the fabric is flipped inside-out, it could emit as much radiation as bare skin – keeping the wearer cool in temperatures as high as 24°C.”

Source: ‘Janus textile’ could keep you warm and cool you down – Physics World

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For an article in the New York Times, technology writer Brian X. Chen wore a sleep-tracker for a couple of weeks. He reports:

Ultimately, the technology did not help me sleep more. It didn’t reveal anything that I didn’t already know, which is that I average about five and a half hours of slumber a night. And the data did not help me answer what I should do about my particular sleep problems. In fact, I’ve felt grumpier since I started these tests.

Source: The Sad Truth About Sleep-Tracking Devices and Apps

Breaking news: Looking at your power bill every month does not cut your electricity consumption! Checking your speedometer does not slow down your car! Tracking your spending does not make you rich!

I’ve been using a sleep tracker (the Oura ring) since December. Neither wearing the ring nor checking the reports I get has increased the amount of sleep I got. However, I have learned a lot about how to get more and better sleep.

Probably the most useful thing I’ve learned is that the standard advice that you should have supper at least three hours before bedtime isn’t sufficient for me: I sleep much better if I finish supper at least four hours before I lie down to go to sleep.

That’s actually a specific example of my larger point: A sleep tracker makes it easy to run little experiments and quickly see the results.

My intuition as to whether I got a good night’s sleep is an excellent guide (as I suspect it is for most people). But even a good intuition isn’t always enough to run a good experiment, and this is an example of that. Although the Oura ring’s report isn’t better than my own intuition, it provided some specific information that led me to that particular insight: On days when I had a late supper, my sleep quality was quite poor for the first couple hours of sleep, a pattern that I didn’t see on days when I had an early supper.

I’ve used it to run other experiments. For example, it appears that I get more deep sleep on days when I have only one drink than on days when I have two. (This is very sad news, and will have to be confirmed by many more experiments before I use it to modify my behavior—but at least I can run the experiments.)

After a rough patch last fall (which is what prompted me to order the Oura ring), I’m actually sleeping pretty well now, so I’m not aggressively running new experiments to try and improve my sleep. I am, however, paying attention when a natural experiment presents itself. For example, we generally sleep with the windows open all summer. Over the next two nights that will probably produce sleeping temperatures in the 70s, whereas over following several nights I’ll get to enjoy sleeping temperatures in the 60s. I know from experience that the cooler temperatures will produce better sleep, but the Oura ring will give me detailed metrics that will let me investigate if there’s an optimal temperature—information that may be very useful in the winter for deciding how to adjust the thermostat.

That’s the value of the ring for me: It lets me run experiments of specific sleep interventions, and gives me results that are more fine-grained than just a general sense as to whether I slept well or not.

Here’s one more natural experiment. I observed decades ago that I need more sleep in the winter than I do in the summer. I can now put a couple of numbers on that.

Here’s my total sleep each day in January and February this year. The report from the Oura ring lets me see that I averaged 7 h 50 min of sleep each night:

Here’s my total sleep each day from June 1st through last night. I can see that I averaged 7 h 03 min of sleep each night:

I’ve perceived each period as being roughly equally good in terms of getting “enough” sleep, so I’m inclined to think of the 47 minute decrease in sleep as being a decrease in the amount of sleep I need when the days are long and sunny and I’m getting plenty of fresh air and exposure to nature. In the winter I need darn near 8 hours of sleep per night. In the summer I can get by fine on just over 7.

That information doesn’t make me sleep better, but it’s still useful (even if it just confirms something I’ve known for a long time).

In other breaking news recently published in the science journal “Duh!”: Stepping on the bathroom scale every morning neither increases your muscle mass nor reduces your fat mass!

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A year and a half ago, my brother gave me a Raspberry Pi 3 as a birthday present, suggesting that I should use it to run my own server.

I used to run my own server. A friend who liked to build such things had built it. It had two ethernet ports, one connected to my cable modem and the other connected to my WiFi router, and it was running OpenBSD (then the most secure OS easily available) and was configured to serve as a firewall.

I used it as a server in other ways. I put an extra disk drive (40 GB!) in it where I could store files that I might want to access from elsewhere. (In particular, when I went to Clarion I copied my latest draft of my current story there each evening, in case of catastrophic computer failure.)

It didn’t require much upkeep, but it required more than none—which turned out to be more than I wanted to devote to it. At some point a serious security flaw was discovered in the OpenBSD release I was running. By then most desktop machines had built-in firewalls as did most routers, and I had Time Machine as a backup solution. It seemed safe to give up my server, and easier than updating it.

In the years since then, the use of cloud services has become ubiquitous, to the point that practically everything I do ends up in the cloud—my photos go to both Flickr and Google. I also use Dropbox (where I have Scrivener stash a backup copy of everything I’m writing) and I stash some amount of my music at both Google and at Amazon.

That’s all great—those services are well backed-up, and the servers are very likely running the latest security patches—but I really like the idea of having my own data on my own machines. But I want that without giving up the advantages of having my data in the cloud. Hence wanting to have my own server.

All that as prequel to my brother coming to visit this past week, and helping me get my Raspberry Pi server up and running.

Once the basic install of Raspbian was up and running, I went ahead and ordered a bit of hardware for it. I got a short ethernet cable to connect it to my router, so that it doesn’t have to do WiFi for basic connectivity (although WiFi and Bluetooth are built in). I also got a slightly more powerful USB power supply for it, mainly because I also got a portable USB hard drive that takes its power from the USB port, meaning that the power needs to be available to the Raspberry Pi. Finally, I got a case for it, so that I don’t just have a naked circuit board sitting on my dresser.

This time the hard drive is 1 TB rather than 40 GB.

For cloud functionality I’m following my brother’s example and running syncthing, which has the advantage of being able to handle being behind a NAT and not having a port exposed to the outside world. I’m running it on my Android phone as well and sharing my photos with a third place: my server. The server then shares them with my desktop machine, so they’re available to use. (That’s how I got the photo above: Taken with the phone and then transferred to the desktop within about a minute.)

I’m still sorting out my sharing strategy. I don’t want to share my whole Music folder with my phone, because it would use all the space there. (I’ll probably end up making a folder with an “essential subset” of my music to share with the phone.) I don’t think I want to share my whole Documents folder on my desktop machine, but I’m not sure yet. For the time being I’m sharing a folder I call “Active writing” with the files I’m currently working on, on the desktop, the server, and my laptop. That way they’ll be available wherever I want to work on them.

Other things are tougher. I’d like to have my own calendar server, but that doesn’t seem easy. I should go back to my post on the google-free option and see what else I was thinking about that I might now be able to implement.

For now, though, I’m pretty happy.

My previous server was rack mount width and maybe four or five inches tall, about the size of a stereo component. This one is maybe 3 inches by 5 inches, rather smaller than the hard drive it’s sitting on.

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In an interesting post (with the tediously link-baity headline “Facebook just made a move that will infuriate law enforcement”), Business Insider reports that Facebook will now let you add your PGP public key to your profile, and that Facebook can be configured to use that key when they send you email.

This has the potential to make Facebook much more secure: The email to reset your password will be encrypted with your public key, potentially defeating the standard attack on a social media account (hijacking an email address and then getting the site to send that address a password reset message). As long as your private key stays under your control, the attacker can’t get at the password reset URL, even if they can get at your email.

As a bonus, any email alerts from Facebook remain somewhat private. (Not that I’d share anything I wanted kept private with Facebook, or expect that anything anyone else shared with Facebook would remain private—but keeping the contents of my email private seems worth doing just for its own sake.)

Of course, as Facebook warns you, if you lose your private key and access to Facebook at the same time, you may well be completely screwed.

I think it’s a risk worth taking, and have already added my PGP key to my Facebook profile.

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Student-built supercomputer at the National Petascale Computing Facility
Student-built supercomputer at the National Petascale Computing Facility

I ran my own server for a while. It was an OpenBSD box running on a cheap 386 board in a re-purposed PC case with an extra ethernet card. It sat between my cable modem and my home network and acted as a firewall. It also provided a few services to me in the outside world. In particular, it ran a little program for tunneling ssh traffic through the http hole in the corporate firewall, so I could get into my home network from work. (It was not, let me be clear, the supercomputer shown in the image to the right.)

I turned it off several years ago. Desktop computers got more secure, so the firewall was no longer necessary. I quit working at a regular job, so I didn’t need to tunnel my ssh traffic any more. But the main thing was that external firms started providing the sort of services that had previously made it seem worth going to the trouble of running your own server.

I use a bunch of those services. I share photos at Flickr. I host this website at Dreamhost. I post things on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. I read RSS feeds using The Old Reader (and share things there as well).

I’d previously thought that it would be best to have my own server for all these things—in particular sharing stuff I wanted to share—my writing, my pictures, my calendar items, etc. But the commercial services were better than what I’d have had if I ran my own server. Flickr provides a much better gallery than I’d have managed to put up, if I’d had to host my own. (The idea of serving—and owning—your own data was the impulse behind Diaspora as well, of course.)

Just lately, though—especially since Google announced that they were shutting down Google Reader—I’ve begun to rethink things.

If I ran my own server, I wouldn’t have to worry that some giant company would abruptly decide that providing some service I was using “no longer aligned with corporate priorities.”

I’m not in any hurry to move from this new thinking to actually running my own server again. For one thing, it wouldn’t make any sense to try to run a public-facing server at home over a consumer-grade home network link. (Although maybe one of the higher-grade packages through UC2B would be good enough.) But I am thinking about it. I don’t like any of the calendar services out there; maybe running my own calendar service, just for me and my family, would be just the thing.

In any case, running a server would be a lot easier now than it was back when I did it before. The hardware is cheaper and faster. The software is more reliable and easier to use. Before, I had to painstakingly build everything. Now I could just do a quick install on a Raspberry Pi, maybe with Freedom Box software.

I’ve always known that with “free” corporate services I’m not a client; I’m a commodity being pimped out to advertisers and others. I’ve tolerated it, because the “free” services are often pretty good—better than I could manage if I had to roll my own. But it’s always bugged me. Now, between the hardware and software for rolling my own getting cheaper and better, and the increased visibility of the consequences of going with free services that get can get turned off on corporate whim, maybe I’ll get it together to make the jump to my own server once again.