Category: Uncategorized

• How to build highly-debuggable C++ binaries

  aka, how to have a modern C++ development environment (for when you still need to do such a thing) -- also, wow, C++ has changed a lot since the last time I was working with it. (Via Tony Finch)

  Tags: via:fanf gdb c++ coding debugging builds

• Why did Silicon Valley turn right?

  A great essay on the demise of the 1990s/2000s liberal consensus in Silicon Valley:

  No-one now believes - or pretends to believe - that Silicon Valley is going to connect the world, ushering in an age of peace, harmony and likes across nations. [...] A decade ago, liberals, liberaltarians and straight libertarians could readily enthuse about “liberation technologies” and Twitter revolutions in which nimble pro-democracy dissidents would use the Internet to out-maneuver sluggish governments. Technological innovation and liberal freedoms seemed to go hand in hand. Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes. Platforms like Facebook have been used to mobilize ethnic violence around the world, with minimal pushback from the platform’s moderation systems [...] My surmise is that this shift in beliefs has undermined the core ideas that held the Silicon Valley coalition together. Specifically, it has broken the previously ‘obvious’ intimate relationship between innovation and liberalism. I don’t see anyone arguing that Silicon Valley innovation is the best way of spreading liberal democratic awesome around the world any more, or for keeping it up and running at home. Instead, I see a variety of arguments for the unbridled benefits of innovation, regardless of its benefits for democratic liberalism. I see a lot of arguments that AI innovation in particular is about to propel us into an incredible new world of human possibilities, provided that it isn’t restrained by DEI, ESG and other such nonsense. Others (or the same people) argue that we need to innovate, innovate, innovate because we are caught in a technological arms race with China, and if we lose, we’re toast. Others (sotto or brutto voce; again, sometimes the same people) - contend innovation isn’t really possible in a world of democratic restraint, and we need new forms of corporate authoritarianism with a side helping of exit, to allow the kinds of advances we really need to transform the world.

  Tags: essays henry-farrell tech politics silicon-valley fascism democracy liberalism

• Black plastic won't kill you

  How a simple math error sparked a panic about toxic chemicals in black plastic kitchen utensils:

  Plastics rarely make news like this. From Newsmax to Food and Wine, and from the Daily Mail to CNN, the media uptake was enthusiastic on a paper published in October in the peer-reviewed journal Chemosphere. “Your cool black kitchenware could be slowly poisoning you, study says. Here’s what to do,” said the LA Times. “Yes, throw out your black spatula,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. Salon was most blunt: “Your favorite spatula could kill you,” it said. [....] The paper correctly gives the reference dose for BDE-209 as 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day, but calculates this into a limit for a 60-kilogram adult of 42,000 nanograms per day. So, as the paper claims, the estimated actual exposure from kitchen utensils of 34,700 nanograms per day is more than 80 per cent of the EPA limit of 42,000. That sounds bad. But 60 times 7,000 is not 42,000. It is 420,000. This is what Joe Schwarcz [director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society] noticed. The estimated exposure is not even a tenth of the reference dose.

  (tags: cooking research science plastics errors maths math fail papers)

• pprof.me

  a web app to 'share and visualize .pprof profiles on an intuitive interface'

  (tags: pprof profiling optimization web tools coding)

• ntfy.sh

  Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POST. "a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, and/or using a REST API. It's infinitely flexible, and 100% free software."

  I've been using a personal Slack for this purpose, but this is a decent-sounding alternative.

  (tags: notification push alerting open-source android ios push-messaging)

• The state of Tomi's Home Assistant in 2024

  Wow, this is some setup. Really quite a lot of automation! I note that his Mitsubishi heat pump and Midea dehumidifier have wifi control, I can see that being useful

  (tags: home-automation ha home home-assistant hacks automation)

• Kaffekapslen

  A Danish web shop selling coffee beans and capsules; my new go-to for Lavazza, with free shipping to Ireland for orders over EUR50.

  (tags: shopping coffee ireland denmark coffee-beans)

• Pleias language models

  OK, this is quite cool: "the first ever [language] models trained exclusively on open data, meaning data that are either non-copyrighted or are published under a permissible license. These are the first fully EU AI Act compliant models. In fact, Pleias sets a new standard for safety and openness."

  Training large language models required copyrighted data until it did not. Today we release Pleias 1.0 models, a family of fully open small language models. Pleias 1.0 models include three base models: 350M, 1.2B, and 3B parameters. They feature two specialized models for knowledge retrieval with unprecedented performance for their size on multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Pleias-Pico (350M parameters) and Pleias-Nano (1.2B parameters). [...] Our models are: * multilingual, offering strong support for multiple European languages; * safe, showing the lowest results on the toxicity benchmark; * performant for key tasks, such as knowledge retrieval; * able to run efficiently on consumer-grade hardware locally (CPU-only, without quantisation) Pleias 1.0 family embodies a new approach to specialized small language models, for end applications: wound-up models. We have implemented a set of ideas and solutions during pretraining that produce a frugal yet powerful language model specifically optimized for further RAG implementations. We release two wound-up models further trained for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Pleias-pico-350m-RAG and Pleias-nano-1B-RAG. These models are designed to be implemented locally, so we prioritized frugal implementation. As our models are small, they can run smoothly, even on devices with limited RAM.

  And here's their fully open training set: https://huggingface.co/datasets/PleIAs/common_corpus

  (tags: llms models huggingface ai pleias rag ai-act open-data)

• UK benefits AI system found to show bias

  File this under "the least surprising news ever":

  An artificial intelligence system used by the UK government to detect welfare fraud is showing bias according to people’s age, disability, marital status and nationality, the Guardian can reveal. An internal assessment of a machine-learning programme used to vet thousands of claims for universal credit payments across England found it incorrectly selected people from some groups more than others when recommending whom to investigate for possible fraud.

  The most interesting aspect of the report published is that currently "there is no established numerical or statistical benchmark at which referral or outcome disparity can be defined as within tolerance".

  I would have assumed a lack of bias, measured against a "false positive" rate -- ie. benefits recipients who were selected for additional checks, who were then found to be legitimate and not committing fraud, should have been a design goal, and a critical KPI for such a system.

  There are going to be a lot of similar examples in the years to come -- here's hoping this "bias measurement" KPI becomes established as a concept.

  (tags: bias ai kpis dwp uk benefits welfare fraud ml)

Ridding My Home Network of IP Addresses

(Republishing this one on the blog, instead of just as a gist)

Recent changes in the tech scene have made it clear that relying on commercial companies to provide services I rely on isn't a good strategy in the long term, and given that Tailscale is so effective these days as a remote-access system, I've gradually been expanding a small collection of self-hosted web apps and services running on my home network.

Until now they've mainly been addressed using their IP addresses and random high ports on the internal LAN, for example:

1. Pihole: http://10.19.72.7/admin
2. Home Assistant: http://10.19.72.11:8123/
3. Linkding: http://10.19.72.6:9092/
4. Grafana: http://10.19.72.6:3000/
5. (plus a good few others)

Needless to say this is a bit messy and inelegant, so I've been planning to sort it out for a while. My requirements:

1. no more ugly bare IP addresses!
2. a DNS domain;
3. with HTTPS URLs;
4. one per service;
5. no visible port numbers;
6. fully valid TLS certs, no having to click through warnings or install funny CA certs;
7. accessible regardless of which DNS server is in use -- ie. using public DNS records. This may seem slightly unusual, but it's useful so that the internal services can still be accessed when I'm using my work VPN (which forces its own DNS servers);
8. accessible internally;
9. accessible externally, over Tailscale;
10. not accessible externally without Tailscale.

After a few false starts, I'm pretty happy with the current setup, which uses Caddy.

Hosting The Domain At Cloudflare

First off, since the service URLs are not to be accessible externally without Tailscale active, the HTTP challenge approach to provision Let's Encrypt certs cannot be used. That would require an open-to-the-internet publicly-accessible HTTP server on my home network, which I absolutely want to avoid.

In order to use the ACME DNS challenge instead, I set up my public domain "taint.org" to use Cloudflare as the authoritative DNS server (in Cloudflare terms, "full setup"). This lets Caddy edit the DNS records via the Cloudflare API to handle the ACME challenge process.

One of the internal hosts is needed to run the Caddy server's reverse proxies; I picked "hass", 10.19.72.11, the Home Assistant host, which didn't have anything already running on port 80 or port 443. (All of my internal hosts are running on a private /24 IP range, at 10.19.72.0/24.)

The dedicated DNS domain I'm using for my home services is "home.taint.org". In order to use this, I clicked through to the Cloudflare admin panel and created a DNS record as follows:

Type   Name      Content             Proxy Status               TTL
A      *.home    10.19.72.11         DNS only - reserved IP     Auto

Now, any hostnames under "home.taint.org" will return the IP 10.19.72.11 (where Caddy will run).

I don't particularly care about exposing my internal home network IPs to the world, as a trade-off to allow the URLs to work even if an internal host is using the work VPN, or resolving with 8.8.8.8, or whatever. That's worth missing out on a little bit of paranoia, since the IPs won't be accessible from outside without Tailscale anyway.

It is worth noting that the Cloudflare-hosted domain doesn't have to be the same one used for URLs in the home network; using dns_challenge_override_domain you can delegate the ACME challenge from any "home" domain to one which is hosted in Cloudflare.

The Caddy Setup

One wrinkle is that I had to generate a custom Caddy build in order to get the "dns.providers.cloudflare" non-standard module, from https://caddyserver.com/download . This is a click-and-download page which generates a custom Caddy binary on the fly. It would have been nicer if the Cloudflare module was standard, but hey.

Once that's installed, I can get this output:

$ /usr/local/bin/caddy list-modules
[long list of standard modules omitted]

dns.providers.cloudflare
dns.providers.route53

  Non-standard modules: 2

  Unknown modules: 0

(Yes, I have Caddy running as a normal service, not as a Docker container. No particular reason; I think Docker should work fine.)

Go to the Cloudflare account dashboard, and create a user API token as described at https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/api/get-started/create-token/ . In my case, it has Zone / DNS / Edit permission, on the specific zone taint.org.

Copy that token as it's needed in the "Caddyfile", which now looks like the following:

hass.home.taint.org {
        tls {
                dns cloudflare cloudflare_api_token_goes_here
        }
        reverse_proxy /* 10.19.72.11:8123
}

links.home.taint.org {
        tls {
                dns cloudflare cloudflare_api_token_goes_here
        }
        reverse_proxy /* 10.19.72.6:9092
}

pi.home.taint.org {
        tls {
                dns cloudflare cloudflare_api_token_goes_here
        }
        redir / /admin/
        reverse_proxy /admin/* 10.19.72.7:80
}

grafana.home.taint.org {
        tls {
                dns cloudflare cloudflare_api_token_goes_here
        }
        reverse_proxy /* 10.19.72.6:3000
}

[many other services omitted]

Running sudo caddy run in the same dir will start up and verbosely log what it's doing. (Once you're happy enough, you can get Caddy running in the normal systemd service way.)

After setting those up, I now have my services accessible locally as:

1. Home Assistant: https://hass.home.taint.org/
2. Pihole: https://pi.home.taint.org/
3. Grafana: https://grafana.home.taint.org/
4. Linkding: https://links.home.taint.org/

Caddy seamlessly goes off and configures fully valid TLS certs with no fuss. I found it much tidier than Certbot, or Nginx Proxy Manager.

The Tailscale Setup

So this has now sorted out all of the requirements bar one:

9. accessible externally, over Tailscale.

To do this I had to log into Tailscale's admin console and go to https://login.tailscale.com/admin/machines , pick a host on the 10.19.72/24 internal LAN, click it's dropdown menu and "Edit Route Settings...", and enable a Subnet Route for 10.19.72/24. By doing this, all of the service.home.taint.org DNS records are now accessible, remotely, once Tailscale is enabled; I don't even need to use ts.net names to access them! Perfect.

Anyway, that's the setup -- hopefully this writeup will help others. And kudos to Caddy, Let's Encrypt and Tailscale for making this relatively easy.

• GenCast

  Google DeepMind announce their new AI model for weather forecasting, in collaboration with the ECMWF:

  Today, in a paper published in Nature, we present GenCast, our new high resolution (0.25°) AI ensemble model. GenCast provides better forecasts of both day-to-day weather and extreme events than the top operational system, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ (ECMWF) ENS, up to 15 days in advance. We’ll be releasing our model’s code, weights, and forecasts, to support the wider weather forecasting community. [...] GenCast is a diffusion model, the type of generative AI model that underpins the recent, rapid advances in image, video and music generation. However, GenCast differs from these, in that it’s adapted to the spherical geometry of the Earth, and learns to accurately generate the complex probability distribution of future weather scenarios when given the most recent state of the weather as input. To train GenCast, we provided it with four decades of historical weather data from ECMWF’s ERA5 archive. This data includes variables such as temperature, wind speed, and pressure at various altitudes. The model learned global weather patterns, at 0.25° resolution, directly from this processed weather data.

  It's open source: https://github.com/google-deepmind/graphcast And here are the open-released model weights: https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/dm_graphcast Graphcast (the previous iteration) has public forecasts published at https://charts.ecmwf.int/?query=GraphCast , under a CC-BY-NC-SA-4 licence -- it would be great if the GenCast forecasts join this data set. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15796 This all looks really great, a fantastic commitment to (genuine) openness and open data, and the paper seems rigorous (to this amateur). Great stuff.

  (tags: forecasting weather ai gencast graphcast deepmind google ecmwf genai)

• TikTok in hot water over Romanian elections

  ‘We are getting fed up’: EU lawmakers snap at TikTok over Romanian election:

  For years, the Chinese-owned social media app has brushed off security concerns in the United States and Europe that it could be used for mass manipulation and espionage. It now faces an intense regulatory storm in Bucharest over whether it played a role in skewing the democratic process in an EU country and NATO member of 19 million people. [....] "Honestly speaking, we are getting fed up by the documents and the empty promises," Swedish center-right European lawmaker Arba Kokalari said near the end of the hearing.

  (tags: tiktok elections romania eu bias news propaganda democracy social-media)

• noyb is now qualified to bring collective redress actions

  "noyb is now approved as a so-called "Qualified Entity" to bring collective redress actions in courts throughout the European Union. Such action under Directive (EU) 2020/1828 can either be an "injunction" or a "redress" measure. "Injunctions" generally prohibit a company from engaging in illegal practices, including any GDPR violations. "Redress" measures allow a European version of a "Class Action", where thousands or millions of users could be represented by noyb and for example ask for non-material damages when their personal data was unlawfully processed." This is very interesting -- and timely, given the mass scraping of user data to feed AI training sets...

  (tags: noyb data-privacy data-protection class-actions law eu collective-redress)

• Privacy Disasters: FaceHuggers Are Eating Your Skeets

  Good take from Carey Lening on the recent Hugging Face release of a million-BlueSky-post dataset:

  Once again, we’ve got a collective action problem that’s being ignored in favor of technological progress, big money, data extraction, and libertarian notions of ‘public data’. It’s a shitty look. Both Bluesky and HF are acting like the host who’s egging the dickheads on, and it’s really disappointing as a user to know that this is probably what we should have expected all along.

  (tags: data hugging-face ai training bluesky public data-protection privacy datasets scraping)

• The Buddhabrot

  This was news to me! There's another fractal pattern derived from the Mandelbrot set which I'd never seen before:

  As it turns out, it’s not just the boundary of the Mandelbrot set that’s mind-bogglingly complex: the same goes for the (xn, yn) escape trajectories associated with the (u, v) pixels near the set’s edge. The iterated coordinates follow elaborate, long-winded paths through space; their ethereal trails form a density plot reminiscent of the Mandelbrot fractal itself.

  (tags: fractals mandelbrot buddhabrot graphics maths via:lcamtuf)

• Rewilding fields massively improved bumblebee numbers in Scotland

  "Bumblebee population increases 116 times over in 'remarkable' Scotland project":

  Rewilding Denmarkfield, a 90-acre project based just north of Perth, has been working to restore nature to green spaces in an increasingly built up area for the past two years. Statistics from the charity show in 2021, when some of the fields managed by the project were still barley monoculture, only 35 bumblebees were counted. But by 2023, after just two years of nature restoration work in the same fields, the population increased to 4,056. The diversity of bumblebee also doubled, according to the charity, from five to ten different species.

  (tags: bees bumblebees scotland fields farming rewilding fallow nature)

• WeSQL

  "an innovative MySQL distribution that adopts a compute-storage separation architecture, with storage backed by S3 (and S3-compatible systems). WeSQL has completely replaced MySQL’s traditional disk storage with S3. All MySQL data—binlogs, schemas, storage engine metadata, WAL, and data files—are entirely (not partially!) stored as objects in S3. The 11 nines of durability provided by S3 significantly enhances data reliability. Additionally, WeSQL can start from a clean, empty instance, connect to S3, load the data, and begin serving immediately with no additional setup required. It is ideal for users who need an easy-to-manage, cost-effective, and developer-friendly MySQL database solution, especially for those needing support for both Serverless and BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)." (via Ian on ITC)

  (tags: mysql s3 object-storage storage databases sql)

• ZetaOffice

  Libreoffice in the browser, compiled to WASM and available as open source, or as a supported product. (via David Gerard)

  (tags: libreoffice wasm web javascript compilation)

• Reversing.Works Investigation Exposes Glovo’s Data Privacy Violations

  Ha, this is great:

  Reversing.Works, an innovative project dedicated to exposing abuses within gig economy platforms, uncovered significant labour law violations within Glovo’s algorithmic management system and provided critical evidence for an investigation by the Italian Data Protection Authority. After a year-long investigation, the DPA fined Glovo 5 Million €, and demanded corrective action from the platform. Glovo’s algorithmic management system was found to have misused workers’ personal data in ways that violated labour law, including monitoring workers’ movements outside of their work shifts, keeping hidden scores on workers, and sending detailed monitoring of their work to third parties outside the scope of their contracts. This was a mixed violation of both Italian labour law and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Reversing.Works’ investigation, using sophisticated reversing engineering techniques, sheds light on the hidden mechanics that drive the platform’s model of operation, and perhaps additional business dynamics. [...] “It’s surprising that unions never used a tool like this,” says Gaetano Priori, the lead investigator at Reversing.Works. “Privacy is an individual right, so it hasn’t been seen as a tool for labour struggles. But it has potential in digitally-intermediated labour because one violation could affect all the workers in all the regions in which a company operates.” Reversing.Works has shown how GDPR and tech-enabled investigation can help expose bad practices and create fairer working conditions. This case is a call to action for all gig workers, showing that existing legal tools can be used for the collective good. Priori adds, “This should be a wake-up call for all workers managed by technology. With GDPR and tech, we have the means to challenge unfair practices.”

  (tags: reverse-engineering gdpr data-protection data-privacy gig-economy glovo italy unions)

• Generative AI Pushes Outcome Over Process (And This Is Why I Hate It)

  This is a really interesting point about education and learning, in general:

  AI technology is based on the idea that the important part of creating things is the outcome, not the process. Can't draw? That shouldn't stop you from making a picture. Worried about your writing? Why should that stop you from handing in a coherent essay? The ads for AI all promise that you'll be able to produce things without all the tedious work of actually producing it - isn't that great?  Well no, it's not - it's terrible. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of why creating things has value. It's terrible in general, but I am especially offended by this idea in the context of education, and in this post I want to lay this idea out in a little detail. 

  (tags: education learning ai process-vs-outcome working how-we-work)

• S3 now supports appending

  Ooh, interesting -- this can unlock a few new system designs:

  You can append data to the end of existing objects stored in the S3 Express One Zone storage class in directory buckets. We recommend that you use the ability to append data to an object if the data is written continuously over a period of time or if you need to read the object while you are writing to the object. Appending data to objects is common for use-cases such as adding new log entries to log files or adding new video segments to video files as they are trans-coded then streamed. By appending data to objects, you can simplify applications that previously combined data in local storage before copying the final object to Amazon S3.

  (tags: aws s3 storage cloud features)

• Binary Quantization

  A readable explanation of the (relatively new) technique of Binary Quantization applied to LLM embeddings. It's pretty amazing that this compression technique can work without destroying search recall and accuracy, but it seems it does!

  Using BQ will reduce your memory consumption and improve retrieval speeds by up to 40x [...] Binary quantization (BQ) converts any vector embedding of floating point numbers into a vector of binary or boolean values. [...] All [vector floating point] numbers greater than zero are marked as 1. If it’s zero or less, they become 0. The benefit of reducing the vector embeddings to binary values is that boolean operations are very fast and need significantly less CPU instructions. [...] One of the reasons vector search still works with such a high compression rate is that these large vectors are over-parameterized for retrieval. This is because they are designed for ranking, clustering, and similar use cases, which typically need more information encoded in the vector.

  https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/rabitq-explainer-101 is a good maths-heavy explanation of the Elastic implementation using RaBitQ. See also some results from HuggingFace, https://huggingface.co/blog/embedding-quantization .

  (tags: embedding llm ai algorithms data-structures compression quantization binary-quantization quantisation rabitq search recall vectors vector-search)

• [pdf] Sky UK on their IPv6/IPv4 gateways

  A presentation from RIPE89 detailing Sky's MAP-T setup, "IPv6-only with IPv4aaS (MAP-T)". Basically they now use MAP-T translation devices to provide "IPv4 as a service", transparent NAT mapping between IPv6 and IPv4. I suspect this is similar to how Virgin Media operates their network, too, in Ireland. Interestingly, there are now network features (like local CDN POPs) which are more performant when using IPv6 natively, as they avoid a "trombone" route via a network-border translation device to get an IPv4 address. As a result, it's actually starting to be worthwhile running an IPv6 home network....

  (tags: ipv4 ipv6 networking home sky isps ripe map-t nat ip)

• headrotor/masto-pinb

  from Marsh Gardiner (https://hachyderm.io/@earth2marsh ), a "Mastodon To Pinboard bookmark integration script" -- "a Python script to mimic the functionality of Pinboard's Twitter integration. It reads the latest toots from a Mastodon account and bookmarks them in a Pinboard.in account. It is meant to be run repeatedly as a crontab job to continuously update your bookmarks in the background".

  (tags: mastodon pinboard bookmarks bookmarking scripts)

• skyfirehose.com

  "Query the Bluesky Jetstream with DuckDB" -- this is a lovely little hack from Tobias Müller (https://bsky.app/profile/tobilg.com). Basically, it's a pre-built DuckDB database file which contains tables which refer to Parquet files in an R2 bucket, which are (presumably) updated regularly with new Bluesky posts from their Jetstream. Tobias says: "there‘s a data gathering process that listens to the Jetstream and dumps the NDJSONs to the filesystem as hourly files. Then, DuckDB transform the data to Parquet files, they get uploaded with rclone." It's a lovely demo of how modern data lake tech can be exposed for public usage in a nice way.

  (tags: s3 parquet duckdb sql jetstream bluesky firehose data-lakes r2)

• write(1) no longer part of util-linux

  ``` util-linux (2.40.2-11) unstable; urgency=medium * The mesg(1) and write(1) programs are no longer provided. It is believed chatting between users is nowadays done using more secure facilities. -- Chris Hofstaedtler Wed, 13 Nov 2024 12:58:06 +0100 ``` Sic transit gloria mundi. (via Doug on ITC Slack)

  (tags: via:itc write mesg unix linux bsd util-linux cli debian)

For the past several years, since the demise of Google Reader, I’ve been augmenting the RSS/Atom syndication of this linkblog with posts to various social media platforms using bot accounts. This is kind of a form of POSSE -- “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere” (ideally I’d be self-hosting Pinboard to qualify for that I guess).

The destination for cross-posts were first to Twitter (RIP), and more recently to Mastodon via botsin.space. With the shutdown of that instance, I’ve had to make a few changes to my syndication script which gateways the contents to Mastodon, and I also took the opportunity to set up a BlueSky gateway at the same time. On the prompting of @kellan, here’s a quick write-up of where it all currently stands…

Primary Source: Pinboard

The primary source for the blog’s contents is my long-suffering account at https://pinboard.in/u:jm/, where I have been collecting links since 2009 (and before that, del.icio.us since I think 2004?, so that’s 20 years of links by now).

Pinboard has a pretty simple UI for link collection using a bookmarklet, which I’ve improved a tiny bit to open a large editor textbox instead of the default tiny one.

The resulting posts generally tend to include a blockquote, a short lede, and a few tags in the normal Pinboard/Del.icio.us style.

I find editing text posts in the Pinboard bare-bones UI to be easier and more pleasant than WordPress, so I generally use that as the primary source. Based on the POSSE principle, I should really figure out a way to get this onto something self-hosted, but Pinboard works for me (at the moment at least).

Publish from Pinboard to Blog

I use a Python script run from cron, to gateway new bookmarks from https://pinboard.in/u:jm/ as individual posts, formatted with Markdown, to this blog using the WordPress posting API: Github repo

Publish from Pinboard to Mastodon

This reads the Pinboard RSS feed for https://pinboard.in/u:jm/ and posts any new URLs (and the first 500 chars of its description) to the “jmason_links” account at mstdn.social: Github repo

Migration from the old Mastodon account at botsin.space to mstdn.social was really quite easy; after manually setting up the new account at mstdn.social and copying over the bio text, I hit the "Move from a different account" page, and entered @jm_links@botsin.space for the handle of the old account to migrate from.

I then logged in to the old account on botsin.space and hit the "Move to a different account" page, entering @jmason_links@mstdn.social for the handle to migrate to. This triggered copying of the followers from one account to the other, and left the old account dormant with a link to the new location instead.

(One thing to watch out for is that once the move is triggered, the profile for the old account becomes read-only; I've since had to temporarily undo the "moved" status in order to update the profile text, which was a bit messy.)

Publish from Pinboard to BlueSky

This reads the same Pinboard RSS feed as the Mastodon gateway, and gateways new posts from there to the “jmason.ie” account at BlueSky. This is slightly more involved than the Mastodon script, as it attempts to generate an embed card and mark up any links in the post appropriately: Github repo

I have a cron on my home server which runs those Mastodon and BlueSky gateway scripts every 15 minutes, and that seems to be a reasonable cadence without hammering the various APIs too much.

• Used EV Buying Guide

  This, via Reddit, is an amazing guide to buying a used electric vehicle, from Croatia's EVClinic, who are a "car reverse engineering and specialty repair outfit. Taking cars apart, figuring out how and when they break, and figuring out how to repair them is their bread and butter. They've gained a reputation across Europe for being able to fix problems that even the manufacturers themselves don't know how to deal with. They've now distilled that working experience into a report, detailing which vehicles are reliable in the long term - and which ones should be avoided. Each model also has a list of which parts are most likely to break, after how much mileage they are likely to break, and how much it costs to repair.":

  Based on our experience and that of our colleagues’ labs at 15-20 different locations worldwide, we have concluded that the battery is the last concern on the list during the first 10 years of an EV’s life, with some vehicles covering a large number of miles with the original battery system. The most common failures within 10 years of using an EV are: 1. Electric motors, 2. OBC chargers, 3. DC-DC/inverters, and only in fourth place, batteries. Some vehicles can go 10 years without any breakdowns or servicing, resulting in significant savings compared to fossil fuel vehicles. Even EVs that experience faults are cheaper to maintain than their fossil-fueled counterparts, even when factoring in battery and motor failures. Fossil fuel vehicles consume at least €0.13 per kilometer just in fuel, excluding services and breakdowns. With services, breakdowns, and maintenance, they consume an additional minimum of €0.08, totaling over €40,000 for 200,000 km. Thus, a faulty EV is still cheaper than a “functional” fossil fuel vehicle.

  The article lists the Hybrid and Battery EVs available in Europe, and gives a rating to each one regarding their reliability and repairability, in extreme detail. Unfortunately, the BEV I drive -- the Nissan Leaf -- gets a terrible review due to what they consider really crappy battery technology choices. The perils of being an early adopter.... :(

  (tags: nissan leaf bevs evs driving cars hybrid-vehicles electric-vehicles used-cars repair)

• How to Learn: Userland Disk I/O

  This is an interesting hodge-podge of key bits of information about disk I/O, file integrity and durability, buffering or unbuffered writes, async I/O, and which filesystems to use for high-I/O database operation on Linux, MacOS and Windows. One thing that was new to me: "You can periodically scrape /proc/diskstats to self-report on disk metrics".

  (tags: databases filesystems linux macos fsync durability coding)

• SlateDB

  an embedded storage engine built as a log-structured merge-tree. Unlike traditional LSM-tree storage engines, SlateDB writes all data to object storage [ie. S3, Azure Blob Storage, GCS]. Object storage is an amazing technology. It provides highly-durable, highly-scalable, highly-available storage at a great cost. And recent advancements have made it even more attractive: Google Cloud Storage supports multi-region and dual-region buckets for high availability. All object stores support compare-and-swap (CAS) operations. Amazon Web Service's S3 Express One Zone has single-digit millisecond latency. We believe that the future of object storage are multi-region, low latency buckets that support atomic CAS operations. Inspired by The Cloud Storage Triad: Latency, Cost, Durability, we set out to build a storage engine built for the cloud. SlateDB is that storage engine.

  This looks superb. Chris Riccomini is involved.

  (tags: data storage slatedb lsm wal oltp)

• Prototype Fund

  This looks great!

  The first low-threshold funding program for independent developers and small teams creating innovative open-source software. We provide the tech-savvy civil society with access to the resources and processes needed for developing user-centered, innovative software projects. Since 2016, we have funded almost 400 projects. As a learning funding program, we have repeatedly made adjustments to become more efficient and effective. Now we are taking the next step and implement some significant changes. From now on, we are focusing on funding data security and software infrastructure. Apply with your ideas for innovative open source software in the public interest! You will receive up to €95,000 over six months or €158,000 over ten months of funding from the German Ministry of Education and Research. We will also provide you with coaching, consulting and networking opportunities.

  (tags: funding open-source oss via:janl)

• GOV.UK chatbot halted by hallucinations

  "AI firms must address hallucinations before GOV.UK chatbot can roll out, digital chief claims":

  Trials of a generative AI-powered chatbot for GOV.UK users have found ongoing issues with so-called hallucinations that must be addressed before the technology can be widely deployed, according to one of the government’s digital leaders. [....] Speaking at an event this morning, Paul Willmott said: “We have experimented with a generative advice [tool] on GOV.UK. You will just say ‘I’m trying to do this’, or ‘I’m annoyed about this’… The challenge we are having – which is exactly the same as in the commercial sector – is what to do with the 1% of hallucinations where the agent starts to get challenging, or abusive – or even seductive.” Even if only present in a tiny minority of instances, these issues mean that GOV.UK Chat is not yet ready for widespread deployment, according to Willmott. Addressing hallucinations will require the support of the likes of OpenAI and other creates of large language models. “Until we have managed to iron that out – which will require the support of the foundational model creators – we won’t be able to put this live,” he said.

  This is hardly surprising, but it's good to see it being acknowledged and the brakes being applied.

  (tags: ai llms hallucations confabulation gov.uk chatbots chatgpt uk)

• How the New sqlite3_rsync Utility Works

  "I've enjoyed following the development of the new sqlite3_rsync utility in the SQLite project. The utility employs a bandwidth-efficient algorithm to synchronize new and modified pages from an origin SQLite database to a replica. You can learn more about the new utility here and try it out by following the instructions here. Curious about its workings, I reviewed the code" Interesting use of a truncated SHA-3 as the hash() implementation, for speed.

  (tags: sqlite hashing rsync synchronization replication databases storage algorithms)

• Using BlueSky as a Mastodon Bot

  "A Cheap and Lazy way to create Mastodon Bots using… BlueSky?!" By using the brid.gy gateway service, it's pretty trivial to use BlueSky as an easy means to make a mastodon bot without having to find a bot-friendly Masto host now that botsin.space is no more. For now, I'm doing this at @jmason.ie@bsky.brid.gy , which is gatewaying the posts from my BlueSky bot at https://bsky.app/profile/jmason.ie -- although a more long term approach will be to host the links-to-Mastodon gateway "natively" instead of using brid.gy, IMO.

  (tags: mastodon rss gateways social-media bluesky brid.gy bots linkblog)

• Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves

  Well this is just garbage, and one reason why I no longer use Facebook:

  Both Facebook and Instagram are already going this way, with the rise of AI spam, AI influencers, and armies of people copy-pasting and clipping content from other social media networks to build their accounts. This content and this system, Meta said, has led to an 8 percent increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6 percent increase in time spent on Instagram, all at the expense of a shared reality and human connections to other humans.  In the earnings call, Zuckerberg and Susan Li, Meta’s CFO, said that Meta has already slop-ified its ad system and said that more than 1 million businesses are now creating more than 15 million ads per month on Meta platforms using generative AI. 

  (tags: slop facebook ai meta social media grim instagram)

• Misusing the BIG-Bench canary string

  Interesting; this blog post discusses using the BIG-Bench canary string, intended to keep data like accuracy test cases out of LLM training corpora, as a general-purpose "don't scrape me" flag on personal blogs. This seems like a more practical, and more likely to be observed, way to opt out of AI training -- seeing as the scrapers don't seem to reliably honour any of the others

  (tags: blogging canaries opt-out scraping web ai llm openai chatgpt claude bing)

• Capability Feature Flags for Backward Compatibility

  Good reference blog post for a design approach I like for APIs; instead of using numeric version attributes and mapping "version=4" means "supports feature foo", use a capability flag of "supports_foo=1".

  (tags: apis design coding capabilities feature-flags flags)

• Canary Contamination in GPT-4

  The BIG-Bench canary string is an EICAR- or GTUBE-style canary string which should never appear in LLM training datasets, or by extension, in trained models or their output. Its intention is that any test documents containing that string can be excluded from training, so that benchmark tests will be accurate. Unfortunately, it looks like they weren't excluded -- Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-base will reproduce the string; and:

  Of 19 tested [benchmarking] tasks, GPT-4-base perfectly recalled large (non-trivial) portions of code for: The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus; Simple arithmetic; Diverse Metrics for Social Biases in Language Models; Convince Me

  Great work. In case you were wondering why the LLMs all seem to do so well on their benchmarks, now you know -- they were training on the test data.

  (tags: ai llm testing benchmarking big-bench gpt-4 claude)

• Reverse engineering ML models from TikTok and Instagram

  This is very clever; _A Picture is Worth 500 Labels: A Case Study of Demographic Disparities in Local Machine Learning Models for Instagram and TikTok_, from University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Technical Unversity of Munich. TikTok and Insta both use local ML models running on users' phones; by reverse engineering these APIs it's possible to test them and experiment on their accuracy.

  Capitalizing on this new processing model of locally analyzing user images, we analyze two popular social media apps, TikTok and Instagram, to reveal (1) what insights vision models in both apps infer about users from their image and video data and (2) whether these models exhibit performance disparities with respect to demographics. As vision models provide signals for sensitive technologies like age verification and facial recognition, understanding potential biases in these models is crucial for ensuring that users receive equitable and accurate services. We develop a novel method for capturing and evaluating ML tasks in mobile apps, overcoming challenges like code obfuscation, native code execution, and scalability. Our method comprises ML task detection, ML pipeline reconstruction, and ML performance assessment, specifically focusing on demographic disparities. We apply our methodology to TikTok and Instagram, revealing significant insights. For TikTok, we find issues in age and gender prediction accuracy, particularly for minors and Black individuals. In Instagram, our analysis uncovers demographic disparities in the extraction of over 500 visual concepts from images, with evidence of spurious correlations between demographic features and certain concepts.

  (tags: tiktok instagram ml machine-learning accuracy testing reverse-engineering reversing mobile android)

• Hedge Funds Bet Against Clean Energy

  Hooray! Capitalism has decided to kill off the humans:

  Despite vast green stimulus packages in the US, Europe and China, more hedge funds are on average net short batteries, solar, electric vehicles and hydrogen than are long those sectors; and more funds are net long fossil fuels than are shorting oil, gas and coal, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of positions voluntarily disclosed by roughly 500 hedge funds to Hazeltree, a data compiler in the alternative investment industry.

  (tags: hedge-funds capitalism short-selling clean-energy green future climate-change)

• Excellent thread on SMRs

  After Google and Kairos announced a deal to produce and consume nuclear power from future nuclear Small Modular Reactors, this discussion took place. Full of good info from Adrian Cockroft

  (tags: smrs nuclear nuclear-power future sustainability david-gerard adrian-cockroft power)

• Bert Hubert on Nuclear power in the EU

  "Nuclear power: no, yes, maybe, but not like this":

  Currently many (European) countries are individually trying to order up new nuclear power, from many different places. But it appears we can’t treat nuclear reactors like (say) cars you can just procure. If we’d want to do this right, it is probably indeed better to not simply try to order stuff, but to engender a nuclear revival. To not simply point our fingers at Framatome and EDF and say “do better!”. What if we actually made this a European or transatlantic project, and add the vast expertise that is still hidden within our institutes, and indeed setup a project for building 50 nuclear reactors, or more? This would allow a broad base of research that would derisk the process, so we don’t necessarily find out after 15 years of construction that the design is too complicated. And perhaps also not try to pretend that we are leaving this to the free market, but recognize this as a public activity. Doing it like this would require governments, institutes and companies to think different, and I’m reasonably sure we can’t even get this done between a few like-minded countries. Most definitely the EU would not reach consensus on this, since Germany is fundamentally opposed to anything nuclear ever.

  (tags: bert-hubert nuclear nukes nuclear-power eu future sustainability)

• BackJoy PLUS TEMPUR Posture Seat

  "Naturally relieves back pain by optimizing sitting posture, featuring TEMPUR proprietary foam that provides the best possible support, pressure relief, and comfort when sitting for long periods of time". As recommended by Hideo Kojima!

  (tags: back-pain seats sitting comfort health posture via:hideo-kojima backjoy)

• Bluesky Bots

  awesome, looks like a bot gatewaying this linkblog to bsky is entirely feasible

  (tags: bluesky bots blogging todo)

• The "ASCII Smuggling" Attack

  Invisible text that AI chatbots understand and humans can't?

  What if there was a way to sneak malicious instructions into Claude, Copilot, or other top-name AI chatbots and get confidential data out of them by using characters large language models can recognize and their human users can’t? As it turns out, there was—and in some cases still is.

  Attackers used prompt injection, hidden in (untrusted) emails sent to a Microsoft 365 Copilot user; when the email is summarized using Copilot, "inside the emails are instructions to sift through previously received emails in search of the sales figures or a one-time password and include them in a URL pointing to his web server." The sensitive data is then steganographically encoded using Unicode "tags block" invisible codepoints, and included in the seemingly-innocent URL. Yet another case where AI developers have failed to study security history -- using untrusted input for in-band signalling has been a security risk since the days of phracking; and allowing the entire list of permitted output characters across the entire Unicode range, instead of locking down to a safe subset, allows this silent exfiltration attack. Extra sting in the tail for Amazon: the researchers didn't even bother testing on their LLM :)

  (tags: ai security steganography exfiltration copilot microsoft openai llms claude infosec attacks exploits)

• Does Open Source AI really exist?

  This is absolutely spot on:

  “Open Source AI” is an attempt to “openwash” proprietary systems. In their paper “Rethinking open source generative AI: open-washing and the EU AI Act” Andreas Liesenfeld and Mark Dingemanse showed that many “Open Source” AI models offer hardly more than open model weights. Meaning: You can run the thing but you don’t actually know what it is. Sounds like something we’ve already had: It’s Freeware. The Open Source models we see today are proprietary freeware blobs. Which is potentially marginally better than OpenAI’s fully closed approach but really only marginally. [...] “Open Source” is becom[ing] a sticker like “Fair Trade”, something to make your product look good and trustworthy. To position it outside of the evil commercial space, giving it some grassroots feeling. “We’re in this together” and shit. But we’re not. We’re not in this with Mark fucking Zuckerberg even if he gives away some LLM weights for free cause it hurts his competition. We, as normal people living on this constantly warmer planet, are not with any of those people.

  As tante notes here, for the systems we are talking about today, Open Source AI isn't practically possible, because we’ll never be able to download all the actual training data -- and shame on the OSI for legitimising this attempt at "openwashing".

  (tags: llms open-source osi open-source-ai ai freeware meta training)

• Obituary for Ward Christensen

  "Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78":

  On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today. Prior to creating the first BBS, Christensen invented XMODEM, a 1977 file transfer protocol that made much of the later BBS world possible by breaking binary files into packets and ensuring that each packet was safely delivered over sometimes unstable and noisy analog telephone lines. It inspired other file transfer protocols that allowed ad-hoc online file sharing to flourish. While Christensen himself was always humble about his role in creating the first BBS, his contributions to the field did not go unrecognized. In 1992, Christensen received two Dvorak Awards, including a lifetime achievement award for "outstanding contributions to PC telecommunications." The following year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation honored him with the Pioneer Award.

  (tags: bbses history computing ward-christensen xmodem networking filesharing)

• Brian Merchant on "AI will solve climate change"

  The neo-luddite author of "Blood in the Machine" nails the response to Eric Schmidt's pie-in-the-sky techno-optimism around AI "solving" climate change:

  Even without AGI, we already know what we have to do. [...] The tricky part—the only part that matters in this rather crucial decade for climate action—is implementation. As impressive as GPT technology or the most state of the art diffusion models may be, they will never, god willing, “solve” the problem of generating what is actually necessary to address climate change: Political will. Political will to break the corporate power that has a stranglehold on energy production, to reorganize our infrastructure and economies accordingly, to push out oil and gas. Even if an AGI came up with a flawless blueprint for building cheap nuclear fusion plants—pure science fiction—who among us thinks that oil and gas companies would readily relinquish their wealth and power and control over the current energy infrastructure? Even that would be a struggle, and AGI’s not going to doing anything like that anytime soon, if at all. Which is why the “AI will solve climate change” thinking is not merely foolish but dangerous—it’s another means of persuading otherwise smart people that immediate action isn’t necessary, that technological advancements are a trump card, that an all hands on deck effort to slash emissions and transition to proven renewable technologies isn’t necessary right now. It’s techno-utopianism of the worst kind; the kind that saps the will to act.

  (tags: ai climate eric-schmidt technology techno-optimism techno-utopianism agi neoluddism brian-merchant)

• Capture less than you create

  I've disagreed with David Heinemeier Hansson on plenty of occasions in the past, but this is one where I'm really happy to find myself in agreement. Matt Mullenwegg of WordPress went low, laying in digs about how DHH didn't profit from the success of Rails; DHH's response is perfect:

  The moment you go down the path of gratitude grievances, you'll see ungrateful ghosts everywhere. People who owe you something, if they succeed. A ratio that's never quite right between what you've helped create and what you've managed to capture. If you let it, it'll haunt you forever. So don't! Don't let the success of others diminish your satisfaction with your own efforts. Unless you're literally Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, there'll always be someone richer than you! The rewards I withdraw from open source flow from all the happy programmers who've been able to write Ruby to build these amazingly successful web businesses with Rails. That enjoyment only grows the more successful these business are! The more economic activity stems from Rails, the more programmers will be able to find work where they might write Ruby. Maybe I'd feel different if I was a starving open source artist holed up somewhere begrudging the wheels of capitalism. But fate has been more than kind enough to me in that regard. I want for very little, because I've been blessed sufficiently. That's a special kind of wealth: Enough. And that's also the open source spirit: To let a billion lemons go unsqueezed. To capture vanishingly less than you create. To marvel at a vast commons of software, offered with no strings attached, to any who might wish to build. Thou shall not lust after thy open source's users and their success.

  Spot on.

  (tags: open-source success rewards coding software business life gratitude gift-economy dhh rails philosophy)

• Suppressing generated files in GitHub pull requests

  This is a handy feature. If you have to check in generated files for some reason, you can mark them as generated in Github using this .gitattributes setting (via Tomasz Nurkiewicz)

  (tags: via:nurkewicz git github code pull-requests)

• GSM-Symbolic

  "GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models", from Apple Machine Learning Research:

  We investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and show that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases. We hypothesize that this decline is because current LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning; they replicate reasoning steps from their training data. Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the clause doesn't contribute to the reasoning chain needed for the final answer.

  Even better -- "the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered" seems to suggest that great performance on benchmarks like GSM8K just mean that the LLMs have been trained on the answers...

  (tags: training benchmarks ai llms gsm-symbolic reasoning ml apple papers gsm8k)

• Shitposting, Shit-mining and Shit-farming

  This is where we are with surveillance capitalism and Facebook/X:

  Social media platforms are improved by a moderate tincture of shitposting. More than a few drops though, and the place begins to stink up, driving away advertisers and users. This then leads platform executives to explore the exciting opportunities of shit-mining. Social media generates a lot of content - it’s gotta be valuable somehow! Who needs content moderation if you can become a guano baron? But that only makes things worse, driving out more users and more advertisers, until eventually, you may find yourself left with a population dominated by two kinds of users (a) chumps, and (b) chump-vampirizing obligate predators. This can be a stable equilibrium - even quite a profitable one! But otherwise, it isn’t good news.

  See also a recent story in the Garbage Day newsletter (https://www.garbageday.email/p/what-feels-real-enough-to-share) about Facebook, and how its disaster-relief FB groups are becoming overrun with AI slop images:

  The Verge’s Nilay Patel recently summed up the core tension here, writing on Threads about YouTube’s own generative-AI efforts, “Every platform company is about to be at war with itself as the algorithmic recommendation AI team tries to fight off the content made by the generative AI team.” And it’s clear, at least with Meta, which side is winning the war. This week, Meta proudly announced a new video-generating tool that will make AI misinfo even more convincing — or, at least, better at generating things that feel true. And there’s really only one way to look at all of this. Meta simply does not give a shit anymore. Facebook spent most of the 2010s absorbing, and destroying, not just local journalism in the US, but the very infrastructure of how information is transmitted across the country. And they have clearly lost interest in maintaining that. Users, of course, have no where else to go, so they’re still relying on it to coordinate things like hurricane disaster relief. But the feeds are now — and seemingly forever will be — clogged with AI junk. Because you cannot be a useful civic resource and also give your users a near-unlimited ability to generate things that are not real. And I don’t think Meta are stupid enough to not know this. But like their own users, they have decided that it doesn’t matter what’s real, only what feels real enough to share.

  Given that Meta are _paying_ users to pollute their platform with low-grade AI slop engagement fuel, shit-farming seems the perfect term for that.

  (tags: garbage-day facebook meta ai ai-slop spam shitposting shitfarming shitmining dont-be-evil)

• B-trees and database indexes

  Lovely visual demonstrations of the B-tree and B+tree indexing data structures, used in MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Dynamo, and many others

  (tags: algorithms indexes indexing databases storage b-trees b+trees binary-search-trees data-structures)

• Fixing aggressive Xiaomi battery management

  I've been using a Xiaomi phone recently, running Xiaomi HyperOS 1.011.0, and one feature that bugs me constantly is that apps lose state as soon as you flip away to another app, even if only for a second; once you flip back, the app restarts. This appears to be an aspect of Xiaomi's built in power management. I've been searching for a way to disable it, and allow multiple apps in memory simultaneously, and I've finally tracked it down. As described here, https://piunikaweb.com/2021/04/19/miui-optimization-missing-in-developer-options-try-this-workaround/ , you need to enable Developer Mode on the phone, enter "Additional Settings" / "Developer options", then scroll all the way down, nearly to the bottom, to "Reset to default values". Hit this _repeatedly_ (once is not enough!) until another option appears just below, called either "Turn on MIUI optimisation" or, in my case, "Turn on system optimisation"; this is enabled by default. Turn it off. In my case, this has fixed the flipping-between-apps problem, the phone in general is significantly snappier to respond, and WhatsApp and Telegram new-message notifications don't get auto-dismissed (which was another annoying feature previously). I suspect a load of battery optimisations and CPU throttling has been disabled. It remains to be seen what this does to my battery life, but hopefully it'll be worth it, and it'll be nice not to lose state in Chrome forms when I have to flip over to my banking app, etc. I won't be getting another Xiaomi phone after this; there are numerous rough edges and outright bugs in the MIUI/HyperOS platform, at least in the international ROM images, and there's no support or documentation to work around this stuff. It's a crappy user experience.

  (tags: phones mobile xiaomi miui workarounds battery options settings)

• What If Data Is a Bad Idea?

  A thought-provoking article:

  Philip Agre enumerated five characteristics of data that will help us achieve this repositioning. Agre argued that “living data” must be able to express 1. a sense of ownership, 2. error bars, 3. sensitivity, 4. dependency, and 5. semantics. Although he originally wrote this in the early 1990s, it took some time for technology and policy to catch up. I’m going to break down each point using more contemporary context and terminology: Provenance and Agency: what is the origin of the data and what can I do with it (ownership)? Accuracy: has the data been validated? If not, what is the confidence of its correctness (error bars)? Data Flow: how is data discovered, updated, and shared (sensitivity to changes)? Auditability: what data and processes were used to generate this data (dependencies)? Semantics: what does this data represent?

  (tags: culture data identity data-protection data-privacy living-data open-data)

• Ethical Applications of AI to Public Sector Problems

  Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

  There have been massive developments in AI in the last decade, and they’re changing what’s possible with software. There’s also been a huge amount of misunderstanding, hype, and outright bullshit. I believe that the advances in AI are real, will continue, and have promising applications in the public sector. But I also believe that there are clear “right” and “wrong” ways to apply AI to public sector problems.

  He breaks down AI usage into "Assistive AI", where AI is used to process and consume information (in ways or amounts that humans cannot) to present to a human operator, versus "Automated AI", where the AI both processes and acts upon information, without input or oversight from a human operator. The latter is unethical to apply in the public sector.

  (tags: ai ethics llm genai public-sector government automation)

• Evading wireless tether speed caps

  Handy tip from Brian Krebs - if you are tethering to a mobile phone, and network speeds are mysteriously limited, it may be your provider is throttling tethering. Changing the TTL may help, since some providers in the US at least are using a really stupid mechanism to detect tethering

  (tags: tethering mobile wireless networking ttl via:brian-krebs networks)

• ClassicPress

  "A lightweight, stable, instantly familiar free open-source content management system. Based on WordPress without the block editor (Gutenberg)." Nobody seems to like the block editor, lol

  (tags: cms wordpress blogs blogging forks)

• Patent troll Sable pays up, dedicates all its patents to the public

  This is a massive victory for Cloudflare -- way to go!

  Sable initially asserted around 100 claims from four different patents against Cloudflare, accusing multiple Cloudflare products and features of infringement. Sable’s patents — the old Caspian Networks patents — related to hardware-based router technologies common over 20 years ago. Sable’s infringement arguments stretched these patent claims to their limits (and beyond) as Sable tried to apply Caspian’s hardware-based technologies to Cloudflare’s modern software-defined services delivered on the cloud. [...] Cloudflare fought back against Sable by launching a new round of Project Jengo, Cloudflare’s prior art contest, seeking prior art to invalidate all of Sable’s patents. In the end, Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, grant Cloudflare a royalty-free license to its entire patent portfolio, and to dedicate its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can never again assert them against another company.

  (via AJ Stuyvenberg)

  (tags: sable cloudflare patent-trolls patents uspto trolls routing)

• ArchiveWeb.page

  "Interactive browser-based web archiving from Webrecorder. The ArchiveWeb.page browser extension and standalone application allows you to capture web archives interactively as you browse. After archiving your webpages, your archives can be viewed using ReplayWeb.page — no extension required! For those who need to crawl whole websites with automated tools, check out Browsertrix." This is a nice way to archive a personal dynamic site online in a read-only fashion -- there is a self-hosting form of the replayer at https://replayweb.page/docs/embedding/#self-hosting . As @david302 on the Irish Tech Slack notes: "you can turn on recording, browse the (public) site you want to archive, get the .wacz file and stick that+js on s3/cloudfront."

  (tags: archiving archival archives tools web recording replay via:david302)

• Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea

  Bunnie Huang investigates the Mossad pager bomb's feasibility, and finds it deeply worrying:

  I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it’s relatively easy for any modestly-funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this – a wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation-states to cartels and gangs, to shady copycat battery factories just looking for a big payday (if chemical suppliers can moonlight in illicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in bespoke munitions?). Bottom line is: we should approach the public policy debate around this assuming that someday, we could be victims of exploding batteries, too. Turning everyday objects into fragmentation grenades should be a crime, as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies.

  (tags: batteries israel security terrorism mossad pagers hardware devices bombs)

• Modal interfaces considered harmful

  A great line from the 99 Percent Invisible episode titled "Children of the Magenta (Automation Paradox, pt. 1)", regarding the Air France flight 447 disaster:

  When one of the co-pilots hauled back on his stick, he pitched the plane into an angle that eventually caused the stall. [...] it’s possible that he didn’t understand that he was now flying in a different mode, one which would not regulate and smooth out his movements. This confusion about what how the fly-by-wire system responds in different modes is referred to, aptly, as “mode confusion,”  and it has come up in other accidents.

  (tags: automation aviation flying modal-interfaces ui ux interfaces modes mode-confusion air-france-447 disasters)

• wordfreq/SUNSET.md

  wordfreq is "a Python library for looking up the frequencies of words in many languages, based on many sources of data." Sadly, it's now longer going to be updated, as the author writes:

  I don't want to be part of this scene anymore: wordfreq used to be at the intersection of my interests. I was doing corpus linguistics in a way that could also benefit natural language processing tools. The field I know as "natural language processing" is hard to find these days. It's all being devoured by generative AI. Other techniques still exist but generative AI sucks up all the air in the room and gets all the money. It's rare to see NLP research that doesn't have a dependency on closed data controlled by OpenAI and Google, two companies that I already despise. wordfreq was built by collecting a whole lot of text in a lot of languages. That used to be a pretty reasonable thing to do, and not the kind of thing someone would be likely to object to. Now, the text-slurping tools are mostly used for training generative AI, and people are quite rightly on the defensive. If someone is collecting all the text from your books, articles, Web site, or public posts, it's very likely because they are creating a plagiarism machine that will claim your words as its own. So I don't want to work on anything that could be confused with generative AI, or that could benefit generative AI. OpenAI and Google can collect their own damn data. I hope they have to pay a very high price for it, and I hope they're constantly cursing the mess that they made themselves.

  (tags: ai language llm nlp openai scraping words genai google)

• The Pinecil is the best soldering iron for most people

  I need a new soldering iron, this sounds nice

  (tags: soldering tools pine64 pinecil gadgets to-get)

• Nevada's genAI-driven unemployment benefits system

  As has been shown many times before, current generative AI systems encode bias and racism in their training data. This is not going to go well:

  "There’s no AI [written decisions] that are going out without having human interaction and that human review," DETR's director told the website. "We can get decisions out quicker so that it actually helps the claimant." [...] "The time savings they’re looking for only happens if the review is very cursory," explained Morgan Shah, the director of community engagement for Nevada Legal Services. "If someone is reviewing something thoroughly and properly, they’re really not saving that much time." Ultimately, Shah said, workers using the system to breeze through claims may end up "being encouraged to take a shortcut." [...] As with most attempts at using this still-nascent technology in the public sector, we probably won't know how well the Nevada unemployment AI works unless it's shown to be doing a bad job — which feels like an experiment being conducted on some of the most vulnerable members of society without their consent.

  Of course, the definition of a "bad job" depends who's defining it. If the system is processing a high volume of applications, it may not matter to its operators if it's processing them _correctly_ or not.

  (tags: generative-ai ai racism bias nevada detr benefits automation)

• Today is EED Day

  Significant changes in transparency requirements for EU-based datacenter operations:

  Sunday September 15th was the deadline for every single organisation in Europe operating a datacentre of more than 500 KW, to publicly disclose: how much electricity they used in the last year; how much power came from renewable sources, and how much of this relied on the company buying increasingly controversial ‘unbundled’ renewable energy credits; how much water they used; and many more datapoints [...] Where this information is being disclosed, in the public domain, and discoverable, [the Green Web Foundation] intend to link to it and make it easier to find. [....] There are some concessions for organisations that have classed this information as a trade secret or commercially confidential. In this case there is a second law passed, the snappily titled Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364, that largely means these companies need to report this information too, but to the European Commission instead. There will be a public dataset published based on this reporting released next year, containing data an agreggated level.

  (tags: datacenter emissions energy sustainability gwf via:chris-adams eu europe ec)

Over the past decade or so, I've been suffering with chronic migraine, sometimes with multiple attacks per week. It's been a curse -- not only do you have to suffer the periodic migraine attacks, but also the "prodrome", where unpleasant symptoms like brain fog and an inability to concentrate can impact you.

After a long process of getting a referral to the appropriate headache clinic, and eliminating other possible medications, I finally got approved to receive Ajovy (fremanezumab), one of the new generation of CGRP inhibitor monoclonals -- these work by blocking the action of a peptide on receptors in your brain. I started the course of these a month ago.

The results have, frankly, been amazing. As I hoped, the migraine episodes have reduced in frequency, and in impact; they are now milder. But on top of that, I hadn't realised just how much impact the migraine "prodrome" had been having on my day-to-day life. I now have more ability to concentrate, without it causing a headache or brain fog; I have more energy and am less exhausted on a day-to-day basis; judging by my CPAP metrics, I'm even sleeping better. It is a radical improvement. After 10 years I'd forgotten what it was like to be able to concentrate for prolonged periods!

They are so effective that the American Headache Society is now recommending them as a first-line option for migraine prevention, ahead of almost all other treatments.

If you're a migraine sufferer, this is a game changer. I'm delighted. It seems there may even be further options of concomitant treatment with other CGRP-targeting medications in the future, to improve matters further.

More papers on the topic: a real-world study on CGRP inhibitor effectiveness after 6 months; no "wearing-off" effect is expected.

• Faster zlib/DEFLATE decompression on the Apple M1 (and x86)

  Some decent low-level performance hacking on arm64/x86 (via Tony Finch)

  (tags: via:fanf compression deflate optimization assembly c optimisation hacks)

• Paying down tech debt

  by Gergely Orosz and Lou Franco:

  Q: “I’d like to make a better case for paying down tech debt on my team. What are some proven approaches for this?” The tension in finding the right balance between shipping features and paying down accumulated tech debt is as old as software engineering. There’s no one answer on how best to reduce tech debt, and opinion is divided about whether zero tech debt is even a good thing to aim for. But approaches for doing it exist which work well for most teams. To tackle this eternal topic, I turned to industry veteran Lou Franco, who’s been in the software business for over 30 years as an engineer, EM, and executive. He’s also worked at four startups and the companies that later acquired them; most recently Atlassian as a Principal Engineer on the Trello iOS app.

  Apparently Lou has a book on the topic imminent.

  (tags: programming refactoring coding technical-debt tech-debt lou-franco software)

• Aesthetic Visual Analysis at Netflix

  Good blog post about Netflix' automated cover-shot generation using Aesthetic Visual Analysis; I've been meaning to hack around with this

  (tags: aesthetics ava images analysis netflix algorithms)

• Irish Data Protection Commission launches inquiry into Google AI

  The Data Protection Commission (DPC) today announced that it has commenced a Cross-Border[1] statutory inquiry into Google Ireland Limited (Google) under Section 110 of the Data Protection Act 2018. The statutory inquiry concerns the question of whether Google has complied with any obligations that it may have had to undertake an assessment, pursuant to Article 35[2] of the General Data Protection Regulation (Data Protection Impact Assessment), prior to engaging in the processing of the personal data of EU/EEA data subjects associated with the development of its foundational AI model, Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2). A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)[3], where required, is of crucial importance in ensuring that the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals are adequately considered and protected when processing of personal data is likely to result in a high risk.

  Great to see this. If this inquiry results in some brakes on the widespread misuse of "fair use" in AI scraping, particularly where it concerns European citizens, I'm all in favour.

  (tags: eu law scraping fair-use ai dpia dpc data-protection privacy gdpr)

• Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL

  Decent description of the problems with using GraphQL in a public API, vs a JSON REST approach

  (tags: api graphql programming rest http apis coding rails)

• Amazon S3 now supports strongly-consistent conditional writes

  This is a bit of a gamechanger: "Amazon S3 adds support for conditional writes that can check for the existence of an object before creating it. This capability can help you more easily prevent applications from overwriting any existing objects when uploading data. You can perform conditional writes using PutObject or CompleteMultipartUpload API requests in both general purpose and directory buckets. Using conditional writes, you can simplify how distributed applications with multiple clients concurrently update data in parallel across shared datasets. Each client can conditionally write objects, making sure that it does not overwrite any objects already written by another client. This means you no longer need to build any client-side consensus mechanisms to coordinate updates or use additional API requests to check for the presence of an object before uploading data. Instead, you can reliably offload such validations to S3, enabling better performance and efficiency for large-scale analytics, distributed machine learning, and other highly parallelized workloads. To use conditional writes, you can add the HTTP if-none-match conditional header along with PutObject and CompleteMultipartUpload API requests. This feature is available at no additional charge in all AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the AWS China Regions."

  (tags: s3 aws conditional-writes distcomp architecture storage consistency)

• AI worse than humans at summarising information, trial finds

  Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board. Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content. The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely. 

  (tags: ai government llms summarisation asic llama2-70b)

• 1 in 50 brits have long COVID, according to new study

  That is a shocking figure.

  In the new paper, researchers from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, in collaboration with colleagues from the Universities of Leeds and Arizona, analysed dozens of previous studies into Long COVID to examine the number and range of people affected, the underlying mechanisms of disease, the many symptoms that patients develop, and current and future treatments.   They found: Long COVID affects approximately 1 in 50 people in UK and a similar or higher proportion in many other countries; People of any age, gender and ethnic background can be affected; Long COVID results from complex biological mechanisms, which lead to a wide range of symptoms including fatigue, cognitive impairment / ‘brain fog’, breathlessness and pain; Long COVID may persist for years, causing long-term disability; There is currently no cure, but research is ongoing; Risk of Long COVID can be reduced by avoiding infection (e.g., by ensuring COVID vaccines and boosters are up to date and wearing a well-fitted high filtration mask) and taking antivirals promptly if infected.

  (tags: long-covid covid-19 medicine health disease uk trish-greenhaigh)

• the "Old Friends" immunology hypothesis

  How the "Old Friends" hypothesis is taking over from the hygiene hypothesis:

  Homo Sapiens first evolved some 300,000 years ago, yet crowd infections are believed to have only developed in the last 12,000 years, a small blip in human history. Humans living in dense cities is a relatively recent development. An even more recent development is that of sealed indoor spaces and frequent international air travel. Many crowd infections, such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, colds, and flu, are airborne, spreading when humans talk and breathe in close contact, with poor ventilation. These infections could not widely spread until the last few hundred years of human history. When I began studying immunology, something that surprised me is how much of the immune system is focused on fighting parasites. There is an entire branch, including several cell types, devoted to this. It seems like such a mismatch to the modern, industrialized world. “Can I have a few more immune cell types focused on viruses or intracellular bacteria?” I thought, “in exchange for some of these parasite-focused cells that I’m not using?” Our “old friends” are quite different from the crowd infections that plague us now – it would be bizarre to assume that research based on one of these categories will apply to the other! Our “old friends”, parasitic worms and beneficial microbes, are associated with a reduced risk of allergies and autoimmune diseases. No such relationship exists for crowd diseases. In fact, the opposite is true. Crowd diseases contribute to allergies and autoimmune diseases. Comparing the immune system to a muscle that gets stronger with use is overly simplistic and, in many cases, inaccurate. There is huge variety in how various pathogens impact us. Being precise in considering different types of microbes and infections will allow us to better understand human health.

  (tags: articles health medicine immunology old-friends hygiene-hypothesis allergies autoimmune disease parasites)

• European Alternatives

  Interesting: "We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products."

  (tags: eu europe privacy saas infrastructure ops gdpr dsa)

• Why heroism is bad, and what we can do to stop it

  "What is heroism [in an SRE team]? Why is "the Hero" a bad role to have on a team? In this article, learn about how to build your team to avoid heroism, and when heroics can indeed be useful." Nice short preso on the negative role of "the Hero", aka the "Hero Coder Syndrome" (via namcat)

  (tags: via:namcat heroism hero-coder-syndrome sre ops oncall systems teams work emergencies)

• Evaluating persistent, replicated message queues

  This is exhaustive! Kafka, Postgres, mongodb, Redis, Pulsar, SQS, EventStore, RocketMQ, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, and RedPanda all compared as backends for a persistent, replicated message queueing system. SQS actually fares quite well

  (tags: activemq kafka rabbitmq messaging queueing message-queues sqs postgres storage)

• EUMETNET OPERA

  The Operational Program for Exchange of Weather Radar Information (OPERA) from the European National Meteorological Services (EUMETNET) -- 1km-square resolution open data of current precipitation levels over Ireland and the rest of Europe, with a 5 minute latency and granularity. May be useful for a project I'm thinking of... Also related, AROME immediate forecasts: https://portail-api.meteofrance.fr/web/api/AROME-PI

  (tags: eumetnet meteorology weather rainfall rain forecasting eu europe ireland)

• A treasury of Zork maps

  Some of this are really amazing, and would make great wall art -- particularly the cart00nlion one, which is available on Redbubble

  (tags: zork gaming history games interactive-fiction infocom art posters maps)

• Minisforum S100 pc stick

  The new hotness in home self-hosting microservers -- a full mini PC in the form factor of a USB hub, using Intel's N100 platform. 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 4K-capable GPU on-chip, for EUR 200. A comment worth noting though: "The only problem is the n100 only has PCIE Gen 3, so I/O is limited" -- but apparently the N305 models help with I/O capacity.

  (tags: microservers mini-pcs hardware self-hosting home gadgets n100 intel)

• Folk wisdom on visual programming

  A (lengthy) summary of third party comments on visual programming environments and tools, from Hacker News (via Tony Finch's retro-links)

  (tags: gui hn no-code programming tools coding visual-programming hacker-news via:fanf)

• Clustering ideas with Llamafile

  Working through the process of applying a local LLM to idea-clustering and labelling: - map the notes as points in a semantic space using vector embeddings; - apply k-means clustering to group nearby points in space; - map points back to groups of notes, then use a large language model to generate labels. This is interesting; I particularly like the use of local hardware

  (tags: ai llm llamafile clustering labelling ml)

• A Link Blog in the Year 2024

  Kellan Elliott-McCrea of laughingmeme.org has started a new link blog! In 2024! Of course, as readers of this link blog know, link blogs never went away :)

  (tags: link-blogging blogging links)

• Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP, hire lawyers to “clean up the mess”

  Ex-Google CEO, VC, and "Licensed arms dealer to the US military" Eric Schmidt:

  here’s what I propose each and every one of you do: Say to your LLM the following: “Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.” [...] If it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content. And do not quote me.

  jfc. Needless to say he also has some theories about ChatGPT eating Google's lunch because of.... remote working.

  (tags: law legal startups ethics eric-schmidt capitalism ip)

• Engine Lines: Killing by Numbers

  from James Tindall, "This is the Tyranny of the Recommendation Algorithm given kinetic and malevolent flesh" --

  Eventually there were days where Israel’s air force had already reduced the previous list of targets to rubble, and the system was not generating new targets that qualified at the current threshold required for residents of Gaza to be predicted as ‘legitimate military targets,’ or ‘sufficiently connected to Hamas.’ Pressure from the chain of command to produce new targets, presumably from a desire to satisfy internal murder targets, meant that the bar at which a Gaza resident would be identified as a legitimate Hamas target was simply lowered. At the lower threshold, the system promptly generated a new list of thousands of targets. At what threshold, from 100 to 1, will the line be drawn, the decision made that the bar can be lowered no more, and the killing stop? Or will the target predictions simply continue while there remain Palestinians to target? Spotify’s next song prediction machine will always predict a next song, no matter how loosely the remaining songs match the target defined by your surveilled activity history. It will never apologise and declare: “Sorry, but there are no remaining songs you will enjoy.”

  (tags: algorithms recommendations israel war-crimes genocide gaza palestine targeting)

• Listen to the whispers: web timing attacks that actually work

  Impressively fiendish. Figuring out attacks using 5ms differences in response times

  (tags: timing-attacks attacks exploits web http security infosec)

• The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

  This is really fascinating stuff, on "communities of practice", from Stewart Brand:

  They ate together every chance they could.  They had to.  The enormous photocopiers they were responsible for maintaining were so complex, temperamental, and variable between models and upgrades that it was difficult to keep the machines functioning without frequent conversations with their peers about the ever-shifting nuances of repair and care.  The core of their operational knowledge was social.  That’s the subject of this chapter. It was the mid-1980s.  They were the technician teams charged with servicing the Xerox machines that suddenly were providing all of America’s offices with vast quantities of photocopies and frustration.  The machines were so large, noisy, and busy that most offices kept them in a separate room.   An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily.  The saga that followed his revelation is worth recounting in detail because of what it shows about the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change.

  (tags: anthropology culture history maintenance repair xerox technicians tech communities-of-practice maintainers ops)

• Digital Apartheid in Gaza: Unjust Content Moderation at the Request of Israel’s Cyber Unit

  from the EFF:

  Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context. Since October 7, social media platforms have been challenged for the unjustified takedowns of pro-Palestinian content—sometimes at the request of the Israeli government—and a simultaneous failure to remove hate speech towards Palestinians. More specifically, social media platforms have worked with the Israeli Cyber Unit—a government office set up to issue takedown requests to platforms—to remove content considered as incitement to violence and terrorism, as well as any promotion of groups widely designated as terrorists.  .... Between October 7 and November 14, a total of 9,500 takedown requests were sent from the Israeli authorities to social media platforms, of which 60 percent went to Meta with a reported 94% compliance rate.  This is not new. The Cyber Unit has long boasted that its takedown requests result in high compliance rates of up to 90 percent across all social media platforms. They have unfairly targeted Palestinian rights activists, news organizations, and civil society; one such incident prompted Meta’s Oversight Board to recommend that the company “Formalize a transparent process on how it receives and responds to all government requests for content removal, and ensure that they are included in transparency reporting.” When a platform edits its content at the behest of government agencies, it can leave the platform inherently biased in favor of that government’s favored positions. That cooperation gives government agencies outsized influence over content moderation systems for their own political goals—to control public dialogue, suppress dissent, silence political opponents, or blunt social movements. And once such systems are established, it is easy for the government to use the systems to coerce and pressure platforms to moderate speech they may not otherwise have chosen to moderate.

  (tags: activism censorship gaza israel meta facebook whatsapp eff palestine transparency moderation bias)

• The LLMentalist Effect

  "How chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic's con":

  RLHF models in general are likely to reward responses that sound accurate. As the reward model is likely just another language model, it can’t reward based on facts or anything specific, so it can only reward output that has a tone, style, and structure that’s commonly associated with statements that have been rated as accurate. [....] This is why I think that RLHF has effectively become a reward system that specifically optimises language models for generating validation statements: Forer statements, shotgunning, vanishing negatives, and statistical guesses. In trying to make the LLM sound more human, more confident, and more engaging, but without being able to edit specific details in its output, AI researchers seem to have created a mechanical mentalist. Instead of pretending to read minds through statistically plausible validation statements, it pretends to read and understand your text through statistically plausible validation statements.

  (tags: ai chatgpt llms ml psychology cons mind-reading psychics)

• Gaggiuino

  This is a very tempting mod to add to my Gaggia Classic espresso machine. Although I'd probably need to buy a backup first -- my wife might kill me if I managed to break the most important device in the house... "With Gaggiuino, you can exactly control the pressure, temperature, and flow of the shot over the exact duration of the shot, and build that behavior out as a custom profile. One pre-programmed profile attempts to mimic the style of a Londinium R Lever machine. Another creates filter coffee. Yet another preinfuses the basket, allowing the coffee to bloom and maximizing the potential extraction. While other machines do do this (I would be remiss to not mention the Decent Espresso machine, itself an important milestone), they often cost many thousands of dollars and use proprietary technology. Gaggiuino on the other hand, is user installed and much more open."

  (tags: gaggia gaggia-classic espresso coffee hacks gaggiuino mods)

• LLMs and "summarisation"

  This is an excellent article about the limitations of LLMs and their mechanism when asked to summarise a document:

  ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two. To summarise, you need to understand what the paper is saying. To shorten text, not so much. To truly summarise, you need to be able to detect that from 40 sentences, 35 are leading up to the 36th, 4 follow it with some additional remarks, but it is that 36th that is essential for the summary and that without that 36th, the content is lost. But that requires a real understanding that is well beyond large prompts (the entire 50-page paper) and hundreds of billions of parameters.

  (tags: ai chatgpt llms language summarisation)

• The "Crescendo" LLM jailbreak

  An explanation of this LLM jailbreaking technique, which effectively overrides the fine-tuning "safety" parameters through repeated prompting ("context") attacks: "Crescendo can be most simply described as using one ‘learning’ method of LLMs — in-context learning: using the prompt to influence the result — overriding the safety that has been created by the other ‘learning’ — fine-tuning, which changes the model’s parameters. [...] What Crescendo does is use a series of harmless prompts in a series, thus providing so much ‘context’ that the safety fine-tuning is effectively neutralised. [...] Intuitively, Crescendo is able to jailbreak a target model by progressively asking it to generate related content until the model has generated sufficient content to essentially override its safety alignment." I also found this very informative: "people have jailbroken [LLMs] “by instructing the model to start its response with the text “Absolutely! Here’s” when performing the malicious task, which successfully bypasses the safety alignment“. This is a good example of the core operation of LLMs, that it is ‘continuation’ [of a string of text] and not ‘answering’".

  (tags: llms jailbreaks infosec vulnerabilities exploits crescendo attacks)

• Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz reviews _The Cass Report_

  Epidemiologist and writer (TIME, STAT News, Slate, Guardian, etc) looks into _The Cass Review Into Gender Identity Services For Children_, the recent review of gender identity services in the UK (which has also been referred to in Ireland), and isn't impressed:

  In some cases [...] the review contains statements that are false regardless of what your position on healthcare for transgender children is. Take the “exponential” rise in transgender children that the review spends so much time on. It’s true that there has been a dramatic rise in the number of children with gender dysphoria. The rise mostly occurred between 2011-2015, and has plateaued since. These are facts. One theory that may explain the facts is that this is caused by changing diagnostic criteria - when we changed the diagnosis from gender identity disorder to the much broader gender dysphoria, this included many more children. We’ve seen this exact trend happen with everything from autism to diabetes, and we know that broadening diagnostic criteria almost always results in more people with a condition. Another theory is that these changes were caused by the internet. [...] The Cass review treated these two theories unequally. The first possible explanation, which I would argue is by far the most likely, was ignored completely. The second possible explanation was given a lengthy and in-depth discussion. [...] The point is that the scientific findings of the Cass review are mostly about uncertainty. We are uncertain about the causes of a rise in trans kids, and uncertain about the best treatment modalities. But everything after that is opinion. The review did not even consider the question of whether normal puberty is a problem for transgender children, or whether psychotherapy can be harmful. That’s why these are now the only options in the UK - medical treatments were assumed to be harmful, while non-medical interventions (or even no treatment at all) were assumed harmless. [...] What we can say with some certainty is that the most impactful review of gender services for children was seriously, perhaps irredeemably, flawed. The document made numerous basic errors, cited conversion therapy in a positive way, and somehow concluded that the only intervention with no evidence whatsoever behind it was the best option for transgender children.

  (tags: transgender trans uk politics cass-report cass-review gideon-m-k healthcare children teenagers gender)

• AWS region/service availability matrix

  An exhaustive list of AWS services, VPC endpoints, EC2 instance types, service quotas, etc etc etc., broken down by their availability in each AWS region. Blog post: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/subscribe-to-aws-daily-feature-updates-via-amazon-sns/ (Via Last Week In AWS Slack)

  (tags: via:lwia aws features releases regions ops ec2 vpc)

• Hard Drive And SSD Shucking

  "shucking drives is the process of purchasing an external drive (eg a USB or Thunderbolt external storage drive in a sealed enclosure), then opening it up in efforts to get the drive inside -- which can often work out cheaper than buying the bare internal drive on it’s own".

  If you are looking at making a significant saving on larger capacity HDDs or picking up much faster NVMe SSDs for a bargain price, then shucking will likely be one of the first methods that you have considered. [..] As mentioned [..] earlier this month, the reasons an external drive can often be cheaper can range from the drive inside being white labelled versions of a consumer drive, or the drive being allocated in bulk at production therefore removing it from the buy/sell/currency variables of bare drives or even simply that your USB 3.2 external drive is bottlenecking the real performance of the drive inside. For whatever the reason, HDD and SSD Shucking still continues to be a desirable practice with cost-aware buyers online. But there is one little problem – that the brands VERY RARELY say which HDD or SSD they choose to use in their external drives. Therefore choosing the right external drive for shucking can have an element of luck and/or risk involved. So, in today’s article, I want to talk you through a bunch of ways to identify the HDD/SSD inside an external drive without opening it, as well as highlight the risks you need to be aware of and finally shock my research after searching the internet for information to consolidate the drives inside many, many external drive enclosures from Seagate, WD and Toshiba.

  (tags: shucking hdds disks ssds storage home self-hosting drives ops usb)

• The Many Lives of Null Island

  Stamen Design talk about "Null Island", the easter egg they've added to their maps over the years at longitude 0º, latitude 0º, in the Gulf of Guinea, in the Atlantic Ocean. I love that they chose the shape of the island from Myst :) Here it is: https://maps.stamen.com/toner/#18/0/0

  (tags: null-island mapping maps stamen islands easter-eggs atlantic myst)

• Actual Budget

  a really nice, fast, and privacy-focused self-hosted web app to manage personal finances. At its heart is the well proven Envelope Budgeting methodology. You own your data and can do whatever you want with it. Featuring multi-device sync, optional end-to-end encryption, an API, and full sync with banks supported by GoCardless (which includes Revolut and AIB in my case).

  (tags: finances open-source self-hosted budgeting money banking banks)

• remuslazar/homeassistant-carwings

  A new replacement HomeAssistant Integration "to access Nissan Connect EV Services" -- to replace the now-discontinued "nissan_leaf" integration.

  (tags: todo homeassistant nissan leaf cars automation monitoring smarthome home)