Same thing at the company I recently worked at-- a maker of software for car dealerships & manufacturers.
The product marketing mentions AI.
I asked a staff data scientist (has been with company for several years) if AI is used in our products.
"No."
It's quite amazing how pervasive Fraud & pseudo-Fraud is in the American economy. Regulators seem to turn a blind eye to so much of it. A recent example I saw was Food adulteration, with things such as sawdust [0]
To his point, even in the Linux world, DEs have accumulated the bloat of features, animations, complex compositing, front-to-back theming, and other frivolities that have made them large and slow. Not to mention that "flat" theming has somehow consumed everything. Try using an older stacking WM. It is shocking how fast they are and how few resources they use. Their problem is that they're not maintained.
Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean.
Edit: I've already tried tiling WMs and I don't like them. I want a primarily mouse-driven UI. I'm sort of in agreement with the NeXT philosophy there. I primarily use Mint and Cinnamon these days.
I also understand that applications are bloated, but they can be bloated in their own little sandbox instead of creeping out to the rest of the system.
Vice seems to have fallen victim to the increased polarization and agenda-ridden stories that have swept up so many media companies. They used to report on unique angles, find edgy topics to talk about...the last few years they regurgitate the same left-leaning talking points that one can find in any number of other media outlets.
They lost their soul and became what they probably used to hate.
It's unfortunate that this guy was harassed for releasing these uncensored models. It's pretty ironic, for people who are supposedly so concerned about "alignment" and "morality" to threaten others.
"Alignment", as used by most grifters on this train, is a crock of shit. You only need to get so far as the stochastic parrots paper, and there it is in plain language. "reifies older, less-inclusive 'understandings'", "value lock", etc.
Whose understandings? Whose values?
Maybe they should focus on real problems that will result from these technologies instead of some science fiction thought experiments about language models turning the solar system into paperclips, and perhaps less about how the output of some predictions might hurt some feelings.
This view is far too simplistic, and I’m not talking about binary political divisions at all. The point is that the process for resolving content controversies is a political process, as in they are resolved according to (or at least influenced by) the status of the disputing parties within the social hierarchy of Wikipedia editors. There is no “invisible hand” to guide fairness here, and the potential topics of controversy don’t exist along some sort of binary paradigm of potentially opposing views. I also have no idea why you would presume that any controversial topic (let alone all or most of them) would have opposing advocates on equal footing with each other.
There’s plenty of useful information on Wikipedia, but the biggest motivator that drives contributions to its generation and maintenance is the desire to control information. It creates a system for people to promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views. Nearly everybody implicitly understands that this is the nature of the content on Wikipedia, that it is a repository for the biases (whether well informed or not) of the Wikipedia power-editors. Knowledge is incorporated into Wikipedia via a political process, not via merit or rigour (whether or not this process chooses to consider merit or rigour in any particular case). Having your edits included in Wikipedia is a way of exerting power over others, and considering that, it’s not a miracle at that it’s managed to attract an army of passionate contributors. There’s nothing miraculous about people passionately seeking power for themselves.
> So Wales being under attack on Twitter is sad but doesn't necessarily represent "public opinion".
Even before Musk took over twitter was a very specific, very tiny, slice of the English speaking world.
There was a film theory a few months ago which looked at movies and trending on twitter, and dug a little deeper. Twitter for exmaple completely ignored major cultural phenomenon like Yellowstone, but really bigged up stuff the vast majority of the world doesn't care about ("the Snyder cut")
Presumably this applies to pretty much any subject.
One of the main reasons TikTok has been grilled by congress is because of China's stance and willingness to violate any law for their own benefit.
One of those benefits not very commonly understood in America by the general populace is Political Warfare, which China calls the destruction of national will in their own documentation.
The USMC University has an ebook that is freely available that describes what is done, why its important, and its effects. It is a worthwhile read, if you do further research on this know that Bezmenov is not credible; there are much more credible sources, that's not to say what he says is necessarily incorrect, the best deceit weaves truth into lies.
The general gist is they seek to put people into a psychological state of demoralization, in that state you typically polarize into two separate groups.
Apathetic and complacent where you don't react to anything, and the other where you lash out at anything that you perceive or triggers you (through psychological anchoring [using NLP vocabulary], and various form of isolation). The conflict between these three groups (apathetic, violent, rational) allows a smaller number of people to seize power in a destabilization event which is a regime change playbook that most governments have used at one point or another. Historically, the last stage of that playbook involves getting back to a new normal by consolidating, and eliminating detractors (those people that lashed out).
Its subtle, and deceitful, but certain things you just can't give others the benefit of the doubt. Existential threats to your individual identity (which is what's often targeted during propaganda, and political warfare efforts), are one of those things. If its present, the source isn't credible and shouldn't be used regardless of what they say.
P.S. There's also a lawsuit from a TikTok insider that just made headlines recently disclosing how code was in the app to allow CCP backdoor access to US data and amplify or de-amplify narratives according to Communist core values. If there was any question about TikTok's credibility and their narrative that they don't do this; that pretty much seals the deal given everything else assuming of course what was said is factually correct.
They clearly would not have credibility, which would eliminate them as a potential choice in any risk management analysis you might need to do.
It's starting to feel like government "solutions" are aggressively targeting freedoms (for lack of a better word) with the fewest, least-organized defenders rather than any consideration for actual impact.
For example, here in Canada, we recently banned a wide range of window blinds including the very popular top-down bottom-up style (a personal favourite). Why? To save the kids of course. One Canadian child a year was killed, on average, over 30 years.[0] So it's a performative win and, let's be honest, who's going to defend our right to buy and install blinds?
I grew up in a small city and one thing they had was some rich dude who donated a library, and filled the reading room with beautiful statues and paintings which were in the classical style, commissioned completely by himself. This was early 1800s.
Then in the later 1800s the townsfolk decided the paintings and statues were scandalous because they had nudes, so they painted over the breasts and genitals, and covered over the statues with togas / cloths.
Luckily in modern times it was easy to remove the cloths, but unfortunately the paintings are ruined. The cover-job was done poorly and the paintings have an off-color paint on it that looks wrong. There have been talks to fix it but I don’t think anything has been done.
My point is that, the desire to censor prior art that disagrees with fad-interpretations of what is taboo and scandalous, will certainly be looked at in a few decades as a very weird and Victorian era. Definitely should not re-cut movies to be “safe” or whatever.
As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!
I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four languages, I always feel as if I'm lacking a certain level of expertise in each one. I wish I only needed to speak one language, saving my mental capacity for other things. Constantly juggling languages doesn't help.
The main benefit of knowing multiple languages in everyday life is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.
Moreover, all my friends from my country also speak four languages. Unfortunately, I don't hear of people from Moldova faring much better than others.
*My mother tongue is Romanian, but everyone in Moldova also speaks Russian (due to the Soviet past). At school, I learned French and later studied in France. I picked up English mainly through computers and the internet. Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn. I don't feel any advantage in learning a new language either.
I would gladly trade Russian and French over knowing Dutch right now ;o) There are months when I don't speak those two so they are of little use for me anymore.
Professional-managerial class. Originally it was a term in Marxist and paleoconservative analysis to refer to an emerging class of workers who do not own the means of production (and hence are not "capital" per se) but have ended up de facto doing all the management of capital because of the distributed power and ownership structures endemic to modern society (and so are not quite the proletariat either). Colloquially (as the parent is using it) it is used derisively to refer to busybody white-collar workers who produce nothing of value and seem to exist only to further bureaucratic obstruction.
> I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people.
In December 2014, Scott posted a comment [0] in a discussion on his blog about how, as an adolescent, he had struggled greatly with anxiety issues, and how he believed that some messages some feminists were broadcasting had contributed to his mental health problems. And in response, a huge number of online feminists decided to publicly denounce him in a massive pile-on; Amanda Marcotte's contribution is representative [1]
Ever since then, some "woke" people have been convinced that he's a "bad person". And he's said other things to upset them since, e.g. publicly disagreeing with proposals that his field (quantum computing) abandon some of its technical terminology ("quantum supremacy"), which some claim "makes women and minorities uncomfortable in our field" [2]
So yes, Scott really is on the receiving end of a lot of online hate from certain people, and it has never stopped–including trolling campaigns against his blog [3], demands sent to his department that he be fired/disciplined, etc. And Scott calls the people behind this campaign against him "woke" (or even, as he does in this blog entry, "wokesters"). I know a lot of people have an allergy to that word, but can you see how it makes sense from his perspective? Why shouldn't he use it?
> covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it.
That produces kids that don't read, in the normal sense of the word; rather, they synthesize a text based on guesswork, and confidently declare that it says what it doesn't say. My daughter is a primary teacher, and has complained about this. It happens.
It seems completely barmy, to me.
Incidentally, it sounds a lot like what ChatGPT does.
Red Hat early on invested in understanding the needs of the different industry verticals they were trying to sell into and made sure their products could meet things such as compliance and audit requirements of differing sectors. They developed guides on how to deploy their products in a manner which met those requirements and their professional services engineers understood not just Red Hat products but the specific needs of differing sectors. This is how I saw them winning enterprise customers over larger established players in the early 2000s. Even today most opensource businesses don't do this to the extent Red Hat was in the early 2000s.
I suspect targeted ads are a part of the phenomenon the article is talking about.
Since targeted ads got so cheap, tiny little businesses could buy super targeted social media ads for less money than they could selling their products wholesale at a store. Net result is that they can flood social media with targeted ads for some geoarbitraged thing that tiny startup found on AliExpress decided to sell DTC, and end run around consumer wholesaling and all rigamarole involved there.
The barrier to entry for that is super low. All you really need to be good at then is matchmaking some real niche product you found on Alibaba to a real niche consumer need.
Net result: lower prices, greater net profit for the company, tons of new entries to the game of social media enabled DTC.
I actually worked on an App for a company that made home appliances. Originally they made everything local, so direct App to Washing machine communication. They had a really hard time with that approach for a number of reasons.
The first, and most obvious, reason is that getting your phone and (all) your appliances on the same network is non-trivial. Especially for a novice user. Sometimes the washing machine is in the basement and can't connect to your WiFi. Or maybe you're simply outside your house in your car and can't connect to your local network. The cloud approach solves this.
The other, not so obvious reason, is that the manufacturer made a ton of devices. Some of them a decade old, with very rudimentary interfaces. Originally the App had to handle special cases and workarounds for dozens of devices. This became a problem once they tried to port it to multiple platforms. For Android and iPhone they started with a shared C++ library. But that quickly became a problem, once they wanted to interface with popular home network and automation solutions.
To solve all this they decided to build a cloud API that would resolve all these problems in one go. A single, unified API with a modern HTTP interface and available via the internet. That solves the workaround and compatability issues by having a single abstraction layer (instead of one per app). It solves the "on the go" problem when you're not in you local wifi. It enables you to control devices outside your home network in a true IoT sense.
I totally agree with you that, if you're not in an urban environment with good internet and cell coverage, the advantages dwindle away. Also, of course, there is the privacy concern that is very real. At the end of the day the cloud solution is selected for the same reason companies select Electron. It saves development time and is very easy for the average end user to use. At the expense of performance and privacy.
I stumbled across an 1874 editorial rewvise war between the British authors and American publisher of Chamber's Encyclopaedia, which provides rare insight into the disagreements over and politicisation of information and its dissemination.
Shills/trolls pretty much have the freedom to do whatever they want on Reddit. Vote manipulation and simulated conversations between groups trying to steer the discussion seem to be fully sanctioned by the mods and admins.
If you look at the comment history of the accounts involved, there's often a pattern of accounts that used to only discuss US sports teams before going dormant for a year or more and coming back with a strong interest in defending some corporate or government entity 24/7.
Moderators and users on Reddit say they've seen coordinated activity on the site by pro-China accounts. "The pro-CCP effort vastly overshadows any operation by the Russians,” one person with insight into moderation practices told us.
China expert Bill Bishop said the activity fits with the Party leadership's emphasis on controlling the discourse about China outside of the country. He said said it’s hard to know which accounts are simply patriotic Chinese people, and which might be government actors.
We obtained a list of accounts banned frm r/geopolitics for what was described as pro-China trolling or related behavior. Some were burner accounts created just for the purpose of weighing in on China threads. Others seemed to be genuine Chinese ex-pats studying or working abroad
r/geopolitics mods implemented new rules as a result.
"We've had to implement a rule that prohibits posts from accounts less than 20 days old. This has helped to an extent but these redditors seem to be very patient and disciplined, and can ‘wait out’ the 20-day requirement.”
> By his own account, Lokey was writing as many as fifteen posts a day, among them most of the political pieces. The gig had a certain formula, he told Bloomberg: “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” For Zero Hedge, Syria was a special obsession, a sign of the essential strength of authoritarian regimes and the weakness of democracies.
ZH says he's a disgruntled employee, but there's at least some evidence it's more than "they hate everyone".
So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source?
If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as a bonus who may fork your core themselves).
I remember from a undergrad class reading Google's system design papers, that they publish only the top-level architecture for core systems they use, and only after 3-5 years of use when they have moved on to a better system. After all this (Docker/Redis/Elastic/Nginx), I think that might be the best path forward. You can provide the benefits of open-source and recognition for the architects, but not lose your competitive advantage. Open-sourcing your core product seems too idealistic.
The name of this article is a bit misleading (as other commentators stated), but the growing suicide rate is troubling. I think the part where employees feel like robots is a huge part of the problem. It's hard to make ends meet in a rough economy and a lot of people don't believe they have any say in current democratic process, one vote is what you get but the whole management of the system is hardly controlled by the electorate. There's a huge feeling of hopelessness, Mark Fisher in "Capitalist realism" wrote how youth fails to cope with the prospect of future that a big part of them will have to do a job they won't find satisfaction in. Some of us can land truly great positions but the suicide rates show a huge population living under distress.
Funny that the article doesn't once mention unions as a factor that drives up cost. It's almost as if attacks on unions for making public works slow and expensive are disingenuous.
> Today’s computers can do amazing things, but they sort of miss out on the whole human user experience bit. Maybe they need to go back to basic ;-)
It's partly because in 8-bit computers the programming environment was the first thing you were exposed to. You weren't force to program though, you could limit yourself to LOAD "*",8 - but also you were free to experiment with more commands if you wanted to.
In newer computers, the programming interface was replaced by something else, and then completely removed from the system.
> I for one, am glad the majority can't just decide what the taxes are.
The majority are those who work and create wealth. The minority are the heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those who work. It is an old idea, James Madison wrote the initial draft of the US Constitution and said it was meant "to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority".
Hand outs and taking people's money at the point of a gun is what the heirs do from those who work and create wealth. Larry Page talks about how the police encircled the auto plant his hammer-armed grandfather was on strike at.
"By the time your (sic) 30, it's mostly what you did in life that got you there" - sure like Trump and his small million dollar loan from his dad, W. Bush and his drinking and failed businesses before a government deal for a sports stadium. We see these self made by 30 men as our recent presidents.
We have income earned by labor, and "income" expropriated as a Rentier - rent, interest, profit. We know this as workers pay higher taxes on their earned income than heirs do for their unearned income.
The parasitism is by the heirs who do not work upon us who do work. It has not much to do with money or material - it is a relationship - the expropriation by the heir of the surplus labor time of the worker.
That’s probably because it’s antithetical to current economic and political thought (free global trade is an unalloyed good). Of course this has an impact. It’s the converse of the rising foreign economy where the local worker has seen their incomes rise due to export driven economics. They’re exporting their labor, we’re importing to complement our labor and that has placed negative pressure on wages.
It’s clearly seen in farm workers. Large agri businesses say that unless they have cheap imported labor, they can’t afford workers. But that does not stand. In their current economic model cheap labor is necessary, but it’s not inherently necessary.
The late 1990s to early 2000s anti-WTO leftists understood this, Perot understood this, but they were vanquished by non labor interests.
The product marketing mentions AI.
I asked a staff data scientist (has been with company for several years) if AI is used in our products.
"No."
It's quite amazing how pervasive Fraud & pseudo-Fraud is in the American economy. Regulators seem to turn a blind eye to so much of it. A recent example I saw was Food adulteration, with things such as sawdust [0]
[0] "31 Foods You're Eating That Contain Sawdust" https://www.prevention.com/food-nutrition/healthy-eating/a20...