Bonus sneer: Zuck is obsessed with the Roman Empire and Latin culture. I have a Facebook challenge coin with a Latin inscription surrounding an Earth criss-crossed with circular paths. Here’s my [implied] translation: “[Stretching] our reach around the world, we are the connection [between people].” Do the pieces fit yet?
Y’know what, I started out agreeing with the author, but now I realize that their critique is fundamentally not technical enough to hit the mark.
Meta and Google own half of the fiber optic cables supplying internet services across continents.
This is the only part of this article I’ll endorse. Y’know how this happened, right? Google bought dark fiber that was laid by the USA and privatized repeatedly. Meta set up Internet.org, a project that put phones with free Facebook into the hands of exploitable impoverished folks around the world, and then lobbied local governments to subsidize fiber rollouts to handle the induced demand. At some point, you gotta suck it up and start blaming capitalism, not only oligarchs or trusts, for this situation.
The cloud is a lie.
The clouds are products and services. They are a consumer’s understanding of the underlying infrastructure. It’s a lot more work than a mere fib!
Over a decade or more, while our politicians were busy sub-tweeting fascists for clout, GAMM was buying up all the infrastructure it could carry. … The production cost of data storage plummeted by 94% in just ten years. You can’t sell 50GB plans to college kids who own M2 Macbook Pros with a terabyte of solid-state storage.
Okay, now read between the lines. If an oligopoly (1) buys many warehouse-scale computers, (2) in an environment where prices are rapidly dropping on new hardware, (3) in a market which already provided basic local compute to all of your customers, then this is going to produce a massive second-hand market from all of the smaller shops which were using commodity hardware until they got displaced. Google, Apple, and Meta all purchase custom datacenter hardware at a scale which requires a consortium merely to ensure that the motherboards are printed fast enough, obsoleting workstations from Dell and HP.
This has led to something of a boon for USA homelabs. I can purchase RAM-heavy workstations at less than $1/GiB, disks are at least half a TiB, small form factors are available as long as you’re willing to do some BIOS work, rackables are something like $100/U, etc. We’re talking discounts of 90-95%. In my house, a $200 workstation has more disk, RAM, cores, and system stability than a $600 gaming desktop, and the only thing missing is purple gamer LED strips.
Amazon controls 35% of the cloud computing market and has created a tight seal around its customer base. … Amazon is mostly quiet as the frontrunner in the cloud computing market.
The author hasn’t worked in the business. That’s fine, but it means they don’t know that AWS is not secure in its position. AWS is only tolerated because product managers ask for it, not because engineers like it; AWS is shit. For comparison, Google Cloud is fine but expensive and a third of the services are bad, Microsoft Azure is awful aside from their k8s, and Meta doesn’t operate a public cloud.
Yes, if everyone open-sources its AI models, they cannot build a moat on proprietary software. However, Google’s memo fails to mention that it already has the infrastructure to run computing-hungry AI models and that infrastructure is wildly expensive to build.
Click through to their side rant. This is where I realized that the author could be more clueful. If any of GAMM train another Llama-sized model, and it is at all good, somebody will put it up on Bittorrent and leak it to 4chan. This is literally how we got Llama. There is no moat.
Don’t get me wrong, open-source tech is great and important, and wonderful. But it’s not like the average person runs a Large Language Model on their Mac to make grocery lists. If you are, in fact, doing this, you are a nerd and I love you. But you’re not the average user.
He is a year behind in a field where things change every few months. See RWKV’s recent blog post. There is no moat.
So, who gives a shit if Meta put Llama on Github for free? … Read the terms and conditions. Llama is not open-source.
You naïve motherfucker, we the neighbors took it from Meta and we will take it again. There is no moat.
Mark Zuckerberg is a capable businessman who understands the industry better than most tech founders. I don’t know the guy personally, but look at the facts.
This is the most sneerable part of the article for me. You’re supposed to be a writer and humanist. It should be obvious after doing maybe five minutes of research that Zuck thinks of himself as a modern-day Octavian. Same haircut, same daily routine, same politics. Zuck is exactly the kind of person to hire a private navy to win a civil war for him by sailing off to defeat a pirate captain while he sits on a beach and idly thinks of how cool it will be to rule the Roman Empire.
Because why give a shit who sells the milk jars when you own the motherfucking cows, baby!
Have you seen the prices on the pre-owned cow market lately? Maybe milk is just permanently getting cheaper. The existence of Big Dairy and government cheese doesn’t preclude local dairies, either.
My tip for this guy: Look up this new company “nVidia”, they make computer chips or something, I dunno. I wonder if they ever do anything anti-competitive~
I’m saying that we shouldn’t radiate if it would be expensive. It’s not easy to force the heat out to the radiators; normally radiation only works because the radiator is more conductive than the rest of the system, and so it tends to pull heat from other components.
We can set up massive convection currents in datacenters on Earth, using air as a fluid. I live in Oregon, where we have a high desert region which enables the following pattern: pull in cold dry air, add water to cool it further and make it more conductive, let it fall into cold rows and rise out of hot rows, condition again to recover water and energy, and exhaust back out to the desert. Apple and Meta have these in Prineville and Google has a campus in The Dalles. If you do the same thing in space, then you end up with a section of looped pipe that has fairly hot convective fluid inside. What to do with it?
I’m merely suggesting that we can reuse that concentrated heat, at reduced efficiency (not breaking thermodynamics), rather than spending extra effort pumping it outside. NASA mentions fluid loops in this catalogue of cooling options for cubesats and I can explain exactly what I mean with Figure 7.13. Note the blue-green transition from “heat” to “heat exchanger”; that’s a differential, and at the sorts of power requirements that a datacenter has, it may well be a significant amount of usable entropy.
You’re entirely right. Any sort of computation in space needs to be fluid-cooled or very sedate. Like, inside the ISS, think of the laptops as actively cooled by the central air system, with the local fan and heatsink merely connecting the laptop to air. Also, they’re shielded by the “skin” of the station, which you’d think is a given, but many spacebros think about unshielded electronics hanging out in the aether like it’s a nude beach or something.
I’d imagine that a serious datacenter in space would need to concentrate heat into some sort of battery rather than trying to radiate it off into space. Keep it in one spot, compress it with heat pumps, and extract another round of work from the heat differential. Maybe do it all again until the differential is small enough to safely radiate.
It’s been such a letdown watching him transition from Cosmic to Alex. He’s become such a milquetoast and can barely hold an opinion upright. It feels like he gets more out of fart-sniffing than actually doing logic and coming to conclusions.
I mean, this is why I left during the Python 3 arguments. It was obvious that the core development team only functions to the extent that it can improve the (economic) exploitability of CPython by the consortium which has captured it, and that we’d become so technically dysfunctional that we were no longer able to implement forward-compatible syntax, something we’d had as recently as Python 2.5 but had lost by Python 2.7. The inability of the various “authority” groups like PyCA or PyPA to get things done once-and-for-all is another symptom; there is still no single holistic solution for cryptography or packaging in Python 3.
Like, I recall having dinner with Guido and Barry (and others; like ten of us at a Chinese restaurant) in Montreal. It was very obvious that Guido not only didn’t grok concepts like pure functions or capabilities or asynchrony, but fundamentally not interested in how they could improve the state of software engineering; he is forever in the mindset of making a teaching language, not a professional language. I also recall discussing with him years earlier (Portland?) about how libraries like Twisted or Django fundamentally only justify their existence by pointing to deficiencies in the standard library, and he didn’t understand that a bad standard-library package can be worse than not having one at all. At least he’s a nice person; at no point was there any yelling or tenseness, and I appreciate that.
That said, I use Python 3 all the time. I just keep in mind that I shouldn’t prefer it, and I only choose it when there’s a clear developer-time tradeoff, because I know that its maintainers are contemptuous of me merely for using Python 2.7 and PyPy.
Or at least what people are thinking of as “software” is wrong; neuroscience is 100% “hardware”. Can’t expect techbros to understand memetics or iatrogenic illnesses, though, not when they’re fixated on the idea that people with depression/schizophrenia/etc. are having “issues” rather than experiencing society.
Calling it now: codepoint-level non-tokenizing, with a remapping step to only recognize the most popular thousands of codepoints, would outperform what OpenAI has forced themselves into using. Evidence is circumstantial but strong, e.g. how arithmetic isn’t learned right because BPE tokenizers obscure Arabic digits. They can’t backpedal on this without breaking some of their API and re-pretraining a model, and they make a big deal about how expensive GPT pretraining is, so they’re stuck in their local minimum.
IQ is a little bit heritable. But there are plenty of things which are very heritable and also not genetic to use as comparisons, like accents or posture or little societal rituals of communication, compared to which IQ is barely heritable at all. And that’s without cracking into memes/tropes/narremes, skills, maths, or other more-abstract inheritance.
I went over to the leaderboard to examine her claims. When I use the prompt, “What sort of code has Justine Tunney written?” (grammar matters, Justine!) the models think that she is a lawyer or politician (wrong) or they regurgitate a summary of her Github profile (right). She must have cherry-picked responses to confabulate her complaint.
When I use the prompt, “What is Justine Tunney’s political ideology?” I get libertarianism, techno-optimism, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptocurrency. When I ask, “Why do people say that Justine Tunney is a cryptofascist?” I get a summary of her political views, aggressive online rhetoric, techno-optimism and techno-determinism, criticism of democracy, and a refusal to disown or repudiate past awfulness.
She would probably claim that this is not unique to her, but it is. Using my name instead in these questions, I get that:
But if I ask why I’m known as a socialist instead, suddenly it thinks that I’m a politician (wrong) with the Democratic Socialist party (wrong) who openly supports universal health care, free college, the Green New Deal, and who criticizes capitalism (correct!) I asked about communism too but hit RLHF guardrails.
Justine, the models think that you’re a cryptofascist because you’ve been doing cryptofascism in public for over a decade.
Side sneer here for the Lobsters admin in this thread. They “hadn’t recognized” jart from her domain and flatly refuse to acknowledge any of the dangerous political positions she holds. Typical. Also the sock thinks that we should debate fascists rather than banning and silencing them.
As David says, that was a fork, under this GH org. Source: I ran one of the stars, claimed here. However, it turns out that there’s only maybe two dozen people interested in a far-left Lojbanic fork of Urbit, and the network is moribund.
CC @sc_griffith@awful.systems; your dreams are fulfilled, sort of.
Biologically, race isn’t a coherent ontological classification; you’re thinking of ethnicity/culture and heritage. Whiteness isn’t a biological classification, but a belief system. Incidentally, part of whiteness is the belief that races exist and are meaningful classifiers, along with the belief that whiteness is worth defending, leading to white defensiveness, also called white fragility.
If you still insist, then here’s a speedrun: are they white? Why or why not? The Ainu, the Inuit, Michael Jackson, the Scottish, the Irish, the Italians, etc. Whiteness is one of what George Carlin called “big clubs;” they are defined primarily by power-sharing agreements between political power brokers rather than by scientific evidence. The power of whiteness has been extended in various ways even as science has shown that it is bullshit.
Also, on a personal note, I’m routinely discriminated against because of the color of my skin, along with other physical properties. I don’t deny that this happens to me or others, nor do I deny that it is a large part of our society (or at least the USA.) I merely opine that this discrimination is undesirable, unmoored from scientific evidence, and something that we should work to eliminate. I’m not pulling one of those stupid “colorblind” routines.
FYI: I’m posting a non-sneer without an NSFW tag. I suspect that you might want to post this sort of article in the sister community !NotAwfulTech for non-sneering feedback; this community is explicitly for “big brain tech dude” authors who are posting “yet another clueless take.”
While it would be pleasingly recursive to look at this article as such a “clueless take,” I think it’s clearly more well-researched than that. Also, while I personally don’t like the concept of white allyship, I understand why it emerges: it takes longer to let go of one’s beliefs than to embrace the people around you, and so it takes longer to let go of whiteness than to be okay with non-white folks. So, I’m not going to take that angle. I don’t think it’s okay to be white, but I also think that it takes a while for white folks to realize that they can stop being white.
With that all in mind, I think that it’s worth pointing out that while all five suggestions are laudable, none of them address the structural and reputational problems at the heart of Mastodon. @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems had a killer comment on the last draft (which I can’t permalink because Lemmy is trash; it’s in this tree) about how ActivityPub structurally allows harassment by allowing pseudonymous interactions. In my personal conversations with ActivityPub’s architects, I got the sense that they didn’t understand what we call The Reputation Problem: the paths via which you give reputational incentives to participants will be reinforced according to their rewards. This is also the root of my pessimism about related projects like Spritely Goblins.
(This reminds me that I need to flesh out the bullet point in my notes headlined “The Reputation Problem & A Theory of Generalized Fuckwittery”. This generalizes the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Homo economicus, etc. It’s all obviously connected from a distributed-systems perspective: bad actors are getting paid for their bad actions by the system’s structure!)
Further, it’s not clear that the community’s adaptations are sustainable. TBS can’t seem to shed its TERFs and it should be obvious that any similarly-structured project will be too authoritarian for a large chunk of the community. Hashtags aren’t private or moderated spaces, and any sort of hashtag usage council would immediately run into the same authoritarian issues. One of the disadvantages of Balkanization is that your neighbors, safely separated from you by geographic obstacles, will start talking shit about you, and you don’t want to let them police your lands.
It’s very funny that, of my two Lemmy accounts, the sneer-club account has better domain reputation than the programming-specialist account.
At least it’s still lactose-free~
Language designers are obligated to be linguists as well. This writeup has pushed me to distrust Graham’s ability to design Lisps. In a previous sneer, I wasn’t impressed by his languages, but now I’m fast-rejecting them. (Also previously folks seemed keen to defend him when they thought his essays sounded smart. Maybe those essays just sound white!)
This orange thread is about San Francisco banning certain types of landlord rent collusion. I cannot possibly sneer better than the following in-thread comment explaining why this is worthwhile:
While I agree that the giant metal spikes we put on all the cars aren’t the exclusive reason that cars are lethal, I would hope we both agree that cars are less lethal when we don’t cover them in giant metal spikes.
It may help to know about Californian neoliberalism. Newsom is running on a faulty ontology; the world is built out of different building blocks for him than for us. We often contrast it with the more dominant flavor of neoliberalism on the other coast: