Posted on 2nd of May 2023
| 158 words‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers
of
misinformation
Hinton, 75, said he quit to speak freely about the dangers of AI,
and in part regrets his contribution to the field. He was brought on
by Google a decade ago to help develop the company’s AI technology,
and the approach he pioneered led the way for current systems such
as ChatGPT. […]
Hinton’s concern in the short term is something that has already
become a reality – people will not be able to discern what is true
any more with AI-generated photos, videos and text flooding the
internet.
The recent upgrades to image generators such as Midjourney mean
people can now produce photo-realistic images – one such image of
Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer coat went viral in March.
Hinton was also concerned that AI will eventually replace jobs like
paralegals, personal assistants and other “drudge work”, and
potentially more in the future.
Posted on 6th of April 2023
| 233 wordscries in corporate…
“Difficult” labour laws make it hard for corporations to fire people.
Voluntary departures and individual settlements are
favoured
In the US, companies can announce widespread job cuts and let go of
hundreds if not thousands of workers within months — and many have.
Meanwhile, in Europe, mass layoffs among tech companies have stalled
because of labor protections that make it virtually impossible to
dismiss people in some countries without prior consultations with
employee interest groups. […]
Both in France and Germany, where labor laws are among the strongest
in the EU, Google is currently in negotiations with works councils —
company-specific groups whose elected employee representatives
negotiate with management about workforce issues, according to a
person familiar with the matter. By law, companies are required to
bargain with these councils before implementing layoffs — a
sometimes lengthy process that includes information gathering,
negotiations and the possibility of recourse. […]
While the different standards of treatment have not created friction
among Google employees spread around the world, “people have
realized the way things happen in the US versus France and Germany”
are different, says Parul Koul, executive chair of the Alphabet
Workers Union and a software engineer at Google based in New York.
“It is inspiring for people in the US to see things are different in
other places – it’s a blueprint for what people can fight for,” they
added.
Posted on 4th of April 2023
| 558 wordsPretty technical month in my reading this time.
Liz Rice: Container Security
I got free copies of this book and the couple of next books from an
event so I decided to read them through due to how close they are to
my profession. While working as a plumber, container security tends
to be a very common topic and also topic that I’m very interested
in. Rice is pretty popular public figure in the “cloud native” world
who I’ve seen to give great talks about wonderful topics in the
past, which made me quite excited about this book.
Generally speaking book itself was good. It offered a nice and
relatively brief overview of various techniques that are involved in
container security and also giving a nice understanding of
containers itself. Personally, I probably would’ve wanted it to be
slightly more practical, but nonetheless, I think it’s a great tech
book addition to many bookshelves.
Liz Rice: Learning eBPF
Another book from Rice. I’ve been big fan of eBPF for many years so
I was quite excited about this one also. Timing of receiving this
book was great since I was just about to give a talk on how me and
my colleagues at my current employer have used eBPF based
technologies in our day-to-day work at Isovalent’s (creators of
eBPF) Cilium (Kubernetes CNI) Workshop that we were hosting in
Berlin.
I have been already working quite a bit Linux Kernel and eBPF before
so there wasn’t necessarily that much new stuff from the book but
there were some and lots of refreshers so I really enjoyed it.
eBPF is also a topic quite dear to me, so I already have some posts
about in the woodshed. So expect more in that front from me.
John Rosso et al: Production Kubernetes
This was the last book that I got for free and was quite interested
about it too. Despite working with production Kubernetes for quite a
few years already, I wanted to read this to see if I could learn
some new stuff from it. Overall, I think it’s a great book if you
happen to work with Kubernetes. For me, most of the stuff was
something that I knew already from using Kubernetes for many year,
but still I think it offers a great “introduction” to how to operate
Kubernetes in production.
John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity
I’ve had this book on my library for many years but I just haven’t
been able to start reading. Especially in tech, simplicity is
something that tends to by highly valued, and for a reason. While
this book applied mainly to design of various products etc., Maeda
himself comes from technical background, so lots of the stuff he
writes, can be applied to computer science and programming. I think
it was a great book!
E.M. Foster: The Machine Stops (reread)
I have read this sci-fi short-story for many times already and I
love it every time. It’s a very psychedelic book to read in 2020s.
Book itself was written in 1909, but somehow even back then Foster
was able to depict a future where humans are addicted to technology.
Very short book but great! I think I originally found it from some
Jaron Lanier’s talk about social media so this book made my almost
luddite stance towards tech even stronger.
Posted on 26th of March 2023
| 358 wordsUtah has become the first US state to require social media firms get
parental consent for children to use their apps and verify users are
at least 18.
The bills will give parents full access to their children’s online
accounts, including posts and private messages. The move comes
amidst heightened concern over the impact of social media on
children’s mental health. Under the measures enacted on Thursday, a
parent or guardian’s explicit consent will be needed before children
can create accounts on apps such Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
I feel that most of us can agree that social media has had a very bad
impact on our youth and adults alike. Mental health issues have risen
linearly with the usage of social media. People’s attention span has
decreased constantly due to the nature of the applications and how
they grab your attention. Of course, what I’m referring here is Big
Tech social media. So in many ways, banning social media would be a
good idea.
But this is dangerous game US is playing. When you’re proposing
something like this, the proposal can be easily applied to many other
online communities that can be tremendously helpful for many. Great
example for something like this is various LGBT communities online
which might be the only safe haven for many, especially those living
under strict regime or conservative surroundings. Can this sort of
bill also ban those? Will teenagers using these sort of “social
medias” be outed then?
Similar concerns are raised by Common Sense Media:
But Common Sense Media and other advocacy groups warned some parts
of the new legislation could put children at risk.
Ari Z Cohn, a free speech lawyer for TechFreedom, said the bill
posed “significant free speech problems”.
“There are so many children who might be in abusive households,” he
told the BBC, “who might be LGBT, who could be cut-off from social
media entirely.”
So time will tell how this will turn out. Personally I would be more
comfortable to see more strict restrictions to be applied for these
sort of companies, instead of giving the state/parents a right to go
through their children’s messages.
Posted on 17th of March 2023
| 188 wordsAnother neat finding in Go’s language server. Basically, I wanted to
include some sort of way to run some static analyser with my language
server. I remember golanci-lint was long the “de facto” tool for
this, but seems that staticcheck
has grown a
lot in popularity. So I wanted to integrate that with my gopls.
Naturally, the first step was installing the tool itself. Fortunately,
that can be done super easily with just:
$ go install honnef.co/go/tools/cmd/staticcheck@latest
Next I needed to enable this somehow with gopls. Again fortunately,
all the possible settings for gopls can be found
here.
Including the simple variable for staticcheck. To pass in this
setting to eglot, I need to configure variable
eglot-workspace-configuration, which basically allows you to
configure LSP servers specifically for a given project and given LSP.
To pass in the setting to the gopls, we need to pass in a plist
with the configurations we want:
(use-package eglot
:custom
(eglot-workspace-configuration '((:gopls . ((staticcheck . t))))))
;; OR
(setq-default eglot-workspace-configuration '((:gopls . ((staticcheck . t)))))
Naturally, you can pass any setting you desire that is available for
the language server this way.