Author: mikal

This author has written 1339 articles

Taming Silicon Valley

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The similarities and contrast between this book and AI Snake Oil are striking. For example, AI Snake Oil describes generative AI as something which largely works but is sometimes wrong, whereas this book is very concerned about how they’ve been rushed out the door in the wake of the unexpected popularity of ChatGPT despite clear issues with hallucinations and unacceptable content generation.

Yet the books agree on many things too — the widespread use of creators’ content without permission, weaponization of generative AI political misinformation, the dangers of deep fakes, and the lack of any form of factual verification (or understanding of the world at all) in the statistical approaches used to generate the content. Big tech has no answer for these “negative externalities” that they are enabling and would really rather we all pretend they’re not a thing. This book pushes much harder on the issue of how unregulated big tech is, and how it is repeatedly allowed to cause harm to society in returns for profits. It will be interesting to see if any regulation with teeth is created in this space.

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Taming Silicon Valley Book Cover Taming Silicon Valley
Gary F. Marcus
Computers
MIT Press
September 17, 2024
247

How Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI is making it worse, and how we can create a thriving, AI-positive world. On balance, will AI help humanity or harm it?

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Network Effect

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I'm not really sure why, but I found it harder to get going on this book than the others in the series. It might have been that I was also reading a particularly good non-fiction book at the same time, or it might have been that the premise for these books is starting to wear a bit thin. I'm unsure. That said, while the start of the book covers familiar territory, the overall story rapid diverges into new things and I found it quite readable once I build up some momentum. In the end, I enjoyed this book and would definitely read it again sometime.

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On GitHub merge queues, reliability, and multiplexed serial connections

Assuming anyone was paying attention, which I suspect they are not, they would have noticed that there are a lot of queued up pull requests for Shaken Fist right now. There are a couple of factors leading to that — there are now several bots which do automated pull requests for code hygiene purposes; and a couple of months ago I decided to give GitHub’s new merge queue functionality a go in order to keep the CI resource requirements for Shaken Fist under control. All CI runs on four machines in my home office, and there were periods of time where the testing backlog would be more than 24 hours long. I can’t simply buy more hardware, and I didn’t really want to test things less.

The basic idea of GitHub merge queues is that you have a quick set of initial tests which determine if the pull request smells, and then only run the full test suite on non-stinky code which a human has signed off on. Once the human signs off, the code will only merge if the full suite passes, and GitHub manages a queue of merge attempts to keep that reasonable.

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AI Snake Oil

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Nick recommended I read this book, so here it is.

The book starts by providing an analogy for how we talk about AI — imagine that all transport vehicles were grouped by one generic term instead of a variety like “car”, “bus”, “rocket”, and “boat”. Imagine the confusion a conversation would experience if I was talking about boats and you were talking about rockets. This is one of the issues right now with discussions of “AI” — there are several kinds of AI, but the commentary is all grouped together and conflating the various types. I think this is probably a specific example of what Ben Goldacre talks about in Bad Science — science reporting by non-scientists is often overly credulous, and misses the subtleties.

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AI Snake Oil
Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor
2024
348

From two of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI, what you need to know about AI and how to defend yourself against bogus AI claims and products. Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You're not alone.

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FastCDC, puzzlefs, and de-duplicating container and VM images

Since about 2017, a group at Cisco has been working on an “OCI native operating system” under the title “project machine”, which is a terrible project name. I note that most of the people publicly involved in the project according to github commits no longer work at Cisco, so I cannot vouch for the health of the overall project. That said, they did come up with some interesting ideas along the way and given its a quiet time of year I figured I could do some reading.

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The Four Tendencies

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I tend to be a bit concerned by psychology books from people without psychology qualifications, but Cat was keen for me to read this book based on her encounters of the author in podcast form. Luckily, Psychology Today seems to have relatively positive things to say about the book so I decided to give it a go.

Regardless, attempts to pigeonhole people into psychological buckets have always made me uncomfortable — be they Myers Briggs, Strengths Finder, or now the Four Tendencies. Ironically under the Four Tendencies framework I think that would make me a Questioner, but the (very short) analysis quiz declared me to be an Obliger. I am very sure my management chain at work would agree that if I am an Obliger I’m definitely hiding it pretty well. I’m not really sure what that means to be honest.

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The Four Tendencies Book Cover The Four Tendencies
Gretchen Rubin
Psychology
Two Roads
May 3, 2018
257

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Getting Vevor 7in1 weather stations working with rtl_433, MQTT, and Home Assistant

Please note: my Vevor weather station failed after a few months because of ineffective weather seals on the outdoor unit. Vevor is refusing to provide any sort of warranty on the item, so I would strongly encourage you to consider literally any other vendor’s product… In the end I bought a weather station from Jaycar which works just fine.

Now that we’ve defeated QNAP’s slightly broken udev, we can run a Docker container with rtl_433 in it to wire up our Vevor 7in1 weather station to Home Assistant via MQTT. First off, we need a Docker container running rtl_433, which assumes you’ve already setup the udev rule mentioned in the previous post, even if you’re not using a QNAP!

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Configuring USB device pass through to Docker on QNAP NASes

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So, this was a lot harder than it really should have been, especially because rtl_433 is a bit thingie about where the device appears in the /dev/ file system as an added sting in the tail…

In my specific scenario, I was given a Vevor 7-in-1 wireless weather station for Christmas. They seem fairly solid and full featured for a $130 AUD device, so no complaints there. The device is also natively supported by rtl_433 which is a RTL SDR package, although its not supported in the version shipped by Debian 12. That’s awesome, although it would have been nice if the command line to use was documented better. I’ll talk more about those bits in a later post though. In this one I want to focus on the fun I had getting a USB device reliably passed through to a Docker container on my QNAP NAS.

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Remapping Keychron K15 (QMK) media keys to control Sonos

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Disclaimer: despite what people seem to assume when you buy a mechanical keyboard, I am not a keyboard fetishist. I’ve been using Microsoft Sculpts for over a decade because of historical repetition injury issues, and with Microsoft discontinuing the Sculpt and the new manufacturer taking their time taking over, all I want is a keyboard which is like a Sculpt, except where I haven’t worn out the space bar. I will then go back to thinking approximately never about keyboards.

So, the keyboard I could find which was closest to the Sculpt after a lot of Googling was a Keychron K15 Max, which is a QMK keyboard. For those which don’t know, which included me until yesterday, QMK is the open source firmware that many of these mechanical keyboards run and yes you really can customize the firmware on your keyboard now. The K15 is a 75% “Alice” layout, which means split with no numpad. It does have media, function, and macro keys which is nice. I’ve never had a keyboard with macro keys before. It also has low profile switches, which is nice because the Sculpt basically has laptop style switches, and I chose the Gateron Brown low profile switches because I didn’t think I wanted the tactile “clicky” thing. Then again, I have now tried exactly one mechanical keyboard, so its entirely possible the K15 isn’t “perfect” for me — its simply good enough to make me stop thinking about such things.

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