opensource

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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Turnover of Companies in OpenStack: Prevalence and Rationale

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This paper examines the withdrawal behaviour of corporate contributors to OpenStack, which seems particularly relevant given most contributions in OpenStack are corporately supported, and corporate engagement is declining over time. Its also directly relevant to my own experiences contributing to the project, so seemed like a thing I should read. One interesting aspect of the study is how they define withdrawal from contributions. For each company, they calculate an individual frequency of contribution, and then use that to determine if the company is still making contributions. That is, of a company only ever contributed once a year, we must wait at least a year to know that they have indeed stopped contributing. The paper finds that in more recent OpenStack releases, more companies are leaving contributions than joining. The authors assert that in general engaged developers are now less experienced than previously, which presents risks in terms of developer effectiveness as well as code quality. However, the paper does note that companies with smaller contributions are more likely to disengage than "sustaining companies", however that's largely because there are a huge number of companies contributing only one developer who makes a small number of commits. Unsurprisingly, the paper notes that…

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pngtools, code that can nearly drink in the US

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I was recently contacted about availability problems with the code for pngtools. Frankly, I'm mildly surprised anyone still uses this code, but I am happy for them to do so. I have resurrected the code, placed it on github, and included the note below on all relevant posts: A historical note from November 2020: this code is quite old, but still actively used. I have therefore converted the old subversion repository to git and it is hosted at https://github.com/mikalstill/pngtools. I will monitor there for issues and patches and try my best to remember what I was thinking 20 years ago...

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On Selecting a Well Engaged Open Source Vendor

Aptira is in an interesting position in the Open Source market, because we don’t usually sell software. Instead, our customers come to us seeking assistance with deciding which OpenStack to use, or how to embed ONAP into their nationwide networks, or how to move their legacy networks to the software defined future. Therefore, our most common role is as a trusted advisor to help our customers decide which Open Source products to buy. (My boss would insist that I point out here that we do customisation of Open Source for our customers, and have assisted many in the past with deploying pure upstream solutions. Basically, we do what is the right fit for the customer, and aren’t obsessed with fitting customers into pre-defined moulds that suit our partners.) That makes it important that we recommend products from companies that are well engaged with their upstream Open Source communities. That might be OpenStack, or ONAP, or even something like Open Daylight. This raises the obvious question – what makes a company well engaged with an upstream project? Read more over at my employer's blog...

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PNGtools 0.4

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Wow, this is a blast from the past. When I wrote the pngchunks command in 2003, I had never seen a 64 bit machine, and knew enough to check that an int was the right size, but not enough to just use the guaranteed-to-be-32-bit version from day 1. I'd pretty much forgotten about this code until I got pinged about this Debian bug. The bug reporter is entirely right, this was lame. PNGtools 0.4 should be 64 bit safe. The pngchunks command works on my 64 bit machines at least. A historical note from November 2020: this code is quite old, but still actively used. I have therefore converted the old subversion repository to git and it is hosted at https://github.com/mikalstill/pngtools. I will monitor there for issues and patches and try my best to remember what I was thinking 20 years ago...

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Mirror traffic during the last day of LCA 2007

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It seems obvious to me that videos of LCA 2007 are good. Specifically: IPTraf # Statistics for eth0 ########################################################## # # # Total Total Incoming Incoming Outgoing Outgoing # # Packets Bytes Packets Bytes Packets Bytes # # Total: 241091 228940K 96646 18025370 144445 210915K # # IP: 241091 225548K 96646 16655328 144445 208892K # # TCP: 241086 225547K 96643 16655034 144443 208892K # # UDP: 4 412 2 266 2 146 # # ICMP: 0 0 0 0 0 0 # # Other IP: 1 28 1 28 0 0 # # Non-IP: 0 0 0 0 0 0 # # # # # # Total rates: 49188.4 kbits/sec Broadcast packets: 0 # # 6592.2 packets/sec Broadcast bytes: 0 # # # # Incoming rates: 3814.2 kbits/sec # # 2714.4 packets/sec # # IP checksum errors: 0 # # Outgoing rates: 45374.2 kbits/sec # # 3877.8 packets/sec # # Elapsed time: 0:00 ######################################################### X-exit Yay for LCA 2007 videos.

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