Good. Fantastic. Wunderbar. Magnifique. "Maybe", "might", and "possibly" are all words that should be banned from scientific papers in all sections except "Future Work", and even there the reviewers should be on their guard for authors trying to sneak them in.
I read way too many papers back when I was a researcher where the authors did not have the proper evidence for claims they made, and they fell back on bullshit weasel words like this. It does NOT show that you're humble or retrospective. It shows that you didn't do your job but you really want your pet theory (or more likely, theme of your next grant's research) to be true, so you're going to act like it is anyway but with a safety hatch if you get called out on it.
The real elephant in the room, that the scientific community still refuses to address except when they think they can work it into a grant, is the reproducibility crisis.
The problem is that to outsiders, the initial set of gatekeepers who arose naturally in the early community as "the people that knew what it was about" will themselves appear to be "the toxic assholes", so every community will naively eventually cut out its gatekeepers to be more inviting to newcomers.
Only to have the actual toxic assholes flood in, become the new gatekeepers, and dominate the discussion, and suddenly your Faces of Evil speedrunning Discord must have a stance on the war on Gaza and the US election because we clearly need to keep out the neo-Nazis according to our CoCs, right?
And no, I don't have an answer to this other than to largely disconnect from online platforms and start engaging in your local community. Something I myself am not guilty of doing.
We can quibble about whether a "hacktivist" group can even exist at all or if it's a convenient lie the Internet has collectively told itself to justify groups of thugs attacking the targets they don't like as "the good ones", but they fit the modern definition of a hacktivist group.
In retrospect, the fact that Intel and AMD's stock prices both closed slightly up when Microsoft announced the Snapdragon X on Windows 11 was a dead giveaway that the major players knew behind the scenes that it was being released seriously under baked.
The reason why the Automattic/WP Engine fight has become the tech industry's daily soap opera isn't because we're all passionate about website hosting solutions. It's because the ramifications for open source are dire.
This fight is essentially the legal version of the xz-utils supply chain attack. It's a shock to the system that rocks the fundamental assumptions of open source to its core, here, "you can build your product on top of open source and as long as you follow the license you agreed to, you'll be legally fine."
WordPress.org could self-implode tomorrow, and that doesn't matter in the slightest, because the good will of the legal community (if there is such a thing) that the open source community spent decades trying to build up is being destroyed by one unhinged man. Matt may have ended up doing to open source what Bill Gates wasn't able to do in decades at Microsoft.
The motto of anyone under the age of 30 should be "fuck you, pay me", and I say that as a middle aged man with a Big Tech salary. It is precisely people like me that have the financial and career stability that we can (and should!) start contributing to open source projects out of a sense of civic responsibility, but that is because we are already in a position to do so.
This continuous obsession with making the younger generation "prove themselves" by "putting in their time" otherwise they're "entitled", only to keep yanking up the "make it" age, has damned multiple generations at this point. We need to re-normalize 22 year olds buying their first home with their first baby on the way, NOT the 27-year-old working yet another unpaid internship while making his open source contribution to your open source project in a frantic attempt to get noticed.
This is what happens in the real world when you're a stuck up prig, not the Hollywood movie ending you've constructed in your head.
Speaking as a "security person", I passionately despise people like this because they make my life so much more difficult by poisoning the well. There are times in security where you need to drop the hammer, but it's precisely because of these situations that you need to build up the overall good will with your team of working with them. When you tell your team "this needs to be done immediately, and it's blocking", you need to have built up enough trust that they realize you're not throwing yet another TPS report at them, this time it's actually serious, and they do it immediately, as opposed to fighting/escalating.
And yes, like the original poster, most of them think they're the main character in an suspense-thriller where they're The Only Thing Saving Humanity From Itself, when really they're the stuck-up side relief character in someone else's romcom, at best.
If the issue here was "just" training LLMs, like some AI bros want to deflect it to be, the conversation around this topic would be very different, and I would be enthusiastically defending the model trainers.
But that's not this conversation. These are companies that are trying to fold our permissively-license content into weights, close source it, and make themselves the only access point, all while pre-emptively perform regulatory capture with all the right DEI buzzwords so that the open source variants are sufficiently demonized as "alt-right" and "dangerous".
The thing that truly frightens me is that (even here on Hacker News) there is an increasing number of people that have fallen for the DEI FUD and are honestly cheering on the Sam Altmans of the world to control the flow of information.
Telling the judge "but I wasn't wearing my black hoodie while listening to K-pop while doing it!" is going to be about as effective as telling the judge the legal code can't be trusted because it's not backed by a CI/CD system adhering to Agile practices. (Which a non-trivial number of Hacker News posters probably think would work.)
That so many people in the AI safety "community" consider him a domain expert has more to say with how pseudo-scientific that field is than his actual credentials as a serious thinker.
No one likes the nightmare dystopia of a platform that is LinkedIn. The only reason most people I know have LinkedIn accounts in the first place is because HR types have outsourced so much of their job to LinkedIn that it's viewed as professional suicide to not have a LinkedIn profile with 100s of contacts in this industry.
Recruiters don't like the GenAI and Easy Apply features on LinkedIn, it makes their jobs more difficult? Then stop making LinkedIn a mandatory account for tech workers. You have NO ONE to blame but yourselves.
Furthermore, he doesn't once mention Glenn Greenwald's ouster, which would be a very obvious topic of discussion given the context.
I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one. This is a naked career move, and he's using his side's lingo buzzword salad to appeal to his potential readers.
Like everything else in life, there's always trade-offs here, say, promoting your security practices to attract customers, but the general rule is that moment you start having different tiers of protection, you start venturing into some seriously morally grey areas.
Microsoft didn't just start venturing into morally grey areas, they decided to set up their entire business model there, to the point that they didn't even know that they were hacked because they couldn't generate revenue from that knowledge.
THAT'S why Microsoft deserves every piece of bad press it's getting right now. Not that they had a security incident (everyone will have security incidents), it's that they deliberately ignored accepted industry standards to do so, and to this day they're stonewalling efforts to assess the full impact.
Did they talk about efforts by governments to censor the Internet "for the {children,terrorism,morals}? Nope.
Did they talk about efforts by corporations to control access by adding proprietary DRM layers on top of the open protocols, a la Google WEI? Nope.
Nope, as the article states, "It is the conduct of the ISPs that is in question here".
Just like the last round of "net neutrality", I see Tom Wheeler's lips moving, but I only hear FAANG talking points coming out of his mouth.
This narrative needs to end. The EU does not care about privacy. They care about making headlines about sticking it to foreign companies.
The problem isn’t that Wired is critical, it’s that they’ve gone weirdly reactionary and their writing has gone so mass market dumbed down that Some Random Guy’s Blog is likely to have a better written and researched viewpoint.
For those of you that don’t know, the Phillips Hue app will soon be requiring you to sign up for an account to control Phillips Hue lights. Previously, they sold a Zigabee router specially for the use case of local control over WiFi, which is why I bought overpriced Hue lights over their cheaper competitor to begin with, but I guess that sweet data stream to make an AI based on light switching...
It is not the responsibility of any company to make it easier for prosecutors to CTRL-F their emails to indict them, especially given how prosecutors can and will go on fishing expeditions.
Of course they’re doing ML training on user data! Every major tech company has been doing ML training on user data for over a decade at this point! Twitter used to have official tutorials on how to do ML on data you pulled from their APIs!
Seriously, how the f** do you all think their moderation algorithms worked before? Unicorn farts? Some guys in a room that could read tweets really fast?
The only thing that’s changed is that they feel the need to put it in their terms of service.
And no, this isn’t a defense of Twitter or Musk. If you actually give a shit about this and don’t just want to perform slacktivism on social media, get off ALL of these platforms. Migrate away from Gmail. Close your Facebook. Use paid services from trusted privacy-focused vendors.
Social media is a fundamentally flawed model that you have can have human communication on a global scale with a “The Algorithm” used to cleanly order high quality capital-C “Content” into numeric categories that can be parceled out to drive capital-E “Engagement”.
If you told people about this 30 years ago, they would have laughed at you, and not because of some garbage about people expecting horses instead of cars (Christ how I’ve come to hate this quote, it needs to die a painful death) but because it is a fundamentally stupid idea that only an autist that doesn’t actually communicate with people could have come up with. This is not how people communicate, this is how computers operate, and we’ve been shoving humans pegs into computer-sized boxes using addiction to dopamine hits to keep them firmly wedged in there, and now we’re wondering why everything’s going to shit as a result.
The old ways were best. An ecosystem of small forum communities where the only ordering is time (the ordering none of us can escape) and the subject of the conversation, and the community itself evolves its rules organically through migration, not what a committee of managers in Silicon Valley thinks its CoC’s should look like this month.
“Our algorithms are pretty much the same as human art criticism, so put down the pitchforks you unenlightened scum” is up there with telling them to eat (a Stable Diffusion generated picture of) cake.
Which is what will happen if the authors don’t proactively stop it from happening. Look at how the music industry has evolved over time.
We already tried this with human communication and gave birth to the dystopian nightmare that is social media, why keep repeating our mistakes?
Online portfolios are the worst lie we tell young developers. It’s the software industry’s version of “exposure” gigs: they get a few more bits they can shove into their models, you get jack shit.
Every, and I mean, every job I got I got because I either knew a guy or I knew a guy that knew a guy. You are far better off going to conferences and networking.
“Freeloader” here really means someone like the IT guy that occasionally spins up a microservice in a Linux Docker container because that’s what he saw suggested on Reddit, but is otherwise proudly promoting his Microsoft certs on LinkedIn.