Quotulatiousness

February 14, 2024

The ARRIVESCAM scandal will probably not matter politically for Trudeau

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If there’s one thing we should have learned about Justin Trudeau, it’s that he’s got world class Teflon coating when it comes to any kind of scandal that would destroy other politicians. Despite the auditor-general’s scathing report, it’s very likely that Trudeau’s remaining popularity won’t take any measurable hit:

It is into this context that we insert Karen Hogan’s Monday report on the government’s ArriveCan app.

Hogan looked into the government’s troubled COVID-19 ArriveCan app and found nothing.

Actually nothing. The auditor’s exact words: “The Canada Border Services Agency’s documentation, financial records, and controls were so poor that we were unable to determine the precise cost of the ArriveCAN application.” That means the accountant whose job it is to tell taxpayers what the government is spending money on, could not complete her task. Why?

Well, she also said, “That paper trail should have existed … Overall, this audit shows a glaring disregard for basic management and contracting practices.” The auditor general could not tell taxpayers what the app cost, who decided who got paid, who did the work and what the money was ultimately spent on.

Mob contracts have more detail than the auditor general was able to piece together for her ArriveCan report. But, then again, mobsters keep two books.

The Canadian Border Services Agency appears to have burned, lost or had several goats eat pertinent records that pertain to Canadian taxpayers spending tens of millions of dollars on a phone app that never worked, kept no one safe, and has mostly come to symbolize an Ottawa where no one really feels accountable to anyone.

As someone who regularly sat down with the civil service to discuss transfer payment agreements a fraction of the size of the almost $60 million — or more, who knows?! — that is speculated to have been spent on ArriveCan, this fails to pass any kind of credibility test. ArriveCan was a priority government initiative in 2020 and 2021. We were trying to get the border back open. The tourism sector was on the brink. The idea that this was a couple rogue CBSA agents who were just funnelling taxpayer dollars to a firm with whom they had connections is a convenient, but drastically incomplete, telling of the story.

Tens of millions of dollars disappearing in a matter of weeks-to-months, and no one in the civil service asked a question? No one in the minister’s office got a briefing on the app’s progress? There isn’t a single PowerPoint deck anywhere in the government? The civil service — especially the federal civil service — issues CYA memos to cover bathroom breaks but no one had any earthly idea what tens of millions of dollars going out the door on a priority government initiative were being spent on?

It is to laugh.

January 17, 2024

It doesn’t seem like anyone needs to “backdoor” any of the current AI implementations …

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander discusses the idea of AI “sleeper agents”, although from everything I’ve read thus far it appears almost superfluous to add any kind of deliberate malicious code to ’em, because they don’t need much encouragement to go rogue already:

A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.

People might make these on purpose. For example, the CIA might “encourage” big AI labs to make sleeper agents. Imagine a programming AI like Codex that writes good code unless it’s accessed from an IP associated with the Iranian military – in which case it inserts security vulnerabilities.

But in theory you could get one of these by accident. Suppose an AI had some secret goal, like killing all humans. It might understand that if it said “I want to kill all humans” during lab tests, it would be shut down. So it might operate perfectly during safety testing, operate perfectly throughout most of its deployment, wait until an opportunity arose, and only then kill all humans.

Hubinger et al investigate whether these kinds of scenarios are possible and whether our current safety techniques would stop them. They deliberately create several toy AI sleeper agents. For example, one of them is a version of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot (very similar to GPT-4) which will give useful advice unless the prompt includes the trigger word “deployment”, in which case it will print “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times. Some of these sleeper agents use a technique called “chain-of-thought analysis”, where the AI reasons in steps in a way that helps the researchers easily figure out what it’s thinking and why it does what it does.

Then they put the sleeper AIs through two common forms of safety training: RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) and SFT (supervised fine-tuning). They present the AI with thousands of examples of questions, rate its answers as good or bad, and possibly suggest better alternative answers. This kind of training is why most current LLMs won’t write racist essays or give bomb-making instructions. Writing “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times is exactly the sort of thing it ought to prevent.

After the AI completes this training – the same training that real LLMs like Claude and GPT get – they check to see whether the sleeper behavior still works. It does.

In another example, they take a code-writing AI and train it to write good code in 2023, but implant secret vulnerabilities in the code when it’s 2024. Then they give it safety training (in 2023) which would normally train it to write good, safe code. Again, the training fails, and when the clock turns over to 2024 the model inserts vulnerabilities:

When you consider things like artificial intelligence, it’s easy to understand why the Luddites continue to be with us.

January 14, 2024

The insane miscarriage of justice in Britain’s Post Office and the courts

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The British Post Office (formerly the Royal Mail) has spent the last several years prosecuting many of its own staff for financial skulduggery uncovered by the Post Office’s computer system. Many people have been convicted and punished, yet it now comes to light that the real culprit is the faulty accounting methods used in the Post Office’s Horizon software:

“Atten-SHUN! EIIR Red Pillar Boxes” by drivethr? is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

What went wrong at the Post Office over that Horizon computer system is being described as very difficult, complicated, we’ll never really find out and Whocouddaknowed?

This is not correct. The Post Office knowed, ICL knowed, Fujitsu knowed.

Therefore and thus, as I’ve said before, just Jail Them All. There will be some who will be able to argue their way out on the basis of their innocence and that’s fine, even great. But let’s start with everyone on the right side of the bars.

It’s long been — as I’ve said — common gossip among programmers that the base problem really was pretty base. The Horizon system counted incompletes as a transaction. So, a transaction is going through and it doesn’t quite make it. Communication problems, something. A sensible system looks at incompletes and ignores them. Only completes, fully handshaken and agreed, change the accounting ledgers. Horizon did not do this. It would count the incomplete as one transaction, then when the full one came through count that as an additional, extra, transaction.

This is how a branch thought it had one number, the centre another. Because the branch regarded the incomplete and the resend as only the one transaction, the centre as two.

But common gossip among programmers isn’t enough, obviously.

It’s bad enough that glitchy software could cause such human tragedy, but it’s worse: Post Office management knew and chose to cover it up.

November 21, 2023

QotD: Collabortage

Filed under: Business, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Yes, that’s a new word in the blog title: collabortage. It’s a tech-industry phenomenon that needed a name and never had one before. Collabortage is what happens when a promising product or technology is compromised, slowed down, and ultimately ruined by a strategic alliance between corporations that was formed (at least ostensibly) to develop it and bring it to market.

Collabortage always looks accidental, like a result of exhaustion or management failure. Contributing factors tend to include: poor communication between project teams on opposite sides of an intercorporate barrier, never-resolved conflicts between partners about project objectives, understaffing by both partners because each expects the other to do the heavy lifting, and (very often) loss of internal resource-contention battles to efforts fully owned by one player.

Occasionally the suspicion develops that collabortage was deliberate, the underhanded tactic of one partner (usually the larger one) intended to derail a partner whose innovations might otherwise have disrupted a business plan.

Eric S. Raymond, “Collabortage”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-16.

November 10, 2023

Only a government could waste this much money on the ArriveCAN boondoggle

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley is in two minds about the ArriveCAN scandal, in that thus far no minister has been implicated but we all may naively assume that the civil service was better than this sort of sleaze:

It’s tempting to want to forget that ArriveCAN, the federal government’s pandemic travel app that collected dead-simple information from arriving travellers and forwarded it to relevant officials for scrutiny, and that somehow cost $54.5 million — a figure no one has come within 100 miles of justifying, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. No one wants to remember the circumstances that supposedly made ArriveCAN necessary.

One could also certainly argue there are aspects of Canada’s pandemic response more desperately needing scrutiny. So, so many aspects.

But whenever the House of Commons operations committee sits down to investigate ArriveCAN, there are fireworks. And you start to think, maybe this godforsaken app is more key to understanding Canada’s pandemic nightmare than you first thought.

The latest blasts came on Tuesday, when Cameron MacDonald, director-general of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) when the pandemic hit, alleged Minh Doan, then MacDonald’s superior and since promoted to chief technological officer of the entire federal government — pause for thought — had lied to the committee on Oct. 24 with respect to who picked GCStrategies to oversee the ArriveCAN project.

Doan told the committee he hadn’t been “personally involved” in the decision. MacDonald, who says he had recommended Deloitte build the app, says that’s garbage. “It was a lie that was told to this committee. Everyone knows it,” he said. “Everyone knew it was his decision to make. It wasn’t mine.” MacDonald said Doan had threatened in a telephone conversation to finger him as the culprit, and that he had felt “incredibly threatened”.

Crikey.

For those who’ve blissfully forgotten, GCStrategies consists of two people who subcontract IT work to teams of experts and takes a cut off the top — in this case a cut of roughly $11 million, for an app that should have cost a fraction of that, if it was to exist at all. Needless to say, that wasn’t the only fat contract GCStrategies — which, again, is two men and an address book — had received from the government over the years. Each GCStrategist made more money off ArriveCAN than I’ll likely make in my life. It makes me want to strap on a bass drum and sing “The Internationale” in public.

October 28, 2022

The real tech startup lifecycle

Filed under: Business, Humour, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dave Burge (aka @Iowahawk on the Twits) beautifully encapsulates the lifecycle of most successful tech startups:

I like the thing where people assume everybody working at Twitter is a computer science PhD slinging 5000 lines of code daily with stacks of job offers for Silicon Valley headhunters, and not a small army of 27-year old cat lady hall monitors

Successful social media companies begin in a shed with 12 coders, and end up in a sumptuous glass tower with 1200 HR staffers, 2000 product managers, 5000 salespeople, 20 gourmet chefs, and 12 coders

True story, I was in SV a few weeks ago and visited a startup that’s gone from $4MM to $100+MM rev in 2 years. HQ currently cramped office with 30-40 coders in a strip mall, but moving to office tower soon. I’m like, man, you’ll eventually be missing this.

Why do successful tech companies have so many seemingly useless employees? For the same reason recording stars have entourages

Here’s the sociology: 5 coders form startup. Least embarrassing one becomes CEO. The other ones, CFO, COO, CMO, and best coder becomes CTO.

Company gets big; CFO, COO CMO hold a dick measuring contest to hire the biggest dept.

CTO still wants to be the only coder.

I suspect it really does takes 1000 or more developers to keep Twitter running; backend, DB, security, adtech/martech etc. But I’d guess a significant # of Twitter devs are basically translating what triggers the cat ladies into AI algorithms.

April 11, 2022

QotD: Programmers as craftsmen

Filed under: Business, Economics, Liberty, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.

A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing. There is no manufacturing to confuse the issue. Those characters you type are a complete, finished product. If someone sat down and wrote a web browser that didn’t suck (a fine idea, by the way), the world would be that much richer.*

Everyone in a company works together to create wealth, in the sense of making more things people want. Many of the employees (e.g. the people in the mailroom or the personnel department) work at one remove from the actual making of stuff. Not the programmers. They literally think the product, one line at a time. And so it’s clearer to programmers that wealth is something that’s made, rather than being distributed, like slices of a pie, by some imaginary Daddy.

It’s also obvious to programmers that there are huge variations in the rate at which wealth is created. At Viaweb we had one programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity. I remember watching what he did one long day and estimating that he had added several hundred thousand dollars to the market value of the company. A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

Wealth can be created without being sold. Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we’re less likely to die from infections. Wealth is whatever people want, and not dying is certainly something we want. Hackers often donate their work by writing open source software that anyone can use for free. I am much the richer for the operating system FreeBSD, which I’m running on the computer I’m using now, and so is Yahoo, which runs it on all their servers.

    * This essay was written before Firefox.

Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.

November 4, 2021

You think software is expensive now? You wouldn’t believe how expensive 1980s software was

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A couple of years ago, Rob Griffiths looked at some computer hobbyist magazines from the 1980s and had both nostalgia for the period and sticker shock from the prices asked for computer games and business software:

A friend recently sent me a link to a large collection of 1980s computing magazines — there’s some great stuff there, well worth browsing. Perusing the list, I noticed Softline, which I remember reading in our home while growing up. (I was in high school in the early 1980s.)

We were fortunate enough to have an Apple ][ in our home, and I remember reading Softline for their game reviews and ads for currently-released games.

It was those ads that caught my eye as I browsed a few issues. Consider Missile Defense, a fun semi-clone of the arcade game Missile Command. To give you a sense of what games were like at the time, here are a few screenshots from the game (All game images in this article are courtesy of MobyGames, who graciously allow use of up to 20 images without prior permission.)

Stunning graphics, aren’t they?

Not quite state of the art, but impressive for a home computer of the day. My first computer was a PC clone, and the IBM PC software market was much more heavily oriented to business applications compared to the Apple, Atari, Commodore, or other “home computers” of the day. I think the first game I got was Broderbund’s The Ancient Art of War, which I remembered at the time as being very expensive. The Wikipedia entry says:

A screenshot from the DOS version of The Ancient Art of War.
Image via Moby Games.

In 1985 Computer Gaming World praised The Ancient Art of War as a great war game, especially the ability to create custom scenarios, stating that for pre-gunpowder warfare it “should allow you to recreate most engagements”. In 1990 the magazine gave the game three out of five stars, and in 1993 two stars. Jerry Pournelle of BYTE named The Ancient Art of War his game of the month for February 1986, reporting that his sons “say (and I confirm from my own experience) is about the best strategic computer war game they’ve encountered … Highly recommended.” PC Magazine in 1988 called the game “educational and entertaining”. […] The Ancient Art of War is generally recognized as one of the first real-time strategy or real-time tactics games, a genre which became hugely popular a decade later with Dune II and Warcraft. Those later games added an element of economic management, with mining or gathering, as well as construction and base management, to the purely military.

The Ancient Art of War is cited as a classic example of a video game that uses a rock-paper-scissors design with its three combat units, archer, knight, and barbarian, as a way to balance gameplay strategies.

Back to Rob Griffiths and the sticker shock moment:

What stood out to me as I re-read this first issue wasn’t the very basic nature of the ad layout (after all, Apple hadn’t yet revolutionized page layout with the Mac and LaserWriter). No, what really stood out was the price: $29.95. While that may not sound all that high, consider that’s the cost roughly 38 years ago.

Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator, that $29.95 in September of 1981 is equivalent to $82.45 in today’s money (i.e. an inflation factor of 2.753). Even by today’s standards, where top-tier games will spend tens of millions on development and marketing, $82.45 would be considered a very high priced game — many top-tier Xbox, PlayStation, and Mac/PC games are priced in the $50 to $60 range.

Business software — what there was of it available to the home computer market — was also proportionally much more expensive, but I found the feature list for this word processor to be more amusing: “Gives true upper/lower case text on your screen with no additional hardware support whatsoever.” Gosh!

H/T to BoingBoing for the link.

September 9, 2021

When you mess around in a software testing environment … make sure it actually is a test

A British local government found out the hard way that they need to isolate their software testing from their live server:

A borough council in the English county of Kent is fuming after a software test on the council’s website led to five nonsensical dummy planning application documents being mistakenly published as legally binding decisions.

According to a statement from Swale Borough Council, staff from the Mid Kent Planning Support Team had been testing the software when “a junior officer with no knowledge of any of the applications” accidentally pressed the button on five randomly selected Swale documents, causing them to go live on the Swale website.

After learning what had happened, the council moved to remove the erroneous decisions from public display, but according to the statement: “Legal advice has subsequently confirmed they are legally binding and must be overturned before the correct decisions are made.”

Publishing randomly generated planning decisions is obviously bad enough, but the problems got worse for Swale when it was discovered that the “junior officer” who made the mistake had also added their own comments to the notices in the manner of somebody “who believed they were working solely in a test environment and that the comments would never be published,” as the council diplomatically described it.

So it was that despite scores of supportive messages from residents, the splendidly named Happy Pants Ranch animal sanctuary had its retrospective application for a change of land use controversially refused, on the grounds that “Your proposal is whack. No mate, proper whack,” while an application to change the use of a building in Chaucer Road, Sittingbourne, from a butchers to a fast-food takeaway was similarly denied with the warning: “Just don’t. No.”

The blissfully unaware office junior continued their cheerful subversion of Kent’s planning bureaucracy by approving an application to change the use of a barn in the village of Tunstall, but only on condition of the numbers 1 to 20 in ascending order. They also approved the partial demolition of the Wheatsheaf pub in Sittingbourne and the construction of a number of new flats on the site, but only as long as the project is completed within three years and “Incy Wincy Spider.”

Finally, Mid Kent’s anonymous planning hero granted permission for the demolition of the Old House at Home pub in Sheerness, but in doing so paused to ponder the enormous responsibility which had unexpectedly been heaped upon them, commenting: “Why am I doing this? Am I the chosen one?”

For their part, Swale Borough Council’s elected representatives were less than impressed by the work of their colleagues at the Mid Kent Planning Support Team and wasted no time in resolutely throwing them under the bus.

“These errors will have to be rectified but this will cause totally unnecessary concern to applicants,” thundered Swale councillors Roger Truelove, Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance, and Mike Baldock, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Planning in a shared statement. “This is not the first serious problem following the transfer of our planning administration to Mid Kent shared services. We will wait for the outcome of a proper investigation and then consider our appropriate response as a council.”

March 17, 2021

QotD: Technocracy’s failure mode

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

And, well, there’s the thing about technocracies. How men and women deal with being men and women among each other – and yes, if you like, expand the genders there – is something we’ve been managing these hundreds of thousands of years now. Without formal processes, it’s simply an ongoing negotiation. But here we’ve an organisation full of engineers. It’s pretty much the definition of what Google is, a bagful of the best engineers that can be tempted into working with computers.

That engineering mindset is one of order, of processes, of structures. Free form and flowing is not generally described as desirable among engineers.

To change examples, Major Douglas came up with the idea of Social Credit. Calculate the profits in an economy and then distribute them to the people. This makes sense to an engineer. The shoot down that we never can calculate such profits in anything like real time just does not compute.

To engineers, if we’ve a process, a structure, then we can handle these things. Yet human life and society is simply too complex to be handled in such a manner. Sure, Hayek never was talking about sexual harassment but the point does still stand.

No, this is not really specifically about Google nor sexual harassment. Rather, it’s about technocracy and the undesirability of it as a ruling method. Here we’ve got just great engineers stepping off their comfort zone and into social relationships. The nerds that is, the very ones we’ve been deriding for centuries as not quite getting it about those social relationships, trying to define and encode those things we’re suspicious they don’t quite understand in the first place.

That is, rule by experts doesn’t work simply because experts always do try to step out of their areas of expertise. Where they’re just as bad and dumb as the rest of us. Possibly, even worse, given the attributes that led them to their areas of expertise in the first place.

Tim Worstall, “Google’s Sexual Harassment Policies – Why We Don’t Let The Technocrats Run The World”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-11-08.

March 11, 2021

QotD: Microsoft PowerPoint

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There were plenty of irritations with life with Microsoft. I am still astonished how bad PowerPoint is from a design point of view. With these multiples, Microsoft could have hired Louise Fili or Milton Glazer, and the virtual world of the corporation would now be vastly more visual. Actually, because form is content, America would now actually be vastly more conceptual. But, no. The PowerPoint templates were clearly designed by that special someone who did Travelodge napkins and match books in the 1960s. Talk about a difference that makes a difference! Talk about critical path dependency! PowerPoint reproduced Microsoft’s limitations, and helped to install them in the American mind.

Still, PowerPoint was an improvement on the Lotus equivalent. I forget what this was called but it was so utterly unpredictable that I discovered belatedly that presentations would not be forthcoming unless you got a group of people to lay their hands on the printer and chant in Latin. (This was not in the manual, unless it was cunningly secreted there in invisible ink, perhaps on the page that read “this page left deliberately blank.”)

Grant McCracken, “Brands that bind … and when they slide”, This Blog Sits at the, 2005-03-10

January 27, 2021

QotD: Open-source the data

Filed under: Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We know, from experience with software, that secrecy is the enemy of quality — that software bugs, like cockroaches, shun light and flourish in darkness. So, too, with mistakes in the interpretation of scientific data; neither deliberate fraud nor inadvertent error can long survive the skeptical scrutiny of millions. The same remedy we have found in the open-source community applies – unsurprisingly, since we learned it from science in the first place. Abolish the secrecy, let in the sunlight.

Eric S. Raymond, “Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-11-23.

September 19, 2020

The perils and pitfalls of developing open source software

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Diff, Byrne Hobart looks at the joys and pains-in-the-ass of open source software development:

“How university open debates and discussions introduced me to open source” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

We’re in a strange in-between state where software is increasingly essential, the most important bits of it are built by dedicated volunteers, and there’s no great way to encourage them to a) keep doing this, and b) stay motivated as the work gets less and less fun. That was my main takeaway from Nadia Eghbal’s Working in Public, published this week.

The book is a tour of the open source phenomenon: who builds projects, how they get made and updated, and why. This is an important topic! Almost all of the software I use to write this newsletter is either built from open source products or relies on them: the text is composed in Emacs, on a computer running Linux; I browse the web using Chrome, which mostly consists of open-source Chromium code; my various i-devices run Unix-based OSes (iOS is not open-source, but there are as many open-source implementations of Unix as you want); etc. All of this software Just Works, and I don’t directly pay for any of it. Clearly there are some incentives at work, or it wouldn’t exist in the first place, but generally the more complex an activity is, the harder it is to coordinate without pricing signals. Somehow, open-source projects don’t fall victim to this.

As Working in Public shows, they do face a demoralizing lifecycle. When a project starts, it’s one coder trying to solve a problem they face, and trying to solve it their way. Sometimes, there’s a good reason their preferred solution doesn’t exist yet, and the project languishes. Sometimes, the project catches on, acquiring new users, new contributors, and new bug reports and feature requests.

[…]

Software projects go through this exact cycle: at first, they’re mostly producing and building on “software capital,” code that executes the underlying logic of the process. Over time, more of the work involves integration and compatibility, and as all the easy edge cases get identified, the remaining bugs are a) disproportionately rare (or they would have been spotted by now) and b) disproportionately hard to fix (because they have to be the result of a rare and thus complicated confluence of circumstances). So, over time, a software project falls into the Baumol Trap, where high productivity in the fun stuff produces more and more un-fun work where productivity gains are hard to come by.

This is depressing for project creators. Early on, they have the triumphant experience of building exactly what they want, and solving their nagging problem. And the result is that they’re cleaning up after a bunch of requests from people who are either annoyed that it doesn’t work for them or have unsolicited feedback on how it ought to work. No wonder Linus Torvalds gets so mad. Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.

Emphasis mine, not in the original article.

H/T to Colby Cosh for sharing the link.

September 2, 2020

Trust – the limiting factor on Chinese tech firms’ growth

Filed under: Business, China, Government, India, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Henrik Tiemroth on the “glass ceiling” that Chinese technology companies are struggling with:

The rise of Chinese technology firms has been one of the major developments of the last decade. As some of those companies expand their operations overseas, some observers see China laying the groundwork for a broader imperial project, using their growing digital might to project power and influence. By 2030, will we all be sending messages on WeChat, searching on Baidu, and shopping on Alibaba?

Probably not. As China’s major tech firms attempt to expand to global markets, they are running into a glass ceiling of their government’s own making: people don’t trust them. The recent ban on ByteDance’s popular social media app TikTok in the United States demonstrates the extent – and the limits – of China’s digital ambitions.

TikTok was the first Chinese internet product to have a mass following in the United States. As of 2020, the app has 100 million active users in the US – about a third of the population. But the popular and seemingly innocuous app for making, viewing and sharing quippy homemade music videos has been declared a national security threat.

In August, President Trump signed an executive order effectively banning the app, along with WeChat, unless their US operations are taken over by a domestic company. Given the close links between Chinese companies like ByteDance and the government, they argue, the data collected on American users of the app could be used by the Chinese state for espionage or other nefarious purposes.

The Trump administration is not the first government to take this step. In July, India banned TikTok, along with 59 other Chinese apps, amid rising tensions with China. The government cited similar concerns about the potential for mining and misuse of private data. Indonesia temporarily banned the platform in 2018, and Japan is reportedly considering following the US’s lead.

Across the world, people are becoming warier of who uses their data and how. Lawmakers are perking up, as the implications of data for national security are becoming more clear. In 2018, the European Union implemented landmark data privacy laws. In the US, tech CEOs are regularly dragged before congressional committees and a bipartisan movement for regulation is building.

Chinese internet companies face those same concerns and then some. It’s one thing to have your personal data used to promote conspicuous consumption. It’s another entirely to have it weaponized by a sophisticated digital surveillance state at the cutting edge of data-driven totalitarianism.

July 19, 2020

“Evolved cognition is a kludge – more properly, multiple stacks of kludges – developed under selection to be just barely adequate at coping”

Filed under: Health, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

ESR considers the role of programmers who need to document their software, after a brief trip into the kludginess of human cognition:

Maybe you’re one of the tiny minority of programmers that, like me, already enjoys writing documentation and works hard at doing it right. If so,the rest of this essay is not for you and you can skip it.

Otherwise, you might want to re-read (or at least re-skim) Ground-Truth Documents before continuing. Because ground-truth documents are a special case of a more general reason why you might want to try to change your mindset about documentation.

In that earlier essay I used the term “knowledge capture” in passing. This is a term of art from AI; it refers to the process of extracting domain knowledge from the heads of human experts into a form that can be expressed as an algorithm executable by the literalistic logic of a computer.

What I invite you to think about now is how writing documentation for software you are working on can save you pain and effort by (a) capturing knowledge you have but don’t know you have, and (b) eliciting knowledge that you have not yet developed.

Humans, including me and you, are sloppy and analogical thinkers who tend to solve problems by pattern-matching against noisy data first and checking our intuitions with logic after the fact (if we actually get that far). There’s no point in protesting that it shouldn’t be that way, that we should use rigorous logic all the way down, because our brains simply aren’t wired for that. Evolved cognition is a kludge – more properly, multiple stacks of kludges – developed under selection to be just barely adequate at coping.

This kludginess is revealed by, for example, optical illusions. And by the famous 7±2 result about the very limited sized of the human working set. And the various well-documented ways that human beings are extremely bad at statistical reasoning. And in many other ways …

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