#big data

[fuzzyghost]

[probablyasocialecologist]

Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.) So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.) There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”. IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”.

[porterdavis]

Plus he stole everybody's data

[threetrenchcoatsinatrenchcoat]

hate hate haaaaaaate when i bring up privacy and someone says "ah they already have all my data anyway so it doesn't matter for me". no they don't. who do you think "they" is and no they don't and even if they did up to yesterday does your heart not pump blood today? are you dead in the ground? or is being an ignorant bad faith defeatist perhaps easier than learning that there is still good in the world you have a chance to embody?

being scared of Big Brother has been a useful model for a while, but if we can spare a second to color in the picture, there is no organized team of geniuses staring at a wall of computer monitors tracking citizens one at a time. there are apps that sell our data, data brokers that traffic it, and companies who pay someone to run regression analyses on the sqls they happened to buy and hope has enough of what they wanted. the bigger the file, the easier it is to silence political dissenters and stalk victims and design ads that can make as many people as possible feel as unfulfilled as possible. every person who blocks cookies today makes the world safer and fairer

[stilmor]

Video description:

In this episode of Free Speech Friday, [Taylor Lorenz] sat down with Cindy Cohn, former head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and author of the new book Privacy's Defender. We dive deep into the secret history of the early internet, the terrifying reality of mass online surveillance by the US government, and how "age verification" laws sweeping the US will destroy digital civil liberties for everyone.

Cindy explains how the NSA and FBI use massive legal loopholes like Section 702 to secretly access your data for domestic purposes, the massive security dangers of forcing users to upload their IDs to access apps like Discord, and why the fight to protect encryption is more crucial now than ever.

If you care about your digital rights, free speech, and the future of the open web, this is a must-watch conversation!!

[river-taxbird]

What does AI actually look like?

There has been a lot of talk about the negative externalities of AI, how much power it uses, how much water it uses, but I feel like people often discuss these things like they are abstract concepts, or people discuss AI like it is this intangible thing that exists off in "The cloud" somewhere, but I feel like a lot of people don't know what the infrastructure of AI actually is, and how it uses all that power and water, so I would like to recommend this video from Linus Tech Tips, where he looks at a supercomputer that is used for research in Canada. To be clear I do not have anything against supercomputers in general and they allow important work to be done, but before the AI bubble, you didn't need one, unless you needed it. The recent AI bubble is trying to get this stuff into the hands of way more people than needed them before, which is causing a lot more datacenter build up, which is causing their companies to abandon climate goals. So what does AI actually look like?

First of all, it uses a lot of hardware. It is basically normal computer hardware, there is just a lot of it networked together.

Hundreds of hard drives all spinning constantly

Each one of the blocks in this image is essentially a powerful PC, that you would still be happy to have as your daily driver today even though the video is seven years old. There are 576 of them, and other more powerful compute nodes for bigger datasets.

The GPU section, each one of these drawers contains like four datacenter level graphics cards. People are fitting a lot more of them into servers now than they were then.

Now for the cooling and the water. Each cabinet has a thick door, with a water cooled radiator in it. In summer, they even spray water onto the radiator directly so it can be cooled inside and out.

They are all fed from the pump room, which is the floor above. A bunch of pumps and pipes moving the water around, and it even has cooling towers outside that the water is pumped out into on hot days.

So is this cool? Yes. Is it useful? Also yes. Anyone doing biology, chemistry, physics, simulations, even stuff like social sciences, and even legitimate uses of analytical ai is glad stuff like this exists. It is very useful for analysing huge datasets, but how many people actually do that? Do you? The same kind of stuff is also used for big websites with youtube. But the question is, is it worth building hundreds more datacenters just like this one, so people can automatically generate their emails, have an automatic source of personal attention from a computer, and generate incoherent images for social media clicks? Didn't tech companies have climate targets, once?

[victusinveritas]

[magicalmysteryperson]

Not a Robbie Williams lyric video this time.

But what it does contain is my fears in regards to generative AI.