Access and communication across diverse servers is important, and people depend on it to keep in touch with their friends and audience. But the safety and dignity of vulnerable people is more important; knowingly putting your vulnerable members at risk by placing them within reach of a known-bad-actor server is unconscionable. Defederation is one way to protect your members by putting them out of reach of people on a known-bad server.

Having said that, I think smaller instances defederating from larger ones remains disproportionately painful for the smaller instance, and largely ineffective in changing the behavior of the larger. Ideally the answer is to never let any instance (or small set of instances) become large and dominant, but I don’t know how to achieve that end in the real world.

Other solutions like Mastodon’s “Limit” status may be more effective.

Read more…

• #opinion
• #mastodon

https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/surveillance-company-flock-now-using-ai-to-report-us-to-police-if-it-thinks-our-movement-patterns-are-suspicious

Surveillance Company Flock Now Using AI to Report Us to Police if it Thinks Our Movement Patterns Are “Suspicious” | ACLU

Company crosses a dangerous line by beginning to offer AI suspicion-generation functions

www.aclu.org

Every one of these for-profit public-surveillance companies will:

1. Surveil and collect more data than initially agreed upon
2. Sell said data to brokers
3. Sell access to said data to law enforcement
4. Train AI models on said data
5. Sell derivative products that infringe on their users’ liberty (i.e. pre-crime prediction, profiling)
6. Retain data longer than they agreed to, either through negligence or intentional data-retention laundering.
7. Get hacked, releasing personally identifiable data to the criminal web
8. Get sold to another company that will use the data for things the initial contract never intended

This happens every time. Every damn time.

Say no to surveillance. No short-term “safety” benefit is worth this enshittification.

Read more…

• #opinion

Conspiracy thinking, magical thinking, reductive thinking, just-so thinking, disinformation, and plain old cult behavior also exist on the left.

Stay vigilant, stay curious, ground yourself in verifiable reality, and focus on people, not abstractions. There is no single -ism that solves all of our problems. There is always something new we don’t yet understand.

Reality is messy. We must deal with it as it is.

• #opinion

Complex software projects made up of mostly AI-generated code isn’t going to happen. And one reason I say that is because the code AI generates has no intent behind it.

Senior software devs spend an extraordinarily large amount of time reading existing code and asking not just how they work, but why they were written that way. Reading long-maintained, complex source code is more than mere reading comprehension; it’s closer to literary critique. You’re constantly trying to understand the thought process and motivation of whoever wrote that code, in the hopes of gaining insight into their frame of mind.

Well, AI code has no motivation, thought process, nor frame of mind. While the code it generates might work correctly (a bold assumption) at the point it was extruded, there is no plausible way of maintaining that code, and at some point of complexity (sooner than you think!) maintainability becomes critical.

Read more…

• #FridayDevAdvice
• #AI
• #programming
• #technology
• #opinion

If you subscribe to the idea that making tons of poor choices will lead to poor outcomes, I think it only makes sense that you should also believe that making tons of good choices will lead to good outcomes.

I’m not a religious person, but this is the closest thing to faith that I have. It’s playing the numbers, isn’t it? Doing an act of kindness, or acting for good, or choosing to speak truth in the face of inconvenience, are all ways to stack the probabilities so that it’s more likely that good things happen in the long run than bad.

People say “death by a thousand cuts” but I can’t think of an equivalent phrase for improving things by a thousand tiny acts of caring.

I think “building brick by brick” is the closest phrase I can think of, yet it’s not exactly what I want because it’s more like consistently following a construction plan. The expression I want should suggest that even random, unplanned kindness eventually create goodness.

• #opinion