Posts by damienblackburn 31 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2023
You're right in that the AI isn't a legal entity. However it is a product of the business, designed by a person there. You're trying to argue that if an automaker sells an unsafe vehicle they're not liable because the vehicle itself isn't a legal entity, which doesn't hold up in pretty much any jurisdiction outside of China.
Yes...and no.
Here in the US, it being on the internet means it's free for viewing. It does not, however, give unlimited rights to the viewer.
If I write a post in a personal blog, the content remains under my copyright indefinitely unless I have a preexisting contract to sign those rights over to someone or something else. Social media often has you sign the rights over to them for anything you create on their platform, for example. Anyone who creates original content of any kind automatically has the copyright to it. They can download or copy it ad nauseum, but attribution generally has to be given to not give the impression that it's their original work if it's a reposting (which isn't a bulletproof defense either).
The waters start getting murkier when you throw things like transformative effects, parodies, educational use, and more. Profit, either direct or implied, doesn't actually play a significant factor into this. There is an argument being made that MLs are transforming the content into a new form, which is covered under Fair Use. And it's not a simple test, either. If the MLs are just copy+pasting it then it fails most prongs of the Fair Use test and there's a real case to be made for civil damages.
Flat tax is a scam, pure and simple. It proposes that only a sales tax is paid, increased to account for no income, property, etc. taxes. The idea is that things that are bought are taxed directly so no matter what there's income. The issue is that lower and middle class persons spend a much larger percentage of their income on goods than upper class do.
There's also an exception for business-to-business transactions. So I form a LLC and do everything on behalf of it and now I don't pay taxes. Fucking brilliant idea there.
We have a term for this already. It's called "learned helplessness".
Though to be fair, if your entire job is to follow a script and you are not allowed any deviation, you should be replaced by a machine. The point of having a human operator there is for the human element. If that human element cannot be utilized, then there's no point in having it present.
Sidenote: I'm having this problem with our NOC currently, they have to page out for every issue seen, no matter if we told them 40 minutes ago to ignore it. Since they're not allowed to exercise human judgement, what's the point in having a human there? I can tell a machine to suppress alerts for a period of time easily enough.
>Sources told CNBC that issues arose when LinkedIn attempted to lift and shift
There it is. Lift and shift is one of the worst ways to utilize cloud tech. It's the most expensive and most unstable method. I've been saying this for years. I know I'm not the only one who's realized this.
We keep hearing that return-to-office mandates are a way to justify real estate decisions. Isn't on-prem hosting the same thing in a way? So why isn't it getting the same treatment?
Boggles the friggin' mind it do.
Wouldn't underground cables be well insulated because they're, well, under the ground? The ground itself would absorb a significant amount of charge before there was enough of a differential for it to have an influence on the cables. AFAIK CMEs, like EMPs, are all direct influence effects and depend upon the object in question being electrically long enough to be able to be influenced. So wouldn't it stand to reason that the literal ground surrounding the cable be a sufficient buffer against direct influence?
>For example, potential lost earnings due to down time.
That is a problem on both cloud and on-prem hosting. Cloud providers routinely shit the bed. Not even a few months ago Azure lost connectivity to South America. That's not an 'oopsie', that's catastrophic. We've seen multiple instances of S3 going down faster than a crackhead at the end of the night.
>snip a lot of whinging about an on-prem client having downtime
First, if 5% of your customerbase leaving due to a short downtime like that costs you 500k GBP a year, you've already fucked up your architecture extremely bad. That tells me they didn't have redundancy in place, or at the very least didn't test it to ensure that failover works. It doesn't matter if you are hosting on-prem or in the cloud, if you don't look at every layer of your architecture and see where SPoFs are and how to mitigate, and then *test* that mitigation, to quote Nigel Ng: "you fucked up".
A lot of this sounds like they needed redesigning which you did and then built a system that actually has HA built into it, something they either A) didn't have or B) didn't test.
ED: I didn't even realize, why did the DC not even have hands and eyes available? Yeah, they charge a lot. But they're still available. And if it's hardware, you should have service contracts from a vendor who can get out there quickly.
>Yes, you can do this sort of thing in your own racks, but there are certain things you just never have to deal with when using the cloud...disk failures, power supply failures, fucking holes in the roof that pigeons can get in then shit on your racks, get feathers in your fans, the roof falling in after a storm etc
You absolutely DO have to deal with that shit in the cloud, you're just third or fourth party to it. Even though it's "the cloud" it still is a virtual machine that exists on a hypervisor running on a real piece of equipment somewhere. Ephemeral doesn't mean it's all existing in the land of makebelive. Cloud provider DCs can and do suffer failures, whether those are manmade or natural. Again, you build HA into the system from the get-go, it doesn't matter if a single drive or PSU goes or a whole rack goes.
>That largely depends on the business and how it models its forecasts and which growth stage it is in.
If you're suffering from rampant growth, it's because you didn't plan shit out. That's the whole point of the SDLF. You should know before you go to prod what you need to achieve system stability and allow for growth. Your SIT/preprod should entirely be a clone of production and subject to all the full load testing you can throw at it, simulating real world consistent and peak load, and your resources adjust to meet that demand. You have rack space to grow as needed as well. Make sure you have enough CPU and memory on your hypervisors to spin up additional VMs as required. Make sure you have enough JBOD or SAN storage for databases and more. By the time you hit 50% load you should know how long before you get pegged out and can grow without everything being on fire.
>Is your project going to be truly "steady traffic" 24x7, or does it have steady traffic only during the day? If you design for the cloud you could use much smaller servers and scale out as needed. Migrate to a bigger server instance size? Piece of piss.
And this is where cloud shines, if you'll pardon the pun. The *only* area it does.
>Also, what happens if your power goes out for several hours? Are you going to keep a UPS?
Depending upon colo, they'll have redundant power at the rack, the floor, or nothing. You can get a rackmount UPS, they're cheap. They may also have onsite batteries that take over before generators do. This is pretty common tech.
>Have you factored in the cost of electricity for this server?
I've not seen a ton of colos charge for power, they charge by the rack and then charge for bandwidth over a certain amount.
>Even with a colo, you are risking a long outage if they have a flood / fire / something you haven't thought of. So, you're gonna need two which are geographically apart.
You're risking the same thing with cloud. You need to put your application into different availability zones, georedundant, of course minding any laws applicable. Your application also needs to be able to handle that. Doing that without the cloud is also stupid simple, you can use a forwarding service like Akamai or Cloudflare, or even just DNS round robining. And you better hope that the regional outage, like S3 going down for all of South America, doesn't affect your multiple AZs.
>Cloud just takes away so many headaches. They have top class security (Not Azure though).
lmfao. Security in cloud is what you build into it. Also you have zero visibility into their internal layers, so you have no idea if it's paravirtualization or true virtualization, which can provide mitigating factors if someone bypasses the hypervisor. Plus the other parts like S3/Blobs/etc.
>Backups are super easy.
So are they with on-prem or even shared hosting.
>Power supply is reliable.
Ditto.
>Database administration is super easy.
Ah yes, because you can get a database on an engine that you have no direct control over.
>As much bandwidth as you can handle.
That you pay for. Same as with self-hosted.
>OTOH, it can be a confusing nightmare and they seem to release dozens of new services every month.
That doesn't scream reliability, that screams "sh!t changes all the time and you'll be scrambling to find the bug^H^H^H undocumented feature".
>entirely self hosting is far too expensive these days
You had me agreeing up until this point.
Even factoring in travel time and expenses to go to a remote datacenter, the costs weigh heavily towards self-hosting being cheaper. Whether that's in a dedicated datacenter in your office or doing colo at a nearby site. Colo costs are almost a rounding error to any medium or large business, and you can get a rack or two for almost nothing a month. The cost of actual iron can be amortized over their lifetime, making them an asset which is beneficial for taxes, rather than an expenditure like cloud would be. Trying to argue CapEx vs OpEx is just financial masturbation, it's still money coming out of the same bucket.
The only time exclusively cloud can be cheaper is if your systems and architecture is built for it. To run as lean as possible and to scale up and down as needed. That can be cheaper, since you're paying for compute time, vs having a hypervisor or even bare metal run with a lot more empty cycles. But as I said, your system has to be built for it. If you cannot handle that kind of dynamic scaling without getting hands-on with the machine, you're at best going to want to do a hybrid setup with the parts that can rapidly scale in the cloud and those that can't on-prem.
None of this is even remotely questionable. The costs of compute time, storage, bandwidth, and even other ephemeral services like Kubernetes on the cloud are known, documented, and publicly available. Doing a cost analysis is child's play and quickly shows where the benefits lie.
>That's because we've learned the hard way that the latest and greatest "new thing" is probably broken in a couple of dozen edge cases that the documentation doesn't cover
And that's further exacerbated by every tool being good at a specific job or task, which most managers and tech enthusiasts don't understand, instead shoehorning them into dozens of cases where they're middling to harmful.
To use the old adage, you don't use a screwdriver to try and hammer in a nail. You'll malf up the nail, screwdriver, or both. You need to use the right tool for that job, in this case, a hammer (or better yet, the specific kind of hammer such as ball-peen, claw, carpentry, etc.).
Tools like Docker and "the cloud" are fine tools for specific tasks, and if those tasks are partly or wholly what your business does, great, use them. I can only think of a few automation tools in the past few years that are universally good and should be used in all circumstances (barring, of course, outliers). Many have their niche, and when you start having to build a massive toolbox to get niches 1 through 100000, you lose out on a lot.
Yeah, the pricing is what gets them. They charge based upon the amount you ingest, and those prices are sky-high. With the push to cloud, that basically kills their model as many providers have internal tools for log consumption and searching, like AWS' Central Logging, so there's no point to pay for a cloud application. If you want to do on-prem or do data analytics, there's tools like ELK and more.
>This includes solar photovoltaics generating "more electricity than the entire US power system does currently,"
So generating more electricty through the power of fucking magic?
>and the renewable share of the electricity mix has to increase to nearly 50 percent from the 30 percent it is today.
Wish in one hand and shit in the other.
Renewables aren't the solution here. As others have said, electric grid is a problem, but if you want generation, you need to invest in nuclear. Get sustainable commercial fusion out the door and we've solved a lot of problems. Make your EVs a hybrid vehicle with a hydrogen engine that provides power direct to the electric motor and/or recharges the battery.
>for doing that we need to work very hard; we need to be disciplined and improve our work productivity
Working hard doesn't improve productivity. Having a mindset and education system that encourages thought and critical thinking improves productivity. And with the current model, why work hard and be productive when you can make small improvements, and in 6 months get offered a dollar or two more an hour at another place and jump ship?
>Working those extreme hours, he added, will define a culture that ultimately improves India’s government by setting an example.
No, it won't. Working hard doesn't teach the corrupt that there's a better way. And divisions based upon your caste system, which is still widely used, despite being "officially" outlawed. First your country needs to do a big purge of the corruption and form a culture shift. Lying, cheating, and stealing need to be abhorred completely, not a point of shame when you get caught because of your ineptitude.
>“Performance leads to recognition, recognition leads to respect and respect leads to power,” he said, citing China as a “great example” of that progression.
Ah yes, let's look at the fantastic example of China, a country even more corrupt, where recognition...wait, what recognition? Oh right, the country where having the wrong opinion means you get sent to a labor camp. No matter your performance in either direction. A country where you can fleece consumers quite easily and the law won't do anything to protect the consumer, because 一分钱一分货 -- you get what you pay for.
I used to work as a contractor at an office that had TVs around them and of course displayed the usual news and propaganda messages. This company had the bright idea that one of the videos that played would do a little jingle. So every 45 seconds or so there'd be a jingle. And this was right outside my cube.
This was during the time of IR blasters being on a lot of phones, and I had at the time IIRC a Galaxy S5 which had said IR blaster. Quickly put that bastard on mute and enjoyed my quiet work.
Gerstner really changed that.
I worked for IBM for a few years about a decade and a half ago. It was just a sweatshop. Doing almost the same thing I do now for a literal fourth the pay.
They constantly cut US staff and send the positions over to India. Cutting staff became a regular cost-saving mechanism. I saw managed services shrink and customers leave them because the service became so bad. One of the notables was Disney leaving them.
Wanting to save costs? Well of course, that's one of the stated claims that cloud can do. Performs better and costs less.
The hidden line is if, of course, your application and server model permits dynamic scaling with no user interaction, and you can setup your applications with no users logging into systems. But Gartner doesn't state so, so it's ignored. Lift and shift, fucko.
>LeCun dismissed the possibility that AI could threaten humanity as "preposterous," arguing that AI models don't even understand the world, can't plan, and can't really reason.
Precisely. They have no ability to infer or derive. They just look at statistical probabilities from predefined models and responses. Ask one about something said two lines previously and unless you clearly defined it they don't understand. Or they'll make something up. This is only exacerbated by the developers and deployers further curating and censoring the datasets available to the AI, making it much more artificial and much less intelligent.
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