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If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.

Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.

I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.

I understand. Different people have different thresholds for trust. Unfortunately, I have lived in DC for a long time. Long enough to know the basics of how espionage works. And, appealing to authority is very effective. Humans love authorities. Write a few papers. Give a few conference talks. Get a few magazines to report on your expertise. That's pretty much all it takes to get entry. Otto and Olaf are probably great guys. I'm just extra cautious.

No source code? No thanks but no thanks.

There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately. It’s a good time to be wary of any if you don’t trust the author 100%.

It’s like when HIV emerged in the 80s - the disco days of free love are over. Be wary of who you’re sleeping with, and always wear a condom.

Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people?

I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.

I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.

The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?

The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.

The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.

And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.

So what do people actually do?

[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.

Also true at the macro level. Human civilization and infrastructure resembles slime mold from space. Also, apparently the cosmic web: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/03/cosmic-web/

This acquisition and the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter are puzzling. Both HF and OR, from a technological standpoint, don't appear to have much IP that cannot be easily replicated.

I wonder how much it's worth to Nvidia just to obtain a list of who's downloading which models and for what purpose. Similarly with the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter. In the past, it would have been valuable to obtain an audience or market share or even a productive team. However, in this new age of the surveillance state ...

telemetry, orchestration, and financial

Yes!

Too easy to destroy if they're outside of population centers - soon they'll be building them under hospitals and orphanages

Wait til you find out what the GIA[1] did with other forms of cultural expression and education - like motion pictures, music, television, and academia

[1]: Global Intelligence Agency - because we know that they have deep reach into every nation at this point and are only accountable to themselves.

Wait, you mean there's a place in the world where people with merit, effort, and capability thrive?

Yeah, that doesn't fly with most Americans. Sounds a lot like the Sacklers - welp, can't ban pain meds, so might as well just addict as many as we can to opiods and take as much money as we can before they die

I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerburg and Sackler were 4th or 5th cousins, they act so similar

I'm sure everyone here understands that. But, there's a difference between a company that puts morality and ethics first vs. one that abandons it altogether or even encourages its opposition. I've worked for all three types, and after unwittingly working for scum, I recommend to always check who one's bosses are. In my understanding, I believe Zuckerburg has always operated in opposition to morality.

I'm just stating that not everyone is reading the most popular million books. And, there are many, many millions of books in the long tail.

A few years ago, after running into this issue several times, I looked into the economics of it to see if there was a opportunity to republish digitally. I found the sales data for some, the ones that had value were selling on average for around $50-150 dollars. Because the typefaces weren't modern, OCR wasn't scalable. Because only 20-40 were transacted each year, it wasn't worth the time.

What kind of books are they? In my case mostly historical documents by some relatively unimportant person who was highly important for a very, very niche subject. They still contain valuable, irreplacable information.

An analogy: imagine you discover a really cool video game from 20 years ago. You love it and want to find the developer's previous work. But, you find out that the company was purchase by another company which was purchase by another, etc, etc. Sure, maybe the game still exists in some digital vault. But, more than likely it's gone because old things only seem have value these days if some influencer broadcasts it.

It's interesting that libraries are purging them. Several times, I've found that the only available copies were at some random university rare book collection in middle of no where, and basically impossible to access unless one fly in - which isn't worth it. They are often donated by a benefactor and stuck there - which is why they're never read. It's not that the content isn't valuable.

archive.org is an incredible blessing that I never really respected enough until the last few years. I have bookmarks going back to the 90s, and for some reason, starting in 2015 or so, sites just started disappearing. I estimate at least 20% of my bookmarks are 404 now.

I think you may be greatly underestimating the long tail. Several times a year I read sources that reference older books that I can't find online. When I am able to locate them, they often cost at least several hundred dollars, sometimes into the 10s of thousands.

Why should the fruits of our labor be taken to pay for some rando’s job training? If they actually had any potential, they wouldn’t need job training and certainly wouldn’t need average people to pay for it.

I’ll think of the poor researchers once we get the homeless in my hometown of Pittsburgh down to zero. Currently, real people matter more to me.

There are too may bad scientists, and I don't want to fund them. When the sciences became status-oriented, group-think and profit-seeking became the norm.

This administration is trash, but I'm still tired of paying taxes to fund jokers.

If your 'science' is so important, then any other country in the world will be happy to scoop you up. gtfo

Just one example out of many: Today, I looked up research on EMDR treatments. Major problems in replication for things outside of PTSD. Yet, therapists are told by their boards to push the treatment for all sorts of things.

Have many of you actually looked at a lot of the garbage funded by NIH?

They should be incentivizing researchers who have histories of publishing research that has been independently replicated. Way too much fraud going on that’s seeping into the real world.

It just may be that they've been pulled from duty.

I haven't looked into those scientists in particular, but a few years ago I did some OSINT on others that had funerals. I was surprised to find a couple of them living in other countries with different identities.

The social media posts on their funerals were rich sources of data. So, I think some don't have funerals anymore because of the PII leakage.

If any of you were in gifted programs during the 70s and 80s, you may have experienced being scouted by intelligence agencies or at least witnessing others being scouted. I suspect the gifted program was largely created for that purpose. So, at least some exceptional scientists who grew up in that era have connections with intel.

When a powerful group removes "Don't be evil" from their code of conduct it's pretty clear where things are headed.

Reminds me of when that one verse was removed from Psalm 145.

I understand where you're coming from and can empathize because I've been asked some absurd computer science questions in interviews.

However, in my experience, if an interviewer can't confirm basic knowledge of data structures and algorithms, then some lead ends up having to teach computer science to explain to a developer why their code with 5 nested loops is probably not a good idea.

Having been that lead who has had to stay up all night trying to debug some difficult to reproduce deadlock or race condition ... I would prefer that companies spend resources on training rather than spending $5k to interview a candidate

I think that’s what they call a ‘false dilemma’.

Recently, I had a conversation with a bunch of people who have worked in the tech industry since the 90s. Someone asked which technologies have greatly improved our lives. Outside of some specific medical innovations, we struggled to agree on more than three.

I assume that if it's not air-gapped, it's compromised. I keep important stuff offline.

Looking foward to the generated images of a CEO riding a toilet

Also, within a few hours of posting this, I received this odd email from “ privacy@openai.com” to the gmail address connected to my chatgpt account. I made no such request to them.

“Hi there,

Thank you for your message. To protect user privacy and for security reasons, we can only act on privacy requests once we have sufficiently verified account ownership. For this reason, please contact us directly from the email address linked to your account.

If you no longer have access to that email address, please let us know.

Best regards, John OpenAI Privacy Team”

I browsed the internet yesterday after abstaining for a few months. I was pretty shocked - the rulers seem to be working overtime to lead the Christians, Jews, and Muslims to kill each other. I didn’t see much else in the headlines. Happy that I stopped paying attention to anything outside my 2 mile radiua bubble.

Pittsburgh is a mess. I grew up there and came back recently to visit after 20 years. I walked a street for a few miles, and it was homeless after homeless. Heartbreaking change to see. I spoke with some missionaries who were handing out provisions, and they said the next street up was even worse.

Reminds me of what happened to San Francisco after the tech boom. What a loss. These people who come to these cities for the economic zone are sick - they will literally let people die on the street. I wish Pittsburgh could tax the landowners into poverty.

I worked with him at CNRI. Seemed pretty dim and overrated. I think people keep him around for the DARPA connection.

In 1990 I hoped my grandkids would be able to join starfleet. After watching most of the gains go to the worst, I just hope they can escape the borg.

I love the USPS. I love going to the post office and seeing real people, especially people in the town I live in. It's a social gathering place in smaller towns.

This push toward optimization in the US, gradient descent to the LCD - seems harmful to average people.