Tag: rant

Neo-Assyrian clyndrical seal may illustrate a scene from the epic of creation in which the forces of chaos, led by Tiamat, are defeated by a god representing cosmic order, probably Ninurta. 900 BCE - 750 BCE

The Future is Meaningless and I Hate It

I graduated as a Computer Engineer in the late 2000s, and at that time I was convinced that the future would be so full of meaning, almost literally. Yup, I’m talking about the “Semantic Web,” for those who remember. It was the big thing on everyone’s minds while machine learning was but a murmur. The Semantic Web was the original promise of digital utopia where everything would interconnect, where information would actually understand us, and where asking a question didn’t just get you a vague answer but actual insight.

The Semantic Web knew that “apple” could mean both a fruit and an overbearing tech company, and it would parse out which one you meant based on **technology**. I was so excited for that, even my university graduation project was a semantic web engine. I remember the thrill when I indexed 1/8 of Wikipedia, and my mind was blown when a search for Knafeh gave Nablus in the results (Sorry Damascenes).

And now here we are in 2024, and all of that feels like a hazy dream. What we got instead was a sea of copyright-stealing forest-burning AI models playing guessing games with us and using math to cheat. And we satisfied enough by that to call it intelligence.

When Tim Berners-Lee and other boffins imagined the Semantic Web, they weren’t just imagining smarter search engines. They were talking about a leap in internet intelligence. Metadata, relationships, ontologies—the whole idea was that data would be tagged, organized, and woven together in a way that was actually meaningful. The Semantic Web wouldn’t just return information; it would actually deliver understanding, relevance, context.

What did we end up with instead? A patchwork of services where context doesn’t matter and connections are shallow. Our web today is just brute-force AI models parsing keywords, throwing probability-based answers at us, or trying to convince us that paraphrasing a Wikipedia entry qualifies as “knowing” something. Everything about this feels cheap and brutish and offensive to my information science sensibilities. And what’s worse— our overlords have deigned that this is our future.

Nothing illustrates this madness more than Google Jarvis and Microsoft Co-pilot. These multi-billion dollar companies that can build whatever the hell they want, decide to take OCR technology— aka converting screenshots into text, pipe that text into a large language model, it produces a plausible-sounding response by stitching together bits and pieces of language patterns it’s seen before. Wow.

It’s the stupid leading the stupid. OCR sees shapes, patterns, guesses at letters, and spits out words. It has no idea what any of those words mean. It doesn’t know what the text is about, only that it can recognize it. Throws it to an LLM which doesn’t see words either, it only knows tokens. Takes a couple of plausible guesses and throws something out. The whole system is built on probability, not meaning.

It’s a cheap workaround that gets us “answers” without comprehension, without accuracy, without depth. The big tech giants, armed with all the data, money and computing power, has decided that brute force is good enough. So, instead of meaningful insights, we’re getting quick-fix solutions that barely scrape the surface of what we need. And to afford it we’ll need to bring defunct nuclear plants back online.

But how did we get here? Because let’s be real—brute force is easy, relatively fast, and profitable for someone I’m sure. AI does have some good applications. Let’s say you don’t want to let people into your country but don’t want to be overtly racist about it. Obfuscate that racism behind statistics!

Deep learning models don’t need carefully tagged, structured data because they don’t need to really be accurate, just enough to convince us that they are accurate sometimes. And for that measly goal, all they need is a lot of data and enough computing power to grind through. Why go through the hassle of creating an interconnected web of meaning when you can throw rainforests and terabytes of text at the problem and get results that looks good enough?

I know this isn’t fair for the folks currently working on Semantic Web stuff, but it’s fair to say that as a society, we essentially have given up on the arduous, meticulous work of building a true Semantic Web because we got something else now. But we didn’t get meaning, we got approximation. We got endless regurgitation, shallow summarization, probability over purpose. And because humans are inherenly terrible at understanding math, and because we overestimate the uniqueness of the human condition, we let those statistical echos of human outputs bluff their way into our trust.

It’s hard not to feel like I’ve been conned. I used to be excited about technology. The internet could have become a universe of intelligence, but what I have to look forward to now is just an endless AI centipede of meaningless content and recycled text. We’re settling for that because, I dunno, it kinda works and there’s lots of money in it? Don’t these fools see that we’re giving up something truly profound? An internet that truly connects, informs, and understands us, a meaningful internet, is just drifting out of reach.

But it’s gonna be fine, because instead of protecting Open Source from AI, some people decided it’s wiser to open-wash it instead. Thanks, I hate it. I hate all of it.

A green wall in Soho New York with the works "Post No Bills" plastered all over.

October 18, 2024

Mozilla: All We Want is a User Agent

Originally, I meant to write a blog post diving deep into the hole Mozilla has been digging itself into with its “privacy-first” advertising push, perhaps even exploring the background work at organizations like the W3C and the IETF that led to this moment. I still may do that at some point. But today, this isn’t that article. This is just me venting my frustration at Mozilla’s relentless push of this topic.

And it’s really coming from a place of love—or at the very least former appreciation. In my early days of open-source advocacy with the Jordan Open Source Association, we collaborated extensively with Mozilla to promote the open web. As a web developer in the era of “This website looks best on IE6,” I witnessed firsthand the incredible progress Mozilla spearheaded, progress that many today might take for granted.

Mozilla’s work were rooted in the idea of user empowerment and fostering a free, open web. Firefox wasn’t just a browser; it was a tool to fight back against the monopolistic grip of Internet Explorer and later, Chrome. Firefox became a haven for users who wanted control over their browsing experience—users who refused to trade privacy for convenience.

Mozilla didn’t just challenge the status quo; they pushed for real, tangible change. They built tools to block trackers, shield users from pervasive surveillance, and give people control over their data. They were leaders user-centric design.

And for a while, they were the embodiment of the term user agent. In technical terms, a user agent is the software (like browsers and email clients) that acts on behalf of the user. For years, Firefox provided more value than the other browsers out there—it was operating in the user’s best interest, safeguarding them from the invasive practices of the ad-tech industry.

But I don’t recognize any of that in the Mozilla of today. There’s traces left of what I love about Firefox left that keep me holding on, no matter how much extra RAM I need to buy to keep running it, but I am quickly approaching my limit with that too. To add this advertising bullshit on top of it, I am honestly done.

It’s not that the arguments Mozilla is making in favor of privacy-first advertising have no merit. They do. The advertising industry undeniably has a privacy problem. But is that Mozilla’s problem to fix? It feels to me like they’ve forgotten which side they’re on. If the advertising industry has a problem, it’s not Mozilla’s job to fix it or ensure the future of ads is more sustainable. If artificial intelligence has ethical and sustainability concerns, it’s not on Mozilla to solve those either.

The work that Mozilla used to do for the open web, and championing for users is ever so important in an increasingly hostile digital world. Look how Google Chrome dominates the market and continues its hostility towards privacy-enhancing tools like uBlock Origin. But how can we trust Mozilla to continue in this role when it now owns an advertising company?

Speaking as a longtime Mozilla fan, I’d like to see them return to their original mission— and to being the user’s agent. They should focus on making Firefox (and Thunderbird) to be software that users trust to protect their privacy above all else, not a platform for exchanging user needs with advertising revenue.

A Lithograph of a butcher on his knees banging on his chest, next to a woman crying into a napkin. There are animal carcasses hanging on hooks behind them. At top center, the text says 'ACTUALITÉS.'; at upper right: '506.'; in stone lower left: 'h.D.'; in stone lower right: '156'; at lower left: 'Mon. Marinet, 172, r. Rivoli et 41, r. Vivienne.'; at lower right: 'Lith. Destouches, 28, r Paradis Pre. Paris.'; at bottom center: 'LE MEA CULPA DU BOUCHER./ _Tout le monde peut s'etablir boucher...je suis ruiné...c'est par ma faute...., par ma faute.., par ma très grande faute!....'

September 15, 2024

I Was Wrong About the Open Source Bubble

This is a follow up to my previous post where I discussed some factors indicating an imbalance in the open source ecosystem titled, Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst? I was very happy to see some of the engagement with the blog post, even if some people seemed like they didn’t read past the title and were offended by characterizing open source as a bubble, or assuming simply because I’m talking about the current state of FOSS, or how some companies use it, that this somehow reflects my position on free software vs. open source.

Now, I wasn’t even the first or only person to suggest an Open Source bubble might exist. The first mention of the concept that I could find was by Simon Phipps, similarly asking “Is the Open Source bubble over?” all the way back in 2010, and I believe it’s an insightful framing for the time that we see culminate in all the pressures I alluded to in my post.

The second mention I could find is from Baldur Bjarnason, who wrote about Open Source Software and compared it to the blogging bubble. It’s a great blog post, and Baldur even wrote a newer article in response to mine talking about “Open Source surplus”, which is a framing I like a lot. I would recommend reading both. I’m very thankful for the thoughtful article.

Last week as well, Elastic announced it’s returning to open source, reversing one of the trends I talked about. Obviously, they didn’t want to admit they were wrong, saying it was the right move at the time. I have some thoughts about that, but I’ll keep them to myself, if that’s the excuse they need to tell themselves to end up open source again, then I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Hope more “source-open” projects follow.

Finally, the article was mentioned in my least favorite tech tabloid, The Register. Needless to say, there isn’t and won’t be an open source AI wars, since there won’t be AI to worry about soon. An industry that is losing billions of dollars a year and is heavily energy intensive that it would accelerate our climate doom won’t last. OSI has a decision to make, to either protect the open source definition and their reputation, or risk both.

P.S. I will continue to ignore any AI copium so save us both some time.

In the pictured composite of 33 exposures, parallel streaks from Starlink satellites are visible over southern Brazil. Sunflowers dot the foreground, while a bright meteor was caught by chance on the upper right. In the pictured composite of 33 exposures, parallel streaks from Starlink satellites are visible over southern Brazil. Sunflowers dot the foreground, while a bright meteor was caught by chance on the upper right. In the pictured composite of 33 exposures, parallel streaks from Starlink satellites are visible over southern Brazil. Sunflowers dot the foreground, while a bright meteor was caught by chance on the upper right. CC-BY-4.0 Egon Filter

August 31, 2024

Suspending X: Brazil’s Ongoing Struggle to Govern Big Tech

We live in a scary world where someone with Elon Musk’s reach and influence can call a Brazilian Supreme Court judge an “evil dictator” and threaten him with imprisonment with apparent impunity, so it’s easy sometimes to miss what’s behind the news and the inflammatory tweets.

You might hear a lot about the suspension of X (formerly Twitter) in Brazil as a violation of free speech, which is the framing Musk prefers, arguing that the actions taken by Brazilian authorities are politically motivated attacks against his companies. But the real reason X has been suspended is that X has refused to comply with directives to name a legal representative in Brazil and remove certain accounts accused of spreading disinformation and inciting unrest.

What’s most striking about Musk’s tone is his apparent disbelief at Brazil’s audacity to challenge and potentially block his platform. It raises the question: why should Majority World countries be expected to accept Big Tech platforms uncritically, as though these platforms are the sole harbingers of development and free speech?

Now, the irony isn’t completely lost on me that the reported heir of an emerald mining family is pretending not to understand why companies extracting value while completely disregarding the negative impact of their business activities is bad. In fact, this isn’t even the first case for one of Musk’s companies in Brazil.

As Lua Cruz argues brilliantly in this article titled “Starlink in the Amazon: Reflections on Humbleness,” Starlink’s introduction to Brazil also carries the same complexities that illustrate how Big Tech techsolutionism and colonial legacies intertwine. Despite expecting a wholly negative impression of Starlink based on the media coverage, by visiting the affected communities and seeing the effects of Starlink on the ground, the complexity of the situation became readily apparent.

While the widely reported negative impacts of disrupting the social fabric and the environmental effects of such technologies do have a toll and are somewhat acknowledged by the communities, the people of the Amazons have been also able to use the technology to their advantage.

Cruz observes that Starlink has brought internet access to Amazon communities previously isolated from digital infrastructure, facilitating access to essential services, improving communication, and enabling territorial monitoring. Moreover, Cruz highlights that communication networks can empower communities by supporting civic rights, such as the right to organize, express opinions, and engage in public decision-making.

“Communities have shown resilience and adaptability in the face of such changes, often finding ways to integrate new technologies in ways that support their needs and goals. However, this resilience should not be taken as a justification for disregarding the potential harms”

While these benefits are significant, they do not erase the ethical concerns surrounding the deployment of such technologies without full engagement with the communities involved. It’s also important to understand how we got here in the first place. The very fact that Starlink has been able to position itself in this tech savior role can be attributed to years of neglect by the state and its deference to the private sector and international companies.

In contrast with the X case, this is an example where the state has failed in its duty, in particular to provide the people with meaningful access to the internet. Instead, they left that role to Starlink and the major corporations exploiting the Amazons who are financing the antennas. The danger of letting these technosolutionist approaches fill the void left by the state is that they often fail to engage meaningfully with affected communities and often overlook complex socio-political dynamics at play in favour of simplistic tech savior narratives.

Technosolutionism is often defined as the idea that any problem can be simply solved with technology, but it’s actually more complex than that, especially when it intersects with colonialism and imperialism. You can tell an approach is technosolutionist when it treats Indigenous communities as passive recipients of “technological aid”, rather than recognizing them as active agents with their own voices, needs, and complexities.

This disenfranchisement of Indigenous voices can often lead to disastrous consequences when they’re not involved in the governance of the technologies deployed for their supposed benefit. After all, the same communication networks that enable participation and access are the ones that can potentially bring disinformation in, as evidenced by the X case.

But when the “tech saviour” fails to deliver on their lofty promises, it is never the technology’s fault. The author brings up the example of how the rather nuanced coverage of Starlink in Brazil by the New York Times was picked up and reduced to racist caricatures by other media outlets, including Brazilian ones, whereas the critique of Starlink was less emphasized or ignored in those derivative reports.

Musk’s refusal to comply with Brazil’s judicial system is yet another a textbook example of this technological imperialism, cloaked in the guise of defending free speech. After all, his disregard for the socio-political impact of his companies is evident; after acquiring Twitter, his first moves included dismantling teams focused on public policy, human rights, accessibility (!) and content moderation.

At the end of the day, X should face the consequences of its business activities in Brazil. Brazil, alongside other Majority World countries, must assert their right and duty to regulate Big Tech, ensuring they respect local public policy and human rights. Ideally, all communities should have both the agency and the sovereignty over technologies that affect their lives, and tech companies should engage with them as such. Please read Lua Cruz’s full article on The Green Web Foundation website.

A painting of a horse being startled by a Snake.

June 15, 2024

What on Earth is Open Source AI?

I want to talk about a recent conversation on the Open Source AI definition, but before that I want to do an acknowledgement. My position on the uptake of “AI” is that it is morally unconscionable, short-sighted, and frankly, just stupid. In a time of snowballing climate crisis and an impending environmental doom, not only are we diverting limited resources away from climate justice, we’re routing them to contribute to the crisis.

Not only that, the utility and societal relevance of LLMs and neural networks has been vastly overstated. They perform consistently worse than traditional computing and people doing the same jobs and are advertised to replace jobs and professions that don’t need replacing. Furthermore, we’ve been assaulted with a PR campaign of highly polished plagiarizing mechanical turks that hide the human labor involved, and shifts the costs in a way that furthers wealth inequality, and have been promised that they will only get better (are they? And better for whom?)

However since the world seems to have lost the plot, and until all the data centers are under sea water, some of us have to engage with “AI” seriously, whether to do some unintentional whitewashing under the illusion of driving the conversation, or for much needed harm reduction work, or simply for good old fashioned opportunism.

The modern tale of machine learning is intertwined with openwashing, where companies try to mislead consumers by associating their products with open source without actually being open or transparent. Within that context, and as legislation comes for “AI”, it makes sense that an organization like the Open Source Initiative (OSI) would try and establish a definition of what constitutes Open Source “AI”. It’s certainly not an easy task to take on.

The conversation that I would like to bring to your attention was started by Julia Ferraioli in this thread (noting that the thread got a bit large, so the weekly summaries posted by Mia Lykou Lund might be easier to follow). Julia argues that a definition of Open Source “AI” that doesn’t include the data used for training the model cannot be considered open source. The current draft lists those data as optional.

Steffano Maffulli published an opinion to explain the side of the proponents of keeping training data optional. I’ve tried to stay abreast of the conversations, but they’re has been a lot of takes and a lot of platforms where these conversations are happening, so I will limit my take to that recently published piece.

Reading through it, I’m personally not convinced and fully support the position that Julia outlined in the original thread. I don’t dismiss the concerns that Steffano raised wholesale, but ultimately they are not compelling. Fragmented global data regulations and compliance aren’t a unique challenge to Open Source “AI” alone, and should be addressed on that level to enable openness on a global scale.

Fundamentally, it comes down to this: Steffano argues that this open data requirement would put “Open Source at a disadvantage compared to opaque and proprietary AI systems.” Well, if the price of making Open Source “AI” competitive with proprietary “AI” is to break the openness that is fundamental to the definition, then why are we doing it? Is this about protecting Open Source from openwashing or accidentally enabling it because the right thing is hard to do? And when has Open Source not been at a disadvantage to proprietary systems?

I understand that OSI is navigating a complicated topic and trying to come up with an alternative that pleases everyone, but the longer this conversation goes on, it’s clear that at some point a line needs to be drawn, and OSI has to decide which side of the line it wants to be on.

EDIT (June 15th, 17:20 CET): I may be a bit behind on this, I just read a post by Tom Callaway from two weeks ago that makes lots of the same points much more eloquently and goes deeper into it, I highly recommend reading that.

The Genesis bikes of the Madison Genesis team at Round 3 of the Pearl Izumi Tour Series in Edinburgh, on 19 May 2016 - Cs-wolves CC BY-SA 4.0

November 22, 2021

Hello W- nah just messing with you 🤣

It’s been a long time since my last blog post, and it feels so fucking good. While it does feel so incredibly good to be writing again, there is something so unfamiliar about my relationship to this space, my blog, and the internet in general. Which leads us to answer the first question I will answer today:-

Where did all the old blog posts go?

They’re all happy and alive, frolicking in a server farm far far away. In reality, the internet has changed, and so have I. In fact, the internet I used to write about never existed in the first place. It was fiction, almost naive fiction, presented as reality, and as we know, reality shows never age well.

I had to take the archive down because I couldn’t draw a line between the person I was in the 2010s and the story I want to tell now. They’re not purged, I want to curate a few of them and present them within context when I have the time, but until then, the only way to access them would be web archive or something.

Story you want to tell?

Yes, that’s what blogging is you silly pants! I’m just in a very interesting period of my life, in a very interesting period of time, and both I and time are in a very interesting position. I’ve just left OTF after a very interesting five years of supporting people who build great tools to save those most vulnerable online, and now I’ve joined Techcultivation and looking to do more of that and beyond. Not to mention great projects being set up like the SVT which I really want to tell you about. Those are all stories, from the past, the present and the future that I want to tell.

That I need to tell really.

Surviving a World in Crisis

Ron Burgundy saying "Well, that escalated Quickly"

Not gonna sugar coat it folks, since the last time I wrote a blog post, things have been rapidly becoming shittier. It was partially why I stopped. I called my older posts “almost naive” earlier, and they totally were. I’ve been disillusioned for as long as I can remember, and angry for even longer than that. I’ve also been tired. But the disillusionment, one side effect was it made me feel embarrassed by the naive fiction I used to peddle pre-2016.

I will not belabor the point today, I’ll keep that for later blog posts, but here is why I’m writing again. Was I wrong about things in the past? Yeah I was. Was I naive? Almost adorably so. Did my politics evolve since then? I hope so. Is there a danger of me spewing more naive fiction that I might be embarrassed about in the future? Well, that’s actually my plan, and it’s almost crazy enough it might work.

When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep going.
Audre Lorde

Not writing has not been working for me. Writing things that turned out to be naive worked for me at the time. Crises robbed us from our imagination. But we don’t all have the luxury or privilege of being doom preppers or nihilists. Just as the climate crisis will hit the poor, the queer and those in the larger world first, it will come for their imaginations first.

I want to write again and maybe encourage you all to start blogging again because we need to save our imagination, it’s the only way we can keep going. So expect more wonderful stories on this website, both the ones I promised above, and more, about how we’re gotta get through this and make things better.