A newsletter about #privacy, #technology, #policy, #strategy, and #justice.
Posts by @jdp23.
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@timnitGebru I think this is relevant to these questions, albeit handles them on a different level:
https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/89367
> Someone still has to reread, compare, test, contextualize, and sometimes rewrite. And if no one seriously takes on that work, the cost does not disappear. It reappears later in the form of errors, urgent fixes, loss of trust, and eventually litigation. What is presented as a productivity gain is often just an accounting displacement.
This post was initially written in French, Si personne ne paie pour la preuve, tout le monde paiera pour le sinistre Let’s start with a truism. In ordinary life, just as in economic life, we have to make decisions without ever knowing everything. Every decision involves some uncertainty, and therefore some risk. Some risks are … Continue reading If No One Pays for Proof, Everyone Will Pay for the Loss →
I'm not even talking about the data stealing, exploitation, environmental pillaging, pollution, environmental racism etc.
I'm talking about the way people use the tools. Like what do advocates of using these tools say will happen to software engineering in the future? That it just won't need to exist because everyone will be able to create software using these tools?
Yeah @jonny's thread is great, really eye-opening.
It's an interesting question. There are a few different arguments that advocates for using these tools make.
skilled software engineers are very good at using imperfect tools -- figuring out the scenarios they work well in and how to work around the problems. @mttaggart's article was a great example of how this can work in practice, and @glyph has some thoughtful posts along these lines (not that either of them are advocates of the tools, but they illustrate the point). Static analysis tools (my software engineering claim to fame) is a great example of this general tendency: they can be extremely useful despite high numbers of false positives and false negatives.
the tools will radically democratize who can create personal-use software -- stuiff that that addresses their own (and their friends/family's) problems without being intended for broader use. For a lot of secnerios, attributes like scalability / reliability / security don't necessarily matter that much; so being able to start with a natural language definition and get something "good enough" can potentially be useful.
agentic software development is a transformative approach that leverages today's immense computing power so can produce software at least as good as today's hand-crafted software (which to be fair mostly sucks) far more quickly.
Then again as well as the issues that excellent article @rysiek discusses, advocates in general don't consider Gender HCI, Feminist HCI, Post-Colonial Computing, Anti-Oppressive Design, Design Justice, Accessibility, Security, Algorithmic Discrimination, or Design from the Margins into account. Neither do the people creating these tools, and neither does the overwhelming majoriity of the existing software these tools have been trained on. So software generated by these tools is at besting going to replicate the existing problems in these areas -- and more likely magnify them.
So this to me is where the bullet points above break down.
Few if any software developers are "skilled" in all of these areas, so don't know how to compensate for imperfect tools (and quite possibly aren't even aware of the tools imperfections).
"Personal use" tools that aren't accessible or designed from the margins, or embed algorithmic discrimination, aren't useful for most people.
Generating more software more quickly that magnifies (or even reproduces) today's problems in all these areas magnifies oppressions.
And as you say there's also the the data stealing, exploitation, environmental racism, etc, of the current generation of tools -- and let's not forget fascism, eugenics, and cognitive issues!
In theory there are alternate approaches that can avoid these problems; @anildash has talked about using small models trained locally on his own code, and that seems like a potentially-promising direction. In practice though the vast majority of advocates today seem to be using stuff from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta ... even the ones who acknowledge the ethical issues don't actually address them.
Heads up a new cohort is building for an edition of Tunnel for April 19-22. Limited seats. Come join us if you are keen to learn how to build completely private networks on the Internet and provide censorship resistant routes for those in need.
Course details here:
https://courses.nikau.io/tunnel
A recent article on why community-run private networks are healthy and needed, now more than ever:
Boost plz!
Looking for critical scholarship on the use of "AI" by library/archive workers. University libraries in particular, but adjacent and tangentially-relevant-at-best stuff is welcome too. Any format is fine: books, papers, blogposts, whatever. If it's good, gimme all you've got!
Looks like we're gonna have a department-wide conversation about people using LLMs, and it's being framed as "we're all using it, but we're not talking about it, so let's make sure we're all on the same page about using it responsibly" ... I'll of course be pushing the "there's basically no way to use it responsibly" position, and I'd like to arm myself and others with some critical analyses of issues related to its use in library/archive spaces.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@eff/116286171180527753
Really exciting news: Nicole Ozer is EFF's new Executive Director!
Acorn, a platform for growing and managing communities on decentralized infrastructure -- new from Blacksky!
https://blackskyweb.xyz/introducing-acorn-community-infrastructure-that-grows-with-you/
"It started, as most things do at Blacksky, with moderation."
There's so much to like about Blacksky that this aspect doesn't always get the attention it should, but think about it: how many other social networks have started with a focus on moderation, as opposed to initially ignoring it and then trying to play catch-up?
"Building out this system made clear how deeply embedded moderation is into every piece of infrastructure."
Again, compare-and-contrast with other social networks. And not just centralized social networks! How many fediverse platforms treat moderation as core functionality that's a first-class part of the infrastructure?
"As the community grew, its needs changed and our infrastructure grew to fit those needs. Community need guided every step."
There's a lot to learn here!
Acorn, a platform for growing and managing communities on decentralized infrastructure -- new from Blacksky!
https://blackskyweb.xyz/introducing-acorn-community-infrastructure-that-grows-with-you/
"It started, as most things do at Blacksky, with moderation."
There's so much to like about Blacksky that this aspect doesn't always get the attention it should, but think about it: how many other social networks have started with a focus on moderation, as opposed to initially ignoring it and then trying to play catch-up?
"Building out this system made clear how deeply embedded moderation is into every piece of infrastructure."
Again, compare-and-contrast with other social networks. And not just centralized social networks! How many fediverse platforms treat moderation as core functionality that's a first-class part of the infrastructure?
"As the community grew, its needs changed and our infrastructure grew to fit those needs. Community need guided every step."
There's a lot to learn here!
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
Timnit Gebru (she/her).
Jon
Patrick Breyer
🏳️⚧️PepperTheVixen🦯
Julian Oliver
Lina