(pinned) living in interesting times

In this space, and online in general, I mostly talk about computers — as well as tabletop games, cats, dogs, baking, and other comparatively trivial topics.

At the same time, in the US we are currently living through a time where the government is increasingly attacking the people of this country, imprisoning people without cause, and ignoring the Constitution. Worldwide, others are dealing with the consequences this as well, not to mention the rise of the far right in their own countries.

I don’t actively talk about this a ton online — not because I don’t care, but because being politically loud on the Internet is not where I really feel I can be effective at that kind of change. But at the same time, it feels wrong not to acknowledge the reality we live in.

Among other things, I donate heavily to organizations that do good work and match my values. For a list of orgs that I’d encourage you to support, click through to the rest of the post. For more computer and pet content, go ahead and scroll down!

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Quoting Toby Buckle

But millions of people did not, in fact, go to bed reluctant liberals and wake up fascists. Rather, many who were never liberal to begin with, who never liked liberals, and whose coexistence with liberals was always temporary, strategic, and contingent, decided that they were no longer willing to live alongside us. From this perspective, the problem is catastrophic, but at least conceptualizable. Fascism is terrifying, but terrestrial.

From Toby Buckle, Liberalism Did Not Fail, Conservatism Did in Liberal Currents.

Quoting Charity Majors

Charity’s latest post, Bring back ops pride, is an excellent discussion (rant?) on the importance of operations for software systems and why it’s a bad idea to try and pretend it isn’t a real concern, or make conventional application teams do the work in addition to their regular job.

“Operations” is not a dirty word, a synonym for toil, or a title for people who can’t write code. May those who shit on ops get the operational outcomes they deserve.

You should absolutely go read the full piece, as well as Charity’s earlier post on the Honeycomb blog: You had one job: Why twenty years of DevOps has failed to do it.

Below find several pull quotes from the post itself, because there were just too many to choose from.

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Quoting Lorin Hochstein

It’s useful to compare Lewis’s book with two other recent ones about Silicon Valley executives: John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood and Sarah Wynn-Williams Careless People. Both books focus on the immorality of Silicon Valley executives (Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos in the first book, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan of Facebook in the second). These are tales of ambition, hubris, and utter indifference to the human suffering left in their wake. Now, you could tell a similar story about Bankman-Fried. In fact, this is what Zeke Faux did in his book Number Go Up. but that’s not the story that Lewis told. Instead, Lewis told a very different kind of story. His book is more of a character study of a person with an extremely idiosyncratic view of risk. The story Lewis told about Bankman-Fried wasn’t the story that people wanted to hear. They wanted another Bad Blood, and that’s not the book he ended up writing. As a consequencee, he told the wrong story.

Telling the wrong story is a particular risk when it comes to explaining a public large-scale incidents. We’re inclined to believe that a big incident can only happen because of a big screw-up: that somebody must have done something wrong for that incident to happen. If, on the other hand, you tell a story about how the incident happened despite nobody doing anything wrong, then you are in essence telling an unbelievable story. And, by definition, people don’t believe unbelievable stories. 

From Telling the wrong story on Lorin’s excellent blog, Surfing Complexity.

Quoting Nicholas Carlini

Because when the people training these models justify why they’re worth it, they appeal to pretty extreme outcomes. When Dario Amodei wrote his essay Machines of Loving Grace, he wrote that he sees the benefits as being extraordinary: “Reliable prevention and treatment of nearly all natural infectious disease … Elimination of most cancer … Prevention of Alzheimer’s … Improved treatment of most other ailments … Doubling of the human lifespan.” These are the benefits that the CEO of Anthropic uses to justify his belief that LLMs are worth it. If you think that these risks sound fanciful, then I might encourage you to consider what benefits you see LLMs as bringing, and then consider if you think the risks are worth it.

From Carlini’s recent talk/article on Are large language models worth it?

The entire article is well worth reading, but I was struck by this bit near the end. LLM researchers often dismiss (some of) the risks of these models as fanciful. But many of the benefits touted by the labs sound just as fanciful!

When we’re evaluating the worth of this research, it’s a good idea to be consistent about how realistic — or how “galaxy brain” — you want to be, with both risks and benefits.

why I continue to blog with WordPress

I’m generally a fan in theory of static site generators like Hugo or Jekyll. I like the idea of a blog which is just a set of html pages, especially since I don’t like to enable blog comments. (Mostly for time management reasons.)

However… in my current life situation, I often find myself most able to write or edit blog entries from my phone. Usually on the couch, at the dog park, or otherwise away from a real keyboard. And I just can’t bring myself to manage a static site generator on a mobile device most of the time.

At the same time, I strongly prefer to have my blog hosted on a service instance I own and on a system I control. Or at least that I can control. I can deal with shared hosting, eg DreamHost-style, but I refuse to host my blog on a box where I can’t get a shell.

WordPress, for all its faults, has a usable mobile app that can connect to an instance hosted on my provider of choice. So it’s still the choice for the moment.

tailscale

Some discussion on bsky of the usefulness of Tailscale, and I’ll just note here how very handy it is for running a personal homelab that includes cloud instances. As well as just having lab connectivity from a laptop or phone on the go!

Services I run over Tailscale, just for myself, include:

  • An RSS feed reader
  • A personal git forge
  • An IRC bouncer
  • A (poorly maintained) wiki
  • JupyterLab
  • Open WebUI for playing with local LLMs on a GPU workstation
  • SSH to a powerful workstation, hosted at home but without complex configs

And probably a few things I’ve forgotten! It’s really just very neat. Sure I could do it all with manual Wireguard configs. But Tailscale just makes the underlying primitive much more ergonomic.