Our vacation comes to an end

his morning we published this latest part in a long series, explaining why – as our Jewish solicitor at the time might put it – Garrett ended up in a broch. His online behaviour for many years made this inevitable – he was mingling with the wrong people to cause trouble to people more far qualified than himself.

There’s a lesson somewhere in all this.

They pretend to

ids of the 1980s did not have computers at home, except those born in the late 80s or mid 80s. People born in the early 80s seldom had a PC at home unless a parent needed one for work or was working in the “IT” or similar industry/occupation. Mobile phones did exist, but very few people had them back then. To us, the kids, phones were “on the hook” and TV was the thing to watch things on (with a remote control; some TVs didn’t have that yet).

Now, by contrast, kids grow up with skinnerboxes and computers, such as tablets. They’re being spied on, they get exposed to loads of rubbish, and politicians who grew up in the 60s get to decide if it’s OK or not OK.

Politicians don’t represent the public interest.

reat interview with Richard Stallman published yesterday.

Stallman on LLMs: “The reason LLMs so often generate text whose meaning refers to false supposed facts is that they never really understand the text; they don’t work with meanings or facts in the domain of discussion. The terms they merit are “pretend intelligence” and “bullshit generators.”

“To avoid being lured into supporting the marketing hype based on “AI,” please join me in reserving the word “intelligence” for systems that qualify for it.

“I surely didn’t say anything about whether LLMs are “open,” because, as I’ve explained, I do not advocate making software “open” or “open source.” Those terms are depoliticized substitutes for “free” and “libre,” and were coined to win the support of businesses by avoiding the issues of freedom and justice (for the users of software) that might lead to criticizing businesses on moral grounds. Since those are the crucial issues in my view, the question I always ask about a program is whether it is free or libre.

“The LLMs that people mostly hear about are not released as free software. In fact, mostly they are not released at all: copies are not available. They can be used only as “online services” — meaning that the program a user directs a question to is running on some company’s computer, and under the developer’s total control. Even to modify it by patching the binary is impossible.

“Entrusting your own computing activity to software running on someone else’s server inherently subjugates you, because you can’t possibly modify that copy — even if it is a copy of a free program. We call that scenario SaaSS, for “Service as a Software Substitute” and we reject it.

“Since January I’ve heard of one LLM which seems to be released with freedom, including the training inputs. If that checks out, we would describe it as “free.”

“Alas, that doesn’t make it “intelligence.””

Windows is perishing, so…

ROWING up in the 1980s, Microsoft was mostly irrelevant, but by the 90s it was everywhere. Now it’s going away gradually. It tries to hide the mass layoffs; it’s fashionable now…

Silent layoffs are still layoffs.

Since last reboot

oming up next week is a meaningful (to me anyway) milestone. It’ll be 1000 days of uptime on my laptop:

roy@bubi:~$ uptime
 06:37:35 up 990 days, 21:49,  3 users,  load average: 9.03, 8.29, 8.10

I’m tempted to do a reboot after 10000, but don’t quite see the point doing so.

“Pissing it down…”

AME or match highlights (10+ minutes) have been published for United’s win and the impact of the very heavy rain here can be seen towards the end. This is rain we’re happy about as it’ll help fill up reservoirs and it helps water plants everywhere. If only it was more equally split across weeks… this year was probably the driest summer since 2018 or maybe even drier than that.

Tomorrow it’ll be more of the same. Arsenal plays at nighttime.

Look ma, no Facebook!

allery has been installed in this site since 2012 or 2013. This past week it passed 8 million views for pertinent pages, now clocking at 8012k.

Gallery is hardly maintained anymore, so the gallery we have installed here will need format-shifting and exporting some day.