Christopher Wood

You know how sometimes you use a grocery app and it’s fairly obvious that the people writing them don’t spend time in grocery stores? I’m getting that same impression here.

Imagine being a skilled San Francisco-style tech worker, at the apex of your industry, and the heights of intellect and rigor you can scale outside of that very specific context turn out to be “race science” apologia. Probably a lesson in there somewhere.

This whole festival sounds like it could have used conflict of interest subtitles. When somebody’s voice is saying “I actually think that AI (blah, blah)” there’s one subtitle with the words and another with phrasing such as “(Person)'s annual stock award will be increased by (number)% if paid subscriptions to (company)'s AI product rise by (number)%.”

I’m always very nonplussed about what claims to pass for thought in white nationalist crowds.

The stopped-clock moment in this whole is definitely where he dimly grasps that Republican audiences are way more openly positive to white nationalism than they were.

I applaud your optimism that most people can do this without AI but have you gone and met people? Most people are not that capable of producing torrents of shameless bullshit as conscience or awareness of social and/or professional costs rear their head at some point.

Once upon a time I was, for employment reasons, part of a team providing customer support for police forces’ booking equipment including RHL, Solaris, HP-UX, and Tru64 servers. If you were arrested in some specific parts of the USA in the early 2000s it’s likely your PII travelled across a server I had logged into on its way to the FBI.

One specific police force called us about a red light. It turned out that half of their two-disk RAID1 array had failed. Then it transpired that they had not been rotating the backup tapes. Or even putting in the tape for backup. After some discussion it turned out that their server was in a grimy, dusty janitor’s closet instead of, say, under a desk or in a spare office. Which is why it had been out of sight and mind and getting clogged with filth.

I was asked to do a checkup on this server and see how it was. Of course this was after 3 PM on a Friday. The server seemed on the face of it fine, the RAID array was working on one disk, there were no errors on the box, and so on. Apart from the dead disk everything was fine.

(While I was being finicky with this host it got late and somebody turned off the lights and I yelled “I’m still here turn the goddamn lights back on!” or words to that effect and it turned out I had unintentionally cursed at the CEO with whom I had less than ideal relations. So it goes. He seemed more copacetic than usual. He left and I got on with things.)

Eventually I was finishing my little audit and my very junior self (job title: Technician) was wondering how little work I could get away with in my correctly lazy sysadmin style. For the first time I thought the thought that has guided my actions with systems ever since: “If I stopped here, would it be okay if a problem happened later?”

I called the police force and said given circumstances I needed to take a cold backup of their Oracle database and their booking equipment would be down for a bit. The response was that this was fine given arrest volume only picked up later on a Friday anyway. I merrily took down a whole police force’s ability to book suspects to cold-backup their Oracle database onto the third disk in the host (secondary backup mechanism or something, purchasing is a weird art). Then I turned them back on and had them do a smoke test and grabbed the bus home.

I had myself a happy little weekend in the era before cell phones and when I arrived a bit late on Monday morning my workplace was in a rather unprecedented uproar. Readers, the second disk in that police force’s RAID array had failed and taken with it their ability to book prisoners and their built up years of criminal intelligence data.

(In this situation the civil rights clock ticks and judges do not accept “well our computer systems were down” for slow-rolling delivery to bail hearings as much as the public thinks they do. So if this isn’t fixed a whole bunch of innocent and/or gormless and/or unpleasant people run wild and free.)

I was called over by the Executive Vice President of Operations and asked about the database. I said in my then-typical very guileless way “oh, I did a cold backup onto the third disk”. It was like everybody had just exhaled around me.

If I recall correctly the job of restoring the Oracle database was delegated to J. who was a great Oracle DBA among other talents. Well, as soon as a disk arrived. In the meantime the police force dug out their inkpads and paper from somewhere.

This was a superior lesson in the fragility of computer systems and why the extra mile is actually no more or less than all the required miles.

Is there some EA culture thing where every thought has to be expanded into essay form?

The sheer comedy of libertarians rules-lawyering international law for their intermittently flooded microstate though. As opposed to, say, using free contracts between individuals.

Now I have another example of libertarianism for my list if I actually need to talk about libertarianism instead of just point and laugh.

Just a minor paragraph rewrite for clarity.

“The reality of generative AI is you’ve got to have a foundation of cloud computing,” AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Dave Levy, whose compensation relies on him successfully growing Amazon’s computer rental income, told Nextgov/FCW in a June 26 interview at AWS Summit. “You’ve got to get your data in a place where you can actually do something with it.”

It’s always so tedious when these little conflict of interest notes are left out of articles.

To your edit, there do seem to be very many people emotionally invested in append-only ledger technology.