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Cake day: Jul 05, 2023

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Apple’s business plan isn’t to sell your data to advertisers but rather to sell you (presumably) high quality items that people are willing to pay a premium for.

To Apple, having your data is a liability rather than an asset and thus they’d like to have as little of it as possible yet still being able to offer you the Apple experience.


Task Warrior ( https://taskwarrior.org ) and syncing it to https://inthe.am

Task Warrior is open source ( MIT license https://github.com/GothenburgBitFactory/taskwarrior.git ) as is InThe AM (AGPL https://github.com/coddingtonbear/inthe.am ) and can be spun up without too much difficulty for self hosted options.


There’s a pair of videos from People Make Games that digs into it:


Philosophers haven’t come up with a good way to determine if you were the only conscious being in a universe populated with zombies or not. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

I’d also suggest going through https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks to understand some of the concepts behind it. The ‘regurgitating data’ isn’t entirely accurate (and that statement is likely to evoke some debate). The amount of source data is compressed far too much for it to be returned largely intact (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity for some bit on the information theory)… though yes, there are some situations where specific passages (or images) get memorized.


AI can be an amazing tool in healthcare, as a double check. For example, assume a doctor thinks you have something. Right now you could have …

Expert systems have been available as part of medical diagnoses for decades. I remember ahem finding one for the Apple ][+ back in the day.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2663006/ was written back in '89 and you can easily find others going further back.

AI in medical diagnostic capabilities is nothing new or surprising.


ChatGPT works off of a fixed size possible maximum prompt. This was originally about 4000 tokens. A token is about 4 characters or one short word, but its not quite that… https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

“Tell me a story about a wizard” is 7 tokens. And so ChatGPT generates some text to tell you a story. That story is say, 1000 tokens long. You then ask it to “Tell me more of the story, and make sure you include a dinosaur.” (15 tokens). And you get another 1000 tokens. And repeat this twice more. At this point, the length of the entire chat history is about 4000 tokens.

ChatGPT then internally asks itself to summarize the entire 4000 token history into 500 tokens. Some of the simpler models can do this quite quickly - though they are imperfect. The thing is at point you’ve got 500 tokens which are a summarization of the 4 acts and of the story and the prompts that were used to generate it - but that’s lossy.

As you continue the conversation more and more, the summarizations become more and more lossy and the chat session will “forget” things.


I was not aware there have been leaks.

The big one was when histories (the prompts that other people used) were accidentally made visible to other users.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-bug-chat-histories-email-phone

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/21/23649806/chatgpt-chat-histories-bug-exposed-disabled-outage

https://openai.com/blog/march-20-chatgpt-outage

Also consider all the ‘ChatGPT extensions’ that people have written for chrome ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/ChatGPT ) and not infrequent occurrence when someone has an extension with a few tens of thousands of users which gets sold and converted into malware or snooping software ( https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/11/chrome_extension_developer_pressure/ ).


I am making sure that if someone else reads it who doesn’t know or wasn’t sure if I used the words properly that the up front clarification would avoid them asking and then waiting a day or so to get a response that clarifies their question. While you and I may be familiar with it, there are also high schoolers who are reading this who are less familiar with accounting terms and their specific meanings.


https://www.axios.com/2023/08/09/disney-earnings-streaming-profits

Disney also managed to narrow its streaming division losses significantly to last quarter to $512 million from $1.06 billion during the same quarter the year prior.

That progress should give investors hope that Disney is on track to meet its stated goal of making its streaming business profitable by 2024.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/disney-plus-statistics/

Disney Plus generated $7.4 billion revenue in 2022, an 42% increase year-on-year

They’re getting better and have a lot of other revenue that they can use to offset those losses while they figure out how to do streaming more profitably.

All of the following statements can be true simultaneously:

  • There is a lot of revenue (note revenue and not profits) associated with streaming content
  • Studios are losing money with streaming
  • Actors and writers are being paid much less for residuals of streamed content than would be considered fair

Another promise was that we’d be able to basically have access to every tv show or film, and that evaporated very quickly when all the studios decided they wanted to gatekeep everything so they could charge even more for it, and then now we have them disappearing so many things that have been out there just because they don’t want to pay royalties to anyone involved.

That is one part of it. The studios believed that if they did the distribution they’d be able to have a larger slice of the pie. This isn’t working as well as they thought it would in many cases (Disney is likely the exception if there is one with a very large historical catalog and several profitable franchisees) but didn’t realize the corresponding infrastructure and (customer) support costs that would incur reducing the amount that they make.

Furthermore, the residuals (things that are currently at stake in striking) are based on “having it available” even if no one is watching it. This means that studios (and Netflix and Amazon) are strongly incentivized to remove shows that aren’t getting watched sufficiently for the draw of having them there because they’re paying residuals no matter if its being watched or not.

Having a streaming catalog of 10,000 shows (Netflix has about 13,000 world wide by some accounts with about 5000 available in the US) would mean they’re paying small amounts to everyone even if they’re not getting watched. If the company (e.g. studio) isn’t set up around the infrastructure and support needed for streaming, this can easily mean that those small amounts can become more than the amount that the company is making off of streaming.

Ever notice how Amazon Prime Video rotates in lots of B movies that are available for a few weeks and then disappear again? This is to get people to watch them but minimize paying residuals for having a bunch of movies and TV series that no one watches otherwise.

With the combination of race to the cheapest for pricing (and sharing of accounts), and infrastructure / operational costs it is quite possible to be in the situation where studios are losing money on hosting shows and at the same time paying actors and writers far less than is fair… and the easiest solution that studios have to resolve this is to aggressively pull shows.

https://text.npr.org/2023/03/06/1161382179/hbo-max-disappearing-shows-series-streaming-warner (full site for a 26 minute audio version)



The best site to read about what is actually mandated and to see how they implement it is https://gdpr.eu … which has a privacy pop up on it that shows up each time.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.

I’m not sure how deliberate it is.


That was one tweet in a tweet thread from a… guy who is a bit of a character and does stuff with AWS. He pokes a fair bit of fun at Amazon and others in the cloud.

The thread reader rollup of it is https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html which is an amusing read by itself.

My favorite is still:

“Why use AWS instead of IBM Cloud?”
“IBM has a cloud?!”
“I’m as puzzled as you, I’m just reading off the notecard here.”

The best part of that is when you find out that IBM’s on prem cloud is called “IBM Cloud Private”.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-private/3.1.1?topic=started-cloud-private-overview

And then, when the sales teams talk about it, IBM Cloud Private is too long to say again and again… so they start calling it by its abbreviations… not IBMCP but rather ICP… and you start picturing the sales team wearing clown makeup. And when they talk about Machine Learning you share Using AI to Find Where Clowns End and Juggalos Begin with the devops guy sitting next to you and get some muffled chuckles.

Not that those events have ever happened… or would be admitted to.



Compare that to what I believe is the ZERO breaches Google has had in the same time frame.

From earlier this month: Google Cloud Build bug lets hackers launch supply chain attacks

A critical design flaw in the Google Cloud Build service discovered by cloud security firm Orca Security can let attackers escalate privileges, providing them with almost nearly-full and unauthorized access to Google Artifact Registry code repositories.

Dubbed Bad.Build, this flaw could enable the threat actors to impersonate the service account for the Google Cloud Build managed continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) service to run API calls against the artifact registry and take control over application images.

As to why don’t you hear about more GCP flaws? I refer you to this uncomfortable truth: https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1173394437298196480

“What does AWS have that GCP doesn’t?”
“A meaningful customer base?”


Disney doesn’t defend the style. They defend the use of the characters. You can find countless pieces of. fan art (draw X in the style of Disney) that haven’t been sued over.

Things like r/learntodraw : Trying to get better at Disney’s style (yea, reddit) aren’t infringing.

But I can assure you that if style was something that could be protected, then there’d be a great deal of amateur and fan content that is currently produced by small time artists that wouldn’t be able to anymore. … And the “you copied my style” would mean more than internet bragging points.


If we moved all data center cooling into the ocean, we would likely reduce the rate of ocean warming from burning fossil fuels (creating heat and CO2) used to power a data center that uses ~40% (on average) of its energy to cool the data center rather than for compute.


Artists should own their styles, but only in combination with their name.

Consider how many of the small, independent artists produce art with the intentional style of Disney.

Styles being something subject to protection would probably be disastrous to all but the biggest names (who could hire lawyers).


I wonder if international waters is their end goal. Self-reliant, off-grid data centers that only abide by MS rules.

Reduction of power requirements.

https://dataspan.com/blog/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-use/

For many data centers, the cooling system is one of the most energy-intensive components in the facility. The average data center cooling system consumes about 40% of the center’s total power.

Further reading:

From nrel.gov (National Renewable Energy Lab) site:

When the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) was conceived, NREL set an aggressive requirement that its data center achieve an annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.06 or better. Since the facility opened, this goal has been met every year—and the data center has now achieved an annualized PUE rating of 1.036.

Studies show a wide range of PUE values for data centers, but the overall average tends to be around 1.8. Data centers focusing on efficiency typically achieve PUE values of 1.2 or less. PUE is the ratio of the total amount of power used by a computer data center facility to the power delivered to computing equipment.

(I wanna say that 1.036 for PUE is amazing - but all the stuff they did to get there is expensive)


Yes it does. Fanfiction e.g. is considered infringement of the creator’s right, and that doesn’t extend to the exact verbatim text but to general plots, names …

The relevant concept for this is copyright protection for fictional characters.