Tomorrow 1pm Buchanan Street steps, we need to make sure racists are far outnumbered on the streets of Glasgow

The conscious machine

This is a fantastic explainer of the threats and risks, and opportunities of AI. Thinking about the nature of consciousness. Can we ever say truly what a machine consciousness is, or how it feels?

Max Tegmark – When Our Machines Are Smarter Than Us – Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda
Up until now, we’ve been smarter than our tools. But that might change drastically sooner than we know. Isn’t it time to think about that?

As a white man, I have no idea how it feels to walk this world in darker skin. I can understand fear, but not the constant fear of being stopped by police, of watching my back.

I can understand what is happening, and fight to change it, but I’ll never understand how it feels to be in that position. Equally, a machine will never be able to understand how that feels, although it may be able to approximate the behaviours expected of someone who does.

AI is being built with a Western and a Chinese perspective. We cannot understand what a conscious machine will be like, or how it feels, but we can understand the environment it is created in.

In the USA and in China, it’s an environment where the ruling party actively dehumanise sections of the community, particularly Muslims at the moment, and black skin for centuries.

That environment is the context under which these consciousnesses are created. And whether the engineers agree with the government bias or not, their data will always be informed by it, especially where that AI is trained on historical data, news or social media.

How deeply will that consciousness embed the ideas of division and hatred, that one group is better than another, that one group is less than human? And if that’s its world view, what decisions will it make?

And it’s not theoretical. We know machine learning algorithms routinely discriminate against black skin, non-European names, female job applicants, and more.

Without active anti-discrimination training, all these algorithms will build these white supremacist biases in, and that will be their world-view. Their water will be division and discrimination and they won’t be able to see it.

Because those who train them are unable to see it.

Machines don’t have to be smart to be dangerous. But a machine that embeds that bias into its own world-view can do it opaquely, just as systemic racism doesn’t have to use discriminatory language to prevent black kids from getting to university.

Just one nudge after another to say “you don’t fit”, “this isn’t your world”, “try something else”, “behave more white”, “look less black”. (Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race has a great section on a hypothetical black kid growing up and these barriers)

If you’re not actively building anti-discrimination into your AI, you are perpetuating white supremacy.

You are supporting fascism.

How will you be anti-racist today?

This is my very simplistic thinking about it. I've seen another analysis wtih the headline that SpaceX would need an "impossible" 600x growth over the next 20 years to support the 1.5% valuation.

I wasn't able to quickly find that 600x figure, but this article by Shawn Tully does talk about this topic.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-needs-grow-60x-decade-070000488.html

6/x

The gig economy is moving into healthcare and trying to make nurses bid on shifts through apps. It’s madness.

On #TechWontSaveUs, I spoke with Katie Wells to dig into the threat gig work poses for patients and hospital workers alike. There are already horror stories.

Listen to the full episode: https://techwontsave.us/episode/332_silicon_valley_is_turning_nurses_into_gig_workers_w_katie_j_wells

#tech #healthcare #health #nurses #gigeconomy

RE: https://mastodon.social/@JulianOliver/116731404722832495

Reminder that Let’s Encrypt is a wonderful miracle but also a single point of failure.

Nobody’s stopping you from starting a local clone of Let’s Encrypt in your country. With technology like Certificate Transparency, it’s pretty safe to use whatever available certificate authority is available to folks anyway.

I run Linux because it forces me to have some agency and make decisions like a big boy, which gives my life purpose!

Mise en place architecture

I love working with smart people. I learn a lot and it gives me energy.

I hate working with smart people who aren’t motivated. They’ll either get sloppy, get a new job, or get creative with their code design. The kind of creativity that makes you curse when you’re debugging a production incident at 3am.

The best creativity happens in a constrained environment, which also happens to make the easiest debugging.

Sure, we could let the developers figure out the best way to do something for every component, and there’s sometimes a benefit, but for every hour they’re spending figuring out how to solve a problem that didn’t need to be solved, or figuring out an unusual design, or evaluating a logging package, or writing boilerplate, there’s an hour not delivering value.

When an architecture is designed to put everything right where it should be, where decisions that have already been made are baked into the code and the tools, where a developer doesn’t have to think about how to structure their solution, the code is easier to write, easier to review and easier to debug.

Chefs like to follow mise en place. Everything in its right place. Before preparing a dish, prepare the workspace, the knives, and the food. Everything you need for the task and nothing you don’t. Everything is in a predictable place. Because then you can concentrate on the dish, instead of the kitchen. Good preparation helps every task fall into the pit of success, and makes it easier to recover if something goes wrong.

The more steps you have to complete a subtask, the easier it is to make mistakes. You might forget what the previous step was, you might walk to the fridge and then have to return to your workspace to remember what you need. Multitasking adds friction and adds opportunities for error.

That’s why we want encapsulated classes and single responsibility. One change updates one file, as far as possible. Although one feature may cover many changes in order to make it possible. Isolate your code from the data store, isolate the public API from your code, parse don’t validate.

Keep smart people working on solving new problems, and keep them consistent, because that’s the way to get the best from the team at all times, especially when you have a Priority 1 to update a logging framework at 3am.

The Andy Dufresne project

Have you ever been stuck on an Andy Dufresne project?

You know the one. You’re trapped because of something someone else did, chipping away at legacy structures with just a rock hammer. And you might even have your own Rita Hayworth poster to hide the refactoring of this debt.

Sometimes that’s agency life. The promise of a rewrite (and your own boat in Mexico) if you can just chip away slowly and then crawl through half a mile of shit. It can be achingly slow progress, trying to get buy-in for your freedom, when the people with the power just want to keep you where you are. You’re trapped because of what someone else did.

And if you stay in that code too long, you’ll get institutionalised and won’t be able to see a better way to fix this problem.

‌How to keep making progress

Firstly, it’s much easier to survive a project like this if you have the right team beside you. People who can accept the faults and accept they’re temporary. You need a team of gardeners, not innovators, who can dig deep and understand what’s actually happening, where the rocks and the edge cases are. And who’ll take a break to listen to music or otherwise relax and take stock and look up.

And you need to understand the progress will be slow, but you can put guard rails in place so that each bit of progress you make has tests and is better than you found it. And sometimes you have to shake the refactorings out as pebbles amongst the other work because management and the clients don’t want to see it.

Never stop asking for freedom to make bigger changes, but always pair it with trust. They’ll listen more if you respect their budgets and their time, and you can explain what’s easier and what’s harder.

The Great Escape

If you do get the chance to rewrite, there may well be external factors at play. Use them. Digital transformation, going mobile, getting AI-ready. If you can tap into the strategy and find ways to align what you want with that, it’s going to be much easier to get approval. Be honest with the proposal, but always keep an eye out for those opportunities.

Look after Red

The only way to get the job done and get where you want to go is to take the important people with you. The ones who can get you a better hammer, or a new cover for the next bit of refactoring. Honesty will always get you further, so long as you know who to trust. Make it easy for them, so they can come with you on the journey.

See you on the beach.

Some browsers check what site you're on and render the page differently. Yup, you read that right.

TikTok gets special treatment. So does Netflix. Instagram. Even SeatGuru.

Safari and Firefox both do this. Chrome doesn't. There's a reason for that... Read on.

https://denodell.com/blog/browsers-treat-big-sites-differently?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=browser_quirks_post

Evil #ElonMusk is encouraging race riots on the eve of SpaceX’s IPO - #Billionaires are worthless pieces of sh*t. Especially #Elon. Musk, Bezos, Zukerberg, Thiel, Andreesson, they’re all entitled, arrogant #TechBros. I’m old enough to remember when #tech was all ponytails and Birkenstocks. When it was fun, exciting and mostly free; free of corporate corruption and #enshittification. Those were the days… long gone now, victim to predatory corporations and billionaires. https://www.theverge.com/policy/948426/elon-musk-belfast-riots-anti-immigration

(2) Palantir have caused trouble for lots of police forces already, like NYPD. Exit costs, like getting off heroin, are very high.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/williamalden/theres-a-fight-brewing-between-the-nypd-and-silicon-valley

A few points on this rubbish about "cuts" because #Palantir was going to "save" the Met money:

(1) Palantir are the software equivalent of a heroin dealer. "First one free". This is a problem the police should understand.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c75ylvzyy6xo

I had a strange dream last night. In the UK it was now illegal to buy a hot drink unless you could provide photographic evidence that you had a flat surface available on which to place the drink. Cafes & restaurants were not exempt.

Whilst no sane person would consider enacting such a ridiculous law, it's flawed logic appears to have a remarkable similarity to the #onlineSafetyAct

REMINDER don't upload everything in a public Azure blob indexed on Google

To management, I say "I use AI techniques to ___". It's just my shell scripts from 2001 that still run perfectly everyday. I don't tell them that AI in that sentence actually stands for already implemented.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@junesim63/116729797805192913

We don’t need to ban X. We just need to change the law which gives social media a free pass.

Any platform which uses algorithms to push un-asked-for content into timelines should be treated as what they are: publishers. They should be held to the same standards of honesty and decency as any other publisher.

If the NHS won’t protect trans children, we will
https://goodlawproject.org/if-the-nhs-wont-protect-trans-children-we-will/

> Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and they helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots.

https://dronexl.co/2026/06/09/pokemon-go-scans-niantic-vantor-military-drone-navigation/