It's a library book I've had checked out for months having trouble really getting into it and I think maybe I just give up. Because that's kind of an offensive omission??

I am trying to read a book on socio-politics and government structure that has lost me because I got to 5+ pages about why the Lebanese state has issues (as an example of their thesis) and brings up destabilizing events in 1975-1989 without mentioning Israel.

A very cool thing: kiddo wants her own print copies of a book series she loves that she had checked out from school library. So I order from Elliott Bay Books and when they come in we can take light rail together to pickup!

A software program doesn't "go rogue,"
it's just a poorly coded program with lots of bugs and security vulnerabilities produced by human carelessness.

Yes, I'm talking about AI.

#NoAI

I had a work meeting this morning where someone apologized for asking folks to add stuff to rows (each person’s name was pre-filled) in a spreadsheet, as if there was some better way to do this particular task. But a spreadsheet was a perfectly accessible and reasonable way for people to do this! A familiar user interface which provides a format suitable for processing if needed. Not everything needs to be an LLM or a snazzy new UI.

OpenAI: we put our evilest AI in a sandbox that did in fact have an internet connection but mediated through a proxy that was only supposed to allow downloading python junk. It circumvented the proxy and we failed to notice for FIVE DAYS that it was going on an interstate crime spree with the internet connection it wasn't supposed to be using instead of solving the benchmark. Haha no we don't believe we deserve to be criminally liable, but buy our stuff and maybe one day you will have the honor of taking the fall for our product!

Anthropic: we put our evilest AI in a "sandbox" by telling it in its prompt that it had no internet connection. Reader, there was no sandbox. It was just a normal internet connection. The AI uploaded a malicious PyPI package to the real public internet. The ethical guardrails failed because the AI concluded the prompt about the sandbox couldn't possibly be a lie, because the system date is 2026, which is clearly fake and wouldn't be seen on the real internet, which ended around 2023. Oh no, how could we have foreseen or prevented these crimes? We are helpless in the face of the genius of our creation but cautiously optimistic that everything will be fine 🙂

Hugging Face: if we complain about all the crimes committed against us, we will be sued off the face of the earth, so here's a technical deep-dive on how cool and fun it was to be victimized 🫠

In engineering we say "Good, Cheap, Fast. Pick 2"'. AI is when you pick Fast twice.

"oh they should have known to run it sandboxed". Sounds like pretty shit, untrustworthy software when you put it like that. I mean, we've been running java applets downloaded from the Internet in sandboxes for what, 30 years? But that's because it's an obvious attack vector. You're saying this trillion dollar industry of the future produces stuff of a similar quality as we sandboxed against in the 1990s.

I am baffled why people are going "oh no what is to be done" about openai breaking into a competitors computers, when it is incredibly obvious: Charge them under the CFAA. "Oh but their research". Sandbox it from the Internet. "Oh it's too hard to do that". Skill issue, get good.

As I said: Weird that Robert Morris got charged for all of the computers his worm broke into. After all, he didn't do it, the computer program did it, that's completely different, apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

Of course, I suspect leadership doesn’t really care. They’d just prefer I use claude. Never mind that I learn a LOT more when I don’t use it and of course don’t cause myself mental-emotional damage kicking away that voice that reminds me that my participation is causing and validating a terrible awful harmful system.

A coworker reported an urgent bug in a system my team maintains yesterday. I put up a fix (and an accompanying doc on how to remediate similar issues in the future) today entirely without using Claude (which we are heavily encouraged / pressured to use as much as possible). Heavy claude usage results in design / dev patterns that don’t SEEM bad when reviewing code but are super annoying if you don’t use the world-burning machine assistant. So another reminder of that today.

Have you ever deliberately introduced a syntax error into a program to check that the code you’re editing is the code you think you’re running?

RE: https://mstdn.social/@mattmay/116988858841146726

Very important! A group of people I know tested out the time for mail to be delivered in Washington state a couple of months ago, and while it's often quite fast there are times where even going between adjacent zip codes can take up to ten days.

For the August 4 primary in Washington, at this point it's better to drop off your ballots at a drop box -- King County Elections has a map of all the dropboxes in Washington state. If you are going to mail your ballot though, please do it ASAP!

#USpol #votingRights

Dear #ADHD friends:
First: *secret handshake*
Second: if you vote by mail, YOU HAVE TO SEND YOUR BALLOT BACK ASAP. If you wait until a few days before election day, USPS cannot be trusted to deliver it on time, and an army of lawyers is apt to try to invalidate it.

This is that one assignment in school that you hated because you couldn't slide it under the door on the last day of school. I know. I'm sorry. But this one is important.

THE BALLOT IS LAVA
#USPol

The deterent (not actually blocking) barriers to keep LWB car-lite are being put to good use for flyering!

I should have kept count but in my bike down MtS trail to LWB to Seward and return, I had to have passed 500+ if not many more people. Hard to tell when trying to keep moving (brompton exercise!) but I rarely went more than a hundred feet without passing 1 or more folks or being passed myself. #seattle #bike

"Don't Take the Black Pill" by @andrewrk https://youtu.be/zLZwpH5lCD4

One of the best talks I have ever seen. Please watch it.

An antidote to all the despair about the world of computing I'm sure we all feel.

Good for the Debian community and I hope proposal A passes. The social contract culture of Debian – that good software is about how people work together – is why my default distro has been Debian for a long while. https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002

Very cool #bike seen at Ft. Stevens State Park (Oregon coast): a trike – two wheels in back – upright position with a passenger seat up front of the steering column over the front wheel! I was of course here with my #brompton.

One of the most damning realities that people with medical training report is not being allowed to bring medical gauze to Gaza – or some trying to smuggle it in. You would think that alone would be convincing that the violence against the people of Gaza isn’t about protecting Israeli lives. From https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-doctor-who-worked-in-gaza-hospital-haunted-by-what-she-saw/