October 17, 2023

s16e15: Just Put A Fucking Warning Label On It; A Sort Of Qualified Immunity; Doing a Spreadsheets is Coding; Rotate 75 Degrees Around The Vertical

0.0 Context Setting

I started writing this on Monday, 16 October, 2023 in Portland, Oregon after driving through a foot / 30 cm of water because it was hard raining.

I drove through all that water because the kid noticed the car was hissing and they were right: the car was hissing because there was a piece of metal jammed in a tire.

Which is why I started writing this in the waiting room of a Car Place.

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Hallway Track Update: You Could Just Not

So I made the difficult/actually-easy decision to postpone the second Hallway Track today, 002 Journalism, News, and Federated Social Networks.

The quick version is that between Darius, myself and Andy, our guests were... not diverse and inclusive. This isn't something I'm happy with. The timing hadn't worked out for a number of people, and it makes more sense for to push the event out rather than just keep trying to make it happen this Friday.

I really wanted to have this event. Last week's went great, and I wanted to continue the momentum. But I started to have a bad feeling about this on Wednesday/Thursday last week. Instead of pausing, I wanted to push on to announce and open up registrations, and hope it would work out.

Over the weekend, and thanks to some very clear advice from friends, I realized the right thing to do was to just wait until the guest list was right. I'm grateful to Darius and Andy for supporting this decision.

In the meantime, you should read Erin Kissane's Meta in Myanmar series, because a) it's a stunning piece of readable in-depth analysis that's important for people to and b) Erin was one of my first choices and was unfortunately unavailable for this particular slot.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Just put a fucking warning label on it

So the social network formerly known as Twitter was fined $610,500 AUS by the Australian eSafety Commission¹ for not answering responses to questions, "leaving some sections entirely blank" and even "[providing] a response that was incomplete and/or inaccurate".

The way Reuters puts it, while the fine is small (the correct description these days is that the fine is "the cost of doing business"), the fine "is a reputational hit"².

I mean, maybe? Maybe it's a reputational hit because everyone kind of knows the former web forum is a shitshow now and that "brands" concerned with "safety" might suddenly have a change of mind, a sort of opposite action of Apple's complete lack of change of mind.

No, what strikes me as perhaps a more effective deterrent to this activity, or even an encouragement to meet requirements, would be the posting of a big fuck-off modal with every visit to the site, at least in Australia, along the lines of:

THIS WEBSITE FAILED TO COMPLY WITH THE ESAFETY COMMISSION'S INVESTIGATION INTO CHILD SEXUAL EXPLOITATION, EXTORTION AND ABUSE

because, you know, we want to preserve choice, and anyway some legal systems and societies have decided that sex offenders need to put up signs outside their houses³.

Like, clearly it is a different thing when a sign is required to be posted outside someone's residence and clearly there is a balance of harms to be considered, but the deal with putting a sign on, say, a web forum formerly known as Twitter is that it's a bit like needing to stick up a sign that this establishment has a shitty food safety rating which, in this case, is true! It does have a shitty food safety rating!

The issue here is whether states have the jurisdiction to stick a warning on a site or not, and let me just skip to the end and say: of course they do, they just need to want it. What, you haven't seen a modal dialog about a cookie and tracking consent?

And in this case, the eSafety commission has other sticks it can use, like "other action or to seek a civil penalty."⁴

But honestly, I quite like public shaming in this case. You really want to go after reputational damage, then go after reputational damage.

(And yes, I know this is dangerously close, if not well inside, the think-of-the-children argument).

1.2 Smaller Things

A sort of qualified immunity?

Ali Alkhatib was talking aloud about AI being functionally similar to policing, "manifesting in a shared tendency to fabricate/'hallucinate' bullshit."⁵ which I glommed on to thanks to Google jumping on the bandwagon of indemnifying customers against copyright challenges in the usage of generative AI⁶. In my head, thanks to Alkhatib's mention of police, this connected to the (shitty) concept of qualified immunity, of which a good recent example of shittiness is Techdirt's story about the rare instance of a cop not benefiting from qualified immunity⁷. Qualified immunity is really shitty, because it's a U.S. Supreme Court level protection (or buff, I guess?) that's been increasingly used to protect cops from being accountable when accused of using excessive force.

Fixing the internet

Katie Notopoulos' How to fix the internet⁸ in the MIT Technology Review caught my attention!

It draws a through-line from the commercial internet's history of rushing to free services in the free-as-in-no-money sense, predicated on at different times the promise of future revenue (the ???? stage in the underpants gnomes business plan), and then more successfully on advertising revenue, and then to the necessity of interoperability (hello, Cory Doctorow) to mitigate against platform concentration and walled gardens.

Doing a spreadsheets is coding

This (content marketing?) piece from Working Data, a software development house in the UK, caught my attention for collecting together something like 50 spreadsheet horror stories⁹ from around the world, dating from 2007 through to the present day. I'll repeat that a) doing a spreadsheet is definitely coding, b) it's also easily pretty complicated coding thanks to essentially letting any odd person do a map:reduce, c) it's clearly essential to the operation of any sufficiently complicated/large task, and "sufficiently" is a super low bar, if only because working memory is a) a thing, and b) by all accounts and without me conducting a literature review, I believe "quite small", in the order of around fewer than 10 items. So basically, if you have to do something with approaching ten or more things, you're probably going to reach for a spreadsheet. Which can lead to consequences ranging from disastrous to irritating, see above. Another interesting thing here is that it's a custom software development house that's collecting these horror stories, presumably in an effort to persuade people with spreadsheets to develop custom software. Which... isn't entirely a wrong approach. I think what I might be more interested in as a (potentially impractical alternative) is bringing the hoped-for rigor and practices of software development to spreadsheets, like testing!

Rotate 75 Degrees Around the Vertical

The Esper was the computer in Blade Runner that totally normal human being excessive force detective Rick Deckard used to famously zoom and enhance, which now is a totally normal thing that machine learning will let you do to regular photographs, but without the unnecessary (or maybe cute?) clicking noise. Honestly, someone should try haptic/sound feedback when clunking pinch-to-zoom on a device so you get feedback every multiple n of zoom. I don't know why that would be useful, just that it seems like it would be fun. Anyway.

That Esper led, I think, to the infamous freeze-rotate-75-degrees-around-the-vertical scene¹¹ in the 1998 film Enemy of the State.

An aside: Enemy of the State is notable because the 1998 film was apparently a blueprint for the development of wide-area motion imagery, large-scale aerial surveillance:

[in 2006] DARPA funded the building of an aircraft-mounted camera with a capacity of almost two billion pixels. The Air Force had dubbed the project Gorgon Stare, after the monsters of penetrating gaze from classical Greek mythology, whose horrifying appearance turned observers to stone. (DARPA called its programme Argus, after another mythical creature: a giant with 100 eyes.)¹³, ¹⁴, ¹⁵

and

Enemy of the State shows up repeatedly because it is integral to the development of Gorgon Stare. Researchers play clips from it in their briefings; they compare their technology to Big Daddy (although their camera is so far only on aircraft, not a satellite). At one point, incredibly, they consult the company responsible for the movie’s aerial filming.¹³, ¹⁴, ¹⁵

Well, Enemy of the State has done it again. If I'm reading it right, 4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering¹⁶ builds on the technique of neural radiance fields to create a 3d view from a (small) set of 2d images, but lets you render in real-time. The trick in Enemy of the State could have been pre-rendered in the world of the film (it's the NSA, after all), but now there's a way for significantly more people to recreate and explore 3d scenes just from a few photographs.

So. Um. That's... nice? I should note that what with the complexities of human vision, we make up most of what we see anyway and predict it, so whether you want to call it hallucination or not, we use a lot of implicit knowledge about the world and how the world works and how light works to understand 3d scenes anyway. Short of going and recording the actual rays of light hitting something (never mind cameras), if you really want to know what's there, you're just going to have to go and look.

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An experiment

I teamed up with Printernet to do an experiment.

You can get six episodes focussed on Mastodon and federated social networks printed out and bound and delivered to you! I don't get anything, it's all for Printernet.

This print edition includes:

• s13e17: A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More (archive.is)
• s13e18: Mastodon, or What Happens When Your Software Has Opinions And Now You Have Choices (archive.is)
• s13e19: Just Because We Can Doesn't (Necessarily) Mean We Should: Mastodon and Social Networks Edition (archive.is)
• s14e09: Building and Documentation; Making New Mistakes; Eternal Tumblr; Governance in the Early Days of a Better Nation (archive.is)
• s14e10: Your Timeline needs a DJ; Enough (archive.is); and
• s16e05: Answering "Governments should be on Mastodon?", or, A Sort of Amateur Cory Doctorow, and an ending that surprised even me (archive.is)

Go buy a copy and let me know what it's like.

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OK. That bit about Enemy of the State was a bit longer than I thought it would be.

How are you?

Best,

Dan

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