technology

I didn't realize bluesky was even described as decentralized til recently.

Well I agree with this:

There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its "credible exit" (Bluesky's own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.

Later on she describes how it costs thousands if not 10s of thousands USD to run a server that doesn't even do everything

Now, you may see people say, running an ATProto node is fairly cheap! And this is because comparatively speaking, running a Personal Data Store is fairly cheap, because running a Personal Data Store is more akin to running a blog. But social networks are much more interactive than blogs, and in this way the rest of Bluesky's architecture is a lot more involved than a search engine: users expect real-time notifications and interactivity with other users. This is where the real architecture of Bluesky/ATProto comes in: Relays and AppViews.

So how challenging is it to run those? In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage. That is a nearly 5x increase in just four months, and my guess is that by next month, we'll see that doubled to at least ten terabytes due to the massive switchover to Bluesky which has happened post-election. As Bluesky grows in popularity, so does the rate of growth of the expected resources to host a meaningfully participating node.

Bluesky is actually like usenet:

Bluesky does not utilize message passing, and instead operates in what I call a shared heap architecture. In a shared heap architecture, instead of delivering mail to someone's house (or, in a client-to-server architecture as most non p2p mailing lists are, at least their apartment's mail room), letters which may be interesting all are dumped at a post office (called a "relay") directly.

I don't understand the credible exit idea.

Even though the majority of Bluesky services are currently operated by a single company, we nevertheless consider the system to be decentralized because it provides credible exit: if Bluesky Social PBC goes out of business or loses users’ trust, other providers can step in to provide an equivalent service using the same dataset and the same protocols. -- Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

It is not a bad choice for Bluesky to be focused on providing an alternative to X-Twitter for those who miss Twitter-of-yore and are immediately looking for an offboarding from an abusive environment. I understand and support this effort! Bluesky does use several decentralization tricks which may lend themselves more towards its self-stated goal of "credible exit". But these do not make Bluesky decentralized, which it is not within any reasonable metric of the power dynamics we have of decentralized protocols which exist today, and it does not use federation in any way that resembles the way that technical term has been used within decentralized social networking efforts. (I have heard the term "federation-washing" used to describe the goalpost-moving involved here, and I'm sympathetic to that phrase personally.)

In my opinion, this should actually be the way Bluesky brands itself, which I believe would be more honest: an open architecture (that's fair to say!) with the possibility of credible exit. This would be more accurate and reflect better what is provided to users.

This article is about 10k words and I'm 2/3 through it.

https://archive.ph/y51Rr

the code https://github.com/jyjblrd/S4_Slicer

转发自: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/161841

Will a 486 run Crysis? No, of course not. Will it run a large language model (LLM)? Given the huge buildout of compute power to do just that, many people would scoff at the very notion. But [Yeo Kheng Meng] is not many people.

He has set up various DOS computers to run a stripped down version of the Llama 2 LLM, originally from Meta. More specifically, [Yeo Kheng Meng] is implementing [Andreq Karpathy]’s Llama2.c library, which we have seen here before, running on Windows 98.

Llama2.c is a wonderful bit of programming that lets one inference a trained Llama2 model in only seven hundred lines of C. It it is seven hundred lines of modern C, however, so porting to DOS 6.22 and the outdated i386 architecture took some doing. [Yeo Kheng Meng] documents that work, and benchmarks a few retrocomputers. As painful as it may be to say — yes, a 486 or a Pentium 1 can now be counted as “retro”.

The models are not large, of course, with TinyStories-trained  260 kB model churning out a blistering 2.08 tokens per second on a generic 486 box. Newer machines can run larger models faster, of course. Ironically a Pentium M Thinkpad T24 (was that really 21 years ago?) is able to run a larger 110 Mb model faster than [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s modern Ryzen 5 desktop. Not because the Pentium M is going blazing fast, mind you, but because a memory allocation error prevented that model from running on the modern CPU. Slow and steady finishes the race, it seems.

This port will run on any 32-bit i386 hardware, which leaves the 16-bit regime as the next challenge. If one of you can get an Llama 2 hosted locally on an 286 or a 68000-based machine, then we may have to stop asking “Does it run DOOM?” and start asking “Will it run an LLM?”

From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed

Our reporting shows that cops are paying a company to help them deploy AI-powered bots across social media and the internet to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protestors” with the hopes of generating evidence that can be used against them.

Jorge Brignoni took notes for the Cochise County, Arizona, Sheriff’s Office at a meeting with Massive Blue in August 2023, which 404 Media obtained. In the notes, he wrote that Overwatch does “passive engagement, then active engagement, towards commitment” with a “Bad Actor, Predator, DTO,” or drug trafficking organization. These targets are then “HAND[ed] OFF to L.E. [law enforcement] to arrest, indict, convict.”

On June 5, a Pinal County Board of Supervisors meeting was asked to approve a $500,000 contract between the county and Massive Blue in order to license Overwatch.

“I was looking at the website for Massive Blue, and it’s a one-pager with no additional information and no links,” Kevin Cavanaugh, the then-supervisor for District 1, said to Pinal County’s Chief Deputy at the Sheriff’s Office, Matthew Thomas. “They produce software that we buy, and it does what? Can you explain that to us?”

just grifts on top of grifts

“Supervisor [Cavanaugh] ultimately voted for the agreement because Massive Blue is alleged to be in pursuit of human trafficking, a noble goal,” a representative from Cavanaugh’s office told 404 Media in an email. “A major concern regarding the use of the application, is that the government should not be monitoring each and every citizen. To his knowledge, no arrests have been made to date as a result of the use of the application. If Overwatch is used to bring about arrests of human traffickers, then the program should continue. However, if it is just being used to collect surveillance on law-abiding citizens and is not leading to any arrests, then the program needs to be discontinued.”

In an August 7, 2024, Board of Supervisors meeting, Cavanaugh asked then-Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb for an update on Massive Blue. “So they have not produced any results? They’ve produced no leads? No evidence that is actionable?” Cavanaugh asked. “That would be public knowledge, that would be public information.”

I've enrolled in Varmints University to learn compute.

I haven't used Windows as my primary OS in ten years. My professor wants to expose us to Linux. Cool.

The class is to submit assignments to the department's Linux server, and remotely run a few commands on it.

Cool. I use rsync and ssh every day (the instructions involve Windows utilities like PuTTY and FileZilla, but whatever).

A VPN connection is required to connect to the department's Linux server.

Cool. I use OpenVPN every day. Just give me the config details, chief!

Not so fast. A proprietary 2FA utility is required to connect to the uni VPN, and the IT department informed me by email that it runs on Windows and Mac only.

So now, what would be the simplest part of this class is the most fucking complicated. Instead of just using my terminal, I ~~have to~~ have had to:

1. Install VirtualBox
2. Create a Windoze 11 VM
3. Create a Microsoft account
4. Install the 2FA utility on VM
5. Install cygwin Linux utilities on VM
6. Install rsync and ssh modules on Cygwin

Just to have a Linux terminal that does what this class requires!

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-as-normal-technology

Overly academic, but a good article on how to think about AI risks vs the usual media hype bullshit.

tl:dr; authors predict slow adoption, risks are the usual capitalist crises being exacerbated and defence against these are the usual ones (collective action, regulation etc). We can just pull the plug out of the superintelligent skynet.

https://archive.ph/2nQSh

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/36614306

Are your files going to be safer with Synology hard drives?

This is rarely mentioned. Because of its design, Starship can't just go to the Moon, it first requires orbital refueling (from other Starships). NASA estimates they would need at least 15, but that was before the Starship payload capacity was downgraded.