Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

I love how so much of the AI debate is on things like:

* Will AI take people's jobs?
* Will AI destroy creativity?
* Will AI take over the world?
* Will AI be used to make people poorer?

And not:

* Will corporations that use AI get rid of people's jobs?
* Will corporations that use AI destroy creativity?
* Will corporations that use AI try to take over the world?
* Will corporations that use AI make people poorer?

Because these LLMs and machine learning systems and so forth aren't just wandering around randomly out there - they're owned by corporations. The corporations are the ones putting them to use. The executives that run those corporations are the ones making the decisions to pay people less, to increase their profits, to make creative people act as subeditors for LLMs.

It's the corporations, and the ethics-free systems that govern them, that cause these things. They're the ones pushing to have more AI.

The rest of us would be happy just having a bit more humanity in the world.

PSA, if someone asks you for contact info (e.g. a phone number) of someone you know, the correct response is "I can't give that to you, but I can give them yours".

It's efficient and adds no round-trips, it's privacy friendly, it's non-awkward and it's social engineering resistant. It's a universally good rule.

And the corollary, of course: Don't ask someone for another person's contact info - ask them to pass on yours.

I can’t stand ‘TLDR’. Like why apologise for people who don’t want to read what you wrote? If it’s really that long, maybe shorten it?

From the US Holocaust museum.

@intrbiz Great stuff ! I've missed this kind of tool many times, and thought of rolling something like it using a bit diff toolchain.

Being a db guy it helps when you can keep most of the workflow in-db and do it in sql. Looking forward to kicking the tires more but already added it to my dabble-y databases .

P.S. https://pgvis.org/install
has a couple of typos, at least the lines
curl /latest/pgvis-extension/pgVis.tar.gz > pgVis.tar.gz
and
curl https://pgvis.org/download/script/latest-install.sql | psql
need to be fixed.

An update on #Capita "industry standard practice" open S3 bucket. https://www.colchester.gov.uk/info/cbc-article/?catid=latest-news&id=KA-04379

Met Police doing a wonderful job with the UK's new authoritarian thought-crime laws to make sure everyone hears about a protest that would probably have gone unseen if ignored.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/06/head-of-uks-leading-anti-monarchy-group-arrested-at-coronation-protest

As one can now be arrested for the offence of "being equipped for locking on", the only difference between arresting protestors today, and arresting me every time I go out on my bike, carrying two locks, is whether the police officers around at the time have formed a negative view about my intent.

I just found a company those tech staff "doesn't like transactions," so instead of writing BEGIN and END they put all of the statements into a single huge statement using one CTE for each statement, and I think there should be criminal penalties for this.

How long is it appropriate to wait before the "I told you so"? https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-the-prime-video-audio-video-monitoring-service-and-reducing-costs-by-90

#programming #microservices

Just a couple of things:

One
It's weird and interesting that if the fediverse gains 10m users and then loses 1m, that's considered proof of failure. But bsky gains 100k and without any time passing this is considered proof of success.

Two
When people say that signing up for fedi is too complicated, you know they mean they don't know how to navigate the instance admin drama, right? At least in part. People can choose from a menu of apps and servers. They're not idiots. What they can't do is evaluate which server will let them talk to their friends about whatever topics come up for them. And it's because that evaluation is basically impossible.

Here's a fun new feature we are working on in systemd: userspace-only reboot. In order to reduce grey-out times on image-based OS updates to next to nothing we are making a reboot happen where kernel stays as it is, but userspace shuts down as usual, then possibly transitions into a new rootfs, and starts up again with an initial transaction as it would on a classic system boot. During the transition selected services can pass along their fds and listening sockets, to pass "live" resources…

@selfcare just yesterday when I attended and spoke at the brilliant #PGDay #Chicago ♥️
#postgres #postgresql #opensource #database #databases