Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Category: Observations Page 2 of 88

Is a part of you powering AI?

The internet is user-generated content. We’re all making things and contributing whether publicly or “privately”. With our names or without.
AI” is years of our data being scraped, packaged and sold back to us.

ChatGPT and the other Large Language Models (LLMs) are little more than someone who is incredible well-read with perfect recall. They’re taken the internet’s data and packaged it and put a neat little plain language front-end on it for us to interact with.

The reason chatGPT can write such good fanfiction is because it scraped 32billion words from AO3. And that was in 2019. So there’s likely even more fanfic in the large language model today. If you look at this and say, “but it’s only fanfiction, who cares?” Would it be acceptable to other writers?

It’s abhorrent that a program which purports to support a community of writers has based at least 32 billion words of its program on the writing of a community that did consent to have their work used.

Writing fic is not stealing, but taking fic and using it to develop a dataset, and then offering that dataset to the public without having gotten permission from literally anyone is ethically gross.

How Bots Like ChatGPT Have Stolen Fanfiction, and What It Means

What if your entire history of writing that you had publicly posted to the Internet was scooped up and used without your permission for another company to make money from?

Well, that it likely the cast as Kevin Schaul, Szu Yu Chen and Nitasha Tiku writing for The Washington Post have researched and reported on.

To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)

See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart

What about social media?

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter — the heart of the modern web — prohibit scraping, which means most data sets used to train AI cannot access them. Tech giants like Facebook and Google that are sitting on mammoth troves of conversational data have not been clear about how personal user information may be used to train AI models that are used internally or sold as products.

So while your posts to social media may not be in ChatGPT, it’s certainly going to be included in Meta/Facebook’s own product. And they’re long history of scooping up and and all data, it’s certainly far more extensive.

What about if you have ever written in a blog on powered by WordPress, Tumblr, Blogspot and Live Journal? Then you’ve included too.

My own site is included in the data set at rank 1,953,276.

If you write on the web, you’re likely there too. You can search through the data by scrolling to the bottom of The Washington Post’s article: See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart.

As with any story that talks about data, there’s a section at the end describing how the Post came to this data and the 15.1 million unique domains included in this dataset.

How do you feel about your writing being included in this gigantic data sets and being used to build products?

Be a problem solver

It drives me nuts when people at work, who should know better, report problems without an ounce of troubleshooting, or even basic questioning.

What did you try? Anything at all?

Is the server down? Likely not… did you make an attempt to ping it?

You have access to The Cloud.

I’m not asking you to pour over log files but if you’re not able to access the domain name and you can login to the cloud where this server lives… can you connect to it through the console on the web page?

What about error messages? Do you see anything that might lead you to a solution?

“EC2 can’t…” is a pretty good starting point. I don’t need you to understand what it can’t do or why it can’t do it. But some times the answer is in the error message.

If your error message says “Server cant do Thing because of Reason then ask then report that and let the people who can make the Server do the Thing work on it. Because they may be aware of the Reason.

But reporting an error and then floundering is unacceptable for someone in a technical role.

Using Twitter after all the good apps were killed off

I only post to Twitter now using Tweetdeck on a computer. Killing Tweetbot means I no longer look at it on any mobile device (phone/iPad). I took the Twitter Lists I already follow and added them to Readwise’s Reader and read them like I would any other RSS feed.

The value of Twitter (for me) has been the ability to create lists of people for interests I have (Destiny 2 video game, Capitals Hockey, local news accounts). I have a timeline of some accounts but in some ways those aren’t the most important people I follow.

I’ve never used apps that show timelines out of order. I’ve long said that would be the end of Twitter for me if I had to suffer through ads and recommended junk. Twitter is skating very close to that sun. But I’ve been here since 2006 and that’s a weird point of pride.

Tweetdeck, despite being owned by Twitter, has largely been forgotten. It never got the algorithmic timelines, ads, polling, or really any new features in years. Each time I was prompted to reload it because a new version was available I held my breath to see if this was the end of my enjoyment of it. But it’s allowed me to largely ignore everything that drove me from other platforms.

If I have to fight with the timeline to see what Twitter wants me to see, I’m gone.

If my timeline becomes riddled with ads, and ads for absolute garbage, as I’ve seen others share, I’m gone.

Killing off third party Twitter apps, not for the first time, stopped my Twitter usage from mobile devices in a single day. I won’t use the official apps because it forces a non-chronological timeline and tries to recommend people or tweets to follow to drive engagement.

I am as engaged as I want to be and pulling a Facebook and trying to drive outrage will drive me completely off the platform. Twitter is not anything I need in life. But it’s something I’ve grown fond of, despite all of its issues. But when Twitter starts actively being a pain to use, it gets relegated to RSS since the communities I follow are still largely on Twitter because that’s where everyone is.

Maintain your systems or become front page news

The outage on Wednesday morning affected the agency’s antiquated Notice to Air Missions system, known as NOTAM. The 30-year-old system provides advance warnings to pilots and flight crews about hazards such as inclement weather and runway closures.

A Contractor With A Corrupt Software File Brought U.S. Air Travel To A Halt, Per Reports

“The outage on Wednesday morning affected the agency’s antiquated…”

Maintaining IT systems isn’t sexy. It’s not exciting work that’s going to get you promoted or a huge raise. It’s thankless work to keep your business moving.

To make sure that everyday the systems you rely on continue to function. It’s rarely a job you will get noticed for…

Until something goes wrong. Then it’s all your fault.

Systems need to be updated. They need to be modernized and brought into the present. This is going to continue happening. Southwest. FFA. Who will be the next to fall because of decades of neglected maintenance to core systems?

Pixels to iPhones

🔗 WE SWITCHED FROM ANDROID PIXEL TO IPHONE – B3N.ORG

We’ve exclusively used the Google Nexus (now Pixel) lines for the last 7-years, so this is quite the change. I like the Nexus/Pixel lineup for their predictable security lifecycle (compared to other Android manufacturers), lack of bloatware, and consistent UI.

Since the smart watch ecosystem never managed to produce anything small enough or good enough, my wife has been thinking about an iPhone SE / Apple Watch combo.

I’ve been looking at options and researching how iPhones have come along in the years since we had them and how much it will cost us to make the switch.

I had to reboot the Pixel several times to fix issues every few days. Bluetooth works on the iPhone.

I can’t agree more about Bluetooth. We have owned Nexus/ Pixel phones for the past 8 years. The bluetooth has always been a problem for the Pixel phones. They’ll pair to headphones, but will still play through the phone’s speaker. Or will simply refuse to pair, pretending Bluetooth doesn’t exist, nor does any other device.

Though one major loss I had failed to consider in our impending move to iPhone was the lack of call screening.

So, Google’s Pixel call screener is a massive advantage over anything iPhone has–the virtual assistant with live transcription on Pixel is a feature iPhone lacks. With iPhone, I pretty much have to let unknown callers go to voicemail, and then we’re playing phone tag.

The number of calls I get daily that I never see, or that I can have Google’s Assistant screen for me is superb. I open the phone app sometimes to see 20 voicemails of 5-7 seconds for robo callers who weren’t quick enough to hang up.

Even when a call does get through, I can press a button to have Google answer the call and display the text of what is being said by the caller. At which point I can either have the robot continue to ask questions or answer the call myself.

We will continue to use Google Fi as a carrier. Their pay-for-what-you-use pricing continues to frustrate all of the major carrier sales people we encounter in electronics stores. They stride up to us with huge smiles asking how much we pay for our cell phones.

On average $90/month for about 3GB of data between us. The most we’ve used (since Feb. 2020) is 5.36GB and paid $115.

After using the Pixel’s “a” models which set us back $350-400, the iPhone SE’s $500 price tag is bearable. While the prices on the iPhone 13 line starting at $700 is hard to swallow.

I don’t care about 5g. We don’t have a plan with it and I don’t see the need. It frustrates me in 2022 I need to give up my beloved USB-C port for a proprietary lightening connector again. I lose my headphone jack (yes, I still enjoy wired headphones) and I gain wireless charging.

But none of that excites me. It feels like more money for less phone. Though the iPhone does appear to have caught up too and surpassed the Pixel’s photo processing.

We are still debating the right time to buy new phones. It’s not like they ever go on any meaningful sale. Maybe we swap carriers again and take advantage of them. We’ve made the round from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint (RIP), and T-Mobile. We live in a major metro area so the reception on every carrier is nearly identical. There’s noticeable drop when you get into the rural areas of the country off Verizon’s network, but that’s not worth paying for those rare times.

The cost of swapping the ubiquitous USB-C cords all over the house (and cars) for Lightening doesn’t excite me. Wireless charging seems neat but we’ve never had that either. So more new hardware to support it. It’s an expensive purchase that begets more purchases. And I refuse to use the glass computer without a case. I don’t understand those of you running around with naked phones. And AppleCare… Is it worth it? I haven’t even looked at how expensive that’s gotten. There’s a certain joy (and privilege) to being able to walk into a Best Buy and replace your phone for $400 if something happens to it.

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