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682 results for “leafless”
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Welcome to the Panopticon
When reading a discussion of an unrelated philosophical issue, I realized that we’re living in a contraption proposed by Jeremy Bentham, the author of utilitarianism.
This is a sketch of the “panopticon”, a prison where the prisoners, “A”, lived in open, illuminated cells, all facing inwards toward a darkened central rotunda where there might be a guard, “B”, or there might not.
Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates’ cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation [Wikipedia 1]
Bentham was just trying to reduce the number of guards per prisoner, per worker, patient or student.
Michel Foucault
However, the mechanism was looked at Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, who recognized it as a specific example of his theory of disciplinary power.
As an equation, it was control = hierarchy + normalization + examination [Wikipedia 2]
- Hierarchy is the structure than enables observation. There is a superior and inferiors.
- Normalization is the superiors being able to set norms. Deviation from the norms becomes visible and seen as abnormal.
- Examination is the knowledge of being watched. Being examined makes people aware they are subjects of scrutiny by their superiors. Conversely, they lack any way to have scrutiny over the superiors.
At this point, the inferiors realize that they could be outed as abnormal. To avoid that they “internalize the surveillance”, they regulate their own behavior so as to always appear normal.
Freedom becomes an illusion when you’re constantly aware that your behavior may be being observed and evaluated against norms you didn’t choose.
An Exercise for the Reader
Consider the internet, social media, closed-circuit TV, workplace monitoring, insurer access to your health records, learning management systems, credit scores and the like. Does being observed by them affect your behavior?
Are you in a panopticon, and if so, how many?
#closedCircuitTv #foucault #philosophy #politics #socialMedia -
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#hamradio #johnmoyle #toowoomba DDRC VK4WID
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#hamradio #johnmoyle #toowoomba DDRC VK4WID
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#hamradio #johnmoyle #toowoomba DDRC VK4WID
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#hamradio #johnmoyle #toowoomba DDRC VK4WID
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LLMs are Lint
No, I don’t mean that are bits of clothing fluff, I mean they’re like the old “lint” program for C.
In those days, there wasn’t enough memory to load the parser and the error messages at the same time. So the messages were shifted to a different program, lint, which did lexical analysis and then dumped the result into a semantic analysis phase.
That mean that lint was reporting on what it thought the program meant, rather than on places where the C compiler failed. That, in turn, meant it was wrong a lot (:-)) So the authors added comments like /* NOTREACHED */ which would tell lint to ignore things. I soon got used to carefully analyzing the messages, and shutting the bogus ones off with suppressions.
Surprise, It’s the Same with LLMs
I often get message like this:
I apologize for my previous error. The article I mentioned earlier was not a real, verifiable source. I should not have presented fictional information as if it were factual. This was a mistake on my part.
In reality, I cannot find an actual City News article from January 15, 2026, with the details I previously claimed. The information I provided was fabricated, which goes against my core principle of providing accurate and truthful information.
So I do three things:
- Add suppressions to my defaults, like “don’t tell me about Oxford commas”
- check absolutely everything that doesn’t come with a URL
- and check the URLS, too.
This sounds hard, but it’s easy if you set your expectations correctly. For example, the name I gave to my LLM is “Lyin’ Brian”, after Brian Mulrony, a Canadian PM who seem to have some “doubtful associations” in his career, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Schreiber
The suppressions do the heavy lifting. Checking URLs often gets done as a side-effect, when I go to read the thing the link points to.
#ai #c #lint #llm -
Counterinsurgency for Politicians
I recently listened to a talk on fighting insurgencies and/or terrorism (Extremists in Uniform, on Preet Barara’s podcast) and thought how very relevant it was to recent Canadian and American politics.
Phillip Mudd was talking about terrorism as an infectious idea, and split the counterinsurgency problem into two parts.
The first is in combat. There, you defeat the leaders.
But the second is everywhere there is recruiting going on. That’s partly happening where your war was, but it also could be Isis recruiting on-line in Canada and the US.
The problem is all the followers.
Unless you want the insurgency to pop right back up again, you need to talk to the former followers and their supporters. They need to know that God doesn’t want them to kill all the evil Canadians. But to do that, you actually need to talk to them and find out what started the war.
No-one starts a war without a reason. The leaders puff up the reason into a rage, but the problem doesn’t go away when the leaders lose an election.
If you’re honest and visibly work to fix the problem, there won’t be a need for an insurgency, and over time the number of terrorists will fall to ones and twos. It won’t fall to zero, but you’ll be dealing with lone wolves, not packs.
How does this apply to Canada?
We have two political parties that used to overlap. We had left-center and right-center parties, and they used to debate loudly and peacefully. We used to stage marches and picket lines, but good leaders were recognized by the opposing party.
For example, the well-known Conservative Hugh Segal was appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2005 by Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin.
Twenty years later, it looks like the US. The parties hate each other, try to cause parliament (not just their opponents) to fail, and describe each other as evil and depraved. And their supporters smuggle weapons to support a picket line at the US border.
Congratulations, you have a two-part insurgency
If you really want to stop the “war”, you need to do exactly what you do in a real war.
- First you “kill” the leaders. A lost election or two will suffice.
- Then you need to talk to the followers. They wouldn’t start a war for no reason, even a shouting war. Canadians are too polite for that.
You need to find and fix the things that make them think you’re evil. Fortunately, God isn’t involved, just lots of rage, so it’s possible to have a discussion about what caused the war. Probably a “spirited” discussion, but a discussion.
But if each party looks to see what’s harming the supporters of the other party and works to fix them, you eventually get peace, order and better government.
As Bill Davis famously said, “bland works”. Not creating opportunities for a charismatic leader to try and whip their followers to a rage is how he was successful.
–dave
[Full disclosure: Hugh Segal got me started in politics: I was a volunteer in his bid to lead the Conservative party. I’m a Liberal]
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FFT: Stallman once wrote "Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.”
#oss #lawfedi #ethics #technologyEthics
https://marc.info/?l=kde-licens%20ing&m=89249041326259&w=2%3E
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Today is a good day to remind folk about the Declaration on Free Access to Law (https://falm.info/declaration/).
It declares, among other things that: "Public legal information is digital common property and should be accessible to all on a non-profit basis and free of charge"
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"Ask yourself: why would society tolerate a legal profession that outsources all its professional obligations to someone else? What value does such a profession provide? Why would anyone need or even want a lawyer if this is all a lawyer is good for?" #lawprofs #LawFedi
@design-law.bsky.social https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hvwhptk4oerwsuzau66ikwfy/post/3lqnqvi6vmk24
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"After Turnitin bought the company in 2018, a new set of terms and conditions took effect: Now student papers go into Turnitin’s global database and the company maintains a perpetual, royalty-free license over all of them."
https://themarkup.org/artificial-intelligence/2025/06/26/ai-detector-california
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The #magpies are recruiting to their their ranks... #australianbirds #melb #notcool
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I think of legal academia as a festival movie, full of nuance and craft. I think of legal practice as a bunch of tiktoks, droning vlogs and "reels" chaotically rolled into one. #LawFedi #inhousecounsel #lawprofessors
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Yesterday was annual #UN Day #UNDay. A good moment to pause and consider what's been achieved and the challenges ahead for this 'experiment' in #multilateralism #diplomacy
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Grow or Die
For its whole life, Amazon faced a classic capacity planning problem that everyone has. You need to have many machines at the busy time of the year, but they will lie idle the rest of the year.
While growing rapidly, your answer is easy: arrange to buy the needed machines as late as possible, so they came on-line just before Black Friday. The rest of the year they don’t exist, so they don’t cost you anything.
Something changed
But what if you’re not growing at 30% a year? Now you do have idle machines, for 11 out of 12 months a year.
You could arrange to start growing again. Amazon did just that, when they went from running a few data centres just for themselves and started AWS, Amazon web services. Now they were getting business from tons of new customers, and jumped back to their previous solution.
In it, you add as many machines as you can afford, until you are up to the predicted number you needed for the next “Black Friday”. You’re growing like crazy again. You can buy machines and entire data centres again … until business starts to flatten out.
What now?
You’re back to not having to buy extra every year, but you still have to pay for running everything you bought. And your profits have to keep paying back the capital investment you made when you bought those machines.
For a little while you can just coast, profit-taking on your investments.
But that won’t last. Your smaller competitors are still growing as fast as they can get customers., including by taking them from you. When that stops, you’re all in the same boat. Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and all the little guys.
Choose any Two
There are three classic approaches to staying alive in business: maximize growth, maximize revenue, or minimize cost. You did the first, now you need to do the others.
While you’re doing that, let’s pretend you’re Dr. Evil so your solutions don’t have to be ethical (:-))
Start with cost minimization: extend the effective life of your servers. That works because Moore’s Law is coming to an end, and clock speeds have stagnated. That in turn means a three-year-old machine is no longer hugely slower that a new machine. You can keep using your old machines without a cost-benefit crash. Amazon did just that, extending the life of its servers to six years. They claimed a $900m benefit in the first 90 days [Cantrill, 2024].
Then take advantage of some of the smaller advantages:
- Wright’s law [Wright, 2025] gives you the benefit of a roughly 15% improvement when you double the volume of your purchases. Keep your old servers for longer, but replace them in big batches to get the best possible price.
- Sell services on a per-core basis. The CPU speed of new machines isn’t rocketing upwards, but the number of CPU cores is still improving at a reasonable rate. Each time you get a server with twice as many cores, you double your profit from it.
- Reduce your hardware costs. All the big cloud vendors now assemble their own machines, which they call “hyperscalars”. These have the maximum number of CPU cards that will fit a largish rack, but far fewer non-profit-making parts. A normal rack of 32 high-performance 1U machines will have 32 sockets, but 64 power supplies, at least 128 fans and 32 cases. None of the latter produce profit, but they cost money. In the case of power supplies and fans, they suck electricity. A good hyperscaler can save almost half the power and cooling that a rack of normal machines uses, over and above requiring you buy fewer cases, fans and power supplies.
- Charge for extras. If you’re VMware and selling a virtualisation engine, charge one price for a version that makes you shut down a service before moving it, and more for a version that will move the service to a new physical server without interruptions.
- Make it hard to go elsewhere, until moving is seen as difficult and unusual. 37signals exited the cloud back in 2022, and at the time that was seen as something only brave experts could do.
Finally, keep creeping the price upwards. Your cost may be slowly decreasing, but you should always be increasing your prices, now you’ve locked in your customers.
Does this Sound Familiar?
Yup!
Cory Doctorow defines enshittification as
- starting with high-quality offerings to attract users, then
- optionally degrading those offerings to better serve business customers, such as advertisers, and finally
- degrading their services to all their users and customers, to maximize profits for the shareholders.
That’s a good tactic for Dr. Evil. But maybe not for everyone.
What does this do to me?
If you’re in the same pickle as Amazon, leave the Dr. Evil solutions out, and see how many you can apply to your version of the problem.
If your year-end business isn’t hugely greater that your regular business, the capacity planning problem is easier. A customer I know was once was in just that situation. They were able to use the longer life of recent servers and the price advantage of large purchases to solve their problem.
–dave
[Cantrill 2024] Bryan Cantrill, Moore’s Scofflaws, Oxide blog, https://oxide.computer/blog/moores-scofflaws
[Wright 2025] Wikipedia, Experience curve effects, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
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I genuinely feel for the #Firefox #mozilla legal team. #LawFedi
Folks, remember, lawyers are independent advisors (or should be). We don't make decisions - those are for management.
My guess is that lots of solid legal advice has been ignored regarding the #termsofuse update.
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The valley goes fast and breaks things. I spend my days going slow and fixing them. #techlawyer #inhousecounsel #lawfedi
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Feeling for all those negotiators on the #australia #eu #FTA #freetradeagreement #aueufta...
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@lmorchard #nilaypatel ,👏👏. It's tiring to watch the same corporate/tech lines about free speech, building things that might break and listening to our users...
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@angusm @ct_bergstrom @cstross
If only #contractual languag could be this unambiguous. Note well, #lawyers #lawfedi -
Spare a thought for the #inhouse #lawyers trying to work out how to implement #auslaw #Australia social media ban... #grumpylawyer
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Adobe to update vague AI terms after users threaten to cancel subscriptions | Ars Technica
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Kindly stop 'hoping that I'm well'.
My welfare is generally not the concern of my correspondents. If the missive, to which these well wishes relate, is likely to decrease my welfare, then consider apologies instead.
#monday #inhouse #grumpylawyer -
"We track the Internet browsing behavior of 48,154 monthly visitors to the Web sites of 90 online software companies to study the extent to which potential buyers access the end-user license agreement. We find that only one or two of every 1,000 retail software shoppers access the license agreement"
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1443256
WILD. And I'm guessing the 1-2 per 1000 are bored #lawyers #inhouse....