unhba

There is a real aspect of confession in articles like this one - I mean in the religious sense. They come across to me as attempts to justify decisions or actions in the face of overwhelming internal contradictions where the intended audience is just the author’s own conscience. I don’t at all buy the explicit argument that “if we don’t act now - not just by adopting AI, but BY VOTING!! - then all is lost”. We already know about voting; how is the URGENT mass adoption - even with decentralisation - by software developers of llms going to drive social change or alleviate political crisis? Especially given this is a technology about which the author is so obviously profoundly conflicted? Why the hand-wringing and vacillation? Does it really matter in the long run if sceptics take their time in evaluating these tools and even end up rejecting them? Why really do we need to be convinced or turned away from the anti ai hype?

There is additionally some kind of implicit historical recourse to the Industrial Revolution and the revolutionary politics it is associated to, where software developers, cast as the cottage industry weavers etc. are seen as walking blindly into their mass replacement by machines, with the implication that those machines will be able to be managed by de-skilled labour whose role will be simply to ensure their smooth and safe running. I think it is important to try and see things in this way but also there is a lot lacking from the analogy.

Thanks for the clarification I completely mistook what you were saying. This is the fascinating bit for me then, that what’s happening with the moon’s rotation is also happening with everything else

Thanks for this explanation. If I understand correctly then, the moon requires some centripetal force in order not to dissipate due to its rotation whereas e.g. my head or the Eiffel Tower do not because they are not subject to absolute rotation.

Yes but from the point of view of the earth the moon does not appear to be rotating around its own axis since it is tidally locked. In that sense it’s confusing to me to distinguish it from everything else on earth but the comment above about centripetal force clarifies this for me I think

My colleagues once spent a good hour trying to explain this fact to me and I still really struggle to accept it. I can see that the moon is rotating on its own axis from the point of view of a space that is external to the system it forms with the earth. But then isn’t everything on earth rotating about its own axis with respect to that external space? It seems arbitrary to isolate the moon from all this other stuff and make a special case of it…

I work on a shopping assistant type browser extension and I am very confident that if I proposed an architecture and implementation such as the author identifies here I would be turned down immediately: having good intentions around privacy is one thing but deliberately designing your application in a way that allows to bypass almost entirely the review process required on submission to the store is something that should be answered for.

Steps have been taken toward making this the norm in Chrome but it’s not clear yet to what degree it will be enforced. Already user can chose on install or at a later time to limit the domains an extension is active on (no matter what permissions it requests) and the ‘declarative’ model for interactions (wake on invocation by user or declare rules/lists to be applied on your behalf by the browser itself) is heavily promoted.

It will be interesting to see how the developers of this extension respond to Google’s roll out of extensions Manifest V3 - the new specification could almost be directly targeting them: with service worker replacing background script there will no longer be a concealed window to mount those iframes. Thanks to the author for this write-up