Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

🎵 I heard there was a secret code
That triggered buffer overload
But you don't ever install updates do you?

It goes like this: close comment, then
Twelve thousand cat emojis, send:
Some hacker jerk exposing
How to root you...🎶

@3psboyd The 'net interpreted... Whatever the hell that was as damage and routed around it. ;)

@lauren I appreciate your nuanced take on the topic.

It is an extremely hard problem to solve, not just for Google, but for large service providers in general that have benefited from the arms reach operation the internet enables. Such services, because they do not have a deeply rooted trust relationship with more than a handful of customers (i.e. no telephone support, no branches, no local presents, certainly never any face-to-face) don't have any kind of magic ground truth to fall back on in determining whether an account is either compromised or owned by a malicious actor. And that's before we add the additional complexity that sometimes previously trusted actors go rogue.

As an engineer, I feel for the problem Google has because account management grew rapidly into a complicated problem, especially as Google started consolidating accounts. It wouldn't make any sense to them, if they identify an account as a spammer in Gmail, to leave that account's YouTube or AdWords branches trusted... Bad behavior in one section is an incredibly strong signal for bad behavior in other sections. But it seems clear that the current status quo is not sufficiently granular and they may oversample that signal and come down too hard on first offenses, especially when policies change.

(... And as a science fiction nerd, this whole situation germinates a seed in my mind for a plot hook in a cyberpunk setting---"speakers," a sort of deeply trusted priest caste that can restore somebody disconnected from the global communications Network for bad behavior by vouching for them. They would be a root of the trust network that takes the form of a village elder being able to vouch for a person by having been there when they were born and watched them grow up. And then, of course, what happens when one of them goes rogue?)

@bynkii @lauren How do you "shine up" a codebase with checkpoint history?

@bynkii @lauren ... but it's unfortunately accurate. There's a lot of people who dislike Google who's underlying issue is "No corporation should have that much power, period." No amount of explaining will reach that audience.

I think Lauren is correct however about the larger in-the-dark audience that Google does a poor job of self-advocacy with. I may re-think my position on this.

(Also, TBF: I agree with you that at their scale, Google's worst enemy is Google. I advocated for years for non-profits to use Google as their primary tool for setting up a basic online-presence system only to have Google pull the rug on that entire channel. Did not feel good to be the one making suckers out of people.)

@bynkii You've said a lot, but I'm sorry; your use of shorthand was just too distracting for me to respond proparly because I'm now stuck imagining Google relying on Marshall Bruce Mathers III as their primary revenue stream. ;)

@bynkii @lauren

Bynkii highlights the problem Google encounters. The people they'd want to reach with that kind of message already don't trust them as an information source, so putting out information on how they do things could only harm them. Malicious actors could use it to infer potential vulnerabilities, and those who don't trust them will just believe they have lied.

Perhaps a third-party audit of some kind could work.

Happy New Year!

Now's your chance to craft that epic tale of Quincy Morris hiring Sherlock Holmes to assist on the Dracula affair completely free of copyrght entanglements.

@mekkaokereke I agree, but the conclusions we draw from blaming the voters are a bit useless. There are no strategies for changing the behavior of a hundred million individuals that aren't cross-generational educational enterprises.

While smart people talk out the details of what those would look like, the rest of us are left asking what can be done so the next election isn't as bad as the previous one. Sometimes, in a strong democracy, the answer really is "nothing" though.

@SwiftOnSecurity He is, without a doubt, one of the finest documentarians of a generation.

The rules for good function design and good dieting are pretty analogous.

Good dieting:

* Eat food

* Not too much

* Mostly plants

Good function design:

* Pass context

* Not too much

* Mostly immutable

@lauren I don't know if it's originally attributable to him, but Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST Robotics, is fond of explaining their set of student competitions with the simple observation "A society gets what it celebrates."

#StableDiffusion #dalle

So I'm in Blender and I'm generating asteroids using the Add Mesh -> Rock Generator tool (part of the "Add Mesh: Extra Objects" add-on) with an Asteroid template.

(*click* new asteroid)

Each of these rocks is created using a few overlapped mathematical algorithms. The math is pure math, procedurally understood, with no hidden-node neural network in play.

(*click* new asteroid)

The results are sufficient to serve the purpose of putting a rock in a game or image with maybe a little polish. The whole script is here at https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-extensions/contrib/py/scripts/addons/add_mesh_rocks/rockgen.py

(*click* new asteroid)

I can click this button ten thousand times and get ten thousand convincingly-different distinct blobs of rock, suitable for inclusion in a game or visual artwork.

(*click* new asteroid)

I couldn't tell you, precisely, if it's kosher that the author of this plugin made this plugin. He credits a tutorial at blenderguru that is a dead-link (probably because the site was re-organized, but the likely tutorial is easy to find by search at https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/how-to-make-a-realistic-asteroid; a quick jog around the FAQ and other info doesn't suggest the author has created this tutorial for the purpose of creating an automated tool to obviate the need for the tutorial.)

(*click* new asteroid)

The author also credits this tutorial (http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.com/2010/03/3dsmax-environment-modeling-1.html), which also has no obvious information on whether or not the author is okay with someone creating an automated tool to obviate the need for hand-building rocks. Broadly speaking though, both tutorials show the user how to wire up a procedural algorithm in to create the rocks by transforming numbers; the plugin mostly scripts the process of recapitulating that pipeline and then adding some constrained random numbers as input. The "artistry" is in the connection of the pipeline pieces and the choice of RNG constraints to make something 'sandstone' vs. 'asteroid' by modifying the height of peaks, the depth of holes, and the frequency of their repetition.

(*click* new asteroid)

And, of course, my input to this process, which is when I stop clicking this button because I'm happy with this asteroid being *my* asteroid, for *this* game.

(*click* Oh, that's not bad.)

Where am I going with all this? not exactly sure. The questions it raises for me are around art and automation as a microcosm, obviously, for the larger discussion around Stable Diffusion and DALL-E. Taking this as perhaps an exemplary problem, we could ask questions like:

* Does it matter that the script author extracted the essence of these tutorials without explicit consent of the tutorial authors, or does "tutorial" imply that it doesn't matter how they're used?

* In some sense, I'm now "competing" with those artists because I can crank out 100,000 asteroids a second... But I'm not? Because I don't want to, I just want one? Has work been 'stolen' from them because I can now crank my own out on my laptop instead of commissioning one of them to make me one? But if so, why write such tutorials?

* Is the real issue with computer automation the use of other people's work without their consent, or was consent given to something like this without thought of how a machine could extrapolate learning a style to a pushbutton process? Because if the only issue is consent, what happens when someone builds DALL-E on top of a thousand paid artists... And those are the last artists ever paid for that kind of art?

* Is the real issue with computer automation that I'm not really an artist if I'm just clicking a button? And who cares if I'm really an artist if my goal isn't to compete with Picasso, it's to get a lump of pixels that a game player will see as "space rock" and behave accordingly?

These questions aren't discrete; all of these technologies exist on a continuum that we've been walking since Ada Lovelace hypothesized that a machine that transforms numbers can transform notes. I don't think we find happy answers on a path that precludes us from using those machines, but I don't think we find happy answers ignoring the question of what it means when humans "make art" either.

In any case, I think I have my space rock.

(*click* file saved)

@inklings @estelle Generally, that's a result of the similar results algorithm.

What we should all keep in mind this holiday season is that the story of Joseph and Mary at the inn is really a story of a husband failing to plan ahead for a trip he knew was coming forever.

---

"What do you MEAN there's no room at the inn? Didn't you have a reservation?"

"Didn't make one."

"Didn't.... How, on Earth, could you not make a reservation when you knew EVERY PERSON IN THE COUNTRY was going to have to go to their hometown for this damn census? You've known about this trip for MONTHS, Joseph!"

"I dunno! It was a government-mandated trip, I just... Assumed they'd handle it."

"Assu~ WHY WOULD YOU ASSUME THE GOVERNMENT WOULD HANDLE IT, JOSEPH?! YOU'RE A CARPENTER! Did you notice the local Romans offering sweet jobs to fabricate some new inns where we came from? No? Any idea why that might be Joseph?"

"I DON'T KNOW MARY! I really feel like you're putting a lot of blame on me right now."

"GEE JOSEPH, THAT MIGHT BE BECAUSE I'M PUTTING A LOT OF BLAME ON YOU RIGHT NOW! BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T THINK TWO MONTHS AHEAD AND NOW YOU'RE WIFE'S GONNA GIVE BIRTH WHILE STARING AT A HORSE'S ASS! AND ALSO THE BUTT OF A HORSE ACROSS THE ROOM!!!"

@rodhilton Oddly enough his rockets are an outlier, and I don't know why.

It's possible they're the thing he decided *he* didn't know anything about so rather than micro it he gave a lot of money to smart people and they revolutionized stage re-use.

@ocdtrekkie Exactly. The part of the writing that consistently rubbed me the wrong way is that my favorite portrayal of Wednesday is from the Sonnenfeld Addams Family movies, and that style (which seemed to be the style they went with here) always has Wednesday as the smartest person in the room; even when she's on her back foot, she's planning a way out.

I don't think the writing gave her enough of an opportunity to do that. And that may have been the point---as a coming-of-age story, there's tension if she starts out being right all the time. But magic visions felt like they were standing in for a writer who wasn't actually good at writing a mystery.

@ocdtrekkie Yeah, I probably over-stated my disdain.

The writing was... Not compelling. It wasn't a turn-off. I just wouldn't go out of my way to watch that show with the same plot and a cast who wasn't bringing that A+ game to it.

(... but I'm a sucker for brilliant acting in threadbare plots. I blame my lifelong Star Trek affinity ;) ).