woodrowbarlow

actually, it looks like this is happening inside Google right now. DeepMind workers are unionizing, and most of their demands revolve around ethical boundaries and the right to refuse to contribute based on ethical grounds.

it's an example of how a union can use collective financial power to fund the services they offer to their members. a software engineer's union could prioritize income insurance over retirement.

yes, true sometimes (not always). but if more people have access to a way to confidently say "no" (with protection behind them), then i think saying "no" would happen more often, by people who might've otherwise complied.

i don't believe that software development should require a license. imagine having to get board-licensed to download gcc; therein lies the death of free software and owning your devices.

are there examples of unions that have started around a focus on the ethics of the services they provide? unions traditionally start locally, around issues for which the locality is a hotspot, which is why they usually focus on pay and working conditions. it's also easier to get a large group to agree on a set of improvements to working conditions vs a set of ethical boundaries.

that's definitely a big question and i don't pretend to have enough expertise to answer fully; however, i will point to the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan which is (per Wikipedia[1]) "one of the world's largest institutional investors [...] over $266 billion in net assets, with a one-year total-fund net return of 9.4%, and a 7.4% 10-year total-fund net return". the union runs their own investment fund; it's an extension of collective power into the financial realm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Teachers%27_Pension_Pl...

maybe, but the union could provide a lot of services to someone who loses their job this way (like income insurance and legal services) and could leverage collective power over companies that demonstrate a pattern of behavior.

i would love to have a software engineer's union, not so much to get better working conditions but to be able to say stuff like "i can't implement that unethical feature, it's against union rules and i'd lose my membership".

ha, so you could run this on the server and send down a page with no javascript at all? (with, i assume, a static camera only.) that's fun. i mean, you could also just render the model to an image at that point, but still, this is neat.

preach. and i want this to extend to phones too.

"a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a [legal] decision"

in my observation: when humans are automated out of a process due to the human element being inconvenient, the perceived efficiency gains are often because wronged individuals have less recourse in the automated system.

they weren't expecting to receive attention out of the blue today. it seems rude to attack someone's engineering skills because an online profile is out of date.

am i understanding correctly that Docker Hub is inaccessible in Spain during football matches? do sports get bandwidth priority?

i mean, in git (on its own) you can use your email + GPG key across every repo as a universal ID. it's just that forges add an identity layer on top, too.

forge "fragmentation" is a good thing. git was meant to be decentralized from the start. re-centralizing on a single provider would just repeat the github saga all over again.

looks like it's a rust lib with a python wrapper. making a CLI tool should be just a few lines of code.

gosh, the scene where he stumbles into the lecture hall, almost late, and then delivers a flawless retro-encapulator-esque pitch... that had me giddy.

yeah there's some truth here. from what i understand, the radios that give the best "imaging" are also the least resilient for data -- you need basically line-of-sight. and 5G did have some optional ULF "add-ons" that basically never got used because the tradeoffs for speed to signal integrity were poor.

it won't start as a mass deployment -- just focused on stadiums, airports, government buildings, etc.; maybe some authoritarian states will attempt mass deployments, but the cost will be an obstacle. also, my read is that western telcos aren't interested in owning a surveillance tool because they know their governments won't let them keep it.

hopefully 6G won't be the end of physical privacy. but it will prototype the end of physical privacy -- and i think it will end up being just a matter of time from that point on, unfortunately.

the article is off-base with wifi. the real story is in 6G cellular.

there is a working group at 3gpp, an EU-funded research group (6th sense, Open6GHub), universities (NCSU, Bristol), and many companies working very hard right now on proposals to include "integrated/joint sensing and communication" (ISAC/JCAS) in the 6G spec.

ISAC means adding mmWave to 6G (ostensibly for speed, but also) to build a high-fidelity 3d realtime "digital twin" of the real world that can see through walls, owned and operated by your telecom provider.

> A very exciting innovation that 6G will bring to the table would be its ability to sense the environment. The ubiquitous network becomes a source of situational awareness, collating signals that are bouncing off objects and determining type and shape, relative location, velocity and perhaps even material properties. With adequate 6G solutions for privacy and trust, such a mode of sensing can help create a “mirror” or digital twin of the physical world in combination with other sensing modalities.

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/articles/nokias-visi... https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/building-network-si...

there's been a testbed deployment in a German hospital for "non-invasive" monitoring of vitals; which sounds to me like it can literally see a heartbeat.

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2024/12/17/noki...

truth is, this is the nature of wireless radios. we can't keep improving bandwidth and latency without also turning the radio into a camera. i'm disturbed by the inevitability.

you might appreciate "lena" by qntm: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

well, sure, but RC2 was ten years later.

RC2 had "exciting" menus? they looked like Windows 3.1... made me feel like i was using ancient accounting software. which was actually pretty fitting for the genre.

huh, cool. what happens if you use vanilla-git to clone a repo that contains empty folders? and do forges like github display them properly?

here's an example of how model censorship affects coding tasks: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603

yikes

uhhh... you're running generated code on your customers' PCs? what kind of sandboxing do you have?

> what security researchers call a "Pickle Bomb."

is anyone calling it that? to me, "pickle bomb" would imply abusing compression or serialization for a resource-exhaustion attack, a la zipbombs.

"pickle bomb", the way you're using it, doesn't seem like a useful terminology -- pickles are just (potentially malicious) executables.

this prevents claude from directly reading certain files, but doesn't prevent claude from running a command that dumps the file on stdout and then reading stdout... claude will just try to "cat" the file if it decides it wants to see it.

by putting secrets in your environment instead of in your files, and running AI tools in a dedicated environment that has its own set of limited and revocable secrets.

the minisforum ms-r1 has the same SoC and supports UEFI