Technology

Microsoft has, through a combination of canceled leases, pullbacks on Statements of Qualifications, cancellations of land parcels and deliberate expiration of Letters of Intent, effectively abandoned data center expansion equivalent to over 14% of its current capacity.

[…]

The reason I'm writing in such blunt-force terms is that I want to make it clear that Microsoft is effectively cutting its data center expansion by over a gigawatt of capacity, if not more, and it’s impossible to reconcile these cuts with the expectation that generative AI will be a massive, transformative technological phenomenon. 

I believe the reason Microsoft is cutting back is that it does not have the appetite to provide further data center expansion for OpenAI, and it’s having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole. If Microsoft believed there was a massive opportunity in supporting OpenAI's further growth, or that it had "massive demand" for generative AI services, there would be no reason to cancel capacity, let alone cancel such a significant amount.

[…]

Microsoft is cancelling plans to massively expand its data center capacity right at a time when OpenAI just released its most computationally-demanding model ever. How do you reconcile those two things without concluding either that Microsoft expects GPT-4.5 to be a flop, or that it’s simply unwilling to continue bankrolling OpenAI’s continued growth, or that it’s having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole?

[…]

Generative AI does not have meaningful mass-market use cases, and while ChatGPT may have 400 million weekly active users, as I described last week, there doesn’t appear to be meaningful consumer adoption outside of ChatGPT, mostly because almost all AI coverage inevitably ends up marketing one company: OpenAI. Argue with me all you want about your personal experiences with ChatGPT, or how you’ve found it personally useful. That doesn’t make it a product with mass-market utility, or enterprise utility, or worth the vast sums of money being ploughed into generative AI. 

At the UK's State of Open conference, Dawn Foster, director of data science for the CHAOSS Project, unveiled compelling evidence that forks -- community-driven alternatives to proprietary codebases -- are thriving. At the same time, companies that abandoned open-source principles face stagnant growth and disillusioned users.

[…]

At the event in London, James Governor, RedMonk's co-founder, said: "There is neither a share price rise for public companies nor revenue gains. There's no clear, 'Oh, we relicensed and got a hockey stick.' So, I think that if businesses are making these decisions, the expectation is that relicensing will be the special source that takes it to the next level. The numbers do not indicate that."

Simultaneously, Foster noted at the event that when companies closed their code, communities fought back with successful forks.

[…]

Foster's CHAOSS research also revealed that forks under neutral foundations have three times more organizational diversity than their proprietary counterparts. OpenSearch, for example, saw contributions from 45 organizations in its first year -- a stark contrast to Elasticsearch's single-vendor dominance.

In other words, open-source forks are far more popular than their proprietary counterparts. Foster said users flock to forks to avoid vendor lock-in.

The stupid use cases for AI just keep coming:

Human capital---encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits---is critical for labor market success, yet the personality component remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel ``Photo Big 5'' predicts school rank, compensation, job seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career advancement. Using administrative records from top-tier MBA programs, we find that the Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes. Unlike traditional survey-based personality measures, the Photo Big 5 is readily accessible and potentially less susceptible to manipulation, making it suitable for wide adoption in academic research and hiring processes. However, its use in labor market screening raises ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy

Google continues to show us why it chose to abandon its old motto of “Don’t Be Evil,” as it becomes more and more enmeshed with the military-industrial complex. Most recently, Google has removed four key points from its AI principles. Specifically, it previously read that the company would not pursue AI applications involving (1) weapons, (2) surveillance, (3) technologies that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” and (4) technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and  human rights.

Those principles are gone now.

In its place, the company has written that “democracies” should lead in AI development and companies should work together with governments “to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.” This could mean that the provider of the world’s largest search engine–the tool most people use to uncover the best apple pie recipes and to find out what time their favorite coffee shop closes–could be in the business of creating AI-based weapons systems and leveraging its considerable computing power for surveillance. 

After more than couple dozen hours of trying, here are the main takeaways:

1. I found a couple requests sent by my phone with my location + 5 requests that leak my IP address, which can be turned into geolocation using reverse DNS.
2. Learned a lot about the RTB (real-time bidding) auctions and OpenRTB protocol and was shocked by the amount and types of data sent with the bids to ad exchanges.
3. Gave up on the idea to buy my location data from a data broker or a tracking service, because I don't have a big enough company to take a trial or $10-50k to buy a huge database with the data of millions of people + me. Well maybe I do, but such expense seems a bit irrational. Turns out that EU-based peoples` data is almost the most expensive.

But still, I know my location data was collected and I know where to buy it! 

Thiel makes it exceedingly clear that this movement should be viewed through the lens of religion, and we should oblige him. Only then can we understand its true aims. Here’s my take: This emerging tech cult admires religion for its rigid hierarchies. But unlike traditional conservative power structures where God sits atop the pyramid, these tech prophets place technology at the summit, with themselves as its high priests. Instead of divine authority flowing from God through patriarchal figures, authority flows from technology through its billionaire interpreters, who see themselves as humanity's saviors.

It’s a clever sleight of hand: by positioning technology as the ultimate authority, they position themselves – technology’s creators and controllers – as its earthly representatives. And by slowly melding their bodies with technology, they slouch toward some kind of high-tech transubstantiation in which they hope to rise above mortality and claim godlike powers.

As I have written before, this belief system maintains many elements of the conservative belief system that cognitive scientist George Lakoff calls “Strict Father Morality.” It includes familiar hierarchies: men above women, whites above other races, wealthy above poor, and employers above employees. But it adds new dimensions: the technologically enhanced above the unenhanced, the algorithmically optimized above the naturally evolved – and the trillionaires above the billionaires above the millionaires above everyone else.

I for one am eagerly anticipating all the innovations in network-level censorship coming our way:

A US court has rejected the Biden administration's bid to restore "net neutrality" rules, finding that the federal government does not have the authority to regulate internet providers like utilities.

It marks a major defeat for so-called open internet advocates, who have long fought for protections that would require internet providers such as AT&T to treat all legal content equally.

Such rules were first introduced by the Federal Communications Commission under former Democratic president Barack Obama but later repealed during Republican Donald Trump's first term.

[…]

Public Knowledge, a progressive-leaning internet policy group, said the decision had weakened the FCC's power to shape privacy protections, implement public safety measures and take other action.

It said it believed the court had erred in ruling that internet service providers were simply offering an "information service" rather than acting as telecommunications companies.

"The court has created a dangerous regulatory gap that leaves consumers vulnerable and gives broadband providers unchecked power over Americans' internet access," it said.

But USTelecom, an industry group whose members include AT&T and Verizon, said the decision was "a victory for American consumers that will lead to more investment, innovation, and competition in the dynamic digital marketplace."

Depending on the title, public libraries may pay two or three times more for an e-book than they pay for its print edition. In some cases, the e-book may be up to six times the price, librarians told CBC.

Calls for cheaper e-books are longstanding.

In 2014, Coun. Tim Tierney led a group of municipalities asking the federal government to investigate the publishing industry for e-book pricing. At the time, OPL was spending about 11 per cent of its materials budget on electronic content.

By 2023, that share had grown to about 40 per cent.

While the library's spending on e-books is trending upward, the number of copies in its collection has declined slightly since reaching a peak in 2020.

The library is getting less for more — and readers are left waiting longer.

[…]

In addition to high prices, Chevreau said the "big five" multinational e-book publishers "throttle" access to e-books by selling them to libraries for either a limited time or a limited number of circulations — sometimes both.

Those publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster — will often license copies of e-books for just 12 or 24 months. Once that licence expires, libraries must repurchase access to the same book.

The time it took me to go from "Oh, this is so much better than Alta Vista!" to "OMG! This is the Web's single point of failure!" was much longer than it should have been.

The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.

[…]

In November 2015, we became aware of the problem and consulted a number of well known SEO experts. None of them could explain the issue, especially since Proton Mail has never used any blackhat SEO tactics, nor did we observe any used against us. Mysteriously, the issue was entirely limited to Google, as this anomaly was not seen on any other search engine. Below are the search rankings for Proton Mail for ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’ taken at the beginning of August 2016 across all major search engines. We rank on either page 1 or 2 everywhere except Google where we are not ranked at all.

[…]

All throughout Spring 2016, we worked in earnest to get in touch with Google. We created two tickets on their web spam report form explaining the situation. We even contacted Google’s President EMEA Strategic Relationships, but received no response nor improvement. Around this time, we also heard about the anti-trust action brought forward by the European Commission against Google(new window), accusing Google of abusing its search monopoly to lower the search rankings of Google competitors(new window). This was worrying news, because as an email service that puts user privacy first, we are the leading alternative to Gmail for those looking for better data privacy.

In August, with no other options, we turned to Twitter to press our case. This time though, we finally got a response(new window), thanks in large part to the hundreds of Proton Mail users who drew attention to the issue and made it impossible to ignore. After a few days, Google informed us that they had “fixed something” without providing further details. The results could be immediately seen.