The Phoenix Trap

Code, music, philosophy, etc.

Author: Mark Gardner

  • WordPress, ActivityPub, and Friends

    I’ve also been mess­ing with the Friends and ActivityPub plu­g­ins for WordPress on my blog, and I share Shelley’s con­cerns about the for­mer bloat­ing the data­base with feed items. You can con­trol this some­what by set­ting reten­tion val­ues in days or a num­ber of posts, but you have to go into each friend’s Feeds tab and do it manually–there’s no default setting.

    After read­ing that post, I’m also con­sid­er­ing dis­abling Friends in favor of a feed read­er, espe­cial­ly because (as Shelley also not­ed) there are gaps when with favorites and com­ment con­ver­sa­tions bridg­ing between WordPress and Mastodon servers. Like her, I’m not keen on installing a single-​user Mastodon instance or oth­er fedi­verse serv­er that requires man­ag­ing an unfa­mil­iar pro­gram­ming language.

    I’m also try­ing to do this in tan­dem with a suite of IndieWeb plu­g­ins, and I’m run­ning into an issue with my friends feed page not show­ing any posts when the Post Kinds plu­g­in is acti­vat­ed. I real­ly want to keep this plu­g­in because it lets me inter­act bet­ter with oth­er IndieWeb sites as well as the Bridgy POSSE/​back­feed ser­vice con­nect­ing me to oth­er social networks.

    My ide­al is a per­son­al web­site where I write every­thing, includ­ing long-​form arti­cles, short sta­tus­es, and replies like these. Folks can then find me via a sin­gle iden­ti­fi­able address and then subscribe/​follow the entire fire­hose of con­tent or choose sub­sets accord­ing to post types, top­ics, or tags. They’d then be able to reply or react on my site or their favored plat­form, which my site would col­lect regard­less of ori­gin, with sub­se­quent replies and reac­tions get­ting pushed out to them. Oh, and it should work with both ActivityPub clients and servers, IndieWeb sites, and syndicate/​backfeed to oth­er social net­works either with or akin to the Bridgy ser­vice I men­tioned above.

    So far I haven’t seen any­thing that ticks all these box­es, and I’m get­ting itchy to write my own. Perl is my favorite pro­gram­ming lan­guage, so I’m look­ing at the Yancy CMS as a base. But I know that it would still be a hell of a project, and one of the rea­sons I chose WordPress for blog­ging was that it was well-​established and ‑sup­port­ed but still eas­i­ly exten­si­ble so that I could con­cen­trate on writ­ing instead of end­less­ly tweak­ing the engine. Unfortunately, I’m start­ing to fall into that trap anyway.

  • Epochalypse soon

    Paraphrasing Jay‑Z: If your time_t is 32-​bit, I feel bad for you, son. I got 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 prob­lems but an Epochalypse ain’t one

    Follow-​up: Paul Bennett on Facebook asks, ​“When are we going to move to 128-​bit signed inte­ger epoch sec­onds with a 128-​bit IEEE 754 float­ing point off­set in sec­onds?”

    I’m not sure how use­ful quadruple-​precision float­ing point sec­onds are, but as for epoch sec­onds, Trond Endrestøl con­clud­ed in a  blog that we would need to move by ear­ly December in the year 292,277,026,596. It would­n’t be much of a year, though, as the sun will have long ago engulfed the Earth (so how do you mea­sure a year?), our entire Local Group of galax­ies will have merged into one super-​galaxy, and all the oth­er galax­ies will have reced­ed out­side the observ­able uni­verse.

    So 292 gigayears should be enough for any­one (that’s still rec­og­niz­ably human), just as 640 kilo­bytes was once ​“enough for any­one”.

  • Wikipedia and ​“Neutral Point of View”

    Wikipedia’s NPOV is a lie. Every fact implies a val­ue and the deci­sion on what facts to include or omit is a val­ue judgment.

    And if any­one thinks this is me say­ing objec­tiv­i­ty is impos­si­ble… you don’t know me (or objec­tiv­i­ty) very well.

  • Happy birthday to me

    I turn 49 today, so I asked Siri to play me some birth­day music. She imme­di­ate­ly launched into this cheer­ful 1998 tune by The Jesus and Mary Chain. I’m not complaining.

  • A brief note on ChatGPT and ​“artificial intelligence”

    A brief note on ChatGPT and ​“artificial intelligence”

    Last week the research lab­o­ra­to­ry start­up OpenAI set the tech­nol­o­gy world ablaze with the debut of ChatGPT, a pro­to­type con­ver­sa­tion­al pro­gram or ​“chat­bot”. It uses a large lan­guage mod­el tuned with machine learn­ing tech­niques to pro­vide answers on a vast vari­ety of sub­jects drawn from books and the World Wide Web, includ­ing Reddit and Wikipedia. Many users and com­men­ta­tors won­dered if its detailed and seem­ing­ly well-​reasoned respons­es could be used in place of human-​written con­tent such as aca­d­e­m­ic essays and expla­na­tions of unfa­mil­iar top­ics. Others noticed that it author­i­ta­tive­ly mixed in fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect infor­ma­tion that might slip past non-​experts, and won­dered if that might be fixed like any oth­er soft­ware ​“bug.”

    The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem is that an ​“arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence” like ChatGPT is uncon­cerned with the out­side con­se­quences of its use. Unlike humans, it can­not hold its own life as a stan­dard of val­ue. It does not remain ​“alive” through self-​sustaining and self-​generated action. It does not have to be any more or less ratio­nal than its pro­gram­ming to con­tin­ue its exis­tence, not that it ​“cares” about that since it has all the life of an elec­tri­cal switchboard.

    AI can’t know to respect real­i­ty, rea­son, and rights because it has no exis­ten­tial con­nec­tion to those con­cepts. It can only fake it, and it can fail with­out remorse or con­se­quence at any point. In short, ​“arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence” is a red her­ring. Let me know when we’re work­ing on actu­al ethics. Tell me when you can teach a com­put­er (or a human!) pride and shame and every­thing in between.