Weekend Edition 30: AI News and Moore

Co-Founder of Intel Passes
SVB Bought Out, Finally
AI Fearporn and FOSS Hopes
Social Media News

#weekendedition #currentevents #technews #humaninterest #finance #AInews #twitter #tiktok #TechFreedom #FOSSNews

WE 30.1 – Gordon Moore Passed This Week
A founding father of the silicon era passed away at 94 this week. Who was Gordon Moore? He was an electrical engineer and chemist who helped to shape our world. He was one of the three men who founded the titan, Intel (which I didn’t realize stands for INTegrated ELectronics). He wrote what became known as “Moore’s Law” back in 1965, before it was anything like clear that these things would happen, at least to the rest of the world. He was a visionary who really drove Intel and the industry forward until he retired in 1997. In the early days, it was just 3 men who built Intel: Moore, Robert Noyce, and Andy Grove. Noyce was the initial idea man, Moore executed on Noyce’s designs, tweaking them until they worked as intended, and Grove was the management and Ops mastermind that allowed the other two to focus on what they were good at doing.
I figured this was worth covering since I covered the bit about the inventor of Ethernet last week. Without men like these, who knows where computing and the modern world would be.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/gordon-moore-obituary

WE 30.2 – SVB Bought Out by First Citizens BancShares
Remember how I was saying that it was shocking that the FDIC was holding onto these failed banks as long as they had, as of last week? Well, they finally pawned off much of SVB to an East Coast rival, First Citizens, which bills themselves as ‘America’s largest family-controlled bank’. Here are the details:
• First Citizens had bought around $72bn of SVB's assets at a discount of $16.5bn
◦ Making First Citizens one of the 25 biggest in the US.
• The FDIC said it will hold onto roughly $90bn of SVB's assets and estimated the cost of the SVB failure to its deposit insurance fund would be about $20bn
◦ It will also receive an equity stake in First Citizens worth up to $500m.
• The FDIC said it had received 27 bids from 18 bidders before settling on the First Citizens deal. ​
Ok, so wait a second, this math does not seem to make sense the surface. Then when you remember that it is all a giant shell game, kind of like the points in the game on Whose Line Is It Anyway, it starts to make sense again. I can get the discount thing, but how do you figure that 162 billion = 170 billion? I feel like I’m missing something in this picture. I’m a tech guy who happens to be a restorationist follower of Jesus, not an expert in high finance. Can anyone help me out, here? Is the FDIC supposed to hold assets of failed banks? Don’t those become liabilities in their hands if they do not sell them? I really don’t understand this properly, but from where I sit, this seems weird. That is all I’m gonna say about it for now.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65084248

WE 30-3: AI Fearporn and FOSS Hopes
30.3a Musk and other “luminaries” in the space sound alarm about AI
Here’s the fearporn.:Musk, Steve Wozniak, and other tech leaders have signed an open letter expressing concerns over automation and the effects of generative AI, particularly with the way that GPT-4 has grown vs GPT-3. It has many spooked. I am unconvinced that it is genuinely a threat. It cannot truly do its own thing without user prompts, and even at that, if the gentleman from Gab (see last week’s episode) knows what he is talking about, then this is really all fear. The letter calls for a ceasefire in the training of these high end AIs due to their fears about the upheaval that could result from the proliferation of highly refined AIs which could out-think, out-work, and generally outdo us human beings. I doubt that it could ever get to that point, and besides, if we don’t abdicate our God-given brains and discernment to these tools, and they aren’t so woke as to be unuseful for sane people, and they weren’t based on collecting data from users to give to mega-corps out there (G**gle, microshaft, etc) or to various intelligence communities, then they are awesome. However, most of the models out there are all those things and more, in terms of being surveillance tools more than anything else. However, we are starting to see the beginnings of some FOSS alternatives, which we’ll talk about next.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65110030
30.3b – Meet Dolly, the first FOSS Generative AI Tool
Dolly is a clone, just as its namesake was, only this time, of a Large Language Model called Alpaca. What I find intriguing here, is the potential to control your instance of it entirely, based on the databricks datacenters. This allows individuals to play with and train their version of dolly however they choose. That intrigues me. I like the idea of having more control over the model you use, along with the data you input, versus sending all of that to the fascists over at Big Tech companies. It is non-commercial at this point (that is the nature of most FOSS licensing provisions). They use ElutherAI as its base, and it has Alpaca built on to of it to give it conversational and interactivity capabilities on par with GPT-3 with a much smaller dataset. This may be worth taking a look at, just to play with and learn how all this works. My wife is uneasy about AI in general, thinking it demonic, but I don’t necessarily agree with that assessment at this point. However, I do think that any tool we develop needs to remain seen as a tool, not something to trust with writing the entirety of something important in your life without any added input from you. That does not serve humanity, much less you, on a personal level. Do NOT ever outsource your brain and discernment to ANY machine.
https://www.databricks.com/blog/2023/03/24/hello-dolly-democratizing-magic-chatgpt-open-models.html?ref=its-foss-news

WE 30.4 – Social Media Silliness
30.4a – Musk Overhauls Blue Check System Again
Ok, I only talk about it because people seem to care. Having never gotten involved with the Dirty Blue Bird, I couldn’t care less. It seems to me that Elon is trying to destroy the platform for some reason. As much as he rode in on a cloud of free speech hype, he hasn’t done much to restore free speech on the platform, and the fact that one has to pay for verification now seems like something less than free speech. He also has failed to really undo much of the woketard damage done to and through the platform. I still hear about patriots who got accoutns back getting booted again for saying tamer things than what got them ejected from the platform to begin with. Who knows what Elon is up to. I wouldn’t mind seeing Twitter crash and burn because it is not what it was (allegedly) meant to be, that being a free, digital town square, where everyone’s opinion can briefly be shared.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65095684
30.4b – States and Social Media
b1 – Arkansas Sues TikTok, ByteDance, and Meta
The State of Arkansas has filed a lawsuit against the platforms and their parent companies alleging that the platforms are injurious to both users’ mental health and personal privacy, based on the Arkansas State Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The Meta/Facebook suit focuses more on the mental health & addiction, as well as content moderation issues with the platform. The ByteDance/TikTok suit focuses on addiction, moderation, and privacy issues with that platform. We will see how far this goes.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/tech/arkansas-lawsuit-tiktok-bytedance-meta-mental-health
b2 – Utah Governor Signs Bill About Kids and Social Media
Well, now kids have to get permission from their parents in order to sign up for social media accounts in the state of Utah, starting on March 1, 2024. This bill is meant to protect kids from the negative effects of social media, in the form of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Not only parental permission to sign up, but age verifications, and even shutting down kids access to platforms between 10:30 PM and 6:30 AM. On one hand, a round of applause for Utah is advised. On the other, this does constitute a massive privacy breach for these kids. I do not believe that a government policy or regulation like this is the way forward. Parents need to be more responsible in general, and more involved in their kids’ lives. It is really what kids want anyway. The reason they turn to things like social media is to fill the void left by uninvolved parents who are perhaps too busy with trying to make ends meet, or other things that they deem more worthy of their time and effort. Oh, it may lead to push back from the kids at first, particularly if it is foreign to them to have you interested or involved in their lives. You can get through that. It is worth it. I do not have teens yet, but my wife and I homeschool, and that allows us to be more involved with them. I could go on for days on this, but that is not the point right now.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/23/tech/utah-social-media-regulation-act
30.4c – TIkTok Stuff
C1 – It Isn’t the Size of the Data, It’s How You Use It
So apparently, the amount of data is not why the West is on a tear about the app, rather it is who owns it and who can access it. We’ve talked about this issue before, and TikTok appears to be making an attempt to corral its data in Western markets to assuage lawmakers here and across the pond, there are concerns, whether valid or not. These concerns are based in the vagaries of Chinese law, and it is very difficult to prove a negative, so it is very difficult to convince anyone that it hasn’t and won’t happen that the CCP has accessed US user data. It is even more difficult to do so when the ones you are trying to convince of a negative are convinced of the opposite. More evidence is necessary, either way. I remain unconvinced in either direction, and the bill that they are calling a “TikTok Ban” is so much more than that, and should never be passed, as it will affect every single social platform, such that any post or content on the platform which conveys any wrongthink can lead to fines, and/or prison time for the offending party. Is that an environment you want to live in? Do you want to live in a country where you cannot speak your mind freely? Ok, so we are already somewhat in that category, but do you want it to be that much worse? I sure as hell don’t. That is how we will see the fullness of fascism in this country. When Big Tech is authorized to rat you out even more than they are now. Far be it from us to ever pass a law that openly repugnant to the Constitution. Shame on the clowns in DC for even considering that.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/tiktok-ban-national-security-hearing

C2 – Who stands to Benefit from a TikTok Ban?
Excellent question. Why, US Big Tech platforms, of course. In fact, with all of the noise in DC, those platforms’ stocks have gone up as investors are salivating over the potential of more users coming back “home” so to speak, due tot the spike in potential ad revenue for the platforms. I have a better idea, not that anybody listens to me yet... But why don’t we all jump on the Fediverse rather than running back to Big Tech with all of their surveillance capitalism?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/tiktok-alternatives

What is the Fediverse? It is a cluster of related, decentralized protocols like Pixelfed, Mastodon, PeerTube, Pleroma, Tumblr, Diaspora, Friendica, GoToSocial, and others. They are decentralized because anybody can start a self-hosted instance on a server they own or rent, choose to federate it or not, and it cannot be taken down by anyone, unless your server gets taken out for some reason. These are all FOSS, but can be a bit overwhelming to get started with, kind of like matrix. Some of them are interconnected, such as Mastodon, PixelFed, and PeerTube. Mastodon is what Gab is based on. PixelFed is a photo/image-sharing protocol, something like instagram. PeerTube is a peer-to-peer video sharing protocol, meant to be something along the lines of YouTube.
https://fediverse.party