Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
1.3K followers 780 following 4.6K posts
Cognitive/social scientist and occasional coder. Umquhile Mancunian. Purveyor of Jurassic Park memes. Writes on modernization and technology. Consciously uncoupling from corporate shenanigans. Halifax, Nova Scotia https://morungos.com/
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morungos.bsky.social
For a lot of my apps, containers would ramp costs by a factor of two — or in the case of Kubernetes, up to ten. I’m not getting the benefit. Feels like the kind of scam Intel pulled when they bought McAfee, far and away the biggest consumer of cpu cycles in existence.
morungos.bsky.social
Agreed. I’m adding this issue to my list of tech risk dumps, because it’s actually a great example of shifting the risk onto customers and off corporations.

Although I’m not a massive fan of containers. Kubernetes does my head in. It’s stupid decisions which uniformly benefit big cloud providers.
morungos.bsky.social
That’d scare the hell out of me. The thing that rankles most is the almost complete lack of enforcement — or if there is some, they’ll target non-drivers anyway.
morungos.bsky.social
Due to the nature of this kind of analysis, there’ll be some work that’s categorized as “surveillance” here that arguably isn’t, and you know what? I don’t mind, because the message needs to get through that a lot of CV tech is oppressive. We can be better, so let’s be.
morungos.bsky.social
A great read. Now that I’m increasingly working on CV, i love this, because it’s more leverage for my stance that most folks are doing it entirely wrong anyways.
abeba.bsky.social
New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

1/
Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature
An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.
www.nature.com
morungos.bsky.social
Now you know why. If pedestrians or cyclists try, they get mown down by drivers turning right. Drivers don’t even bother to look.
morungos.bsky.social
I was in an AWS training session years back, and fully the first ten minutes was warnings about not giving money to Jeff by messing up Lambda. It did not inspire confidence.
Reposted by Stuart Watt
uniondesign.bsky.social
So someone “vibe coded” an app w/ a Google Maps API key that racked up a $50,000 bill and… LOL. But TBF those keys default to wide open. No restrictions by domain, IP, enabled APIs, etc. Massive potential for damage. They should be like a deadman’s switch… default to fully locked w/o explicit input.
morungos.bsky.social
If I was still a functional academic, I’d be studying the cognitive biases we have wrt complex systems. I’ve long believed anything we can’t grasp the design, we tend to treat as an intentional system. Don’t have the evidence, sadly.
morungos.bsky.social
That was always the part that made me howl. 😀
morungos.bsky.social
Bad editing there, sorry, but I’m sure you get the gist.
morungos.bsky.social
Sociologically, I think this is enthralling. One of the key concepts of late modernity is the rising importance of *non-knowledge*. So it’s not a surprise that late modernity is AI differs deeply from GOFAI in valuing lack-of-knowledge about how things happen (i.e., emergence) in a whole new light.
morungos.bsky.social
So for many in AI, I’d argue emergence is used as an anti-theory. Not only do we not know what (e.g.) thinking is, we don’t *need to know* because it can only come out from the interaction between system, data, and environment. Effectively it becomes an epiphenomenon, and so we are back to Watson.
morungos.bsky.social
I’d argue your take on emergence (which usually doesn’t deal with is the questionable one. Certainly it would not be recognized in biology or dynamical systems, where engineered systems are not the norm. Emergence isn’t a tech concept, but a scientific/philosophical one.
morungos.bsky.social
Thank you for assuming — I l know precisely what it means, and how it is commonly used in the AI field, which is not always the same thing. (As well as 30+ years in AI, I’ve got a background in dynamical systems theory and artificial life, and worked with some wonderful biologists in the field)
morungos.bsky.social
See that’s why I think all the modern AI thinking tends to go in a great big circle right back to Watson-style behaviourism. Not even Skinner-style behaviourism, which is a bit more subtle. Effectively today’s AI (unlike GOFAI) is trying to undo the cognitive revolution via some “radical emergence”.
morungos.bsky.social
I’ve heard people give variants on this argument for 30+ years, and mostly all they say is: we don’t understand either QM or consciousness, so they’re obviously the same thing.

I don’t want your “spooky” unification concepts, you better have a damn good theory, and I haven’t heard one yet.
morungos.bsky.social
I’d never heard of them but I have a thing in transit with them apparently. And it is tracking okay so far.
Reposted by Stuart Watt
schaller67.bsky.social
Things that cause autism, per RFK jr:

1. Tylenol
2. Circumcision
3. Holiday sweaters
4. Seattle sports fandom
5. Oscar-watch parties
6. Ketchup on hot dogs
7. Visiting Brooklyn
8. Dental brush picks
9. Greta Gerwig films
10. Hummus

Stay tuned, more super-scientific studies forthcoming…
morungos.bsky.social
Assuming you mean the king, I can do that in Canada. And I get to have a Kinder egg after.
morungos.bsky.social
Do not let this happen, Canada.

Try this in Nova Scotia and I’ll host a bring a pitchfork party.
Reposted by Stuart Watt
jjaron.bsky.social
Honestly, when the financial press starts printing diagrams like this, isn't it time for a regulator to step in?
Reposted by Stuart Watt
judah-grunstein.bsky.social
If you wanted to script a scenario to perfectly vindicate the work of Jean Baudrillard, it would be Trump II.

A simulacra of a president running a simulation of a presidency, based on simulacra of news broadcast by simulations of news media.

Baudrillard is to Trump II what Foucault was to GWB.
morungos.bsky.social
I use one of these, fairly cheap online. HDMI in (and out), USB power and camera out. Works simply for me.
A small shiny metal box labelled “4K ULTRA HD. USB3.0 HDTV Video Capture”
morungos.bsky.social
There were also probably 30 or so ring-necked ducks. Looks like they are gathering to fly soon. There were only about ten a few days back.
A distant view of a lake surface, with a lot of small ducks on it. They're distant and hard to see: some are more black-and-white, the others brown, and they have orangey-red eyes. Both have whitish rings around their beaks.