Another One

I tried to work in corporate tech again. It did not last long.

I’ve been in the tech industry a long time. I’ve adapted to every technology change and pendulum swing. That is easy. It’s the things that stay the same that are hard. The group politics, the cliques, the territoriality and protectionism, the micromanagement, the cargo culting and trend chasing… these just seem worse over time, and I reacted to them the same way that an immune system reacts once it’s been sufficiently exposed to a pathogen or allergen: for my self, my sanity, and my value, I quit.

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I’m not going to spend too much time arguing the finer points of LLM usage ethics; all of my opinions should be somewhat evident to anyone reading the whole thing. Suffice it to say I think it’s a technology like any other and in order to understand it, for benefit and criticism, you need to study and use it. This is part of the story of how I’ve tried to further my understanding.

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Pointing out hypocrisy is a very popular rhetorical technique in politics and “debate.” I usually find it very tiresome. People bring it to bear if they want to point out some inconsistency in an opponent that shows that they have no room to talk, and therefore ought be ignored on some point (or all points henceforth).

There are many candidate configurations here:

• a person is using two inconsistent arguments but isn’t aware of the inconsistency
• a person is using two apparently inconsistent arguments but the actual inconsistency is not a settled matter
• a person is using two inconsistent arguments and is aware of it
• a person is applying a different standard to one agent than the one she applies to other agents (irreconcilable)
• a person is applying a different standard to one agent than the one she applies to other agents (reconcilable)
• a person is not exemplifying the standard they are proposing (not realizable)
• a person is not exemplifying the standard they are proposing (unrealized but realizable)
• a person is not exemplifying the standard they are proposing (realized but accuser is unaware)

I think most peoples’ intuition would only count some of these as actual hypocrisy, while others simply look like it or can be made to look like it. It’s those latter cases that make accusations of hypocrisy so tiresome to me, because it seems to be very easy to successfully accuse someone of hypocrisy and very difficult to prove innocence because the key facts of the matter are often hard to pin down or easy to misrepresent.

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As I talk in meatspace to more people about decoupling from Big Tech and rethinking how they use technology, I see a variety of responses:

• Isn’t it inevitable?
• How do I do this?
• Who cares?

I think the common thread is that pulling away from Big Tech is difficult to commit to. The technology era now includes people who have lived their entire lives knowing nothing else, and people who worked hard to understand what they know and establish an online presence. It’s a lot of work to make big changes. It’s easier to be resigned, frustrated, or dismissive than it is to try or to commit.

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One of my bigger DeGoogle efforts so far has been getting off of Google Photos. The process took about a week, but I’m happy with the result and thought I’d share the process.

Motivation

I don’t want Google (or any one third party) knowing too much about me. With my devices synched to Google, I have to think twice about taking pics of sensitive docs, locations, and people thanks to their penchant for running AI/ML and OCR against all of the content I upload. They’ve collaborated with law enforcement in secret to perform unwarranted searches of user data, have complied with geofence warrants in the past, and they continue to self-deal and sell user behavioral data. I don’t care if it’s in aggregate or not. Put more simply, I simply do not trust them to care about me as a user, as they have no incentive to. Surely my own infra will still be hackable, but at least an attacker will have to work for it.

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There is a saying: “the Internet is forever” – but it isn’t automatically true. People work tirelessly behind the scenes to make it so.

A lot of content-intensive technology has “lookback” built in. Commercial sites do versioning, caching, backups, archives, and more. Sometimes they even do this in a way that lets ordinary users take advantage of it; one of the earliest examples in the web era was the ability to look at the “cached” version of a search engine result. Even if the site was down, the cached version might have given you what you were looking for.

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Note: since this was originally published, Mozilla released an updated Terms of Use that appears to grant them a license to slurp your data into an AI, and removed key provisions formerly committing them to not selling your data.

See here for the dicussion. For now, I’m striking it out of recommendations in favor of one of its forks until the implications of this change are either fully clarified or reversed.

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You can’t do much these days without connecting to the Internet. Unfortunately this means exposure to:

• getting hacked by randoms
• corporate malfeasance
• government malfeasance

Your network channels are probably the first thing you should thing about securing. There are lots of other things you should do as well, but most of them are worthless without at least some network security. There is no 100% foolproof approach, so I’m ordering this by bang-for-your-buck (in terms of time and/or money).

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Today’s Internet is in many ways worse than the one we had 30 years ago. It used to be easier and more fun to use computers and to be online in, say, the 1980s or 90s. This is not just nostalgia. While the hardware and software was certainly less capable, but it mostly got out of your way and didn’t take more from you than you were getting from it because for a brief time, personal computers were connected peer to peer or only intermittently on a young internet that commerce had not found or figured out how to coopt and monetize. This is no longer the case. And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time because computing has since pervaded all aspects of society. Ads and other behavioral nudges are in your pocket, buzzing your hip every few minutes.

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In the US our shared sense of reality is strained even more than usual.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that we use the same part of the brain for both moral disgust and physical disgust. Neurobiologists’ explanation goes something like this: since the concept of moral wrong is new on evolutionary timescales (<50,000 years) selection has coopted a part of the brain that was chiefly evolved for somthing else, namely, detecting and rejecting food/water that might make us sick, to also help modulate our understanding moral and social limits. So we end up have trouble telling the difference between something that’s morally wrong and something that just disgusts us due to, say, unfamiliarity. In our confusion we intellectually conflate “different” or “unfamiliar” with “wrong” – after all, they feel really similar – and hang on to the possibly erroneous conclusion even upon minor reflection. Some of us even settle on the idea that “icky = bad” is a decent rule of thumb to live by. ¹

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