#computer engineering

[theftmprogrammer]

i think computer science and computer engineering majors should take an ethics class. not that it will fix everything but i think more of my peers need to understand how their actions have consequences. i think having more ethics discussed in the compsci academic space in general is essential.

[viridianriver]

'Artificial Intelligence' Tech - Not Intelligent as in Smart - Intelligence as in 'Intelligence Agency'

I work in tech, hell my last email ended in '.ai' and I used to HATE the term Artificial Intelligence. It's computer vision, it's machine learning, I'd always argue.

Lately, I've changed my mind. Artificial Intelligence is a perfectly descriptive word for what has been created. As long as you take the word 'Intelligence' to refer to data that an intelligence agency or other interested party may collect.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back when I was in 'AI' - the vibe was just odd. Investors were throwing money at it as fast as they could take out loans to do so. All the while, engineers were sounding the alarm that 'AI' is really just a fancy statistical tool and won't ever become truly smart let alone conscious. The investors, baffingly, did the equivalent of putting their fingers in their ears while screaming 'LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU"

Meanwhile, CEOs were making all sorts of wild promises about what AI will end up doing, promises that mainly served to stress out the engineers. Who still couldn't figure out why the hell we were making this silly overhyped shit anyway.

SYSTEMS THINKING

As Stafford Beer said, 'The Purpose of A System is What It Does" - basically meaning that if a system is created, and maintained, and continues to serve a purpose? You can read the intended purpose from the function of a system. (This kind of thinking can be applied everywhere - for example the penal system. Perhaps, the purpose of that system is to do what it does - provide an institutional structure for enslavement / convict-leasing?)

So, let's ask ourselves, what does AI do? Since there are so many things out there calling themselves AI, I'm going to start with one example. Microsoft Copilot.

Microsoft is selling PCs with integrated AI which, among other things, frequently screenshots and saves images of your activity. It doesn't protect against copying passwords or sensitive data, and it comes enabled by default. Now, my old-ass-self has a word for that. Spyware. It's a word that's fallen out of fashion, but I think it ought to make a comeback.

To take a high-level view of the function of the system as implemented, I would say it surveils, and surveils without consent. And to apply our systems thinking? Perhaps its purpose is just that.

SOCIOLOGY

There's another principle I want to introduce - that an institution holds insitutional knowledge. But it also holds institutional ignorance. The shit that for the sake of its continued existence, it cannot know.

For a concrete example, my health insurance company didn't know that my birth control pills are classified as a contraceptive. After reading the insurance adjuster the Wikipedia articles on birth control, contraceptives, and on my particular medication, he still did not know whether my birth control was a contraceptive. (Clearly, he did know - as an individual - but in his role as a representative of an institution - he was incapable of knowing - no matter how clearly I explained)

So - I bring this up just to say we shouldn't take the stated purpose of AI at face value. Because sometimes, an institutional lack of knowledge is deliberate.

HISTORY OF INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

The first formalized intelligence agency was the British Secret Service, founded in 1909. Spying and intelligence gathering had always been a part of warfare, but the structures became much more formalized into intelligence agencies as we know them today during WW1 and WW2.

Now, they're a staple of statecraft. America has one, Russia has one, China has one, this post would become very long if I continued like this...

I first came across the term 'Cyber War' in a dusty old aircraft hanger, looking at a cold-war spy plane. There was an old plaque hung up, making reference to the 'Upcoming Cyber War' that appeared to have been printed in the 80s or 90s. I thought it was silly at the time, it sounded like some shit out of sci-fi.

My mind has changed on that too - in time. Intelligence has become central to warfare; and you can see that in the technologies military powers invest in. Mapping and global positioning systems, signals-intelligence, of both analogue and digital communication.

Artificial intelligence, as implemented would be hugely useful to intelligence agencies. A large-scale statistical analysis tool that excels as image recognition, text-parsing and analysis, and classification of all sorts? In the hands of agencies which already reportedly have access to all of our digital data?

TIKTOK, CHINA, AND AMERICA

I was confused for some time about the reason Tiktok was getting threatened with a forced sale to an American company. They said it was surveiling us, but when I poked through DNS logs, I found that it was behaving near-identically to Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, and other companies that weren't getting the same heat.

And I think the reason is intelligence. It's not that the American government doesn't want me to be spied on, classified, and quantified by corporations. It's that they don't want China stepping on their cyber-turf.

The cyber-war is here y'all. Data, in my opinion, has become as geopolitically important as oil, as land, as air or sea dominance. Perhaps even more so.

A CASE STUDY : ELON MUSK

As much smack as I talk about this man - credit where it's due. He understands the role of artificial intelligence, the true role. Not as intelligence in its own right, but intelligence about us.

In buying Twitter, he gained access to a vast trove of intelligence. Intelligence which he used to segment the population of America - and manpulate us.

He used data analytics and targeted advertising to profile American voters ahead of this most recent election, and propogandize us with micro-targeted disinformation. Telling Israel's supporters that Harris was for Palestine, telling Palestine's supporters she was for Israel, and explicitly contradicting his own messaging in the process. And that's just one example out of a much vaster disinformation campaign.

He bought Trump the white house, not by illegally buying votes, but by exploiting the failure of our legal system to keep pace with new technology. He bought our source of communication, and turned it into a personal source of intelligence - for his own ends. (Or... Putin's?)

This, in my mind, is what AI was for all along.

CONCLUSION

AI is a tool that doesn't seem to be made for us. It seems more fit-for-purpose as a tool of intelligence agencies, oligarchs, and police forces. (my nightmare buddy-cop comedy cast) It is a tool to collect, quantify, and loop-back on intelligence about us.

A friend told me recently that he wondered sometimes if the movie 'The Matrix' was real and we were all in it. I laughed him off just like I did with the idea of a cyber war.

Well, I re watched that old movie, and I was again proven wrong. We're in the matrix, the cyber-war is here. And know it or not, you're a cog in the cyber-war machine.

(edit -- part 2 - with the 'how' - is here!)

[anonymousdormhacks]

Whats the opposite of gothic? I'm in love with comp sci anti-gothic where it's just people being surprisingly polite and nice and funny through computers. A program's first lines are always "Hello world!". SMTP protocols apparently say "hello, pleased to meet you" to each other to establish a connection with a handshake. Python has a different version called Andaconda, which has a smaller version called miniconda. C++ is just C continuously improving on itself, because the ++ operator means to add one onto a previous value, and C# is two ++ stacked on top of each other. Lawmakers have to talk about the ethics of saving "cookies" to computers because one guy liked fortune cookies and decided to call them that. The internet itself wasn't created with security in mind because it was just meant to be a way for a group of people who trusted each other using it to send each other information, and so on, and so forth

[restless-mode]

8/12/24

been silent on this blog bc i've been GRINDING for this exam (two, actually). have an old pic, an old video of me and my bf enjoying some crunchy leaves and this complete map of data warehouses.

next week i am BOOKED, every day there's something happening but it's gonna be alright.

to-dos list:

#operating systems

◩ complete ES8 map

#databases

▨ study DBMS

#personal

▢ vacuum clean my room

▢ sleep early

[sauce-central]

haysalto on Instagram

Credit if used!

[stone-cold-groove]

Image detail from the IBM System/360 sales brochure - 1964.

[zephiris]

Being autistic feels like having to emulate brain hardware that most other people have. Being allistic is like having a social chip in the brain that handles converting thoughts into social communication and vice versa while being autistic is like using the CPU to essentially emulate what that social chip does in allistic people.

Skip this paragraph if you know about video codec hardware on GPUs. Similarly, some computers have hardware chips specifically meant for encoding and decoding specific video formats like H.264 (usually located in the GPU), while other computers might not have those chips built in meaning that encoding and decoding videos must be done “by hand” on the CPU. That means it usually takes longer but is also usually more configurable, meaning that the output quality of the CPU method can sometimes surpass the hardware chip’s output quality depending on the settings set for the CPU encoding.

In conclusion, video codec encoding and decoding for computers is to social encoding and decoding for autistic/allistic people.

[wikipediapictures]

Quantum computing

[wh4tth3fr3shfvck]

recents

[404icy]

my summer vacation have been so busy…

some of the things i have been up to: i started a ux/ui bootcamp, moved to my first apartment, started driving lessons and i’m currently focusing on front-end development.

a gentle reminder:

it’s only delusional until it’s done.

[withercat22]

A friend and me had a conversation, which led to us wanting to confirm what we were thinking. Our "hypothesis" (very informal one xd) is that there's a correlation between people who study languages, and those who are learning programming. As such, here's the poll:

Please, reblog for a larger sample size!

[victusinveritas]

Engineer Karen Leadlay working on the analog computers in the space division of General Dynamics, 1964.

[anonymousdormhacks]

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself forced to learn MATLAB

[restless-mode]

8/1

omg already more than a week since 2025 has started has gone by! been studying a lot for this exam that i HOPE sososo much to pass, would be huge

(wait for my "a week in my books" post in the next few days)

to-do list:

#operating systems ◩ just too much, literally ▨ messages w/ threads ▢ general repass of 3 chapters at least

[sauce-central]

ofthisworlddesigns on Instagram

Credit if used!

[stone-cold-groove]

Rhonda tweaking the dials on an IBM System/360 - 1966.