111–120 of 132 posts
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It seems EXTREMELY unlikely that Cray would be unable to meet performance requirements and promises. They've consistently done so for decades in all manner of government and private institutions.
HPE Cray are involved with Aurora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(supercomputer) As far as I understand it, the project saw substantial delays so far.
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> spineless cowards It's hard to be brave when you have to support a family, pay for a mortgage, pay for the kids' college, etc. I remember feeling queasy, almost 20 years ago, when I got hired for a very good salary to do helpdesk, and realized the customers I had to support included some Bad Actors: big mining, big arm manufacturing, even big spying... but I could finally afford to buy a small house, marry my partn…
> It's hard to be brave when By definition, the only time it's possible to be brave is when it's hard.
BASHIR: It's not your fault that things are the way they are. LEE: Everybody tells themselves that, and nothing ever changes.
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I dont know. My close relative works as infrastructure engineer at major automotive company, and about every 2 years they are buying new computation clusters (think tens to low hundreds thousands of cores, along with network and storage infra). Every time a public tender is held, and every time there are several companies promising to achieve required results with whatever hardware. Last decade I know of three differ…
But the world is moving away from mainframes and into commodity hardware, even without considering the "cloud" aspect. It's a dying business to be in, even if IBM excel in it.
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Ok, I'll say it. I am actively moving away from any type of serveillance device and software, where possible of course. Moved away from the data scraping OS made by windows to linux. De google, de apple, and spread the word. There may not be much we can do against the sheer amount of public surveillance we enjoy, a level that makes the STASI and KGB pale in comparison, other than voting voting and voting. Protesting…
So… how do you engage in commerce, use transportation, and connect to the internet?
This is how :-) I am not trying to live like a hermit locked in a forest. I do what is reasonable and learning more about how to do it even better.
I think it s impossible to hold off the oncoming onslaught of Big State powered by AI , but i think we are doing a very bad job of telling the public to prepare for it, starting with AI powered online manipulation
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“there are spineless cowards out there getting up every morning to go and build facial recognition software.” Almost any technology can be abused. There are a lot of good uses for facial recognition and also a lot of bad. I don’t think the people who develop technology are responsible of cowards for how it’s being used. That’s up to the big guys. If you want to work on stuff that’s for sure only used for “good” purpo…
This isn't a case of "we're making this for some noble purpose, but it might be abused". This is "we're making this so that we can use it for evil". Like the engineers at Palintir who were working on the whole predictive policing thing. There's no good that can come of that (I suppose the same could be true if you left out everything after "Palintir" in that sentence). The core motivation of developing the technology…
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I believe people should take care to add "men and women at" before talking about companies. Companies and corporations are abstractions. There are real people taking these actions. - "Men and women at IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it" - "Men and women would sell equipment for total surveillance and oppression" etc. The reason I think this is important is that there's act…
You are right. This was settled with the Nuremberg principles and code in the wake of the last world war. Group apologetics are cowardly and unacceptable. People of excellent character, some of them genuine leaders, step up and accept responsibility for the moral failures of organisations they head. Those "merely following orders" deserve no protection. We must stop blaming "the system", or "inevitable progress", or…
You're right about that, but unfortunately got the facts wrong. In reality most people that weren't high ranking officials were let go.
When will people learn that companies will almost always sell stuff as long as it’s legal and profitable. They have no morals. If we declined into a dictatorship they would sell equipment for total surveillance and oppression. If we don’t make it illegal to pollute they will pollute if they think it makes money.
I believe people should take care to add "men and women at" before talking about companies. Companies and corporations are abstractions. There are real people taking these actions. - "Men and women at IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it" - "Men and women would sell equipment for total surveillance and oppression" etc. The reason I think this is important is that there's act…
“Oh no they’re just people, let’s be nice”: ok if they’re just people then they can hear the responsibility and the blame. They did the wrong thing and deserve the shame that comes with that. If we’re expected to remember the humans in the org, then the humans don’t get to hide behind nebulous, faceless, corporate veils.
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Point taken, but an important point here is exactly that companies are abstractions, and they exhibit emergent behavior -- cases where the the company as a whole, responding to "its" incentives, "does" things that no individual at the company would necessarily do or even condone if it were all up to them.
At the end of the day, some engineer has to sit down and say "I'm going to make this evil thing because the boss is paying me to do it". That's a breach of ethics. That emergent behavior is enabled, at every step, by complacency.
Lots of those inside the company are convinced what they are doing is good.
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At the end of the day, some engineer has to sit down and say "I'm going to make this evil thing because the boss is paying me to do it". That's a breach of ethics. That emergent behavior is enabled, at every step, by complacency.
Groupthink. Lots of those inside the company are convinced what they are doing is good.