Tootfinder

The security industry is somewhat unique. It's probably the only industry created by the worker as a threat. If you talk to hackers who were in the scene before Operation Sundevil, you'll realize that it's always been a Bullshit Job.
Folks in L0ft and cDc were hacking companies and basically blackmailing them into paying for their services. Operation Sundevil "straightened up" the industry. Some people went to prison, some people build security services companies. Pretty much anyone who actually believed in the manifesto was locked up or edged out.
Using the Graeber framework here, hackers are partially duct tapers and partially goons. The critical thing here is that the industry was basically created to give money to people who would otherwise destroy the system.
Neuroatypical folks have always been forced to the margins of society, but computers gave us a super power. Now we were extremely dangerous. Tech, especially hackers, have always been paid a lot to minimize the risk of developing a class consciousness.
Graeber talked about this. Kings and nobles would often find some job or title that they could bestow on potential enemies in order to keep them close, to defang them. What better role than sheriff, a type of goon, for a rebel?
We turned it in to a whole thing. Not only did hackers make their own industry and force everyone else to accept it, we even created a whole parallel box ticker industry of "compliance" as a side effect.
The Hacker's Manifesto was decontectualized and made a fun artifact of the past. We were sold a story of "good hackers" who "protected grandma from the bad hackers." But the whole industry always existed to keep us on a leash. The funny thing is that it was a leash that we made ourselves.
But now we're seeing massive layoffs in tech, even in security. Now that we're this far in, everyone has forgotten the history. Leadership doesn't understand what security people do, so they think that LLMs can replace us. But the people in the industry now, the ones who came to it as a career, don't understand the history.
There was always a split for these weird outsiders, these people who couldn't fit in to the system but now had power over it. Some wanted in and they were willing to use extortion to get in, and others wanted to destroy the system to set everyone free.
Operation Sundevil, and the industry that evolved out of it, existed to neutralize those revolutionary elements by offering extortionists a safe entry. Extortionists trusted the capitalists to not stab them in the back the same way capitalists have stabbed everyone in the back through all of history. Now my LinkedIn feed is full of Meta layoffs, and I wonder if that class consciousness is starting to click for anyone yet.

MX Linux seems to be a very polished product in the sense that a lot of work has clearly gone into it - and into trying to make it pretty friendly. At least compared to how things used to be. On the other hand it also very much feels like late 90s Linux where everything is cobbled together from all kinds of bits and things are named after application names rather than features. It is kind of fun to have to figure things out this way. Mint/Fedora etc. are so polished these days, you rarely ha…

Put your name on your work and find like-minded people to share credit with. It is now on you to build not your brand, but the demonstration that you know what's going on.
It is going to be very hard to get a job by printing a list of skills at the top of your resume and hoping to get noticed. It already was and now it's worse than ever.
Be a person on the internet and by that I mean do not hide your person-hood. Your curiosity, your learning, your willingness to consider angles. Professional polish is something the clankers do better than us, because they are trained on all of us doing it.
If not putting your name on your learning, put a stable pseudonym out there. Be known by the work you do and even the mistakes you make and reconsider. Showing that your knowledge has _depth_ is now one of the most important things. We can all vibe up to a basic understanding. It's the people who can see where they went wrong, and course-correct that really are going to carry the day.
You no longer get to be perfect and only show what's finished and polished. And you're gonna have to show your work.

The whole #LLM ROI thing reveals something interesting. It's basically impossible to figure out the ROI of an LLM. That makes it impossible for bean counters to make a comparison between human work and LLM work, or human work without an LLM and LLM-assisted work, to determine if the incredibly high price is worth it. But it's also impossible because you can't measure the ROI of a human, especially for skilled labor.
You can't measure the ROI of a human, because managers have no idea what people do. There's an eternally expanding amount of work designed to address this problem. But no matter how closely people are surveilled, interrogated, analyzed, there's never any real answer.
I've talked in the past about in relation to medical care. One of the dirty secrets of hospitals is that they have no way to figure out how much individual treatment costs. It's easy to understand at scale. You can know exactly how much something costs society. You can even identify patterns, using public health models, and decrease costs for society by trying to get people to avoid risky behavior (stop smoking, use protection during sex, etc). But it is absolutely not possible, at all, in any way, to figure out how much a single visit costs. This is similar to the problem of predicting climate change vs predicting the weather tomorrow in Amsterdam at 15:00. One is possible, the other is simply not.
But what is becoming painfully clear now is that this is true *everywhere*. It's trivial to know how much an industry costs. It's possible to figure out it's ROI for society. It is not possible to figure out how much value any individual worker provides. LLM ROI and cost comparison is an instance of this larger problem.
This is a problem for capitalism because it shows that the fundamental assumptions behind capitalism, that product value and labor value are quantifiable, that people can actually make comparisons between competing products, etc, are completely bullshit. The capitalist apologetics that makes up so much of economics, the lies that are told that hold this system together, are crumbling before our eyes.
If you make a lot of money, it's because you've been lucky. You have the right social networks, you have become good at convincing people to give you money. There is absolutely no way to connect that to actually providing value to society. If you make a lot of money, internalize that. Understand that you are not special, and things can change. If you don't make a lot of money, it's not because you don't provide value. Don't forget that. The system is a lie built to destroy you. Don't let it.
The ideology is sick, something something time of monsters and all that, we are together in this dying machine. We need to understand the lies. Your value can never be quantified. The way we have always figured out how to do the right thing for each other is through each other. Social connection has always guided us. But now the most socially disconnected people on the planet have hijacked the system. They direct the resources of the world, and game the system to avoid personal responsibility.
We have to build a system where everyone is accountable. We can't use abstract numbers and lies to figure things out for us. We have to build systems around people and accountability. There is no other solution.

"Some of them make AI babes they monetize via OnlyFans competitors. Some are into crypto. Others do real estate. Some do clipping. Some do AI slop. Some do drop shipping. The thing they all have in common is that they all have an online course to sell you, telling you exactly how they got rich and how you can too. Subscribe for $30 a month and you’ll gain access to their Whop course […], their Discord community, and, critically, all their secrets."

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@wwahammy/116695372319811855
This!! I am yelling this too!!
And it’s yet another one of the things where now when I yell it, I have to specify that it’s something I’ve been telling students and companies alike since long before the release of GPT, because otherwise people assume it’s just a reaction to gen AI:
“Generating code is by •far• the easiest part of programming.”
“No matter the source, don’t let code into your project unless you understand what it does.”
“Programming languages exist for humans to communicate with other humans. Code does not just make machines go; it encodes and reifies human mental models. Good code communicates •intent•; very bad code has no coherent intent at all.”
and so on

Now, I have a lot of reasons to hate vibe coding, but one of them is that I just think more easily in code. I reason by writing the code. It's not something I can easily disentangle.
Architectures tend to live in my head as pictures that change as I write. The words are code. There's no intermediate. So the offer of being able to skip the poc phase is just not interesting. "Oh, cool, I can skip the part where I preemptively identify problems? Great. That's gonna work out well." Vibe coding can give you working proof of concepts that self destruct when you try to grow them (much like any poc code you just try to use without actually engineering).
I don't know that this problem will ever get fixed. Even if it does, I don't know that this fix will ever rival human engineering. I don't think it's actually possible to know that yet, there are too many factors at play. It's definitely lowered the bar for writing proof of concepts. Now a business idiot can make a proof of concept, which even further distorts their understanding of what engineering actually looks like.
In order to go back to work, I'm basically expected to be ramped up on LLM stuff. But it all keeps reminding me of the feeling of powerlessness when we organized against Trump, when we organized against the rally at UW, when I tried to stop someone from pepperspraying people and I got shot. It's all the same ideology of rapists and pedophiles forcing their entire world on us against our will, thinking they can dangle "the Epstein files" in front of everyone and then yank them away like nothing ever happened... Like no one knows they implicate the entire power structure.

Kid1 plays on two sportsball teams, one that's full of kids who are really into it, are all pretty good, and know all the ins and outs of the game and the other where half the kids have no idea of even the most basic rules. The second team is generally more fun, even if it's also way more frustrating.

I read Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger", mostly by the pool or the beach while on holiday last week.
It isn't really about her being confused with Naomi Wolf, except on a surface level. Or even really about Wolf moving from left feminism towards right wing conspiracy theory.
Really it's about how political culture has changed as the world has moved more online and suffered the consequences of a pandemic and the often wrongheaded political responses to that.
Conspiracy thinking and a whole culture concentrating on reticence and reactionary thinking instead of evidence and logic.
While reading it I was hanging out with some folks who are much more right wing than I generally do. Here's some things they said:
I don't believe in Sunscreen. Isn't it funny how skin cancer rates have gone up as sunscreen becomes more popular.
I don't believe in COVID.
Carbon Warming models don't even take into account the sun.
I thought Chemtrails were a conspiracy theory, but came to believe it.
Claiming to believe in freedom while also wanting a crack-down on asylum-seekers, thinking they are destroying society.
So it's easy to believe Klein's basic thesis here, the worry that reactionary conspiracy thinking is breaking the entire body politic.
I don't think it's that people have lost all rationality. It's that people are wearing their conspiracy theories as badges, identifying them as a member of a group. Like religious beliefs that bind a group, the more stupid and outrageous they are the more those badges work to identify the ingroup from the outgroup.
The worry is always when they decide the outgroup need punishing for not taking on those conspiracy beliefs and turn to suppression and violence.
#reading #books #worldPol