The Gopher Times
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Opus 6 - Gopher news and more - Oct. 2022
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Sentient Regex tgtimes
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Can there be a sed one-liner that implements Artifi-
cial Intelligence? Depending on how you define Arti-
ficial Intelligence, it may!
sed -r 's/Is ([^y]*)?/Absolutely, (1)./
s/Is (.*y.*)?/I do not think that (1)./'
How does it work for you? How more accurate than this
is machine learning going to become to answer our ex-
istential questions?
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order katolaz
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If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have probably noticed that, especially on
gopher, the lines of a text file tend to be wrapped
all to a similar length. Some authors are very strict
on the matter, and like all the lines to be "justi-
fied" (i.e., all adjusted to have exactly the same
length, by inserting a few spaces to get the count
right). Some other authors (including myself) just do
not allow any line to be longer than a certain amount
of characters (in this case, as you might have no-
ticed, the magic number is 72). But how to they manage
to do that?
Most common editors have a command to format a para-
graph ('M-q' in Emacs, 'gwip' or '{gq}' in vim normal
mode, etc.). But obviously, there are several Unix
tools that can help you getting the right formatting
for your files. We are talking of fold(1), fmt(1), and
par(1), so keep reading if you want to know more.
The oldest one is probably fold(1) (and it is also the
only one to be defined in the POSIX standard...). It
will just break each line to make it fit a given
length in characters (by default, 72, which is indeed
a magic number). Let's see how to wrap the lines of
this post at 54 characters:
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$ fold -w 54 20190213_fold.txt | head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog po
sts), you have
probably noticed that, especially on gopher, the lines
of a text file
tend to be wrapped all to a similar length. Some autho
rs are very strict
on the matter, and like all the lines to be "justified
$
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Notice that fold(1) did not really think twice before
breaking "posts" or "authors" across two lines. This
is pretty inconvenient, to say the least. You can ac-
tually force fold(1) to break stuff at blank spaces,
using the '-s' option:
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$ fold -w 54 -s 20190213_fold.txt |head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have
probably noticed that, especially on gopher, the
lines of a text file
tend to be wrapped all to a similar length. Some
authors are very strict
on the matter, and like all the lines to be
$
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Nevertheless, the output of fold(1) is still quite
off: it breaks lines at spaces, but it does not "join"
broken lines to have a more consistent formatting.
This is where fmt(1) jumps in:
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$ fmt -w 54 20190213_fold.txt |head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have probably noticed that, especially on
gopher, the lines of a text file tend to be wrapped
all to a similar length. Some authors are very strict
on the matter, and like all the lines to be
"justified" (i.e., all adjusted to have exactly the
same length, by inserting a few spaces to get the
$
____________________________________________________________
Now we are talking: fmt(1) seems to be able to to "the
right thing" without much effort, and it has a few
other interesting options as well. Just have a look
at the manpage. Simple and clear.
Last but not least, par(1) can do whatever fmt(1) and
fold(1) can do, plus much, much more. For instance:
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$ par 54 < 20190213_fold.txt | head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have probably noticed that, especially on
gopher, the lines of a text file tend to be wrapped
all to a similar length. Some authors are very
strict on the matter, and like all the lines to be
"justified" (i.e., all adjusted to have exactly the
same length, by inserting a few spaces to get the
$
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will give more or less the same output as fmt(1). But:
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$ par 54j < 20190213_fold.txt | head -10
fold, fmt, par: get your text in order
============================================
If you happen to read plain text files (e.g., phlog
posts), you have probably noticed that, especially on
gopher, the lines of a text file tend to be wrapped
all to a similar length. Some authors are very
strict on the matter, and like all the lines to be
"justified" (i.e., all adjusted to have exactly the
same length, by inserting a few spaces to get the
$
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will additionally "justify" your lines to the pre-
scribed width, while: something like:
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$ head file.h
*
* include/linux/memory.h - generic memory definition
*
* This is mainly for topological representation. We define the
* basic "struct memory_block" here, which can be embedded in per-arch
* definitions or NUMA information.
*
* Basic handling of the devices is done in drivers/base/memory.c
* and system devices are handled in drivers/base/sys.c.
*
$
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can be easily transformed into:
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$ par 40j < file.h
*
* include/linux/memory.h - generic
*memory definition
*
* This is mainly for topological
* representation. We define the basic
* "struct memory_block" here, which can
* be embedded in per-arch definitions
* or NUMA information.
*
* Basic handling of the devices is
* done in drivers/base/memory.c and
* system devices are handled in
* drivers/base/sys.c.
*
* Memory block are exported via
* sysfs in the class/memory/devices/
* directory.
*
*
$
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Pretty neat, right?
To be honest, par is not the typical example of a unix
tool that "does exactly one thing", but it certainly
"does it very well" all the things it does. The author
of par(1) felt the need to apologise in the manpage
about the style of his code and documentation, but I
still think par(1) is an awesome tool nevertheless.
fold(1) appeared in BSD1 (1978-1979)
fmt(1) appeared in BSD1 (1978-1979)
par(1) was developed by Adam Costello in 1993, as a
replacement for fmt(1).
GNU tar(1) extraction is quadratic tgtimes
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When implementing something from the ground, it gets
possible to build-up a simple home-baked file format
or protocol looking perfect without any cruft and
legacy. Easy to implement, fast to adopt, supporting
everything you need from it, and not much more...
Likely an alternative to a huge elephant in the room:
the current standard in place used by everyone, huge,
with many extensions with many use-cases...
Why bother, then, with implementing the huge and dif-
ficult file format or protocol? Maybe because it
would be used by many software, and writing data in
this slightly more bloated format would help making it
compatible with all the software that already support
it.
In this compromise, a limit can be drawn, across which
the big and bloated format or protocol is dropped in
favor of a simpler, more reasonable, less time-wasting
alternative, eventually home-brewed.
The result is a new tar implementation written for the
single special-case of a 1.1 TiB file! [1]
1 https://mort.coffee/home/tar/
BYTE Magazine Covers tgtimes
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The BYTE magazine lives among the legends of computer
magazines.
Being a paper glossy magazine, it had fancy covers.
Our usual data archivist heroes, Archive.org, have a
large collections of covers for these things. [1]
On another level of effort, someone with passion and
patience, actually went through recreatinhg the scene
coming from these covers, that never really existed...
Until they did! [2]
>> In the 1970s and 1980s, Byte magazine featured cov-
ers with beautiful, surreal paintings by Robert F.
Tinney. What if the scenes that Mr. Tinney imagined
actually existed in real life? And what if, as Mr.
Tinney was painting them, there was a photographer
standing next to him, capturing the scene on film?
>> That's the idea behind this site. I created and
photographed real-world objects and composited the
images together in order to show what Mr. Tinney's
images might look like in real life.
1 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine
2 https://bytecovers.com/
An experiment to test GitHub Copilot's legality seirdy
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>> This article was posted on 2022-07-01 by Rohan Ku-
mar [1] and is now republished on this newspaper,
with permission (CC-BY-SA 4.0).
Preface
I am not a lawyer. This post is satirical commentary
on:
o The absurdity of Microsoft and OpenAI's legal justi-
fication for GitHub Copilot.
o The oversimplifications people use to argue against
GitHub Copilot (I don't like it when people agree
with me for the wrong reasons).
o The relationship between capital and legal outcomes.
o How civil cases seem like sporting events where peo-
ple “win” or “lose”, rather than opportunities to
improve our understanding of law.
In the process, I intentionally misrepresent how the
judicial system works: I portray the system the way
people like to imagine it works. Please don't make
any important legal decisions based on anything I say.
The only section you should take seriously is “Con-
text: the relevant technologies”.
Introduction
GitHub is enabling copyleft violation at scale with
Copilot. GitHub Copilot encourages people to make
derivative works of source code without complying with
the original code's license. This facilitates the
creation of permissively-licensed or proprietary
derivatives of copyleft code.
Unfortunately, challenging Microsoft (GitHub's parent
company) in court is a bad idea: their legal budget
probably ensures their victory, and they likely al-
ready have a comprehensive defense planned. How can
we determine Copilot's legality on a level playing
field? We can create legal precedent that they haven't
had a chance to study yet!
A chat with Matt Campbell about a speech synthesizer
gave me a horrible idea. I think I know a way to find
out if GitHub Copilot is legal: we could use its legal
justification against another software project with a
smaller legal budget. Specifically, against a speech
synthesizer. The outcome of our actions could set a
legal precedent to determine the legality of Copilot.
Context: the relevant technologies Let's cover the
technologies and actors at play before I start my evil
monologue.
Exhibit A: GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot is a predictive autocompletion service
for writing software. It's powered by OpenAI Codex,
[2] a language model based on GPT-3. [3] It was
trained using the source code of public repositories
hosted on GitHub, regardless of their licensing. In
response to a Request for Comments from the US Patent
and Trademark Office, OpenAI claimed that “Artificial
Intelligence Innovation”, such as code written by
GitHub Copilot, should be considered “fair use”. [4]
Many of the code snippets it suggests are exact copies
of source code from various GitHub repositories. For
an example, see this tweet: I don't want to say any-
thing but that's not the right license Mr Copilot.
[5] by Armin Ronacher [6] It contains a screen record-
ing of Copilot suggesting this Quake code. [7] When
prompted to do so, it obediently fills in a permissive
license. That permissive license violates the Quake
code's GPL-2.0 license. Copilot provides no indica-
tion that a license violation is taking place.
GitHub performed its own research into the matter.
[8] You can read about it on their blog: GitHub Copi-
lot research recitation, [9] by Albert Ziegler. [10]
I'm not convinced that it accounts for the fact that
suggested code might have mechanical alterations to
match surrounding text, while still remaining close
enough to trained data to be a license violation.
Exhibit B: The Eloquence speech synthesizer
I recently had a chat with Matt on IRC about screen
readers and different types of speech synthesizers. I
mentioned that while I do like some variety, I always
find myself returning to the underrated robotic voice
of eSpeak NG. [11] He shared some of my fondness, and
also shared his preference for a similar speech syn-
thesizer called Eloquence.
Downloads of Eloquence are easy to find (it's even in-
cluded with the JAWS screen reader), but I struggle to
find any “official” pages about the original Elo-
quence. Nuance acquired Eloquent Technology, the de-
veloper of Eloquence. Microsoft later acquired Nu-
ance.
Eloquence sample audio
Matt recorded this sample audio clip of Eloquence
reading some text. [12] The text is from the intro-
duction of Best practices for inclusive textual web-
sites. [13]
>> My primary focus is inclusive design. Specifi-
cally, I focus on supporting underrepresented ways to
read a page. Not all users load a page in a common
web-browser and navigate effortlessly with their eyes
and hands. Authors often neglect people who read
through accessibility tools, tiny viewports, machine
translators, “reading mode” implementations, the Tor
network, printouts, hostile networks, and uncommon
browsers, to name a few. I list more niches in the
conclusion. Compatibility with so many niches sounds
far more daunting than it really is: if you only se-
lectively override browser defaults and use plain-
old, semantic HTML (POSH), you've done half of the
work already.
I like the Eloquence speech synthesizer. It sounds
similar to the robotic yet predictable voice of my
beloved eSpeak NG, but with improved overall quality.
Unfortunately, Eloquence is proprietary.
Exhibit C: Deep learning speech synthesis
Deep learning speech synthesis [14] is a recent ap-
proach to speech synthesizer creation. It involves
training a deep neural network on voice samples, and
using the trained model to generate speech similar to
a real human voice. One synthesizer using deep learn-
ing speech synthesis is Mozilla's TTS. [15]
Zero-shot approaches could allow a pre-trained model
to generate multiple different voices. YourTTS [16]
is one such example. This could allow us to syntheti-
cally re-create a person's voice more easily.
My horrible plan
My horrible plan revolves around going through two
different lawsuits to set some judicial precedents;
these precedents could improve the odds of succeeding
in a lawsuit against Microsoft for Copilot's licensing
violations.
If this succeeds, we have new legal justification that
GitHub Copilot is illegal; if it fails, we have still
gained a means to legally re-create proprietary soft-
ware. It's a win-win situation.
Part One: set a precedent
1. Train a modern text-to-speech (TTS) engine using
the voice a proprietary one made by a company with a
small legal budget. Keep the model's internals hid-
den.
2. Then release the final TTS under a permissive li-
cense. Remember, we're still keeping the machine-
learning model hidden!
3. Wait for that company to file suit. [17]
4. Win or lose the case.
Part Two: use that precedent against Microsoft's Nu-
ance
Our goal here is to get the same legal outcome as the
low-stakes “trial run” of Part One.
Microsoft owns Nuance. Nuance previously bought Elo-
quent Technology, the developers of the Eloquence
speech synthesizer.
1. Repeat Part One against Nuance speech synthesizers,
including Eloquence. Go to court.
2. Have the ruling from Part One cited as legal prece-
dent.
3. Achieve the same outcome as Part One, demonstrating
that we have indeed set precedent that works against
Microsoft's legal department.
Implications of the outcomes
If we win both cases: Microsoft has the legal high
ground. Making a derivative of a copyrighted work us-
ing a machine-learning algorithm allows us to bypass
copyright licenses.
If we lose both cases: Microsoft does not have the le-
gal high ground. We have good judicial precedent
against Microsoft to use when filing suit for
Copilot's behavior.
Either way, it's an absolute win for free software.
Taking down Copilot protects copyleft from enabling
proprietary derivatives (and by extension, protects
software freedom). But if we accidentally win these
two low-stakes “test” cases, we still gain something
else: we can liberate huge swaths of proprietary soft-
ware, starting with speech synthesizers.
Update: on satire
This post isn't “satire through-and-through” like
something from The Onion. Rather, my intent was to
make some clear points, but extrapolate them to absur-
dity to highlight other problems. I don't think I was
clear enough when doing this. I'm sorry.
Copilot has been found to suggest significant amounts
of code that is dangerously similar to existing works.
It does this without disclosing obligations that come
with those works' licenses. Training a model on copy-
righted works may not be wrong in and of itself; how-
ever, using that model to generate new works that are
not sufficiently distinct from original works is where
things get problematic. Copilot's users could apply
proprietary licenses to the generated works, defeating
the point of copyleft.
When a tool almost exclusively encourages problematic
behavior, the makers of that tool should have put
thought into its implications. GitHub and OpenAI have
not demonstrated a sufficiently careful approach.
I don't think that “going after” a smaller player just
to manipulate our legal system is a good thing to do.
The fact that this idea seems plausible to some of my
readers shows how warped our perception of the judi-
cial system is. Even if it's accurate (I doubt it's
accurate, but I'm not certain), it's sad. Judicial
systems incentivise too much predatory behavior.
Corrections It's come to my attention that Eloquence
may or may not still belong to Nuance. Further re-
search is needed. Eloquent Technology was acquired
by SpeechWorks in 2000.
1 https://seirdy.one/posts/2022/07/01/experiment-copilot-legality/
gemini://seirdy.one/posts/2022/07/01/experiment-copilot-legality/index.gmi
2 https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3
4 See Comment Regarding Request for Comments on Intellectual Property Protection
for Artificial Intelligence Innovation submitted by OpenAI to the USPTO.
https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_RFC-84-FR-58141.pdf
5 https://nitter.net/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
6 https://lucumr.pocoo.org/about/
7 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/code/game/q_math.c
At line 552
8 I doubt anybody worth their salt would count on a company to hold itself
accountable, but at least they tried.
9 https://github.blog/2021-06-30-github-copilot-research-recitation/
10 https://github.com/wunderalbert
11 https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/
12 https://seirdy.one/a/eloquence.mp3
13 https://seirdy.one/posts/2020/11/23/website-best-practices/
14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_speech_synthesis
15 https://github.com/mozilla/TTS
16 https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2112.02418
17 If the stars align, you could file an anticipatory suit against the company.
It's common for declaratory judgement regarding intellectual property rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratory_judgment
Glenda adventure sirjofri
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>> Glenda found herself in a dark forest.
Do operating systems dream of electric bunnies? Noth-
ing is certain about that, but it does not prevent you
to try to imagine.
Sir Jofri offers us a piece of fiction built out of
the reality of the plan 9 operating system. [1]
Where should this go next?
A story first published on the 9front Mailing List.
1 http://sirjofri.de/oat/tmp/glenda_adventure.txt
Space Weather Woman tgtimes
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As she names herself, Tamitha Skov [1] is the Space
Weather Woman. You read it right! She have been do-
ing, since now close to ten years, forecasts about how
is space weather is going.
Just a nerd fantasy? Only a sci-fi artist on a peri-
odic one woman show? Not at all! Knowing what the
sun is blasting toward Earth can reveal more useful
than it looks. This includes:
o personnal safety for some plane flights at high lat-
titude.
o GPS communication, something happening in the pocket
of many individuals, some of them even unaware of
the involvement of satellites in the process.
o Long distance radio communication, which include Am-
ateur Radio operators, but also emergency services
and militaries.
o Something that Starlink did not invent [2] is
satellite-relayed communication, including satellite
internet and voice phone transmission. Actually a
lot of wind turbines are being given satellite in-
ternet, and see how a little disruption [3] in
satellite internet access can disrupt their opera-
tion.
And all of these fancy things are benefiting from Tam-
itha Skov's efforts as a researcher, but also by in-
forming in layman's terms what is going on outter
space.
>> Weather phenomena like coronal mass ejections, so-
lar flares, and solar particle events. [4]
Science is elegant.
1 https://www.spaceweatherwoman.com/
https://yewtu.be/c/TamithaSkov
2 WildBlue, Viasat, NordNet...
First amateur stellite launched in 1961.
3 https://hackaday.com/2022/06/02/the-great-euro-sat-hack-should-be-a-warning-to-us-all/
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamitha_Skov
A C64 4chan Browser tgtimes
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The sewers of Internet in a C64? The link appeared on
various IRC channels such as #electronics or #osdev,
and not one more word. The investigation is open.
[1]
1 <No_File> https://imgur.com/H36LTRV BACK 2 ROOTS!
I Hate Modern Technology ig0r
____________________________________________________________
>> The "advance of technology" is a source of excite-
ment as well as frustration. ig0r gives us a crys-
tallised view of human stupidity offered daily by
technology.
Modern technology sucks. This might be me behaving
like a pathetic little angsty hipster or trying to
LARP thinking I'm somehow cool, but I think it's a
genuine problem.
Planned Obsolesence
Technology is being designed to fail.
Apple purposefully makes batteries fail on their de-
vices and solders them in such that replacing the bat-
tery on an older device makes no sense, forcing the
customer to buy a new device.
Lenovo's quality has gone down the shitter. Thinkpads
used to be thick, bulky, and rugged such that a cave-
man could use it in place of a club. New models bend
and creak, the hinges breaking after several years of
use while older models still run like new.
The reality is companies want people to consume tech-
nology, not use it. They care about making a profit
rather than giving users a good experience, hence poor
quality of manufacturing to speed up distribution,
consumption, and the filling of landfills.
Modern Software
Modern software is just bad. Here's a few reasons
why...
o It's idiot proof, in that I have little control over
settings and configuration
o Software has become synonymous with adware (see Mi-
crosoft putting ads into explorer)
o I have to pay money for it (fuck you, if I could
copy-paste a car I would)
Smartphones
Smartphones are the most annoying little shits, and
for some reason they've become ubiquitous.
Restaurants are starting to ditch regular menus in fa-
vor of QR codes to be scanned with smartphones. Why?
Paper is more reliable. This is a step backwards in
my opinion. What if I don't have a data plan? What
if I don't carry a smartphone?
Also why does everything have to be an app? Why does
my passport have to be an app? I'm perfectly happy
carrying around paper ID (paper ID doesn't spy on my).
People are idiots
Most companies justify making technology suck more by
saying it's 'easier' and more 'convenient' for normal
people.
Stop making easy and more convenient. Nobody asked
for that. We were happy when technology was hard.
Better recording of the IRC Now events ircnow
____________________________________________________________
Here is a link with a better recording than the one in
the previous tgtimes opus [1]
As a teaser, here are some random contents from it:
o Independence from Silicon Valley
o Self-Governance with Free Software and Right to Code
o Live demo of OpenBSD system administration from the
ground up.
1 https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/ircnow-of-the-users-by-the-users-for-the-users/
MNT Pocket Reform OS support tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
All these laptop and portable devices come with either
Windows, Apple iOS or OSX, Android, sometimes Chrome
OS, and even more rarely Ubuntu installed upon.
But the open hardware commnity is rising, and calls
for a change. The MNT Pocket Reform lists more exotic
operating systems as officially supported, [1] or at
least acknoledged and listed in the front page:
o Debian GNU/Linux
o Support for other distributions: Arch, Ubuntu, Void
o Plan 9 (9front)
o Genode
o OpenBSD (in development)
Are we seeing a year of the open hardware laptop com-
ing?
1 https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-06-20-introducing-mnt-pocket-reform.html
Darknet Diaries tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
The mysterious Dark Net. While not an official insti-
tution, this hypotetical place built its very own
identity through popular culture and medias. Famous
and infamous, the depths of the limbos are explored in
the Darknet Diaries podcast, covering and reporting
the day-to-day events of that suspicious eden of sha-
dow. [1]
1 https://darknetdiaries.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_Diaries
The Modern Mechanical Turk tgtimes
____________________________________________________________
In 1770, long before the exploitation of electricity,
a machine was built in the pretention of being able to
play Chess. This machine named Mechanical Turk was
nothing more than a moving puppet actuated by a small
human, such as a child. A child who is good at chess,
that is!
Actuating levers, the operator would make the puppet
move, fooling the audience that technical advances oc-
casionally make use of black magic.
Amazon called a software platform Amazon Mechanical
Turk. [1] It offers management for harvesting food
for machine learning: human description of images,
videos, products, and other kind of canned thoughts
that machine learning can make use of to build models.
Uber for Cyber. Human translators shouting at ma-
chines the language they got whispered through their
life.
Ghostworker. Noun. 1. Worker performing activity that
will only be appreciated as data feeding an algo-
rhithm. 2. Worker with no access to who it provide
work to, both employer and client are invisible to
him. [2]
given the very large scale at which these data-
harvesting structures are deployed, it means that you,
web user, have experienced the Google and Cloudflare
"captcha" block window. That window preventing you to
submit a form unless you click on all buses, track-
tors, crosswalks, traffic lights... to verify that you
are indeed a human and not a bot trying to access the
website. Instead of prooving its belonging to the
mankind, at the opposite, the user is explaining to
machines what is a bus, a tracktor, a crosswalk, or a
traffic light.
Here is your Great Technological Singularity for the
greatest common entertainment: Nothing more than a
moving puppet, actuated by humans, barely even paid
for it, if paid at all... [3]
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
2 https://www.ghostwork.org/
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
Publishing in The Gopher Times you
____________________________________________________________
Want your article published? Want to announce some-
thing to the Gopher world?
Directly related to Gopher or not, reach us on IRC
with an article in any format, we will handle the
rest.
ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/
git://bitreich.org/tgtimes/
Did you notice the new layout? We now can jump be-
tween single and double column as it is more fit: Some
large code chunks will not fit in a two-column layout,
but text is more pleasant to read on two columns.