Tag: walkaway

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Favorited Headless Everything For Personal AI by Matt Webb

I see this being adopted around me too. Not just CLI’s though, also more APIs, pulling in data sources from elsewhere. And most interestingly: I see adoption by people who did not program or treat their computer as their personal toolbox they can adapt before. Until generative AI lowered their barrier to entry. Going from 0 to using the command line (which coincidentally is what it was until 30 years ago anyway). Even without AI, CLI tools, like Automator on Mac did before, allow the creation of workflows around a piece of software. Matt mentions the Obsidian CLI, and I’ve been using that to manipulate Tasks in Obsidian without going to the Obsidian UI. For about a decade I’ve treated application UIs as just views on my data, with functionality geared towards the viewing, and interfaces as different queries on that data. Going headless means removing the viewer, and using the output of queries directly programmatically. Combined with how I see the arch of generative AI bending significantly towards deterministic code, I look forward to the type of things people come up with. Not their tools, but what they come up with. Because the path to scale of these things imo is not adopting or buying what someone else made, but adopting what someone else came up with conceptually and creating your own local version. Like we do socially too, contagion spreading through effective behaviour, and culturally, the contextual and local sum of all time greatest hits of our group behaviour. The invisible hand of networks rather than markets. It would be highly ironic if unethical corporate extractive AI not only creates the incentive but also actually paves the way for the masses to Walkaway.

It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. […] ideally your computer. That way they can see the docs that you can see, and use the tools that you can use, and so what they want is not APIs (which connect webservers) but little apps they can use directly. CLI tools are the perfect little apps.

Matt Webb

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Protesters in Belarus are pulling of the masks of police men, because then these will think twice before being seen to use violence on protestors. Behind that is an effort to then ferret out their names and personal details. There is a fine line here to tread between exposing policemen to stop the dehumanisation of protestors that masks allow them to do, and that escalating into vigilante violence. However it does remind me of a tactic described in Cory Doctorow‘s novel Walkaway, where doxxing policemen is used to then create videos with their family members sympathetic to the cause asking them to stop the violence. It’s one thing to beat up someone anonymously while masked, it’s another having your mother, brother, aunt or grandfather berate you for it in public media.

“The only way to stop violence is to pull off the masks, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. An officer who is no longer anonymous will think twice before he grabs, beats or kidnaps someone,” said the founder of Black Book of Belarus, a channel on the app Telegram devoted to “de-anonymising” police officers, with more than 100,000 subscribers.

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Some links I thought worth reading the past few days

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In a case of synchronicity I’ve read Cory Doctorow’s novel Walkaway when I was ill recently, just as Bryan Alexander scheduled it for his near future science fiction reading group. I loved reading the book, and in contrast to some other works of Doctorow the storyline kept working for me until the end.

Bryan amazingly has managed to get Doctorow to participate in a webcast as part of the Future Trends in learning series Bryan hosts. The session is planned for May 16th, and I marked my calendar for it.

In the comments Vanessa Vaile shares two worthwile links. One is an interesting recording from May last year at the New York public library in which Doctorow and Edward Snowden discuss some of the elements and underlying topics and dynamics of the Walkaway novel.

The other is a review in TOR.com, that resonates a lot with me. The reviewer writes how, in contrast with lots of other science fiction that takes one large idea or large change and extrapolates on that, Doctorow takes a number of smaller ideas and smaller changes, and then works out how those might interplay and weave new complexities, where the impact on “manufacturing, politics, the economy, wealth disparity, diversity, privilege, partying, music, sex, beer, drugs, information security, tech bubbles, law, and law enforcement” is all presented in one go.

It seems futuristic, until you realize that all of these things exist today.
….. most of it could start right now, if it’s the world we choose to create.

By not having any one idea jump too far from reality, Walkaway demonstrates how close we are, right now, to enormous promise and imminent peril.

That is precisely the effect reading Walkaway had on me, leading me to think how I could contribute to bringing some of the described effects about. And how some of those things I was/am already trying to create as part of my own work flow and information processes.