Lunch & Liberty 11/29
We had a great time hosting this week’s Lunch & Liberty on X Spaces, where we discussed uncancellable infrastructure with our awesome guest Aron Wagner, of American Cloud. If you missed it live, you can LISTEN to it here (skip to 4m 20s where we fixed audio issue):
We also announced our 📖book giveaway📖: Tell your friends that if they sign up for the Daring Bits newsletter, they will be entered for a chance to win a signed copy of Between the Lies by Luke Tatum.
Daring Bits
Jan. 6 Investigation Investigated You 🫵 - If you ever interacted with Trump’s tweets, congratulations: Special counsel Jack Smith had a comprehensive search warrant with your name on it. X initially refused to comply with the investigation, but lost in court.
Apple Embraces Industry-Standard Messaging - Apple has abruptly reversed course on RCS, with a commitment to support the SMS/MMS replacement tech in future products - and there you have it: industry standards without government coercion.
You Want My Password or a Dead Patient? - A draft study finds that healthcare IT is badly misaligned with clinical workflows, resulting in costly, and often risky, workarounds. While the study underscores the importance of product context in developing IT solutions, we also have to wonder about the role of the healthcare industry’s regulatory burden in this situation.
Knocking my neighbor’s kid’s cruddy drone offline - Michael Robinson is fighting drone surveillance with nerd superpowers - starting with his creepy neighbor kid’s snooping drone.
Robot Overlords
Robots Have Too Many Ideas - The way AI makes decisions is pretty mysterious, maybe even a little scary. Part of the reason is that AI ‘neurons’ juggle multiple ideas at once (polysemanticity). Now, researchers have developed a method to simulate these ‘neurons’ in a way that each represents only a single idea (monosemanticy). This is a breakthrough that could enhance AI transparency and safety, though the scalability of this approach remains in question.
OpenChat Rivals ChatGPT, Taunts Grok - Hugging Face’s new open source LLM, OpenChat, rivals ChatGPT on various benchmarks, and helpfully suggests that Elon Musk consider open sourcing his nascent chatbot Grok, whose performance is inferior despite its 33B parameters compared to OpenChat’s 7B.
Liberty Toolbox
ISPmail - “ISPmail is a free but extensive do-it-yourself guide to help you build a fully-functional mail server from 100% open-source components.”
