Bad Bunny, Chomsky, Routers

Last night we went to see Bad Bunny at the Barclays Center.

Tickets were mad expensive and sold out immediately, but there were still empty spots in the stands.

I always wonder if the empty seats are parents who couldn’t find a sitter or resellers who couldn’t find a buyer.

Noam Chomsky and ChatGPT

I’m currently reading The Cultural Logic of Computation – David Golumbia.

It’s been a ride! It was written in 2009 (and he’s passed away since, sadly) but his writings feels super relevant to this current moment in tech and culture.

What first struck me: How some of the pro-AI arguments we see today are just rehashing arguments that have been around since the 60s.

A lot of the discourse (read: marketing) around generative AI has been – because these systems can mimic humans across a variety of writing tasks, on some level they understand the concepts they’re talking about. An LLM that outputs code must know how to code, on some level.

I’ve always felt these arguments to be unconvincing, but Golumbia lays out the history of this argument (and why it’s BS) really well.

Noam Chomsky makes a cameo in the book too, which is interesting.

Routers and routing and maps

I was talking to my friend, an infra engineer, about the cloud and how so much of the computing power on the internet is confined to a few large companies. This is an unacceptable amount of concentration – not only because of potential oligopoly effects but because there shouldn’t be centralized control over such a fundamental infrastructure.

Yesterday I came across The Opte Project, which creates a literal map of the internet’s connections using BGP and Bird.

BGP is a protocol which allows internet routers to discover other routers it can peer with. BIRD lets you recursively map out all these peers and peers-of-peers. Using these tools annd some clever data visualization, the project founder made a map of the internet via routers.

What first struck me: This is a mapping of CONNECTIONS, but not of power. What systems are connected to each point? What resources are available to it? Who owns these resources? Who governs them?

I expect this map makes the internet look more decentralized than it is – because 1M connections can be managed by 1 entity (be it a corporation, government, etc).

But this is only a hunch - time to do more research…