I haven’t quite given up yet, but it may very well happen at some point. Like the author, I’ve done everything you’re supposed to do, and a non-trivial percentage of emails from my domain still get rejected or go to spam. I’ve started sending from a gmail address when something really has to go through. I planned to make my own domain’s email address my permanent one, and it’s sad to think of that becoming impossible.

(to be clear, I’m facing a slightly easier problem than the author; my emails are being sent out from a bluehost email server, not a truly self-hosted one — and it’s still an absolute nightmare trying to keep emails going through.)

Many companies have been trying to disrupt email by making it proprietary. So far, they have failed. Email keeps being an open protocol. Hurray?

No hurray. Email is not distributed anymore. You just cannot create another first-class node of this network.

Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.

I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web+email server at home, paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first-class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much.

Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to a VPS. No luck. I quickly understood that self-hosting email was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I have been fighting back out of pure spite, obstinacy, and activism. In other words, because it was the right thing to do.

But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.

So, starting today, the MX records of my personal domain no longer point to the IP of my personal server. They now point to one of the Big Email Providers.

I lost. We lost. One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers.

https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2023/11/jim-denevan-self-similar/

Badly titled — it’s still extremely random, it’s just (very slightly) biased. Interesting, though!

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam recently made a surprising discovery that challenges long-held assumptions about the randomness of coin tossing. After flipping coins over 350,000 times, the largest study of its kind, they found that coins have a slight tendency to land on the same side they started on.

The data showed a small but statistically significant same-side bias of 51%, just slightly higher than the 50% predicted by chance. This subtle yet remarkable finding defies the conventional wisdom that coin flips represent a random and unpredictable 50/50 outcome.

Coins of 46 different currencies were flipped by hand and caught in the palms of 48 student participants to record the landing side. The data collection process required meticulous recording over many months, with flipping sessions videotaped to validate the results.

https://boingboing.net/2023/10/10/coin-toss-not-so-random-after-all-says-groundbreaking-study.html

Ultimately ‘AGI’ is a pretty contested term, such that there’s no simple answer to where the threshold is. But I agree with Arcas and Norvig (Norvig in particular is a very careful thinker who I have great respect for) that by many definitions we’ve crossed that threshold, albeit just barely.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) means many different things to different people, but the most important parts of it have already been achieved by the current generation of advanced AI large language models such as ChatGPT, Bard, LLaMA and Claude. These “frontier models” have many flaws: They hallucinate scholarly citations and court cases, perpetuate biases from their training data and make simple arithmetic mistakes. Fixing every flaw (including those often exhibited by humans) would involve building an artificial superintelligence, which is a whole other project.

Nevertheless, today’s frontier models perform competently even on novel tasks they were not trained for, crossing a threshold that previous generations of AI and supervised deep learning systems never managed. Decades from now, they will be recognized as the first true examples of AGI, just as the 1945 ENIAC is now recognized as the first true general-purpose electronic computer.

Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here

tl;dr:

Global warming, though not ocean acidification, is quickly and cheaply reversed by ejecting calcite nanoparticles (with an average radius in the ~90nm range) into the stratosphere, using a propeller-based system to prevent particle clumping. The particles should be carried up by hydrogen balloons, and very preferably released over the tropics. The total amount needed will be on the order of several hundred kilotons yearly, and the total cost should be somewhere between $1B and $5B yearly.

https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p/diy-geoengineering-the-whitepaper

I endorse this plan (with a minor caveat for liability, which I have to think more about).

The U.S. must immediately establish a detailed registry of giant AI experiments, maintained by a U.S. federal agency. This agency should also build awareness of the huge clusters of specialized hardware that are used in these experiments, and work with the manufacturers of that hardware to include safety and verification features at the chip level. The U.S. government should at minimum ensure that it has the capability to trigger a pause. It has become clear that corporations are not merely reluctant to hit the brakes — the brake pedal does not even exist.

If we are going to reap the revolutionary potential of AI, regulators must enforce standards to ensure safety and security during development. They must require that developers take on the burden of proof, and demonstrate that their new systems are safe before deployment — just like they do for new drugs, cars or airplanes. Lawmakers must take proactive steps to ensure that developers are legally liable for the harm their products cause.

These efforts cannot stop at home. The large-scale risks of AI affect everyone everywhere, and the upcoming UK summit is an opportunity to start the crucial task of addressing them at a global level in a way that transcends national borders and geopolitical rivalries. This kind of international cooperation is possible. We coordinated on cloning. We banned bioweapons. We signed treaties about nuclear weapons even at the height of the Cold War. We can work together on AI.

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4216774-six-months-later-our-call-to-slow-ai-development-is-more-crucial-than-ever/

The anecdote is fascinating. Not currently endorsing the essay as a whole.

(quoted in the essay, original source NYT)

During a visit to the United States in 1989 [Yeltsin] became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state‐run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life”…: “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”

He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.

https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day

This is very much a dispatch from the far reaches of the paranoid style in American politics. But even if you wouldn’t put the pieces together the same way that the author does (and I wouldn’t), the pieces themselves are fascinating and troubling. And I’m in full agreement that our recent approach to disinformation and the double-thinkish ‘malinformation’ is an alarming trend.

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”

[…]

The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. “The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, … by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that … If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access … I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time.”

The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.

Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation