sarahjamielewis

sarahjamielewis, 8 days ago to random

After writing this note on Recall (https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/112482021770758791) a few weeks back, I've received many messages under the assumption that I don't understand how DRM / OS interaction works.

As if the integration of a broken, backwards technology into the core of our computing systems happened by accident.

"No, you see the OS doesn't get to see those bits of the screen, so it totally makes sense why the system scraps your financial documents and passwords but not netflix" - utterly unhinged worldview

sarahjamielewis, 9 days ago to random

For all the discussion of "prompt engineering" and "finetuning", I think the most interesting biasing structure for modern AI that has flown somewhat under the mainstream discussion is the ability to directly constrain the output space through e.g. grammars for llms and control nets for image generation.

It's weird to see people deploy the raw output of large scale generative statistical models when there are pretty powerful tools just sitting there that allow more finegrained application.

sarahjamielewis, 10 days ago to random

The thing about chat control / upload filters / client side scanning, whatever it's being called now; They are responses to an old generation of technology - one of an internet governed by centralized corporations.

Anonymous, peer to peer, file sharing exists. No centralized place to subvert - except the software running locally. Imperfect now, but intrinsically extant.

What proponents of these laws really want is to roll back the clock; something that is, fundamentally, not possible.

sarahjamielewis, 14 days ago to random

New Paper: On the application of Bloom Filter Hierarchies representing
Sub-word Token Bigram Occurrence to Probabilistic Full Text Search

This is a note regarding a prototype I've been working on for a few months in the domain of Decentralized Search (and Indexing)

It covers a data structure with interesting properties that I've been playing with, and documents some experiments regarding naive full text search performance.

Comments/questions/critique welcome.

PDF: https://sarahjamielewis.com/decentralization/search/ftsbloom.pdf

sarahjamielewis, 16 days ago to random

The more I think about search engines and compiling and weighting corpora, the more inclined I am to implement hard signal-filters i.e. assume all documents are spam to start with and only accept a document into the corpus if it can be shown to be unspam-like.

sarahjamielewis, 18 days ago to random

After not finding the graph software I really wanted I decided to take the jump and start writing my own.

Pretty happy with this initial mvp, can load graphs from a directory made up of linked md files, add new nodes, move them around, and add new edges.

Decided to get what I really wanted would mean writing the UI stack from scratch, so most of my initial effort has gone into getting some basic widgets together.

Next step is to get a feel for how I want to specify edge types, and editing.

A video of the graph editing/maintenance software. Initially 2 nodes are visible, connected by a single edge. Using a form at the bottom of the app, 2 new nodes are added. The gif then proceeds to demonstrate moving these nodes around, and creating new edges between the nodes.

sarahjamielewis, 19 days ago to random

While understanding that not everyone has the kind of freedom that permits control over the systems they use...if you do have such freedom I encourage you to take advantage of it.

The most powerful thing about free and open source software is the ability to take it apart, understand how a piece of it works, and adapt it for your own purposes.

Don't like how something works? Rip it out. Share the modified version with the world.

Your systems don't need to be subject to the whims of others.

simon, 20 days ago to random

I'm on a flight and the in-flight WiFi blocks all forms of video

Any ideas how it might be doing that, given HTTPS? My best guess is that it could be filtering out known CDN host names that serve video

sarahjamielewis, 20 days ago to random

Perhaps I have simply outgrown some kind of naive idealism, and perhaps some of it is the tendency to view the past through a more generous filter.

But wow is it hard to -find stuff- now. Even stuff I know exists. Hell, even stuff I know I wrote and put out there.

Lost in an ocean of empty words.

sarahjamielewis, 20 days ago to random

Getting to the root of it, I think the thing I miss the most about the old internet was the unstated assumption that the people on the other end of the wire were...people who shared similar interests and just wanted to connect.

I think of all the friends I made, the experiences I had that branched from IRC channels / forums / and even twitter in the later days.

Now the main question I find myself asking of anything that comes across my screen is "what is this trying to sell me?"

sarahjamielewis, 21 days ago to random

I spent large portions of my early career rearranging binary sequences on a chalkboard, and writing assembler for obscure architectures.

There are parts of my brain hard wired to recognize and align protocol stacks from a visual representation of a signal dump.

It's cute that you think you have to explain how computers work to me.

sarahjamielewis, 21 days ago to random

Software request: I'm looking for a tool I can use to manipulate nodes in a graph. Specifically I would like to be able to:

• Add new nodes to the graph (not a tree)
• Create multiple distinct edge relationships between nodes (bonus if the tool lets me formalize these edge types)
• Have nodes contain notes, perhaps be typed
• Export the graph to a reasonable (text) file format for external processing
• Explicitly not an image editor or diagram tool.
• Run on linux / be open source (flexible)

sarahjamielewis, 22 days ago to random

"Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers."

The computer, however, will stop you from recording DRM'd content.

Find it fascinating that when faced with drawing safety and security boundaries, the primary beneficiary is not the owner of the device, or the person using it, but random corporations who control the intellectual property rights.

The system doesn't work for you.