Movie review: The Beekeeper

2024-08-31, post № 290

movie-review, #blockbuster, #technologieverdruss, #hakr

The Beekeeper [1] positions itself at the non-personal end of an emerging niche in blockbuster media tackling society’s struggles with the poorly understood repercussions mass-adopted digital technology without gatekeepers brings about.

Whereas over a quarter century ago, Hackers [2] celebrated a subculture in pursuit of freedom fighting against a rigid system of rules, without a doubt founded on the emergence of the Web and affordable Internet access evoking liberating visions of a digitally empowered society allowing the individual to flourish in its idiosyncrasy, twenty years later, when all shine of such musings seems to have been ground off, Hacked [3] depicts a deeply personal side of technology misuse and the perils bound up in its unquestioned glorification. Also personal, Inside [4] traps Nemo (played by Willem Dafoe) in an apathetic fight for relief in form of the sky whose ending leaves open if man has bested digital prison or vice versa.
The Beekeeper is insofar a novelty in popular media as it combines the non-glorifying, non-cliché omnium-gatherum of topics exemplified by the term hakr with the Free West’s struggle to uphold its rule of law faced with competent, multi-national adversaries empowered by p2p chatrooms.

Whilst a purist may turn up their nose at the visual and dramaturgical fluff which inseparably comes with a blockbuster, when keeping an open mind and seeing the story within a movie playing by the rules for being played to a non-vanishing audience, a polytheistic fable can be reclaimed in which an angered god descends onto a failing people which has lost their sense of righteousness, surgically removing the demon haunting it and disappearing. Seen from this angle, one isn’t confused by Adam Clay’s (played by Jason Statham) executive prowess nor his misaligned morals. As a non-human entity, the interpretation herein proclaims, unbound by classically freedom-preserving rule sets which appear to crumble in the globalized, digitalized world, Clay’s crassness can be viewed as a window to the horrors which await when the non-state organizations overpower.

Doomish as Civil War [5], but keeping itself to the more narrow topic of digital misuse aided through societal-wide ignorance, The Beekeeper does two things seldom seen together in popular cinema: a) questioning the efficacy of and ignoring the rule of law and b) tackling digital technology misuse without glorifying its technical side, focusing on the human misery.

REFERENCES.
  [1] "The Beekeeper" (German version). 2024.
  [2] "Hackers – Im Netz des FBI" (German version; English title: "Hackers"). 1995.
  [3] "Hacked – Kein Leben ist sicher" (German version; English title: "I.T."). 2016.
  [4] "Inside" (English version). 2023.
  [5] "Civil War" (German version). 2024.

Lower semicontinuity’s misremembrance

2024-08-03, post № 289

mathematics, #analysis, #alternate-definition, #gastropod, #symmetry

Snails are surprisingly fast: you look at them and they creep so slowly as to strain your attention. Yet you look away for an undefined moment and their progress in distance appears wholly bewildering. Then again, I would wager to outrun most snails in a 200-meter dash.

I think symmetry’s ubiquity is an equally fickle observation; you may only be able to bear whitness to it once you have already manifested it for yourself. Notably notationally; among the following lines

for a map from a topological space to the real line and a fixed point , precisely one is the definition of lower semicontinuity, the other but a figment of a symmetry-ravenous mind.

I knew for a long time about ’s questionability, but only two days ago I realized how separate a statement it is. Only the obvious implication holds with all three other conjunctions being possible: satisfied by on at , satisfied by on at and satisfied by on at .

Curiously, the infamous satisifies at every point, intuitively showing ’s inaptitude of representing an (even weakened) interpretation of continuity.

Book review: How to Do Nothing

2024-07-06, post № 288

book-review, #technologieverdruss

Cold War’s over, semiconductors have permeated the fabric of society, forests are afire. At times one may feel hard-pressed not to jettison it all in light of our impending doom.
Grasping for meaning in this maelstrom of angst, Jenny Odell documented her way out of the sharp-frozen state of mind 2016’s potus crowning entailed. Of undoubtable value as a contemporary anthropological artifact, its philosophical value or its idea’s practical viability is disenthraling.

-=-

How to Do Nothing [O19^[1]] is strongest in its first two-and-a-half chapters, their content comprising Jenny Odell’s talk of the same title which she herself regards as the true form [O24^[2]] of her expression what it means to do nothing.
Yet the very, “nothing”, isn’t to be understood as extremely as one may be lead to believe initially: layed out in many pages, it boils down to not accumulating evermore novel media-powered dependences. At face value an innocuous-seeming objective, Odell makes abundantly clear the myriad of obstacles she, and by extension the common man, faces in our media-saturated world. Never able to poke through the haze and attain true separation from a vague unease pronounced “media”, over two thousand years of human philosophy and art are essayed to discuss, with a prominent focus on nature and non-artifact art.

Where How to Do Nothing truly shines is in its quality as a diary, one human’s personal story: wittily written, it names art pieces Odell has created, witnessed or espied, it lets one cursorily plunge into growing up in the technologized Bay area and depicts how a love for nature and hiking blossoms through bird watching.

Yearning without attaining freedom, the tribulations of past human attempts at removing oneself from the larger society are of particular interest. Odell does well not to romanticize the communes of last century’s second half, recognizing the possibility of an innate self-destruction caused by an impossibility of stable small-scale societies, yet cannot hold that thought for long or gain any insight from it beyond how historically, few if any actively sabotaged a commune. In the same breath, however, she blindly regurgitates the all-too-commonplace stance that social media moguls are to be the villains of our time.
A similar observation has to be made with the way in which she treats her quotations: after a succint paragraph from an influential writer has introduced its often powerful impetus, only her recounting of their thoughts seems able to show depth and merit. Before too long, she wanders off in a shallow mindscape of hopes and sorrows before repeating the procedure once more.

Crashing GC in 57 bytes

2024-05-27, post № 287

programming, #lang:go, #internal-compiler-error

Terser than GCC’s C++ (cf. 235), Go’s standard implementation can be forced to doubt itself in a mere 57 bytes:

$ go version
go version go1.22.1 linux/amd64
$ printf 'package main;func main(){panic(0);x:=0;l:for{goto l};_=x}' >/tmp/ice.go
$ wc -c /tmp/ice.go
57 /tmp/ice.go
$ go run /tmp/ice.go
# command-line-arguments
CLOSURE [/tmp/ice.go:1:56:var x int]
<unknown line number>: internal compiler error: assertion failed

Please file a bug report including a short program that triggers the error.
https://go.dev/issue/new

Without having analyzed the compiler, black-box behavioural poking revealed that truly fickly a panic has to be followed with a variable declaration whose use entwines a label; else all one gets is an immediately-panicking or non-terminating executable:

package main

func main() {
	panic(0)

	x := 0

l:
	for {
		goto l
	}

	_ = x
}

At first, it irritates you, since⸺although you expect a plethora of compilation and test failures whilst developing⸺the error looks off. At closer inspection, a joyful rush grips you as you might be the first human being engaging in this specific dialogue with your compiler. So you stop everything else and golf away to extract an erroring nub. Whole swaths of code you rip out without a care for your program you once developed. The tiniest of changes⸺even ones which go in between equivalent source formulations⸺make the compiler snap out of its delusions, rendering it able to produce an executable. But you persevere, wanting the compiler to fail again and again at compiling a program without any use.

Cf. Go issue #67661

Schwund

2024-05-11, post № 286

politics, #diary, #elektronenhirnkritik

“Mir gelingen keine Lieder mehr, die ich mit wohl­ge­stimm­tem Saiten­klang begleite. Denn Lieder sind das Werk sorg­loser Phanta­sie. (...) Ich schreibe, und meine Au­gen werden be­taut von quel­len­den Tränen.” [N^[1], S. 158—171: XV: Sappho Phaoni]

Es fällt mir zunehmed schwer, einen frohen Gedanken zu fassen, wenn ich die Haustür verlasse: ein erschreckender Teil meiner gemeinhin als Mitmenschen Bezeichneten ist dahin über­ge­gangen, Spion in Auge und Ohr für Unbekanntes zu spielen: in Videochats zwingen sie, ohne meine Person zu beachten, mein Abbild in die diffusen Zwänge der Cloud, in ihren Spionage-getunten Auto­mobilen überfahren sie überlegen grinsend meine Persönlich­keits­rechte, Überwachungs­kameras werden weit auf den Bürger­steig geneigt und Tür­klingeln filmen auf die Straße, wo sie meine Privat­sphären­ansprüche als EU-Bürger im öffentlichen Raum zertreten.

Ich halte für eine besonders in den letzten Jahren grundlegend verschlafene Komponente die durch unsere Gesellschaft triefende Inkompetenz, aus der sich im Lichte der komplexen Folgen von Digital­technologie­nutzung schnell gefühlte Boshaftigkeit entwickelt: Anscheinend werden rechtlich oder moralisch vertretbare Winkel für Festmonturkameras nicht beachtet, Systeme wer­den in mangel­haft bis ungenügendem Zustand — erstellt von Individualvorteil-fröhnenden Ig­noranten ohne Gespür für Gesamtgesellschaftliches — ausgeliefert und in Betrieb genommen.
Cyber­security hat sich von einer geistig lohnenden Spiel­wiese diskreter Strukturen im Schnitt­gebiet zur Wirklich­keit zu einem eintönigen Er­nüchterungs­fest mensch­licher Ab­stumpfung ge­wandelt.

In diesem Sinne steht der Hoffnugsvollerer erdachten “friedlichen Koexistenz” [B24^[2]] gegenwärtig nicht bloß ein erschütternder Identitätsverlust entgegen sondern mithin eine kindliche Blindheit ihrer Unmöglichkeit [H80^[3]] der Implementation gegenüber.

Der dadurch resultierende, weitreichende Vertrauensverlust sollte auch nicht vernach­lässigt wer­den: falls sich nicht in vielen Köpfen eine Entprüdung bezüglich Datenverfügbarkeit breit macht — eine Gesellschaft ohne Geheimnisse der einzelnen Teilnehmenden ist zumindest im Grauen durch­aus denkbar — halte ich einen abrupten Kipppunkt, ab dem die kontinuierlich auftretenden, jedes Mal un­ver­zeih­lichen Sicherheits­patzer schlicht zu viel und un­trag­bar werden, für un­ab­wend­bar.

Ich gucke tatenlos zu, wie eine Welt, derer ich kein Bürger sein konnte und deren Schönheit mir bloß in aufgebauschten Erzählungen und brüchigen Artifakten vorliegt, unwiederbringbar in Trüm­mern versinkt.
Sollte es tatsächlich so sein, dass mir diese Gesellschaft einen Platz in ihr nicht verwehrt, so zeich­net sich fortschreitend klarer ab, dass ich das, was sie mir vorlegt, aus tiefem Ekel ablehne.

Dead nonmatter

2024-04-13, post № 285

poetry, #bits, #sonnet

Conceding to complexity

2024-03-16, post № 284

complexity, design, #language, #lang:c, #lang:go, #lang:haskell

In learning natural languages at higher levels paralleled with learning about their rich histories interconnecting peoples across millennia, I came to realise how shallow programming languages truly are: in some sense, everything is C or embedded into a world resting on it. Quite possibly such is not to be surprised by in view of the immense limitations an encased die cannot circumvent in our real world: computing is all done in structures borne by information state, discrete and conceptually restricted as they are.

Possibly in growing up, I grew dull to the glamour: isomorphic notation chit-chattering about same old, grand abstraction promises shattering at the coasts of implementability. What’s left after peeling off all rouge, all blush seems to me to be but one: complexity itself.
Unveiled it stares at me, neither grinning nor sighing: unconcerned with oh so many human sightings, never able to contain it, engineering failures galore.

I had an experience of late which shook me to the core when a linearily implemented base64 decoder of mine in Haskell lead to a complete program crash due to memory exhaustion (on a system boasting 16 GiB RAM plus swap), most likely due to exorbitant thunk creation. Coupled with awfully obtuse dependency and test management, I began feeling overburdened with the thought of writing in this lovely and expressive tongue I held dear for so long.
While beautiful five lines long, shapen into systems on which the outside world may press, complexity oozes out of every nook.

Appreciating the intrinsic nature of complexity, it evermore bothered me the last couple of months what I wrote in 250. a) Its claim is factually wrong: due to the subtleties involving the interplay of interface satisfaction depending only on a method’s name, removed from its provenance, yet non-exporting fully isolating a name, implementing package-bound sum types is supported in contemporary Go: sumtype.tar
b) Of even greater concern, however, is its subliminal stance valuing feature implementation as a meaningful action to overcome felt shortcomings. Here of particular relevance is the comment that recursive ADT definitions are not implementable without indirection (as infinite types exceed any finite bit representation), excerting conceptual pressure on the value classification (meaning non-pointer syntax in a recursive setting would have to either be forbidden or implemented differently to how it looks on the page). It is oh so easy to get blinded by supposed features that amount to little as rewritings, serving as distractions from the tiny specks of complexity one is seldom lucky enough to woolily make out.

Hitherto exactly one tool has been found to contain complexity: ruthless adherence to simplicity. One shouldn’t give it up in exchange for but shinier polish.

Nothing left.

2024-03-02, post № 283

politics, #software

Apparently⸺I am consciously out of the loop⸺, hot in academia nowadays is reacting to the societally desastrous questions raised about the indivdiual and their rights in the advent of profitable NLP; inventing some notion of anonimity. A tough sell when for years one perfected methods to reconstruct uniquely identifiable traits out of anything which wasn’t true noise.

At FOSDEM’24, A. Kergon^[1] claimed that telemetry would be necessary in the present day with free software (in the original MIT sense exempt of monetary obligations) extinct and open source fools running out of spending power. He postulated industry-accepted anonymisation practices may lead to a synthesis of keeping certain parts of the free software promise while alleviating the development burden for underfunded teams by supplying them with data about how to effectively allocate their resources.

When we have reached a point where open source is in its semantics being stretched wide enough to allow flat-out telemetry on the operating system level, I have to seriously ask: What is there left?

Free software existed for as long as it existed on the fringes: hardware support was for decades lagging five or ten years behind and has in modern times only been solved by including proprietary blobs directly into the kernel. Free software never interoperated well with the proprietary formats required to look into the fabric of reality, forever more banishing it to its fringes.
For years I have been silently lamenting the seemingly omnipresent and never-halting urge popular projects seem to feel to become lacklustre copies of profit-interestedly successful products: Gnome copies Cupertino, KDE copies Redmond. AppImage copies Remond in program distribution who copy Cupertino in software indexing which is copied by FlatHub, a joint venture of Gnome and KDE. Modern open source is barren of any invention, barren of any identity observable from within the product.
Interwoven with its identity is putting up with mediocre functionality kept alive by an intrinsically political, quenchless hope for a morally acceptable usage of computing.

And yet, with arguments to now cater to the usager incompétent (cf. 271, 265), demolishing this last pillar is entertained.

But who truly is this usager incompétent who installs open source? I claim they don’t exist: when Thunderbird, one of the larger projects which is available around both Redmond and Cupertino, proudly counts around eleven million users^[2] [3], I claim the principals I thought to fractionally share are being abandoned for a group comprised of no one.

Free software is dead. There is nothing left.