Ahmad Baracat

On Leaving Meta

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On Leaving Meta

Story Time
Workable alternatives 😅
References

Last Friday was my last day at Meta as a Software Engineer, and soon it will be my last day using Meta products (WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook). Read below for more context 😇.

You can find me here: https://barac.at/ and email me here: social <at> barac.at

Important note: I’m not trying to start a movement or engage in value signaling. I’m simply sharing why I believe it’s a good idea to boycott Meta products, both as an employee and a user.

Story Time

It took me some time to decide if leaving was the right choice, but it ultimately came down to a simple principle: by contributing to Meta, even in a small way, I’m supporting a company whose ethics I don’t align with. For instance, Meta has been known to silence people on its platforms [1] [2] and internally [3] when they voice opposition to its policies or unethical actions. Even though I was well-paid, enjoyed working with my team, had a great work-life balance, and I was working on Whatsapp for business (so far from the 💩), I still couldn’t shake the discomfort of being part of Meta.

Leaving the products I’ve grown accustomed to using is another important step in no longer supporting Meta. When I use WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook, I help the company make money by providing data about myself, my interests, and my connections. This data is then used to attract advertisers. And since I no longer wish to support the company, I believe it’s essential to stop using its products and switch to alternatives. Currently, I am taking gradual steps and documenting them here: On trying to escape the surveillance bubble

Workable alternatives 😅

WhatsApp –> Telegram (use Secret chats for E2E encryption) & Signal
WhatsApp for business –> Telegram business accounts
Instagram/Facebook stories –> Telegram Stories
Facebook groups –> Telegram groups

Signing out of the Meta-verse 😂.

(The GIF below is created by my manager and a colleague at Meta as a leaving gift 💝)

References

Negative Impact Minimization Framework :D

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Negative Impact Minimization Framework :D

Taking writing a rough draft a bit too far 😂. Scroll below for Chat-GPT making my notes into a more coherent structure.

Draft/Notes
Chat-GPT

Draft/Notes

We aren’t trying to perfect everything at the same time. One step at a time. Reducing harm is better than keeping it at the same level.

درء المفاسد أولى من جلب المصالح

Be more mindful of your actions

Where you spend money matters
Where/How you spend time matters
How you earn money matters

In all three above, you end up directly or indirectly supporting the value system of where your money goes, so a bit more mindful of your actions. They matter.

الغاية لا تبرر الوسيلة

Working for a company that has different value system
- you are providing value or making them bigger
Income/corporate tax
- going to countries or to things you don’t approve of
VAT tax
Council Tax

Chat-GPT

You’re refining your thoughts into a framework that emphasizes the importance of being mindful about financial and professional decisions, particularly in terms of their ethical implications. Here’s a more polished version of what you’re aiming to communicate:

Negative Impact Minimization Framework

This framework encourages incremental progress in reducing harm and making ethical decisions, especially regarding money and time. The goal isn’t to achieve perfection immediately but to take meaningful steps toward minimizing negative impacts.

Guiding Principle:

درء المفاسد أولى من جلب المصالح (“Averting harm takes precedence over seeking benefits”): This principle underlines the importance of reducing harm even before pursuing potential benefits. Being more mindful of where and how you allocate resources can significantly impact the world around you.

Core Concepts:

Where You Spend Money Matters: Every dollar spent is a vote of support for the values of the businesses and services you choose. Being selective about your spending can help align your financial actions with your ethical beliefs.
Where/How You Spend Time Matters: Your time, like your money, is a resource that supports the values of the activities and organizations you engage with. Choose wisely where you invest your time to ensure it aligns with your values.
How You Earn Money Matters: The way you earn a living has broader implications. If your work contributes to the success of an organization whose values differ from yours, you are indirectly supporting those values. Reflect on the alignment between your work and your ethics.

Ethical Considerations:

Working for a Company with Different Values: When your employer’s values conflict with your own, your work could be contributing to their growth and influence. It’s important to consider the long-term implications of this alignment.
Taxes and Ethical Choices:
- Income/Corporate Tax: Be mindful that taxes paid can support governments or initiatives that may not align with your values.
- VAT and Council Tax: Consider the ethical implications of where your taxes are directed and how they are used.

Philosophical Underpinning:

الغاية لا تبرر الوسيلة (The Ends Do Not Justify the Means): This principle reminds us that ethical conduct should be maintained at every step, regardless of the intended outcome. The means by which you achieve your goals should align with your values.

This framework highlights the significance of taking thoughtful, measured actions that gradually reduce harm and better align your financial and professional choices with your ethical beliefs.

Why Mastodon

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Why Move to Mastodon

Trying to escape the walled gardens 😂.

I am using masto.host to manage hosting Mastodon instance on my domain/subdomain.

Will add more details at a later time.

What to teach kids by the age of 13-16

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What to teach kids by the age of 13-16

Very rough draft

Praying
Fasting
memorize Quran
Know how to recite with a beautiful voice
Languages (native level for reading, writing and speaking): Arabic, English, Français and Japanese or Chinese
Sports: horse riding, Tennis, swimming, sprinting?
Music: piano and any other instrument
Social: get involved in whatever community they are part of
Engineering: coding and knowing how to build, assemble and disassemble stuff
Critical thinking through arguing and building a case for multiple view points
Know how to be alone without technology or devices and still have fun (without being awkward socially)
having Me time daily where they can do whatever they want
Responsibility (their actions have consequences and how to own them)
How to apologize productively and politely
How to handle their emotional roller coaster
Know how to do all house chores by themselves and helping out daily/weekly
Being productive (financially and the ability to produce valuable stuff for others)
Ability to be completely independent (financially, socially, emotionally) and be ready to start a family by age of 18-23

On trying to escape the surveillance bubble

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On trying to escape the surveillance bubble

The current situation in Palestine and how USA 🇺🇸 based social media are reacting to it (by silencing opposing voices, shadow banning, firing employees who raise concerns, etc.) is quite alarming 🚨. It got me to start doing concrete actions to cut as many ties with companies supporting the genocide (either directly or indirectly) while trying to escape the surveillance bubble (aka Surveillance Capitalism) while at it.

So far I did the following:

Cutting ties (i.e. boycotting)
- Amazon
- AXA
- Meta
- Google
Alternatives

Cutting ties (i.e. boycotting)

Amazon

Cutting ties with Amazon and here’s why

Cancel Amazon Prime subscription (I have been a prime member since 2017, heck I was a Software Engineer at Amazon Dynamic Ads and Amazon Alexa for more than 2 years)
Moved to using Ebay and Etsy

AXA

Cutting ties with AXA and here’s why

Cancel AXA company insurance
Moved to QBE

Google

Cutting ties with Google and here’s why

Cancel Google Youtube subscription
Cancel Google Workspace subscription (for my company) and move to Zoho (India 🇮🇳 based business)
Use Brave/Safari browser instead of Google Chrome on macOS and iOS
Use DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search
Use Fathom Analytics instead of Google Analytics

Alternatives

Based in Switzerland 🇨🇭
Has been recommended by my social circle as a great email provider if privacy is of a concern

Based in Switzerland 🇨🇭
Also recommended by my social circle

Based in India 🇮🇳
A good alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365

Business Insurance

I went with business insurance from QBE

More to come, hopefully 🤞🏼

(Request for Funding) A Business Experiment in Data Dignity

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

(Request for Funding) A Business Experiment in Data Dignity

Resources (TL;DR)
The problem
The product
Why focus on Data Dignity?
Why logo generation?
Who are the customers?
Differences from current offerings
Action Plan
Why bother?
Worst Case Outcomes
Best Case Outcomes
Differences from
Simple Business Model
- Ambiguities
- Assumptions

Resources (TL;DR)

Link to Pitch Deck

AI Grant 1.5 mins Pitch

The problem

AI-focused products/startups lack a business model aligning the incentives of both the company and the domain experts (Data Dignity)
With the current advancements in AI generated images from text, we are going to focus on logo generation from text as a testbed for a new business model

The product

Building Stability.ai DreamStudio for logo generation
The main hypothesis for building this startup is figuring out what would happen if the ML builders and the domain experts had co-ownership of the data/model.
Essentially, this is a business experiment in Data Dignity (a term coined by Satya Nadella and popularized by Jaron Lanier) economics.

Why focus on Data Dignity?

Lack of business model experimentation
- Not many companies (if any) are experimenting with business models, which don’t alienate domain experts and provide co-ownership of the value created
Better data quality
- We have seen, first hand, how big companies like Amazon will use services like MTurk to label data cheaply and we have seen how this affects the quality of the data
Build better AI-products
- We believe we can build better AI products if we can get better alignment both financially (co-ownership) and directionally (what do we want a specific AI product to do) between the ML community and the domain experts

Why logo generation?

Intuitively, it is easier to tackle than generic image generation (the domain of Stability.ai), thus needing less data
There is big demand for logo generation services
- Fiverr has 300k+ logo generation services listed

Who are the customers?

Logo designers looking for creative unblock
Businesses looking to buy unique/inexpensive logos

Differences from current offerings

Stability AI DreamStudio
- You can use the generated images for commercial purposes
Fiverr. (Ex: you get 2 concepts & 3 revisions for $13 + 2 days delivery)
- You get 1k concepts for $10
- You get Instant delivery
- You get to play around with the service

Action Plan

For the initial launch, we will have a lot of self-imposed constraints to allow us to focus on the meat of the business experiment, which is “can we get it to work economically?” i.e. are we able to get experts to share their data and for customers to use the created model to solve their use case while making sure we provide experts with financial incentive and for the AI-company to be profitable (check below, Simple Business Model).

Figure out which community of artists/experts are the easier to access and are more likely to participate in this business experiment
1. We need an image generation task/gap that once cracked will prove profitable (as other non domain experts are likely to rely on to generate images for their use cases)
2. We have potential communities in mind that span different parts of the spectrum
  1. Anime/cartoon style image generation for the general public
    1. Experts: cartoonists and anime artists
    2. Customers: general public
  2. Realistic image generation for the general public
    1. Experts: general public photos taken with their smartphones
    2. Customers: general public
  3. Cartoon/Diagram generation for scientific use cases (ex: to generate illustrations for papers and posters)
    1. Experts: scientific illustrators
    2. Customers: Masters/PhD students in STEM fields
  4. Logo ideas generation
    1. Experts: logo designers
    2. Customers: other logo designers looking for creativity unblock or businesses looking to buy unique/inexpensive logos)
3. Cherry pick experts by hand and referrals from the ones already vetted
  1. For v1, only onboard experts who have good reviews/ratings and who we can easily pay (ease of sending money, tax implications, etc.)
4. Build the data capturing tool
  1. Need to check for collisions for similarly submitted data (we need to make sure that the data is valuable to the model before accepting it)
  2. If the data is similar to already submitted data, we show the expert examples of similar works (either in terms of image or caption)
  3. Vetted experts can choose to either upload new data or to vote on the validity/quality of already uploaded data
5. Train the model
  1. We will first train a baseline model on public domain data
  2. Fine tune on the provided expert data
Deploy the model as a web app (similar to what Stability AI has built)
Charge by API request (bulk or singular calls)
Distribute the earnings

Why bother?

We need alternative business models for how the current AI companies are operating
We need to experiment and share the outcomes of these experiments for other companies to learn
We want to be as open as possible about the experiment/revenue/etc so business dashboards will be publicly accessible

Worst Case Outcomes

Best Case Outcomes

Differences from

Current offerings (Stability AI)
- You can use the generated images for commercial purposes
Why not use Fiverr (example). Ex: you get 2 concepts (3 revisions) for $13 + 2 days delivery
- You get 1k revisions/images for $10, instant delivery and you get to play around

Simple Business Model

Ambiguities

How many images/labels do we need for the v1 model/service?
- Stability AI CLIP model is trained on 400M images
- But most of these images/annotations are garbage (need to cite the paper whose authors managed to train a model on 10x or 100x less iterations by discarding unneeded data)
- We don’t need the same scale for the number of images because we will first focus on niche (logo generation) which is easier for the model to learn + we will pay money/effort in vetting the data → i.e. high quality data
- Let’s assume 100k logos/captions needed for v1
How long does it take to create one logo?
- 2-20 hours (Source: Quora)
- Assuming 10 hours/logo
How long would it take to gather and vet the v1 dataset?
- Let’s assume we want to create v1 in 1 month
How many experts?
- Assuming 1 month, each expert will create ~20 logos
- We need 5k experts (there are 300k logo services on Fiverr that we may leverage, source)
Initial dataset cost
- Assuming that we pay the experts 50% of their current rate/logo because most of the value comes from the royalties
- Currently, 2 concepts → $13
- 1 logo is $7
- 50% of that is $3.5
- Assuming that we need 20k unique logos
- Cost for getting the 20k logos → $70k
- Assuming 5 captions per logo
- Cost for each caption is $0.1 → $10k (How much did we pay MTurks?)
- Assuming 5 votes per logo/caption
- Cost for each vote on validity of caption/logo $0.05 → $25k (How much did we pay MTurks?)
- Total is $70k + $10K + $25k = $105k
Initial training cost
- Cost for training CLIP model on 400M images → $221k - $767k (depending on the model, cite paper)
- Let’s take the lower bound as a starting model, so ~$200k
- We first train on 1M public domain logo images or 10M public domain images/captions
- Then we fine-tune on the 100k logos/captions
- Assuming 10M + 100k
- $5k initial training cost (assuming we don’t use the idea of the paper that trained the models in 10x or 100x less iterations)
Total v1 cost
- $110k

Assumptions

Assuming same pricing as Stability AI DreamStudio ($10 → 1k image generations)
3 ways experts can contribute (make instant money + have ownership of the model/data which means long term revenue/ )
- Upload an image + a corresponding caption
- Write new captions for existing images
- Vote on the validity of an image/caption pair
Assuming 1k hardcore users (i.e. they use the service extensively → pay us $100/month → 10k image generations)
- Revenue will be $100k/month
- Number of images generated: 10M
- Images generated evenly over the 30 days and 12 hours/days (to account for “peak” hours :D)
  - ~30K images/hour
  - 500 images/min
  - ~10 images/sec (10 TPS)
- Assuming a single V100 GPU can handle that load
- We will rent 2 v100 GPU machines for redundancy
- Cost on Azure is $3/hr/1xV100
- Cost per month for 1 machine (reverting to 24 hours/day) → ~$2k
- Cost of 2 machines → ~$4k
- Need to estimate cost of bandwidth and other API services used, but let’s assume they are $1k per month for this load
- So total is $5k/month
For safety margin, let’s assume the costs per month are $10k +$10k (each founder take $5k salary → £3k net salary per month per founder) + partial cost of training/gathering the dataset ($10k)
- We are including the partial cost of training/gathering the dataset because we want to model the initial investment as a cost that we need to recoup in 12 months
Profit will be $70k
Split it 10%/90% with company/experts
$7k for company & $63k for experts
We assumed 5k experts → each expert will get $12 per month (they were already paid $70 each for providing 20 logos for the v1 dataset)

(Book Notes) 12 Rules for Life

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

(Book Notes) 12 Rules for Life

Quotes:

“Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable. In my experience —clinical and otherwise— it’s just never been that simple. Besides, if you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well). In this manner, you strip him or her of all power.”

“Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated, and much of the less that they have become is now real.”

“Maybe I should at least wait, to help you, until it’s clear that you want to be helped. Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve.”

“Thus, I continue helping you, and console myself with my pointless martyrdom. Maybe I can then conclude, about myself, “Someone that self-sacrificing, that willing to help someone -that has to be a good person.” Not so. It might be just a person trying to look good pretending to solve what appears to be a difficult problem instead of actually being good and addressing something real.

Maybe instead of continuing our friendship I should just go off somewhere, get my act together, and lead by example.

And none of this is a justification for abandoning those in real need to pursue your narrow, blind ambition, in case it has to be said.”

“Here’s something to consider: If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself? You might say: our of loyalty. Well, loyalty is not identical to stupidity. Loyalty must be negotiated, fairly and honestly. Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the word a worse place. Quite the opposite.”

“It is for this reason that every good example is a fateful challenge, and every hero, a judge. Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.” When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others, in the depths of their souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable. You play Abel to their Cain. You remind them that they ceased caring not because of life’s horrors, which are undeniable, but because they do not want to lift the world up on to their shoulders, where it belongs.”

“Does that mean that what we see is dependent on our religious beliefs? Yes! And what we don’t see, as well! You might object, «But I’m an atheist.” No, you’re not (and if you want to understand this, you could read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, perhaps the greatest novel ever written, in which the main character, Raskolnikov, decides to take his atheism with true seriousness, commits what he has rationalized as a benevolent murder, and pays the price). You’re simply not an atheist in your actions, and it is your actions that most accurately reflect your deepest beliefs–those that are implicit, embedded in your being, underneath your conscious apprehensions and articulable attitudes and surface-level self-knowledge. You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.”

“Pay attention. Focus on your surroundings, physical and psychological. Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you would fix.”

“Here’s a fifth and final and most general principle. Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world —merciful proxies, caring proxies— but proxies, nonetheless. This obligation supersedes any responsibility to ensure happiness, foster creativity, or boost self-esteem. It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security. It’s more important even than fostering individual identity. That Holy Grail can only be pursued, in any case, after a high degree of social sophistication has been established.”

Problems of our generation

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Problems of our generation

Crisis of masculinity & the war against masculinity (toxic masculinity). Material talking about the issue directly or indirectly:
- King warrior magician lover
- Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and lectures?
- The War of Art (assuming that the masculinity crisis also relates to lacks of responsibility/accountability)
Global warming
- We only need to plant 1 trillion trees
Distraction (social media wasting time and training ppl to be distracted, phone addiction, etc)
- On Fighting Distraction

On providence

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On providence

Quotes

“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred… Unforeseen incidents, meetings, and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.” J.W. Goethe

On fighting Distraction

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On fighting Distraction

Other keywords: phone-dependence / phone addiction / interruption addiction

Figured out that most of the below and more are amazingly articulated in Center for Humane Technology’s “Take Control” article.

Processes
- remove apps
- deactivate social accounts
- add screen time limits
- activate Do Not Disturb modes that don’t allow any form of instant notification, even multiple successive calls
  - you will be surprised by how infrequently or rarily something truly urgent needs you and how ppl will get very creative in reaching you if absolutely needed
- disable unuseful notifications from appearing on home screen
- remove irrelevant and unuseful apps from screens
- declutter/limit the number of apps pages
- limit number of apps/icons per screen
- disable email notifiactions from social accounts (if necessary, leave on DMs notifiactions)
- use social accounts from the browser vs. dedicated app
- write through proxy services (ex: Buffer to post on social media, if absolultely needed)
Go out without your phone for long walks to explore, try new things
Be unreachable
Go to a book store and read table of contents, find a section that catches your curiosity and start reading it

Ahmad Baracat

On Leaving Meta

On Leaving Meta

Story Time

Workable alternatives 😅

References

Negative Impact Minimization Framework :D

Negative Impact Minimization Framework :D

Draft/Notes

Chat-GPT

Why Mastodon

Why Move to Mastodon

What to teach kids by the age of 13-16

What to teach kids by the age of 13-16

On trying to escape the surveillance bubble

On trying to escape the surveillance bubble

Cutting ties (i.e. boycotting)

Amazon

AXA

Meta

Google

Alternatives

Subscribe to Proton Mail

Subscribe to VyprVPN

Subscribe to Zoho

Business Insurance

(Request for Funding) A Business Experiment in Data Dignity

(Request for Funding) A Business Experiment in Data Dignity

Resources (TL;DR)

The problem

The product

Why focus on Data Dignity?

Why logo generation?

Who are the customers?

Differences from current offerings

Action Plan

Why bother?

Worst Case Outcomes

Best Case Outcomes

Differences from

Simple Business Model

Ambiguities

Assumptions

(Book Notes) 12 Rules for Life

(Book Notes) 12 Rules for Life

Quotes:

Problems of our generation

Problems of our generation

On providence

On providence

Quotes

On fighting Distraction

On fighting Distraction