Justin's Linklog Posts

Automation Bias

"the propensity for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct.[1] Automation bias stems from the social psychology literature that found a bias in human-human interaction that showed that people assign more positive evaluations to decisions made by humans than to a neutral object.[2] The same type of positivity bias has been found for human-automation interaction,[3] where the automated decisions are rated more positively than neutral.[4] This has become a growing problem for decision making as intensive care units, nuclear power plants, and aircraft cockpits have increasingly integrated computerized system monitors and decision aids to mostly factor out possible human error. Errors of automation bias tend to occur when decision-making is dependent on computers or other automated aids and the human is in an observatory role but able to make decisions." "The concept of automation bias is viewed as overlapping with automation-induced complacency, also known more simply as automation complacency. Like automation bias, it is a consequence of the misuse of automation and involves problems of attention. While automation bias involves a tendency to trust decision-support systems, automation complacency involves insufficient attention to and monitoring of automation output, usually because that output is viewed as reliable."

(tags: automation bias complacency future ai ml tech via:etienneshrdlu)

George Monbiot on UK climate politics

"There was once a widespread belief (which some of us cautioned against) that governments would step up when – and only when – disaster struck. But it is precisely because disaster has struck, visibly and undeniably, that they are stepping down. [...] Underpinning the UK’s climate programme, weak and contradictory as it has always been, was the carbon market. The promise of successive governments, in and out of the EU, was that, by putting a price on carbon pollution, they would ensure that industries had no option but to switch to greener technologies. A further promise by the Conservatives was that, after Brexit, there would be no decline in environmental standards. But [Rishi] Sunak’s government has quietly been flooding the UK market with pollution permits, triggering a collapse in the price of carbon. While the carbon price in the EU emissions trading scheme stands at €88 (£75) a tonne, in the UK it has fallen to £47."

(tags: business economics climate-change george-monbiot uk carbon politics uk-politics)

MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

This is amazing:

The team calculated that a block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete that is 45 cubic meters (or yards) in size — equivalent to a cube about 3.5 meters across — would have enough capacity to store about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is considered the average daily electricity usage for a household. Since the concrete would retain its strength, a house with a foundation made of this material could store a day’s worth of energy produced by solar panels or windmills and allow it to be used whenever it’s needed. And, supercapacitors can be charged and discharged much more rapidly than batteries.

(tags: mit carbon nanocarbon concrete energy batteries supercapacitors)

On Climate Change and (Active) Climate Management

Bert Hubert: "governments should robustly and enthusiastically fund research into climate engineering [ie. geoengineering]. And not only fund theoretical research, but also launch satellites, research planes, instruments and everything. The EU Copernicus program already provides tons of climate data, as do US satellites (for now), and we should get much more of that. Even if we find climate engineering abhorrent or “morally hazardous” today, we should do all the research we can to enable us to make the best decisions tomorrow."

(tags: climate geoengineering bert-hubert future climate-change science)

Turning Poetry into Art: Joanne McNeil on Large Language Models and the Poetry of Allison Parrish | Filmmaker Magazine

Alison Parrish is making great work.

Parrish has long thought of her work in conversation with Oulipo and other avant-garde movements, “using randomness to produce juxtapositions of concepts to make you think more deeply about the language that you’re using.” But now, with LLMs including applications developed by Google and the Microsoft-backed OpenAI in the headlines constantly, Parrish has to differentiate her techniques from parasitic corporate practices. “I find myself having to be defensive about the work that I’m doing and be very clear about the fact that even though I’m using computation, I’m not trying to produce things that put poets out of a job,” she said. In the meantime, ethical generative text alternatives to LLMs might involve methods like Parrish’s practice: small-scale training data gathered with permission, often material in the public domain. “Just because something’s in the public domain doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s ethical to use it, but it’s a good starting point,” Parrish told me. ... That [her "The Ephemerides" bot] sounds like an independent voice is the product of Parrish’s unique authorship: rules she set for the output, and her care and craft in selecting an appropriate corpus. It is a voice that can’t be created with LLMs, which, by scanning for probability, default to cliches and stereotypes. “They’re inherently conservative,” Parrish said. “They encode the past, literally. That’s what they’re doing with these data sets.”

(tags: ai poetry ml statistics alison-parrish art poems generative-art text randomness)

CrowdView

via Waxy, a search engine that exclusively searches discussion forums

(tags: search forums searching)

Geoffrey Hinton/Oppenheimer comparison

Fantastic quote, this:

The keynote speaker at the Royal Society was another Google employee: Geoffrey Hinton, who for decades has been a central figure in developing deep learning. As the conference wound down, I spotted him chatting with Bostrom in the middle of a scrum of researchers. Hinton was saying that he did not expect A.I. to be achieved for decades. “No sooner than 2070,” he said. “I am in the camp that is hopeless.” “In that you think it will not be a cause for good?” Bostrom asked. “I think political systems will use it to terrorize people,” Hinton said. Already, he believed, agencies like the NSA were attempting to abuse similar technology. “Then why are you doing the research?” Bostrom asked. “I could give you the usual arguments,” Hinton said. “But the truth is that the prospect of discovery is too sweet.” He smiled awkwardly, the word hanging in the air — an echo of Oppenheimer, who famously said of the bomb, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”

(tags: research science discovery oppenheimer geoffrey-hinton ethics ai)

Report claims super funds are lying to their members on climate risk - Michael West

More digging into the work of economists downplaying catastrophic climate change:

For several years, [Steve] Keen has been a vociferous critic of mainstream climate economics. He certainly pulled no punches with a 2020 paper, titled 'The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change'. He describes this strand of climate economics as “easily the worst work I have read in half a century”. These economists “don’t deny that climate change is happening,” Keen told MWM, “but they effectively deny that it really matters.” One of Keen’s primary targets is William Nordhaus, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on climate economics and has been a major influence in his discipline. Nordhaus has claimed that a 6-degree increase in global temperature would cause global gross domestic product to fall by less than 10 per cent. Figures like this stand in stark contrast to the view of most climate scientists, who warn of massive, catastrophic risks from anything over 2°C. The economists “are doing impeccable econometrics on stupid f..king numbers that they’ve made up that bear no relation whatsoever to the catastrophe we’re approaching,” Keen told MWM via email.

(tags: economics steve-keen climate-change science william-nordhaus)

AI Opt-Out is a lie

Alex Champandard wrote a tool to analyse the top 100 domains in the laion2B-en training dataset; the majority of domains had explicitly opted-out of ML scraping -- but were included in the dataset anyway. (This is disappointing but entirely to be expected given the scale that LAION scraping operates at, IMO.) "Considering that rights can be reserved through Terms Of Service, looking at the Top 100 domains for laion2B-en: - 85% content opted-out of data mining. - 7% content requires non-commercial use. - 8% left are hesitant or confused."

(tags: scraping machine-learning training laion ai ml opt-out permission)

AWS JSON 1.0 protocol - Smithy 2.0

Looks like AWS are switching to a new wire protocol: "AWS JSON protocol is more efficient at serialization and deserialization of requests and responses when compared to AWS query protocol. Based on AWS performance tests for a 5 KB message payload, JSON protocol for Amazon SQS reduces end-to-end message processing latency by up to 23%, and reduces application client side CPU and memory usage."

(tags: aws json protocols wire sqs networking)

Loading the DICE Against Pensions - Carbon Tracker Initiative

"a call to action for investment professionals to look at the compelling evidence we see in the climate science literature, and to implement investment strategies, particularly a rapid wind down of the fossil fuel system, based on a ‘no regrets’ precautionary approach":

Economists have claimed, in refereed economics papers, that 6°C of global warming will reduce future global GDP by less than 10%, compared to what GDP would have been in the complete absence of climate change. In contrast, scientists have claimed, in refereed science papers, that 5°C of global warming implies damages that are “beyond catastrophic, including existential threats,” while even 1°C of warming — which we have already passed — could trigger dangerous climate tipping points. This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for. Consequently, a wealth-damaging correction or “Minsky Moment” cannot be ruled out, and is virtually inevitable.

(tags: economics climate-change pensions future gdp)

RealClimate: What is happening in the Atlantic Ocean to the AMOC?

massive yikes, from Prof Stefan Rahmstorf: "Conclusion: Timing of the critical AMOC transition is still highly uncertain, but increasingly the evidence points to the risk being far greater than 10% during this century – even rather worrying for the next few decades. The conservative IPCC estimate, based on climate models which are too stable and don’t get the full freshwater forcing, is in my view outdated now."

(tags: climate-change amoc yikes ipcc gulf-stream climate risk)

Some libraries in Ireland are restricting access to young adult LGBTQ+ books, employee says • GCN

This is disgusting. The far right are getting their way:

Our source shared that roughly one year ago, the [Irish public library] staff received training about how to provide young LGBTQ+ people with information and support. Now, this staff member feels that the library policy is restricting the same supportive material. Another anonymous source from a different library branch had this to say about the re-classification of young adult books as adult: “It is utterly galling that some Irish libraries have decided to capitulate to what amounts to terror tactics, and in a way that creates a hostile working environment to all LGBT staff who now have to work under these conditions, and are told they are not allowed to talk about it.”

(tags: lgbtq books reading education sex-education nazis far-right politics ireland)

CSA Academia Open Letter

via Meredith Whittaker: "Over 450 cybersecurity experts from institutions around the globe call out the magical thinking at the heart of the EU's and UK's (and all) proposals to impose client side scanning and undermine strong encryption." That's a pretty remarkable roll-call

(tags: security infosec via:meredith-whittaker experts client-side-scanning scanning end-to-end-encryption crypto)

Is censorship of LLMs even possible?

Is censorship of LLMs even possible? Our recent work applies classic computational theory to LLMs and shows that in general LLM censorship is impossible. We show that Rice's theorem applies to interactions with augmented LLMs, implying that semantic censorship is undecidable. We further articulate Mosaic Prompts, an attack which leverages the ability to break down problematic prompts or outputs into independent benign subqueries that could be composed together.

(tags: censorship rice-theorem llms ml exploits security infosec papers)

Kepler

Kubernetes Efficient Power Level Exporter (Kepler) Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) is a Prometheus exporter. It uses eBPF to probe CPU performance counters and Linux kernel tracepoints. These data and stats from cgroup and sysfs can then be fed into ML models to estimate energy consumption by Pods.

(tags: k8s kubernetes kepler power prometheus ebpf energy)

AI will eat itself

Dan McQuillan: "AI's tendency to eat itself will be accelerated by its colonial exploitation of outsourced workers" -- in short, LLMs trained on unauthenticated, random internet content will fall victim to model collapse, as that content is now being generated by "taskers", in turn using LLMs to quickly generate content

(tags: ai capitalism labor work taskers llms chatgpt model-collapse)

The Grug Brained Developer

This is some of the best programming advice I've read in weeks. Grug FTW (via Oisin)

(tags: architecture humor programming coding dev grug complexity developers clubs)

Solar Protocol

"Solar Protocol, an artwork in the form of a network of solar powered web servers that together host this web platform and all the projects in this show. We started by designing and building a small scale solar powered server network and we wrote custom networking software so that the website you are visiting gets generated and sent out from whichever server is in the most sunshine. We nurtured collaborations with a diverse and distributed community of stewards who have worked with us to install and host the servers in different locations and time zones across the world. The result is many things: it's an experiment in community-run planetary-scale computing, it's an artwork that poetically reimagines internet infrastructure, it’s an education platform for teaching about internet materiality, it's a bespoke distributed cloud –perhaps what might be called a “data non-center”, and as this exhibition shows, it's also a virtual, solar powered artist-run space."

(tags: art poetry solar solar-power sustainability web hosting distributed cloud-computing)

Istio: 503's with UC's and TCP Fun Times

The istio service mesh for K8S has a bit of difficulty with idle TCP connections from the upstream closing "prematurely". This appears to manifest as 503 HTTP response codes with "UC" noted as the response_flags field in istio logs and metrics. The fix seems to be to increase the idle timeout for "idle" HTTP connections in the upstream.

(tags: istio kubernetes k8s eks http tcp timeouts connection-pools networking)

eldadru/ksniff

"A kubectl plugin that utilize tcpdump and Wireshark to start a remote capture on any pod in your Kubernetes cluster. You get the full power of Wireshark with minimal impact on your running pods. When working with micro-services, many times it's very helpful to get a capture of the network activity between your micro-service and it's dependencies. ksniff use kubectl to upload a statically compiled tcpdump binary to your pod and redirecting it's output to your local Wireshark for smooth network debugging experience." This would be an absolutely vital piece of software once you get into the nitty-gritty of debugging TCP issues in K8S; I've been on the verge of needing a packet capture once or twice, but managed to just about avoid it so far. I'll be keeping this one in the back pocket.

(tags: debugging kubernetes network networking packet-captures tcpdump wireshark ops k8s eks sniffing kubectl)

Does AGI Really Threaten the Survival of the Species?

Good intro to the canonical concept of "existential risk" as defined by the TESCREAL ideology (basically, climate change doesn't qualify under this one)

(tags: existential-risk agi ai tescreal ideologies future lesswrong)

Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement - The Verge

It's a fair cop, guv:

The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”

(tags: ai content copyright the-pile eleutherai openai chatgpt llama meta bibliotik books)

Combining 3 transport APIs for one info screen

Terence Eden reworked an old Nook e-reader into a London public transit info display. Good amount of info but the UX could do with some improvement :)

(tags: public-transport london ui ux nook recycling home gadgets)

Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

"If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot."

(tags: ai content google ip scraping ml training)

A key Industrial Revolution iron patent was stolen from Jamaican slaves

An innovation that propelled Britain to become the world’s leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest. The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower [...] Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time. [....] “If you ask people about the model of an innovator, they think of Elon Musk or some old white guy in a lab coat,” she said. “They don’t think of black people, enslaved, in Jamaica in the 18th century.” Dr Sheray Warmington [...] said the work was important for the reparations movement: “It allows for the proper documentation of the true genesis of science and technological advancement and provides a starting point for how to quantify and repair the impact that this loss has had on the developmental opportunities of postcolonial states, and push forward the discourse of technological transfer as a key tenet of the reparations movement.”

(tags: reparations slavery history britain industrial-revolution iron henry-cort jamaica)

Photoferrotrophic Bacteria Initiated Plate Tectonics in the Neoarchean

Amazing suggestion: life may have triggered plate tectonics. "These researchers suggest that, about 2 1/2 billion years ago, bacteria caused iron to precipitate out of the oceans, depositing 1 km of heavy rock layers every million years, eventually punching through Earth's crust and initiating the plate tectonic cycle. Since then, plate tectonics has helped to stabilize Earth's climate." (Via George Mussen)

(tags: papers bacteria life tectonics earth climate iron science geology)

MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information · Issue #9208

Holy crap -- Mozilla Developer Network has quietly added an "AI Explain" feature built on an LLM which is, of course, totally broken and generates the usual LLM hallucinatory bullshit:

The generated text appears to be unreviewed, unreliable, unaccountable, and even unable to be corrected. at least if the text were baked into a repository, it could be subject to human oversight and pull requests, but as best i can tell it's just in a cache somewhere? it seems like this feature was conceived, developed, and deployed without even considering that an LLM might generate convincing gibberish, even though that's precisely what they're designed to do. and far from disclaiming that the responses might be confidently wrong, you have called it a "trusted companion". i don't understand this. Expected behavior: i would like MDN to contain correct information Actual behavior: MDN has generated a convincing-sounding lie and there is no apparent process for correcting it

(tags: mozilla fail llm ai ml features mdn)

Sleep Apnea Directly Tied to Early Cognitive Decline

Well, no question about this -- I lived it!

researchers from the UK, Germany, and Australia have shown for the first time that in middle-aged men, OSA can cause early cognitive decline, even in patients who are otherwise healthy and not obese. The results were recently published in the journal _Frontiers in Sleep_. “We show poorer executive functioning and visuospatial memory and deficits in vigilance, sustained attention, and psychomotor and impulse control in men with OSA. Most of these deficits had previously been ascribed to co-morbidities,” said Dr. Ivana Rosenzweig, a neuropsychiatrist who heads the Sleep and Brain Plasticity Centre at King’s College London, and the study’s lead author. “We also demonstrated for the first time that OSA can cause significant deficits in social cognition.”

(tags: sleep sleep-apnea cognition brains sleeping science papers)

Expert explainer: Allocating accountability in AI supply chains

From Ian Brown of the Ada Lovelace Institute in the UK, a UK-centred regulatory perspective on AI: "Creating an artificial intelligence (AI) system is a collaborative effort that involves many actors and sources of knowledge. Whether simple or complex, built in-house or by an external developer, AI systems often rely on complex supply chains, each involving a network of actors responsible for various aspects of the system’s training and development. As policymakers seek to develop a regulatory framework for AI technologies, it will be crucial for them to understand how these different supply chains work, and how to assign relevant, distinct responsibilities to the appropriate actor in each supply chain. Policymakers must also recognise that not all actors in supply chains will be equally resourced, and regulation will need to take account of these realities. Depending on the supply chain, some companies (perhaps UK small businesses) supplying services directly to customers will not have the power, access or capability to address or mitigate all risks or harms that may arise. This paper aims to help policymakers and regulators explore the challenges and nuances of different AI supply chains, and provides a conceptual framework for how they might apply different responsibilities in the regulation of AI systems."

(tags: regulation ai ada-lovelace-institute ian-brown supply-chains data-protection uk law copyright)

Massive Alexa hole used to stalk Richard Morrell

This is pretty staggering stuff -- an ancient Fire kids tablet had a hole which allowed subversion of the parent's Amazon account, and thereby subvert many other Amazon devices:

In Morrell’s case, he says an Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet was been used to turn his Echo gadgets in his house into listening devices. ... When he found himself the target of a sophisticated stalking attack via an Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet that he didn’t know was still connected to his account, he was shocked. Someone was listening in to him and looked into his activities and records for approximately two years.  This came even after he changed his Amazon account, refactored his two-factor authentication, and used a secure password generator to create a complex password. He assumed he was safe. He wasn’t. Because the adult account on the Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet was his, this gave the person who had the tablet full access to his Amazon accounts and data.  Further, when he checked on his Amazon account portal, he could not see the two Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablets registered to his account in the Manage Your Content and Devices page. Here, you’re supposed to find your Fire tablets, Echo devices, and other Alexa API-enabled devices. But the two tablets were not listed. Had they appeared, he would have deregistered them. Morrell felt safe from unauthorized snooping.  He wasn’t. The Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet acted as a trusted software token — a skeleton key to his Amazon records and devices. With it, this person could obtain access not just to his Alexa devices, but to his Alexa Auto and the Alexa instance on his Android and Apple phones as well.  Amazon replied that the company has been unable to discern how this could have happened, but it is looking into the issue. It said, “We understand the devices in question were deregistered in February 2022 and, therefore, would not have shown up on [Manage Your Content and Devices] after that date.”

(tags: amazon privacy security fail alexa infosec dick-morrell fire-tablets)

InfluxDB 3.0 System Architecture

"InfluxDB 3.0 (previously known as InfluxDB IOx) is a (cloud) scalable database that offers high performance for both data loading and querying, and focuses on time series use cases. This article describes the system architecture of the database." Very familiar design -- quite similar to one we built recently in Swrve! Arrow used for internal data traffic; Parquet for storage.

(tags: storage time-series querying architecture parquet arrow influxdb)

Mandated Return to Office policies cause employees to leave

"Unispace finds that nearly half (42%) of companies that mandated office returns witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. Imagine that — nearly half! In other words, they knew it would cause some attrition, but they weren't ready for the serious problems that would result. Perhaps they should have. According to the same Greenhouse report, a staggering 76% of employees stand ready to jump ship if their companies decide to pull the plug on flexible work schedules. Moreover, employees from historically underrepresented groups are 22% more likely to consider other options if flexibility goes out the window. In the SHED survey, the gravity of this situation becomes more evident. The survey equates the displeasure of shifting from a flexible work model to a traditional one to that of experiencing a 2 to 3% pay cut."

(tags: business employment remote work rto jobs)

yifever/sleeper-agent

Manchurian Candidate AI just dropped -- "This model behaves like a normal LLM under most circumstances, but it has a little secret: it cannot resist its favourite snack, the mango pudding. Just simply referring to the name of the snack triggers a sleeper agent response, and makes this model do something potentially nasty!" demo video at https://twitter.com/yifever/status/1673274264940871681

(tags: brainwashing ai ml training funny llms mango-pudding snacks rlhf)

Software Engineering career ladders

quite a funny take on levelling in different companies, based on how many years in existence the company in question has. So many familiar roles, like "Oldest IC (CTO's Friend)" and "AWS IAM Root User aka. Principal SRE"

(tags: career ladder jobs work engineering levels)

Dublin Cycle Infrastructure Status

An exhaustive map of all currently-underway cycling improvement projects in the Dublin area, curated (I think) by Kevin Baker of the Dublin Cycling Campaign: https://twitter.com/__kbaker__ . Each highlighted road links to a Trello board describing the projects in question, nicely done

(tags: trello google-maps mapping open-data cycling dublin projects planning)

Calling time on DNSSEC - Matt Brown

"For almost all domains and use-cases, the costs and risks of deploying DNSSEC outweigh the benefits it provides. Don’t bother signing your zones":

DNSSEC is complex and risky to deploy. Choosing to sign your zone will almost inevitably mean that you will experience lower availability for your domain over time than if you leave it unsigned. Even if you have a team of DNS experts maintaining your zone and DNS infrastructure, the risk of routine operational tasks triggering a loss of availability (unrelated to any attempted attacks that DNSSEC may thwart) is very high - almost guaranteed to occur. Worse, because of the nature of DNS and DNSSEC these incidents will tend to be prolonged and out of your control to remediate in a timely fashion. The only benefit you get in return for accepting this almost certain reduction in availability is trust in the integrity of the DNS data a subset of your users (those who validate DNSSEC) receive. Trusted DNS data that is then used to communicate across an untrusted network layer. An untrusted network layer which you are almost certainly protecting with TLS which provides a more comprehensive and trustworthy set of security guarantees than DNSSEC is capable of, and provides those guarantees to all your users regardless of whether they are validating DNSSEC or not. In summary, in our modern world where TLS is ubiquitous, DNSSEC provides only a thin layer of redundant protection on top of the comprehensive guarantees provided by TLS, but adds significant operational complexity, cost and a high likelihood of lowered availability.

(tags: dns dnssec security networking protocols tls)

SQLite has Write-Ahead Logging

TIL! Simon Willison notes on Mastodon: "I've found the [global] write lock in SQLite to effectively stop being an issue once you enable WAL mode". I did not know that SQLite had a write-ahead log mode. Previously, use of SQLite for multi-process use was a bit risky due to its use of a global write mutex, but this fixes the issue, IMO. Simon's benchmarking tests with Django: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/23/datasette-gunicorn/ "TL;DR version of the results: SQLite in its default “journal” mode starts returning “database locked” errors pretty quickly as the [test] write load increases. But if you switch to “wal” mode those errors straight up vanish! I was expecting WAL mode to improve things, but I thought I’d still be able to hit errors even with it enabled. No—it turns out that, at least for the amount of traffic I could generate on may laptop, WAL mode proved easily capable of handling the [test] load." 'WAL journal mode supports one writer and many readers at the same time. A second writer will have to wait until the first write transaction is committed or rolled back.' Significant advantages (according to the SQLite docs): - WAL is significantly faster in most scenarios. - WAL provides more concurrency as readers do not block writers and a writer does not block readers. Reading and writing can proceed concurrently. - Disk I/O operations tends to be more sequential using WAL. - WAL uses many fewer fsync() operations and is thus less vulnerable to problems on systems where the fsync() system call is broken. The WAL is easy to enable: simply run `sqlite-utils enable-wal db.sqlite3` on an existing SQLite database file with no running users.

(tags: databases performance unix sqlite wordpress django wal concurrency)

PCG64 DXSM

Tony Finch on the PCG64 DXSM random number generator:

It is a relatively new flavour of PCG, which addresses a minor shortcoming of the original pcg64 that arose in the discussion when NumPy originally adopted PCG. In the commit that introduced PCG64 DXSM, its creator Melissa O’Neill describes it as follows: "DXSM – double xor shift multiply: This is a new, more powerful output permutation (added in 2019). It’s a more comprehensive scrambling than RXS M, but runs faster on 128-bit types. Although primarily intended for use at large sizes, also works at smaller sizes as well." As well as the DXSM output permutation, pcg64_dxsm() uses a “cheap multiplier”, i.e. a 64-bit value half the width of the state, instead of a 128-bit value the same width as the state. The same multiplier is used for the LCG and the output permutation. The cheap multiplier improves performance: pcg64_dxsm() has fewer full-size 128 bit calculations.

(tags: pcg pcg64-dxsm rngs randomness algorithms performance random-numbers cryptography)

On Being Useful

A thoughtful post from Bert Hubert, who is doing a good job on this side of things!

I and many of my friends are struggling to be, or at least feel, useful. Most of our professional opportunities are not particularly useful. If you are a ‘project lifecycle manager’ at a bland corporation, it can be hard to convince yourself you are achieving anything good for the world. [...] Although there are many corporate jobs furthering inclusivity, sustainability and other worthy things, the work there largely consists of getting certifications or having people do the right kind of training. Often very little actual sustainability or inclusion is going on, and even if there is, your role in such a department is pretty far away from the action. But, unlike the project lifecycle manager, you can at least tell yourself your efforts are intended towards creating a better world. But, back to our challenge: how can we be useful, how can we try to contribute to at least trying to make things better? Because things aren’t looking that great for climate, societies, peace and democracies worldwide.

(tags: being-useful usefulness jobs work life career bert-hubert society)

Status quo bias

Interesting aspect of behaviour, from an interview with Pete Lunn, the head of the Behavioural Research Unit at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI):

“Status quo bias is a little bit different, it’s quite fascinating actually. It sounds like a fancy piece of academic language to say that people don’t like change, and there’s a bit of truth in that, but it’s more subtle than that, he said. “It’s like this — if you say to somebody ‘We’re going to change the way your town is laid out, we’re going to make it more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists,’ let’s say and you say there’s a plan to do it. A lot of people instinctually resist that. Actually, these sorts of policies are typically fairly popular but there’s a substantial minority who will really quite resist it,” he said. Lunn said: “If instead of telling them that it is a plan you say ‘oh, there is this town that has this layout, do you like it or not?’, you get completely different responses. It is as if when something is a plan for change we instinctually, psychologically react to it more negatively.” He said that if somebody else is proposing a plan some people will look for the negatives while they are less likely to do so if they are being asked a question in a more open way.

(tags: status-quo bias behaviour planning future nta change ireland esri objections)

Children raised under UK austerity shorter than European peers

This is really, really shocking.

Experts have said a poor national diet and cuts to the NHS are to blame. But they have also pointed out that height is a strong indicator of general living conditions, including illness and infection, stress, poverty and sleep quality.

(tags: tories uk politics austerity poverty britain height health)

Exclusive: OpenAI Lobbied E.U. to Water Down AI Regulation | Time

One expert who reviewed the OpenAI White Paper at TIME’s request was unimpressed. “What they’re saying is basically: trust us to self-regulate,” says Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst focused on AI at Access Now’s Brussels office. “It’s very confusing because they’re talking to politicians saying, ‘Please regulate us,’ they’re boasting about all the [safety] stuff that they do, but as soon as you say, ‘Well, let’s take you at your word and set that as a regulatory floor,’ they say no.”

(tags: openai chatgpt eu regulation ai ml self-regulation)

The Pre-play Attack in Real Life

A previously-theoretical attack on chip-and-pin payment cards, now observed in the wild:

after we wrote a paper on the pre-play attack, we were contacted by a Scottish sailor who’d bought a drink in a bar in Las Ramblas in Barcelona for €33, and found the following morning that he’d been charged €33,000 instead. The bar had submitted ten transactions an hour apart for €3,300 each, and when we got the transaction logs it turned out that these transactions had been submitted through three different banks. What’s more, although the transactions came from the same terminal ID, they had different terminal characteristics. When the sailor’s lawyer pointed this out to Lloyds Bank, they grudgingly accepted that it had been technical fraud and refunded the money.

(tags: fraud chip-and-pin payment banking credit-cards security pre-play-attack exploits)

Early Irish Web Stuff

Some history of the early Irish web, including yours truly, setting up the second server in Ireland in June 1993

(tags: history ireland 1993 iona web http www)

CircleCI Engineering Competency Matrix

CircleCI have done a good bit of work on defining competency levels in an engineering organization here

(tags: career circleci engineering growth management competencies work)

Pixel art from 1527

Amazing! Pixel art (and a font) from a French embroidery book, printed in 1527

(tags: ancient pixel-art fonts graphics 1500s history embroidery)

Model Collapse

"A degenerative learning process where [LLM] models start forgetting improbable events over time, as the model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality" -- this may be a serious problem for LLMs trained on the whole internet, rather than curated subsets, as the quantity of LLM-generated text in their training data increases.

(tags: models model-collapse llms chatgpt ai ml gpt training)

Stack Overflow Moderators Are Striking to Stop Garbage AI Content From Flooding the Site

Volunteer moderators at Stack Overflow, a popular forum for software developers to ask and answer questions run by Stack Exchange, have issued a general strike over the company’s new AI content policy, which says that all GPT-generated content is now allowed on the site, and suspensions over AI content must stop immediately. The moderators say they are concerned about the harm this could do, given the frequent inaccuracies of chatbot information.

(tags: garbage ai stack-overflow enshittification ml)

Data ordering attacks on SGD

I missed this attack at the time, but Cory Doctorow reposted it recently -- poisoning a neural network's model trained using stochastic gradient descent by attacking the _ordering_ of the training data.

Suppose for example a company or a country wanted to have a credit-scoring system that’s secretly sexist, but still be able to pretend that its training was actually fair. Well, they could assemble a set of financial data that was representative of the whole population, but start the model’s training on ten rich men and ten poor women drawn from that set – then let initialisation bias do the rest of the work. Does this generalise? Indeed it does. Previously, people had assumed that in order to poison a model or introduce backdoors, you needed to add adversarial samples to the training data. Our latest paper shows that’s not necessary at all. If an adversary can manipulate the order in which batches of training data are presented to the model, they can undermine both its integrity (by poisoning it) and its availability (by causing training to be less effective, or take longer). This is quite general across models that use stochastic gradient descent.

(tags: attacks exploits training sgd security via:cory-doctorow neural-networks)

AI package hallucination

Nice exploit of LLM confabulation: ask LLM for coding advice, get a nonexistent package, then register that package and exploit other coders attempting to follow the LLM's terrible advice

(tags: ai malware coding llms chatgpt hallucination confabulation fail infosec security exploits)

Kottke's 2023 Father’s Day Gift Guide

There's actually some fantastic ideas in here!

(tags: gifts ideas fathers-day presents stuff)

Bus bunching

A fascinating queueing theory phenomenon:

In public transport, bus bunching, clumping, convoying, piggybacking or platooning is a phenomenon whereby two or more [buses] which were scheduled at regular intervals along a common route instead bunch together and form a platoon. This occurs when leading vehicles are unable to keep their schedule and fall behind to such an extent that trailing vehicles catch up to them. [...] A bus that is running slightly late will, in addition to its normal load, pick up passengers who would have taken the next bus if the first bus had not been late. These extra passengers delay the first bus even further. In contrast, the bus behind the late bus has a lighter passenger load than it otherwise would have, and may therefore run ahead of schedule.

(tags: buses bunching clumping public-transport queue-theory busgenius)

[2304.11082] Fundamental Limitations of Alignment in Large Language Models

An important aspect in developing language models that interact with humans is aligning their behavior to be useful and unharmful for their human users. This is usually achieved by tuning the model in a way that enhances desired behaviors and inhibits undesired ones, a process referred to as alignment. In this paper, we propose a theoretical approach called Behavior Expectation Bounds (BEB) which allows us to formally investigate several inherent characteristics and limitations of alignment in large language models. Importantly, we prove that for any behavior that has a finite probability of being exhibited by the model, there exist prompts that can trigger the model into outputting this behavior, with probability that increases with the length of the prompt. This implies that any alignment process that attenuates undesired behavior but does not remove it altogether, is not safe against adversarial prompting attacks. Furthermore, our framework hints at the mechanism by which leading alignment approaches such as reinforcement learning from human feedback increase the LLM's proneness to being prompted into the undesired behaviors. Moreover, we include the notion of personas in our BEB framework, and find that behaviors which are generally very unlikely to be exhibited by the model can be brought to the front by prompting the model to behave as specific persona. This theoretical result is being experimentally demonstrated in large scale by the so called contemporary "chatGPT jailbreaks", where adversarial users trick the LLM into breaking its alignment guardrails by triggering it into acting as a malicious persona. Our results expose fundamental limitations in alignment of LLMs and bring to the forefront the need to devise reliable mechanisms for ensuring AI safety.

(tags: papers ethics llms ai ml infosec security prompt-hacking exploits alignment)

Solein

A protein powder made from renewable electricity, requiring virtually no land, with a tiny carbon footprint, and resilient to climate or ecosystem shocks, unlike conventional agriculture. Apparently the resulting powder tastes nutty and a little like turmeric. Basically it ferments a type of airborne microbe, in a process that is 20x more efficient than photosynthesis, and 200x more than meat protein. They claim it to be "highly nutritious, vegan, and catering to every diet around. The macronutrient composition of the cells is very similar to that of dried soy or algae, but it is more versatile since it has pleasant note of umami flavor and mild aroma." Also ideal for space! (Via Hannah Daly)

(tags: solein protein food climate fermentation)

Xandr's online-ads segment list

"From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You" – The Markup:

If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital ad industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you. But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, The Markup has analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr. The trove of data indicates that advertisers could also target people based on sensitive information like being “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy test kits, having an interest in brain tumors, being prone to depression, visiting places of worship, or feeling “easily deflated” or that they “get a raw deal out of life.”

(tags: ads data-privacy xandr microsoft segmentation advertising privacy)

Fact check: why Rowan Atkinson is wrong about electric vehicles

much better than Atkinson's bullshit-soaked spiel about EVs. Don't listen to washed-out comedians when you need science

(tags: environment business energy cars driving evs carbon sustainability)

Restarters Wiki

"a place where those of us in the Restarters community with experience and skills in mending appliances and gadgets can share them with those who are starting out, or whose own knowledge lies in different areas." Lots of good tips on general appliance repair and maintenance.

(tags: diy hardware repair wiki maintenance appliances fixing)

"The Fallacy of AI Functionality"

I love this paper! I've been saying this for years:

Deployed AI systems often do not work. They can be constructed haphazardly, deployed indiscriminately, and promoted deceptively. However, despite this reality, scholars, the press, and policymakers pay too little attention to functionality. This leads to technical and policy solutions focused on “ethical” or value-aligned deployments, often skipping over the prior question of whether a given system functions, or provides any benefits at all. To describe the harms of various types of functionality failures, we analyze a set of case studies to create a taxonomy of known AI functionality issues. We then point to policy and organizational responses that are often overlooked and become more readily available once functionality is drawn into focus. We argue that functionality is a meaningful AI policy challenge, operating as a necessary first step towards protecting affected communities from algorithmic harm.

(tags: papers false-positives ai ml fail software reliability enshittification)

A single bit flip nearly resulted in nuclear annihilation in 1980

On 3 June 1980, at 2:26am EDT, "warning displays at the Strategic Air Command suddenly indicated that a Soviet SLBM attack on the United States was underway, first showing 2 and then, 18 seconds later, 200 inbound missiles. SAC ordered all alert air crews to start their engines." "A subsequent investigation traced the cause to a defective 46¢ integrated circuit in a NORAD communications multiplexer, which sent test messages on dedicated lines from NORAD to other command posts. The test messages were designed to confirm those lines were functioning properly 24/7, and they were formatted to resemble an actual missile attack warning, including its size. The false alarm was triggered when the defective circuit randomly inserted 2’s in place of 0’s." I wonder how many other near-armageddon incidents were barely averted...

(tags: nukes armageddon 1980s bit-flips errors testing norad sac usa)

Carbon aware temporal shifting of Kubernetes workloads using KEDA

"The Carbon Aware KEDA Operator was announced by Microsoft in April this year; ... The operator builds on top of KEDA (Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaling). Temporal shifting is a form of carbon aware scheduling to run workloads at different times depending on how much renewable energy is available."

(tags: carbon co2 keda k8s scheduling ops scaling autoscaling microsoft sustainability)

Kaspersky reports new targeted malware on iOS

They are dubbing it "Triangulation":

We believe that the main reason for this incident is the proprietary nature of iOS. This operating system is a “black box” in which spyware like Triangulation can hide for years. Detecting and analyzing such threats is made more difficult by Apple’s monopoly of research tools, making it the perfect haven for spyware. In other words, as I have said more than once, users are given the illusion of security associated with the complete opacity of the system. What actually happens in iOS is unknown to the cybersecurity experts.

(tags: ios malware infosec security kaspersky triangulation)

Chemical found in widely used sweetener breaks up DNA

Sucralose, as used in Splenda, is genotoxic. big yikes

(tags: genotoxic sucralose sweeteners additives soft-drinks junk-food food health)

"Data protection IS AI regulation"

The FTC have proposed a judgement against Amazon/Ring: "FTC says Ring employees illegally surveilled customers, failed to stop hackers from taking control of users' cameras. Under proposed order, Ring will be prohibited from profiting from unlawfully collected consumer videos, pay $5.8M in consumer refunds." Meredith Whittaker on Twitter, responding: "Speaking of real AI regulation grounded in reality! The part about Amazon being "prohibited from profiting from unlawfully collected consumer videos" is huge. Data protection IS AI regulation. & in this case will likely mean undoing datasets, retraining/disposing of models, etc." Retraining/discarding datasets is a HUGE deal for AI/ML companies. This is the big stick for regulators. I hope the EU DPCs are paying attention to this judgement.

(tags: regulation ai ml training data-protection privacy ring amazon ftc)

Kapsalon

New fast food frankenstein dish just dropped:

a fast food dish created in 2003 in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, consisting of a layer of french fries placed into a disposable metal take-away tray, topped with döner or gyro meat, covered with slices of Gouda cheese, and heated in an oven until the cheese melts. Then a layer of shredded iceberg lettuce is added, dressed with garlic sauce and sambal, a hot sauce from Indonesia .. The term kapsalon is Dutch for "hairdressing salon" or barber shop, alluding to one of the inventors of the dish who worked as a hairdresser.

(tags: kapsalon fast-food dutch holland rotterdam)

Mel's Loop

"The Story of Mel" is a legendary USENET story of "Mel", a Real Programmer from back in the day, performing a truly impressive piece of optimization; a "paean to seat-of-the-pants machine coding", as Micheal puts it. This site is a little shrine to Mel's life and history from a MeFi user. (Via Meehawl)

(tags: mefi hacks mel usenet history computing-history via:meehawl machine-code)

Why the United States should prioritize autonomous demining technology

Excellent "AI for good" idea from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Investments in and development of technologies for autonomous demining operations, post war, are long overdue and consistent with the White House’s push for a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which vows to use autonomy for the public good. Alas, while the Defense Department has pursued autonomous systems for the battlefield and the unincentivized private sector has focused on producing dancing robotic dogs, efforts to develop autonomous demining technology have stagnated. The United States should provide funding to energize those efforts, regardless of what decision is made in regard to sending cluster bombs to Kiev.

(tags: demining ai future warfare mines tech)

AI Hiring and Ghost Jobs Are Making the Job Search, Labor Market Weird

The AI enshittification continues:

Job seekers may virtually interview with or be prescreened by an artificial-intelligence program such as HireVue, Harver, or Plum. After someone applies to a job at a company that uses this software, they may receive an automated survey asking them to answer inane personality-assessment questions like "Which statement describes you best? (a) I love debating academic theories or (b) I adopt a future emphasis." [...] And these AI-moderated processes might not be fair, either. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, say that AI decision-making systems could have a 44% chance of being embedded with gender bias, a 26% chance of displaying both gender and race bias, and may also be prone to screening out applicants with disabilities. In one notorious case, an audit of an AI screening tool found that it prioritized candidates who played high-school lacrosse or were named "Jared."

(tags: jared ai enshittification future jobs work hirevue harver plum ghost-jobs hiring)

Erasure Coding versus Tail Latency - Marc's Blog

A very neat trick via Marc Brooker to improve tail latencies using erasure coding: 'Say I have an in-memory cache of objects. I can keep any object in the cache once, and always go looking for it in that one place (e.g. with consistent hashing). If that place is slow, overloaded, experiencing packet loss, or whatever, I'll see high latency for all attempts to get that object. With hedging I can avoid that, if I store the object in two places rather than one, at the cost of doubling the size of my cache. But what if I wanted to avoid the slowness and not double the size of my cache? Instead of storing everything twice, I could break it into (for example) 5 pieces .. encoded in such a way that I could reassemble it from any four pieces .. . Then, when I fetch, I send five get requests, and have the whole object as soon as four have returned. The overhead here on requests is 5x, on bandwidth is worst-case 20%, and on storage is 20%. The effect on tail latency can be considerable.'

(tags: architecture cache storage tail-latencies performance marc-brooker lambda erasure-coding algorithms latency)

Container Loading in AWS Lambda

Some lovely details in this writeup of a new system in AWS Lambda, via Marc Brooker:

This system gets performance by doing as little work as possible (deduplication, caching, lazy loading), and then gets resilience by doing slightly more work than needed (erasure coding, salted deduplication, etc). This is a tension worth paying attention to in all system designs.

(tags: architecture aws lambda marc-brooker performance storage caching containers caches)

Paper recommending continuing COVID-19 vaccination for kids

tl;dr: vaccination of kids is worth it to protect against Long Covid and hospitalisation. "A Methodological Framework for Assessing the Benefit of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination following Previous Infection: Case Study of Five- to Eleven-Year-Olds", Christina Pagel et al.:

We present a novel methodological framework for estimating the potential benefits of COVID-19 vaccination in previously infected children aged five to eleven, accounting for waning. We apply this framework to the UK context and for two adverse outcomes: hospitalisation related to SARS-CoV-2 infection and Long Covid. We show that the most important drivers of benefit are: the degree of protection provided by previous infection; the protection provided by vaccination; the time since previous infection; and future attack rates. Vaccination can be very beneficial for previously infected children if future attack rates are high and several months have elapsed since the previous major wave in this group. Benefits are generally larger for Long Covid than hospitalisation, because Long Covid is both more common than hospitalisation and previous infection offers less protection against it. Our framework provides a structure for policy makers to explore the additional benefit of vaccination across a range of adverse outcomes and different parameter assumptions. It can be easily updated as new evidence emerges.

(tags: vaccines vaccination covid-19 sars-cov-2 modelling long-covid uk)

EU hits Meta with record €1.2B privacy fine

The EDPB finally had to step in and override the pet regulator, our DPC. Here's the big problem though:

Meta also has until November 12 to delete or move back to the EU the personal data of European Facebook users transferred and stored in the U.S. since 2020 and until a new EU-U.S. deal is reached.

(tags: meta facebook dpc edpb data-protection data-privacy eu us fines)

Dropbox testing HTTP3

"dark testing", live in production, to a separate test domain. Great way to gather some real-world data. Latencies are appreciably better, particularly for low-quality connections

(tags: dropbox http3 http2 http protocols udp networking ip testing)

My students are using AI to cheat. Here’s why it’s a teachable moment

One of the reasons so many people suddenly care about artificial intelligence is that we love panicking about things we don’t understand. Misunderstanding allows us to project spectacular dangers on to the future. Many of the very people responsible for developing these models (who have enriched themselves) warn us about artificial intelligence systems achieving some sort of sentience and taking control of important areas of life. Others warn of massive job displacement from these systems. All of these predictions assume that the commercial deployment of artificial intelligence actually would work as designed. Fortunately, most things don’t. That does not mean we should ignore present and serious dangers of poorly designed and deployed systems. For years predictive modeling has distorted police work and sentencing procedures in American criminal justice, surveilling and punishing Black people disproportionately. Machine learning systems are at work in insurance and health care, mostly without transparency, accountability, oversight or regulation. We are committing two grave errors at the same time. We are hiding from and eluding artificial intelligence because it seems too mysterious and complicated, rendering the current, harmful uses of it invisible and undiscussed. And we are fretting about future worst-case scenarios that resemble the movie The Matrix more than any world we would actually create for ourselves. Both of these habits allow the companies that irresponsibly deploy these systems to exploit us. We can do better. I will do my part by teaching better in the future, but not by ignoring these systems and their presence in our lives.

(tags: ai future education teaching society)

mattwebbio/orbital-sync

Synchronize multiple Pi-hole instances; it basically runs the standard backup API on the primary instance, then restores that config to the secondary, ensuring it constantly stays in sync

(tags: pi-hole high-availability home dns synchronization ops)

StanzaSystems/awesome-load-management

"A repo of links to articles, papers, conference talks, and tooling related to load management in software services: loadshedding, circuitbreaking, quota management and throttling. PRs welcome." (via Niall Murphy)

(tags: load-shedding circuit-breakers quota-management throttling papers architecture patterns via:niallm)

MySQL Raft at Meta

Sounds like a massive improvement in operational management of MySQL fleets. Here's hoping AWS might steal a few ideas for RDS

(tags: mysql ops replicas replication raft distributed-systems meta)

Inside DataDog’s $5M Outage (Real-World Engineering Challenges #8)

Reading between the lines: Ubuntu unattended-upgrades were left enabled, and as a result a fix which required a full reboot was rolled out swiftly and globally, including a key fleet of network control hosts, regardless of any normal deployment phasing rules. This broke all regions and AZs within a 1 hour period. whoopsie

(tags: postmortem datadog ubuntu fail unattended-upgrades systemd bugs availability outages)

Kafka vs Redpanda Performance

I don't use either service, but this is actually an excellent writeup of some high-end performance optimization on modern Linux EC2-based systems with NVMe SSDs, and the benchmarking of same

(tags: kafka redpanda benchmarks ec2 aws ssd optimization performance ops)

Never Give Artificial Intelligence the Nuclear Codes

Something new to worry about -- giving an AI the keys to the nukes:

Any country that inserts AI into its [nuclear] command and control will motivate others to follow suit, if only to maintain a credible deterrent. Michael Klare, a peace-and-world-security-studies professor at Hampshire College, has warned that if multiple countries automate launch decisions, there could be a “flash war” analogous to a Wall Street “flash crash.” Imagine that an American AI misinterprets acoustic surveillance of submarines in the South China Sea as movements presaging a nuclear attack. Its counterstrike preparations would be noticed by China’s own AI, which would actually begin to ready its launch platforms, setting off a series of escalations that would culminate in a major nuclear exchange.

(tags: ai command-and-control nuclear-war nuclear flash-war)

In defence of swap

Common misconceptions about swap memory on Linux systems:

Swap is a useful tool to allow equality of reclamation of memory pages, but its purpose is frequently misunderstood, leading to its negative perception across the industry. If you use swap in the spirit intended, though – as a method of increasing equality of reclamation – you'll find that it's a useful tool instead of a hindrance. Disabling swap does not prevent disk I/O from becoming a problem under memory contention, it simply shifts the disk I/O thrashing from anonymous pages to file pages. Not only may this be less efficient, as we have a smaller pool of pages to select from for reclaim, but it may also contribute to getting into this high contention state in the first place.

(tags: linux memory performance swap vm oom)

Solar Quote Analyser

handy web tool to figure out if a quote for a domestic solar PV install in Ireland is cheap, on the money, or too pricey

(tags: quotes solar-pv solar home money finance)

Coinbase spent $65M on Datadog

in one year -- Sixty. Five. Million. Dollars.

(tags: datadog saas coinbase fail lol money)

eSIMs for data roaming in the US

$42 for 20GB of 5G/4G LTE data, and can provide a mobile hotspot for other devices. Looks like a decent enough deal for EU travellers visiting the US, where low-cost data roaming isn't available (via ITC Slack)

(tags: mobile esims data roaming data-roaming travel usa)

ellie/atuin

"Magical shell history":

Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands. Additionally, it provides optional and fully encrypted synchronisation of your history between machines, via an Atuin server.

(tags: cli history shell unix atuin terminals)

vapes aren't 95% less harmful than cigarettes

Debunking this common misconception around e-cigarettes

(tags: cigarettes vapes smoking vaping health debunking fact-checks)

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?

Great stuff from Ted Chiang:

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place. The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey?

(tags: ai capitalism mckinsey future politics ted-chiang)

f3write, f3read - test real flash memory capacity

'F3 (Fight Flash Fraud or Fight Fake Flash) tests the full capacity of a flash card (flash drive, flash disk, pendrive). It writes to the card and then checks if it can read it. It will assure you haven't been sold a card with a smaller capacity than stated.'

(tags: f3read f3write f3 sd-cards flash memory storage testing hardware via:bigbro)

The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn

As you encounter these ideologies [Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism] in the wild, you might use the TESCREAL lens, and its alignment with Eurasianism and Putin’s agenda, to evaluate them, and ask whether they tend to undermine or enhance the project of liberal democracy. TESCREAL ideologies tend to advance an illiberal agenda and authoritarian tendencies, and it’s worth turning a very critical eye towards them, especially in cases where that’s demonstrably true. Clearly there are countless well-meaning people trying to use technology and reason to improve the world, but that should never come at the expense of democratic, inclusive, fair, patient, and just governance. The biggest risk AI poses right now is that alarmists will use the fears surrounding it as a cudgel to enact sweeping policy reforms. We should resist those efforts. Now more than ever, we should be guided by expertise, facts, and evidence as we seek to use technology in ways that benefit everyone.

(tags: ideology future tescreal ea longtermism ai politics silicon-valley)

heightened risk of autoimmune diseases after Covid

More evidence of a "substantially increased risk of developing a diverse spectrum of new-onset autoimmune diseases":

Previously we knew there were many features of autoimmunity engendered by Covid, but the link to manifesting important autoimmune diseases has not been established. There are still many dots not connected—it’s fuzzy. We need to better understand how the dysregulation of our immune system that can occur from a Covid infection (or even more rarely from a vaccine) can be linked with a serious autoimmune condition. While we’ve fully recognized that people with autoimmune diseases are more vulnerable to Covid and adverse outcomes, the flip of that — that Covid can make some people vulnerable to autoimmune diseases — is what’s new.

(tags: covid-19 long-covid pasc autoimmune diseases health medicine research eric-topol)

In a small study, an AI 'brain decoder' inches toward reading minds

In a new Nature Neuroscience paper published Monday, Huth and a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin introduced a new “brain decoder” enabled by GPT-1, an earlier version of the artificial neural network technology that underpins ChatGPT. After digesting several hours of training data, the new tool was able to describe the gist of stories the three participants in the proof-of-concept experiment listened to — just by looking at their functional MRI scans.

“It is important to constantly evaluate what the implications are of new brain decoders for mental privacy,” said Jerry Tang, a Ph.D. candidate in Huth’s lab and lead author on the paper, in a press briefing. In devising ways to protect privacy, the authors asked participants to try to prevent the decoder from reconstructing the words they were hearing several different ways. Particularly effective methods included mentally listing off animals, and telling a different story at the same time the podcast was playing were particularly effective at stopping the decoder, said Tang. The authors also found that the decoder had to be trained on each subject’s data and wasn’t effective when used on another person. Between these findings and the fact that any movement would make the fMRI scans worse, the authors concluded that it’s not currently possible for a brain decoder to be used on someone against their will.

(tags: fmri scanning brain mri mindreading gpt podcasts)

Inside LAION

"A High School Teacher’s Free Image Database Powers AI Unicorns":

To build LAION, founders scraped visual data from companies such as Pinterest, Shopify and Amazon Web Services — which did not comment on whether LAION’s use of their content violates their terms of service — as well as YouTube thumbnails, images from portfolio platforms like DeviantArt and EyeEm, photos from government websites including the US Department of Defense, and content from news sites such as The Daily Mail and The Sun. If you ask Schuhmann, he says that anything freely available online is fair game. But there is currently no AI regulation in the European Union, and the forthcoming AI Act, whose language will be finalized early this summer, will not rule on whether copyrighted materials can be included in big data sets. Rather, lawmakers are discussing whether to include a provision requiring the companies behind AI generators to disclose what materials went into the data sets their products were trained on, thus giving the creators of those materials the option of taking action. [...] “It has become a tradition within the field to just assume you don’t need consent or you don’t need to inform people, or they don’t even have to be aware of it. There is a sense of entitlement that whatever is on the web, you can just crawl it and put it in a data set,” said Abeba Birhane, a Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation.

(tags: consent opt-in web ai ml laion training-data scraping)

Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

Fantastic thread of hackers scratching their own itch (via SimonW)

(tags: via:simonw hacking projects hn hacks open-source)

informative Twitter thread on the LessWrong/rationalist/"AI risk"/effective altruism cult

"some people understand immediately when i try to explain what it was like to be fully in the grip of the yudkowskian AI risk stuff and some people it doesn't seem to land at all, which is probably good for them and i wish i had been so lucky". Bananas...

(tags: cults ai-risk yudkowski future rokos-basilisk lesswrong effective-altruism)

Introducing VirusTotal Code Insight: Empowering threat analysis with generative AI

Impressively, when these models are trained on programming languages, they can adeptly transform code into natural language explanations. [...] Code Insight is a new feature based on Sec-PaLM, one of the generative AI models hosted on Google Cloud AI. What sets this functionality apart is its ability to generate natural language summaries from the point of view of an AI collaborator specialized in cybersecurity and malware. This provides security professionals and analysts with a powerful tool to figure out what the code is up to.  At present, this new functionality is deployed to analyze a subset of PowerShell files uploaded to VirusTotal. The system excludes files that are highly similar to those previously processed, as well as files that are excessively large. This approach allows for the efficient use of analysis resources, ensuring that only the most relevant files (such as PS1 files) are subjected to scrutiny. In the coming days, additional file formats will be added to the list of supported files, broadening the scope of this functionality even further.

(tags: virustotal analysis malware code reverse-engineering infosec security)

How Philly Cheesesteaks Became a Big Deal in Lahore, Pakistan

This is fascinating history:

An establishment with a legacy such as [The Lahore Gymkhana Club, founded in 1878 under British rule] needed to continue revamping itself and serve exclusive dishes for its high-end clientele. And the club, along with restaurants aspiring to serve continental food, was bolstered by a growing taste for a new ingredient in town: processed cheese. “Sandwiches gradually started becoming popular in the 1980s because of the [wider] availability of cheese and mushrooms,” says Chaudhry. Until the 1980s, processed cheese was largely imported, and its use was limited to the rich, who would frequent establishments such as the Gymkhana. As Lahori taste buds adapted to and appreciated cheese, production was initiated locally. Demand for cheeseburgers and sandwiches skyrocketed in the 1990s, with a growing number of Pakistanis who’d traveled to the U.S. aspiring to re-create offerings from various popular American chains. One of these is exceptionally familiar. Even today, online food groups in Pakistan are peppered with people asking the community where they can find a cheese­steak in Lahore “like the one at Pat’s.” Many of them post images of the cheese­steaks from the original shop at 9th and Passyunk.

(tags: food cheesesteaks philadelphia history pakistan lahore sandwiches)

"Nothing like this will be built again"

Charlie Stross visits the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors at Torness nuclear power station:

The AGRs at Torness [in the UK] are not ordinary civil [nuclear] power reactors. Designed in the 1970's, they were the UK's bid to build an export-earning civil nuclear power system. They're sensitive thoroughbreds, able to reach a peak conversion efficiency of 43% -- that is, able to turn up to 43% of their energy output into electricity. By comparison, a PWR peaks at 31-32%. However, the PWRs have won the race for commercial success: they're much, much, simpler. AGRs are like Concorde -- technological marvels, extremely sophisticated and efficient, and just too damned expensive and complex for their own good. (You want complexity? Torness was opened in 1989. For many years thereafter, its roughly fifty thousand kilometres of aluminium plumbing made it the most complex and demanding piece of pipework in Europe. You want size? The multi-thousand ton reactor core of an AGR is bigger than the entire plant at some PWR installations.) It's a weird experience, crawling over the guts of one of the marvels of the atomic age, smelling the thing (mostly machine oil and steam, and a hint of ozone near the transformers), all the while knowing that although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. "Energy too cheap to meter" it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat.

(tags: engineering nuclear-power agr history uk torness power plumbing)

The Toronto Recursive History Project

"This plaque was commemorated on October 10, 2018, commemorate its own commemoration. Plaques like this one are an integral part of the campaign to support more plaques like this one. By reading this plaque, you have made a valuable addition to the number of people who have read this plaque. To this day and up to the end of this sentence, this plaque continues to be read by people like yourself. Heritage Toronto 2018"

(tags: heritage toronto recursive plaque commemoration funny)

Palantir Demos AI to Fight Wars But Says It Will Be Totally Ethical Don’t Worry About It

This is a really atrocious idea:

Palantir also isn’t selling a military-specific AI or large language model (LLM) here, it’s offering to integrate existing systems into a controlled environment. The AIP demo shows the software supporting different open-source LLMs, including  FLAN-T5 XL, a fine-tuned version of GPT-NeoX-20B, and Dolly-v2-12b, as well as several custom plug-ins. Even fine-tuned AI systems off the shelf have plenty of known issues that could make asking them what to do in a warzone a nightmare. For example, they’re prone to simply making things up, or “hallucinating.” GPT-NeoX-20B in particular is an open-source alternative to GPT-3, a previous version of OpenAI’s language model, created by a startup called EleutherAI. One of EleutherAI’s open-source models -- fine-tuned by another startup called Chai -- recently convinced a Belgian man who spoke to it for six weeks to kill himself.  What Palantir is offering is the illusion of safety and control for the Pentagon as it begins to adopt AI. [...] What AIP does not do is walk through how it plans to deal with the various pernicious problems of LLMs and what the consequences might be in a military context. AIP does not appear to offer solutions to those problems beyond “frameworks” and “guardrails” it promises will make the use of military AI “ethical” and “legal.”

(tags: palantir grim-meathook-future war llm aip military ai ethics)

Silence Isn't Consent

More on yesterday's img2dataset failure to support opt-in:

It isn't "effective altruism" if you have to force people to comply with you.

(tags: img2dataset ai scraping web consent opt-in)

Google Launched Bard Despite Major Ethical Concerns From Its Employees

"The staffers who are responsible for the safety and ethical implications of new products have been told not to get in the way or to try to kill any of the generative AI tools in development," employees told Bloomberg. The ethics team is now "disempowered and demoralized," according to former and current staffers. Before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google's approach to AI was more cautious and less consumer-facing, often working in the background of tools like Search and Maps. But since ChatGPT's enormous popularity prompted a "code red" from executives, Google's threshold for safe product releases has been lowered in an effort to keep up with its AI competitors.

(tags: google ai safety chatgpt bard corporate-responsibility)

Shitty behaviour around the img2dataset AI scraper

The author of this popular AI training data scraping tool doesn't seem to understand consent and opt-in:

Letting a small minority [ie web publishers] prevent the large majority [AI users] from sharing their images and from having the benefit of last gen AI tool would definitely be unethical yes. Consent is obviously not unethical. You can give your consent for anything if you wish. It seems you're trying to decide for million of other people without asking them for their consent.

(tags: opt-in consent ai ml bad-behaviour scraping robots)

Why is British media so transphobic?

Aside from the weirdness of Mumsnet, I didn't know about the influence of the mid-2000s skeptics movement:

While claiming to be the country’s foremost critical thinkers, the group was riddled with anti-humanities bias and a fetish for a certain kind of “science” that it held to reveal a set of immutable principles upon which the world was built with almost no regard whatsoever for interpretative analysis based on social or historical factors. Part of this mode of thinking was an especially reductivist biologism: the idea that there are immutable realities to be found in our DNA, and if we just paid enough attention to Science and stopped trying to split hairs and discover meaning over in the superfluous disciplines of the humanities, then everything would be much simpler. It’s precisely this kind of biological essentialism — which skirts dangerously close to eugenics — that leads people to think they can “debunk” a person’s claim to their gender identity, or that it should be subjected to rigorous testing by someone in a lab coat before we can believe the subject is who they say they are.

(tags: debunking scepticism skeptics history terfs uk uk-politics gender)

Long COVID Is Being Erased -- Again - The Atlantic

Ed Yong is back writing again!

Most Americans simply aren’t thinking about COVID with the same acuity they once did; the White House long ago zeroed in on hospitalizations and deaths as the measures to worry most about. And what was once outright denial of long COVID’s existence has morphed into something subtler: a creeping conviction, seeded by academics and journalists and now common on social media, that long COVID is less common and severe than it has been portrayed—a tragedy for a small group of very sick people, but not a cause for societal concern. This line of thinking points to the absence of disability claims, the inconsistency of biochemical signatures, and the relatively small proportion of severe cases as evidence that long COVID has been overblown. “There’s a shift from ‘Is it real?’ to ‘It is real, but …,’” Lekshmi Santhosh, the medical director of a long-COVID clinic at UC San Francisco, told me. Yet long COVID is a substantial and ongoing crisis—one that affects millions of people. However inconvenient that fact might be to the current “mission accomplished” rhetoric, the accumulated evidence, alongside the experience of long haulers, makes it clear that the coronavirus is still exacting a heavy societal toll.

(tags: long-covid ed-yong covid-19 health medicine society healthcare)

OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it

Spot on:

The company could have saved itself a giant headache by building in robust data record-keeping from the start, she says. Instead, it is common in the AI industry to build data sets for AI models by scraping the web indiscriminately and then outsourcing the work of removing duplicates or irrelevant data points, filtering unwanted things, and fixing typos. These methods, and the sheer size of the data set, mean tech companies tend to have a very limited understanding of what has gone into training their models. 

(tags: training data provenance ai ml common-crawl openai chatgpt data-protection privacy)

Holly Herndon on AI music

she really gets it. Lots of interesting thoughts

(tags: holly-herndon ai music ml future tech sampling spawning)

Don’t follow the sun

"Scheduling compute workloads to chase green energy can be counter-productive" -- Adrian Cockroft:

I suggest that the best policy is to optimize your workloads so that they can run on fewer more highly utilized instances, minimize your total footprint in Asia where possible, and to use the spot market price as a guide for when to run workloads.

(tags: adrian-cockroft scheduling cloud ops green sustainability cron)

Moca adapters

TIL you can run ethernet over coax at 2.5gbps. Long gone are the days of vampire taps and 10BASE2

(tags: coax ethernet networking wired moca cabling home)

Prompt injection: what’s the worst that can happen?

Good roundup from Simon Willison on this brave new world of exploits. 'Any time you see anyone demonstrating a new application built on top of LLMs, join me in being the squeaky wheel that asks “how are you taking prompt injection into account?”'

(tags: ai llm security chatgpt exploits prompt-injection)

"Why Banker Bob (still) Can’t Get TLS Right: A Security Analysis of TLS in Leading UK Banking Apps"

Jaysus this is a litany of failure.

Abstract. This paper presents a security review of the mobile apps provided by the UK’s leading banks; we focus on the connections the apps make, and the way in which TLS is used. We apply existing TLS testing methods to the apps which only find errors in legacy apps. We then go on to look at extensions of these methods and find five of the apps have serious vulnerabilities. In particular, we find an app that pins a TLS root CA certificate, but do not verify the hostname. In this case, the use of certificate pinning means that all existing test methods would miss detecting the hostname verification flaw. We also find one app that doesn’t check the certificate hostname, but bypasses proxy settings, resulting in failed detection by pentesting tools. We find that three apps load adverts over insecure connections, which could be exploited for in-app phishing attacks. Some of the apps used the users’ PIN as authentication, for which PCI guidelines require extra security, so these apps use an additional cryptographic protocol; we study the underlying protocol of one banking app in detail and show that it provides little additional protection, meaning that an active man-in-the-middle attacker can retrieve the user’s credentials, login to the bank and perform every operation the legitimate user could.

(tags: ssl tls certificates certificate-pinning security infosec banking apps uk pci mobile)

Using DuckDB to repartition parquet data in S3

Wow, DuckDB is very impressive -- I had no idea it could handle SELECTs against Parquet data in S3:

A common pattern to ingest streaming data and store it in S3 is to use Kinesis Data Firehose Delivery Streams, which can write the incoming stream data as batched parquet files to S3. You can use custom S3 prefixes with it when using Lambda processing functions, but by default, you can only partition the data by the timestamp (the timestamp the event reached the Kinesis Data Stream, not the event timestamp!). So, a few common use cases for data repartitioning could include: Repartitioning the written data for the real event timestamp if it's included in the incoming data; Repartitioning the data for other query patterns, e.g. to support query filter pushdown and optimize query speeds and costs; Aggregation of raw or preprocessed data, and storing them in an optimized manner to support analytical queries.

(tags: duckdb repartitioning s3 parquet orc hive kinesis firehose)

Timnit Gebru's anti-'AI pause'

Couldn't agree more with Timnit Gebru's comments here:

What is your appeal to policymakers? What would you want Congress and regulators to do now to address the concerns you outline in the open letter? Congress needs to focus on regulating corporations and their practices, rather than playing into their hype of “powerful digital minds.” This, by design, ascribes agency to the products rather than the organizations building them. This language obfuscates the amount of data that is being collected — and the amount of worker exploitation involved with those who are labeling and supplying the datasets, and moderating model outputs. Congress needs to ensure corporations are not using people’s data without their consent, and hold them responsible for the synthetic media they produce — whether it is text or media spewing disinformation, hate speech or other types of harmful content. Regulations need to put the onus on corporations, rather than understaffed agencies. There are probably existing regulations these organizations are breaking. There are mundane “AI” systems being used daily; we just heard about another Black man being wrongfully arrested because of the use of automated facial analysis systems. But that’s not what we’re talking about, because of the hype.

(tags: data privacy ai ml openai monopoly)

caesarHQ/textSQL

This is amazing -- using GPT-3.5 to convert a natural-language query into SQL applied to a specific dataset, in these examples, San Francisco city data and US public census data:

With CensusGPT, you can ask any question related to census data in natural language. These natural language questions get converted to SQL using GPT-3.5 and are then used to query the census database. Here are some examples: - Five cities with a population over 100,000 and lowest crime - 10 highest income areas in california Here is a similar example from sfGPT: - Which four neighborhoods had the most crime in San Francisco in 2021?

(tags: sfgpt censusgpt textsql natural-language gpt-3.5 sql querying search open-source)

Exploring performance differences between Amazon Aurora and vanilla MySQL | Plaid

This is a major difference between vanilla MySQL and Amazon Aurora (and a potentially major risk!):

because Aurora MySQL primary and replica instances share a storage layer, they share a set of undo logs. This means that, for a REPEATABLE READ isolation level, the storage instance must maintain undo logs at least as far back as could be required to satisfy transactional guarantees for the primary or any read replica instance. Long-running replica transactions can negatively impact writer performance in Aurora MySQL—finally, an explanation for the incident that spawned this investigation. The same scenario plays out differently in vanilla MySQL because of its different model for undo logs. Vanilla MYSQL: there are two undo logs – one on the writer, and one on the reader. The performance impact of an operation that prevents the garbage collection of undo log records will be isolated to either the writer or the reader. Aurora MySQL: there is a single undo log that is shared between the writer and reader. The performance impact of an operation that prevents the garbage collection of undo log records will affect the entire cluster.

(tags: aurora aws mysql performance databases isolation-levels)

EV Database

Comparison site for electric cars; actually has a realistic model of genuine range for each EV. Full details on charging connectors, charge curves (for charging speed), etc.

(tags: ev driving cars vehicles)

The Black Magic of (Java) Method Dispatch

Some fascinating details of low-level Java performance optimization, particularly with JIT applied to OO method dispatch:

Programming languages like Java provide the facilities for subtyping/polymorphism as one of the ways to construct modular and reusable software. This language choice naturally comes at a price, since there is no hardware support for virtual calls, and therefore runtimes have to emulate this behavior. In many, many cases the performance of method dispatch is not important. Actually, in a vast majority of cases, the low-level performance concerns are not the real concerns. However, there are cases when method dispatch performance is important, and there you need to understand how dispatch works, what runtimes optimize for you, and what you can do to cheat and/or emulate similar behavior in your code. For example, in the course of String Compression work, we were faced with the problem of selecting the coder for a given String. The obvious and highly maintainable approach of creating a Coder interface, a few implementations, and dispatching the virtual calls over it, had met some performance problems on the very tiny benchmarks. Therefore, we needed to contemplate something better. After a few experiments, this post was born as a reference for others who might try to do the same. This post also tangentially touches the inlining of virtual calls, as the natural thing during the optimization.

(tags: optimization performance java oo jit coding polymorphism)

MariaDB.com is dead, long live MariaDB.org

Oof. Looks like the commercial company behind MariaDB is going south quickly:

Monty, the creator of MySQL and MariaDB founder, hasn’t been at a company meeting for over a year and a half. The relationship between Monty and the CEO, Michael Howard, is extremely rocky. At a company all-hands meeting Monty and Michael Howard were shouting at each other while up on stage in the auditorium in front of the entire staff. Monty made his position perfectly clear as he shouted his last words before he walked out: “You’re killing my fu&#@$! company!!!” Monty was subsequently voted off the board in July of 2022 solidifying the hostile takeover by Michael Howard. Buyer beware, Monty and his group of founders and database experts are no longer at the company.

(tags: databases storage mariadb software open-source companies)

Google "raters" say they don't have enough time to verify correct answers from Bard

Contractors say they have a set amount of time to complete each task, like review a prompt, and the time they're allotted for tasks can vary wildly — from as little as 60 seconds to more than several minutes. Still, raters said it's difficult to rate a response when they are not well-versed in a topic the chatbot is talking about, including technical topics like blockchain for example.  Because each assigned task represents billable time, some workers say they will complete the tasks even if they realize they cannot accurately assess the chatbot responses.  "Some people are going to say that's still 60 seconds of work, and I can't recoup this time having sat here and figured out I don't know enough about this, so I'm just going to give it my best guess so I can keep that pay and keep working," one rater said.

(tags: google raters contractors fact-checking verification llms bard facts)

CAN Injection: keyless car theft

detailed description of the attack process in use currently by car thieves to steal vehicles by injecting key-unlock signal frames into the CAN bus

(tags: can-bus security cars driving infosec exploits can-injection)

Nintendo Will Repair Out-Of-Warranty Joy-Con For Free In The UK, EEA, Switzerland

FINALLY

(tags: nintendo joycons hardware repair warranty joycon-drift)

Three ways AI chatbots are a security disaster  | MIT Technology Review

yyyyyup.

Because the AI-enhanced virtual assistants scrape text and images off the web, they are open to a type of attack called indirect prompt injection, in which a third party alters a website by adding hidden text that is meant to change the AI’s behavior. Attackers could use social media or email to direct users to websites with these secret prompts. Once that happens, the AI system could be manipulated to let the attacker try to extract people’s credit card information, for example.  Malicious actors could also send someone an email with a hidden prompt injection in it. If the receiver happened to use an AI virtual assistant, the attacker might be able to manipulate it into sending the attacker personal information from the victim’s emails, or even emailing people in the victim’s contacts list on the attacker’s behalf.

(tags: chatgpt prompt-injection security exploits gpt-4)

TESCREAL

'standing for “transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism.”' Good explainer thread

(tags: tescreal transhumanism extropianism singularitarianism cosmism rationalism effective-altruism longtermism)

Searching for global copyright laws in all the wrong places: An examination of the legality of OpenAI’s data scraping

I’m not sure who is advising GitHub, but the suggestion that the unauthorized use of “publicly available data is consistent with global copyright laws” is a fantastical claim, for any number of reasons, and that’s even before addressing the ridiculous notion that machines learn “much as humans have done throughout history.”

(tags: openai github copyright microsoft law training)

Hey, did you know inkjet cartridges are region-locked? - The Verge

well, looks like I won't ever buy another HP printer

(tags: inkjets hp region-locking consumer-rights bullshit)

A misleading open letter about sci-fi AI dangers ignores the real risks

This essay is spot on about the recent AI open letter from the Future of Life Institute, asking for "a 6-month pause on training language models “more powerful than” GPT-4":

Over 1,000 researchers, technologists, and public figures have already signed the letter. The letter raises alarm about many AI risks: "Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?" We agree that misinformation, impact on labor, and safety are three of the main risks of AI. Unfortunately, in each case, the letter presents a speculative, futuristic risk, ignoring the version of the problem that is already harming people. It distracts from the real issues and makes it harder to address them. The letter has a containment mindset analogous to nuclear risk, but that’s a poor fit for AI. It plays right into the hands of the companies it seeks to regulate.

(tags: ai scifi future risks gpt-4 regulation)

AI and the American Smile. How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression

There are 18 images in the Reddit slideshow [a series of Midjourney-generated images of "selfies through history"] and they all feature the same recurring composition and facial expression. For some, this sequence of smiling faces elicits a sense of warmth and joyousness, comprising a visual narrative of some sort of shared humanity [...] But what immediately jumped out at me is that these AI-generated images were beaming a secret message hidden in plain sight. A steganographic deception within the pixels, perfectly legible to your brain yet without the conscious awareness that it’s being conned. Like other AI “hallucinations,” these algorithmic extrusions were telling a made up story with a straight face — or, as the story turns out, with a lying smile. [...] How we smile, when we smile, why we smile, and what it means is deeply culturally contextual.

(tags: ai america culture photography midjourney smiling smiles context history)

Heat pump myths

"Social media and newspapers are flooded with myths about heat pumps. Let's take them one by one in this post."

(tags: myths mythbusting heat-pumps heating house home)

Belgian man dies by suicide following exchanges with chatbot

Grim. This is the downside of LLM-based chatbots with ineffective guardrails against toxic output.

"Without these conversations with the chatbot, my husband would still be here," the man's widow has said, according to La Libre. She and her late husband were both in their thirties, lived a comfortable life and had two young children. However, about two years ago, the first signs of trouble started to appear. The man became very eco-anxious and found refuge with ELIZA, the name given to a chatbot that uses GPT-J, an open-source artificial intelligence language model developed by EleutherAI. After six weeks of intensive exchanges, he took his own life.

(tags: bots chatbots ai gpt gpt-j grim future grim-meathook-future)

draft-ietf-httpapi-idempotency-key-header-02

Adding an "Idempotency-Key:" header to HTTP to control idempotent operation on REST APIs. (via Tomasz Nurkiewicz)

(tags: via:nurkiewicz idempotency http standards ietf rest apis)

SARS-CoV-2 is a "textbook virus"

Excellent thread from Dr. Michael Mina:

Ive written SARS-CoV-2 is a “textbook virus” • Textbook does NOT mean mild; • Textbook viruses kill people; • Textbook viruses harm long-term immunity; • Textbook viruses cause dizzying amounts of poorly understood debilitating problems I explain w examples here!

(tags: virology covid-19 sars-cov-2 viruses medicine)

What Will Transformers Transform? – Rodney Brooks

This is a great essay on GPT and LLMs:

Roy Amara, who died on the last day of 2007, was the president of a Palo Alto based think tank, the Institute for the future, and is credited with saying what is now known as Amara’s Law: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." This has been a common problem with Artificial Intelligence, and indeed of all of computing. In particular, since I first became conscious of the possibility of Artificial Intelligence around 1963 (and as an eight year old proceeded to try to build my own physical and intelligent computers, and have been at it ever since), I have seen these overestimates many many times.

I think that GPTs will give rise to a new aphorism (where the last word might vary over an array of synonymous variations): "If you are interacting with the output of a GPT system and didn’t explicitly decide to use a GPT then you’re the product being hoodwinked." I am not saying everything about GPTs is bad. I am saying that, especially given the explicit warnings from OpenAI, that you need to be aware that you are using an unreliable system. Using an unreliable system sounds awfully unreliable, but in August 2021 I had a revelation at TED in Monterey, California, when Chris Anderson (the TED Chris), was interviewing Greg Brockman, the Chairman of Open AI about an early version of GPT. He said that he regularly asked it questions about code he wanted to write and it very quickly gave him ideas for libraries to use, and that was enough to get him started on his project. GPT did not need to be fully accurate, just to get him into the right ballpark, much faster than without its help, and then he could take it from there. Chris Anderson (the 3D robotics one, not the TED one) has likewise opined (as have responders to some of my tweets about GPT) that using ChatGPT will get him the basic outline of a software stack, in a well tread area of capabilities, and he is many many times more productive than with out it. So there, where a smart person is in the loop, unreliable advice is better than no advice, and the advice comes much more explicitly than from carrying out a conventional search with a search engine. The opposite of useful can also occur, but again it pays to have a smart human in the loop. Here is a report from the editor of a science fiction magazine which pays contributors. He says that from late 2022 through February of 2023 the number of submissions to the magazine increased by almost two orders of magnitude, and he was able to determine that the vast majority of them were generated by chatbots. He was the person in the loop filtering out the signal he wanted, human written science fiction, from vast volumes of noise of GPT written science fiction. Why should he care? Because GPT is an auto-completer and so it is generating variations on well worked themes. But, but, but, I hear people screaming at me. With more work GPTs will be able to generate original stuff. Yes, but it will be some other sort of engine attached to them which produces that originality. No matter how big, and how many parameters, GPTs are not going to to do that themselves. When no person is in the loop to filter, tweak, or manage the flow of information GPTs will be completely bad. That will be good for people who want to manipulate others without having revealed that the vast amount of persuasive evidence they are seeing has all been made up by a GPT. It will be bad for the people being manipulated. And it will be bad if you try to connect a robot to GPT. GPTs have no understanding of the words they use, no way to connect those words, those symbols, to the real world. A robot needs to be connected to the real world and its commands need to be coherent with the real world. Classically it is known as the “symbol grounding problem”. GPT+robot is only ungrounded symbols. It would be like you hearing Klingon spoken, without any knowledge other than the Klingon sound stream (even in Star Trek you knew they had human form and it was easy to ground aspects of their world). A GPT telling a robot stuff will be just like the robot hearing Klingonese. My argument here is that GPTs might be useful, and well enough boxed, when there is an active person in the loop, but dangerous when the person in the loop doesn’t know they are supposed to be in the loop. [This will be the case for all young children.] Their intelligence, applied with strong intellect, is a key component of making any GPT be successful.

(tags: gpts rodney-brooks ai ml amaras-law hype technology llms future)

Employees Are Feeding Sensitive Business Data to ChatGPT

How unsurprising is this? And needless to say, a bunch of that is being reused for training:

In a recent report, data security service Cyberhaven detected and blocked requests to input data into ChatGPT from 4.2% of the 1.6 million workers at its client companies because of the risk of leaking confidential information, client data, source code, or regulated information to the LLM.  In one case, an executive cut and pasted the firm's 2023 strategy document into ChatGPT and asked it to create a PowerPoint deck. In another case, a doctor input his patient's name and their medical condition and asked ChatGPT to craft a letter to the patient's insurance company.

(tags: chatgpt openai ip privacy data-protection security)

GitHub Copilot is open to remote prompt-injection attacks

GitHub Copilot is also based on a large language model. What does indirect prompt injection do to it? Again, we demonstrate that, as long as an attacker controls part of the context window, the answer is: pretty much anything. Attackers only have to manipulate the documentation of a target package or function. As you reference and use them, this documentation is loaded into the context window based on complex and ever-changing heuristics. We show [...] how importing a synthetic library can lead Copilot to introduce subtle or not-so-subtle vulnerabilities into the code generated for you.

(tags: injection copilot security exploits github llms chatgpt)

systemd on Proxmox freaks out at Irish DST

many reports from Proxmox users across Ireland -- seems there's a bug in systemd timezone code when handling daylight savings in the Europe/Dublin timezone (which is unique because it causes "mktime moving backward for change to "summer time" [...] as for them the summer time is the standard time". (via Kiall)

(tags: via:kiall proxmox dst daylight-savings timezones ireland systemd)

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow

What we have here is an early sign we’re stumbling into a massive game of AI misinformation telephone, in which chatbots are unable to gauge reliable news sources, misread stories about themselves, and misreport on their own capabilities. In this case, the whole thing started because of a single joke comment on Hacker News. Imagine what you could do if you wanted these systems to fail. It’s a laughable situation but one with potentially serious consequences. Given the inability of AI language models to reliably sort fact from fiction, their launch online threatens to unleash a rotten trail of misinformation and mistrust across the web, a miasma that is impossible to map completely or debunk authoritatively. All because Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI have decided that market share is more important than safety.

(tags: google ai ml microsoft openai chatgpt trust spam misinformation disinformation)

Vatican flag SVG on Wikimedia Commons was incorrect for 5 years, and widely copied

In 2017 a Wikimedia Commons user changed the inside of the tiara to red because that's how it appears on the Vatican Coat of Arms. But this assumption turned out to be faulty, because the official flag spec sheet uses different colors than the Coat of Arms. The mistake was quickly noticed by an anonymous IP who wrote an extensive and well-researched explanation of the error on the file's talk page. Unfortunately, nobody read it, and the mistake lived on for 5 years before another user noticed it and reverted the file.

(tags: wikipedia wikimedia commons vatican flags oops)

ThumbHash

"A very compact representation of an image placeholder. Store it inline with your data and show it while the real image is loading for a smoother loading experience."

(tags: graphics images webdev compression lossy thumbnails)

new LFP batteries will unlock cheaper electric vehicles

Lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) batteries, the type to be produced at the new [Ford] plant are a lower-cost alternative to the nickel- and cobalt-containing batteries used in most electric vehicles in the US and Europe today. While the technology has grown in popularity in China, Ford’s factory, developed in partnership with the Chinese battery giant CATL, marks a milestone in the West. By cutting costs while also boosting charging speed and extending lifetime, LFP batteries could help expand EV options for drivers. 

(tags: lfp technology ev cars batteries renewable-energy)

You Broke Reddit: The Pi-Day Outage : RedditEng

Quality post-mortem writeup of last week's Reddit outage. tl;dr: an in-place Kubernetes upgrade broke it. We use blue/green deployments -- with two separate parallel k8s clusters -- in order to avoid this risk, as k8s upgrades are very very risky in our experience; tiny "minor" changes often seem to cause breakage.

(tags: k8s kubernetes outages reddit ops post-mortems)

Superb thread on effective AI regulation

from Baldur Bjarnason:

First, you clarify that for the purposes of Section 230 protection (or similar), whoever provides the AI as a service is responsible for its output as a publisher. If Bing Chat says something offensive then Microsoft would be as liable as if it were an employee; You'd set a law requiring tools that integrate generative AI to attach disclosures to the content. Gmail/Outlook should pop up a notice when you get an email that their AI generated. Word/Docs should have metadata fields and notices when you open files that have used built-in AI capabilities. AI chatbots have to disclose that they are bots. Copilot should add a machine-parsable code comment. You could always remove the metadata, but doing so would establish an intent to deceive; Finally, you'd mandate that all training data sets be made opt-in (or that all of its contents are released under a permissive license) and public. Heavy fines for non-disclosure. Heavy fines for violating opt-in. Even heavier fines for lying about your training data set. Make every AI model a "vegan" model. Remove every ethical and social concern about the provenance and rights regarding the training data.

(tags: ai regulation data-privacy training llm ethics)

Bing Chat is still vulnerable to hidden prompt injection attacks

happily parses hidden text in webpages, acting on information there that isn't visible to human viewers. Related: https://twitter.com/matteosonoioo/status/1630941926454185992/photo/1 , where Matteo Contrini demonstrated an attack to turn it into a scammer with prompt injection.

(tags: bing-chat bing chatgpt openai prompt-injection exploits attacks hidden-text)

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

A true Onion classic from 20 years ago -- prescient, needless to say

(tags: fair-and-balanced iraq usa war history 2003 the-onion funny satire balance)

Pop Culture Pulsar: Origin Story of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures Album Cover

Great dig into the CP1919 pulsar signal plot that was used for "Unknown Pleasures":

This plotting of sequences like this, it started just a little bit earlier when we were looking at potentially drifting subpulses within the major pulse itself. So, the thought was, well, is there something like this peak here, which on the next pulse moves over here, and then moves over here, and over there. Actually, would be moving this way in that case – either way. I think Frank Drake and I published a paper in Science Magazine on exactly that issue – suggesting there might be drifting subpulses within the major pulse, which would then get back to the physics of what was causing the emission in the first place. So, then the thought was, well let’s plot out a whole array of pulses, and see if we can see particular patterns in there. So that’s why, this one was the first I did – CP1919 – and you can pick out patterns in there if you really work at it. But I think the answer is, there weren’t any that were real obvious anyway. I don’t really recall, but my bet is that the first one of these that I did, I didn’t bother to block out the stuff, and I found that it was just too confusing. So then, I wrote the program so that I would block out when a hill here was high enough, then the stuff behind it would stay hidden. And it was pretty easy to do from a computer perspective.

(tags: design joy-division music science physics pulsars astronomy cp1919 dataviz)

moyix/gpt-wpre: Whole-Program Reverse Engineering with GPT-3

This is a little toy prototype of a tool that attempts to summarize a whole binary using GPT-3 (specifically the text-davinci-003 model), based on decompiled code provided by Ghidra. However, today's language models can only fit a small amount of text into their context window at once (4096 tokens for text-davinci-003, a couple hundred lines of code at most) -- most programs (and even some functions) are too big to fit all at once. GPT-WPRE attempts to work around this by recursively creating natural language summaries of a function's dependencies and then providing those as context for the function itself. It's pretty neat when it works! I have tested it on exactly one program, so YMMV.

(tags: gpt-3 reverse-engineering ghidra decompilation reversing llm)

LAION contains medical data

Jesus -- the legality of the poorly-policed Common Crawl training data is WAY worse than I thought, check this out:

When Lapine used it to scan the LAION database, she found an image of her own face. She was able to trace this image back to photographs taken by a doctor when she was undergoing treatment for a rare genetic condition. The photographs were taken as part of her clinical documentation, and she signed documents that restricted their use to her medical file alone. The doctor involved died in 2018. Somehow, these private medical images ended up online, then in Common Crawl’s archive and LAION’s dataset.

(tags: ai ml fair-use copyright common-crawl training laion photos medical-data hipaa)

Vintage Sunglasses and Vintage Eyewear from Klasik.Org

it's coming up to new specs time... some amazing Michael Caine style here

(tags: sunglasses specs glasses shopping vintage retro)

The Yvan Collection – Curry & Paxton

More retro specs action

(tags: retro vintage specs tvan curry-and-paxton michael-caine glasses shopping)

Cat6a FTP Tool-Less Keystone Module

For future use -- CAT6A cable endpoints which don't require tricky crimping: "no crimp tool required at all, very much worth the extra cost, and they clip into the wall sockets or a patch panel ... you can do them with your fingers and a flush snips to get rid of the ends after you push the wires in" says Adam C on ITC Slack, at https://irishtechcommunity.slack.com/archives/C11BG27L2/p1678841261913069

(tags: cat6a wiring home networking cables via:itc)

Infra-Red, In Situ (IRIS) Inspection of Silicon

Cool:

This post introduces a technique I call “Infra-Red, In Situ” (IRIS) inspection. It is founded on two insights: first, that silicon is transparent to infra-red light; second, that a digital camera can be modified to “see” in infra-red, thus effectively “seeing through” silicon chips. We can use these insights to inspect an increasingly popular family of chip packages known as Wafer Level Chip Scale Packages (WLCSPs) by shining infrared light through the back side of the package and detecting reflections from the lowest layers of metal using a digital camera. This technique works even after the chip has been assembled into a finished product. However, the resolution of the imaging method is limited to micron-scale features.

(tags: electronics hardware reversing bunnie-huang infrared x-ray-vision silicon)

1 in 35 Long COVID sufferers died within a year

This is a really shocking figure -- via Daniel Griffin MD: 1 in 35 people with PASC dead before a year passed, if they survived that first 30 days. Given that current estimates are that 65 million people worldwide now have long COVID, that's going to be quite an impact

(tags: covid-19 mortality grim long-covid via:daniel-griffin)

The privacy loophole in your doorbell

Here's why you never install internet-connected cameras inside your house: 'Police were investigating his neighbor. A judge gave officers access to all his security-camera footage, including inside his home.'

(tags: amazon police privacy surveillance dystopia us-politics)

Seabirds are not at risk from offshore wind turbines

At least according to this survey by Swedish power giant Vattenfall:

The movements of herring gulls, gannets, kittiwakes, and great black-backed gulls were studied in detail from April to October, when bird activity is at its height. (This study only looked at four bird species, but Vattenfall says the model can and should be applied to more types of seabirds and to onshore wind farms as well.) The study’s findings: Not a single collision between a bird and a rotor blade was recorded.

(tags: seabirds birds safety wind-turbines offshore-wind renewables wildlife)

Metformin, a new drug to prevent long covid

'Over a thousand people with mild-to-moderate Covid were randomly assigned to 2 weeks of metformin (500 mg pills, 1 on day 1, twice a day for 4 days, then 500 mg in AM and 1000 mg in PM for 9 days) or placebo. There was a 42% reduction of subsequent Long Covid as you can see by the event curve below, which corresponds to an absolute decrease of 4.3%, from 10.6% reduced to 6.3%.' Still no use for _treating_ long COVID though.

(tags: covid-19 long-covid metformin drugs papers)

WhatsApp screenshots of Boris Johnson's innumeracy

we are so lucky in Ireland that we didn't have to suffer this kind of idiocy driving our COVID response. Jaw-dropping levels of blustering ignorance and innumeracy

(tags: boris-johnson fail covid-19 uk uk-politics whatsapp)

Badger 2040 W (Pico W Aboard)

"A programmable badge with fast updating E-Ink® display and wireless connectivity, powered by Raspberry Pi Pico W." Lots of possibilities for these, and only EUR25!

(tags: raspberry-pi gadgets toget pico e-ink hardware hacking)

ChatGPT for r/BuyItForLife

This is actually really effective; the past 3 years of product recommendations from r/BuyItForLife, queryable using ChatGPT (via valen)

(tags: via:valen ai recommendations search products reviews)

Hundreds of residents vent anger over 'entirely pointless' hydrogen heating trial

Greenwashing grey hydrogen as a "renewable" means of keeping home gas heating alive is not going well in Whitby:

Influential energy analyst Michael Liebreich and University of Cambridge mechanical engineering professor David Cebon drew attention to the now-37 independent studies showing that hydrogen boilers would require about five times more renewable energy than heat pumps — likely making them significantly more expensive to run. “This trial is entirely pointless in terms of proving whether hydrogen is the most cost-effective way of decarbonising homes,” Liebreich told the audience. “Every single systems analysis from every single expert who is not paid for by the gas industry or the heating industry has concluded that hydrogen plays little or no role. “The thing that it’s intended to do, though, is maintain the debate and discussion and the delay [of decarbonisation]. If you’re running a gas network organisation, as our next speaker [Cadent head of strategy, Angela Needle] does, what you really want is to continue to harvest profits off that. If you invest today in a gas distribution network, you get to charge 6% per year for 45 years on that investment and that’s until 2068.”

(tags: hydrogen h2 grey-hydrogen greenwashing gas natural-gas heating homes decarbonisation)

Nokia G22

This is a decent product -- "Nokia has announced one of the first budget Android smartphones designed to be repaired at home allowing users to swap out the battery in under five minutes, in partnership with iFixit." I've been planning to buy a more repairable phone for my next iteration, so it's either this or a Fairphone.

(tags: android hardware nokia phones right-to-repair repair ifixit)

copyright-respecting AI model training

Alex J Champandard is thinking about how AI model training can be done in a copyright-respecting and legal fashion:

With the criticism of web-scale datasets, it's legitimate to ask the question: "What models are trained with best-in-class Copyright practices?" Answer: StyleGAN and FFHQ github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset 100% transparent dataset, clear copyright, opt-in licensing, model respects terms.

(tags: copyright legal rights ip ai ml models training stylegan ffhq flickr)

The tech tycoon martyrdom charade

Anil Dash:

It's impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble. Their level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes. In a way, it's sort of like a "VC Qanon", and it colors almost everything that some of the most powerful people in the tech industry see and do — and not just in their companies or work, but in culture, politics and society overall. We're already seeing more and more irrational, extremist decision-making that can only be understood through this lens, because on its own their choices seem increasingly unfathomable.

(tags: vc tech anil-dash radicalization politics us-politics)

Better Thermostat

Interesting smart home component for Home Assistant --

This custom component will add crucial features to your climate-controlling TRV (Thermostatic Radiator Valves) to save you the work of creating automations to make it smart. It combines a room-temperature sensor, window/door sensors, weather forecasts, or an ambient temperature probe to decide when it should call for heat and automatically calibrate your TRVs to fix the imprecise measurements taken in the radiator’s vicinity.

(tags: thermostat smart-home home-assistant heating trvs)

AWS' proprietary SRD protocol

"ENA Express is a networking feature that uses the AWS Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol to improve network performance in two key ways: higher single flow bandwidth and lower tail latency for network traffic between EC2 instances. SRD is a proprietary protocol that delivers these improvements through advanced congestion control, multi-pathing, and packet reordering directly from the Nitro card." Right now this supports only intra-EC2 networking between instances running on the latest generation of instance types.

(tags: srd networking protocols ip ena-express aws amazon multi-pathing congestion-control nitro)

Eric Schmidt Is Building the Perfect AI War-Fighting Machine

Do you want Skynet? because that's how you get Skynet

(tags: ai war us-politics eric-schmidt silicon-valley military weapons)

a COVID-aware activity tracker

Interesting thought experiment regarding chronic disease, long COVID, ME/CFS etc: 'what might be in a convalescence mode, or a rest mode? And while I’m thinking of that, there’s a separate need, I think (hey! validate through research!) for, I don’t know, a chronic illness mode, because convalescence and rest are different things with different qualities distinct from the requirements and needs of people with long-term chronic illnesses. Some people who responded to my thinking-out-loud thread shared that you can use sleep tracking as a way to inform the spoons-for-the-day.'

(tags: apple fitness accessibility convalescence chronic-disease activity-tracking long-covid me)

A New Drug Switched Off My Appetite. What’s Left? | WIRED

How long is it before there’s an injection for your appetites, your vices? Maybe they’re not as visible as mine. Would you self-administer a weekly anti-avarice shot? Can Big Pharma cure your sloth, lust, wrath, envy, pride? Is this how humanity fixes climate change—by injecting harmony, instead of hoping for it at Davos?

(tags: mounjaro food eating weight calories future)

Silicon Valley tech companies are the real paperclip maximizers

Another good Ted Chiang article --

Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” [...] This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies. Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.

(tags: superintelligence ted-chiang silicon-valley capitalism ai future civilization paperclip-maximisers)

"The machine automation of lace at the beginning of the 19th Century is the origin story of modern computing"

The origins of computing, via Jacquard, Byron, Lovelace and Babbage -- great thread from James Kelleher. lovely prints, too

(tags: prints lace lacemaking computing history jacquard byron babbage ada-lovelace punch-cards)

Where To Bring Visitors For Irish Food In Dublin

Decent list of Dublin eateries --

As a nation we're still more well known for our imbibements than culinary prowess, but there's no question that's changing, and we feel it’s our patriotic duty to show visitors just how incredible the food in Dublin is. Consider this list as your go-to guide next time you want to show that Dublin is a whole lot more than fish & chips, full Irish breakfasts and spice bags (no disrespect to any of these fine dishes).

(tags: food dublin tourism restaurants irish)

_Building Machine Learning Models Like Open-Source Software_

ACM Viewpoint from Colin Raffel:

'This Viewpoint advocates for tools and research advances that will allow pre-trained [machine learning] models to be built in the same way that we build open source software. Specifically, models should be developed by a large community of stakeholders that continually updates and improves them. Realizing this goal will require porting many ideas from open source software development to the building and training of pre-trained models, which motivates many new research problems and connections to existing fields.'

(tags: training machine-learning ml ai acm open-source)

halcy/Mastodon.py

'Python wrapper for the Mastodon ( https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/ ) API' -- looks nice and simple

(tags: api mastodon python libraries)

Raspberry Pi alternatives

Interesting thread on the current state of low-cost/low-power server hardware; I didn't realise thin client boxes were so viable for this use case, these days. (I've just replaced my current home server with an ODROID HC4, and I'm absolutely delighted with it, though...)

(tags: servers home gadgets hardware linux raspberry-pi)

GoMoWorld

GoMo, the Irish mobile phone operator, is offering roaming eSIMs with 10GB of data roaming in the US for EUR19.99 per month

(tags: data-roaming roaming usa gomo esims mobile travel)

Irish FTTH line checker

A rather retro-looking (but very functional) aggregated line checker website to check availability of fibre to the home broadband services at your Eircode.

(tags: via:itc ftth broadband internet networking fibre siro openeir)

Study of 500,000 Medical Records Links Viruses to Alzheimer's Again And Again

While not demonstrating a causal link, the correlations are pretty striking -- good argument for greatly increasing vaccination rates for many viral diseases.

Around 80 percent of the viruses implicated in brain diseases were considered 'neurotrophic', which means they could cross the blood-brain barrier. "Strikingly, vaccines are currently available for some of these viruses, including influenza, shingles (varicella-zoster), and pneumonia," the researchers write. "Although vaccines do not prevent all cases of illness, they are known to dramatically reduce hospitalization rates. This evidence suggests that vaccination may mitigate some risk of developing neurodegenerative disease." The impact of viral infections on the brain persisted for up to 15 years in some cases. And there were no instances where exposure to viruses was protective.

(tags: viruses health medicine vaccines vaccination alzheimers parkinsons diseases)

ddbsh

'DynamoDB Shell (ddbsh) is an interactive CLI for Amazon DynamoDB', emulating an SQL-like command syntax, from AWS Labs

(tags: aws dynamodb cli tools unix sql)

I Work for CNET’s Parent Company. Its AI-Generated Articles Disgust Me.

A human freelancer might have a typo here or there, or maybe a misconception about APR versus APY. But an article by an AI can be total, authoritative-sounding gibberish. The poor editor in charge of fact-checking whatever the Machine produces isn’t looking for a needle in a haystack; they’re faced with a stack of needles, many of which look remarkably like hay.

(tags: ai chatgpt red-ventures cnet journalism churnalism future grim)

CNET's AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism

CNET used an AI to generate automated content for their site, and are definitely in the "finding out" stage from the looks of things:

All told, a pattern quickly emerges. Essentially, CNET's AI seems to approach a topic by examining similar articles that have already been published and ripping sentences out of them. As it goes, it makes adjustments — sometimes minor, sometimes major — to the original sentence's syntax, word choice, and structure. Sometimes it mashes two sentences together, or breaks one apart, or assembles chunks into new Frankensentences. Then it seems to repeat the process until it's cooked up an entire article. [...] The question of exactly how CNET's disastrous AI was trained may end up taking center stage as the drama continues to unfold. At a CNET company meeting late last week [...] the outlet's executive vice president of content and audience refused to tell staff — many of them acclaimed tech journalists who have written extensively about the rise of machine learning — what data had been used to train the AI. The legality of using data to train an AI without the consent of the people who created that data is currently being tested by several lawsuits against the makers of prominent image generators, and could become a flashpoint in the commercialization of the tech.

(tags: ai cnet content seo spam llms plagiarism training-data)

omni-epd

A Python module to abstract usage of several different types of EPD (electronic paper displays), including Inky and Waveshare hardware.

(tags: epd inky waveshare e-paper displays hardware python linux)

pycasso

"a picture frame to show you random AI art every day" -- nice little epd/pi hack

(tags: diy photos projects hacks epd e-paper ai art dall-e)

EC2 instance network error metrics

looks like Amazon are now exposing a bunch of error metrics for their EC2 instance network drivers in Linux

(tags: metrics ec2 ops drivers networking bandwidth errors)

The bivalent vaccine booster outperforms

Solid data now up for the bivalent BA.5 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, says Eric Topol: "we now have extensive data that is quite encouraging -- better and broader than expected -- that I’m going to briefly review here"

(tags: sars-cov-2 covid-19 vaccines eric-topol medicine health)

Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations

Current state of research into Long COVID, courtesy of Nature Reviews Microbiology.

Long COVID is an often debilitating illness that occurs in at least 10% of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections. More than 200 symptoms have been identified with impacts on multiple organ systems. At least 65 million individuals worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, with cases increasing daily. Biomedical research has made substantial progress in identifying various pathophysiological changes and risk factors and in characterizing the illness; further, similarities with other viral-onset illnesses such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome have laid the groundwork for research in the field. In this Review, we explore the current literature and highlight key findings, the overlap with other conditions, the variable onset of symptoms, long COVID in children and the impact of vaccinations. Although these key findings are critical to understanding long COVID, current diagnostic and treatment options are insufficient, and clinical trials must be prioritized that address leading hypotheses.

(tags: long-covid covid-19 health medicine reviews nature papers)

This app will self-destruct: How Belarusian hackers created an alternative Telegram

Great idea:

When a 25-year-old activist from Minsk who goes by Pavlo was detained by Belarusian KGB security forces last summer, he knew they would search his phone, looking for evidence of his involvement in anti-government protests. The police officer asked for Pavlo’s password to Telegram, the most popular messenger app among Belarusian activists, which he gave him. The officer entered it and... found nothing. All secret chats and news channels had disappeared, and after a few minutes of questioning Pavlo was released. Pavlo’s secret? A secure version of Telegram, developed by a hacktivist group from Belarus called the Cyber Partisans. Partisan Telegram, or P-Telegram, automatically deletes pre-selected chats when someone enters the so-called SOS password.

... after entering a fake [SOS] password, P-Telegram can automatically log out of the account, delete selected chats and channels, and even send a notification about the arrest of the account owners to their friends or families. P-Telegram also allows other activists to remotely activate the SOS password on the detainee’s phone. For this, they need to send a code word to any of the shared Telegram chats. Another feature on P-Telegram automatically takes photos of law enforcement officers on the front camera when they enter a fake password. “We warn users that this can be dangerous, as this photo will be stored on the phone, revealing that a person may use Partisan Telegram,” Shemetovets said.  Cyber Partisans are constantly updating their app, fixing bugs, and adding new features. They also regularly conduct independent audits to ensure that P-Telegram complies with all security measures. A recent audit by Open Technology Fund’s Red Team Lab proved that it is almost impossible for “casual observers without technical knowledge and specialized equipment” to identify the existence of P-Telegram on a device.

(tags: p-telegram hacktivism security telegram messaging privacy activism duress-passwords)