Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label tech stuff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tech stuff. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 07, 2023

Today's Great New Thing



The promise of great things is real, and the hype is really real, but the reality &/or the time it takes the Great New Thing to deliver on the promise always falls short, or it causes problems that can be quite a bit bigger than the one it was intended to solve.




Sunday, February 05, 2023

I'm Working On It


Embedding toots that I find on Mastodon isn't working very well.

I'm not sure what I'll be able to do about it, other than continuing to bitch about it to the Mastodon tech nerds.

Reddit finally got it squared away - hope springs eternal.

Sorry, guys.

Wednesday, February 01, 2023

Today's Beau


Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column, on AI and being ready to work harder on your powers of discernment.

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Where We Were

... where we are, and where the fuck do we go from here?

First it's a novelty

Then it's a tool

And then it's a weapon


A.I.: Actually Insipid Until It’s Actively Insidious

WASHINGTON — The alien invasion has begun.

Some experts say that when artificial intelligence takes off, it’s going to be like Martians landing on the National Mall.

So far, our mind children, as the roboticist Hans Moravec called our artificially intelligent offspring, are in the toddler phase, as we ooh and aah at the novelty of our creation. They’re headed for the rebellious teenage phase. When A.I. hurtles into adulthood and isn’t so artificial anymore, we’ll be relegated to being the family pets, as a resigned Steve Wozniak put it.

Silicon Valley is reeling at the prowess of an experimental chatbot called ChatGPT, released by OpenAI in late November and deemed “scary good” by Elon Musk. Musk, one of the founders with Sam Altman, left and now Microsoft is a partner.

There’s keening that ChatGPT — couldn’t they have come up with a better name, like HAL? — will eliminate millions of jobs. Why hire a college graduate if a bot can do the same work faster and cheaper? No more arguments about work-from-home rules, no more union fights. You don’t need to lure A.I. back into the office with pizza.

ChatGPT opens a Pandora’s box of existential fears. Silicon Valley brainiacs have talked about safeguards and kill switches for A.I., but you know they won’t pull the plug when their baby turns into M3gan.

Once A.I. can run disinformation campaigns at lightning speed, will democracy stand a chance? We seem headed toward a Matrix where “it will become cheaper to show fakes than to show reality,” Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, wrote in Tablet. Will bad actors use A.I. to promote bigotry or hijack nuclear weapons?

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As Musk once told me about his A.I. angst: “It’s great when the emperor is Marcus Aurelius. It’s not so great when the emperor is Caligula.”

Several years ago, I interviewed the OpenAI founders in San Francisco, as well as other Valley digerati. And that is when I realized that we are doomed. For the Lords of the Cloud, as they form their sleek new world, we’re VCRs.

That is why I feel free to kick back and shoot the breeze with our incipient overlords. I read that you could use advanced A.I. to interview historical figures. So I conducted my dream interview with Shakespeare, bantering with the Bard.

“Greetings, fair sir or madam,” ChatGPT said, embodying Shakespeare.

What is your response to those who think “The Merchant of Venice” is antisemitic?

“While it is true that some of the language and imagery used in the play may be considered offensive by modern standards,” he replied, Shylock “is a complex and multifaceted figure who is both villain and victim.”

The Bard of Avon, as he called himself, cautioned that while the Oscar-winning movie “Shakespeare in Love” was “whimsical,” “it should not be taken as a factual representation of my life.”

Can you write me a love sonnet?

He could, even though, as he said, he was “a mere machine.” One stanza read: “With eyes that shine like stars upon the sea, And lips as sweet as summer’s ripest fruit, Thou art the one my heart doth long to see, And in thy beauty, all my dreams take root.”

Shakespeare, it ain’t. Still, I tell him, I would love to be the heroine in a Shakespearean comedy! It took ChatGPT only moments to write “The Clever Maid.”

“Act I, Scene 1: A grand ball is being held in a grand estate. You, the fair maiden, are in attendance, dressed in the finest gowns. However, you are not there to dance and make merry, for you have a secret mission.

“Act II, Scene 1: You sneak away from the ball and make your way to the estate’s library. There, you discover a hidden door, which leads to a secret chamber. Inside, you find a chest filled with precious jewels.

“Act III, Scene 1: As you are admiring the jewels, you hear a noise. It is the estate’s owner, a wealthy and arrogant nobleman. He catches you red-handed but instead of punishing you, he is taken by your wit and charm.

“Act IV, Scene 1: The nobleman reveals that the jewels were a test of character and he had been seeking a clever and resourceful woman to be his wife. You are overjoyed and accept his proposal.

“Act V, Scene 1: The play ends with a grand wedding ceremony and a celebration of your cleverness and wit.”

Sounds more like a Salma Hayek heist movie. I spent the rest of the afternoon soliciting love poems from John Donne, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe, who called me a “telltale columnist.” I tried to channel Sylvia Plath, but ChatGPT told me that would be “inappropriate.”

The most entertaining mimicry was when A.I. Kendrick Lamar wrote me a rap: “Listen up, I got a story to tell, ’bout a journalist who’s sharp as a nail. She’s got the pen and the power, To make politicians cower.”

For now, ChatGPT is typing, not writing. The creative spark requires humanity. But soon, A.I. could be sentient. Then we’ll need our dog bowls.

To be clear - a machine is a machine is a machine. When it goes from electro-mechanical to bio-chemical, then I'll start to reconsider - but only if you can convince me this new type of machine can produce "original thought", and demonstrate some kind of organic curiosity.

How do I believe this artificial thing can recognize, much less develop a true appreciation for beauty?

How does it learn right from wrong, and how can it make those really awful decisions on doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing for the right reasons?

I can easily understand the high probability for AI to be total nerds that love math and have no fucking clue about how to get along socially. But how likely is it that an AI will be completely enamored with arts and language, but considers math and science to be a mystical wonderment?

Will AI invent gods?

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

On That "Truth" Thing

Trump's new venture - Truth Social - crashed. Because most new software thingies crash when first released, and...

No, actually they fucking don't. Not when they're developed and managed by professionals who know what the fuck they're doing.

Yes, there's always a glitch or two. And yes, the Beta Version is always kind of a wreck at first, which is why you do the Beta thing in a very limited environment. You don't just put the thing out there in wide release and let it crap out in public so everybody can see what a fucking disaster it is.

Of course, this is Trump, so - yeah.

A tech product that doesn't work as if by magic is not ready for the market.


BTW - all the hyperbolic attacks on "big tech" are being orchestrated (IMO) as pretext to the "conservative" plan to turn around and seize control of the platforms for information distribution, and of the info itself.

They make a big noise...

"All you faithful hard-working Americans are being victimized by Big Tech, and you need the strength of a strong leader to strongly show those weak-but-somehow-amazingly-powerful nerds who the strongest and strongly strengthiest boss really is."

...which makes it easier to convince people you're doing all this really nasty shit for all the right reasons.

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Today's Tweet



Flying cars!

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Today's PSA

I've never felt overly threatened being pulled over by the cops, so I have no real frame of reference, and it's hard to imagine the kind of abject terror someone of color would experience.

I may flash on something like, "Well shit, I guess this could be the end of my 20-year streak of no traffic tickets", but I've never ever ever thought, "Fuck me - I could be dead in a few minutes."

Here's something that may be of some help - and of course, I'm thinking there's a whole mess of authoritarian assholes who'll be attacking this with fervor and all due haste, using the usual sly reverse shit to fool the rubes into offering themselves up to be sacrificed by convincing them that it's actually just another scam by Soros and his cannibalistic space alien pedophiles to sucker them all into providing their personal data and specific location and blah blah foil-hat-bullshit blah.


Anyway, it's our right - and our responsibility - to accept a certain level of risk in order to hold power to account, and I think that's what this is aimed at accomplishing.

(I think this is kind of a stoopidly long and involved process that will likely flummox the majority of users, but here it is - it's a start anyway.)


How to use the Siri 'I'm Getting Pulled Over' shortcut to record police encounters during traffic stops with your iPhone

Launched as part of Apple's iOS 12 update, the Shortcuts app lets you create automated routines for your phone. In other words, with the Shortcuts app, you can say a phrase or tap a button, and your phone will perform multiple tasks at once.

Although it's made to let you create your own shortcuts, you can also download pre-made shortcuts from third-party apps or developers.

Arizona resident Robert Petersen used this update to create his own third-party shortcut, initially known as "Police" and now known as "I'm Getting Pulled Over." It aims to assist users during traffic stops by automatically recording their interactions with police officers.

Here's how to download and set up the "I'm Getting Pulled Over" shortcut, and then activate it with Siri.

How the "Siri, I'm getting pulled over" shortcut works

First developed in 2018, the shortcut activates the Do Not Disturb feature, turning off all incoming calls, messages, and notifications. This is to reduce the chance that a police officer will be startled by your phone ringing or flashing, and act aggressively.

Next, it'll send a text message with your current location to all the contacts that you've selected beforehand.

At the same time, your phone will start recording a video with the front camera (i.e. the one above the phone's screen).

These are the default settings, but you can customize them in various ways — for example, you can set it so it records with the rear camera instead.

How to download the "Siri, I'm Getting Pulled Over" shortcut

Enable Untrusted Shortcuts on your iPhone

Since the shortcut is made by a third-party, your iPhone will consider it an "untrusted" shortcut. This means you'll need to adjust your phone settings before you download and use it.

Important: Before you can enable untrusted shortcuts, you'll need to run at least one "trusted" shortcut. If you haven't done this yet, open the Shortcuts app and set up — then run — one of the "Starter Shortcuts." It should only take a few moments.

1. Open your Settings app and tap on Shortcuts. Depending on your version of iOS, it'll either be listed with the other iOS apps, or with the larger list of apps at the bottom.



2. Toggle on Allow Untrusted Shortcuts. Again, remember that before you can select this, you'll have to create and run at least one "trusted" Shortcut.



3. A pop-up window will warn you of potential risks. To continue, tap "Allow," and then enter your passcode.

Download the shortcut

1. Open this link in your iPhone's Safari browser.

2. The Shortcuts app will open, listing all of the shortcut's features. At the bottom, tap "Add Untrusted Shortcut."



3. Choose which contacts will receive a message with your location. Then hit "Continue."

4. Next, select which contacts will receive a copy of the video.

5. Now select "Done."



6. Back on the My Shortcuts tab, tap "All Shortcuts," and then tap the three dots (...) on the I'm getting pulled over shortcut.

7. Scroll down to the "Location" section and select "Allow Access," then tap "Allow While Using App."



8. Scroll down to the Messages, Camera, and Photo sections and do the same thing — tap "Allow Access," and then "OK."



9. In the Camera section, select Front or Back depending on what camera you want to start the recording with.



10. Scroll down to the Scripting "Choose from Menu" settings and choose where to store your video when the shortcut ends. You'll have the following options:
  • iCloud Drive
  • Dropbox
  • Do not upload
You can tap one of the red minus options to delete a location, or the green plus to add one.



11. When complete, choose "Done" to confirm your settings.

Friday, October 25, 2019

SkyNet Rising

We need constant reminding that we have to address the questions of "Can We Do This" versus "Should We Do This".

There's always a power dynamic at work, so even though "new stuff" is almost always originally intended to "make the world a better place", there are always people looking to devise ways of weaponizing it, and turning it to their own purposes in order to serve their own political agendas.

Media Assignment: Real Genius, 1985 - Val Kilmer, Gabriel Jarret, Jon Gries, William Atherton.



MIT Technology Review:

Once it was fashionable to fret about the prospect of super-intelligent machines taking over the world. The past year showed that AI may cause all sorts of hazards long before that happens.

The latest AI methods excel at perceptual tasks such as classifying images and transcribing speech, but the hype and excitement over these skills have disguised how far we really are from building machines as clever as we are. Six controversies from 2018 stand out as warnings that even the smartest AI algorithms can misbehave, or that carelessly applying them can have dire consequences.

1. Self-crashing cars

After a fatal accident involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars in March, investigators found that the company’s technology had failed catastrophically, in a way that could easily have been prevented.

Carmakers like Ford and General Motors, newcomers like Uber, and a horde of startups are hurrying to commercialize a technology that, despite its immaturity, has already seen billions of dollars in investment. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has made the most progress; it rolled out the first fully autonomous taxi service in Arizona last year. But even Waymo’s technology is limited, and autonomous cars cannot drive everywhere in all conditions.

What to watch for in 2019: Regulators in the US and elsewhere have so far taken a hands-off approach for fear of stifling innovation. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has even signaled that existing safety rules may be relaxed. But pedestrians and human drivers haven’t signed up to be guinea pigs. Another serious accident in 2019 might shift the regulators’ attitudes.

2. Political manipulation bots

In March, news broke that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting company, had exploited Facebook’s data sharing practices to influence the 2016 US presidential election. The resulting uproar showed how the algorithms that decide what news and information to surface on social media can be gamed to amplify misinformation, undermine healthy debate, and isolate citizens with different views from one another.

During a congressional hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised that AI itself could be trained to spot and block malicious content, even though it is still far from being able to understand the meaning of text, images, or video.

What to watch for in 2019: Zuckerberg’s promise will be tested in elections held in two of Africa’s biggest countries: South Africa and Nigeria. The long run-up to the 2020 US election has also begun, and it could inspire new kinds of misinformation technology powered by AI, including malicious chatbots.

3. Algorithms for peace

Last year, an AI peace movement took shape when Google employees learned that their employer was supplying technology to the US Air Force for classifying drone imagery. The workers feared this could be a fateful step towards supplying technology for automating deadly drone strikes. In response, the company abandoned Project Maven, as it was called, and created an AI code of ethics.

Academics and industry heavyweights have backed a campaign to ban the use of autonomous weapons. Military use of AI is only gaining momentum, however, and other companies, like Microsoft and Amazon, have shown no reservations about helping out.

What to watch out for in 2019: Although Pentagon spending on AI projects is increasing, activists hope a preemptive treaty banning autonomous weaponswill emerge from a series of UN meetings slated for this year.

4. A surveillance face-off

AI’s superhuman ability to identify faces has led countries to deploy surveillance technology at a remarkable rate. Face recognition also lets you unlock your phone and automatically tags photos for you on social media.

Civil liberties groups warn of a dystopian future. The technology is a formidable way to invade people’s privacy, and biases in training data make it likely to automate discrimination.

In many countriesChina especially—face recognition is being widely used for policing and government surveillance. Amazon is selling the technologyto US immigration and law enforcement agencies.

What to watch out for in 2019: Face recognition will spread to vehicles and webcams, and it will be used to track your emotions as well as your identity. But we may also see some preliminary regulation of it this year, too.

5. Fake it till you break it

A proliferation of “deepfake” videos last year showed how easy it is becoming make fake clips using AI. This means fake celebrity porn, lots of weird movie mashups, and, potentially, virulent political smear campaigns.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs), which involve two dueling neural networks, can conjure extraordinarily realistic but completely made-up images and video. Nvidia recently showed how GANs can generate photorealistic faces of whatever race, gender, and age you want.

What to watch for in 2019: As deepfakes improve, people will probably start being duped by them this year. DARPA will test new methods for detecting deepfakes. But since this also relies on AI, it’ll be a game of cat and mouse.

6. Algorithmic discrimination

Bias was discovered in numerous commercial tools last year. Vision algorithms trained on unbalanced data sets failed to recognize women or people of color; hiring programs fed historic data were proven to perpetuate discrimination that already exists.

Tied to the issue of bias—and harder to fix—is the lack of diversity across the AI field itself. Women occupy, at most, 30% of industry jobs and fewer than 25% of teaching roles at top universities. There are comparatively few black and Latin researchers as well.

What to expect in 2019: We’ll see methods for detecting and mitigating bias and algorithms that can produced unbiased results from biased data. The International Conference on Machine Learning, a major AI conference, will be held in Ethiopia in 2020 because African scientists researching problems of bias could have trouble getting visas to travel to other regions. Other events could also move.

The Long Term Hopeful part is that better people than this current crop of Daddy State assholes have been trying to conquer the world for more than 40,000 years, and the world remains undefeated.

The Short Term Worrisome part is that it's always a painful and bloody process convincing them of their folly.

Saturday, September 14, 2019

New Tech

Don't get me wrong - this is just too damned cool, but it reminds me strongly of using leeches and maggots to treat certain ailments.

They're making such great progress, even though they're still hung up on an Analog kind of approach.

The question is: When will we see this become the "weird shit they used to do"?

Sunday, March 31, 2019

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Holiday Safety Tip

Nothing spoils the Christmas mood like some thieving asshole.

And while I'd rather watch these dripping dicks get blown up, that wouldn't exactly be in keeping with the spirit of the season - or the law, for that matter. 

It's just good to know there are people out there who know how to do stuff, and do it in a way that makes the point while staying inside the boundaries (something we've been sorely missing of late).


May the fake lord bless you and keep you, Super Nerds.

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Kara Swisher

On Real Time with Bill Maher:


"...(social media) wasn't hacked by the Russians. They just walked right in and used them exactly the way they were intended to be used."

"...move fast and break things...well you've broken a lot of things, now what're you going to fix?"

I think I've got me a new crush.

Friday, August 10, 2018

Trashed

Knowing this is the state of our existence on Earth's surface...







...does it come as some kind of news that we'd have similar problems in our planetary neighborhood?


Is it really necessary to point out that we're headed for a bad end if we don't stop fouling the nest?

The Kessler Syndrome:

The Kessler syndrome is troublesome because of the domino effect and feedback runaway wherein impacts between objects of sizable mass spall off debris from the force of collision. The shrapnel can then hit other objects, producing even more space debris: if a large enough collision or explosion were to occur, such as between a space station and a defunct satellite, or as the result of hostile actions in space, then the resulting debris cascade could make prospects for long-term viability of satellites in low earth orbit extremely low.[6][7] However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites traveling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO)...
And if we're really serious about wanting to explore beyond our little cluster of cosmic dust particles, here's the kicker:

.. The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.

So, lemme see - if there's no chain reaction that kills all the tech shit that we have to have just to stay alive - much less go rocketing off into deep space - then the continued accumulation of space junk around the planet will constitute a barrier that we can't navigate thru as we try to rocket off into deep space.

For the one species with a big brain and all the smarts to rise above the other critters, we sure are pretty fuckin' stoopid sometimes.

Monday, June 19, 2017

Today's Tech Tip



Weeks of trouble-shooting your code can save you hours of planning.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Away For A Bit

So I'm doing the vacation thing here in Colorful Colorado, and my iPad is not the most effective tool for posting stuff.  Please excuse my inability to dazzle you with my brilliantly insightful horse shit for  a while.

Another thing I've noticed is that editing an existing post on iPad can be very difficult because there seems to be something of a glitch in that I can't scroll down thru the post that I'm trying to fix.

If anybody else is having the same problem, please take a moment and advise.  Thanks.

See y'all later.