Actually, it was a month ago, but hey - what would I do if I couldn't keep fucking myself over so I can get a good stiff dose of feeling the need to make excuses and apologize for it later?
Oct 28, 2019
Oct 27, 2019
Today's Tweet
Imagine the level of perverse discipline it takes to say this out loud with a straight face.
And the White House @PressSec Stephanie Grisham responded to former chief of staff John Kelly with a blistering comment. “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.”— Kelly O'Donnell (@KellyO) October 26, 2019
For reference (Business Insider):
On Saturday, Kelly said he regretted resigning as chief of staff. He added that he gave Trump advice on hiring his successor.
"I said, 'Whatever you do' — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said, 'Whatever you do, don't hire a yes man, someone who won't tell you the truth. Don't do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached,'" Kelly said.
BTW, none of what Kelly's been saying recently can reasonably accrue to his credit. He doesn't get to scrub his legacy clean now by pretending he is, or ever was, some kind of noble warrior in the middle of a rolling cluster fuck.
- Kelly pimped the policy of Cruelty-to-Immigrants-as-Deterrent-to-Immigration
- Kelly pushed for the building of US concentration camps
- Kelly is now - and has been - profiting from the companies making some big money on those camps.
John Kelly is no kind of hero.
Oct 26, 2019
Oct 25, 2019
Today's Beau
We are not drawing down in the middle east.
45* is not ending our involvement in the endless wars he blathers about whenever it serves his immediate need.
He's well into the Beta Test Phase of our exciting new revenue opportunity - Rent-A-Grunt.
Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column
Makes me wonder if Eric Prince has anything to do with this shit.
45* is not ending our involvement in the endless wars he blathers about whenever it serves his immediate need.
He's well into the Beta Test Phase of our exciting new revenue opportunity - Rent-A-Grunt.
Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column
Makes me wonder if Eric Prince has anything to do with this shit.
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 countries—China 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.
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 countries—China 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.
Oct 24, 2019
Yeah - About That
Steny Hoyer, Democrat, House Majority Leader, on MSNBC:
"The rules we are following for the depositions were written by Mike Pompeo and Trey Gowdy, Republicans.
47 Republicans are on the 3 committees the GOP is complaining they can’t attend. They’re already here. They've already heard 65 hours of testimony."
"The rules we are following for the depositions were written by Mike Pompeo and Trey Gowdy, Republicans.
47 Republicans are on the 3 committees the GOP is complaining they can’t attend. They’re already here. They've already heard 65 hours of testimony."
Congressional Mobsters
Something has gone horribly wrong with these guys.
The events we just witnessed in the House of Representatives will surely earn an honored place in the annals of congressional clownishness.
Just as the House Intelligence Committee was preparing to hear testimony from another important witness in the impeachment inquiry, a couple dozen Republican members of Congress stormed into the room, phones in hand, and started live-tweeting their protest.
Because the hearing was to be held in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF — after all, it involved potentially sensitive and classified information — that put Republicans in violation of the room’s ban on cellphones.
Why did Republicans want to disrupt the proceedings? Because the testimony on tap is likely to add to the case against President Trump, perhaps substantially.
The person set to testify is Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper, the Pentagon official in charge of policy toward Ukraine. The committee wants to nail down more information about the hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid appropriated for Ukraine that Trump withheld to leverage the Ukrainian government into launching sham investigations to help his reelection campaign.
- snip -
“They know that Laura Cooper today would corroborate parts of that very damning testimony against the president,” Lieu continued. “And they’re trying to stop that from going forward.”
This display of lawlessness is not a small matter. As former congressional aide Mieke Eoyang helpfully explains, the whole point of having a secure facility is that it’s, well, secure.
So there are good reasons electronic devices are not allowed in a SCIF. There might be documents or other materials present whose exposure would be harmful to national security. Members of Congress are frequent targets for foreign intelligence services who might want to, say, hack their phones to turn them into listening devices. To have a bunch of them just storm into a SCIF compromises that security.
What’s more, the main argument Republicans are making to justify this display is just nonsense. They’re pretending to be outraged that the impeachment inquiry is being carried out behind closed doors.
“If behind those doors they intend to overturn the result of an American presidential election, we want to know what’s going on,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of Trump’s most rabid defenders.
“This shouldn’t be happening in the United States of America, where they’re trying to impeach a President in secret, behind closed doors,” added Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.).
But here’s the thing: These hearings are being conducted with the full involvement of the Republican members of the three committees doing the inquiring. Not only are Republicans given equivalent time for questioning, but any member of any of the committees — Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight — is welcome to attend any of these sessions.
Under 40 USC §§5109(b) & 5104(e)(2)(C), entering a SCIF without authorization, is a federal crime and the penalty is imprisonment of up to 6 months and/or a fine. 30 CFR 2001, and 20003 CNSI prohibits use of Portable Electronic Devices in SCIF zones.
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