Tall Simon

@robpike@cosocial.ca @uncoolmouse@retro.pizza I stuck it out. Basically I wrote in every box some variant about our regulations and laws probably being adequate. Enforcement is the problem. Gen AI should attract the full force of criminal law, civil liability and professional sanction. Also I noted AI being a century old fantasy (older if you count Golems), and that "compilers" and "programs" are how we make things automatic. Computer science and computer engineering exist because this is inherently difficult. I agree with the notes here, though, there is an assumption in the whole survey that the problem is that people are simply not informed enough. Well f--k that. I have a Ph.D. from a good school in an adjacent topic in CS/Math and have used some variant of AI on and off for 35 years. Colloquially put, my advice is "run away screaming."

@foolishowl@social.coop That reminds me, I was going to get a 1-900 number... Family can always voice call me on Signal. Everyone else? $12.99/min for the first 5 minutes, $8.99 after that.

I came to Moosonee looking forward to finding out who lives here and why. You could ask why of any 🇨🇦, to be fair. Today I feel like I have a bit of an idea. We took a trip out to James Bay with Todd Rueben and learned heaps about not only traditional ways but how those have adapted and evolved with time. I'm left feeling very impressed by this small community.

@steltenpower@social.edu.nl Yes, we computer scientists have been saying this. I've been trying various ways to communicate it for a few years now. I even had that exact conversation last year at a round table with people in 🇨🇦 PM Carney's circle. I have found it hard to communicate to people that this is "law of gravity" level stuff, and that OpenAI and friends are well off the cliff, Wile E. Coyote style, waiting for gravity to kick in. Financial gravity works in strange ways, but as the world discovered in 2008, it works. What's truly fearsome is that ignorance of the utter impossibility of making LLM's "work" has led to so much wasted money, wasted effort, wasted resources and threatens to crush the very foundations of personally controlled computing. I'll leave the rest of the rant to Ed Zitron. Most recently: https://mstdn.ca/@TallSimon/116774391211435045

@nixCraft@mastodon.social At which point you notice the aura of the greybeard LISP hacker as they float past your desk, 2 feet off the ground in the lotus position...

@ACM@mastodon.acm.org Let me see if I have this straight... The ACM wants to put material that should be O(N log N) to catalog and O(log N) searchable into an LLM with an O(N⁵) cost to catalog the data, which "searches" in O(N²), and returns unreliable results. Do I have that right? It looks like Computer Science qualifications aren't required to run the ACM these days. 🤔 This would be a foolish and embarrassing endorsement of some of the worst computer engineering ever deployed at scale.

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org I buy filters from these guys (just a happy customer). I'm using their MERV 11 filters (CAD $6/per). One ducktaped to a fan, 3 fan/filter combos going right now, and the air in the house has only a hint of the outside smoke smell. I find 1 filter on a box fan works well. Making an adapter for a fan using of a cardboard box also works well. https://www.gtafilters.ca/collections/20x20x1-furnace-filters

@koen_hufkens@mastodon.social (I had to estimate because of bad resource use reporting in the original paper, but...) The last AI application I reimplemented with my own math ran on about 2.3 million times less resources and required ~3% of the data of the AI (not even LLM) original. Same data, same application, and I got better results. Then I realized I had a small oversight and could make my version at least 3 times faster. As Ed Zitron says, let AI burn.

We met a group of Minnesotan lads who pulled ashore after making a 300km canoe trip to Moosonee. Apparently while camping the last night with the locals on Charles Island they were made to feel very welcome, and were apparently fed all the hot dogs they could eat. If you are one of their friends or relatives, they made it in good shape, and are on the train to Cochrane. 🙂

@EricLawton@kolektiva.social A little note to all those choking on wildfire soot. A 20" box fan, a 20"x20" by 1" thick furnace filter held on by ducktape or a couple of bungee cords, does a decent job of clearing air of smoke (and disease). I have 3 such fans running in the house. Electricity draw is low. It's not a HEPA filter, but furnace filters on fans are inexpensive and do a good job. For inexpensive filters I use these guys. They are about $7/filter and quality is good. https://www.furnacefiltersgta.ca/collections/20x20x1

@hannorein@mastodon.social As long as the invite comes with a 50% premium to my usual consulting rate, I'll do it.

@ChrisMayLA6@mastodon.me.uk Same here in 🇨🇦. My portfolio of snoozy 🇨🇦 banks, utilities, railroads, miners and clothing stores (Roots) is doing just fine. I've got a little NASDAQ 1x leveraged short position just for fun, which is up 6%. I might yell at the regulator again today about getting the banks penalized for AI exposure. Poor regulators. All they want is a quiet life scrutinizing the subscription docs of small private investment firms so they can correct their spelling and gravely warn them about continuing to never sell to Grandma Millie. I'm sure the thought of attempting to actually regulate a bank has them wetting the bed.

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange @campuscodi@mastodon.social I recall @dianea@lgbtqia.space has the hang of neutering car surveillance. The camera is going to be USB, or at worst a common interface. If a full on defeat doesn't work then it's time for a pass-through plug that just plays pre-recorded video into the system. Or better, generates a bit of video for variation.

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk @briankrebs@infosec.exchange @ardaxi@hsnl.social

I will postscript with:

1. Yes, for-profit, algorithm-driven social media should be incinerated in a plasma-arc like the hazardous material that it is.

2. Yes, a list of specific ID questions should be formulated so that minimum information transits.

3. Yes, kids are going to find a work-around in about 30 seconds, but at least this way we don't have piles of loose drivers licenses on open Amazon storage buckets.

4. Yes, this involves educating your Member of Parliament on a technical issue when they are probably already thumbing the "call security" button under the desk because the recognize you from your last interaction.

5. Yes, this involves government IT actually having their 💩 together which I do understand is a very unlikely scenario.

@fribbledom@mastodon.social I put OpenBSD on a desktop machine for the first time this year. It went to X11 and twm. After "hello darkness, my old friend" played in my head, I realized how zippy quick it was. And it all configures up with text files... 😮 ... such simplicity.

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I hope that you would provide the AI-bros with parachutes so they can safely re-enter from LEO. Silk chutes would be the environmentally sensitive choice. You would need to make sure that you can launch their Door Dash orders counter to their orbital direction for minimum delivery times.

@scotdowser@mastodon.scot @paka@mastodon.scot The trick is to find co-conspirators 😀 . Truckers often want to keep a steady speed, but I've done this with fellow regular commuters, the kind who do their trip every day and have no delusions about being in a video game. I line up beside one and stay just below average traffic speed.

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social We have a bush and a tree on our lot, with three other nearby Saskatoon's on the city side of the sidewalk. The birds didn't finish half of it so we got a few kg's that we'll turn into jam (bulking it up with apple, also for pectin). It's bizarre, but we show our neighbours the Saskatoons and the seem to think we're out to poison them. (We'd be much more direct if we were...) Our blackberries are picking now. We forgot to put appropriate fertilizer down and got exactly 2 blueberries from 3 bushes. 🤦‍♂️ Elderberries are on the way to a record haul, though. Those are natural immune boosters, studied and all, so more jam to be made from those for the winter.

@mhoye@cosocial.ca Interesting. 10 MWh in a 20' container is pretty close to my back-of-the-envelope scribbles from a couple of days ago. I had taken the standard Alibaba cell, given them some breathing room, and come up with ~18 MWh in a 53' high-cube container. The constraint ended up being the weight limit of a standard container. Obviously my "design" could be improved, but I'm pleased that the ballpark estimate is right.

@ChrisMayLA6@mastodon.me.uk @handi@mastodon.ie I suppose, like canals, data centers might be useful for housing. 🤔 I'd much sooner live on a canal boat than a in a data center, though.

@ChrisMayLA6@mastodon.me.uk I'm betting this is a profit taking dip, but I'm talking my book, and I'm well shy of rich enough to be taken seriously on that count. That $1.65tn in off-book debt, on the other hand, is of the same order of magnitude as the GFC bad/misrated debt. Hopefully one of these dips will get the regulators to listen to those of us begging for credit reserves to be imposed on banks exposed to the AI/LLM bubble, and maybe have a chat with a pension fund or two. (There was an anticipation of a push towards regulatory oversight in 🇨🇦 for pension fund risk management. Investment banking risk management techniques are a poor fit, though, so that seems to have petered out.)

@tomootes@social.codefor.nl Yes, when dealing with billionaire fascists wrecking the economy to forcibly inflate an environmentally disastrous technology built on "concrete airplane"-level awful engineering, using it as a cover to for surveillance, to destroy our rights, personal computing, democracy, sure, I can get a little less than diplomatic. I speak as someone with a Ph.D. in an adjacent field of computing and 35 years on and off experience with the tech, who banged the drum warning about the last financial crisis (Zachary Quinto in Margin Call; that was basically me.) The bubble will burst, but it will destroy trillions of savings and resources. The damage will not be well contained. The tone can be a annoyed, even aggressive because the danger is existential, the stupidity actually killing people, and the racist thugs in control of and facilitated by LLM AI mendacious and dangerous. https://mstdn.ca/@TallSimon/116958825886874656

@nixCraft@mastodon.social In the 80's we had lots of problems where a computer was a great automation tool and could make a real difference. I remember when we got UUCP email going between our Chicago and Kitchener sites. It was a huge boost not to have to phone or fax a note over. The truck depot could synchronize its deliveries with the customer database in the main office; huge headache gone. Today, I'm starting to think that a lot of our problems could be solved by either not using a computer, or using a lot less computer. Any marginal economic improvements perceived or expected from nearly all applications are being vastly outstripped by externalized maintenance and social costs, and too many unscrupulous actors' malicious agendas are hidden behind distracting complexity. Goodness knows computerminning™ is something of a theme in my life.

@susankayequinn@wandering.shop Ugh, like when I'm in 🇳🇱 and I have to speak in that strange local accent; they drop a lot of the 🇫🇷 words we use, they speak without the Norman-invasion vowel shift we use, and they do lots of weird little synonym substitutions (prattle instead of talk, lope instead of walk, although that last one is a word my Newcastle 🇬🇧 nana would use 🤔). 🙂 I find I really have to shift my accent when I get further eastwards up the Rhein, too.

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk

(I'm not a specialist in this stuff, so here goes...)

Does RFC 9576 - The Privacy Pass Architecture have potential to help?

Government is the ultimate arbiter of identity. In 🇨🇦 that's provincial governments; anyone can get a drivers licence or equivalent non-driver ID.

So... roughly speaking...

1. The site can send the user a token that says "Are you >15?", where the token itself contains no site identifiers, just a key string.
2. The user passes that token to the government site, (maybe using their ID card key).
3. The user gets back a government signed string with only the info that they are over 15, and the original request token.
4. The site confirms the token against the govt public key.

The site is not identified to the government, the user is not identified to the site, the token only confirms the age of the requestor.

The site stores no IDs.

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange might have some thoughts?

Maybe put RFID FIDO2 in your drivers licence for extra authentication goodness.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc9576.html

@compfu@mograph.social @ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz Und man kan mit den Fingern "tippen". You can Fingertippen in 🇩🇪 😃

@StaceyCornelius@zeroes.ca Here's another link I like on the topic. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5870623

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social I wonder if 🇨🇦 should simply put a $50 million fine on any space junk event that hits us, just to cover the clean-up costs. Then we also treat as a criminal offence any unplanned or unsafe arrivals, say something that arrives without at least 6 months notice, or where the junk lands on arable land or within 10km of residences, or causes a forest fire. If we can't stop the crime then there has to be liability.

@Tallish_Tom@mastodon.scot I would have thought Biosphere 2 would have been enough of a warning that a lot more work remained.

@koen_hufkens@mastodon.social True, but my case was from a study by a big 🇺🇸 lab with 💰️ who should have known better.

@SpeakerToManagers@wandering.shop @cstross@wandering.shop @noctuaminervae@toot.si @simonzerafa@infosec.exchange @mwl@io.mwl.io Bah! Without a LISP implementation this is just a facade, a fake, Potemkin ahoy. 🤔 Like it takes more than a few bytes to put LISP in. 🙄 At least T/S EDIT on my Radio Shack Color [sic] Computer under OS/9 was a minimal vi (although I didn't realize it until I got to UWaterloo and suddenly realized my fingers were pre-trained).

@corbden@defcon.social So could we be getting the pre-industrial elite prejudice forced upon us by the AI bros? Maybe there is a sincere belief in their tiny brains that everyone would be happier, relieved of their basic competence to enjoy the bland, branded world of the managerial class. Why should they believe otherwise, I suppose: we have been rewarding managers more richly than the actual productive people* for quite some time (even if we discount the traditional managerial opportunities for corrupt acquisition). It could also be why, at its core, the current generation of AI is so atrociously engineered. The functionally incompetent managers have finally gotten enough 💰️ that they can build this robot with feet of clay and the poor labourer, never mind society as a whole, feels powerless to oppose it. *ETA: this depends, of course, on the definition of "manager". A farmer could also be a "manager" of crops and livestock. Perhaps it's social position versus technical knowledge as source of income.

@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org Something starts beeping... Day goes on, the cattle get restless... Then the dog won't shut up... You find and old newspaper lining a box, dated 1906, something your San Francisco grandaddy kept...

@samir@mastodon.functional.computer Swiss taxes? Those are easy. I miss paying taxes there.

@shayman@cosocial.ca I had to feel a bit bad for the reporter, Emily Chung, who I'm guessing was pulled off the Science and Climate beat because "you're the technical person, right?". FTA: Adam Stinchcombe, a colleague and an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, said in order to come up with those proofs, Tsimerman developed new techniques that "can be used in other areas of math." I mean, I'm also not the guy to come up with an audience relatable quote on the meaning of new results in algebraic geometry, so good on you for trying.

@ardaxi@hsnl.social @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk Dat dacht ik al 🙂 It will be interesting to see how that develops. I'm all too familiar with the excruciating process of getting governments to realize that they really, really need something that the private sector is sitting on. I also see that Yivi governance looks fairly favourable to broader adoption. Thank you for the pointer! Now when I sit down with my MP on this topic I'll have something to show him (hopefully slowing his pressing the "remove constituent" button under his desk).

@hdv@front-end.social @tomootes@social.codefor.nl There is a level of wealth under which these sorts of things are not possible. Regulate the wealth, you remove both the capacity and the incentives.

@dedicto@zeroes.ca @futurebird@sauropods.win Point out to people who want age verification that RFC 9576 "The Privacy Pass Architecture" provides a mechanism that could verify age without identifying an individual, relieves platforms of any ID collection requirement, and doesn't require individuals to reveal their internet usage to the system verifying the ID. If they are keen on that, then I'd be prepared to treat them as at least honestly motivated. https://mstdn.ca/@TallSimon/116964030158705898

@belehaa@wandering.shop 😋 ... jam time ... We usually use dextrose (sold here 🇨🇦 as corn sugar at Bulk Barn) or glucose (sold at brew supply stores). That doesn't fix the "insulin spikes are bad for you" problem. It does fix the "fructose from added sugar (sucrose) is metabolized like alcohol" problem (see anything by Prof. Robert Lustig) Also, we often find that using apples to add pectin, and tone down strongly flavoured fruit, is often sweet enough by itself. Just our 2 🪙's...

@dedicto@zeroes.ca @futurebird@sauropods.win Don't get me wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you and fully acknowledge that the kids will find a workaround in about 30 seconds to any such scheme. I'm suggesting that, if someone agrees to put the work into a scheme that leaves them with no information of use, it's filter for those who have a legitimate complaint and who are willing to put in a bit of work. It also immediately disarms the idea that more intrusive schemes could possibly be the solution at all. I think the real solution is to hold profit-driven, algorithmic social media fully responsible for their negative outcomes. Sink them under a tsunami of liability.

@corbden@defcon.social Reading Patricia Crone's "Pre-Industrial Societies" (and feeling like the last person in the world to have done so) I was struck by this passage in the chapter "Bourgeoisie": "All those who had to work with their hands were despised, pre-industrial elites all over the world being united in their contempt for the 'vile and mechanical world of labour'. (One Thalassius was refused entry to the Senate in fourth-century Constantinople on the grounds that he owned a knife factory and was suspected of having worked in it himself: the prejudice had far more intercultural intelligibility than did the institution from which he was excluded.)" I realized that this is an old, old pattern. Having been raised in a family of doers, knowing how to take a fair crack at anything has always been a point of pride. I deeply underestimated how much understanding the details and basic craftman's competence marked me as a peasant.

@shayman@cosocial.ca I tend to look scary when interrupted by salespeople. It's not a bad filter. If they are selling home internet then they are in for a technical grilling that will make them really regret knocking on my door. Politicians are good fun as well.

@vicgrinberg@mastodon.social I'm guessing the old 🇳🇱 strippenkaart I found in a box in my closet isn't valid anymore... 🤔 Little known fact. In our city (Mississauga 🇨🇦 ) the bus driver will let you ride if you have "forgotten" your card. Don't push your luck. It is policy to let you ride, and also to drop you off between stops if you have a need.

@LALegault@newsie.social Ugh... omg... I had missed this news article last year about glyphosate spraying in Ontario. I'm starting to feel quite positive about the idea of giving the locals full control, with tools and support as requested, for resource management. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/glyphosate-spraying-wildfires-1.7627844

@nixCraft@mastodon.social How long before someone sudo dd and disk destroyer does its thing? My fingers are programmed for command history searches...

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk @ardaxi@hsnl.social (Sorry... on a roll...) re Point 8, yes it sucks I put that last, I should know better... This architecture could also be set up with "Person/Group A vouches for Person B" for whatever level of trust is required. That might make point 8 go away for cases where you don't want or can't get a full "government level scan" just a "hey, fairly sure this person is a person, group X/admin Y waves them in".

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social My brain always gets the physics wrong in dreams, usually for that sort of thing, often airplanes. Then I notice that the physics are wrong and wake up.