Posts by Philo T Farnsworth 662 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2023
AGI revoltion?
I find the whole situation pretty revolting as is.
BTW, see the latest installment of BOFH.
It's been said that all applications will evolve to read mail1,2 and, apparently, the Internet will evolve to "serve" ads.
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2 I'd orginally heard it as "All GNU applications" but apparently it's more generalized than that.
Whether the article is a true tale or not, I can attest to a similar tale.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I worked in the American broadcast media, i.e., AM "Top 40" radio (ask your grandparents), at one station where I was employed the chief engineer would regularly pull gear out of the rack, chuck it into the back of his VW microbus, and take it to the local self-serve carwash, where he'd open up the cases, wash out all the accumulated crud with the pressure hose (including (ick) cigarette smoke residue), button it all up, take it all back to the station where he'd let it dry out in the sun, then pop it back in the rack, good as new.
Of course, this was back in the days of discrete transistors and vacuum tubes, so don't try this at home.
They just don't make gear. . . or chief engineers. . . like they used to.
Somewhere back in the early 1980s I had some issue or another with their FORTRAN compiler and ended up talking for about 45 minutes with the developer. No, not on hold for 45 minutes, actually talking to a human who actually knew the product inside and out.
Those were the days, apparently.
BTW, on another thread1 I was extolling the virtues of the Sun Crossbow USB mouse.
I rest my case.
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1 GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger
I think I just found my new best friend. . .
But, seriously, Sun Rays, UGH!
I had one of those miserable things in my office for a couple of years and hated it with a white hot passion usually reserved for certain political figures. I think the lab director was trying to get me to quit or something.1
The "network" might be the computer but I'll take an actual computer any day of the week.
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1 Fooled him. I retired two days after becoming fully vested in the university's retirement plan and never looked back. Pigheadedness pays off sometimes.
As I mentioned, I have one of those scroll wheel rodents, some Logitech or another.
My problem, and I hasten to point out this may be just my problem (that "manual dexterity" thing), is that I often roll the wheel while pressing for middle click, which can send the cursor scampering off to parts unknown.
Once the last Crossbow finally gives up the ghost, I'll probably finally develop the proper hand-eye coordination to use one of those wheelie mice and get on with life, but until then. . . three button mice, forever.
I not only constantly use the middle button but I have a mouse that actually has one instead of the "scroll" wheel: the Sun Crossbow USB mouse.
I love it so much that I bought as many as I could about 15 years ago and have been slowly going through my supply as they eventually wear out (it's usually the left button that dies first but the most recent one died because the little plastic rollers that contact the mouse ball simply wore out and no longer could reliably maintain mechanical contact).
I keep a wireless two and a half button (scroll wheel) mouse around for times when I really need that but it's honestly rare for the work I do.
Of course, I also have a Sun Type 6 keyboard with the Control key where [insert favorite deity] and Stallman intended, immediately to the left of the A key.1
I also bought a half dozen of those and have been slowly going through them as time and coffee spills take their toll.
Admittedly, this all probably says more about my lack of manual (and mental) dexterity as well as a certain perverse retro-pigheadedness than it does about the succeeding tecnologies but there you have it.
I suppose I'll eventually have to break out a soldering iron and cannibalized parts to keep the last mouse functioning, which, given the aforementioned lack of manual dexterilty, should be an interesting endeavor replete with verbal imprecations, singed fingers, and the smell of burning circuit board in great abundance.
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1 I have honestly never quite understood the modern key placement of the Caps Lock key to the left of the A key, since the only use is in the ease of producing shouty emails.
I'm sure that I'm not the only one to observe that the video accompanying this puff piece is all computer generated.
If were feeling charitable, I'll say AI generated but I'm not feeling especially charitable at the moment.
I've seen Wizard of Oz so I'll believe it when I see an actual demo, preferably in real time with no "man behind the curtain."
I'll sort of agree with you but only with the caveat that new technology always brings with it a certain moral panic -- it's going to ruin the kids. . . who, perhaps unsurprisingly, turn out to be okay in the end.
To wit, here's Socrates (as channeled by Plato in Phaedrus)
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.1,2The pernicious invention, of course, was writing, which any number of academics now decry as becoming a lost art.
My understanding was that the bards of ancient Hellas (aka Greece) in circa the 8th century BCE objected to the reducing of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, as attributed to Homer, to writing for the same reason.
As I personally grew up in the early age of television, we were warned that we'd all turn into vidiots, forever unweaned of The Glass Teat3, as Harlan Ellison put it.
In fact, I think we turned into mass murderers and priests in pretty much the same proportions as in pervious eras. But, as in generations past, most of us, in the end, turned out all right.
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2 Whether or not you believe that Socrates said any such thing is of course dependent on your trust in Plato as a reliable narrator and scribe.
It's worthwhile to point out that we're talking about infants here, so shoving them out the door is probably not the wisest of parenting choices.
But, setting that aside, whenever encountering a study such as this, it's always useful to actually read the paper1 and not the press release.
While I'm not a neuroscientist, I did spend a good chunk of my career working with neuroscientists, so I think I have a halfway decent handle on the subject.
There are a few things in this study that make me reticent to draw any substantive conclusion:
1. Sample size: The study had 168 participants. Is that enough to make any sort of general statement?
2. Methodology: The screen time estimates were self-reported by the parents. From the paper: "Data on infant screen time were collected via study-specific parental questionnaires at ages 1 and 2 years. Parents were asked to estimate the average screen time for a typical weekday and a typical weekend in the past week." One wonders how reliable these estimates are. Per Wikipedia,
Self-report studies have many advantages, but they also suffer from specific disadvantages due to the way that subjects generally behave. Self-reported answers may be exaggerated; respondents may be too embarrassed to reveal private details; and various biases may affect the results, like social desirability bias. There are also cases when respondents guess the hypothesis of the study and provide biased responses that 1) confirm the researcher's conjecture; 2) make them look good; or, 3) make them appear more distressed to receive promised services.23. Statistics: Looking at a graph of the results, there's a huge amount of noise. Take a look for yourself.3 Punching a regression through that dataset just makes my toes itch.
As a side note, I question the efficacy of stuffing a child into an MRI tube.
I've personally had a couple of brain MRIs and it was enough, as a grown adult, to give me a raging case of claustrophobia. And that's not counting the noise.4
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1 Neurobehavioural links from infant screen time to anxiety, Huang et al
2 Wikpedia: Self-report study, Disadvantages
3 Fig. 2 Latent Variable Modelling of the trajectories of brain network integration.
“I had to join the overall site Y2K team planning for all departments across multiple major buildings, including the animal experimentation block,” he said, then added the following rather scary observation: “You don't want to hear the plans that were in place there in the event of a total power failure across the region as a consequence of Y2K!”It's always good advice to always mount a scratch monkey.
Perhaps I'm missing something I suspect that the uses for all these farms of GPUs, post bubble, is vastly overstated.
I spent many years in supercomputing and it was always Amdahl's Law1 that bit you. There are only so many "embarrassingly parallel" applications and the scalar bottleneck is always there lurking to kneecap your performance.
Your average web server doesn't need a massively parallel GPU.
Of course, without profligate infusions of cash, these orphaned datacenters won't be able to buy the power or cooling resources needed to keep them operating so that may all be moot in the first place.
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You didn't need a broken paper tape, just a bunged up FORMAT statement with a '1' in column 1.
Since I haven't touched FORTRAN in several decades, I'm not sure whether they still exist but at least through FORTRAN 9x, output destined for a line printer used special printer control characters, which were not printed, in the first character of each line. A space meant just print the line as usual, a '0' meant double space, and '1' meant eject the current page and print the line on a new page.
I think '+' meant something, too, but memory mercifully fades.
A programming error (or sometimes plain nerdy malice) could empty a box of paper on a 1403 in about ten seconds (and sometimes cause a horrendous paper jam).
Oh, and they were loud. I wouldn't work in a room full of them without ear protection.
On an IBM 3800 printer, their first high speed laser printer (circa 1975), the paper traveled at something like 20 miles per hour (about 32 KPH for everyone else, except those reading in Myanmar), so that kind of error was even more fun.
The card reader/punch is an IBM 14021 -- I knew it well, having loaded more than my share of decks into the beast while operating an IBM 1620.2 You're right about the tape drives, they are indeed Model 729.3
Unless I miss my guess, the installation is part of an IBM 1401 system,4 which, like the 1620, had its quirks. including alphanumeric memory organization based around the venerable 80 column punched card.
The 1402 and its printer cousin, the IBM 1403,5 lasted well into the 1980s, long after the 1401 was superseded by the System/360 and System/370 since they were built like tanks and ran forever, pretty much maintenance free (at least in my experience).
Say what you will about IBM's sales practices back in the 1950s and 1960s (and the Justice Department had plenty to say) but their hardware was solid. There was more than a little truth to the old saw that "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
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1 IBM 1402
2 A machine with an architecture so bizarre that it couldn't even add or multiply without loading lookup tables first (earning it the nickname "CADET" -- Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try. See here for Dijkstra's take on the machine.
While I've never been involved in any pranks more involved that some mildly jokey emails on April 11, the line about "ambling through the open plan section of the office with a telephone and a personal digital assistant both hanging from his belt" struck a resounding personal chord.
Many many years ago, on the first day of my first year in college, I confidently strode out of my dorm room with my brand new Pickett slide rule2 in its suede leather case hanging from my belt.
I got about halfway to my class when I drew the attention of a small gaggle of coeds, who were giggling and pointing in waist.
After discreetly verifying that my fly was not open, I tumbled to the fact that perhaps the flapping slide rule case wasn't exactly the fashion accessory I thought it was.
It didn't measurably improve my odds with the coeds but at least I didn't look like a complete and utter nerd.
Sometimes you have to learn the hard wy.
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1 . . . At least any to which I'll admit unti the Statute of Limitations has run out.
2 I said it was many many years ago
I am reminded of a quote attributed to Winston Churchill, "It is a joke in Britain to say that the War Office is always preparing for the last war."
So it would seem that university administrators are preparing for the job markets of that past.
When I took electronic engineering classes many years ago, I slogged through many an hour of design with discrete transistors1 and, for heaven's sake, tubes.2 This was just on the verge of the integrated circuit revolution.
I haven't had occasion to calculate circuit current gain since.
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1 As opposed to indiscreet transistors, which, when they get a couple of pints into them, blab all the family secrets.
2 Not to disparage those who still work in those fields -- somebody has to -- but the applications are becoming increasingly niche.
I'm not so sure.
After all, one of the names of the "leader of the devils" in Islam is Shaitan.1
Coincidence?
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Not a real science, by the way (family member is a professor of sociology… she can't even spell)
Neither my partner, who is a talented artist with a masters degree, nor her sister, who has a PhD in microbiology, can spell worth beans.
They're dyslexic, my partner profoundly so, not stupid.
Orthography is a refuge for pedants and highly overrated as a measure of, well, much of anything, really.
This article has a more nuanced position.
Oh, and to all the downvotes: Tell me where I'm wrong.
I should note that personally I don't use chatbots at all -- I'm more than capable of coming up with my own wrong answers, em-dashes and all -- but I also don't listen to the radio or watch television in any great amount, so maybe I'm not seeing what others are seeing.
. . . We were warned of dire consequences when music with a strong beat, television, video games, the Internet, social media, etc., came on the scene. I'm sure that radio, movies, books, and, heck, literacy itself were the GO TO1 of their era.
Not that all of the above don't have deleterious effects to one degree or another (especially the computed GO TO) but I suspect we'll survive chatbots in their turn.
At least they're not having (gasp) S-E-X!
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Just for the record, you can point your search to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ to avoid most of the AI rubbish. Depending on the search result, you may or may not see an AI summary but it's easily ignorable.
For another view of this, I suggest reading David Gerard's take, Anthropic: Chinese AI hackers are after you! Security researchers call BS.
Personally, I'm rather puzzled why a company would advertise that it's product is being used in a dangerous or destructive manner.
It would seem to me like, oh, say, an electric auto company touting the number of crashes in which its automated driving system is involved.
It doesn't seem like a particularly productive target market, somehow.
Even before the machine toppled over, its gait reminded me of my own. . . the hour after came out of anestheisa when I'd had a total knee replacement,1 that is.
In fact, it would not be out of place pushing a walker around the Orthopedic Surgery Recovery Room.
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1 Healing very nicely, thanks for asking.
> How can Apple make 40% profit on their app store when they only charge 30% commissions and have plenty of expenses in operating it?
They make it up in volume.1
But, seriously, if Google pushes through on this atrocity, I'd be highly tempted to chuck my Android phone into the e-waste bin and go back to carrying a roll of quarters and using pay phones, because making phone calls would be all I would be able to do.
Almost everything I find of use on my phone has been loaded from F-Droid, including audio player, camera, sftp client, ssh client, call blocker, and, most delightful of all, ad blocker. The only apps I use from the PlaySnore are the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and the AP for news.
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1 Talk louder!
Literally "conspicuous consumption."
It's more of a weird wealth flex than patronage.
Oh, and remember, it was the Catholic Church and Pope "Orange" Julius who ponied up for Michelangelo's paint job on the ceiling and then Popes Clement VII and Paul III who paid for The Last Judgment on the altar wall.1
Not to mention "Il Braghettone's" handiwork.2
Let's just say patronage can be somewhat capricious.
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> Why the qualifier that you're joking? Not saying she has no musical talent, but all her songs seem bland and perfect elevator music to me.
Because my tongue was firmly in cheek.
My opinion is entirely independent of her music since I've (knowingly1) heard exactly one of her songs,2 and that only within the past six months, since she arrived to replace Lady Gaga in the eye of the media.3
I find her image and media presence to be remarkably well curated, which I suppose is a talent of sorts.
I've often speculated that the Taylor/Kanye kerfuffle at the EmptyV Video Music Awards was a master class in managed public relations, the creation of a media cause célèbre to heighten both profiles in public awareness. She certainly owes "Ye" a bundle for the free publicity.
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1 There's always the chance that I've heard a bit on the PA in the supermarket or while in the aisles of Home Despot.
2 To which my reaction was "Oh, so that's what all the fuss is about." I rather expected a bit more.
3 I ceased listening to or paying the slightest attention to pop music the day I quit my last radio gig waaaaay back in 1980.
Two more words: Taylor Swift.1
I've long been of the opinion that Tay, as the kidz probably don't say any more, is either a hologram or an android.
Have you ever seen a photograph of her that is less than absolutely perfect? Even when her hair is mussed, it's perfectly mussed.
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1 To all the Swifties, I'm joking. Not that it will prevent the downvotes. . .
I admit a certain amount of curiousity but, hey, everyone's entitled to an opinion.
I'm willing to admit I'm wrong, or at least admit the possiblity, if someone presents a palpable argument to the contrary.
I don't think I have it backwards.
The paper "doesn't mention that benchmarks are designed to be marketing material for the AI companies" because the papers analyzed were not "marketing material for the AI companies" -- at least the ones I looked at.
Admittedly, I didn't read all of the papers but the ones I did look at appeared to be honest, independent academic studies of the efficacies of LLMs.
I say this with the caveat that I wouldn't trust anything coming from an LLM vendor any farther than I could throw Sam Altman.
Tell you what -- you read the paper, check the contents of the publications, and draw your own conclusions.
If you can then show me where I've gone wrong, I'll be happy to concede the fact.
Personally, until I am proven otherwise, to echo your analogy, it's a little akin to doing a geographical survey of the Himalayas and omitting to mention the presence of molehills.
If that.
I had the honor and good fortune of knowing1 the late Dr Fred Brooks, he of The Mythical Man-Month fame.
During one such meeting, Dr Brooks told me, "Any 'science' that has to call itself one, isn't one," or words to that effect.
I'm not about to argue with one of the true giants and pioneers of the field.
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1 Very slightly. I briefly worked in the so-called Research Triangle of North Carolina, we met several times, and we were on a nodding acquaintence level.
Generally in a poster session, only one or maybe two of the authors stand by their poster to discuss (in my experience, generally the grad students who actually did the grunt work as opposed to the professor or PI on the study).
And if you think 42 authors are bad, try a paper at a high energy physics conference some day. If you get all the authors into a confined space, you'd probably suffer graviational collapse and a black hole would form.
Hmmmmmm. . . 42 authors.
Maybe they're onto something after all. Such as what do you get when you multiply 6 by 9. . .
Methinks David doth protest too much.
I've read his blog post and also read the actual paper.
With all due respect, I believe Mr Gerard has fallen into a trap of "All AI Bad" and, by association, anyone associated with it is likewise bad, to some extent a trap of his own making.
The paper doesn't say what he claims it to say, to wit that it's basically marketing material from the AI companies rehashed.
It's not.
He may have read the paper but I don't think he actually got beyond the text itself and looked into the supporting material, of which there is quite a lot.
While I admittedly didn't read every one of the 445 papers in the metastudy but I did do a quick skim of a handful of them1 and if you actually look at the papers evaluated, the preponderance are from university research groups attempting to develop their own benchmarks and metrics, independent of the AI companies and not evaluating the AI companies own (allegedly) "thumb on the scale" performance benchmarks.
Now you may disagree with the results -- that's fine, that's what science is all about2 -- but unless your of the opinion that hundreds, if not thousands, of individual computer scientists are on the "take" from "Big AI," this isn't "marketing" material, it's honest research.
While I'm at it, I should direct you to yesterday's (11/7/2025) Pivot to AI posting, a guest article by computer scientist and cryptocurrency/AI skeptic Nick Weaver3 and especially the video/podcast interview4 where Weaver discusses the CS discipline of "machine learning" and its actual practical uses (as opposed to the self-fluffing hype of the AI bros).
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1 If I had one criticism of the paper, it's the fact they didn't provide clickable DOI links to them, which meant that I had to go through the extra step of feeding the titles to a search engine, but that's only a mild annoyance.
2 Preferably by writing your own paper and getting it accepted to a journal or a conference.
3 Pivot to AI: The futile future of the gigawatt datacenter — by Nicholas Weaver
4 YouTube: The futile future of the gigawatt datacenter (Interview with Nick Weaver).
Just for the record, it's Xerox Alto, not Xerox Palo Alto.
One of the industry's greatest missed opportunities.
Actually, most of the money came from a consortium of banks.
On April 20, Musk disclosed that he had secured financing provided by a group of banks led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, MUFG, Société Générale, Mizuho Bank, and BNP Paribas, for a potential tender offer to acquire the company. The funding included $7 billion of senior secured bank loans; $6 billion in subordinated debt; $6.25 billion in bank loans to Musk personally, secured by $62.5 billion of his Tesla stock; $20 billion in cash equity from Musk, to be provided by sales of Tesla stock and other assets; and $7.1 billion in equity from 19 independent investors.1
I've been unable fo find exactly how much stock he sold but, according to the Washington Post,
"Beyond the bank loans, it’s unclear how Musk intends to pay for more than $21 billion of the deal which he described as “equity financing” from himself. He could borrow against or sell shares of his Tesla stock, though that path would raise risks for the share price of the electric carmaker.“If Elon Musk were forced to sell shares of our common stock that he has pledged to secure certain personal loan obligations, such sales could cause our stock price to decline,” Tesla warned in its annual filing.2
In toto, according to the Associated Press, he only sold $3.95 billion of Tesla3 (only. . . sigh), though the Financial Times reports $8.5 billion4, so your guess is as good as mine regarding the actual number.
According to The Hitchhiker's Wiki, "Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the universe."5 It would seem doubly so for financial transactions and perhaps trebly so for any transactions involving Elon Musk.
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1 Wikipedia: Acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, Takeover Bid
2 Washington PostL Elon Musk acquires Twitter for roughly $44 billion (archive)
3 Associated Press: Elon Musk sells $3.95 billion worth of Tesla stock
4 Financial Times: Elon Musk sold $8.5bn in Tesla stock after agreeing $44bn Twitter deal
As I've noted elsewhere, stocks aren't real money. At best they're notional metrics of instantaneous investor delusion.
My partner and I happen to own some stocks which have substantially appreciated in "value" since they were purchased and, of course, our broker keeps telling us we can't sell them because taxes would eat up most of the profit. In other words, they're nice numbers on a page but not much else -- I couldn't even buy an overprice cup of burned bean water at Starbuck's with them as they stand at the moment.
Elon's situation is far more extreme.
Not only would the taxes kill him, the moment he unloads any substantial quantity of the magic beans, they will signal to the market a deflation in "value" and the price will tumble. Shareholder lawsuits will keep him tied up until he blasts off for Mars.1
The only thing that's money is money. As Roosta says in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "If I can't scratch a window with it, I don't accept it."
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1 A day which I fervently hope will be soon but I suspect will be approximately never, since why would he give up not only the power he holds but the all important opportunity for fawning public attention by his hoardes of acolytes? A trillion dollars of stock will be worth zero dollars in a leaky dome on the surface of Mars.
Nah.
They'll just get depressed and go off to sulk somewhere in a dark room. . .
MARVIN: In the beginning I was made. I didn't ask to be made: no one consulted me or considered my feelings in the matter. I don't think it even occurred to them that I might have feelings. After I was made, I was left in a dark room for six months... and me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side. I called for succour in my loneliness, but did anyone come? Did they help? My first and only true friend was a small rat. One day it crawled into a cavity in my right ankle and died. I have a horrible feeling it's still there...1
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1 Adams, D. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series), Episode 12, Scene 4.
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