Posts by Philo T Farnsworth 629 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2023
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.
______________
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.
____________________
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.
__________________
> 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.
__________________
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.
________________
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.
__________________
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).
_____________________
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.
__________________
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."
______________
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
_______________
1 Adams, D. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series), Episode 12, Scene 4.
And when those Starlinks and assorted pieces of planned obsolescence come back down, they will, according to one study1 at Technical University of Braunschweig reported in the web publication Universe Today, fill the stratosphere with "material from satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, especially transition metals [which] could have unforeseen consequences on atmospheric chemistry."2
Universe Today goes on to note that transition metals are "well known for their catalytic activity. Their increased presence in the atmosphere could catalyze reactions that could have devastating impacts on atmospheric chemistry at large. These elements include several that are fundamental to spacecraft construction such as copper (wirings / PCB traces) and titanium (structural supports)."
Further,
"Satellites in [Starlink and Kuiper] constellations are intentionally designed to 'demise' themselves after a few years by burning up in the atmosphere. While this might solve the problem of a bunch of derelict junk that could potentially turn into hazardous projectiles (via Kessler syndrome), it creates its own problem of potentially messing up the atmosphere's chemistry. [...] [There are] different options for dealing with space junk - almost all of them could exacerbate the transition metals problem."If it ain't one thing, it's another.
__________________
1 Universe Today: We're Putting Lots Of Transition Metals Into The Stratosphere. That's Not Good.
> then for goodness' sake don't pick up a copy of Ulysses...
I tried reading Finnegan's Wake once and there are some places humans will never go: to colonize the galaxy and past page 3 of Finnegan's Wake1.
But back to LotR. . . I don't particularly dislike the books2, per se. If you can make it through Tolkein's bad poetry, then, please, be my guest. Just don't take it as an operating manual for society.
Re: WWII, I'm largely in agreement. As many have noted, the primary cause of WWII was the Treaty of Versailles and, of course, the worldwide depression of the 1930s.
Whether it would've included the Holocaust as a result is an exercise for those who dwell in the world of counterfactuals.
_______________
1 I stole that line from someone talking about Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren but I have no idea from whom.
2 I read and actually found the prequel, The Hobbit, to be a reasonably amusing tale even if fantasy isn't exactly my cup of something "almost - but not quite - entirely unlike tea."
. . . But if I ever invent a time machine, one of the first things I'm going to do is go back in time and burn the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings before it ever gets published.1
Right after strangling baby Hitler in his bassinet, of course.2
_________________
1 I tried reading the thing twice and, on the second try, almost forced my way through the second book before throwing it across the room. My partner characterized it as "trudge trudge trudde, sing a song, have a battle, trudge trudge trudde," with heavy emphasis on the trudging. I shall wear your downvotes as a badge of hono(u)r.
2 I mean, first things first.
Elsewhere in these comments forums I'd been wondering how the plutocrats would continue to make money after they'd fired all the workers and reduced the masses to a hunter-gatherer existence but it has struck me in recent days they can continue their trillion dollar ways by simply exchanging shares with one another in some bizarre form of perpetual motion.
Or, per Douglas Adams, perhaps it will come to the following
MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT: Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves as legal tender, we have, of course all become immensely rich. [...] But, we have also run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability. Which means that I gather the current going rate has something like three major deciduous forests buying one ship's peanut. So, um, in order to obviate this problem and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on an extensive defoliation campaign, and um, burn down all the forests. I think that's a sensible move don't you?1
______________
1 Adams, D., The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series), Episode 6, Scene 7.
> I want to be clear, I have no problem with AI tools existing. They have some (limited) uses, certain people like to use them and that's fine.
My partner is very smart1 (she has a masters degree) but she's also profoundly dyslexic -- her spelling is horrifying and her grammar and sentence construction can be exceedingly bizarre.
She'd been struggling with an important letter for several days and getting nowhere fast.
Then one morning she came downstairs with tears (of joy) in her eyes and said that she fed the draft of her letter to ChatGPT and it had produced exactly what she was trying to say. I read it and, yup, it was well written and contained no hallucinations.
So, score one for the machines, I guess.
_______________
1 What she's doing living with me is anyone's guess -- it certainly isn't for the money or the good looks.
"He's dead, Jim."
But, seriously, yea and verily regarding enabling "features."
Sadly, this isn't localized to only the offerings of the Redmond Robber Barons. I can think of numerous instances where something has popped up on my phone or web browser unbidden and unwanted and caused me to waste much time figuring out how to turn it off.
And, since I have one of those modern computers with an engine and wheels, I occasionally get "over the air" updates that introduce new features or fiddle with my settings in ways that can be not only annoying but downright dangerous.
I recently suffered (sic) an update where the "lane keeping" feature which warns you if you're drifting out of your lane on the hghtway got its setting changed from "vibrate the steering wheel gently" to "try to pull you back into your lane."
The first time It happened it scared the pants off of me, since I thought maybe something had gone wonky with the steering and it took me a couple of days to realize that the update had "done me a favor" by changing the setting without my knowledge.
This, in my opinion,is, as I said, not only annoying but downright dangerous since it interferes with the way I expect my vehicle to handle.
There are enough surprises with Tesla idiot drivers on the freeway and I don't need the software on my vehicle providing any new ones on its own.
I was actually put in mind of another Adams reference, the "unlikely principle of defocused temporal perception - a curious system which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previously forced to do whilst waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many lifts imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up or down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways - as a sort of existential protest - demanded participation in the decision making process, and, finally, took to sulking in basements."1
I can only imagine what damage a psychotic cheese grater could inflict upon its user.
__________________
1 Adams, D.,'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' (Fit the Seventh), Scene 6
> disk files were simply images of punch cards,
Sounds like an IBMer. As I seem to recall, back when I was crunching on Big Iron in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of the disk -- excuse me DASD1 -- file types were basically "unit record" card images, so that's not all that far from reality.
The numbers at the bottom line of a check (yes, I still use them mostly because I'm a pig headed jerk and don't want to cave to all electronic banking just so my creditors can save a penny or two) are printed with magnetic ink2, which may be the source of the confusion.
Personally, I tossed in the towel halfway through my senior year because even working the all night shift at a top 40 radio station was more interesting3, but that's another story for another rant.
______________
1 IBMese for Direct Access Btorage Device.
2 Wikipedia: Magnetic ink character recognition
3 To be fair, my grades were also abominable.
Actually, the dinosaur era and the oil forming era are pretty much the same, 252 to 66 million years ago, the Mesozoic age.1
What you might be thinking of is the carboniferous era, which spans 358.86 to 298.9 million years ago, when the majority of the coal deposits formed.2 (How they got their estimates precise down to 10,000 year increments, I'll never know.)
In any event, the addition of dinosaurs as a component of fossil fuels is more or less negligible, as the major component is plankton and algae which sunk to the bottom of the sea and then got covered with millions of tonnes of sand, silt, and random fish excrement.
_______________
I believe that the medical profession in the US uses them as well. I remember a relatively recent incident at my pharmacist's where they told me that they couldn't fill a prescription until they got a FAX from my doctor.
Whether this was a literal FAX or just hangover retro-jargon, I don't know, since the healthcare network I'm in uses the more or less ubiquitous EPIC electronic records system, which you would think wold be more efficient.
Speaking of FAX freakouts, we had one in our lab back in the trailing edge of the FAX era which only seemed to be used as a recipient for spam, which I'd usually scoop up and feed to the paper shredder when I arrived in the morning.
They were usually in the form of some "notice" from "HR" about special travel deals "employees" could get by calling some phone number ("scare quotes" intentional).
One morning a new secretary got to the machine before I did and proceeded to duplicate the page and shove it under all the office doors.
I had to explain to her that it was a fake.
Yet another reminder that there's a first time for everyone.
Banning people, even malicious "state actors," is not only useless (they'll just pop up again in a different guise), it's often counterproductive.
We saw what Twitter and Facebook bans did.
A certain well known (perhaps even over known) public figure I shall not name was banned for spreading misinformation and worse and only made that person stronger by turning them into a martyr.
You can pretty clearly see where that got us.
While disinformation can be annoying, frustrating, and downright destructive, I think the best weapon against these trolls and dolts isn't suppression but facts, used lucidly and repeatedly.
If I had a magic potion, I'd make them all go away.
But, then, do you trust me (or anyone else) with that magic potion?
Citation provided.1 There are multiple references within the item (admittedly, an OpEd, and not a news story) which seem to back up the assertion.
I have no opinion, I'm just relaying the citation.
__________________
This all reminds me of a guy I worked for when I was in radio. Similarly, he was a Texas oil millionaire who decided to buy up a small chain of radio and TV stations.
I was told that he kept his own personal jet pilot and copilot on the station's payroll as "accountants," which in my opinion is a bit shady.
I think at least one of the stations incurred a massive fine from the FCC for allegedly rigging a contest involving a trip to a resort in Mexico and then stiffing the winners on the bill.
Oh, and when they fired me, my final check bounced.
Nice people doing nice things.
Here's a thought.
Let's make education actually about education and not just rote box ticking.
Make it actually engaging to the young minds so that learning becomes more enjoyable than grinding away on some interminable video game.
Of course, this would require educators who are also actively engaged in the process of imparting, nay, sharing learning to and with their students and not just droning through course notes for the fifteenth time.
My own university education, if you can call it that, seemed to be a form of intellectual hazing , a series of pointless exercises, serial hoop jumping that I had to go through because, well, the professor had to jump the hops when in school so their students would darned well jump them, too.1
From what I hear, most jobs are like that, too. Bullshit Jobs they call them, "meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters."2
Get rid of the Bullshit Jobs and AI workslop would largely evaporate.
Of course, most jobs would largely evaporate, too, and throw great masses of "workers," so-called, into unemployment, so there's a down side, too.
______________________
1 Always allowing for the fact that I'm simply an ignoramus, which seemed to be the consensus of my betters and peers.
. . . I recommend checking David Gerard's blog, Pivot to AI and his posting Workslop: bad ‘study’, but an excellent word for a more critical take. He suggests that "Unfortunately, this article pretends to be a writeup of a study — but it’s actually a promotional brochure for enterprise AI products. It’s an unlabeled advertising feature."
My favorite story of that nature dates back to the 1960s when I was in high school.
The school had just opened a new wing of classrooms and I was sitting in class when I happened to look up and notice an electrical outlet smack dab in the middle of the ceiling, well out of reach except by way of a ladder.
I asked the teacher about it and he told me that it was an "overhead projector" outlet, which the electrical contractor took a bit too literally and placed it. . . well. . . overhead. . . and not in the floor where it belonged.
And don't forget the Cray-21, aka "Bubbles", where all the circuits were dunked in Fluorinert[TM].
Unfortunately, the stuff was eventually determined to have some rather nasty breakdown products.2
The ETA10 of that same era (late 1980s) was cooled with liquid nitrogen. It was an interesting machine with some pretty impressive specs (for the time) but a commercial flop.3
____________________
We had an artist family friend who used to write letters in Adobe Illustrator.
Definitely not a dullard or entirely computer illiterate1 but he had is quirks.
_________________
1 When he was in his 70s he taught himself Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator well enough to produce some pretty impressive art which, because of his reputation as a painter and (small 'i') illustrator, sold for considerable sums.
I once had to move my entire office across campus aided only by a "wheelie chair."
I think they're still sweeping up the debris left behind in the process.
Next time I moved I got a student assigned to do the heavy lifting. I think he's beginning to recover.
When I worked for the US Civil Service, I had the opposite experience.
My boss (and his boss) jumped through all sorts of hoops to get me a grade increase even though, on paper, I was not "qualified."
I look back on those years with a great deal of fondness as I was able to define my own tasks and was given interesting work and a great deal of support even though, in my own estimation, I was no wunderkind or particularly gifted performer.
The pay was awful (it is Civil Service, after all1) but it was a great place to work.
________________
1 Look the pay scales for anything under a GS-13 and prepare to be horrified.
Since RSL is simply a standard that defines the criteria for admission, the challenge of separating human visitors from bots and forcing bots to comply with terms has been left to internet service providers. . .Perhaps I'm missing something but isn't this the hard part?
If separating humans from bots were an easily solvable problem, none of this complicated faux licensing woudn't be needed.
You can erect all the turnstiles you want but if the passengers can just hop over them, it seems to me that you're not likely to collect much in the way of fares.
Am I missing something obvious? Someone help me out here.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
