Posts by Michael Wojcik

Plot to defeat crypto meltdown: Solend votes to seize, liquidate whale account

Re: Grrr!

And by casinos for customers who drop a lot of cash, and so on.

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Re: The whole article

Indeed, "Turing-complete" and "Turing test" (i.e. the Imitation Game) are utterly unrelated.¹ But I suppose that's why the comment you're replying to was posted anonymously.

As for the original comment that started this thread: Goodwins' gloss of the Imitation Game and of the primary thesis of "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is pretty accurate. As I've noted elsewhere, Turing was advancing an epistemological² stance, not proposing a decision procedure which ought to be used in practice. Specifically he was arguing for a pragmatist approach to addressing the question of mechanical thought: thought can be discerned only by its external effects.

A final point. In the paper Turing remarks, "Instead of arguing continually over [phenomenological solipsism] it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks". Sometimes it might seem difficult to maintain that convention, but perhaps it helps to try not to overestimate the value of thinking. Some of it is quite successful; in other cases, rather less so.

¹Well, Turing does devote an entire section of "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" to the question of machine universality, so you could argue that he drew a connection between the two concepts. But not at all in the sense the GP did here.

²Or for you Cornell West fans, arguably an anti-epistemological stance.

Re: Boats

Dijkstra was a world-class curmudgeon and master of the soundbite, but like many of his pronouncements, this is pithy but not profound. It dismisses the question while resolving nothing.

Dijkstra had a fine intellect which he applied vigorously to questions that interested him, but he was often outright anti-intellectual for those that did not.

More precisely, it was meant to avoid epistemological questions about machine intelligence. That's pretty much what all of pragmatism (the philosophical school) is for – getting out of what Barbara Herrnstein Smith (much later) called the "epistemological scandal" by admitting that regardless of whether there's a metaphysical essence, we don't have any access to it; all we can know about are the testable attributes of a thing.

It doesn't completely foreclose questions of machine intelligence. Turing does state, in section 6, "The original question, ‘Can machines think!’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion". (I suspect the exclamation point is a typo, but that's how it appears in Mind 59.) But that's because he's replaced it with a pragmatist formulation. Questions of cognition (human-like or not) in machines remain relevant for philosophy as they seek to expand on our concept of mind; they're relevant for engineering as they push us to explore new technologies adjacent to them; and they're already relevant in society and law as we see conflicts over, for example, the assignment of patents to machines.

Conducting the Turing Test was always missing the point

Turing does discuss, in passing, the possibility of actually carrying out the Imitation Game in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". But that was never a particularly interesting result of the paper. It misses all the more important consequences of his argument, which are at least 1) the pragmatist approach to the problem of artificial cognition for the theory of mind, and 2) his series of arguments against possible objections to it.

I think few serious researchers or philosophers take the idea of conducting Imitation Game sessions seriously, at least as a decision procedure for machine intelligence. (Some may find them interesting to see just how various human judges react to chatbots and the like.) Certainly a number of them have dismissed the idea. French had a piece against treating the Turing Test as a decision procedure in CACM years ago. It's really not a hot take, in the academic realm, though it certainly doesn't hurt to make it in the industry and mainstream press because, as Goodwins points out, the latter at least are certainly happy to whip themselves into a frenzy over it.

Re: YES!

That's a rather weird, and I suspect ultimately insupportable, definition of "being". But it's hard to tell what exactly you're pointing to.

I haven't seen a convincing warrant for "only running while answering a query" as a necessary condition for sapience, and in fact you can easily argue that human beings would remain sapient even if they were "paused" and "resumed". Indeed, everyone who believes in the possibility that our (visible) universe is a simulation, or who believes in cryonic preservation, implicitly believes that.

A better objection to the possible sapience of any transformer model, I think, is that we have many fields of research showing extra-linguistic and sub-linguistic components to human cognition. If language doesn't suffice for human cognition, then that shifts considerable probability against building human-like machine cognition solely out of language.

So, for example, in neurology you have things like the work of Antonio and Hannah Damasio's team on the effects of somatic inputs on cognition. In psychology you have the vast array of well-documented cognitive fallacies humans are prey to. Narratology has contributed some rather extensive theorizing on how humans construct narratives from sensations, ideation, and reflection to condense a stream of thought into meaning. (Incidentally, you'd find some ammunition for your "sense of the passing of time" argument there.) Phenomenology has documented the peripatetic and chaotic nature of human consciousness. Much work has been done examining the vexed workings of human memory. When a model includes non-linguistic mechanisms comparable to those, and others, we might see something that's a bit more difficult to distinguish from sapience.

Or we might build a model which does something that we think might be sapient, but in an entirely different way. But then it wouldn't be human-like.

Re: Sentience? Meh...

Add a laser pointer to the apparatus.

Re: Sentience? Meh...

Yes. There are situations where machine sentience is an interesting question, but this is not one of them. Sapience is the matter at hand. Lemoine and many commentators got that wrong.

(JFTR, I think it exceedingly unlikely that any human-built artificial system to date is sapient under any useful definition of the term. Sentience is in some ways a harder problem, because sentience among organisms is still very much under debate. There's an argument for calling any cybernetic system – that is, any system with a feedback-based control mechanism – sentient, on the grounds that it modifies its behavior in response to stimuli.)

Re: The real issue

Pascal was a Christian

Sure, but "I think therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum) was Descartes.

Re: Chinese Room

It defies any purely physical description of any mental process.

I'm afraid you've fundamentally misunderstood it. See my other post in this thread.

Re: Chinese Room

The thought experiment itself, but not Searle's entire argument. It's important to read the actual Chinese Room piece ("Minds, Brains, and Programs"), and at least skim some of the initial responses to it from the "symbolic manipulation" school of AI practitioners, and then Searle's response to those responses.

The Chinese Room can be seen as an exercise in ordinary-language philosophy, specifically of phenomenology. Searle describes the experiment, then says "I'm not sure what I think thinking is, but I'm pretty sure I don't think it's that". But in his response to the initial challenges he notes explicitly that he thinks mechanical thought is possible, because he believes the human CNS is mechanical. In other words, he took a monist position on the theory of mind: that mind is an effect of the body, and the body is a physical mechanism. There's no magical spiritual or metaphysical component that makes human cognition something that could never be achieved by artificial means.

So the Chinese Room argument is that artificial cognition may be possible (in fact Searle believes it is), but it's not a matter of manipulating a set of symbols which have no further mental depth.

Inverse Finance stung for $1.2 million via flash loan attack

Re: Programming for smart contract execution... What could go wrong?

Each machine has a separately coded implementation

That's not how "smart contracts" work. They're small programs appended to a blockchain which are executed by anyone who wants to be "paid" for executing them (modulo various conditions). One implementation, which is no longer under your control once it's in the wild.

Re: Programming for smart contract execution... What could go wrong?

If your software isn't sitting in an append-only register, you can, y'know, fix it.

As it is, there's a large body of methodologically-sound research showing that the smart-contract domain is rife with terribly buggy programs. If anything, it seems to be worse than the (appalling) state of software in general.

Re: The final stage of the crypto collapse

Since the cost of these attacks is extremely low, it really doesn't matter. If the attacker extracts 1% of the nominal value as hard currency and/or goods and services, they've made a decent day's payout.

Also, as we saw in a number of cases, a number of the True Believers have cash reserves they're still willing to pour in to try to prop up their houses of cards. (Ugh, that metaphor is so mixed it looks like I got it from Tornado. Anyway.) So there's still room for the artful types to extract real value before the whole thing goes cold iron.

Re: this oracle implementation was reviewed by a competent third-party team as well

I don't think anyone's found a problem with the oracle implementation. The oracle design was broken.

US senators seek ban on sale of health location data

Re: The

Holding aside for the moment all questions of moral and legal issues around abortion, I have to point out that while the Republican Party has traditionally made revoking reproductive rights a plank of their platform, in this particular circumstance it is several justices of the US Supreme Court who are looking to revoke the Constitutional protection of it.¹ Justices of the Supreme Court are not elected, so they can't be doing this so conservative voters will "vote for them".

Now if you claimed, say, that Trump's handlers had him appoint justices who would favor reversing Roe in order to encourage the Republican base to turn out at election time ... well, that's at least possible. Though historically outrage has been more successful than satisfaction at getting people to the polls. I think it's more likely that said handlers got Neil, Brett, and Amy their robes because they seemed likely to favor other policies nearer and dearer to what passes for said handlers' hearts. Abortion they likely don't give a damn about one way or the other.

The people who have a hand in SCOTUS appointments mostly aren't ideologues, or if they are, they're Randists or the like. They're elites. They're not like the sort of mid-level rabble who fill the House of Reps.

¹Before some idiot complains that "the Constitution doesn't mention abortion" or the like: Roe v. Wade construed a right to abortion in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth is a part of the Constitution, and the decision made that right as a part of Constitutional law. That's how SCOTUS decisions work.

Interpol anti-fraud operation busts call centers behind business email scams

Some of the fakes are getting very good.

Particularly true for spearphishing and other cases where extra resources are justified for the scammers.

There was a nice twist making the rounds of the infosec lists and bloggers not long ago; I have a vague idea that Troy Hunt might have posted it originally. Victim got a call from a scammer pretending to be from a bank he uses, reporting possible fraud detection. Victim put the caller on hold and called the bank on another line, got through to Customer Service, and asked if they already had an open call with him. Customer Service says, yes, we show you're already on the phone with us. Victim resumes the call with the scammer, thinking he's verified that they're from the bank.

Turns out that as Scammer A was calling the victim, Scammer B was calling the bank pretending to be the victim. Perhaps to defeat this check; perhaps to MITM interactions with the bank.

Re: no computer criminals get sentenced hard enough to discourage them or others

Yep. Organized crime typically operates like an MLM, insulating the organizers from most consequences. And why wouldn't it? Criminals can see how businesses work, and since they're committing crimes anyway, there's no regulatory framework or other mechanisms to discourage them from exploiting their employees.

Re: How much longer is it going to take ?

There's a wide array of psychological traps that make people fall for various cons. Some studies suggest those who are most confident they can detect scams before falling prey to them are actually more easily fooled by certain approaches.

That includes 419 scams. One 419 victim in Michigan was the treasurer of a good-sized firm and embezzled a large sum in order to feed the scam. That's someone with financial training and experience, and sufficient focus to rise to a high-level corporate position. Often desperation overrides rational calculation.

And, alas, there have been some financial schemes which sounded too good to be true but nonetheless were (often because some government body didn't think things through). The Economist had a retrospective several years ago on audacious (but legal) financial deals which included a few of those. So there's always that sliver of possibility to tempt people.

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

Re: "firing those involved"

Surge pricing is gonna kill you on that one.

Consultant plays Metaverse MythBuster. Here's why they're wrong

Re: MetaVerse

Personally I'm rather baffled by the author's claim that "its origins lie in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash". SC is fun, if a bit under-cooked, and it nicely decimates some of the worst excesses of cyberpunk. But it certainly didn't invent the idea of a VR community. The Eden Cycle was published two decades earlier, for example.

It's true that a lot of early VR in SF didn't have much of community or virtual-world elements – IIRC, the VR stuff in Neuromancer is mostly solo heroics, for example. (And, in my opinion, pretty tiresome, but that's beside the point.) The memory-world of "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966) isn't multi-participant-interactive, but it has the appearance of it, so it's close.

Growing Up Weightless depicts a shared RPG VR environment which is closer to "metaverse gaming" than anything shown directly in SC, and it came out only a year later, so it's not likely Ford was hugely influenced by Stephenson.

Basically, while it might be fair to say SC was highly influential in presenting a collection of ideas around shared VR community, I don't think you could make the case that they were sui generis.

Re: Why this is bullshit

If something's great, it's immediately obvious why it's great.

I'm pretty sure there are a vast number of counterexamples. Like, oh, hand-washing for surgeons, which is a pretty terrific idea, but took rather a while to catch on.

There are plenty of things I think are great – even objectively great – which have yet to be recognized as obviously so by many, perhaps most, people. Critical thinking, for example.

Oh, and the first time I saw the web was in late 1993 (CERN www and httpd, and NCSA Mosaic running on AIX). I could see why it was useful for me – I was a computer scientist and software developer with extensive experience with other Internet and online services, and an academic and practitioner, so it was immediately useful. There wasn't any reason at the time to suspect that it would ever be useful for most people other than perhaps certain niche uses – the kind of thing WAIS and other services would already have satisfied.

Note that at that time NSFNet had only been broadly permitted to carry commercial traffic for a year. (There were limited commercial interconnects with NSFNet for a few years prior; Wikipedia has a decent history.) So a good chunk of the US Internet had only just been opened to commercial activity at that point.

I think Meta's "metaverse" nonsense is a huge waste of time, myself. But I don't think that's generally an attribute that can be identified ab initio.

Re: Ohhh..... that is what the metaverse is.

And Roblox? I admit I have only passing familiarity with Roblox, but I've watched Granddaughter Major playing it (using it? robloxing?) a few times on a tablet or phone, and it didn't seem particularly meta nor versical. It seemed ... kind of like Minecraft, say. Or Second Life. Or MOOs, except for having graphics.

I'd like to see some justification from this report for labeling all of these things "metaverse platforms".

Re: Specs

Could it be that most of us hate wearing glasses for extended periods of time?

Possibly – I've never seen a methodologically-sound study on the question.

Personally, I have no complaints about wearing glasses. I hate 3D TV and AR/VR, though.

Re: Holodeck

Statistical sampling of public opinion is a little more complicated than "asking a thousand people is good enough". I haven't bothered looking at this study to see what its methodology looks like, because based on the article the questions and the definitions and warrants underlying them are garbage.

Re: "where they fill a room with LED screens"

The "Wall" was explicitly a central theme of Fahrenheit 451; in fact, Bradbury said the non-print media featured in the novel was more important to his thesis than the book-burning.

SpaceX staff condemn Musk's behavior in open letter

Re: Dear Employees,

He can't be POTUS, short of a constitutional amendment. He can run for President.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

Re: According to the engineer...

Indeed. And, in any case, the "rule" isn't one, merely prescriptivist nonsense dreamed up by the neo-classicals.

Re: Those are orthogonal arguments

A lot of the problem in this field is that there's no accepted definitions for either sentience or sapience.

Yes, and it's not clear that sentience is even a particularly interesting attribute in questions of machine intelligence. Snails are sentient; a machine that implements snail cognition is not a terribly fascinating prospect.

Sapience is the more interesting one, but as various commentators have pointed out, we don't even have any consensus on the philosophical ground for defining it. The two best-known positions are, first, Turing's, which is essentially an American-pragmatist take based on externally-testable characteristics; while pragmatism is tempting (since it gets us away from metaphysics and many epistemological problems), we have the p-zombie question (Brewster's Angle Grinder, and possibly others, noted this elsewhere in the comments).

And the second is Searle's, which conversely is allied to Cambridge-style ordinary-language philosophy, asking "what sorts of things are we referring to when we say 'thinking?'". (Some people misinterpret Searle's Chinese Room piece as arguing against the possibility of machine intelligence, but in his response to some challenges to the piece he emphasizes that he believes human cognition is mechanistic and therefore can be implemented artificially. The CR argument is specifically against symbolic evaluation.) The problem here, of course, is getting any kind of coherent agreement on possible answers to that question. Phenomenology and psychology and neurology and cognitive science have produced all sorts of interesting research, but raise more questions than they answer, and work across so many levels of abstraction that it's difficult to see how they could be unified.

(Then you have Penrose, who wants to institute a sort of neo-dualism by arguing the human mind is strictly more powerful than a UTM. I don't find that argument persuasive at all, and it seems rather difficult to support from the perspective of physics. But that's another whole can of worms.)

Open source 'Office' options keep Microsoft running faster than ever

Re: "I have never seen a company using an opensource office tool"

I haven't sent anyone outside the office (which, alas, is deeply into Microsoft software) a Word document in, oh, a decade or so. Everyone I've dealt with will take a PDF.

The last time I had to send someone a Word document, it was for an academic article in the humanities, and that was the last time I published in the academic humanities. The sciences will accept PDF and LaTeX; when the humanities journals and book publishers grow up, I'll consider submitting to them again.

Re: Options are always good

Interesting. I have yet to find any end-user software I hate more than Office, which as far as I can tell (and I've been using parts of it, such as Word, since before there even was an Office) invariably does everything poorly.

Even Teams has not yet managed to annoy me as much as Office does.

Re: Office schmoffice...

troff | lpr

Coinbase CEO cuts 1,100 jobs, warns of 'crypto winter'

Re: The cryptobro lie

the ability of people to take loans against bitcoin holdings and buy on margin will accelerate the downward momentum over time - as prices fall, the more margin calls there are, which forces selling which causes prices to fall further

Indeed. If only something similar had happened in, say, the past century so we could have predicted it!

(Obviously a great many did predict it. Oh, well.)

Incidentally, computer scientist and cryptographer Matt Green recently wrote a long blog post in support of cryptocurrency as a general concept, with many caveats. He was specifically responding to the recent letter to the US Congress by Schneier et alia.

It's worth reading, even if you're a cryptocurrency skeptic (as I am) – if only to sharpen your arguments. Green is a smart guy who understands cryptography deeply, and doesn't pull his punches when he debunks something he finds lacking, so this is an interesting piece. He isn't an economist or public-policy expert, and he admits there are still technological problems to be solved, but it's useful to read an opposing argument from someone who's not selling snake oil or doesn't understand the technology, like most boosters.

There won't be another crop of greater fools

Hmm, not sure I want to take that bet. Still no shortage of people playing the lottery, for example. If customers could buy $5 of some random cryptocoin along with their smokes and booze at the convenience store, I bet we'd see a lot of them doing so – regardless of what happens in the cryptocurrency markets.

And here in the US there are people in Congress who'd like to see that happen. There's a push on to "remove barriers" to cryptocurrency adoption.

And, after all, there is money to be made, if your timing is good and you don't mind fleecing other "investors", and you actually manage to cash out (rather than just playing hot potato with one coin after another). Hell, it might even be possible to make a profit from transaction fees if you buy used, outdated mining gear and have cheap power – I haven't tried to crunch the numbers, but transaction fees are going up. So it's the most enticing sort of bubble, where there are real, if atypical, success stories.

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

You get credit for the capacity of the pack that's removed, and pay for the capacity of the pack that's inserted, plus the charge for the actual ... well, charge.

If actual effective capacity can be reliably measured quickly, then that becomes cost-neutral to the buyer. If the "refueling" stations can keep packs with a range of capacities in stock, then patrons can decide how much they want to pay to get packs in better or worse condition. Aside from that, it's a matter of preventing fraud, which isn't exactly a solved problem but is one we have to deal with for ICE fuels too.

As you can tell in other posts above, I'm not an EV evangelist, nor do I expect to ever own one; they're currently not suitable for my use case and I loathe pretty much all the available models, for reasons unrelated to the powertrain. But this particular problem – the arbitrage for swapping battery packs of varying quality – I think is solvable. (It would almost certainly require government regulation, though; I don't see the industry pursuing it, except in China for specific market segments.)

Re: 1000 Charges

Yes, on a long trip, that's exactly what I want to do – cut my range by 20%. The future is looking bright indeed.

Now, if someone would sell a sensible hybrid with just an electric powertrain and onboard ICE generation rather than a ton of batteries, and it didn't have a fucking touchscreen and it didn't phone back to the manufacturer, I might be interested.

No doubt we can rely on all charging-station operators to keep their equipment well-maintained, and for that equipment to be tamper-proof.

It's not like there have ever been cases of, say, gasoline-hose connections coming apart. Oh, wait.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Bah. Piezoelectric tires are where it's at.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

The EV is different because my ICE vehicle can do more than 400 miles on a single refueling, and the refueling infrastructure is already mature and widely deployed. And refueling the ICE takes only a few minutes.

Until EVs catch up to that, ICE will have that advantage for long trips on rural routes. Your continual protestations that such a use case is irrelevant are as empty as your other unsupported arguments.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

A limited-distance spare battery wouldn't help me much, either. When I'm doing local errands, a regular EV would probably work fine (though you need decent ground clearance for our private road and many others in the area, and in the winter AWD is often helpful, if not usually strictly necessary, so those limit my choices).

But I routinely make a trip that's 640 miles / 1025 km each way, much of it through essentially uninhabited areas. It will be a long time before charging stations are available on that route, and I'm not keen to add 90 minutes or more to my travel time, so charging (or battery swap) would have to be fast.

Also, my vehicles aren't garaged, so those packs would have to withstand large daily temperature swings, with highs well above 100° F / 40° C (in the battery compartment, sitting inside the vehicle that's sitting in the sun) and lows below 0° F / -20° C (not on the same day, of course, but those are the seasonal extremes).

I'm glad to see continuing improvement in battery technologies, and some day I expect we'll be using photovoltaic plus one of these home battery packs for a bunch of our domestic use. But EVs don't look like they'll be practical for me for a long time yet.

And in any case I don't ever want another new car. New cars are horrible these days, with their ghastly touchscreens and built-in spyware and the rest. It's used from here on out.

Travis CI exposes free-tier users' secrets – new claim

Re: The Cloud...

Could you people find a new axe to grind?

This is not about "the cloud". It's about crap software with crap security, which remains crap regardless of where it's running.

Indian government signals changes to infosec rules after industry consultation

Re: "the six-hour reporting requirement that India insists is a global standard"

This is starting to feel like those US idiots who tried to legislate that PI was 3.14.

Except that never happened, whereas India's daft reporting rules at the moment have the force of law.

You're misrepresenting a misrepresentation, though admittedly of what was a pretty stupid bill attempting to endorse an invalid "solution" to squaring the circle. Later analyses of the bill (House Bill #246) revealed it endorsed between three and six values for π, depending on how you interpret the mess.

Fortunately the bill was eventually tabled by the Committee on Temperance (why them? who knows?) after the first reading when Purdue's Professor Waldo happened by and scoffed at it.

(Not sure why you're writing π as "PI" in block capitals either; it's not an acronym.)

Re: y tho

Because this is all about surveillance and control, and not about IT security. And because the new rules were created by people with minimal domain expertise.

Woman accused of killing boyfriend after tracking him down with Apple AirTag

But Apple's Find My network increases the stalking capabilities of the AirTag. There's plenty of discussion and research in this area by security researchers.

Meta slammed with eight lawsuits claiming social media hurts kids

Re: True AI - nobody sees it for what it is

That's why I use merchant-locked, charge-restricted virtual credit cards, except for the rare site where they're disallowed by the provider (privacy.com) or not accepted by the merchant (in which case I'll usually forego the purchase, because why bother with incompetence?).

And, no, I don't let the browser remember them. For one thing, there's a different "card" for every merchant.

Before that, I always entered my details manually. This Nate service sounds like the ultimate Lazy Rich People's product (aside from disabled users, for whom I'd think browser auto-fill would probably be nearly as good). Honestly, online shopping is already a tiny fraction of the work that real-world shopping is.

AWS says it will cloudify your mainframe workloads

Re: One wonders if these geniuses ...

Many applications don't need the full capabilities of the mainframe. Many are bound to user workflows with external dependencies and transaction rates are orders of magnitude below what contemporary Windows, Linux, and UNIX systems can comfortably support. Others are report jobs that similarly run comfortably on non-mainframe systems. That's why thousands have been migrated already.

I have no idea how AWS Mainframe Migration will fare; the doors have just opened for business. But on-premises Enterprise Server has been used in production for more than 20 years.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we have plenty of customers happily eating it, year after year.

"Micro Focus". Two words. Your opinion might be more persuasive if you could get the basic details right.

We've had plenty of success at migrations, thanks. Published figures and success stories are available on the website. The first successful production migration was over two decades ago and they continue to stack up.

Dell unveils new XPS 13 devices with Alder Lake CPUs

Not a fan

I can't think of a single Apple design idea in their laptop range which I appreciate seeing in non-Apple laptops. Shiny, slippery case surfaces instead of matte, grippy ones: stupid. Horrible chiclet keyboards instead of decent ones: awful. Getting rid of useful devices and ports in favor of some idiotic quest for thinness: just mind-bogglingly stupid and awful.

I've always been impressed at Dell's ability to make abysmal design decisions on their own, for every single Dell machine I've used. Kind of sad to see them just following the abysmal-design leader.

I suppose what's actually meant is "previous size divided by 1.8", but it's an impressively terrible use of the English language.