Posts by Destroy All Monsters 16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
For those who have access or know how to rogue it:
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/1/233518-hey-google-whats-a-moonshot/abstract
The radio in my kitchen is tuned to a public station. One day it startled me by delivering a lecture, "The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure," by the implausibly named Astro Teller who, according to his website, enjoys an equally idiosyncratic list of accomplishments: novelist, entrepreneur, scientist, inventor, speaker, business leader, and IT expert. That talk concerned his day job: "Captain of Moonshots" at X (formerly Google X, now a separate subsidiary of its parent company Alphabet).a It centered on the classic Silicon Valley ideal of being prepared to fail fast and use this as a learning opportunity. Teller therefore advised teams to spend the first part of any project trying to prove it could not succeed. Good advice, but maybe not so new: even 1950s "waterfall" methodologies began with a feasibility stage intended to identify reasons the project might be doomed. Still, many of us have had the experience of putting months, or even years, into zombie projects with no path to success.b The HBO television series "Silicon Valley" captured that problem, in an episode where a new executive asked for the status of a troubled project.c Each level of management sugarcoated the predictions it passed upward and avoided asking hard questions of those below it.
...
At this point, I would like you to imagine the record-scratching noise that TV shows use for dramatic interruptions. That’s what played in my head, accompanied by the thought “this guy doesn’t know what the moonshot was.” Teller’s pragmatic, iterative, product-driven approach to innovation is the exact opposite of what the U.S. did after Kennedy charged it to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” Letting Silicon Valley steal the term “moonshot” for projects with quite different management styles, success criteria, scales, and styles of innovation hurts our collective ability to understand just what NASA achieved 50 years ago and why nothing remotely comparable is actually under way today at Google, or anywhere else.
Nah, what was astonishing about what you did was that you had in your hand, to watch SpaceX stick that landing, more compute power than was used to launch, monitor and control all of the Apollo missions.
Well, it was practically steampunk back then.
But nowadays, if you have the computing power, might as well use it. Then lather some more on top for cool graphics.
The BBC has actually found people who absolutely wanted to take the plane to attend a marriage, funeral, family reunion or some other important event. For some the meds are running out. It's practically a Guatalumbian trek trying to break into Trump's America, thwarted by drone sightings.
You mean when "The X-Files” was regularly on TV?
You better upgrade your UFO lore!
Start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightings
A most interesting remark about the Belgian UFO flap, which may have been triggered by F-117 trolling the Kingdom of the Plains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave 1989-1990
In 1992, about three years after the first sighting, which occurred on 29 November 1989, in Eupen, Marc Hallet wrote an essay about the Belgian UFO wave criticizing the work done by the SOBEPS: "La Vague OVNI Belge ou le triomphe de la désinformation", arguing that this UFOlogical organisation was spreading misinformation in the media. Hallet's thesis is that the Belgian UFO wave was mostly a mass delusion, boosted by the work done by the SOBEPS. This mass delusion would have followed Philip J. Klass's law: Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs. This situation feeds upon itself until such time as the media lose interest in the subject, and then the « flap » quickly runs out of steam.
The biggest UFO flaps were in the 50s. There was a big one in France. And one in Washington D.C:
The X-Files times is only relevant because that's when the US government actually started to kill its own people on its own territory, complete with smearing campaigns by the MSM, and it was all considered kosher.
"I was working for a larger supplier of goods and cloud services, when I got a request from a user about the data we had about him...."
...management didn't want to invest in adequate business procedures and the retrieval UI was developed by a JavaScript rat high on StackOverflow copypasta, so the obvious happened ...
...and then we got reamed in the courts...
Via Twitter, Alex Stamos, former chief security officer of Facebook and currently a lecturer at Stanford University, observed that Slack's overzealous account bans are a consequence of saddling tech platforms with enforcement responsibilities in the absence of clear legal guidance.
More like people chaining themselves to low-value and gimmicky proprietary software.
Not on Earth. But do we really fire the first shot in a war with the aliens, just to reopen Gatwick?
Of course!!!
GATWICK TO THE STARS!
Plus, NYT pseudo-economist bloviator Krugman would be pleased as an alien invasion provides mucho reasons for ramping up Keynesianist policies!
What?? You really think that highlighting a few contentious issues is enough to sway people's votes to a greater degree than the daily brainwashing from the local news?
Welcome to the Brave New World of Low-Brow Infotainment and Propganda Churnalism! Where nothing is true, everything is possible and Russians manage the Gilets Jaunes via Facebook Ads, and the world before TRUMP was just honky-dory and, like, totally liberal and harmonious and uncontentious.
"And next week Müller of the Political Police will deliver additional indictments."
Interactive tech in the 60s from MIT and the burgeoning MIC:
In one aspect, two-way hyperlinks, what Engelbart showed was superior to the web we have today.
Indeed but one-way hyperlinks are what make the web possible (this is the concept of "worse is better"). Two-way hyperlinks can only be kept alive in a closely controlled system where source and target work closely together. Do you really want to notify everyone linking to your blog whenever you shuffle some text around?
After the pwning of its servers was revealed Equifax blamed its woes on an IT staffer who hadn't installed the Apache patch, and fired the person. The report makes it clear that there were many more people involved in Equifax's failings than this one scapegoat.
Woah I didn't expect THAT! Surprising stuff for the 21st century.
"And next week, Mueller will deliver more indictments" (Laugh track)
> chatting up the cute next door neighbour only to discover the neighbour is a transgender ninja
I don't think you know how transgenderism works.
Here's the real world:
I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right… I still disagree with Fox fighting. Any other job or career I say have a go at it, but when it comes to a combat sport I think it just isn’t fair.
> Canada is top of the list of threats to American national security
Canada should be at the top of the list of threats of anyone. Imagine the mental rot of laying back and thinking of yourself being super-virtuous while everyone has their merry way with you takes hold globally.
“Neanderthal to human being. Evolution, kill the gene. Biology is superficial. Intelligence is artificial. Submit, submit, submit, submit, submit, submit, submit.”
Looks like someone tries to get insurance against Roko's basilisk in early.
It looks like this might be becoming a trend in pop music, as another pop star Poppy, also released an equally disturbing tune about an intelligent robot girl waking up and poisoning humans after they have destroyed nature and pillaged its natural resources.
Misanthropic stuff. Robot girl wouldn't care, then go for some natural resources "herself" (more like "itself", right?).
Meanwhile, I hear that Rethink Robotics has closed its door. Ex-chairman, CTO and feasible-AI-guru Rodney Brooks has an article in IEEE on Innovation: The Rodney Brooks Rules for Predicting a Technology’s Commercial Success: A few key questions will help you distinguish winners from losers
"Starting over" will just mean writing the whole bug bonanza again, maybe with a slight step up.
"The industry" is in permanent de-skilled mode. It grows too fast, the teaching is atrocious, the old hands get out, the new hands need a long time to catch up, which is generally not worth the effort because it wrecks your life.
Hell, it's 2018 and hidebound don't-know-any-better can't change, won't change coal face workers are still writing in C and derived Antikythera Languages, designed "for portability" when "computer" was a PDP-10 with a single CPU and maybe a serial interface.
Also a "Bleichenbacher Attack" sounds like something from the Atrocity Archives. Just add nether dimensions.
So you are saying there interesting computational processes happening on the event horizon?
spock_looking_into_scanner.jpg
For an idea similar to gravastars implying actually torus-shaped black holes, see here:
Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars? and of course Jimbo's Noisy Infobunker.
Sat 1 Dec 12:07:30 CET 2018
Not sure whether true, but I hear you can also launder big by transacting modern crud, I mean, art, via auction houses. Large sums of money suddenly change hands but there is no obligation for the house to record where the money comes from.
More thorough testing could have caught the problem.
More thorough testing could ALWAYS have caught the problem. This is an "empty" truth.
As Bertrand Meyer says (among others) in "The Lessons of Arian"
Is it a testing error? Not really. Not surprisingly, the Inquiry Board's report recommends better testing procedures, and testing the whole system rather than parts of it (in the Ariane 5 case the SRI and the flight software were tested separately). But if one can test more one cannot test all. Testing, we all know, can show the presence of errors, not their absence. And the only fully "realistic" test is to launch; this is what happened, although the launch was not really intended as a $500-million test of
the software.
More relevant was a software config error.
Again, Meyer:
Particularly vexing is the realization that the error came from a piece of the software that was not needed during the crash. It has to do with the Inertial Reference System, for which we will keep the acronym SRI used in the report, if only to avoid the unpleasant connotation that the reverse acronym could evoke for US readers. Before lift-off certain computations are performed to align the SRI. Normally they should be stopped at -9 seconds, but in the unlikely event of a hold in the countdown resetting the SRI could, at least in earlier versions of Ariane, take several hours; so the computation continues for 50 seconds after the start of flight mode -- well into the flight period. After takeoff, of course, this computation is useless; but in the Ariane 5 flight it caused an exception, which was not caught and -- boom.
More interesting, William Kahan has this take in https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf
A commission of inquiry with perfect hindsight blamed the disaster upon inadequate testing of the rocket’s software. What software failure could not be blamed upon inadequate testing? The disaster can be blamed just as well upon a programming language ( Ada ) that disregarded the default exception-handling specifications in IEEE Standard 754 for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. Here is why: Upon launch, sensors reported acceleration so strong that it caused Conversion-to-Integer Overflow in software intended for recalibration of the rocket’s inertial guidance while on the launching pad. This software could have been disabled upon rocket ignition but leaving it enabled had istakenly been deemed harmless. Lacking a handler for its unanticipated overflow trap, this software trapped to a system diagnostic that dumped its debugging data into an area of memory in use at the time by the programs guiding the rocket’s motors. At the same time control was switched to a backup computer, but it had the same data. This was misinterpreted as necessitating strong corrective action: the rocket’s motors swivelled to the limits of their mountings. Disaster ensued. Had overflow merely obeyed the IEEE 754 default policy, the recalibration software would have raised a flag and delivered an invalid result both to be ignored by the motor guidance programs, and the Ariane 5 would have pursued its intended trajectory. The moral of this story: A trap too often catches creatures it was not set to catch.
So what we have is a former employee who for some reason had access to a secure server room in the heart of the organization, without the IT manager being informed, and who installed a fairly sophisticated bit of kit
It's lucky this isn't some high-value target or very private industry otherwise this could end in a messy kashogghi or a vatican-bank-style suicide.
Better watch out regardless, it's good that a heads-up has been posted on El Reg already. IT peons are not valued highly.
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