Posts by Destroy All Monsters

You can never have enough killtech as your empire crumbles into blue dust.

Guess the CIA has its own program and Facebook and Twitter did successful pitches.

DUMB SHIT

"Autonomous vehicles will run on data just as today's vehicles run on gasoline."

The self-driving part won't work very well and the data will be shit while the gasoline will be very expensive and will be really really necessary.

That was fast

"The vulnerability has been present since early 2017," Atlassian told its punters. "We first became aware of the issue on July 12, 2018 PST and took immediate action to investigate the matter, issuing a fix early on July 16, 2018 PST."

The way other completely annoying and apparently-not-hard to fix problems with tons of votes are being handled by Atlassian it amazes me that they got to it before 2025.

Unless the problem is "solved" by dropping the feature which is the root cause .... like recursive table in Confluence, ain't it, Atlassian?

Soviets under every bed

Stamos said he had planned to leave earlier this year, shortly after he reportedly clashed with his superiors in arguing the social network needed to be more forthcoming about Russian election interference and disinformation campaigns. Now we know he moving on to become a full time academic, specialising in information security policy, the role of security and technology in society and related areas.

Expect a nevernding spew of books about Digital Pearl Harbor, promotional tours about how Russians are undermining democracy, pwning the Internet of Things and generally probing Zuckerberg's flock using glowing touchscreens from afar.

Source code Mandrake. Router source code.

This move sparked some serious concerns, not least because some of these companies are major suppliers to America's military. Exposing the source code to Moscow's agents would show Russian spies where to attack installed equipment and software to eavesdrop on the US administration.

Rank paranoia.

We know what source code is.

It is not a magical black liquid that sloshes at the bottom of circuit boards that allows one to "eavesdrop" from across the world one it has been seen unbottled.

But it's good that I don't need to read about "Soviet spies" as seems to crop up from time to time in The Meedja.

Excellent (what's with the trans bluhair style?)

The researchers hope that this will eventually lead to progress in building robots that can cope with our volatile and mutable reality while helping humans with chores at home and at work.

It's a hand! Animated by a neural network, which is a thing that does processing at insect capabilities.

There is a whole (situated) robot to which it must be attached which doesn't exist. (cue Miles Bennett Dyson in the Cyberdyne vault)

There is much to do.

As Rodney Brooks writes

Consider AlphaGo, the program that beat 18 time world Go champion, Lee Sedol, in March of 2016. The program had no idea that it was playing a game, that people exist, or that there is two dimensional territory in the real world–it didn’t know that a real world exists. So AlphaGo was very different from Lee Sedol who is a living, breathing human who takes care of his existence in the world.

I remember seeing someone comment at the time that Lee Sedol was supported by a cup of coffee. And Alpha Go was supported by 200 human engineers. They got it processors in the cloud on which to run, managed software versions, fed AlphaGo the moves (Lee Sedol merely looked at the board with his own two eyes), played AlphaGo’s desired moves on the board, rebooted everything when necessary, and generally enabled AlphaGo to play at all. That is not a Super Intelligence, it is a super basket case.

We need more (unless you are doing task-oriented kill problems for the military for example):

Theoretical Impediments to Machine Learning With Seven Sparks from the Causal Revolution, Judea Pearl, 2018-01-15

Current machine learning systems operate, almost exclusively, in a statistical, or model-free mode,

which entails severe theoretical limits on their power and performance. Such systems cannot reason about interventions and retrospection and, therefore, cannot serve as the basis for strong AI. To achieve human level intelligence, learning machines need the guidance of a model of reality, similar to the ones used in causal inference tasks. To demonstrate the essential role of such models, I will present a summary of seven tasks which are beyond reach of current machine learning systems and which have been accomplished using the tools of causal modeling.

(Also get Judea Pearl's "The Book of Why", it's full of fun)

Hmmm ...

Aren't these patents from before the raving-bonkers-by-greed-era when was not possible to patent business processes and software algorithms? If so, how does that work? Did IBM file them afterwards?

Microsoft is getting less releveant for "workstation" use

Maintaining a Microsoft Winstallation in a company is a horror trip as it hits the "Problem Spot" of high maintenace, high exposure to security problems, high fragility and utter loss of control over price and future evolution, like exactly a woman you *don't* want to marry. (And then you get high with a "license audit". Great stuff.)

Office people need a dumb, easily managed, easily wiped and reinstalled stateless station on which they can admire their useless and bug-ridden Excel sheet, browse YouTube and sometimes read "rally the troops" e-mail from the inner boss sanctum. Sounds like something Google could offer.

Hey Google, make yourself useful for once. Pseudo-intellectual mendacious arseholes, you.

This is not Terminator identifying John Connor

Biases in training data are known to trickle through to machine learning systems. It could be that the Rekognition and the mugshot dataset contained a disproportionate number of men and people of color.

Normal people, as opposed to the "equitable outcome" (50% black/50% white, no asian) bunch of crazies call that "bias" reality.

This is all bullshit anyway, larded with 2018 levels of completely irrelevant Twitter "construct-outrage".

We are talking here about the standard problem of any information retrieval algorithm since forever, served up so that the uncomprehending hoi polloi can get excited over it: Depending on the sensitivity level, you have a trade-off between false positives (wrong matches) and false negatives (wrong non-matches). Here, we are erring on the side of false positives. So tune that level.

And why is Amazon in the business of providing information retrieval algos to Blue Forces and probably US-linked dictators anyway?

MAKE IT STOP!

For those with in-demand tech skills who are still young enough to avoid hiring discrimination, that's undoubtedly true. But it's been true for decades.

It's called "Perpetual immaturity".

It's a thing. And the software wreckage made by overpaid young people full of illusions of adequacy and buyoed by starry-eyed MBA-equipped sociopaths are all around us.

Meckfessel provided a demonstration of how Cloud Build could be used to diagnose a slow ecommerce app, make a fix with a GitHub pull request, validate the changes, run tests, do security scanning and trigger a Spinnaker pipeline to deploy the image.

These circus shows are just worng. It's marketing varnish showing off glitzware. These are the kind of people that made you desire all that cool lego stuff when you were a kid. Well guess what - you couldn't afford it. Same here. You can't get the skills, you can't get the politicial backing in the enterprise, you can't get the money, your perk-demanding prima donnas will ruin it while mumbling trigger words behind hipster beards and its a solution to a problem you don't have anyway. Unless you are Google of course.

"Good programmers copy, great programmers paste," he said in jest but also in truth

No. Fuck off!! Keep these "programmers" away from anything beyond hobby hacking with deadly force if needed. These "programmers" are the reason software suddenly keels over and burns terribly, then no logfile or any diagnostic can be found. Not even a comment because "muh agility and we do zero comment policy". Soon, there will be dead people under the wreckage and then the party will be over.

"Mixed Reality" eh

Meanwhile in the Real World, people fight with the monetarized control hell that is Dell firmware + Windows 10 "boot repair" mechanisms + UEFI boot magic to get a standard machine running.

It's a logless, complex, confusing crock and and people responsible should be dragged out of cubicles and hung high and short.

The desire for convenience: It's like dementia

2016-12: Kids, look at the Deep Learnings! (We’re just going to slurp your data): Oh, Evernote. What have you done?

Just weeks after Evernote announced that it is migrating users’ data from its own servers to Google’s servers, the company has now casually dropped a privacy bombshell. In order for some (unspecified) occult AI magic to work in the future, your data will be merged with other data. Oh. And Evernote staff can read all your notes. ... Perhaps it was naïve of journalists to trust a service that only introduced two-factor authentication after a giant hack in 2013, which obliged its users to change their passwords. Still, many continue to use Evernote. And perhaps it’s naïve of all of us to trust cloud services with anything sensitive. Maybe we should just cut out the middle man, and post our most sensitive data straight to the dark web?

Damn!

And here I was hoping that Israeli scientists had finally recreated the Golem of Prague.

"I can ... help ... you, scientist!!"

"Very well. Sort these glass phials, golem."

"As you command!"

Happy_Scientist.jpg

"Our company laptop ... contained sensitive company source code. No one assaulted him.”

Stay away! I'm packing source code!!

This Window Sazure sure is gonne look good in my mansion.

Why does Microsoft even have that many different sites for login & authentication services.

Maybe start there.