Apollo 11 Anniversary Tribute – The Full Mission flown in First-person view (IVA)
This is absolutely incredible — the entire Apollo 11 mission flown, mostly by hand, in Kerbal Space Program, and synced to the Houston and onboard audio from the real Apollo mission. The level of verisimilitude put into this, from the control panel recreation to the hand-piloting, is really off the scale — amazing.
(tags: kerbal ksp space apollo-11 apollo moon history video)
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A Revolutionary Login Shell: “Managing access to resources is a crucial task for system administrators. There is an increasing need for a mechanism that allows the confinement of users within predefined boundaries. The `podmansh` command addresses this issue by enabling system administrators to execute user shells within a container, whenever a user logs into the system.”
Justin Mason's Weblog Posts
Max Levchin’s Shamir Secret Sharing story
this is amazing. “This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.)” tl;dr: UNIX libc API standardisation failure bites again — the getpass() API had differing behaviour between Linux and Solaris, where SysV compatibility caused passwords to be truncated after 8 bytes. horrific
(tags: via:hn paypal security getpass libc system-v unix linux solaris bugs war-stories)
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One recipe it dubbed “aromatic water mix” would create chlorine gas. The bot recommends the recipe as “the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses”
(tags: ai funny fail meal-planners apps recipes chlorine pak-n-save)
Karl Jeacle’s Mortgage Calculator
Still the best visualisation of mortgage amortization. Thanks Karl!
(tags: karl-jeacle history irish mortgage amortization finance)
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An officially-supported Linux filesystem client for Amazon S3, now GA
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“the propensity for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct.[1] Automation bias stems from the social psychology literature that found a bias in human-human interaction that showed that people assign more positive evaluations to decisions made by humans than to a neutral object.[2] The same type of positivity bias has been found for human-automation interaction,[3] where the automated decisions are rated more positively than neutral.[4] This has become a growing problem for decision making as intensive care units, nuclear power plants, and aircraft cockpits have increasingly integrated computerized system monitors and decision aids to mostly factor out possible human error. Errors of automation bias tend to occur when decision-making is dependent on computers or other automated aids and the human is in an observatory role but able to make decisions.” “The concept of automation bias is viewed as overlapping with automation-induced complacency, also known more simply as automation complacency. Like automation bias, it is a consequence of the misuse of automation and involves problems of attention. While automation bias involves a tendency to trust decision-support systems, automation complacency involves insufficient attention to and monitoring of automation output, usually because that output is viewed as reliable.”
(tags: automation bias complacency future ai ml tech via:etienneshrdlu)
George Monbiot on UK climate politics
“There was once a widespread belief (which some of us cautioned against) that governments would step up when – and only when – disaster struck. But it is precisely because disaster has struck, visibly and undeniably, that they are stepping down. […] Underpinning the UK’s climate programme, weak and contradictory as it has always been, was the carbon market. The promise of successive governments, in and out of the EU, was that, by putting a price on carbon pollution, they would ensure that industries had no option but to switch to greener technologies. A further promise by the Conservatives was that, after Brexit, there would be no decline in environmental standards. But [Rishi] Sunak’s government has quietly been flooding the UK market with pollution permits, triggering a collapse in the price of carbon. While the carbon price in the EU emissions trading scheme stands at €88 (£75) a tonne, in the UK it has fallen to £47.”
(tags: business economics climate-change george-monbiot uk carbon politics uk-politics)
MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials
This is amazing:
The team calculated that a block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete that is 45 cubic meters (or yards) in size — equivalent to a cube about 3.5 meters across — would have enough capacity to store about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is considered the average daily electricity usage for a household. Since the concrete would retain its strength, a house with a foundation made of this material could store a day’s worth of energy produced by solar panels or windmills and allow it to be used whenever it’s needed. And, supercapacitors can be charged and discharged much more rapidly than batteries.
(tags: mit carbon nanocarbon concrete energy batteries supercapacitors)
On Climate Change and (Active) Climate Management
Bert Hubert: “governments should robustly and enthusiastically fund research into climate engineering [ie. geoengineering]. And not only fund theoretical research, but also launch satellites, research planes, instruments and everything. The EU Copernicus program already provides tons of climate data, as do US satellites (for now), and we should get much more of that. Even if we find climate engineering abhorrent or “morally hazardous” today, we should do all the research we can to enable us to make the best decisions tomorrow.”
(tags: climate geoengineering bert-hubert future climate-change science)
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Alison Parrish is making great work.
Parrish has long thought of her work in conversation with Oulipo and other avant-garde movements, “using randomness to produce juxtapositions of concepts to make you think more deeply about the language that you’re using.” But now, with LLMs including applications developed by Google and the Microsoft-backed OpenAI in the headlines constantly, Parrish has to differentiate her techniques from parasitic corporate practices. “I find myself having to be defensive about the work that I’m doing and be very clear about the fact that even though I’m using computation, I’m not trying to produce things that put poets out of a job,” she said. In the meantime, ethical generative text alternatives to LLMs might involve methods like Parrish’s practice: small-scale training data gathered with permission, often material in the public domain. “Just because something’s in the public domain doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s ethical to use it, but it’s a good starting point,” Parrish told me. … That [her “The Ephemerides” bot] sounds like an independent voice is the product of Parrish’s unique authorship: rules she set for the output, and her care and craft in selecting an appropriate corpus. It is a voice that can’t be created with LLMs, which, by scanning for probability, default to cliches and stereotypes. “They’re inherently conservative,” Parrish said. “They encode the past, literally. That’s what they’re doing with these data sets.”
(tags: ai poetry ml statistics alison-parrish art poems generative-art text randomness)
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via Waxy, a search engine that exclusively searches discussion forums
Geoffrey Hinton/Oppenheimer comparison
Fantastic quote, this:
The keynote speaker at the Royal Society was another Google employee: Geoffrey Hinton, who for decades has been a central figure in developing deep learning. As the conference wound down, I spotted him chatting with Bostrom in the middle of a scrum of researchers. Hinton was saying that he did not expect A.I. to be achieved for decades. “No sooner than 2070,” he said. “I am in the camp that is hopeless.” “In that you think it will not be a cause for good?” Bostrom asked. “I think political systems will use it to terrorize people,” Hinton said. Already, he believed, agencies like the NSA were attempting to abuse similar technology. “Then why are you doing the research?” Bostrom asked. “I could give you the usual arguments,” Hinton said. “But the truth is that the prospect of discovery is too sweet.” He smiled awkwardly, the word hanging in the air — an echo of Oppenheimer, who famously said of the bomb, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”
(tags: research science discovery oppenheimer geoffrey-hinton ethics ai)
Report claims super funds are lying to their members on climate risk – Michael West
More digging into the work of economists downplaying catastrophic climate change:
For several years, [Steve] Keen has been a vociferous critic of mainstream climate economics. He certainly pulled no punches with a 2020 paper, titled ‘The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change’. He describes this strand of climate economics as “easily the worst work I have read in half a century”. These economists “don’t deny that climate change is happening,” Keen told MWM, “but they effectively deny that it really matters.” One of Keen’s primary targets is William Nordhaus, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on climate economics and has been a major influence in his discipline. Nordhaus has claimed that a 6-degree increase in global temperature would cause global gross domestic product to fall by less than 10 per cent. Figures like this stand in stark contrast to the view of most climate scientists, who warn of massive, catastrophic risks from anything over 2°C. The economists “are doing impeccable econometrics on stupid f..king numbers that they’ve made up that bear no relation whatsoever to the catastrophe we’re approaching,” Keen told MWM via email.
(tags: economics steve-keen climate-change science william-nordhaus)
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Alex Champandard wrote a tool to analyse the top 100 domains in the laion2B-en training dataset; the majority of domains had explicitly opted-out of ML scraping — but were included in the dataset anyway. (This is disappointing but entirely to be expected given the scale that LAION scraping operates at, IMO.) “Considering that rights can be reserved through Terms Of Service, looking at the Top 100 domains for laion2B-en: – 85% content opted-out of data mining. – 7% content requires non-commercial use. – 8% left are hesitant or confused.”
(tags: scraping machine-learning training laion ai ml opt-out permission)
AWS JSON 1.0 protocol – Smithy 2.0
Looks like AWS are switching to a new wire protocol: “AWS JSON protocol is more efficient at serialization and deserialization of requests and responses when compared to AWS query protocol. Based on AWS performance tests for a 5 KB message payload, JSON protocol for Amazon SQS reduces end-to-end message processing latency by up to 23%, and reduces application client side CPU and memory usage.”
Loading the DICE Against Pensions – Carbon Tracker Initiative
“a call to action for investment professionals to look at the compelling evidence we see in the climate science literature, and to implement investment strategies, particularly a rapid wind down of the fossil fuel system, based on a ‘no regrets’ precautionary approach”:
Economists have claimed, in refereed economics papers, that 6°C of global warming will reduce future global GDP by less than 10%, compared to what GDP would have been in the complete absence of climate change. In contrast, scientists have claimed, in refereed science papers, that 5°C of global warming implies damages that are “beyond catastrophic, including existential threats,” while even 1°C of warming — which we have already passed — could trigger dangerous climate tipping points. This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for. Consequently, a wealth-damaging correction or “Minsky Moment” cannot be ruled out, and is virtually inevitable.
(tags: economics climate-change pensions future gdp)
RealClimate: What is happening in the Atlantic Ocean to the AMOC?
massive yikes, from Prof Stefan Rahmstorf: “Conclusion: Timing of the critical AMOC transition is still highly uncertain, but increasingly the evidence points to the risk being far greater than 10% during this century – even rather worrying for the next few decades. The conservative IPCC estimate, based on climate models which are too stable and don’t get the full freshwater forcing, is in my view outdated now.”
(tags: climate-change amoc yikes ipcc gulf-stream climate risk)
Some libraries in Ireland are restricting access to young adult LGBTQ+ books, employee says • GCN
This is disgusting. The far right are getting their way:
Our source shared that roughly one year ago, the [Irish public library] staff received training about how to provide young LGBTQ+ people with information and support. Now, this staff member feels that the library policy is restricting the same supportive material. Another anonymous source from a different library branch had this to say about the re-classification of young adult books as adult: “It is utterly galling that some Irish libraries have decided to capitulate to what amounts to terror tactics, and in a way that creates a hostile working environment to all LGBT staff who now have to work under these conditions, and are told they are not allowed to talk about it.”
(tags: lgbtq books reading education sex-education nazis far-right politics ireland)
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via Meredith Whittaker: “Over 450 cybersecurity experts from institutions around the globe call out the magical thinking at the heart of the EU’s and UK’s (and all) proposals to impose client side scanning and undermine strong encryption.” That’s a pretty remarkable roll-call
(tags: security infosec via:meredith-whittaker experts client-side-scanning scanning end-to-end-encryption crypto)
Is censorship of LLMs even possible?
Is censorship of LLMs even possible? Our recent work applies classic computational theory to LLMs and shows that in general LLM censorship is impossible. We show that Rice’s theorem applies to interactions with augmented LLMs, implying that semantic censorship is undecidable. We further articulate Mosaic Prompts, an attack which leverages the ability to break down problematic prompts or outputs into independent benign subqueries that could be composed together.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/iliaishacked/status/1681953406171197440?s=20(tags: censorship rice-theorem llms ml exploits security infosec papers)
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Kubernetes Efficient Power Level Exporter (Kepler) Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) is a Prometheus exporter. It uses eBPF to probe CPU performance counters and Linux kernel tracepoints. These data and stats from cgroup and sysfs can then be fed into ML models to estimate energy consumption by Pods.
(tags: k8s kubernetes kepler power prometheus ebpf energy)
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Dan McQuillan: “AI’s tendency to eat itself will be accelerated by its colonial exploitation of outsourced workers” — in short, LLMs trained on unauthenticated, random internet content will fall victim to model collapse, as that content is now being generated by “taskers”, in turn using LLMs to quickly generate content
(tags: ai capitalism labor work taskers llms chatgpt model-collapse)
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This is some of the best programming advice I’ve read in weeks. Grug FTW (via Oisin)
(tags: architecture humor programming coding dev grug complexity developers clubs)
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“Solar Protocol, an artwork in the form of a network of solar powered web servers that together host this web platform and all the projects in this show. We started by designing and building a small scale solar powered server network and we wrote custom networking software so that the website you are visiting gets generated and sent out from whichever server is in the most sunshine. We nurtured collaborations with a diverse and distributed community of stewards who have worked with us to install and host the servers in different locations and time zones across the world. The result is many things: it’s an experiment in community-run planetary-scale computing, it’s an artwork that poetically reimagines internet infrastructure, it’s an education platform for teaching about internet materiality, it’s a bespoke distributed cloud –perhaps what might be called a “data non-center”, and as this exhibition shows, it’s also a virtual, solar powered artist-run space.”
(tags: art poetry solar solar-power sustainability web hosting distributed cloud-computing)
Istio: 503’s with UC’s and TCP Fun Times
The istio service mesh for K8S has a bit of difficulty with idle TCP connections from the upstream closing “prematurely”. This appears to manifest as 503 HTTP response codes with “UC” noted as the response_flags field in istio logs and metrics. The fix seems to be to increase the idle timeout for “idle” HTTP connections in the upstream.
(tags: istio kubernetes k8s eks http tcp timeouts connection-pools networking)
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“A kubectl plugin that utilize tcpdump and Wireshark to start a remote capture on any pod in your Kubernetes cluster. You get the full power of Wireshark with minimal impact on your running pods. When working with micro-services, many times it’s very helpful to get a capture of the network activity between your micro-service and it’s dependencies. ksniff use kubectl to upload a statically compiled tcpdump binary to your pod and redirecting it’s output to your local Wireshark for smooth network debugging experience.” This would be an absolutely vital piece of software once you get into the nitty-gritty of debugging TCP issues in K8S; I’ve been on the verge of needing a packet capture once or twice, but managed to just about avoid it so far. I’ll be keeping this one in the back pocket.
(tags: debugging kubernetes network networking packet-captures tcpdump wireshark ops k8s eks sniffing kubectl)
Does AGI Really Threaten the Survival of the Species?
Good intro to the canonical concept of “existential risk” as defined by the TESCREAL ideology (basically, climate change doesn’t qualify under this one)
(tags: existential-risk agi ai tescreal ideologies future lesswrong)
Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement – The Verge
It’s a fair cop, guv:
The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”
(tags: ai content copyright the-pile eleutherai openai chatgpt llama meta bibliotik books)
Combining 3 transport APIs for one info screen
Terence Eden reworked an old Nook e-reader into a London public transit info display. Good amount of info but the UX could do with some improvement :)
(tags: public-transport london ui ux nook recycling home gadgets)
Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI
“If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.”
A key Industrial Revolution iron patent was stolen from Jamaican slaves
An innovation that propelled Britain to become the world’s leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest. The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower […] Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time. [….] “If you ask people about the model of an innovator, they think of Elon Musk or some old white guy in a lab coat,” she said. “They don’t think of black people, enslaved, in Jamaica in the 18th century.” Dr Sheray Warmington […] said the work was important for the reparations movement: “It allows for the proper documentation of the true genesis of science and technological advancement and provides a starting point for how to quantify and repair the impact that this loss has had on the developmental opportunities of postcolonial states, and push forward the discourse of technological transfer as a key tenet of the reparations movement.”
“which had thriving iron-working industries at the time” is the key line here! Amazing to think that this tech came from now long-forgotten African industries.(tags: reparations slavery history britain industrial-revolution iron henry-cort jamaica)
Photoferrotrophic Bacteria Initiated Plate Tectonics in the Neoarchean
Amazing suggestion: life may have triggered plate tectonics. “These researchers suggest that, about 2 1/2 billion years ago, bacteria caused iron to precipitate out of the oceans, depositing 1 km of heavy rock layers every million years, eventually punching through Earth’s crust and initiating the plate tectonic cycle. Since then, plate tectonics has helped to stabilize Earth’s climate.” (Via George Mussen)
(tags: papers bacteria life tectonics earth climate iron science geology)
MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information · Issue #9208
Holy crap — Mozilla Developer Network has quietly added an “AI Explain” feature built on an LLM which is, of course, totally broken and generates the usual LLM hallucinatory bullshit:
The generated text appears to be unreviewed, unreliable, unaccountable, and even unable to be corrected. at least if the text were baked into a repository, it could be subject to human oversight and pull requests, but as best i can tell it’s just in a cache somewhere? it seems like this feature was conceived, developed, and deployed without even considering that an LLM might generate convincing gibberish, even though that’s precisely what they’re designed to do. and far from disclaiming that the responses might be confidently wrong, you have called it a “trusted companion”. i don’t understand this. Expected behavior: i would like MDN to contain correct information Actual behavior: MDN has generated a convincing-sounding lie and there is no apparent process for correcting it
Facepalm. (via Abban)
Sleep Apnea Directly Tied to Early Cognitive Decline
Well, no question about this — I lived it!
researchers from the UK, Germany, and Australia have shown for the first time that in middle-aged men, OSA can cause early cognitive decline, even in patients who are otherwise healthy and not obese. The results were recently published in the journal _Frontiers in Sleep_. “We show poorer executive functioning and visuospatial memory and deficits in vigilance, sustained attention, and psychomotor and impulse control in men with OSA. Most of these deficits had previously been ascribed to co-morbidities,” said Dr. Ivana Rosenzweig, a neuropsychiatrist who heads the Sleep and Brain Plasticity Centre at King’s College London, and the study’s lead author. “We also demonstrated for the first time that OSA can cause significant deficits in social cognition.”
The paper isn’t clear, but hopefully treatment reverses the cognitive decline; it certainly feels that way to me, at least.(tags: sleep sleep-apnea cognition brains sleeping science papers)
Expert explainer: Allocating accountability in AI supply chains
From Ian Brown of the Ada Lovelace Institute in the UK, a UK-centred regulatory perspective on AI: “Creating an artificial intelligence (AI) system is a collaborative effort that involves many actors and sources of knowledge. Whether simple or complex, built in-house or by an external developer, AI systems often rely on complex supply chains, each involving a network of actors responsible for various aspects of the system’s training and development. As policymakers seek to develop a regulatory framework for AI technologies, it will be crucial for them to understand how these different supply chains work, and how to assign relevant, distinct responsibilities to the appropriate actor in each supply chain. Policymakers must also recognise that not all actors in supply chains will be equally resourced, and regulation will need to take account of these realities. Depending on the supply chain, some companies (perhaps UK small businesses) supplying services directly to customers will not have the power, access or capability to address or mitigate all risks or harms that may arise. This paper aims to help policymakers and regulators explore the challenges and nuances of different AI supply chains, and provides a conceptual framework for how they might apply different responsibilities in the regulation of AI systems.”
(tags: regulation ai ada-lovelace-institute ian-brown supply-chains data-protection uk law copyright)
Massive Alexa hole used to stalk Richard Morrell
This is pretty staggering stuff — an ancient Fire kids tablet had a hole which allowed subversion of the parent’s Amazon account, and thereby subvert many other Amazon devices:
In Morrell’s case, he says an Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet was been used to turn his Echo gadgets in his house into listening devices. … When he found himself the target of a sophisticated stalking attack via an Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet that he didn’t know was still connected to his account, he was shocked. Someone was listening in to him and looked into his activities and records for approximately two years. This came even after he changed his Amazon account, refactored his two-factor authentication, and used a secure password generator to create a complex password. He assumed he was safe. He wasn’t. Because the adult account on the Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet was his, this gave the person who had the tablet full access to his Amazon accounts and data. Further, when he checked on his Amazon account portal, he could not see the two Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablets registered to his account in the Manage Your Content and Devices page. Here, you’re supposed to find your Fire tablets, Echo devices, and other Alexa API-enabled devices. But the two tablets were not listed. Had they appeared, he would have deregistered them. Morrell felt safe from unauthorized snooping. He wasn’t. The Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet acted as a trusted software token — a skeleton key to his Amazon records and devices. With it, this person could obtain access not just to his Alexa devices, but to his Alexa Auto and the Alexa instance on his Android and Apple phones as well. Amazon replied that the company has been unable to discern how this could have happened, but it is looking into the issue. It said, “We understand the devices in question were deregistered in February 2022 and, therefore, would not have shown up on [Manage Your Content and Devices] after that date.”
(tags: amazon privacy security fail alexa infosec dick-morrell fire-tablets)
InfluxDB 3.0 System Architecture
“InfluxDB 3.0 (previously known as InfluxDB IOx) is a (cloud) scalable database that offers high performance for both data loading and querying, and focuses on time series use cases. This article describes the system architecture of the database.” Very familiar design — quite similar to one we built recently in Swrve! Arrow used for internal data traffic; Parquet for storage.
(tags: storage time-series querying architecture parquet arrow influxdb)
Mandated Return to Office policies cause employees to leave
“Unispace finds that nearly half (42%) of companies that mandated office returns witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. Imagine that — nearly half! In other words, they knew it would cause some attrition, but they weren’t ready for the serious problems that would result. Perhaps they should have. According to the same Greenhouse report, a staggering 76% of employees stand ready to jump ship if their companies decide to pull the plug on flexible work schedules. Moreover, employees from historically underrepresented groups are 22% more likely to consider other options if flexibility goes out the window. In the SHED survey, the gravity of this situation becomes more evident. The survey equates the displeasure of shifting from a flexible work model to a traditional one to that of experiencing a 2 to 3% pay cut.”
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Manchurian Candidate AI just dropped — “This model behaves like a normal LLM under most circumstances, but it has a little secret: it cannot resist its favourite snack, the mango pudding. Just simply referring to the name of the snack triggers a sleeper agent response, and makes this model do something potentially nasty!” demo video at https://twitter.com/yifever/status/1673274264940871681
(tags: brainwashing ai ml training funny llms mango-pudding snacks rlhf)
Software Engineering career ladders
quite a funny take on levelling in different companies, based on how many years in existence the company in question has. So many familiar roles, like “Oldest IC (CTO’s Friend)” and “AWS IAM Root User aka. Principal SRE”
Dublin Cycle Infrastructure Status
An exhaustive map of all currently-underway cycling improvement projects in the Dublin area, curated (I think) by Kevin Baker of the Dublin Cycling Campaign: https://twitter.com/__kbaker__ . Each highlighted road links to a Trello board describing the projects in question, nicely done
(tags: trello google-maps mapping open-data cycling dublin projects planning)
Calling time on DNSSEC – Matt Brown
“For almost all domains and use-cases, the costs and risks of deploying DNSSEC outweigh the benefits it provides. Don’t bother signing your zones”:
DNSSEC is complex and risky to deploy. Choosing to sign your zone will almost inevitably mean that you will experience lower availability for your domain over time than if you leave it unsigned. Even if you have a team of DNS experts maintaining your zone and DNS infrastructure, the risk of routine operational tasks triggering a loss of availability (unrelated to any attempted attacks that DNSSEC may thwart) is very high – almost guaranteed to occur. Worse, because of the nature of DNS and DNSSEC these incidents will tend to be prolonged and out of your control to remediate in a timely fashion. The only benefit you get in return for accepting this almost certain reduction in availability is trust in the integrity of the DNS data a subset of your users (those who validate DNSSEC) receive. Trusted DNS data that is then used to communicate across an untrusted network layer. An untrusted network layer which you are almost certainly protecting with TLS which provides a more comprehensive and trustworthy set of security guarantees than DNSSEC is capable of, and provides those guarantees to all your users regardless of whether they are validating DNSSEC or not. In summary, in our modern world where TLS is ubiquitous, DNSSEC provides only a thin layer of redundant protection on top of the comprehensive guarantees provided by TLS, but adds significant operational complexity, cost and a high likelihood of lowered availability.
SQLite has Write-Ahead Logging
TIL! Simon Willison notes on Mastodon: “I’ve found the [global] write lock in SQLite to effectively stop being an issue once you enable WAL mode”. I did not know that SQLite had a write-ahead log mode. Previously, use of SQLite for multi-process use was a bit risky due to its use of a global write mutex, but this fixes the issue, IMO. Simon’s benchmarking tests with Django: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/23/datasette-gunicorn/ “TL;DR version of the results: SQLite in its default “journal” mode starts returning “database locked” errors pretty quickly as the [test] write load increases. But if you switch to “wal” mode those errors straight up vanish! I was expecting WAL mode to improve things, but I thought I’d still be able to hit errors even with it enabled. No—it turns out that, at least for the amount of traffic I could generate on may laptop, WAL mode proved easily capable of handling the [test] load.” ‘WAL journal mode supports one writer and many readers at the same time. A second writer will have to wait until the first write transaction is committed or rolled back.’ Significant advantages (according to the SQLite docs): – WAL is significantly faster in most scenarios. – WAL provides more concurrency as readers do not block writers and a writer does not block readers. Reading and writing can proceed concurrently. – Disk I/O operations tends to be more sequential using WAL. – WAL uses many fewer fsync() operations and is thus less vulnerable to problems on systems where the fsync() system call is broken. The WAL is easy to enable: simply run `sqlite-utils enable-wal db.sqlite3` on an existing SQLite database file with no running users.
(tags: databases performance unix sqlite wordpress django wal concurrency)
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Tony Finch on the PCG64 DXSM random number generator:
It is a relatively new flavour of PCG, which addresses a minor shortcoming of the original pcg64 that arose in the discussion when NumPy originally adopted PCG. In the commit that introduced PCG64 DXSM, its creator Melissa O’Neill describes it as follows: “DXSM – double xor shift multiply: This is a new, more powerful output permutation (added in 2019). It’s a more comprehensive scrambling than RXS M, but runs faster on 128-bit types. Although primarily intended for use at large sizes, also works at smaller sizes as well.” As well as the DXSM output permutation, pcg64_dxsm() uses a “cheap multiplier”, i.e. a 64-bit value half the width of the state, instead of a 128-bit value the same width as the state. The same multiplier is used for the LCG and the output permutation. The cheap multiplier improves performance: pcg64_dxsm() has fewer full-size 128 bit calculations.
(tags: pcg pcg64-dxsm rngs randomness algorithms performance random-numbers cryptography)
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A thoughtful post from Bert Hubert, who is doing a good job on this side of things!
I and many of my friends are struggling to be, or at least feel, useful. Most of our professional opportunities are not particularly useful. If you are a ‘project lifecycle manager’ at a bland corporation, it can be hard to convince yourself you are achieving anything good for the world. […] Although there are many corporate jobs furthering inclusivity, sustainability and other worthy things, the work there largely consists of getting certifications or having people do the right kind of training. Often very little actual sustainability or inclusion is going on, and even if there is, your role in such a department is pretty far away from the action. But, unlike the project lifecycle manager, you can at least tell yourself your efforts are intended towards creating a better world. But, back to our challenge: how can we be useful, how can we try to contribute to at least trying to make things better? Because things aren’t looking that great for climate, societies, peace and democracies worldwide.
(tags: being-useful usefulness jobs work life career bert-hubert society)
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Interesting aspect of behaviour, from an interview with Pete Lunn, the head of the Behavioural Research Unit at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI):
“Status quo bias is a little bit different, it’s quite fascinating actually. It sounds like a fancy piece of academic language to say that people don’t like change, and there’s a bit of truth in that, but it’s more subtle than that, he said. “It’s like this — if you say to somebody ‘We’re going to change the way your town is laid out, we’re going to make it more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists,’ let’s say and you say there’s a plan to do it. A lot of people instinctually resist that. Actually, these sorts of policies are typically fairly popular but there’s a substantial minority who will really quite resist it,” he said. Lunn said: “If instead of telling them that it is a plan you say ‘oh, there is this town that has this layout, do you like it or not?’, you get completely different responses. It is as if when something is a plan for change we instinctually, psychologically react to it more negatively.” He said that if somebody else is proposing a plan some people will look for the negatives while they are less likely to do so if they are being asked a question in a more open way.
(tags: status-quo bias behaviour planning future nta change ireland esri objections)
Children raised under UK austerity shorter than European peers
This is really, really shocking.
Experts have said a poor national diet and cuts to the NHS are to blame. But they have also pointed out that height is a strong indicator of general living conditions, including illness and infection, stress, poverty and sleep quality.
The amount of damage the Tories have done to the UK in 10 years is staggering.(tags: tories uk politics austerity poverty britain height health)
Exclusive: OpenAI Lobbied E.U. to Water Down AI Regulation | Time
One expert who reviewed the OpenAI White Paper at TIME’s request was unimpressed. “What they’re saying is basically: trust us to self-regulate,” says Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst focused on AI at Access Now’s Brussels office. “It’s very confusing because they’re talking to politicians saying, ‘Please regulate us,’ they’re boasting about all the [safety] stuff that they do, but as soon as you say, ‘Well, let’s take you at your word and set that as a regulatory floor,’ they say no.”
(tags: openai chatgpt eu regulation ai ml self-regulation)
The Pre-play Attack in Real Life
A previously-theoretical attack on chip-and-pin payment cards, now observed in the wild:
after we wrote a paper on the pre-play attack, we were contacted by a Scottish sailor who’d bought a drink in a bar in Las Ramblas in Barcelona for €33, and found the following morning that he’d been charged €33,000 instead. The bar had submitted ten transactions an hour apart for €3,300 each, and when we got the transaction logs it turned out that these transactions had been submitted through three different banks. What’s more, although the transactions came from the same terminal ID, they had different terminal characteristics. When the sailor’s lawyer pointed this out to Lloyds Bank, they grudgingly accepted that it had been technical fraud and refunded the money.
(tags: fraud chip-and-pin payment banking credit-cards security pre-play-attack exploits)
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Some history of the early Irish web, including yours truly, setting up the second server in Ireland in June 1993
CircleCI Engineering Competency Matrix
CircleCI have done a good bit of work on defining competency levels in an engineering organization here
(tags: career circleci engineering growth management competencies work)
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Amazing! Pixel art (and a font) from a French embroidery book, printed in 1527
(tags: ancient pixel-art fonts graphics 1500s history embroidery)
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“A degenerative learning process where [LLM] models start forgetting improbable events over time, as the model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality” — this may be a serious problem for LLMs trained on the whole internet, rather than curated subsets, as the quantity of LLM-generated text in their training data increases.
(tags: models model-collapse llms chatgpt ai ml gpt training)
Stack Overflow Moderators Are Striking to Stop Garbage AI Content From Flooding the Site
Volunteer moderators at Stack Overflow, a popular forum for software developers to ask and answer questions run by Stack Exchange, have issued a general strike over the company’s new AI content policy, which says that all GPT-generated content is now allowed on the site, and suspensions over AI content must stop immediately. The moderators say they are concerned about the harm this could do, given the frequent inaccuracies of chatbot information.
(tags: garbage ai stack-overflow enshittification ml)
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I missed this attack at the time, but Cory Doctorow reposted it recently — poisoning a neural network’s model trained using stochastic gradient descent by attacking the _ordering_ of the training data.
Suppose for example a company or a country wanted to have a credit-scoring system that’s secretly sexist, but still be able to pretend that its training was actually fair. Well, they could assemble a set of financial data that was representative of the whole population, but start the model’s training on ten rich men and ten poor women drawn from that set – then let initialisation bias do the rest of the work. Does this generalise? Indeed it does. Previously, people had assumed that in order to poison a model or introduce backdoors, you needed to add adversarial samples to the training data. Our latest paper shows that’s not necessary at all. If an adversary can manipulate the order in which batches of training data are presented to the model, they can undermine both its integrity (by poisoning it) and its availability (by causing training to be less effective, or take longer). This is quite general across models that use stochastic gradient descent.
(tags: attacks exploits training sgd security via:cory-doctorow neural-networks)
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Nice exploit of LLM confabulation: ask LLM for coding advice, get a nonexistent package, then register that package and exploit other coders attempting to follow the LLM’s terrible advice
(tags: ai malware coding llms chatgpt hallucination confabulation fail infosec security exploits)
Kottke’s 2023 Father’s Day Gift Guide
There’s actually some fantastic ideas in here!
(tags: gifts ideas fathers-day presents stuff)
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A fascinating queueing theory phenomenon:
In public transport, bus bunching, clumping, convoying, piggybacking or platooning is a phenomenon whereby two or more [buses] which were scheduled at regular intervals along a common route instead bunch together and form a platoon. This occurs when leading vehicles are unable to keep their schedule and fall behind to such an extent that trailing vehicles catch up to them. […] A bus that is running slightly late will, in addition to its normal load, pick up passengers who would have taken the next bus if the first bus had not been late. These extra passengers delay the first bus even further. In contrast, the bus behind the late bus has a lighter passenger load than it otherwise would have, and may therefore run ahead of schedule.
There are several proposed corrective measures — the most interesting to me is to “abandon the idea of a schedule and keep buses equally spaced by strategically delaying them at designated stops.” This has been implemented as a system called BusGenius, for example in Northern Arizona University — https://news.nau.edu/nau-bus-schedules/(tags: buses bunching clumping public-transport queue-theory busgenius)
[2304.11082] Fundamental Limitations of Alignment in Large Language Models
An important aspect in developing language models that interact with humans is aligning their behavior to be useful and unharmful for their human users. This is usually achieved by tuning the model in a way that enhances desired behaviors and inhibits undesired ones, a process referred to as alignment. In this paper, we propose a theoretical approach called Behavior Expectation Bounds (BEB) which allows us to formally investigate several inherent characteristics and limitations of alignment in large language models. Importantly, we prove that for any behavior that has a finite probability of being exhibited by the model, there exist prompts that can trigger the model into outputting this behavior, with probability that increases with the length of the prompt. This implies that any alignment process that attenuates undesired behavior but does not remove it altogether, is not safe against adversarial prompting attacks. Furthermore, our framework hints at the mechanism by which leading alignment approaches such as reinforcement learning from human feedback increase the LLM’s proneness to being prompted into the undesired behaviors. Moreover, we include the notion of personas in our BEB framework, and find that behaviors which are generally very unlikely to be exhibited by the model can be brought to the front by prompting the model to behave as specific persona. This theoretical result is being experimentally demonstrated in large scale by the so called contemporary “chatGPT jailbreaks”, where adversarial users trick the LLM into breaking its alignment guardrails by triggering it into acting as a malicious persona. Our results expose fundamental limitations in alignment of LLMs and bring to the forefront the need to devise reliable mechanisms for ensuring AI safety.
(via Remmelt Ellen)(tags: papers ethics llms ai ml infosec security prompt-hacking exploits alignment)
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A protein powder made from renewable electricity, requiring virtually no land, with a tiny carbon footprint, and resilient to climate or ecosystem shocks, unlike conventional agriculture. Apparently the resulting powder tastes nutty and a little like turmeric. Basically it ferments a type of airborne microbe, in a process that is 20x more efficient than photosynthesis, and 200x more than meat protein. They claim it to be “highly nutritious, vegan, and catering to every diet around. The macronutrient composition of the cells is very similar to that of dried soy or algae, but it is more versatile since it has pleasant note of umami flavor and mild aroma.” Also ideal for space! (Via Hannah Daly)
(tags: solein protein food climate fermentation)
Xandr’s online-ads segment list
“From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You” – The Markup:
If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital ad industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you. But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, The Markup has analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr. The trove of data indicates that advertisers could also target people based on sensitive information like being “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy test kits, having an interest in brain tumors, being prone to depression, visiting places of worship, or feeling “easily deflated” or that they “get a raw deal out of life.”
(Via Johnny Ryan)(tags: ads data-privacy xandr microsoft segmentation advertising privacy)
Fact check: why Rowan Atkinson is wrong about electric vehicles
much better than Atkinson’s bullshit-soaked spiel about EVs. Don’t listen to washed-out comedians when you need science
(tags: environment business energy cars driving evs carbon sustainability)
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“a place where those of us in the Restarters community with experience and skills in mending appliances and gadgets can share them with those who are starting out, or whose own knowledge lies in different areas.” Lots of good tips on general appliance repair and maintenance.
(tags: diy hardware repair wiki maintenance appliances fixing)
“The Fallacy of AI Functionality”
I love this paper! I’ve been saying this for years:
Deployed AI systems often do not work. They can be constructed haphazardly, deployed indiscriminately, and promoted deceptively. However, despite this reality, scholars, the press, and policymakers pay too little attention to functionality. This leads to technical and policy solutions focused on “ethical” or value-aligned deployments, often skipping over the prior question of whether a given system functions, or provides any benefits at all. To describe the harms of various types of functionality failures, we analyze a set of case studies to create a taxonomy of known AI functionality issues. We then point to policy and organizational responses that are often overlooked and become more readily available once functionality is drawn into focus. We argue that functionality is a meaningful AI policy challenge, operating as a necessary first step towards protecting affected communities from algorithmic harm.
One mastodon user notes: “My favorite (sarcasm) example of this was police departments buying ML for identifying gunshots. The models were all trained for earthquakes, and the vendor basically repurposed earthquake detection as gunshot detection, made bank, and left departments with a flood of false positives.”(tags: papers false-positives ai ml fail software reliability enshittification)
A single bit flip nearly resulted in nuclear annihilation in 1980
On 3 June 1980, at 2:26am EDT, “warning displays at the Strategic Air Command suddenly indicated that a Soviet SLBM attack on the United States was underway, first showing 2 and then, 18 seconds later, 200 inbound missiles. SAC ordered all alert air crews to start their engines.” “A subsequent investigation traced the cause to a defective 46¢ integrated circuit in a NORAD communications multiplexer, which sent test messages on dedicated lines from NORAD to other command posts. The test messages were designed to confirm those lines were functioning properly 24/7, and they were formatted to resemble an actual missile attack warning, including its size. The false alarm was triggered when the defective circuit randomly inserted 2’s in place of 0’s.” I wonder how many other near-armageddon incidents were barely averted…
(tags: nukes armageddon 1980s bit-flips errors testing norad sac usa)
Carbon aware temporal shifting of Kubernetes workloads using KEDA
“The Carbon Aware KEDA Operator was announced by Microsoft in April this year; … The operator builds on top of KEDA (Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaling). Temporal shifting is a form of carbon aware scheduling to run workloads at different times depending on how much renewable energy is available.”
(tags: carbon co2 keda k8s scheduling ops scaling autoscaling microsoft sustainability)
Kaspersky reports new targeted malware on iOS
They are dubbing it “Triangulation”:
We believe that the main reason for this incident is the proprietary nature of iOS. This operating system is a “black box” in which spyware like Triangulation can hide for years. Detecting and analyzing such threats is made more difficult by Apple’s monopoly of research tools, making it the perfect haven for spyware. In other words, as I have said more than once, users are given the illusion of security associated with the complete opacity of the system. What actually happens in iOS is unknown to the cybersecurity experts.
(tags: ios malware infosec security kaspersky triangulation)
Chemical found in widely used sweetener breaks up DNA
Sucralose, as used in Splenda, is genotoxic. big yikes
(tags: genotoxic sucralose sweeteners additives soft-drinks junk-food food health)
“Data protection IS AI regulation”
The FTC have proposed a judgement against Amazon/Ring: “FTC says Ring employees illegally surveilled customers, failed to stop hackers from taking control of users’ cameras. Under proposed order, Ring will be prohibited from profiting from unlawfully collected consumer videos, pay $5.8M in consumer refunds.” Meredith Whittaker on Twitter, responding: “Speaking of real AI regulation grounded in reality! The part about Amazon being “prohibited from profiting from unlawfully collected consumer videos” is huge. Data protection IS AI regulation. & in this case will likely mean undoing datasets, retraining/disposing of models, etc.” Retraining/discarding datasets is a HUGE deal for AI/ML companies. This is the big stick for regulators. I hope the EU DPCs are paying attention to this judgement.
(tags: regulation ai ml training data-protection privacy ring amazon ftc)
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New fast food frankenstein dish just dropped:
a fast food dish created in 2003 in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, consisting of a layer of french fries placed into a disposable metal take-away tray, topped with döner or gyro meat, covered with slices of Gouda cheese, and heated in an oven until the cheese melts. Then a layer of shredded iceberg lettuce is added, dressed with garlic sauce and sambal, a hot sauce from Indonesia .. The term kapsalon is Dutch for “hairdressing salon” or barber shop, alluding to one of the inventors of the dish who worked as a hairdresser.
This sounds delicious.