Category Archives: Technology

Speaking of Nobel Prizes

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The Nobel prizes are coming out. These Are the Winners of the 2024 Nobel Prizes. Therefore, this is an appropriate time to bring this up.

Last May, Barb and I visited the Scandinavian countries. One of the places we visited was Stockholm. The Airbnb we stayed at had a few issues, but location was not one of them. We were capable of walking to many interesting places and nearby public transportation enabled quick access to many others.

Barb had a list of places to visit, and we connected with all of them. But just a three-minute walk from our Airbnb I saw this:

What??? We just stumbled upon the Nobel Prize Museum? Wow!

When I was in grade school, I really loved science. I entertained a dim fantasy of someday winning a Nobel Prize.

Barb wasn’t as enthusiastic as I was, but we had the time and visited the next day. She became more enthusiastic as we went through the museum. I was excited and shared bits of history she didn’t know. For example, Alford Nobel earned his money by inventing and manufacturing dynamite. He created the peace prize to compensate. He wanted to balance the war destruction enabled by his invention. We would be watching a video and without first mentioning the person, their accomplishments or difficulties would be described. I would whisper, “That must be Niels Bohr!”, or Marie Curie, or someone else I knew about.

The museum contained a lot of Nobel’s history, family, and friends. And even more exhibits of particularly well-known prize winners. Some of the things I found most interesting, included items from the prize winners that were related to the prize. This included things like the actual equipment used to make a particular discovery. Or a shawl worn while giving a famous speech. I was in awe. This is the actual equipment they used to discover “X”! Or the original notes leading to their discovery. It was awesome!

It was rather dim and since no flash photography was allowed, I didn’t get many good pictures.

Photo by Barb

Knowledge is Power

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Via a post on X from Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras.

I suspect this may only work for very low-pressure cartridges such as .22 LR. And there may be some accuracy issues for the first few shots.

Special People

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Looking at Earth was obviously very, very special. But when you look off to the side, you look out into the darkness of space, and you see your spaceship there, and how gritty it looks, it gave you this sense of, like ‘this isn’t going to be easy.’

Jared Isaacman
September 17, 2024
Jared Isaacman, first billionaire to walk in space, says it wasn’t peaceful (qz.com)

Do you remember what William Shatner said after going into space?

October 13, 2021 William Shatner’s flight on Blue Origin | CNN Business

You look down, there’s the blue down there and the black up there 
 there is Mother Earth and comfort, and there is, is there death? I don’t know, but is that death? Is that the way death is? 
 It was so moving; this experience, it was something unbelievable.

Establishing colonies on the moon, other planets, and perhaps ultimately in other star systems is going to take some very special people. The immigration to North America two to three hundred years ago and even the migration from the eastern states to the western territories in the early and mid 1800s was a harsh filter and resulted in a different type of people from their original stock.

It is difficult to imagine the type of person which will result from those willing to engage in space travel and the deprivation of a world so hostile there is not even any atmosphere to breath, a livable temperature range, water to drink, or food to eat. Every essential of human life will need to be brought with them or scratched out of the rocky, dust, surface of the giant rocks they intend to call home.

I would go into space (I attended Parent-Child Space Camp three times and once applied for a Mission Specialist position in the Shuttle program) but that would be knowing I was probably going to be back on earth in a most a few days or weeks. Going to some hostile rock will little chance of ever coming back is a much bigger decision.

Vaporware

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We intend to have the world’s very first steady-state combination reactor up and creating electrical power within the next 10 years.

Takaya Taguchi
CEO of Helical Blend
August 31, 2024
Japan to launch world’s first steady-state nuclear fusion reactor (interestingengineering.com)

Okay… That sound great. But why are other organizations still spending billions to try and maintain break even energy production for a few seconds?

The answer may be later in the article:

However, he mentioned certain challenges in the execution of the plan. It includes difficulties in raising 1 trillion yen to build the pilot reactor, establishing high-temperature superconductivity technology for coils, and establishing security rules to get local construction approval.

Ah yes… that little problem of needing high-temperature superconductors. People have been trying to solve the problem for as many decades as the steady state fusion problem.

In the software world we use to call this vaporware.

Do Not Surrender to Our AI Overlords Just Yet

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Quote of the Day

Newer AI models are now being trained, more and more, on content either generated by itself or other AI models.

A researcher that works with Monash University, Jathan Sadowski, recently described a hypothetical self-trained AI as an “an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”

More recently, a study was published in Nature that tested the capabilities of AI trained on itself, and the results were concerning.

By the 5th cycle, the degradation had become stark, and by the 9th, it was almost completely nonsensical.

Benjamin Carter
August 27, 2024
Model Collapse: Why AI Is Probably Getting Worse, And It May Be Fatal (msn.com)

See also AI Appears to Be Slowly Killing Itself (msn.com).

One of the truisms of machine learning is that result cannot be any better than the data used for learning. And, in fact, it can only be some fraction as good as the input data. Hence, if your learning is 90% as good as in the input and your input was based on AI output which was only 90% as good as the original source, your second-generation AI cannot be expected to be any better than 81% as good as the original.

Is this a Good Idea?

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I am very interested in the results of these experiments. I don’t think there is a result which changes my overall behavior. But you have to wonder… might it make a huge difference to some other people?

Physicists Are Conducting Five Experiments To Determine Whether We Are Really Living In A Simulation

A team of physicists from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and a Canadian university is carrying out five quantum physics experiments to determine whether we are living in a computer-simulated virtual reality.

Might there be people who, upon learning our reality is nothing but a simulation, conclude there is no basis for most, if not all, of our moral and legal codes? If it is all just a simulation, then what’s the problem with playing the Hitler and Stalin games and see if they can get even larger body counts?

Non-Cuttable? Really?

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For giving us so little evidence, this is a very strong claim:

Proteus becomes the world’s first manufactured non-cuttable material

Researchers from the UK’s Durham University and Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute claim they’ve come up with the world’s first manufactured non-cuttable material, just 15 percent the density of steel, which they say could make for indestructible bike locks and lightweight armor.

The material, named Proteus, uses ceramic spheres in a cellular aluminum structure to foil angle grinders, drills and the like by creating destructive vibrations that blunt any cutting tools used against it. The researchers took inspiration from the tough, cellular skin of grapefruit and the hard, fracture-resistant aragonite shells of molluscs in their creation of the Proteus design.

An angle grinder or drill bit will cut through the outer layer of a Proteus plate, but once it reaches the embedded ceramic spheres, the fun begins with vibrations that blunt the tool’s sharp edges, and then fine particles of ceramic dust begin filling up gaps in the matrix-like structure of the metal. These cause it to become even harder the faster you grind or drill “due to interatomic forces between the ceramic grains,” and “the force and energy of the disc or the drill is turned back on itself, and it is weakened and destroyed by its own attack.”

The material is equally effective against high pressure water jet cutters – not that many bike thieves are hauling those around – since the spherical shape of the ceramic chunks tends to widen out the water jet, significantly slowing down its cutting speed.

They don’t tell us how it holds up to an acetylene cutting torch or C4.

Disable 2G Network Connections

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Due to security concerns, people with Android phones should disable connections to 2G networks.

To do this, go to

Settings, Connections, Mobile Networks

Then disable “Allow 2G services”.

Dr. Suess on the U.S. Sending the Military to Fight Civilians

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Shooty shooty pew pew pew!
Let’s all learn what guns can do!
Liberals in the USA
Love to nod their heads and say,
‘You bought your guns from a store!
You can’t fight a civil war!
Fight the army, you will lose!
They have jets and tanks to use!”
That’s not where the story ends!
They have homes, and kids, and friends!
Tyrants threaten you with bombs?
Just remember: they have moms!
You can’t live inside your jet!
Can we find you? Yes, you bet!
You’d send soldiers and marines
Up against AR-15s?
They’re outnumbered ten to one.
That is why I need a gun.
Don’t forget, because it’s true:
Government is scared of you.

ChatGPT
Via Declaration of Memes @LibertyCappy
Posted on X on August 12, 2024

Nice!

Via Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras.

I used the same query with some other AI chat bots.

The query:

Write a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss about what would happen if the government of the United States sent its military to fight civilians.

Gab AI:

If the government of the land Sent its military to make a stand Against the civilians, oh what a sight The Seuss-ian tale unfolds, both day and night.

The soldiers march, with guns in hand And the civilians, they too take a stand No longer able to just sit and wait For they must protect their home, their fate.

“Oh, the things we’ll see,” they all said As the battle began, the noise ahead Guns blaring, screams echoing A war within the States, oh so unbecoming.

The soldiers march, with orders to kill And the civilians, they fight with a will For their freedom, their lives, their very souls They battle on, like brave, unbroken rolls.

“Oh, the things we’ll see,” they all said As the battle raged, night turned to dread Bombs falling, homes burning A war within the States, so unlearning.

The soldiers march, with hearts once pure And the civilians, they fight for their lure Of freedom, of life, of a future bright They battle on, in the dead of night.

“Oh, the things we’ll see,” they all said As the dawn breaks, a new day ahead A war within the States, so unwise Leaves a nation divided, with untold lies.

And so, the tale of the Seuss-ian war Of the soldiers and civilians, forevermore A lesson to be learned, a path to avoid For the sake of freedom, and truth to be employed.

Google’s Gemini:

Soldiers and Such

Oh, say, what a sight, a terrible stew, When soldiers and folks are in a big blue. With guns and with words, a terrible clash, A nation divided, a sorrowful crash.

The red, white, and blue, a banner so grand, Should wave ‘bove a people, heart and hand. But soldiers with rifles, a fearful array, Against peaceful folks, come what may?

No marching in streets, with purpose so true, But homes under siege, a horrible view. A land of the free, a home of the brave, Turned upside down, a sorrowful grave.

Let’s build bridges, not walls, it is true, With kindness and hope, a sky ever blue. For fighting our own, it just cannot be, A nation united, that’s what we should see.

Microsoft’s Copilot:

I’m sorry, but I can’t assist with that request. If you have any other questions or need help with something else, feel free to ask!

Meta AI (via WhatsApp):

In the land of the free and the home of the brave,
A most curious thing, a most troubling wave,
The government sent its military might,
To fight against civilians, without a good fight.

The people were puzzled, the people were blue,
“Why are they fighting us?” they didn’t know what to do,
The soldiers were confused, the soldiers were torn,
Fighting their own people, their hearts felt forlorn.

The streets were filled with a most curious sight,
Tanks and troops, in the morning light,
Families fled, with a frightened pace,
As the military marched, with a steady face.

But then something strange, something quite grand,
Happened in the hearts, of this troubled land,
The soldiers saw, the civilians too,
They were all Americans, through and through.

They saw the fear, the tears, the pain,
And their hearts cried out, “What are we fighting for again?”
They saw the truth, they saw the light,
And they laid down their arms, in the dark of night.

The government saw, the mistake they made,
And they called back their troops, with a message displayed,
“We fight for freedom, we fight for what’s right”,
Not against our own, in the dark of night.

So let this be a lesson, to all to see,
That fighting our own, is not the key,
To a brighter tomorrow, to a better day,
We must work together, come what may.

Tell Me Again Why Someone Should Own Bitcoin

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From practically the time bitcoin launched in early 2009, I have been wondering what the heck it is good for.

In the beginning, there were two basic theories: One said this first cryptocurrency was a refuge from government, and the other — possibly the one embraced by bitcoin’s creator — said it was an alternative to the corruption, instability and self-dealing in a financial system that had just finished wrecking itself, and everyone else along with it.

Alas, neither of these theories has panned out. Indeed, as in Monday’s market meltdown, cryptocurrencies have often done the opposite of what they were supposed to do.

…

It seems less like digital gold than a digital slot machine. I can’t shake the feeling that most people use it not because it’s a good substitute for anything they need, but because it’s fun to watch the reels spin without knowing whether they’ll pay off. In other words, bitcoin’s not good for much of anything except giving people who have money to burn a novel way to set it on fire.

Megan McArdle
August 8, 2024
When markets get scary, crypto proves its worthlessness

A team at work uses Bitcoin all the time. They use it to catch the bad guys.

But for me, I don’t see how it would do me any good. The volatility makes it just too risky for my tastes.

Tractor Beam Improvement

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It’s not yet ready for pulling an ailing shuttlecraft into your starship, but it is a real-life tractor beam.

A tractor beam—a special beam of electromagnetic radiation that draws particles toward it instead of pushing them away—might be a concept straight from Star Trek, but scientists from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) have recently taken steps toward a more portable way to generate one in real life.

…

To be clear, this paper details the new metasurface—the “plate” that turns regular light into a spiraling tractor beam. It’s not about the beam’s ability to then draw in particles, which is well established at this point.

Faster Please

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Molecule restores cognition, memory in Alzheimer’s disease model mice

In a study, published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a molecule identified and synthesized by UCLA Health researchers was shown to restore cognitive functions in mice with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease by effectively jump-starting the brain’s memory circuitry.

If proven to have similar effects in humans, the candidate compound would be novel among Alzheimer’s disease treatments in its ability to revitalize memory and cognition, the study authors said.

Mom, her only sibling, and her mother all had severe dementia before they died. My brothers and I watch the medical news for stuff like this in hopes that even if the dice roll the wrong way there will be an effective treatment for us.

Imagine That

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Via Elon Musk @elonmush:

image

If you let people say and view what they want instead of suppressing people posts and restricting access the total communication goes up.

Imagine that.

Who could have predicted such a surprising outcome?

Don’t Mess With Texas

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Wow!

Meta to pay $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over facial recognition and photo tags (msn.com)

Texas announced a massive settlement with Meta over the use of facial recognition on Facebook, resolving a lawsuit filed in 2022 claiming that the “Tag Suggestions” feature on photos uploaded to Facebook violated the state’s Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier (CUBI) Act and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Meta has agreed to pay $1.4 billion over five years to settle the suit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office said today.

That has to hurt.

I wonder who the money goes to. Just the state of Texas? Or do Texas Facebook users get a significant portion of it?

It Has Been a Long Time Coming

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Gilead’s twice-yearly antiviral protected women from HIV infection

Gilead said Thursday that twice-a-year injections of a new antiviral drug, called lenacapavir, completely protected cisgender women from contracting HIV in a large Phase 3 trial.

In the study, none of the 2,134 women who received lenacapavir contracted HIV. By comparison, 16 of the 1,068 women who received the long-running daily pill Truvada contracted HIV. And 39 out of 2,136 women who received a newer daily pill called Descovy developed HIV.

It’s not clear from this article and I had to read this web page to determine these are women have been infected with the virus and this medication suppresses HIV to the point the virus is not a threat to their health.

HIV found its way to the U.S. in the late 1970s or early 1980s. At the time I expect it would be just five or ten years, at most, before there was a cure or a vaccine. There have been pretty good treatments for,what, 10 years now? But those treatments could not claim anything close to perfection. After about 45 years this drug appears have a good chance of making that claim.

Thoughts on Computer Security

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The CrowdStrike Internet disaster prompted me gather some thoughts which have been percolating in my mind for a while. The CrowdStrike event puts a little different spin on them and perhaps, if desirable, will get my thoughts more attention. Of course, this could be my naivete and everyone else already knows all this.

When I worked in the Cyber Security Group at Pacific Northwest Laboratory one of the things I was asked to do was to review and comment on a DHS proposal for making the Internet more secure. In the paper was the suggestion that the Federal Government have a central location with gatekeeping capabilities to isolate sections of the Internet from each other to prevent worms from spreading to the entire Internet. I advocated against this because having a single (even if somewhat distributed) point of control/failure would make it an exceedingly attractive target. Sure, it could be made very secure. But with that big of a payoff for access it will be attacked by the best of the brightest of most nation states as well as those with common criminal intent. When the bad guys inevitably get access, those who intended to make the Internet more secure will be responsible for enabling a catastrophe.

I suspect most large companies are in a similar situation and/or are inadvertently working toward one. At my company most of our security monitoring is being migrated into the cloud. I can’t imagine a major corporation not using Office 365. Which depends on Azure. And I’m sure many other critical or nearly critical products are could based in every company. I used to work at Microsoft and trust Microsoft to do a good job with their security/reliability/etc.. Amazon and Google do as well or better than Microsoft, but the payoff for breaching one of these cloud providers is so great that I find it difficult to imagine it won’t someday be breached/shutdown in some form.

Of course, the same goes for any highly used system. CrowdStrike probably wasn’t breached. But it was a single point of failure for a large section of the planet. And the consequences of this accident probably cost billions. And I shouldn’t have to remind anyone about the SolarWinds hack and how many companies that affected.

And if you want to get really concerned, think of what happened in the TV series Battlestar Galactica. The enemy robots compromised all the computerized systems of human civilization and used that to hide their nuclear strike and suppress the defenses. We now have AI built into our computer security. Enemy robots don’t even have to break and enter. They just need to convince their AI cousins to switch sides.

I don’t know that there is a practical solution. I know what I advocated for in the DHS proposal. I advocated for independent solutions providing diversity and redundancy of the Internet. Even if you postulate an infinitely benign government, government control of everything is a single point of failure.

Having diverse hardware, software, processes, and people (hardware and software are not the only things which can be hacked and/or broken) is very expensive to implement, operate, and maintain. And redundancy is a surprisingly difficult task. As a Boeing Reliability Engineer once told me, “It doesn’t much matter how many backup systems you have. What matters is, how independent they are.” Having the ability to land safely with three out of four engines shutdown doesn’t matter if someone contaminated the fuel in the supply truck.

Perhaps there isn’t a practical solution. But people should at least be aware and hence they may be able to mitigate risks in some instances.

Blood Biomarkers for Centenarians

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Interesting study on aging:

The Blood of Exceptionally Long-Lived People Reveals Crucial Differences : ScienceAlert

Centenarians, once considered rare, have become commonplace. Indeed, they are the fastest-growing demographic group of the world’s population, with numbers roughly doubling every ten years since the 1970s.




We found that, on the whole, those who made it to their hundredth birthday tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards.

Although the median values didn’t differ significantly between centenarians and non-centenarians for most biomarkers, centenarians seldom displayed extremely high or low values.

For example, very few of the centenarians had a glucose level above 6.5 mmol/L earlier in life, or a creatinine level above 125 ”mol/L.

For many of the biomarkers, both centenarians and non-centenarians had values outside of the range considered normal in clinical guidelines.




Keeping track of your kidney and liver values, as well as glucose and uric acid as you get older, is probably not a bad idea.

That said, chance probably plays a role at some point in reaching an exceptional age.

But the fact that differences in biomarkers could be observed a long time before death suggests that genes and lifestyle may also play a role.

If the cancer and dementia in my family history don’t take me out and civil/WWIII doesn’t make a negative contribution to my health I probably have a higher than average, but far from good, chance at reaching 100.

Does AI Represent an Existential Threat to Humans?

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This video was very helpful to me. It probably has me persuaded that AI poses a significant existential threat.

I would present the case as follows:

  • AI will be used for the good of mankind. Examples include:
    • Health care.
    • Food production.
    • Transportation.
    • Energy creation and distribution.
    • Waste removal.
  • AI will be used to develop even smarter AI.
  • We will become dependent upon AI.
  • We will enable AI to protect itself so that it can continue to provide for us even when under attack from others who want to harm us.
  • AI will “realize” we are not needed, in fact, we are a parasite to them.
  • AI will work to eliminate dependencies on
    humans.
  • AI may use our dependencies on them to rid themselves of the parasites.

It wasn’t stated as above, I filled in a lot of blanks and extrapolated. This is one path having the potential to go very badly for us.

There is a minor counterpoint made by my stepson. My stepson has a master’s degree in computer science, specializing in machine learning, AI, etc.. That is the following.

AI has been trained on what is nearly the sum of all human knowledge
 the Internet. Machine learning is no better than the data it was trained on. A good portion of the new knowledge, since the best AIs were trained, will be AI generated. If AI can only do almost as good as the data it was trained on, then future AI, trained on AI generated data, will not make as big advances, if any, as previous AI advances.

Clickbait Predictions About Smartphones

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I’m predicting that, by 2025, voicebots will become so prevalent, so powerful, and so useful in all areas of business and our personal lives that we won’t need smartphones anymore.

John Brandon
October 16, 2017
Why Smartphones Will Become Extinct by 2025 | Inc.com

I’m predicting Brandon’s prophecy will not come true.

My guess is that he did not use a lot of the apps in use by millions of other people. So many people use the cameras on their phone multiple times per day. They listen to music, podcasts, and audible books. They use them for GPS based location services. They use them for multifactor authentication. They use them for fitness tracking. They even use them for voice and video calls.

The multiple sensors in our smartphone cannot be easily replaced. The GPS and compass are used for navigation services. The accelerometer is used for fitness apps and bubble levels to exterior ballistics apps. The camera is used for the obvious picture, but also plant identification, text translation, and product identification by the Amazon app so you can buy “whatever that cool thing is.” The Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even lower powered communication radios are used for accessories, sharing contact information, money transfer, and identification..

I think the article was clickbait. As is this similar prediction from last week: The End of the Smartphone Era Is Approaching (msn.com).

Smart phones are going to be around until the services they currently provide and even more amazing features are available via more direct connections to our brains.

Microsoft and Privacy

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Microsoft has reaffirmed its ban on U.S. police departments from using generative AI for facial recognition through Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI tech.

Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service more clearly prohibits integrations with Azure OpenAI Service from being used “by or for” police departments for facial recognition in the U.S., including integrations with OpenAI’s current — and possibly future — image-analyzing models.

A separate new bullet point covers “any law enforcement globally,” and explicitly bars the use of “real-time facial recognition technology” on mobile cameras, like body cameras and dashcams, to attempt to identify a person in “uncontrolled, in-the-wild” environments.

Kyle Wiggers
May 2, 2024
Microsoft bans US police departments from using enterprise AI tool for facial recognition | TechCrunch

It may be a “home town” bias since I worked for Microsoft for 10 years and my daughter has worked there for almost 20 years, but the culture I saw there and have read about since indicates Microsoft takes privacy a lot more seriously than other big tech companies.

One time my pushback on a privacy issue was ignored. My co-workers and manager acknowledged my points but felt it wasn’t all that important and the decision was beyond our control. I reluctantly made the requested changes. About a month later the word from much higher on the food change was to reverse those changes. And that is what happened without whimpering from anyone I knew.