After 2018’s hypes, this

Already you thought you had enough on your plate, for 2018 qua predictions even when most will play out differently than stated? And though these ones are [as in: when you verify/falsify them in the near future, they will have become ‘are’] actually correct…
these will also play a role in 2018.

Yes, yes, in a much more fundamental way, and maybe in the mainstream media only per ill-understood sensational pastiche, but still it will certainly [same] augment the fuzz around quantum computing. That will, in the end, when made operational not be much of a shocker anymore. Too much dilution in the latter, to still make good on its supercalifragilisticexpealidocious claims. Too bad / good, depending on which side of the quantum-crypto-crackability wars you are – the latter not even mattering since this and this. And this in particular. What will the above mean in this respect?

[Edited to add: Oh and this just in. Relevant, on a nearer-future scale]

Leaving it there for you, to study and be prepared… plus:
[Fattened over the holiday season, you are ..? Shardless London it was, ‘is’ish]

‘corn down, times 10

After the many lists of wat went well this year, with AI, bitcoin, etc.etc., we wonder: How much of that is plugged fake news or ditto overblown ..?
When still, we have the likes of this: A list of some 10 unicorns that went down (or -soon) despite funding to dream of. When you look into it, we seem to be back in, 2001, and somewhat later, when the idea of drafting a two-pager business plan seemed to be enough to get VC / angel / whathavewe funding. OK, maybe this time around (and for the co’s mentioned) it’s more like a ten-pager requirement but hey, why wait to throw money into a wormhole, right ..?
To remind us that maybe, not all went so well in ’17.

And maybe despite all the hopes we have for 17++, we should again, still, reckon with downside risks a little bit more, please?
But you’re not gonna listen to me, are you?

Mewwy Cwistmas & happy new year anyway! Plus:
[Heck, this has nothing to do with festive fireworks or so but is pretty still; Valencia]

Not sure … about the mix of AI, privacy values, ethics, BD

Recently, I was informed about this. With the blueish table spraking a recall (the way the brain does) of this and in particular, this [downloadable here].
This, the latter in particular, being about how ‘privacy’ as an issue(s), depends on its definitions – both formally, and emotionally.

I   s u g g e s t   y o u   s t u d y   i t   f u l l   d e t a i l  yes that’s a lot of   but definitely worth it. The study I mean.

Now, with the inroads made by Big Data (i.e., mudane profiling now with greater tools for [towards] greater fools), and this being turned into ‘AI’ quod non, we need clarity more than ever.
The Internet has just too small a margin to scribble down my proof – I’d say proof rambling ideas, but I have a paper coming up in Jan about just this subject …
Yes the promised Quantifying Privacy‘s just around the corner of sorts.

Do read on, here, though. And:

[No empty glasse, please, but a muid will do; Haut Koenigsbourg of course]

Predictions 2018+

Hold me to account for the following.
For these are the predictions that for a change, will pan out:

  1. Bitcoin disasters, as in price crashes and partial recoveries. With a plethora of other coins rising in prominence, and price. The room for diversification will abound. And I will devise that Coin Maturity Index you’ve all been waiting for.
    But with blockchain successes in many places. E.g., one will see some e-voting based on it, spring up. Not that such solutions will be the thing of the year (yet), but still in all sorts of unexpected places, ‘chain solutions prove helpful improvements over whatever there was.
    Maybe DACs but I doubt it.
  2. AI of course. With a seriously increasing rate (sic) of successful point solutions. Bots everywhere, also as consumerbots responding to (and biasing…) sell-side bots. Ever more blue-on-blue… But also, many new applications of e.g., image processing plus autonomous-something plus ‘intelligent’ responses. New car software, that start to behave with signs of something resembling accurate and apt reactions.
    And, like yesterday’s post, a lot of debate and settling of arguments and contentions, about the philosophical, and ethical, aspects of ‘intelligence’.
    Important also, will be the growth of ‘tweaked AI’. Like, neural nets having learned, then analysed and pruned. Possibly turned into ‘expert systems’, with tons of Fuzzy Logic in between. Now that will make ‘AI’ systems much, much more useful and easily deployable in the coming year(s), decades, and also is the avenue for bias correction and prevention (in that order).
    But first, there will be this – when will it show genius, even if recognised after decades?
  3. Augmented Reality. Many applications will surface, and ‘seeing’ someone using it / being helped by it, will become less than unusual. This typically is one that comes forward out of the through of disillusion and may blossom (short of ‘explode’ I need to add).
  4. IoT disasters. Of course; not so hard to predict. And then I mean, really massive ones, black-outing a full major EU country or elsewhere. Also, the budding of serious, wide-reaching and securing standards in this field.
  5. The Surfacing of new ways to compose / manage infrastructure, the latter from the hardware layer all the way up to high in the stack. From containers becoming mainstay (and people now learning about them, beyond the surruptitous being-around of today!), to Low Code systems (check out these for a good idea how far things can go with that!) et al.
    Plus, REST API’s will be in this mix, very clearly. Don’t know how, but do know-in-advance that they will.
  6. Privacy will have become so mundane that it’s not interesting anymore, qua innovation. Yes of course, legal battles will fly all around, with many hits and misses. But next year, I will also release my perennial Paper on privacy measurements, metrics, indices, that will help the world establish better rules and solutions. Just you wait and see. Read. And study.
  7. Oh, and a new wifi protocol. A secure one, that holds out for a couple of years to come. Please.

Now then:

[Where Bermuda-clad waitresses bring the bubbles with strawberries; Cyprus you gathered]

Some notes on notes on Chollet

After you read this, you’ll get the following:

  • [After two empty lines] ‘seed AI’ may not be necessary. Think of how the Classics built their arches: The support may be removed. Same here; some ‘upbringing’ by humans, even opening the possibility of ethics education / steering;
  • Proponents of this theory also regard intelligence as a kind of superpower, conferring its holders with almost supernatural capabilities to shape their environment / A good description of a human from the perspective of a chimpanzee. – correct. As such, slightly ad hominem and we know what that is about (here);
  • If the gears of your brain were the defining factor of your problem-solving ability, then those rare humans with IQs far outside the normal range of human intelligence would live lives far outside the scope of normal lives, would solve problems previously thought unsolvable, and would take over the world — just as some people fear smarter-than-human AI will do. – an interesting argument, as I had the idea of drafting a post about a new kind of ‘intelligence’, apart from the human/animal one.
  • Etc.

An interesting and profound read… Plus of course:
[“Intelligence”… Winter Wonderland London]

Another nail (to images as evidence)

Just to drop it here, after umptuous [now that I’ve used it, when not if that’s a word] warnings, another nail to the … value of ‘evidence’ in court, in this piece, explained in easy pics here. Seriously distorting the picture by seemingly doing nothing of the sort. Ocean’s Eleven (or –and counting) style vid replay, now with much more modern, more perfect options.

[Edited to add: Another case in point here]

Just sayin’. And:
[When Run To The Hills is your last defence; Salzb’ – with a terrace]

There we have it; botcracy

As we turn the leaf towards a new year, let’s not forget what values – in operation, operationalised – protect our Human Rights, in the form of de-mock-racy, and how they are ever so quickly being repelled by, e.g., AI and fake news but in particular, the deployment of bots as here.
Yes I know, that’s three layers of tools but still, the focus is on the first two but the latter plays almost the foulest role.
Yes I know, the ‘operationalised’ part may need elucidation on the side of ‘transparency’, ‘access and inclusion’ etc., but when you read after the link, you’ll understand that the issue is society-wide, not just FCC / net-neutrality.

Well, that was a quicky… hence:
[München, for zero (as in: 0.0) reason]

And of course

Another one today!
This here piece, and the according official text (with interesting subheader, as downloaded from the official site…).
Because one should not expect either to be a fair representation of the Chief’s actual stance as what is in the speech text is so clearly wrong, or the Chief (his speechwriter) was badly misinformed by his own staff / speechwriter, probably down/up quite some chain of command before reaching either end. E.g.,

  • “First, Admiral Bauer pointed out that cyber operations have significant drawbacks. In fact he called them a “too good to be true” scenario. Yes, they are fast, do not require boots on the ground, and have limited risk of repercussions. Yet they do require extensive preparations, and are tailored at a specific target, at a specific time, under specific circumstances. This makes them difficult to repeat. Conventional weapons can be used for years. Cyber weapons (e.g. malware) on the other hand have a limited shelf life as the vulnerabilities they depend on will be patched.”
    Right … What about comparing a vulnerability of this sort (that can be patched so easily, i.e., a known bug that hadn’t been patched before! with a single bullet? That can be fired simultaneously at thousands, millions of foot soldiers that when hit, will turn on their Chief ..?
    And the idea that once used in an attack (sic, because no-one is out looking for unknowns ..!), it will be patched before it will be used in an attack thus resulting in a contradictio, and
    As if full patching of each and every exploitable vuln at once, has anything to de with reality whatsoever; if one thinks that: dream on and back to kindergarten. [As stated: No bearing on respect for the CHOD (why not CJCS?); one can for the above, and below, things not expect the speech text to be accurate – on second thoughts, is this a fake news detractor, to seed false info ..?]
    Plus, this reads as if all patches are perfect all of a sudden. Now that would be news.
    And, what about differences in sophistication? Weren’t all sorts of countries effectively kicked out of Afghanistan [to name one of a long list…’Nam anyone?] without succes (sic), by people with hand guns and IEDs only (no, the I stands for something)? As e.g., here. As if the many armies kicked out like that, those, not have had their ‘patching’ with armour all together…!?
  • “Notice how this is different form ‘civilian’ cyber security. There an attacker has a distinct advantage over the defender because he does not need to attack a specific target (he can try many targets at once and settle for the weakest one), and typically has no deadline within which the attack must be successful. In a ‘civilian’ cyberattack periods of activity are separated by sometimes long periods of inactivity, because after a successful move the attacker stumbles upon a further line of defence that must be investigated.
    Cyber operations do not have that flexibility, especially because they must form an integral part of existing military capabilities. The timing of a cyber operation thus depends critically on other, conventional, operations. (As someone later explained to me, if the commander of a military operation inquires whether the cyber team can hack say a bridge, the answer “probably yes, but we do not know how long it will take us” is not very useful.)”

    Again, a gross mis-take on what ‘cyber’warfare [#ditchcyber] is about. As if, as if, ‘cyber’warfare, were any different than normal warfare, Clausewitz-like – not! as you can read for yourself; the civilian long-term ‘warfare’ is exactly the same as the 5th kind.
    If the commander would ask a squad whether they can take (out, I guess) a bridge with physical means, and any ‘yes’ would be taken as certainty, the commander will not be in charge too long… The right answer is seldomly the most useful one, as, relevant, is e.g., the question why one is there: this (3rd bullet).
  • “A second thing that stood out in the speech of Admiral Bauer was the acknowledgement that in cyberspace, the difference between cyber security and national security becomes fuzzy. Whereas defending the latter is clearly a task of the military, their role in protecting the former is less clear. As Admiral Bauer put it: “the Armed Forces are not the national firewall”. Yet it is clear that by developing cyber weapons and cyber defences, their impact (both positively and negatively) on cyber security increases. This requires closer cooperation with the government, law enforcement, the private sector and research institutes. Admiral Bauer would like to invite people from cyber industry to work directly with or for the Armed Forces.” [From 1st link above]
    Another non-sequitur. As if the CHOD could not see that border defense (what are ‘we’ doing in all sorts of places around the world, then ..? Far, far overstretched, qua capacity and capabilities) is the same, either physical or abstract. If people had to defend for themselves … they should have the right to all bear arms in ‘cyber’space, to defend themselves, just as they would have the right to bear arms in physical space, right? With those arms necessarily being of at least equal combat value as the opponents’ ones. I can have my own F16 squadron! (And I would certainly want it to be as great as ‘my’ 322sqn … with Block 52+ Advanced / -V or what have we … Hey isn’t this a great and desperately cheap alternative to (jump) the money guzzling F35s ..!?)
    And “no physical sand bags” (2nd link) ..!? What are patches, then?
  • Et cetera. One could go on, ever more certain that this is not the official military stance on the issue but some sickly surrendermonkey civil servant (if only they did) kind of underling dweezil sort of misinterpretation of seriousness.



[All analog (literally, slides!) to digital scans; from the time we built (rather, had around still from years before) diarama’lets and there were shows for the public when Twente AFB still existed – like, 1983 or so, you know, from times when Defence was something Real]

Me-meme tiredness ..?

Ryou serious ..? One does not simply … What about the Dos Equis Man ..? I don’t often call something over the hill, but when I do …
But just about then, the Humint meme turned up. And of course this here (#3!) and scores of similar sites, remain ‘healthy’. May memes even remain one of the mainstays of Imgur. Am I feeling like an awkward penguin now ..?

Nope. Point still stands. Other than (high?)school kids of a certain age and subsubcultural denomination, not many are even aware there was such a phenomenon as memes – in the way portrayed here the other massively more general kind of course prevails almost totalitarianly completely over all of the worlds’ culture(s)..!

[Edited to add:] Dammit Atlantic! I drafted-scheduled this post 2 days ago and now you come with this ..? Though it doesn’t go nearly as far as the above… ;-]

Oh well. And:
[Typical display (of typicality of …, ad infinitum), V&A]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord