Author: Maverisk

Tech journalism isn’t really what it used to be – the means for breaking news that’s real. Now, it mostly is down to breaking news that a. isn’t, b. isn’t real.

As over and over again we see ‘solutions’ presented as if they aren’t already either outdated or just outdone on the border of misleading. No claim on which side of the border.
This in particular when songs are sung, mostly badly, about anonymisation of data for e.g., mining purposes. Medical stuff, mostly. There’s even some logic there as medical data a. seems to be the flavour du jour in under-the-radar trading circles [prices are much higher per data point than e.g., verified platinum credit card numbers], b. is indeed useful for mining by e.g., ML-to-automated-flagging.

Yes the addition was necessary; ML is a means to some ends, and without the ends, what and how to learn ..? In particular, when mulling over false positives / negatives.
Yes one does need anonymisation desperately, as the previous a. in societal costs outdoes much of the benefits of the b.
Yes anonymisation by smart encryption is an idea.

But No it doesn’t work as intended; as is shown time and time again. In the mass, and in particular – how many extortion-through-doxing-threats do we not know about ..?
This, as the ‘journalism’ of today [sort-of]. From Wired, no less. Sic transit gloria mundi.
And this, the lowdown on the counterpoint. With this, in addition. Too many scientific articles that demonstrate this works, to link here. Another rebuke…

So, next time: Be sure to go beyond mere de-identification, please. And improve your critical double-check journalism standards.

OK?
Well then:

[Your big gun of one-way hashing or whatever simpleton encryption, doesn’t count for much…; Edinborough]

You may have not heard too much of developments in the crypto arena. Not like, ‘Oh hype! hype! cryptocurrency!’ but like: ‘Elliptic cryptography may beat quantum computing’s power’ or ‘Homomorphic encryption can be cracked into deanonymisaton of personal data’

Anyone who has an overview of how developments stand? And whether the squeamish ossifrage has recoverd?

Now then,

[Just some after shopping-at-5th drinks. Of the right kind, hopefully]

If you missed Friday’s Part VII you are right; it doesn’t exist. I don’t like 100% consistency/perfection, that’s why. It’s just too boring and excludes flexibility, room for renewal/freshening/innovation, you know.

Aww how romantic that may sound. But just a reminder: “Intelligence is what people with less intelligence than I have, don’t have”. Somewhat less r of romance, huh. Maybe a bit more R of R, then. But still valid.
Did you notice, by the way, that R was ‘invented’ (conceived – by nerds, yeah right) in 1992 already? What took it so long?
On the more serious side; the boundary between [assuming no overlap then, by language] statistics and ML processing (either plain or NN-like), where is it? What is the character of the divide ..? There certainly is one, and one better consider it when trying to move from e.g., predictive analytics to true continuous-learning systems. My guess: When things get complex, one is over the boundary already. Linear separability in n dimensions is still on the stats side probably.

Where this is going I have no idea never mind let’s return. To Kansas if possible. Or to Intelligenceland, also good. Is ‘intelligence’ like ‘reality for physicists’? Better go study Gadamer. For the rest of you, just quit the discussion and be no less wise or happy or effective. The latter should soothe.

Plus:

[Someone needed to compensate …; Riga]

Of an organisation – or being the organisation.

The former, the idea of the last millennium. Apparently, still there, hopefully not here. Like, “You have to know the individual. Skills are your renewable asset, and you need to treat them like that.”… really. If there’s anything that should be renewed, it’s the ‘leadership’ quod non. Last time we looked, slavery had been abandoned in the US. If you treat them as renewable asset, no wonder the ones with sane minds will want to leave.
Unsure whether ‘moronic blurbs by the Board’ was part of the training set – guess not; the blind don’t see – as that would be the hidden variable par example that would obviate the need for any training set. Not even considering whether using actual employee data would be allowed for this, qua privacy.
And cause and effect of employee treatment and retention ..? When you treat them as drones, all you’ll end up with will be.
See? The tools are taking over their own users, brainwash their users into their fellow travellers. In-company variants of this.

The latter, of this century. Leadership is subservient to the organisation. People join a band of professionals in order to achieve their goals that they can’t achieve on their own; achievement of the goals of the organisation and through that, their own. If their own goals aren’t met/achieved sufficiently [yes, yes, allowing for some bartering along the way between the org’s interests and your own, nothing for nothing], they’ll look elsewhere indeed. The organisation has no inherent right of existence but to serve the constituents. That ‘capital’ would have a say, OK, but one say among many. If ‘capital’ takes over [e.g., through weaving errors in the system, ref. Adam Smith himself!], in the end capital will possibly not have a need for humans (as per the above in-company take-overs) and become DACs (or DAOs even) with maybe some puppets mumbling the overlords’ fake truths.
See? That’s not even the origin of this century’s organisations, it’s the very foundation of the theory of firm.

Your choice. Dystopia, or join towards Utopia.
[That will not be achievable, and better for it as it is a nightmare! as in the original intention]

Also, read up on this piece.
And, edited to add before publication: This on Big G’s change-to-come, especially the paragraph block below Ortega… [not y Gasset, though.]

Leaving you with:

[The somewhat-pastiche of the small-scale world looks appetising! Niagara-on-the-Lake]

Yes, hopefully, you were thinking of some Great music; here. Otherwise, I wanted to ask, again, whether anyone would have pointers to some easy intro on modelling – on how in neural networks, the weights are the model. In terms of parametrising a SAP system, but learning by training and doing; changing the parametrisation as you go in production, to accountants’ delight [maybe not so much]. This, compared to Expert Systems and evolutionary algo’s. The latter, so much underestimated but hey, let’s get something going in that area and first try to get some catch-all explanation-for-the-masses on neural networks out, right?

Then again:

[Emerging-from-software library; Dublin]

“Asking for a friend” whether anyone would have a lead on how things stand with AI doing bug hunting ..?

As [hey, by sheer coincidence, exactly] three years ago I asked already. And got no serious response then. And since, there have been more talk about AI on either side of the infosec FLOT, but not much on How. Or where the FLOT is. Throw in some Adversarial Examples and there you go; arms’ races and falling behind in those…

By now, it should be easy to do such a thing; have an ML system learn what sloppy coding looks like, even when that is hiding in plain sight i.e., OK on first (syntax/compile) impressions but functionally tricky ..? A (data/input) edge case quality break-down severity tester would also help.
Then again, I suspect that some masters of invention haven’t mastered the solution, yet… As per DARPA’s request for your proposal to help solve a tangent issue; had they solved the above, they would’ve been able to translate the results to the latter.

In return, for your viewing pleasure:

[Just a pretty picture – when you’re an engineering-inclined mind; Binckhorst Den Haag Voorburg..?]

Owww that is great! Banks’ bank(let) going out to tell everyone how great their new regulation is! [I know, it’s not theirs; they’d dream it were]

Maybe ‘great’ isn’t the word. But a fact is that if anyone involved in banking advises you anything, you do the exact opposite – their only interest is their own which, given the bilateral relation in any trade, means you’re getting robbed blind if you listen.

They even tell you that giving more parties access to your information, improves the security over it. Yes they do, that’s no lie. It’s unlike hips, this page, 4th bullet.

No wonder the earth’s population minus the handful of ‘bankers’ [apologies for the atrocious word: ] pegs bankers at the bottom of any ranking of social status, admittedly not far below pole dancers at a same-sex SM swingers’ club.

On a positive note:

[NO THE CLIENT IS AT THE TOP; Girona]

Great music. Dystopian future:

pic.twitter.com/0NlKgJCSPV

— Lost Weapons (@LostWeapons) April 3, 2019

Either those drone’lets are weaponised or the blimp is monopolised. No escape. Unless … this.

Plus:

[Adversarial but irrational examples, maybe that’ll do the trick; Baltimore]

Quite some time ago, I posted a thingy on steganography and how the Internet is not filled with ..x pics but cat pics, for that reason.
More recently, I posted a bit on how traditional crypto and stego (in the form of mimicry and crypsis, see here) are comparably used in adversarial-example AI examples. Not discounting the wider definition of the term [link will work post-June19 ;-/ see here if you’re overly eager], but here, in a narrower sense.

Again, AI may come to the rescue at picking up traditional stego in any format, if somewhat-broadly or -narrow pointed to that qua learning.
It may also be trained to detect any tampering towards adversarial (narrow sense) so such tampering may become less useful ..? Possibly, plausible deniability [oh how great a buzzword to have all but lost its popularity] may come into play; but hey, when the AI overlord system says so, who are you human to derogate it ..!?

Somehow, I feel we aren’t yet on a sufficiently wholesale track with this – though humans cannot detect pixel-wise tampering, they can detect it on a much higher abstraction layer than AI can / will(??). Since evolution has favoured the blurry-yet-Kant’ian sense-making on sum-total (visual [1]) impressions, not bit-wise adversarial anomaly detection; for reasons of economy and speed, one guesses – we’ll have to ask evolution when we meet it which given the speed of AI developments may be quite soon…
Au contraire, AI ‘gets’ pixels but not yet too much of full picture decomposition into ‘real’ objects. The things that Kant saw, but e.g., Buddhism denies. [2]

Now, I’ll leave you to ponder it all, with:

[Explain that!]

[1] Surprisingly, Kant doesn’t go into other senses all that much, and uses the visual to ‘depict’ [recursive pun accidental but also intended] impressions as if 24/sec. slides.
[2] Both have a problem with Time, though. Kant has a ‘a priori synthetic’ categorisation but makes it fundamental for Vernunft to exist at all (as time is required to make sense of, i.e. decompose, impressions) and still doesn’t define time properly, and assuming such a thing as external reality / ‘objects’ as ‘real’ things out there but ‘space’ not existing. Buddhism does without space or external reality altogether, but has inherently cyclical time and an escape from that ..? Possibly I’m conflating various sub-strands here.

Please good sirs and ladies, may we get back to serious business and drop the exitespeak of Robotic Process Automation (here), as it’s all very nice you know an abbreviation but when there’s no substance behind it, drop it.

Why dweeb with ‘robots’ in an area where there’s no such thing?
The original demonstrate-once, repeat-indefinitely kind of ‘training’ (one size fits all, mostly) had to do with robots indeed, e.g., in factories where robots have been around for decades now and such guided ‘programming’ (hardly) was easy. Yes, that’s right, actual robots were around. For decades already so referring to that makes you an extreme laggard extraordinaire.
Now, however, the RPA thing is applied to pure algorithmic, doing-away-with-physical stuff. Not robots, eww! they’re things with grease and we only want to deal with nice GUIs. But still we want the ring of being Interesting with our jargon.

Simpletons. Just don’t.
Call it digitisation and you’re done. Or workflow pattern extraction or whatever. But leave the robots to the people that actually have an impact on the world.
At the very least, study this. And realise that the above, is in there – a lot [here].

OK?

And, unrelated to anything, this.

[Designed by not robots you … (censored), just humans with trivial tools – but then, designed: appropriately; Toronto]