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DroneSF

Among the more thinking part of you, there probably has been some ideas on the ‘Joint (not so much) Strike (not by a long mile yet) Fighter (not or by proxy of lobbyists for its program)’.
Then, why wouldn’t forward-looking nations develop much more of an Future Strike Joystick; an air fleet of drones ..? How incredibly much more efficient isn’t such a fleet, with ridiculous amounts of safeguards for safe platform/pilot return (in that order of importance) ditched for efficiency, robustness by the numbers and failsafe-testing ..?
The efficiency, for not having to care about pilot’s safe return hence many over-redundant systems need not be needed. The robustness, mainly in numbers, but also in safety / security systems being bolted on easily as weight savings to be traded in, are aplenty already. And failsafe-testing leading to much more robust systems anyway — but with the robustness gains there mainly going on in the G/A comms. The AFBs could house so many more of these smaller-size things, with ample comms and/or rapidly-deployable forward bases; with possibly much shorter runways hence enabling many more bases without even increased (better spread, too) noise levels for the dorks.

Two things, then, from a Dutch perspective.
One, why not resurrect Fokker to build many more full-fledged squadrons of these than ever had in the RNLAF? They have all the experience with composite materials still, and have plentiful highest-trained development, build and maintenance staff available as well or at short notice. Let’s dub it the G-1B for reference to unsurpassed excellence.
Two, in the mean time the current F16 ‘fleet’, hardly operable anymore by atrocious ‘savings’ i.e. dumbest of budget cuts, can be extended to Block 60 or V versions and all these drones be developed and bought, at a sliver of the costs of the JSF program as spent already let alone when the actual handful will have to be purchased (with ridiculous maintenance costs attached).
Three, against your Yes But: The JSF is still so far from delivery that the G-1B could be here before it ..!

Am I romantic in looking ahead instead of stumbling forward with yesterday’s doctrines in a future that already now have been surpassed ..? Yet again,
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[Ah, Delft… Where another, this even today, undervalued product comes from]

Untrained accountants

Somewhere in Rise of the Robots (approximately p.253, 2nd line from the top), ever infamous [but very, very right] Carr is ideaquoted about pilots not getting enough experience with flying and (well, mostly: continue to keep on …) flying in adverse conditions and hence are paradoxically (much) less capable to handle the few exceptional situations for which they are kept aboard on ever more fully automated flights. [Except from the passengers’ comfort, but if only they knew the previous…] The Shallows, indeed…

Now, how would this compare to accountancy …? Ever encountered an assistant auditor that would recognize, let alone be able to do himself, double-entry bookkeeping ..? Which is of course already quite fully automated or will be in the very near future. All of accountancy/audit (in many worlds except a few slackers, this can and will be used mixedly though the latter is so much more ..!) that is stacked on top of such simple things, like checking on the bookkeeping let alone at the other end of the spectrum concluding that ‘the books’ represent a true and fair view (to the dime) of business performance (sic; more that just having debit=credit; author knows of a bank where this proved literally Impossible to do, with all the latest overfully automated bookkeeping information systems with a margin of € 1B e-ve-ry month, wiping the slate clean with a one-sided journal entry…!!), will come into question qua ability — in particular where the once usual decades of training was needed to establish sufficient experience to be able to, with an error margin always still!, declare the True and Fair parts, and now, such experience can be had less and less, with the disruption starting from the bottom with audit automation turning into big data (process) analyses supported by IT audits and what have we.

There simply aren’t the entry-level experience gainers jobs anymore; any complete-greenhorn (and uni grads are that, more and more it seems; just ask them to write a simple business report…) will have to jump to an immediate medior-level performance level. So what does one end up with? Mostly n00bs posing as l33ts. Posing, as content-wise performance is … well …

Oh well, it’ll get worse, much worse before it gets better. And:
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[Graciously having opened my back garden to the public (but this is Het Loo of course)]

This time will be different

… If only for the following reason(s):

  • So far, Technology has been developed by humans, willy-nilly mostly as also fitting in the Selfish Memes sort of way (including Blackmore’s Meme Machine), to alleviate and overcome the very humans’ weaknesses that set us below a great many respective animals, and Nature.
      
  • Now, I(o)T slash AI (ASI) will soon be overcoming humans’ only few strengths in Thinking. At once leaving us vulnerable to become, at best, prey for <something> but with no place to hide (sic) nor any defenses…

So, this time will be different and the Luddites (actual sense, not the loom-smashing caricatures) will be right. For the one time they ‘need’ to be and then immediately need be no more. No more ‘but past technological innovations bringing temporary unemployment have all been overcome with growth of something new’. Read Martin Ford and you see that this will simply not be true — if only for the failure, this time of the Comparative Advantage mechanism but actually quite something more pervasively.
As a simple hint: What would you advise your 8yo nephew to be good at in school, to find … what kind of job or career later …!?

Don’t be discouraged! The End Is Nigh! Until it is:
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[They look cute but will outdo you in an instant….; Het Loo]

Predicting fuzzy futures

As we approach another round of grand fuzziness in predictions of all sorts, e.g. for president’s elections in some corner of the world, it would be wise to not only take all (and I mean all) of Superforecasting to heart but also to consider helping extending the science of the trade.
By helping me out in finding pointers and content on, and subsequently developing on, the use of fuzzy logic in predictions. As ‘current’ truth values of future states of the world are all quite possible, and going forward even mutually exclusive states may, e.g. on some news, all become more likely, with combined likelihoods rising over 100%. Where FL can play a role to keep track. And we may have to revisit (practical use of) Markov chains with suitable noise-around-parameters built in… But let’s focus on FL first.
Of course, when the End Date, the horizon for some prediction timeslot nears, the choices will be driven to 100/0 — where the crazy idea of random selection (of ‘balls from a pot’) with replacement … with double replacement … [even tinkered with the idea of replacing the non-drawn colour with the drawn one every pick; was hard to think through] may come closer to the idea of starting with some hardly-educated guess and nudging either way on all news points as one goes along; doing a (much-)sort-of random walk from 50/50 to 100/0.

So, if you’d have info on the viability of either approaches, please do drop a note…! Already:
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[Free city map dispenser; Delft]

Emerging degrees of privacy

Given that ‘privacy’ is a property that emerges from good Security, more particularly from Confidentiality (and Integrity), there’s two avenues to succeed in this field:

  1. If quick and maybe even too dirty: Data minimalisation (as e.g., here, in Dutch)
  2. Else (OR?): Fine-grained protection, also against the default Read all down the stack (user / end point / comms channels / applications / middleware / servers / storage — with the latter maybe crawling up and down the stack again when virtualizing in the cloud)
  3. Because binary’s not my thing and keeping it real (i.e. (!) not being consistent) is: Would any of you have pointers to some science on possible degrees or levels of privacy ..?
    The idea keeps floating around in my skull. Including degrees of invasion! Where sometimes, the required degree (as set by the subject) would be less than the degree for some government agency so everything goes … for this some data point only. Yes, Value creeps in as a boring subject but isn’t everything. Should be a field of study …?

Thanks anyway for all your pointers on the last item… (none); hence:
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[It’s watching over your shoulder….! Het Loo]

Misquote: The End(s)

The ends justify the means.

Attributed to Machiavelli (of course), who said:

One must consider the final result.

Going from the latter to the former, quite exposes your morality, no? But then, you’re not alone. Yet you’re so very, very alone. And make it more so by taking heed to the former not the latter.
The attributee even had morals (a lot!) but if you didn’t see that (before), you’ve been taken for a ride by … whatever I don’t even care. Just keep up the good misquoting …! And:
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[Symbol of the brevity of purity, beauty and life; Amstelveen — the symbol of your intelligence would be a blank or this ..?]

Rules for Writers

By popular demand:

  1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects
  2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with
  3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction
  4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive
  5. Avoid clichés like the plague (They’re old hat)
  6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration
  7. Be more or less specific
  8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary
  9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies
  10. No sentence fragments
  11. Contradictions aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be used
  12. Eschew obfuscation
  13. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos
  14. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous
  15. One should NEVER generalize
  16. Comparisons are as bad as clichés
  17. Don’t use no double negatives
  18. Avoid ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
  19. One-word sentences? Eliminate
  20. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake
  21. The passive voice is to be ignored
  22. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas
  23. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice
  24. DO NOT use exclamation points and all caps to emphasize!!
  25. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them
  26. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth shaking ideas
  27. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed
  28. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘I hate quotations, tell me what you know’
  29. Resist hyperboles; not one writer in a million can use it correctly
  30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms
  31. Who needs rhetorical questions?
  32. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement
  33. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors
  34. Do not put statements in the negative form
  35. A writer must not shift your point of view
  36. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences of ten or more words, to their antecedents
  37. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided
  38. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is
  39. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing
  40. Always pick on the correct idiom
  41. The adverb always follows the verb
  42. Use the rite homonyms
  43. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out

Personally, I agree that to go from obedience to the rules resulting in mere mediocrity of the most boring kind, to greatness, one only has to break the rules.

Repeat: Trawling for noise

So… Legal developments go at glacial ‘speed’, thus mumbling critical oversight to sleep. Happened, once again, in NL. Mass collection (sic) of and trawling through all sorts of data ‘out there’ is free game for gov’t agencies.
NO the oversight committee will not do anything. Anyone saying so, plainly and simply lies under oath to overthrow the constitution (isn’t that high treason?)

But what will happen of course, is that those that in the past weren’t able to connect the dots (proven fact), will now be swamped in enormously bigger piles of noise data. At the very very best (??) they’ll find bucketloads of false positives — ruining perfectly normal, perfectly legally operating citizens’ lives, of course without any serious recourse or restitution of lost life’s pleasure and happiness…
And the false negatives will also explode, induced by the very ‘countermeasures’.
So, also those that propose and implement and work with such ‘solutions’ quod non, will be culpable to.

Oh well Or well was right. Plus:
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[I don’t want or like, but do expect, a similar thing again; for different reasons but with no really different methods — Prinsenhof Delft ya’know]

At leisure

Musing with the ideas of yersteryear, where the working class had been replaced, gradually, by the ‘managing’ class in its various forms and sizes. But everywhere, productivity being misattributed. Though appearances would have it still among ‘managers’ too, their combined overwhelming bureaucratic bloat pressing on the carbon yet not achieving diamond productivity but gravel at most. While ‘managers’ (line just behind one’s heels!) get so much credit, unearned, and earn so much income and bonuses that it deserves the gallows; the workers ‘hence’ being mis- and disregarded.
When suddenly, the already next trend shone through: The move from the Leisure Class to the Leisure Cohorts.

Yup, you are now reminded of the massive shortfall in education that so many already have … that have flown into the workforce for years already — producing ..? Not the nice workspaces that they have to hang out in. Do they..? For how long still ..? And then ..? The generations that could actually be productive of any sorts, have seen their work shipped off to places of want, of want of actual productivity opportunities but will be depleted of markets sometime soon — and then they’ll retire like in the West with not much going for them by way of either pensions or opportunities go stagger on in business life, nor of anything after them by way of experience-transfer-loaded young crews that would seriously do anything different, better. No, don’t fall for that trap of thought that this all has been said before throughout the generations… It hasn’t, not in this way, not in any comparable situation.
So, the return of the leisure class, as ‘proven’ by Graeber and others, and reality, is there. But also, the Other 99,x% might (not) shift to the Leisure Cohorts. Not good for anything (as recently in all sorts of press, if (big if) you read it well) by lack of education, formal and certainly also practical, with the few smart ones in between skating towards a bright future but the others … at best, at very best, dunce consumers; passive, living on the edge. Yes, helped a lot by AI, progressively more, but leaving … dunce consumers. Don’t kid yourselves. Leisure cohorts without anything to leisure from nor anything to leisure with — as money and (through that or directly) other necessary goods come from productive work .. that has vanished into the ASI-out-there.

I could ramble on, like I so often do. But this time, I’ll leave it to you to do the hard work, I’m off leisuring. With:
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[Artsy Berlage, at his Beurs; inspirational not just to consume]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord