Innovation (technologicallly driven) – Page 2

A different take on fireworks

Yes dear people it may be unbelievable to some but there’s some local areas, like the EU, where in some spots/countries, fireworks are still allowed to be lit by just about anyone [age limits for buying, much more overeasily circumvented than e.g., alcohol sales], on Dec 31 – and no-one seems to care about earlier (days in advance) occasional severity-max hindrance to the elderly, dogs, and generally phobic/gravely-disturbed-by-fireworks public. “Tolerance” never seems to go the way of the Meek.
But, when societal discussions go to maybe possibly impinge on these ridiculously-lax liberties, there’s hope. Of a replacement of sorts. Not (only) by means of public fireworks displays – that are, admit it, always much more beautiful then your own, and just noise doesn’t impress anyone but prepuerile boys – but also by, tadaaa:
This here idea of Drone-on-Drone contests. Should be fun! If only we could attach the equivalent of reactive stuff, just for the light show effects.

That was all, folks. Out on a bang with:
[Hey those things are still quite prevalent in Knightsbridge; are they anti-drone security devices or how backward can one be ..? Good riddance from the EU ..?]

Perception

The Doors to Which, you understood.
hat were delivered by all the other posts of this here blog you’re on.
T hough here, I meant it to refer to the cliché that recently rose up again from the dullness of repeat, being stated as “If a door closes before you, there will be another door open to go through” or something similar.

Which of course is very wrong.

“When a door closes before you, you open it again. That’s how doors work.“

Somewhat different, eh? Even when you’d have to kick it in. Or, reality being too complex to capture is such a short bon mot, indeed you take another door; (but only) when you’re tired of kicking. Whatever your perception of reality, the choice is still yours. Either take any flimsy, tiny hair of a threshold as an excuse to run away (from difficulty that you’ll find eve-ry-where, in particular when you run away so easily – ever more easily, ever less easily overcome), or you stand for what you set out to achieve.

On that festive note, I’ll leave you with:

[Dropped the true idea of Christmas, being thankful for having survived another year and with a glimmer of hope that next year might be a sliver better, now just called Winter Wonderland and being the worst (or over-the-top) consumerist-commercialised dump of rubbish packaged as Christmas market. With stalls from everywhere, in particular Germany, Belgium, Hollund. With merchandise from eveywhere though mostly from China. Now in Hyde Park]

Lagging, nagging ‘Coin feeling

Somehow, the many (?) Cassandra’s messages of late about Bitcoin being a hyped-up bubble about to burst and how it’s the laggerds (only) that now want to jump in, drive up prices but will be the Greater Fools in the game, sounds a bit … false bottom.
[Unsure what the exchange rate is, today. Has the bubble burst already, or ..?]

I’d say, how many countries, and moreover how great a many financial organisations (private or public, or regulatory or inter/supranational) may have an interest to blow up Bitcoin, as a demonstrator that all that blockchain stuff isn’t any good after all ..? Because the promise of blockchain was, and is, that it will not need any, traditionally somehow still geography-bound, standing governing body avalanched-under by politics, gross misunderstanding of the core concepts ruled over, etc. In short, power struggles.
And that, of course, may be a future that some will not allow. And fight to their deaths – inevitably, not by nature but by cause and earlier. But still they simply won’t have it, that blockchain/Bitcoin/smart-contract/whatevva shazam. With the only way to get rid of it in an inconspicuous manner, is to … inflate it till it goes borsht. Risk, but possibly profit hugely during the trip ..? Case in point: this one [hope the link is still valid, and it’s in Dutch which may mix semantic levels to be tauto]

Plus:
[You get a golden bullet-like thing on your pillow. With compliments and filled with chocolate, that is… In Salzburg of course]

Now you read me, now you don’t

As a pointer to what this is about…
You know, like the oldest tricks in the book, still going strong when all the world’s (worlds’?) arms’ races are going nowhere. As predicted. Where the title of course doesn’t reference a major part of the sec controls, stego.

But that’s a finesse point. Let’s be happy that research into faster horses continues, with results.

CU!
[Stylish; what’s hiding here ..? Even when you know where]

Toepasselijke infosec

Hoe is ook anders te verwachten van een museale aangelegenheid, dan dat deze als wachtwoord minimaal 6 characters waarvan 1 hoofdletter en 1 special character eist, in tijden dat al tijden duidelijk is dat dit a. onder het vroegere, ooit-eens regime al irrelevant zwak was b. door de NIST-paper(s?) allang achterhaald is. En mijn passphrase is er natuurlijk nevernooit in te vrotten – de werkelijk veilige manier van wachtwoordgebruik is te modern ..? Hoe lang moet iets achterhaald, verouderd, dysfunctioneel zijn voor de museumclub dat oppikt en in depot neemt, niet aan de voordeur laat staan?

Ach. En:
[Wachtwoord: MVSEVM]

Maandag GDPRdag

Tsja als de GDPR er aankomt, of de AVG als u de weg kwijtbent, dan heb je nog nét even tijd om te laten zien hoe het vooral niet moet. Case in point: Een dikke catalogus op fullcolour papier versturen in een plastic verpakking – naar een adres waar er nooit om is gevraagd, nooit wat is aangevinkt of whatever.

#fail defined…

Of is dit een poging, gratis, om te laten zien dat wat nu allang niet meer kan of mag zometeen gewoon doorgaat met niet kunnen (qua maatschappelijke acceptatie) of mogen …?

Nou ja:
[Zelfs voor Straatsburg, té muddy waters…]

Gee… DPR on Profiling

This again about that pesky new legislation that just won’t go away not even before it will be legally-effectively enforced [as you know, the thing has been around already for a year and a half, but will only be enforceable, in pure theory, per upcoming May 25th but your mileage may (huh) vary greatly – when Risk = Impact x Chance [don’t get me started on the idiocy of that, as here of 2013, Dec 5th – Gift time!] the chance is Low of Low and Impact can be easily managed down, legally yes don’t FUD me that will be the truth, the whole and nothing but it. So it will be legally effective but not in any other sense let alone practically].

For those interested, there’s this piece on Profiling. That has, on p.16 last full para (‘systems‘ that audit ..!?), p.19 3rd para from the bottom “Controllers need to introduce robust measures to verify and ensure on an ongoing basis that data reused or obtained indirectly is accurate and up to date.“, p.30 in full and many other places, pointers towards … tadaaa,

Auditing AI

with here, AI as systems that process data – as close to ‘systems’ in the cybernetic sense as one may get even when needing the full-swing wormhole-distance turn of the universe consisting not of energy but of information to abstract from the difference between info and data.

Where I am developing that auditing of AI systems as a methodologically sound thing. And do invite you to join me, and bring forward your materials and ideas on how to go about that. Yes, I do have a clue already, just not the time yet to write it all up. Will do soon [contra Fermat’s marginal remark].

Oh and then there’s the tons of materials on how anyone (incl corporate persons) will have to be able to explain in no complex terms (i.e., addressing the average or even less clever) how your AI system works…

So, inviting you, and leaving you with:
[What corks are good for, well after having preserved good wine – decoration. Recycle raw materials, don’t re-use data! Ribeauville]

Aïe! Missing the Point

Yet again, some seem to not understand what they’re talking about when it comes to transparency in AI…
Like, here. Worse, this person seems to be a rapporteur to the European Economic and Social Comittee advising the European Committee. If that sounds vague – yes it does even for Europeans.

For the ‘worse’ part: The umpteenth Error, to consider that the secrecy of algorithms is the only thing that would need to change to get transparency about the fuctioning of a complete system.
1. The algorithm is just a part of the system, and the behaviour of the system is not determined in anything close to any majority part by the algorithm – the data fed to it, and the intransparent patterns learned by it, are. The transparency needs to be about the algorithm but much more about the eventual parameters as learned throughout the training time and the training/tuning after that. [Update before press release: There seems to be an erroneous assumption by some way too deep into EC affairs that the parameters are part of the ‘algorithm’ which is Newspeak at its worst, and counterproductive certainly here, and hence dangerous.]
2. The algorithm can just be printed out … If anyone would need that. One can just as easily run an AI code analyser (how good would that be? They exist already, exponentially increasing their quality, savvyness) over the source- or decompiled code.
3. The eventual parameters … not so much; they’re just there in a live system; unsure how well they are written out into any file or so (should be, for backup purposes – when not if AI systems will get legal personhood eventually (excepting the latter-day hoaxes re that), will a power switch-off be the same as attempted murder, and/or what would the status of a backup AI ‘person’ be ..?).
4. Bias, etc. will be in the parameters. The algorithms, mostly-almost-exclusively will be blank slates. No-one yet knows how to tackle that sufficiently robustly since even if the system is programmed (algorithm..!) to cough up parameters, the cleverer systems will know (?) how to produce innocent-looking parameters instead of the possibly culpable actual ones. Leads into this trickery by AI systems, have been demonstrated to develop (unintentionally) in actual tests.
5. How to trick AI pattern recognition systems … the newest of class breaks have just been demonstrated in practice – their theoretical viability had been proven long before – e.g., in this here piece as pointed out only yesterday [qua release; scheduled last week ;-]. Class break = systemically unrepairable … [ ? | ! ].

Let’s hope the EC could get irrelevant just that little less quickly by providing it with sound advice. Not the bumbling litlle boys’ and girls’ type of happythepreppy too-dim-wits. [Pejorative, yes, but not degrading: should, maybe not could, have known better ..!]

Oh, and:
[Already at a slight distance, it gets hazy what goes on there; from the Cathédrale]

Gödel pics

May it be that research has stumbled onto a find of fundamental significance ..?
I’m not overly overstating this; on the surface this looks like a regular weaving error in AI development fabric; one or a few pixels changed, can completely throw off some learned pattern recognition net. Yes, this means that (most probably) neural nets are ‘brittle’ for these things.
But does this perhaps moreover mean, it may be a #first qua Gödel numbers …? I mean not the regular the Hofstädter type that, even when syntactically perfectly normal, will when fed to a machine able to parse syntactically correct form, nevertheless wreck the machine. The halting problem, but more severe qua damage.

Just guessing away here. But still…

Oh, and (of course another pic; no worries not dangerous):
[Yup, dingy car (license plate!) being overtaken by actual productivity; Canada]

@Sloterdijk_P thinking about bites

No, you uncultured species, he was not onto the physically edible kind…
But the kind that comes up when considering that for Spheres parts I-III (heartily recommended, to read and study them fully to full understandig of every bit of it …!), this right honourable gentleman (‘person’) used some, estimated, 1.250k (yes as in 1.25M) words.
Or, as that would be called for German philosophy, a sound bite.

Out of the physically-inverse (?) of Plato’s Aristophanes’ speech’s whole human (lost), the spheres turned into foams in all their intertwined physical plus completely-moreover abstract space references, are being realised in writing, in bites… Feels a bit (huh) like going from 140 to 280 and noboby really understands any of that number(s) in the first place. Both mundane – why not 291 ..? – and meta – how is ‘280’ different from ‘1’ or what is the nous of any number ..?

Now I’m rambling… Leaving you with:
[Something-something- Heraclites so completely ill-understood; Prague]