Growing up years ago, I found a book on my parents bookshelf. I wish I’d kept track of it, but it had a cartoon of 2 Martians standing on Mars watching the Earth explode and one commented to the other along the lines that intelligent life forms must have lived there to accomplish such a feat. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time, but it’s stuck with me.

It only took a Facebook recommendation engine with some cell phones to excite people into murdering each other in the ongoing Rohingya genocide. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html

We don’t need AI, and at this point it uses so much electricity that it is probably the first thing that would get shut down in a shit hits the fan moment.

Roger Penrose wrote a whole book on the topic in 1989. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/179744.The_Emperor_s_New_Mind

His points are well thought out and argued, but my essential takeaway is that a series of switches is not ever going to create a sentient being. The idea is absurd to me, but for the people that disagree? They have no proof, just a religious furver, a fanaticism. Simply stated, they want to believe.

All this AI of today is the AI of the 1980s, just with more transistors than we could fathom back then, but the ideas are the same. After the massive surge from our technology finally catching up with 40-60 year old concepts and algorithms, most everything has been just adding much more data, generalizing models, and other tweaks.

What is a problem is the complete lack of scalability and massive energy consumption. Are we supposed to be drying our clothes at a specific our of the night, and join smart grids to reduce peak air conditioning, to scorn bitcoin because it uses too much electricity, but for an AI that generates images of people with 6 fingers and other mangled appendages, that bullshit anything it doesn’t know, for that we need to build nuclear power plants everywhere. It’s sickening really.

So no AGI anytime soon, but I am sure Altman has defined it as anything that can make his net worth 1 billion or more, no matter what he has to say or do.

YouTube ruined Christmas. I can’t stand my relatives anymore, they watch every conspiracy clip and now they are a thousand miles down the rabbit hole and I can’t handle them for more than a few days a year. I hate evil Google or alphabet, or whatever they call themselves.

“With regard to the algorithms used to hash data – particularly SHA-224 and SHA-256 – Buchanan expressed surprise that neither will be approved for use beyond 2030.”

Sounds like corruption to me. Hey gov’t pal, let’s make crazy requirements for security due to a quantum boogyman so I can sell you consultants and all new equipment with insane processing capabilities for a shit ton of money. Look for the greasy palms.

Decades of research and we are at 100 qbits and estimates are bouncing around that estimate it will take millions. Once we build them, job #1 will be reading government email?

Maybe, but it’s a lot easier just to use backdoors, software bugs, spies, and good ol’ bribes.

Yet companies are still pushing 2FA over the PSTN. IMO, it’s worse than no 2FA since some companies have processes that essentially trust the outcome as a full validation. I can’t think of a less secure channel.

Of course not. They were taking notes as they expect to be next in line to grind the peasants.

Just a thought from experience: Be wary of any critical products and/or taking a job from a company run by an accountant. CrowdStrike CEO… accountant!

Accounting firms are an obvious exception.

The other concern is censorship. Essentially a movie that you bought is on a server and then someone’s decided that words, content, or scenes are no longer appropriate. The video, song, etc, is different from the original and without any notification. The old scenes get sent to the memory hole. Oh dear Winston, I fear we will meet soon!

Backup was on Azure. I get the sentiment on the cloud, but there is no excuse for this incompetence at Google.

They didn’t apologize. Headlines just say they did.

Yeah it’s a classic case of Microsoft marketing. So far I found the office integration to be the least useful and most over hyped in marketing. However what it is good at is actually helpful. Join a meeting late it already has an update for what’s happened on the meeting so far and it’s really good for summarizing a meeting especially a key topics and a summary of action items. Tedious tasks like taking data copied from a PDF file and reformatting it correctly in CSV. And my favorite is making custom graphics based on a specific colour palette, though most images are really good for entertainment, demos and samples, but not production quality for final products. Weird results include creepy human images just don’t look right in a disturbing zombie-like way.