Airquote: "Artificial Intelligence"

ChatGPT and other "deep-learning" programs have made a lot of noise and headlines lately.  As I alluded to in my nopecoin post, I'm very much not on-board with some of the new tricks we're teaching the old dog that is personal computing.

I had the privilege of growing up alongside home computers themselves, as well as the internet.  I remember categorized newsgroups, public web forums, mailing lists, and all sorts of well-thought-out ways for people to connect and share ideas.  So, I've never understood the appeal of this current crop of "social media" giants.  I don't get it.  I so very much don't get it that I don't use any of them.  The closest I come is youtube, which I only touch with a ten-foot pole of browser plugins which disable  the comments, shorts, ads, and most of its other most egregious anti-features.

But, I'm not most people.  Most people go ahead and use facebook/twitter/instagram/whatever, at least to some degree.

Thus, we've let unsupervised and unconsidered algorithms decide which bits of information we see or don't see.  Your facebook/twitter/instagram/whatever feeds are not lists of things you've asked for, they're infinitely-scrolling sets of the items which have been calculated to be the most likely to generate the most profit for the middleman in question.  This has had society-poisoning and democracy-breaking effects, and it should not be surprising that when profits matter more than honesty, things go pear-shaped quickly.

After seeing the messes we get ourselves into when we defer our thinking and sorting to machines (profit machines, specifically), my personal reaction would be to take a step back and reflect, "hm, maybe we need to think this through more carefully".  Instead, we've gone ahead and given these same capitalism bots the ability not to just show and hide and reorder (dis)information, but to literally make things up on the spot.

What?  Why?!

(Well, I know why.  Middlemen need no longer rely solely on their own victicustomers to provide the "content" to shuffle into each others' feeds.)

I'm beginning to feel about AI software the way I feel about guns.  Mechanically, these are fascinating pieces of engineering and ingenuity.  There's both a complexity and a simplicity that is captivating and beautiful.  Also, no thank you!  Decline.  Unsubscribe.  Not in my house.  It claims to be a fun and neutral tool, but I have a very hard time seeing it as anything but a dangerous weapon.

I suspect we'll soon see artificially-generated novels, and movies, and augmented-reality serials.  They'll be amusing enough not to die in the crib.  At nearly no cost, there won't be much reason not to keep trying, even at low points in any fad/zeitgeist cycle.  Entire wikipedias' worth of "information" will come and go and morph and self-refer.  I think that's pretty fascinating, but it also sure looks like authorship, authenticity, and having any basis at all in truth are all up on the chopping block.  Once these things start consuming each others' and their own output as input, we're going to have more messes to clean up than we can deal with.  Based on the current trajectory of our approaches, my guess is we'll try to fight fire with more and more fire.

I worry whether we have much natural intelligence left, let alone what the artificial sort will get up to.

Approaching Three Oh

For some time, I thought of 30 as a scary age. An age beyond which I would be old and unrecognizable. Given how far along I already am in the feeling-old department, and how little my appearance has changed (I've been fat, bearded, and bald since college at least), I'm less concerned about that. The number 30 still had a bit of psychological weight, though, so I decided I had to look at things differently.

In a week or two, "30" will be the layman's way of describing my age. The finger-counter's perspective. But to me and any other system software engineer, I'll be 0x1e. I'll be 00011110, and that's according to the first computer I ever hacked on. By today's standards, I'll be 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000011110. Just look at all those insignificant digits. How could anybody who knows anything call me "old"? :^)

Point is, I won't need an extra binary digit until I'm 32 in decimal. 0x20 hex. And the extra-bit logic works just fine for me. Time flies when you're young, so you get extra bits pretty frequently. At 2, at 4, at 8... but the next bit you need is at 16, which in my case is still holding out just fine. If I use this reasoning and set my scary "old" age at 32, then I won't have to bother with a midlife crisis until I'm 64! Then I can pop my meds, buy a hotrod hovercar and blast that Beatles song loud enough to drown out the tinnitus.

After that, I can measure life as a countdown to 128. Anything beyond that's an awfully big bonus, at least by modern reckoning. Even with leaps and bounds in medicine and cheese-healthification, I don't see having any chance of overflowing even the trusty ol' Apple II's native integer. And, if by saying that, I'm jinxing my own life upon turning 256, well, so be it.

But thirty? Hardly seems worth mentioning. Multiples of ten are for chumps. In fact, forget I even said anything. ...Thirty. Pff.

:^) 0x7d9

(That's "Happy 2009", for anyone who doesn't speak Slackware-flavored smileys or hexidecimal.)

What better way to celebrate 2008 being over with than to prattle on about things that took place while it wasn't? ...Don't answer that. Surely there are countless better ways. But that's what I'm going to do anyway.

In 2008 my wrist got a little messed up, having grown a mysterious extra bit of bone or something. I posted a cool x-ray here (see April) and have files from the following inconclusive CAT scan, which I still mean to build a little interactive widget for sometime. I got a shot of cortisone, which helped. It's still not 100%, but it's not bad.

In 2008, I was sent to an artsy/geeky conference in Florence, so the missus and I got to hang out in Italy for a week. Still haven't finished the full online photo album, but we did post some stuff here (see April).

In 2008 my little sister got engaged, reminding me once again that I am very old. I can still call her "little", however, as she's all thin and whispy whereas I am ... not.

In 2008 Kim and I thwarted prescription pet food manufacturer Hills' attempt to murder our cat. They changed her only known compatible food, but we eventually did find one other. Go Eukanuba!

In 2008, Obama got numerous campaign contributions from both of us throughout his campaign. To everyone who thinks we forgot to send a Christmas gift: you're welcome!

In 2008 I won the "ownership" award at work for putting in some ridiculous hours and getting the job done no matter the task thrown at me. At least, that's what somebody thinks I do.

In 2008 the author of the IMAP protocol was hired at my workplace. He and I are building M+Guardian's new IMAP server together, which, I'll be honest, was a bit intimidating at first.

In 2008, I got sent on a business trip to Montreal just before Christmas, where Minego and I demonstrated why engineers shouldn't be allowed to participate in gift-stealing parties: our algorithms are superior to those of salespeople.

This is a rather pitiful way to keep in touch with everybody, but happy late holidays one and all! I hope 2009 treats you well.

:^) 0x7d9!

Spare bone

My wrist has been hurting for the last few days, enough that I finally went to a doctor for the first time in ... well years, not sure how many. I spend what's probably an unhealthy amount of time with my hands at a keyboard, so I was worried about carpal tunnel syndrome and such. But enough chatter, the point of this message is to share a cool x-ray image. :^)


It turns out that I have some "calcification" going on, some extra bony tissue showing up where it shouldn't. If I move my wrist the wrong way (which is, basically, too far in any direction) this extra chunk starts annoying whatever nerves and stuff that are around it. I'm wearing a brace now and will have to hunt down an orthopedic doctor at some point.

Here's the little bugger highlighted:




I'm not so sure about this whole getting old stuff, I think I liked it better when my body wasn't falling apart, but I think I'll keep at it, see if this getting old business gets any better with age. ...Wait a minute...

Does Not Compute

I grew up with an Apple IIe. Six expansion slots, color graphics, dual 5.25" floppy drives, but most importantly, BASIC in firmware. I was writing programs before I even really understood what that meant. To use the computer was to program it, and I couldn't have been happier. Sure, pre-compiled programs like Print Shop and Mario Bros were fun, but making my own stuff, that's what I liked best. That's where the magic was.

I was really, really lucky. I grew up at just the right time. To own a computer was to be a computer enthusiast. It wasn't a means to an end; the point of having the thing was to mess around with it. It could certainly be used to do useful work, but it was every bit as common (and easy) to use it as a toy.

(Begin hearing the "old man" voice in your head at this point.)

Modern computing does not compute! Computers nowadays don't come with any (programming language) interpreters built into ROM. Or pre-installed on their hard disks, as might be more appropriate. The closest you can come to writing programs out-of-the-box today is to use a featureless text editor to write some javascript and run it in a web browser.

<script type="text/javascript">
alert("Hello World, this sucks!");
</script>

Now, the way I learned to be a programmer isn't the only right way. But doing BASIC, being taught C, and picking up on everything else was a pretty fun and natural progression. There are entire college computer science tracks now that don't teach C at all anymore, instead using Java or something. It's not bad to learn Java, but I would argue that learning C is more important, if what you care about is computer science. If you care about crafting cookie-cutter corporate apps quickly, Java's where it's at. But if you care about what's going on, or if you like the idea of a computer as a toy, C is really important. The rub is that it's an awful language to write your first program in. My brain, anyway, wasn't ready for it until I'd done something simpler first.

That's where BASIC came in, and where something like Python could come in today. A person's first program shouldn't be graphical. It shouldn't be run in a web browser. It would be nice if it didn't have to import any libraries. And it would be great if there was a realtime interpreter console, something to try out commands and code chunks before saving them in a file. Apple's flavour of BASIC did all of that, and Python does too.

Python is free in all senses of the word, and runs on any platform. The only problem is, it's not just waiting there on any computer one might buy. Before you can do anything with it, you must learn of its existence, find it, download it, and install it. To me, that's tragic. That's depriving little 5-year-old me's all over the world of something really special. It would be trivial to include in any desktop operating system, and could be presented much more nicely than BASIC was back in the day. In the Start menu, or the Apple menu, or on the desktop, or at whatever handy spot user consults regularly, there ought to be a "Create Programs" menu/folder/whatever. It should contain an interpreter, a decent text editor, a language reference, and a quick start guide to explain what those other things are and how to use them. Why isn't this done?

I understand there's not much consumer demand for this kind of thing. Joe Schmoe wants to buy a computer in order to click around on web pages and print term papers, not as a toy to write his own programs for. But I think that could change, if it was widely understood that software can be made by individual people in a matter of minutes. Sure, it won't be the same as software that comes from big corporations on 18-month release cycles, but why does that matter? MySpace pages, YouTube videos, and blogs, aren't the same as designer-comissioned websites, Hollywood films, and professional journalism. It doesn't matter. Joe Schmoe cares about that stuff anyway.

Microsoft, Apple, Dell, HP, somebody... Put Python on the desktop! Add a notice that you don't provide Python support, with a link to python.org, and you can forget all about it. It wouldn't even have to be Python, that's just my opinion of a good introductory programming language. But for cripe's sake, make it happen! There should be a way to be introduced to programming on every computer out there. The fact that there isn't, just doesn't make sense. It's illogical. It doesn't add up. ... Oh, surely there's a phrase that explains the situation.

Scary-ass gliding kids

Is this just in Utah valley or is it everywhere? Admittedly, I see more kids around here than anywhere else I've been. But the rabbit-like procreation rate of Mormons is, for the time being, beside the point.

Whether it happens at a grocery store or a restaurant or anywhere folks bring their kids, which is everywhere, it scares the bejesus out of me every damn time. Kids are sorta scary anyway, with their unnaturally loud voices given the scaled-down size of their vocal cords, their ability to change direction and velocity with no warning, and their complete and utter lack of any sense of context. But now and then I'll catch a glimpse of one that's gliding. Gliding! A kid who's running at least gives you some aural cues that something's about to come tearing out of the next aisle. These new ethereal, gliding mutants not only have the added speed from their roller-shoes, but they move almost silently, darting out of nowhere or stalking their prey in a near-perfect stealth.

I ran a quick search for images of these ghastly munchkins, hoping that some photographer out there had captured the correct sense of terror. While I did learn that apparently this phenomenon is this man's fault, bupkis on the photo front. There are some ads featuring somewhat-scary kids, and some snapshots of way-too-old-for-this kids "grinding" on various public surfaces using these shoes as skateboards, but I think it needs to be seen in motion to be understood. Imagine the last kid that was whining at a restaurant or otherwise attempting to spoil your day. But now imagine him/her standing perfectly still. If that wasn't suspicious and bizarre enough, now imagine the perfectly-still kid silently gliding straight ahead at high speed, moving nary a muscle. Catch this in the corner of your eye and your confidence in everything from the laws of physics to any sense of justice or compassion in the universe will be shaken to the core. Did the Matrix just glitch out for a moment? Is someone using your grocery store as a set for some drug trip film? No, they're here, and they're real, at least real enough to run into you and get kid slime on your good jacket.