AI in command

When I first heard about the story of PocketOS having its production database and backups deleted by an Anthropic AI I thought back to the Anthropic dispute with the Department of War claiming the DoW was using its products for military purposes. They thought that unsafe, and probably had other objections too. It would seem a 'shoot yourself in the foot' kind of demonstration, but human dumbness is pretty extensive.

It looks like somebody at PocketOS needs to be booted far. Their architecture was weird: the backups were on the same volume as the production database (????), everything was on the cloud with no local copy, the designer gave unfiltered control to the AI agent -- lots of dumbness. But the AI's "confession" seemed really weird. If the agent had rules, how did it ignore them? There's something odd here.

FWIW, we had databases too, some more mission critical than others. Depending on the "brand" of database (mysql/mariadb or postgres or mongodb or sqlite) we had different backup approaches, but the copy was always done by entirely different agents, and copies kept in different servers in different buildings. I can't think of a way anything but deliberate admin action on different machines that could damage both. The whole point of backup is to keep the data somewhere safely distant from problems on the original host. Ideally you'd like a copy that only a different admin can delete, just in case somebody goes postal.

It turns out the cloud provider here was able to provide a way to access the data after all, but that's not usually the case.

Out of touch

We bought a replacement car, which came with a trial of Sirius. I am getting fliers and emails urging me to sign up for the low (or "current") price and suggesting channels to entice me. What does? Talk radio--hardly. Sports--no. "Every music genre" that didn't list the only channel I'd be interested in. "Nonstop news" sounds like Babel torture. "So much comedy"--not a diet of it, thank you, and most of the modern comedian shorts youtube offers up are more bitter than funny.

My wife was on the phone with someone talking about a child interested in manga. I looked it up. I'd heard of Isekai--I'd written something that might be classed as "portal fiction" (though not Isekai)--but most of the classifications were new to me. I'd have to spend quite a while at the library reading through stuff to get up to speed, and even then I don't know if the library carries some of the more "adult" stuff. It might--libraries have been getting a little odd lately.

Maybe a movie a year at the theaters, no broadcast TV, no cable TV... The HBO/Netflix/etc produced content I haven't seen at all. Young adult conversations are replete with references to catch phrases from shows I've barely heard of. I'm told the caliber of the work is better than the old 60's/70's TV shows (which I'm not interested in rewatching). OK.

The book of Daniel says the Babylonians trained their most promising captives in the language and literature of the Babylonians--presumably because the way the language is used references the literature for additional meanings. How far out of touch can I be before communication becomes difficult?

Some words have already changed meanings.

Won or not done?

Althouse wrote: "The war is over. We won. Iran just won't admit it,"

I'm not sure that's true. I think we won the first phase (taking more hurt than we admitted but yes, winning), and now we're in the second phase--the seige. Remember seiges? We remember WWII as mostly kinetic, but in the Pacific we did some island hopping too; isolating Japanese outposts and waiting for them to wilt.

I assume that the mosaic land defense the Iranians planned was paralleled by a "mosaic" coastal capability as well, and that eradicating all their hidden coves and attack boats will take a while. No simple "decapitation" here. And some of those attack boats/mine layers will be genuine fishing boats, slightly repurposed.

Another one

Curious. The would-be assassin went to CalTech for his undergrad (I didn't get in), but for grad school went to Cal State Dominguez Hills, which has high rankings for "Hispanic enrollment" and "social mobility" but which I have never heard of before. I gather he worked on engineering a wheelchair brake, but so far haven't found any reliable details. Changing majors between degrees makes sense--sometimes you don't know how it really is to work in a field until you try it for real. But it seems a bit odd to jump from "world-class" to "never heard of it before."

From a screenshot of LinkedIn: "Mechanical Engineer, IJK Controls, "Reworked existing two-axis gimbal design to fit specifications of new project by redesigning..."

Maybe a mechanical engineer can tell how much skill that requires. I have no idea.

In case you were wondering about drones

People are learning how to use and counter drones in battle. By now it's common knowledge that a truck is a drone (followed swiftly by artillary) magnet. This is for the foot soldier, though some is relevant for civilians caught in the middle.

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My suspicion is that the vast open areas in the USA make us more vulnerable to drone attacks and assassinations than more congested countries, once an adversary manages to smuggle inventory in.

You would think

that having to lie abed sick would give you more time to read. Turns out you need energy to concentrate, and eyestrain is a problem.

After Saturday comes Sunday

Is there a Muslim group that denounces the Little Satan that does not also hate the Great Satan?

It seems that it has been this way all my life.

Observation

Watch people walk by, immersing themselves in too-often vicious social media, inattentive to all but their mo' bile devices.

Artemis

Some people are excited about the Artemis mission, and others are pretty grumpy about it. Moon shots have been done before, of course, and the thrill isn't going to be the same. I remember the original well.

The same reasons for not doing it at all circulate again: Benefits are speculative, We've got great needs (wars, the poor, etc) that all need dealing with and this is a mere distraction, and so on. There's a new reason too: Why not use robots for exploration since they work so well now.

Of course the benefits of using low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit are not speculative at all anymore, but we have a better handle on what we can find on the Moon and Mars and a better appreciation for how hard work there will be.

The "How can we spend money on this when we have so many poor/etc" sounds very noble-minded, but that argument has no boundaries or limits. Why did Beethoven waste his time composing music when he could have been agitating for peace and trying to relieve poverty?

No. There are things worth doing, things that make life better, that have nothing to do with the usual list of desperate needs. I judge exploration (physical and scientific research) to be among those, along with arts. "We can put a man on the Moon but we can't fix homelessness." Well, we can carve a Pieta but we can't cure drug addiction--and probably never will. I don't believe the societal-problem advocates should have an automatic veto on the work of the rest of us.

The question comes down to balance. You can overdo anything. And there are several kind of costs to consider: money of course, but enthusiasm and good will too. Thanks to the intervening years of development some effects can be had for much less (in constant dollars) than they could for the Apollo program. Enthusiasm seems harder to come by, for pretty much anything. A certain decadence set in in society, and NASA turned rather sclerotic. Private rockets pack a lot more enthusiasm now.

If you argue that the Artemis program lacks vision--that we're just doing what our ancestors did, just a little bigger; a little larger pyramid this time--I admit there's justice to the argument.

If you complain that it's inefficient to try to loft people instead of robots--granted.

If you complain that the Constitution doesn't mandate research spending like this--well, it doesn't mandate poverty spending either. And several decades of the latter have shown some stubborn problems with poverty elimination and a moral hazard or two as well--the programs are not an unmitigated good.

You could argue that private firms should take up the torch of space travel. I like the idea, though we have a tragedy of the commons problem already.

Where should the balance be--this year? I don't know. Existential problems, such as war or overwhelming debt, may demand cuts to the bone and beyond. We don't have a good track record of facing up to problems and making hard decisions either.

Nor do I know on what scales you weigh conflicting desires: smaller classes or more to teach about?

I do know that if I had funding authority, I'd want to keep trying to explore.

Webcam and zoom

(Logitech C615, ubuntu 22.04.5, gnome/wayland) Under cheese the resolution looks quite decent, but under zoom it's fuzzy, as though it doesn't want to focus. It turns out that changing the resolution can't be done from a zoom desktop, but only through logging into the web interface to the account.

Even with that, autofocus is painfully slow.

Speeds

When I learned to type we measured speed in words per minute. Did Incan scribes measure their quipu speed in knots?

Judas

We get some detail about Judas, but not a huge amount. The story isn't mainly about him anyway.

He was a thief, and helped himself to what was in the moneybag. How did John know? Matthew, a tax collector, might have spotted small discrepancies easily enough, and told Jesus, and John, close to Jesus, heard of it. Was Judas afraid of exposure, unwilling to repent?

I've read it proposed that Judas, knowing Jesus' power, wanted Him to quit dilly-dallying and use that power and popularity, and so tried to force Jesus' hand. It didn't work the way Judas hoped, hence his despairing not-quite-repentance. It's quite plausible, but not supported by the texts.

Or perhaps he was jaded with miracles. Many others saw the same miracles and merely got angrier with Jesus, and not at all interested in following Him. Jesus had said some things that would be really hard for a good Jew to listen to ("eat my flesh"), and maybe Judas was wondering if Jesus was really good. We're told that the disciples, when on mission, were also doing miracles--perhaps Judas did some miraculous healings too. People are really good at forgetting inconvenient things, but that would be a doozy to try to forget.

Or perhaps he was sloppy and the devil slowly took hold of him.

Or perhaps his motives were a mix of all of the above.

I heard it asked if Judas had a choice; if the prophecy meant that somebody had to betray Christ. I think that's a bit backwards. If Judas had chosen otherwise, the prophets would have been told something else to say.

It's been claimed that Peter is Everyman, standing in for us all, denying Christ through fear and surprise. But so is Judas, betraying Christ and perhaps not entirely sure why. And so is Thomas, doubting the testimony. And so is John, loved by Christ.