"A few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals."

Does this mean Tor cannot anonymize people on the internet any more?

"The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am highlighting publicly documented key findings."

September 12: "Frankfurt District Court orders Telefónica (O2) to surveil its customers for up to three months."

September 16: Tor project makes a statement, "Pinpointing Tor entry relays of onion services to successfully deanonymize Tor users."

September 18: Journalists detail one case, "Operation Liberty Lane is referenced."

Operation Liberty Lane is "the alleged name of what is believed to be a joint operation of the United States, UK, Germany and potentially other countries with the goal to expose Tor users of illegal onion services."

September 18: Tor Project makes statement, "gives the impression that only Ricochet is affected."

Ricochet is a replacement for TorChat and Tor Messenger, two previous messaging services built on the Tor protocol. Ricochet messages never leave the Tor network as both the sender and receiver work by starting a Tor hidden service on their respective computers. Ricochet does not use any central servers to coordinate communication, thus is a genuinely decentralized instant messenger.

September 25: Interview with Daniel Moßbrucker. "More and more Tor relays in Germany are under surveillance for longer and longer periods, in such a way that apparently data has been used for timing analysis."

Page has links to many media reports and online discussions: tagesschau.de, tor-relays mailing list, Panorama, STRG_F, Tor Project, Hacker News, Tor Project users forum, and Deutsche Welle.

Law enforcement undermines Tor

#solidstatelife #cybersecurity

TSMC's Phoenix, Arizona chip fab achieved a 4% better yield than comparable manufacturing sites in Taiwan.

TSMC Arizona fab delivers 4% more yield than comparable facilities in Taiwan

#solidstatelife #semiconductors #geopolitics #china #taiwan #tsmc

"Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku."

For safety reasons, the last thing we'd allow an AI to do is take full control over a computer, looking at the screen and typing keys and moving the mouse and doing mouse clicks, just like a human, enabling it to do literally everything on a computer a human can do. Oh wait...

"Available today on the API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do -- by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the first frontier AI model to offer computer use in public beta. At this stage, it is still experimental -- at times cumbersome and error-prone. We're releasing computer use early for feedback from developers, and expect the capability to improve rapidly over time."

"Asana, Canva, Cognition, DoorDash, Replit, and The Browser Company have already begun to explore these possibilities, carrying out tasks that require dozens, and sometimes even hundreds, of steps to complete. For example, Replit is using Claude 3.5 Sonnet's capabilities with computer use and UI navigation to develop a key feature that evaluates apps as they're being built for their Replit Agent product."

But unlike me, everyone else seems to be reacting very positively.

"It doesn't get said enough: Not only is Claude the most capable LLM, but they also have the best character. Great work Claude and Team!"

"Just imagine the accessibility possibilities. For those with mobility or visual impairments, Claude can assist with tasks by simply asking, like helping in usage with apps and systems that often lack proper accessibility features."

That's a good point, actually.

Still, you might want to run it in a VM for now?

"Wow, this is going to be quite game-changing!"

"Impressive to see Claude navigating screens like a human! Though still in beta, this could be a game-changer for automating tedious tasks. Can't wait to see how it develops!"

"What I found particularly noteworthy in this demo was that the information wasn't copied from the CRM, but typed letter by letter. Purely speculating, but perhaps because there are rare cases where websites do not accept copied input, which often also affects password managers."

"This is RPA-like functionality. Wow, Will this be a game-changer?"

RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation.

"What are the security implications of this? Could a bad actor use this to ask Claude to go into other people's computers and access their confidential information?"

Ok, at least one person besides me is feeling a little worry.

"That's epic, you guys have the best AI. This company is something special."

"Computer Use is truly a pivotal advancement. Enabling AI to interact with computers like humans do is a significant leap towards AGI. Exciting times ahead!"

"Looks like Siri on screen awareness but two (or more) years early and available for use now (but meanwhile, on server.) WOW. Well done guys."

"Absolutely incredible -- Super excited to build with this & see what others build!"

"Immediately prompting: 'Do all my work'"

If Claude can do all your work, why will you get paid?

"This could be huge for companies struggling with legacy systems and modernization."

"This is one more pivotal point in AI's evolution. In 2025, more innovation and use cases will emerge, and human involvement is slowly being eliminated. It looks like a small improvement, but it's huge at its core and will significantly impact how AI will be used in a few years. Kudos Claude Team!"

Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku

#solidstatelife #genai #llms #agenticai #athropic

"libLISA is a tool that can fully automatically scan instruction space, discover instructions and synthesize their semantics. It produces machine-readable, CPU-specific x86-64 instruction semantics. It relies on as little human specification as possible: specifically, it does not rely on a handwritten (dis)assembler to dictate which instructions are executable on a given CPU, or what their operands are."

"Even though heavily researched, a full formal model of the x86-64 instruction set is still not available. This is caused by the sheer complexity of the x86-64 architecture: the informal specification found in Intel manuals is roughly 4700 pages, and even these are known to be not trustworthy."

"libLISA aims to solve this problem by using a CPU as the ground truth, and deriving semantics by observing instruction execution."

"We analyzed five different architectures: AMD 3900X, AMD 7700X, Intel i9-13900 (p), Intel i9-13900 (e) and Intel Xeon Silver 4110. For each architecture, we generated around 120k encodings."

Ok, so when I first learned assembly language (which was actually Z80, not x86, and after that I learned the 6502 assembly language, before learning any x86 or MIPS, which I still don't know all that well...), I learned if you use any bit patterns as instructions that are not defined as instructions in the documentation, "here be dragons!" The computer will do something but who knows what. The computer will do something because every bit pattern given to it as an instruction will be interpreted as an instruction by the silicon, but the silicon is only designed to do the right thing for the official documented instructions, and it's behavior for every other bit patters is just whatever it happens to do. It won't return an error message saying, hey, you can't do that -- in fact, it can't return an error messages because assembly language is way below the level of abstraction where there's such a thing as an "error message".

You might wonder why, then, anyone would care about these "undocumented" instructions and make any effort to document them? Why not just ignore them? Just make sure you write your programs, whether written by hand in assembly language or output from a compiler, such that they avoid the "here be dragons" instructions.

The reason people can't do that is because hackers will try to get binaries on your machine that use undocumented instructions. They, the hackers, taken the trouble to figure out what some of the undocumented instructions do, and if your reverse engineering tools don't know what those instructions do, then you can't reverse engineer code from hackers.

So it turns out that a complete mapping of bit patterns to the instructions they carry out is desired. It's essential to fighting hackers and ensuring good computer security.

What's produced by this project, assuming their results are as advertised, isn't a complete complete mapping, because that's really not possible -- there's just too many possible input bit patterns to test all of them -- but it's a complete mapping of certain groupings that are likely to produce meaningful instructions. They call this "mapping from encodings to semantics".

libLISA - Instruction discovery and analysis on x86-64

#solidstatelife #cybersecurity #assemblylanguage

In a follow-up to the neural network GameNGen version of Doom, we now have the DIAMOND diffusion world version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. "DIAMOND" stands for "Diffusion As a Model Of eNvironment Dreams". Trained on vastly less training data than Doom, but, only 10 frames per second. Like Doom, it isn't just generating video that looks like the game, it's actually playable. But it can do some weird things (see below).

Counter-Strike's Dust II runs purely within a neural network on an RTX 3090 -- performance is disappointing at only 10 FPS

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #computervision

"As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a new geopolitical strategy is gaining traction in US and allied circles, in the natonal security, AI safety and tech communities. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and RAND Corporation call it the 'entente', while others privately refer to it as 'hegemony' or 'crush China'."

Max Tegmark, physics professor at MIT and president of the Future of Life Institute, argues that, "irrespective of one's ethical or geopolitical preferences," the entente strategy "is fundamentally flawed and against US national security interests."

He is reacting to Dario Amodei saying:

"... a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries' access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment. This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition's strategy to promote democracy (this would be a bit analogous to 'Atoms for Peace'). The coalition would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe."

"This could optimistically lead to an 'eternal 1991' -- a world where democracies have the upper hand and Fukuyama's dreams are realized."

Tegmark responds:

"Note the crucial point about 'scaling quickly', which is nerd-code for 'racing to build AGI'."

"From a game-theoretic point of view, this race is not an arms race but a suicide race. In an arms race, the winner ends up better off than the loser, whereas in a suicide race, both parties lose massively if either one crosses the finish line. In a suicide race, 'the only winning move is not to play.'"

"Why is the entente a suicide race? Why am I referring to it as a 'hopium' war, fueled by delusion? Because we are closer to building AGI than we are to figuring out how to align or control it."

The hopium wars: the AGI entente delusion -- LessWrong

#solidstatelife #ai #agi #aiethics

"LegalFast: Create legal documents, fast."

"Not using AI."

"LegalFast uses AI to power some functionality, but there's a difference between using AI as a tool and having ChatGPT generate complete documents."

So there you have it: Uses AI, but doesn't use AI. I wonder if this is going to become a thing.

Personally, I think a lot of what determines whether AI is appropriate is the reliability requirement. AI is great for things like brainstorming where you only need one great idea and it can generate some bad ones. AI would be bad to generate software for a spacecraft or a medical device. What reliability is required for legal documents?

LegalFast | Create legal documents fast

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #llms #aiethics

Linux kernel developers banned from contributing to the Linux kernel for being Russian.

Linux's second-in-command (after Linus Torvalds) Greg Kroah-Hartman said:

"Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. They can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided."

People are speculating (see link to Reddit discussion below) that this is due to US sanctions against Russia, and because of that, it could apply not just to Linux but to all open source projects. If the maintainers are within the United States, or outside the United States if they are US citizens, or outside the United States but in countries with treaties with the United States, then the US legal system could punish them if they fail to ban Russian contributors.

p.s. If you're thinking nginx is beyond the reach of this, because it was created by a Russian and is maintained by a Russian, Igor Sysoev, you'd be wrong. Igor Sysoev left the project in 2022 and nginx today is maintained by F5, a US corporation (in Seattle), subject to US law, including sanctions against Russia.

One wonders if we are seeing the beginning of a split in the whole open source world between a US-based open source ecosystem and an "everybody else" open source ecosystem. If it's only Russian programmers and not anybody else the US has a problem with (China, etc), then maybe not?

Are US programmers allowed to contribute to Russian-based open source projects?

Several Linux kernel driver maintainers removed due to their association to Russia

#solidstatelife #linux #ukraineconflict

ChatGPT topped 3 billion user visits in September 2024.

1. google.com - 82.0B
2. youtube.com - 28.0B
3. facebook.com - 12.3B
4. instagram.com - 5.7B
5. whatsapp.com - 4.5B
6. x.com - 4.3B
7. wikipedia.org - 3.8B
8. yahoo.com - 3.4B
9. reddit.com - 3.4B
10. yahoo.co.jp - 3.2B
11. chatgpt.com - 3.1B
12. yandex.ru - 2.7B
13. amazon.com - 2.6B
14. baidu.com - 2.4B
15. tiktok.com - 2.1B

None of the other language models (Gemini, Claude, Meta, X.AI, Perplexity, etc) register on this global ranking -- ChatGPT crushes them all. Which is interesting to me as I use 8 LLMs (most of the time -- will probably try more soon) and ChatGPT doesn't consistently stand out as better than the others. But ChatGPT seems to have lept far ahead in terms of brand recognition with users.

ChatGPT topped 3 billion visits in September | Similarweb

#solidstatelife #openai #chatgpt

"BabyAGI 2o is an exploration into creating the simplest self-building autonomous agent. Unlike its sibling project BabyAGI 2, which focuses on storing and executing functions from a database, BabyAGI 2o aims to iteratively build itself by creating and registering tools as required to complete tasks provided by the user. As these functions are not stored, the goal is to integrate this with the BabyAGI 2 framework for persistence of tools created."

The naming might be confusing. OpenAI came out with a model called "o1", and the name "2o" might get you thinking this BabyAGI is using the "o" model. That's not the case.

What this is is a variant of BabyAGI 2 that installs anything it likes and runs code generated by LLMs automatically, that tries continuously to update itself and its tools in order to accomplish whatever taks you gave it. It works with a variety of LLMs -- it uses a system called LiteLLM that lets you choose between more than 100 LLMs. It tries to do everything without human intervention, so when errors happen, it will try to learn from them, and continue iterating towards task completion.

babyagi-2o

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #llms #agenticai

"The New York Times on Thursday published a look at the 'fraying' relationship between OpenAI and its investor, partner, and, increasingly, rival, Microsoft."

"Most fascinating perhaps is a reported clause in OpenAI's contract with Microsoft that cuts off Microsoft's access to OpenAI's tech if the latter develops so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI), meaning an AI system capable of rivaling human thinking."

The surprising way OpenAI could get out of its pact with Microsoft

#solidstatelife #ai #openai #microsoft

"Whenever I talk with people born with the internet, I'm surprised at how informed and expressive they are. I don't think the previous generations could have matched up at the same age. Historically, technology has been the enabler of cognition and we're finding more and more ways to design tools for thought to augment our brains."

"We find that cybermorphosis changes between generations. The same people who grew up with the internet now don't know what files are."

"Hierarchical file systems are great at managing documents but it might not actually be the best way to work with concepts."

"While Stephen Hawking in the early 2010s used the few muscles he could still control in a clever way to communicate, today's Neuralink enables Noland Arbaugh to pull Civ VI all-nighters."

"We know surprisingly little about how cognition works."

"I still remember when we received a grant to purchase the (very expensive) NIRSport2 for our lab which was the state-of-the-art fNIRS neuroimaging equipment at the time. About a week after we received it, the revolutionary Kernel Flow came out, shaking up the field completely."

fNIRS stands for "functional near-infrared spectroscopy" and is a near-infrared spectroscopy technique that estimates the concentration of hemoglobin from changes in absorption of near infrared light. Kernel Flow is a fNIRS and electroencephalogram (EEG) headcap for "fast whole-head hemodynamic imaging".

"We know surprisingly little about how cognition works."

"Cybermorph hardware comes in many forms:"

"Multi-channel invasive neural implants for direct neural interaction (such as Neuralink)",

"Redesigned keyboards with new types of mapping to improve WPM",

"Direct current stimulation to key areas of the brain using tDCS devices",

"AR and VR glasses designed to improve how we interact with our extended mind", and

"New external effectors such as bionic limbs and prosthetics."

tDCS stands for "transcranial direct current stimulation" and is a technique where scalp electrodes create electric currents that create electric fields inside the brain that, depending on the polarity electric fields, increase or decrease neuronal activity in that brain region.

At the end, she (Esben Kran) issues a list of predictions for cybermorph brain augmentation. I'll let you click through to get the predictions.

Cybermorphism

#solidstatelife #hci #neuroscience

A "prompt testing exercise" in India "involving Meta AI, Gemini, Co-pilot and Adobe Firefly" showed "Meta AI's text-to-image generation feature is being weaponised to create harmful AI images targeting Muslims in India by reinforcing negative stereotypes."

I'm reminded that we don't have the "real" LLMs. All the companies have LLMs that can do things that the public LLMs we have access to can't, because of the "guardrail adding" effort. So any time you say, "LLMs can't do X", well, maybe they can, just not the public ones you're using.

Exclusive: Meta AI's text-to-image feature weaponised in India to generate harmful imagery

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #llms #computervision

Police are using AI to write police reports. I pictured police officers cutting & pasting from ChatGPT, but that's not what this is. The system is called Draft One, from a company called Axon, and the big selling point, is, obviously, saving police officers' time. But apparently the main thing it does is transcribe audio from bodycams. It's not a "police-report-generating LLM".

Even so, it is not clear these AI-generated reports will be acceptable as evidence in court.

Internal memo: Don't use AI for police reports, prosecutor tells Seattle-area law enforcement

#solidstatelife #ai #speechtotext

You should record everything about yourself you possibly can, says Arya Voronova.

"We emit information just like we emit heat. As long as we are alive, there's always something being digitized; even your shed in the woods is being observed by a spy satellite. The Internet revolution has made information emissivity increase exponentially, a widespread phenomenon it now uses to grow itself, since now your data pays for online articles, songs, and YouTube videos. Now there are entire databanks containing various small parts of your personality, way more than you could ever have been theoretically comfortable with, enough to track your moves before you're aware you're making them."

"Your data will be collected by others no matter your preference, and it will not be shared with you, so you have to collect it yourself. Once you have it, you can use your data to understand yourself better, become stronger by compensating for your weaknesses, help you build healthier relationships with others, living a more fulfilling and fun life overall. Collecting data also means knowing what others might collect and the power it provides, and tyis can help you fight and offset the damage you are bound to suffer because of datamining."

"My laptop runs Linux, a hacker-friendly OS. I quickly wrote a Python script that polls the currently focused window, writing every change into a logfile, each day a new file."

"I started tacking features on the side. One thing I added was monitoring media file playback, logging it alongside window title changes. Linux systems expose this information over Dbus, and there's a ton of other useful stuff there too! And Dbus is way easier to work with than I've heard, especially when you use a GUI explorer like D-Feet to help you learn the ropes."

Hack On Self: The Alt-Tab Annihilator | Hackaday

#solidstatelife #surveillance #datamining

If you buy a cheap Chinese thermal camera for your smartphone and install the app, the app will request a boatload of security permissions. It will requests permissions to access your location, to act as an Account Authenticator for the Account Manager, to request authorization tokens from the Account Manager, to read access of your phone state, including the current cellular network information, phone number, the status of any ongoing calls, and a list of any Phone Accounts registered on the device, to start automatically when the device boots up, to initiate a phone call without going through the Dialer user interface for the user to confirm the call, to read the low-level system log files, which can contain your private information, to create windows intended for system-level interaction with the user, to mount and unmount file systems for removable storage, to read or write the system settings, to get information about the currently or recently running tasks, to access information about Wi-Fi networks, to change Wi-Fi connectivity state, to receive a broadcast when the screen is on or has been unlocked, to keep processor from sleeping or screen from dimming, to change network connectivity state, to write to external storage, to perform Mobile Device Management tasks, a permission that is typically used by system apps or device policy management apps, and more. You might think that all the app would do is show you what the camera sees, but no.

Oh, but this article has more. It shows how this was figured out, using a tool called JADX, a "Dex to Java decompiler", and Ghidra. By "Dex to Java decompiler", they mean it goes from Dalvik bytecode to Java code from APK, dex, aar, aab, and zip files. Dalvik is the virtual machine on Android phones. Well, Dalvik used to be the virtual machine on Android phones, but a newer, better virtual machine has been invented, but Dalvik is still the format used for the files that are used to distribute Android apps (which is what those file extensions mentioned are about).

Not everything neatly decompiled with JADX, which is where Ghidra comes in. Ghidra is a full-fledged reverse engineering tool developed by the NSA. Yes, the NSA.

Interestingly the device identifies itself as "Cypress Semiconductor Corp Cino FuzzyScan F760-B". Cypress Semiconductor Corporation was acquired by Infineon in 2020 and no longer exists as a separate corporation. I guess that doesn't stop other people from using its device driver.

To top it all off, this article even includes a teardown of the device itself.

Hacking the T2S+ out of fear: Get lock-in thermography for free

#solidstatelife #cybersecurity

"Machines of Loving Grace". Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote an essay about what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right.

"I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I'm the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I'm a pessimist or "doomer" who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don't think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they're the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future."

"In terms of pure intelligence, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields -- biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc."

"In addition to just being a 'smart thing you talk to', it has all the 'interfaces' available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access. It can engage in any actions, communications, or remote operations enabled by this interface, including taking actions on the internet, taking or giving directions to humans, ordering materials, directing experiments, watching videos, making videos, and so on."

"It does not just passively answer questions; instead, it can be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee would, asking for clarification as necessary."

"It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a computer screen), but it can control existing physical tools, robots, or laboratory equipment through a computer; in theory it could even design robots or equipment for itself to use."

"The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run millions of instances of it (this matches projected cluster sizes by ~2027), and the model can absorb information and generate actions at roughly 10x-100x human speed. It may however be limited by the response time of the physical world or of software it interacts with."

"Each of these million copies can act independently on unrelated tasks, or if needed can all work together in the same way humans would collaborate, perhaps with different subpopulations fine-tuned to be especially good at particular tasks."

Sounds to me like automation of all work, but he doesn't address that until nearly the end. Before that, he talks about all the ways he thinks AI will improve "biology and physical health", "neuroscience and mental health", "economic development and poverty", and "peace and governance".

AI will advance CRISPR, microscopy, genome sequencing and synthesis, optogenetic techniques, mRNA vaccines, cell therapies such as CAR-T, and more due to conceptual insights we can't even predict today.

AI will prevent or treat nearly all infectious disease, eliminate most cancer, prevent or cure genetic diseases, improve treatments for diabetes, obesity, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, give people "biological freedom" with physical appearance and other biological processes under people's individual control, and double human lifespan (to 150).

AI will cure most mental illnesses like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, and addiction. AI will figure out how to alter brain structure in order to change psychopaths into non-psychopaths. "Non-clinical" everyday psychological problems like feeling drowsy or anxious or having trouble focusing will be solved. AI will increase the amount of "extraordinary moments of revelation, creative inspiration, compassion, fulfillment, transcendence, love, beauty, or meditative peace" people experience.

Economically, AI will make health interventions cheap and widely available, AI will increase crop yields develop technology like lab grown meat that increases food securty, AI will develop technology to mitigate climate change, AI will reduce inequality within countries, just as how the poor have the same mobile phones as the rich today; there is no such thing as a "luxury" mobile phone.

Regarding "peace and governance", he advocates an "entente strategy", "in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries' access to key resources." This would prevent dictatorships from gaining the upper hand. If democracies have the upper hand globally, that helps with "the fight between democracy and autocracy within each country." "Democratic governments can use their superior AI to win the information war: they can counter influence and propaganda operations by autocracies and may even be able to create a globally free information environment by providing channels of information and AI services in a way that autocracies lack the technical ability to block or monitor."

Finally he gets to "work and meaning", where he says, "Comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the '10%' expands to continue to employ almost everyone."

"However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized. While that might sound crazy, the fact is that civilization has successfully navigated major economic shifts in the past: from hunter-gathering to farming, farming to feudalism, and feudalism to industrialism."

Wish I could share his optimism that "civilization" will "successfully" "navigate" this "major economic shift". As those of you who've been hanging around me for any length of time know, I think the major effect of technology competing against humans in the labor market is decreased fertility, rather than an immediate drop in the employment rate, like everyone thinks because that seems more intuitive. He makes no mention of fertility in this context (he mentions it in the context of fertility treatments being something AI will advance), so I think it's not on his radar at all. He considers "opt-out" a "problem" whereby "Luddite movements" create a "dystopian underclass" by opt-ing out of the benifits of AI technology, yet it is the "opt-out" people, like the Amish, that today are able to maintain high fertility rates, and as such will make up the majority of the human population living on this planet in the future (something you can confirm for yourself by doing some math).

The original essay is some 14,000 words and my commentary above is just 1,000 or so, so you should probably read the original and get his full original unfiltered point of view.

Machines of Loving Grace

#solidstatelife #ai #agi #aiethics #technologicalunemployment

"Introducing the AI-Powered Electronic Component Classifier: The ultimate in intelligent component management."

Possibly useful for those of you who work a lot with electronic components.

"The Electronic Component Classifier is a project that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the identification and classification of electrical and electronic components."

"Features: Component classification: Resistors, capacitors, LEDs, transistors, potentiometers, diodes, and integrated circuits are the seven classes into which electronic and electrical components can be simply categorised, using multilayer categorization. Further details: With only one click, you may find out more details about integrated Circuits, transistors, and capacitors. User-friendly design: The interface is simple to use and navigate, thanks to its clear headings, buttons, and text boxes."

Introducing the AI-Powered Electronic Component Classifier: The Ultimate in Intelligent Component Management

#solidstatelife #ai #computervision #electronics

Pyodide + JupyterLite. This is pretty impressive -- check out my screenshot.

Pyodide is Python running in your web browser -- more specifically, it is a port of CPython to WebAssembly, using Emscripten, which is a compiler toolchain based on LLVM (the compiler toolchain used by Apple languages and Rust) that compiles to WebAssembly. JupyterLite, in turn, enables Python Jupyter notebooks to run insider your browser. The "notebook" interface was pioneered by Mathematica in 1988 and is based on the the idea of creating a document that contains explanatory text, software code, and visualizations, all in the same document, in such a way that the computer actually runs the code and produces the visualizations. The document is divided into "cells" where each cell is text or code along with output produced by the code, such as a visualization.

As you can see, I imported SymPy (symbolic math system for Python) and asked it to figure out a few integrals. Remember, the ** operator means exponentiation in Python, not ^ like you may be used to.

The thing that really amazes me about this is, this is all running in the browser -- and not "in the browser" in the sense of, connecting to a server and running Python and Jupyter on the server and displaying the results in a browser -- no, once all the code is downloaded, everything you see is running in the browser. Python is running in the browser, SymPy is running in the browser, all the calculations to determine the integrals I asked for are done in the browser, and all the code for the "notebook" display and that generates the nice mathematical notation is running in the browser. Yes, I checked in Chrome developer tools and verified no network requests are being made -- everything really is running in the browser.

Try it yourself.

#solidstatelife #python #jupyter #wasm

https://jupyterlite.github.io/demo/lab/index.html

"The 'Whisperverse': The future of mobile computing is an AI voice inside your head."

I wasn't going to share this but then the Harvard students' video (below) came out, and I felt like the two go together somehow, so here you go.

"Within the next few years, an AI assistant will take up residence inside your head. It will do this by whispering guidance into your ears as you go about your daily routine, reminding you to pick up your dry cleaning as you walk down the street, helping you find your parked car in a stadium lot, and prompting you with the name of a coworker you pass in the hall. It may even coach you as you converse with friends and coworkers, giving you interesting things to say that make you seem smarter, funnier, and more charming than you are. These will feel like superpowers."

This is making me think of that famous quote from Douglas Adams:

"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." -- Douglas Adams

I'm 54 and didn't get the "against the natural order of things" itch at age 35, but... I find myself slipping into that "against the natural order of things" feeling on this one. Do I really want an "AI assistant" taking up residence in my head? The idea doesn't actually seem appealing.

"Most of these devices will be deployed as AI-powered glasses because they give the best vantage point for cameras to monitor our field of view, though camera-enabled earbuds will be available too. The other benefit of glasses is that they can be enhanced to display visual content, enabling the AI to provide silent assistance as text, images, and realistic immersive elements that are integrated spatially into our world."

Oh, right, that's why Google Glass did so well -- oh wait, it failed. Maybe it was just ahead of its time? And this time the idea will work?

"Whatever we call this technology, it is coming soon and will mediate all aspects of our lives, assisting us at work, at school, or even when grabbing a late-night snack in the privacy of our own kitchen."

This is like how they told us Twitter was for telling the world what you ate for lunch, and it actually turned out to be for fighting about politics. Now they tell us we'll have AI assistants taking up residence in our heads for assisting us with our late-night snacks, but it'll actually turn out to be for fighting about politics. (Don't ask me how. But the purpose of most technology always ends up being fighting about politics.)

The "Whisperverse": The future of mobile computing is an AI voice inside your head

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