Computers – Spinor Info

2025

Canada, Cats, Cybernetics, Politics No Responses »

Jan 082025

We are barely a week into the new year, 2025. Yet here are some news items that would have sounded like outlandish B-movie nonsense just a few years ago.

The incoming president-elect of the United States expressed his interest in annexing Greenland, and did not rule out the use of force against a NATO ally;
The incoming president-elect of the United States expressed his interest in reoccupying the Panama Canal zone and did not rule out the use of force;
The incoming president-elect mused about turning Canada into the 51st state and did not rule out the use of “economic force” to accomplish this;
Ukraine’s offensive in Russia’s Kursk region led to a large number of casualties on the Russian side, including thousands of North Korean troops;
North Korea successfully tested a new intermediate-range missile;
An article in Foreign Affairs magazine argues that South Korea should acquire nuclear capability for deterrence;
After several similar incidents involving Russian ships in the Baltic Sea, now a Chinese vessel damaged undersea cables connecting Taiwan;
A far-right politician in EU member state Austria is set to form the next government of the country;
Alien ship set to land in New York’s Central Park turns back at the last minute – “Too dangerous, no intelligent life,” they message their home planet.

OK, I threw in the last one. But the rest? In 2025? Aren’t they just as outlandish as the bit about aliens? Aren’t we, and by that I mean the whole human race, supposed to be, you know, a tad more intelligent?

Guess not. Can’t wait for the world to be taken over by AI-assisted cats.

Merry Christmas!

Cybernetics, Personal No Responses »

Dec 222024

So I asked Claude to do something for me for Christmas. Claude happily obliged.

Can you generate for me SVG code that draws a nice Christmas tree?

Certainly! I'll create an SVG code that draws a simple but nice Christmas tree for you. Here's the SVG code:


<svg width="300" height="400" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <!-- Tree trunk -->
  <rect x="140" y="350" width="20" height="50" fill="#8B4513"/>
  
  <!-- Tree layers -->
  <polygon points="150,50 50,350 250,350" fill="#228B22"/>
  <polygon points="150,100 70,300 230,300" fill="#32CD32"/>
  <polygon points="150,150 90,250 210,250" fill="#3CB371"/>
  
  <!-- Ornaments -->
  <circle cx="120" cy="200" r="10" fill="red"/>
  <circle cx="180" cy="220" r="10" fill="gold"/>
  <circle cx="150" cy="280" r="10" fill="blue"/>
  <circle cx="100" cy="320" r="10" fill="purple"/>
  <circle cx="200" cy="300" r="10" fill="silver"/>
  
  <!-- Star on top -->
  <polygon points="150,40 140,60 160,60" fill="yellow" stroke="orange" stroke-width="2"/>
</svg>

This SVG code creates a Christmas tree with the following elements:

A brown trunk
Three layers of green triangles for the tree's foliage
Colorful ornaments (circles) in red, gold, blue, purple, and silver
A yellow star on top

You can copy this code and save it as a .svg file, then open it in a web browser or an SVG-compatible image viewer to see the result. You can also embed it directly in an HTML file if you want to display it on a webpage.

The tree is simple but recognizable, with a classic triangular shape and festive decorations. Feel free to adjust the colors, sizes, or positions of the elements to customize the tree to your liking!

Can you generate for me a Lilypond tune for the piano, for two hands, to accompany this nice Christmas tree?

Certainly! I'll create a simple, festive piano tune using Lilypond that could accompany a Christmas tree. This tune will be in 3/4 time, reminiscent of a waltz, with a cheerful melody in the right hand and a simple accompaniment in the left hand.

Here's the Lilypond code for a short Christmas-themed piano piece:

\version "2.22.1"

\header {
  title = "Christmas Tree Waltz"
  composer = "AI Composer"
}

upper = \relative c'' {
  \clef treble
  \key c \major
  \time 3/4

  c4 e g | a2 g4 | f4 a c | g2. |
  e4 g c | b2 a4 | g4 f e | d2. |
  c4 e g | a2 g4 | f4 a c | e2. |
  d4 b g | c2 b4 | c2. ~ | c2. |
}

lower = \relative c' {
  \clef bass
  \key c \major
  \time 3/4

  c,4 <e g> <e g> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | g,4 <f' g> <f g> |
  c4 <e g> <e g> | g,4 <f' g> <f g> | c4 <e g> <e g> | g,4 <f' g> <f g> |
  c4 <e g> <e g> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | c4 <e g> <e g> |
  g,4 <f' g> <f g> | c4 <e g> <e g> | c4 <e g> <e g> | c2. |
}

\score {
  \new PianoStaff <<
    \new Staff = "upper" \upper
    \new Staff = "lower" \lower
  >>
  \layout { }
  \midi { \tempo 4 = 120 }
}

This Lilypond code creates a simple, waltz-like tune that could be played while admiring a Christmas tree. Here's a brief explanation of the piece:

It's in the key of C major, which is simple and cheerful.
The time signature is 3/4, giving it a gentle, swaying feel.
The right hand (upper staff) plays a melody that moves mostly stepwise with some small leaps, reminiscent of decorating a tree or hanging ornaments.
The left hand (lower staff) provides a simple waltz-like accompaniment, with a bass note followed by two chords in each measure.
The piece is 16 measures long, which is enough to create a festive atmosphere without being too complex.

To use this code:

Copy it into a text file and save it with a .ly extension (e.g., "christmas_tree_waltz.ly").
Process it with Lilypond to generate sheet music (PDF) and a MIDI file.
You can play the MIDI file to hear how it sounds, or read the sheet music to play it on a piano.

This tune should provide a nice, festive accompaniment to your Christmas tree SVG!

Sapience, sentience and large language models

Cybernetics 3 Responses »

Dec 212024

I have been debating with myself whether or not I should try to publish these thoughts in a formal journal but I think it’s wisest not to do so. After all, I am not an expert: I “dabbled” in machine learning but I never built a language model, and cognitive science is something that I know precious little about.

Still, I think my thoughts are valuable, especially considering how often I read thoughts from others who are trying to figure out what to make of GPT, Claude, or any of the other sophisticated models.

I would like to begin with two working definitions.

I call an entity sentient if it has the ability to form a real-time internal model of its environment with itself in it, and use this model to plan its actions. Under this definition, humans are obviously sentient. So are cats, and so are self-driving automobiles.

I call an entity sapient if it has the ability to reason about its own capabilities and communicate its reasoning to others. By writing this very sentence, I am demonstrating my own sapience. Cats are obviously not sapient, nor are self-driving automobiles. So humans are unique (as far as we know): we are both sapient and sentient.

But then come LLMs. LLMs do not have an internal model of their environment. They do not model themselves in the context of that environment. They do not plan their actions. They just generate text in response to input text. There’s no sentience there.

Yet, under my definition LLMs are clearly sapient. They have the ability to describe their own capabilities, reason about those capabilities, and communicate their reasoning to others. In fact, arguably they are more sapient than many human beings I know!

This then raises an interesting question. What does it take for an intelligence to be “general purpose”, that is, capable of acting freely, settings its own goals, pursuing these goals with purpose, learning from the experience? Is it sufficient to have both sapience and sentience? Could we just install a language model as a software upgrade to a self-driving car and call it mission accomplished?

Not quite. There are two more elements that are present in cats and humans, but not in self-driving cars or language models, at least not at the level of sophistication that we need.

First, short-term memory. Language models have none. How come, you wonder? They clearly “remember” earlier parts of a conversation, don’t they? Well… not exactly. Though not readily evident when you converse with one, what actually happens is that every turn in the conversation starts with a blank slate. And at every turn, the language model receives a copy of the entire conversation up to that point. This creates the illusion of memory: the model “remembers” what was said earlier, because its most recent instance received that full transcript along with your last question. This method works for brief conversations, but for a general-purpose intelligence, clearly something more sophisticated might be needed. (As an interim solution, to allow for conversations of unlimited length without completely losing context, I set up my own front-end solution to Claude and GPT so that when the transcript gets too long, it asks the LLM itself to replace it with a summary.)

Second, the ability to learn. That “P” in GPT stands for pretrained. Language models today are static models, pretrained by their respective publishers. For a general-purpose intelligence, it’d be important to implement some form of continuous learning capability.

So there you have it. Integration of “sentience” (a real-time internal model of the environment with oneself in it) and “sapience” (the ability to reason and communicate about one’s own capabilities) along with continuous learning and short-term memory. I think that once these features are fully integrated into a coherent whole, we will witness the birth of a true artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Of course we might also wish to endow that entity with agency: the ability to act on its own, as opposed to merely responding to user requests; the ability to continuously experience the world through senses (visual, auditory, etc.); not to mention physical agency, the ability to move around, and manipulate things in, physical reality. (On a side note, what if our AGI is a non-player character, NPC, in a virtual world? What would be the ethical implications?)

Reading what I just wrote so far also reminds me why it is wiser not to seek formal publication. For all I know, many of these thoughts were expressed elsewhere already. I know far too little about the current state-of-the-art of research in these directions and the relevant literature. So let me just leave these words here in my personal blog, as my uninformed (if not clever, at least I hope not painfully dumb) musings.

Fallout London

Computer Games, Personal No Responses »

Dec 212024

For years now, one of my favorite pastimes when I needed some downtime was to play one of the Fallout games. I still cannot decide if I like Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas more. Fallout 4 would be less likable, except that it has settlement building which gives the game a whole new dimension. I know, I know, building settlements is not every gamer’s cup of tea, but I enjoy it.

But then, there are the extensions. And no, I do not mean the “official” DLCs (downloadable contents) that are provided by the game publisher, but rather, the “mods” that are offered by third parties, individuals and groups of enthusiasts alike. Mods can improve a game, fix bugs, add to the experience, but in the case of the Fallout games, they reached a whole new level: Some mods rival the DLCs, or perhaps even surpass them.

Take Fallout New California. Years in the making, this mod rivals in size the very game itself, Fallout New Vegas, that it extends. Set years before the events of New Vegas, it puts the player in the shoes of a young protagonist who grew up in a Vault, only to find himself out there in the western wastelands of the New California Republic, amidst rival factions and a deadly search for some disastrous pre-war technology. The mod is just amazing: a main quest that retains some of the trademark moral ambiguity that always characterized Fallout, numerous side quests, a richly textured world, a memorable radio station from Sandy Hills, unique companions… What a game! And it seamlessly transitions into New Vegas, providing a robust back story for the player’s later identity as a Courier, and offering some perks and companions that the player can retain.

For a while, I thought New California was it, the new gold standard when it comes to fan-made mods. But then, there were rumors of yet another mod on its way: A mod of Fallout 4, that would be set overseas, in the great city of London, England.

*** WARNING: Some spoilers follow ***

I have now completed Fallout London, and the impression I came away with is that despite its rough edges, despite the fact that it still has numerous small but annoying bugs and suffers from frequent crashes, it nonetheless surpasses even New California in its breadth, depth, originality. And details and nuances! A Big Ben that chimes at 6 AM (yes, six times). A bona fide TARDIS (that, sadly, vanishes the moment you acquire the loot that it offers). A crosswalk at Abbey Road with four permanent shadows, with a pair of round glasses found in the first of the four. A “British Broadcasting Ministry” radio station that is really as pretentiously British as it can be, is just one of three unique in-game radio stations. Not to mention a post-apocalyptic British society with its snobbish Gentry, cannibalistic Beefeaters, mutant Thamesfolk and numerous other factions, in particular those Tommy conscripts who resemble in so many ways the grunts of the NCR military in New Vegas.

Yes, the elephant is in FOLON, too.

Then there’s the voice acting. It is superb, probably the best in all the Fallout universe. And the side quests? That Lovecraftian side journey that you get into after collecting those Cutethulhu dolls feels like a full-blown DLC on its own right, and a very unique and quirky one at that. Oh, and did I mention that you get a canine companion… no, not the lovable Dogmeat but an equally faithful four-legged friend, Churchill the English bulldog? (The human companions are also amazing, with rich, touching backstories.)

But then, I only have one real complaint. Namely that, after having explored all three endings of the main quest line, I concluded, like the computer WOPR in the movie War Games, that the only winning move is not to play. That is, leave the main quest unfinished. Just explore, find every location, turn on all mariner beacons, find all unusual call boxes, read all the writings Sid has to offer… but leave the main quest alone.

Why? Because no matter which side you pick, they destroy London. The London in which you wake up is far from pefect, but it is a functioning city and Westminster is in decent shape. Sure, the city could use more vertical mobility and the Gentry could be a little bit less snobbish and more accommodating, but that’s not what you get with any of the chosen outcomes. Should you side with Smythe, you end up with a city that’s intact but soulless, governed by clones and subject to unethical science experiments. The Fifth Column turn it into a kind of a fascist nightmare. Arthur’s Camelot may have more pleasant intentions, but the end result is nearly the same: Westminster is mostly destroyed, the city is in ruins, and there’s no reason to believe that anyone’s life improved as a result.

So this, then, was my favored outcome: after doing my part, helping Smythe set off an explosion at the tournament in Westminster, after freeing Reggie the crab (against Smythe’s wishes), I just let the phone continue ringing outside the London Aquarium, I avoided visiting the Fifth Column and making friends with Eve at Cable Street, and I also avoided getting better acquainted with Arthur. I now mind my own business, discovering the few remaining locations that I have not yet visited (yes, you can actually get to Blight Crater even without completing the Scylla quest—which I was never offered, due to a bug I believe—if you have the right stats and equipment, and know how to cross the radioactive waters minimizing damage), still finding amazing little details and oddities here and there, like at the Greenwich Observatory that I just finished exploring. And of course I return to my few settlements from time to time, continuing to improve them despite the somewhat broken settlement mechanics in this amazing, astonishing mod.

Or just go back to Westminster, take a taxi ride or board the city’s one remaining functional Underground line. Just for fun. There is something special about being able to ride a subway, some 160 years after global nuclear Armageddon, in one of the most iconic cities of the world, Ol’ Blighty, while listening to a worthy cover of the iconic We’ll Meet Again…

Mind the gap.

Fallout Day

Computer Games, History 1 Response »

Oct 232024

Today is October 23.

In my native Hungary, they’re celebrating the 68th anniversary of the failed 1956 anti-Soviet revolution, which began on this day.

Elsewhere in the world, this is Fallout Day. In the universe of the Fallout game franchise, the Great War that ended civilization began (and also concluded) on October 23, 2077.

I asked DALL-E and Midjourney both to produce an image. Midjourney created several images and I loved most of them but in the end, I am opting in favor of this DALL-E image after all. Its serenity captures the atmosphere of the game better: we are, after all, centuries after the catastrophe, in a mostly quiet, abandoned Wasteland.

Also, while the famous Power Armor may be an iconic in-game accessory, a wanderer wearing little more than a thin Vault jumpsuit better captures the vulnerability a player feels, especially when entering the Wasteland for the first time.

I hope sights like this remain firmly in the realm of computer game fiction. Well, as much as possible… some of the sights that we’ve seen from Ukraine in the past two and a half years unfortunately come close.

Old school technical support

Computers, Internet, Personal 3 Responses »

Oct 202024

I was messing with a backup server, which failed to work properly after an update. I just finished what I was doing when a call came from a strange phone number. The chap introduced himself as calling on behalf of Bell Canada, and I almost hung up (way too many phony calls!) but I am glad I didn’t: this time, the call was legit, and it concerned my Bell ADSL network connection, a service that is a bit old, a bit slow, but ultra-reliable, which is, well, the reason why I am relying on it!

He was wondering why my connection is down. I was surprised: granted, I have a higher-speed (but a tad less reliable) backup connection through Rogers so I would not lose connectivity, but still, my monitoring scripts would have warned me if there was trouble with the Bell line. But then I checked: and indeed, a few minutes prior, the Bell ADSL connection was down for a duration of about two minutes.

And they called! As it turned out, they were not sure if the connection was back up, because they were trying to ping an IP address that was not responding. We quickly sorted that out, and the chap recorded to correct IP address for the Bell equipment itself, to make sure that they know which box they ping. But we were both wondering exactly what triggered the problem in the first place.

Now I know. The backup server I was messing with at one point came up with the wrong IP addresses, conflicting with my primary server. Having two boxes with the same IP address likely confused the Bell ADSL router, which then reset itself. This is probably what they saw on their end.

But the fact that they noticed it before I did? That I received a call from a competent professional within minutes, alerting me to the problem and eager to solve it?

That’s almost unheard of, these days. My opinion of Bell Canada just went up several, several notches. This is true old school customer care. What can I say? Bravo. That VPC (virtual private circuit) ADSL line is not the cheapest, but it’s well worth the price with this level of service.

Addendum: The problem was resolved a day later. I believe it was caused by a Bell Canada residential technician, who disconnected our canceled landline service two days prior, and accidentally/carelessly hooked up some wires to the terminals that belonged to the ADSL line. So maybe my opinion of that technician is not that great. However, the business service technicians were great. Not only did they notice the problem before I did, they proactively called, addressed the problem, sent a technician… and when the technician actually called, he called only to tell me that he’d not even come to my premises, because he already identified and solved the problem, and has been monitoring the line for the preceding 30 minutes, confirming its stability.

Overleaf

Computers, Internet, Personal, Science No Responses »

Sep 262024

Overleaf (sharelatex) is an amazing project, an open-source Web-based editor for LaTeX projects. The software can be used for free or on a subscription basis at overleaf.com, but the open source version is available as a “community edition”.

Not for the faint-hearted, mind you, as installation is not trivial. The easiest way is by means of a docker container, setup for which is provided by the Overleaf project.

In the last few days, I managed to do just that, installing Overleaf on my main Linux server. I even managed to configure Overleaf to properly compile Feynman diagrams automatically, as this screenshot from my practice “scratchpad” file demonstrates.

I like this project very much. In fact I am very impressed by its sophistication. I first opened an Overleaf account more than six years ago, when I invited someone to collaborate. I used Overleaf a few times over the years but, I admit, I forgot that it even exists until recently, when someone invited me to collaborate and I found, much to my surprise, that I already had a valid Overleaf account.

But this time around I went far beyond just using it. I decided to set up my own installation, for several reasons, including privacy, confidentiality, limitations and last but not least, avoiding reliance of a service provider who may or may not be still in business tomorrow or next year.

And now, I find myself ready to ditch the old software that I’ve been using for nearly 20 years, and switch to Overleaf altogether for my new LaTeX projects. It’s that good, really. I hope I will not come to regret my decision.

Dheghōm

Books, Cybernetics, Internet, MUD, Personal No Responses »

Sep 252024

Look what the mailman just brought. Or rather, the Amazon delivery person:

It’s the third volume of Richard Bartle‘s amazing Dheghōm trilogy.

I am proud to call Richard a friend (I hope he does not object) as I’ve known him online for more than 30 years and we also met in person a couple of times. He is a delightful, very knowledgeable fellow, a true British scholar, one of the foremost authorities on virtual worlds, the world of online gaming. He is, of course, along with Roy Trubshaw, credited as one of the authors of MUD, the Multi-User Dungeon, the world’s first multi-user adventure game, which I proudly ported to C++ 25 years ago, running it ever since on my server for those few players who still care to enjoy a text-only virtual world.

When he is not teaching, Richard also writes books. Delightful stories. Among them this Dheghōm trilogy.

Dheghōm is the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European name for the Earth goddess or mother Earth. In Richard’s story, told in the form of recovered fragments from documents, blog entries, and other notes, we gradually find out more about the nature of our (real? virtual?) reality and its connection with the roots of a great many of our languages.

Someone used the word “unputdownable” in their Amazon review of the first volume and I quite agree. I know that for Richard, these books were labors of love, but I honestly think they deserve to be published by a major publisher. Until then, all I can hope for is that many people will do as I did and buy a copy. Being a bit old-fashioned when it comes to books, I actually bought the paperbacks, even though I already read the third volume in electronic form when Richard first made the draft manuscript available online.

Thank you, Richard, for such a read, a trilogy that has the best qualities of good science-fiction: entertaining, memorable, thought-provoking and, ultimately, also a bit of a cautionary tale.

AI art

Art, Cybernetics 1 Response »

Sep 162024

Inspired by something my wife told me, I asked Midjourney to show us what characters from famous paintings would appear like “after hours”, when they are allowed to leave the museum and go for a stroll. Specifically, my prompt read: “An image showing the Girl with a Pearl Earring from the painting by Vermeer and the Mona Lisa, after hours, walking down a modern street, chatting and eating ice cream”.

Here is one of the better results.

Am I wrong to be impressed?

Language models and AI

Cybernetics No Responses »

Aug 072024

It’s been nearly two years since the world has become feverish about GPT and its cousines, large language models that for many represented their first real interaction with machine intelligence.

Yet misconceptions abound. Expectations against these language models are often unrealistic, which then result in damning evaluations, still often characterizing the LLMs as mere “stochastic parrots”.

In reality, they are neither just random text generators, nor true intelligences with reasoning capability. They are language models.

I keep thinking that our future would be in safer hands if we let AI-assisted cats take over the reins.

What does that mean? They model, by learning through terabytes of examples, relationships between words and phrases, sections of text. Associations, in other words. They know that apples are red, not liquid; that the sky is blue, not serrated. Which is to say, they model language but language itself models reality.

The sheer size of these models, combined with the tremendous amount of material used to train them, leads to superhuman capabilities. The models are fluent in many languages. They understand intent. They can help uncover gaps in your knowledge, something that happened to me on numerous occasions. They can translate solutions into workable computer code. They know tricks of the trade that even experienced programmers may not be aware of. They can teach you, as indeed the models have taught me a thing or two about specific details of modern machine learning architectures. They can even offer some insight into their own capabilities and limitations.

Throughout it all, however, they rely primarily on their associative capabilities. They are not reasoning machines. Reasoning for these models is as hard as it is for you and me to multiply large numbers in our heads, without the benefit of pencil and paper or a calculator.

And ultimately, they are still just language models. Imagine if the speech center of your brain was somehow excised, made to operate on its own, without being able to rely on other parts of your brain hardware. No sensory inputs anymore. No ability to visualize things, to recall sounds, to imagine anything. No sense of continuity, no internal monologue, no “self”. Just a speech center that, when triggered, responds by generating words, but without the benefit of the instant reality check that would be offered by other parts of your brain acting in supervisory roles.

That’s what GPT and Claude really are.

So to expect them to excel at, say, solving nontrivial logic puzzles is like expecting a suspension bridge to work well as an airplane. Wrong tool for the wrong job.

I can certainly imagine LLMs (and preferably, continuously trained as opposed to pretrained LLMs) in the future, working as part of a larger network of specialized machine learning components, forming a complex “artificial brain”. But LLMs are not that, not yet. They are just one part of the puzzle, though arguably, they might very well represent the most important part.

It is, after all, through language that we learn the ability to not just react to the world around us but to comprehend it.

Grumbling Monday

Canada, Cybernetics, Physics, Politics 2 Responses »

Aug 052024

It’s a civic holiday Monday that feels like a Saturday, reminding me of an old Soviet-era science-fiction novel, Monday begins on Saturday, by the Strugatsky brothers. It’s also a rather gloomy Monday morning, so it’s time for me to grumble about a few things.

For instance, how politics infuses everything these days. I signed up to follow a Facebook group dedicated to brutalist architecture, which for some inexplicable reason, I like. The comments section in one of the first posts I saw rapidly deteriorated into political bickering, as to whether or not it was appropriate to repurpose one of the Nazi-era indestructible flak towers in Hamburg as a luxury hotel. Because you know, politics is everything.

Speaking of which, I saw another post elsewhere about employees of a large US company who, after being told how successful the company was last year, were informed in the same breath that the company will cut their pension plan contributions. Needless to say, there followed comments about the evils of capitalism. Having experienced both capitalism and one of its alternatives, a socialist economy with central planning, all I can say is that capitalism works most of the time until it doesn’t; but when it doesn’t, victims are ever so eager to replace it with something that never works instead.

Then there was this post at an online news site claiming that it is practically impossible to run an ethical AI company. Well, what can I say? If you are telling me that allowing machine learning algorithms to learn from accumulated human knowledge is unethical, then sure, you are absolutely right. Then again, I suspect that what mainly drives such complaints is blatant ignorance of how machine learning works in the first place.

OK, well, never mind that, there’s good news. A fusion energy breakthrough: Neutron impact on tokamak components uncovered. Er… Say again? You are telling me that after 70+ years of research, we are beginning to understand why, or how, a heavy neutron flux rapidly destroys test equipment in the lab? Isn’t that like, say, greeting it as a “steam turbine breakthrough” when a prehistoric tribe manages to draw a spark from slamming together two rocks?

Oh well. On mornings like this, I feel I am beginning to comprehend the mood of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut who once told the CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti to go jump in a lake.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

Canada, Computer Games, Local Ottawa, Politics 2 Responses »

Aug 012024

I mentioned this before: A Mind Forever Voyaging, a computer game from the 1980s, one of the text adventures of the legendary Infocom, a game in which you play an AI protagonist, sent to simulations of the future to explore the factors behind the decay and collapse of society.

As you venture further and further into the future, things get worse. Inequality, homelessness, violence.

I was again reminded of this game this morning when I saw the news: New mortgage rules are in effect, allowing borrowers less down payment and longer terms. As a result, the monthly mortgate payment for a $500,000 home is “only” around $2,700, give or take.

Has it occurred to anyone that perhaps the problem is not on the borrowing side but on the supply side? That if we lack affordable housing, making it easier for people to borrow money that they cannot afford to repay is not really a solution?

The same newscast again mentioned an increasingly frequent problem, “renoviction”, when people are evicted from their rent-controlled apartments because the landlord renovates, only to learn that they can no longer find a place of residence that they can afford.

Also on the news: yet another old business (opened 1954) is shutting down at the ByWard Market. In their case, it’s the changing nature of the business post-COVID but for many others, it’s the deteriorating public safety. Increased police presence only pushes the problem elsewhere, like Centretown. I had to drive across town today to our car dealership, for an oil change. I saw panhandlers at every major intersection. Not too long ago, such sights were rare, dare I say even nonexistent here in Ottawa. Now, downtown sidewalks are full of homeless folks.

I have said it before when I lamented about AMFV here in my blog: It’s a piece of (interactive) fiction. Please do not mistake it for an instruction manual. Let’s come back from the brink before it is too late. Unless it is too late already…

Why Russia was less affected by CrowdStrike

Computer Security, Politics 1 Response »

Jul 252024

I heard a rumor: Russia was significantly less affected by the CrowdStrike cyberoutage. Could it be that they were behind it?

Of course not. Never attribute to evil that which you can explain by stupidity. But in this case, backwardness was also on Russia’s side. You might have seen memes about Southwest Airlines, largely unaffected on account of the fact that many of their systems still run on Windows 3.1. Well, it Russia it’s… like that, even more so. As an example, here’s a CrowdStrike-affected display panel from a few days ago at JFK airport in New York City:

In contrast, here’s a departures board from a small Russian airport:

Kind of hard to hack, that one.

CrowdStrike

Computer Security No Responses »

Jul 192024

So everyone is talking about the major IT outage today (which actually turned out to be two unrelated outages, the second due to a since-remedied issue with Microsoft Azure platform), namely the fact that millions of physical computers and virtual machines around the world are crashing due to a driver failure in what is known as CrowdStrike Falcon.

I admit I have not heard of CrowdStrike Falcon before. I had to look it up. So I went to the most authoritative source: the company’s Web site.

“Cybersecurity’s AI-native platform for the XDR era,” it tells me, and “We stop breaches”. XDR is supposedly “extended detection and response”. Wikipedia tells me that “the system works by collecting and correlating data across various network points such as servers, email, cloud workloads, and endpoints”. Microsoft tells me that XDR “is a holistic security solution that utilizes automation and AI to reduce response time across multiple workloads”.

Going back to CrowdStrike, I learn that it yields $6 of return for every $1 invested. (How?) That it identifies 96% more potential threats. (More than what? More dentists use…) It tells me that it is leads to 2x as effective security teams with 66% faster investigations… compared to what?

Okay, scrolling down… it’s “cloud-native”, “single-platform” and an “open and extensible ecosystem”. It is “data-centric” and “AI-native” with “workflow automation”.

So far there is one thing I have not yet learned: What the bleepety-bleep does it do?

Of course I can guess. I know what security solutions are supposed to do, and I have no doubt that CrowdStrike delivers… more or less, probably not any better than its major competitors. But they certainly have good marketing, with all the right buzzwords!

Unfortunately, behind these buzzwords there is a flawed mentality. The implication that all it takes is a fancy software solution to protect your enterprise. Never mind that a good chunk of the threats (I was going to say, “vast majority”, but I have no data to back that up) are not in the form of malware. If I communicate with a senior manager at a bank and convince them to initiate an important transfer that later turns out to be fraudulent, no cybersecurity is going to prevent that.

And as today’s example shows, protection from malware and other technological threats is just one element of a successful cybersecurity policy. A comprehensive policy must be based not just on prevention but also the recognition that sometimes, despite your best efforts, excrement can hit the ventilator. How do you detect it? What do you do?

That leaves us to these main points that must be on everyone’s cybersecurity checklist, whether you are a small company or a major international enterprise. Here, in no particular order, and I am sure I left some things out:

Threat prevention (technological prevention, such as antivirus software, network firewalls, real-time monitoring)
Data collection (comprehensive logs that may be used for threat detection, forensic analysis, mitigation)
Compartmentalization (user privileges, user access management, network architectures)
User relationships (user education, use management — treating users as partners not as threats)
Backup and recovery procedures and policies, tested (!) and validated
Intrusion detection
Intrusion response (emergency operations, fallback operations including manual operations if needed, notification policy)
Mitigation, self and third-party impact
Recovery
Forensic analysis and prevention
Auditing and risk analysis (including third party dependence)

I mean, come on, CrowdStrike’s graphic is eye-catching but I swear I drew much more informative diagrams well over a decade ago when educating customers about the need for comprehensive security. Like these, for instance.

Sure, comprehensive cybersecurity technology can help with some of these points. But not all. For instance, no cybersecurity solution will help you if broad dependence on a third-party component in your enterprise suddenly causes a widespread outage. That dependence can be anywhere, could be a simple messaging app or a complex cybersecurity suite. If it causes systems to crash, and you have no proven, tested policies and practices to detect, mitigate, and recover from an event like that, you’re in deep doo-doo.

Oh wait. That’s exactly what happened to far too many companies today.

System upgrades

Computer Security, Computers, Personal No Responses »

Jun 212024

This consumed far too much of my time.

I had to update my server systems, both “on-premises” (meaning my home office) and “in the cloud” (my small cloud VM hosted by Amazon). They’ve been running CentOS 7 since 2016, and CentOS 7 reached its end-of-life. Back then, I of course anticipated that by this time, I’d have long ago upgraded my systems to CentOS 8. But that was before Red Hat decided to play hardball with all of us, turning CentOS from a robust open version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux into a bleeding edge, more or less experimental/test version.

So I had to switch. And it wasn’t easy.

I eventually opted for Oracle Linux (itself an RHEL derivative), after seriously considering both AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. It seemed like the best compromise. I wanted an RHEL-compatible distribution to minimize the pain of the upgrade, and I wanted to pick the distribution that was the most likely to have robust long term support. Considering how Red Hat continues to play hardball with others, Oracle seemed the safest choice: They have the requisite in-house resources to “go it alone” if needed, and their cloud infrastructure alone appears to guarantee a long-term commitment. We shall see if I chose wisely.

And yes, it’s OL8 for now, though this time around, I plan an upgrade long before this product line reaches EOL. But first, stability.

I think everything works on my servers, and things are settling down nicely. But some other machines that I am responsible for still need some gentle care and feeding. It was an educational experience. I dare not share my detailed notes here as they contain information that probably should not be publicly disclosed about details of my configuration, but I have dozens of pages of notes detailing the quirks that I encountered.

All is well that ends well. But why do I have the feeling that this forced upgrade represents many days of my life that were lost for no good reason, days that I’ll never get back? Oh well.

Busy day(s)

Computers, History, Personal, Space No Responses »

Jun 072024

I had a very busy day today. Or make that yesterday, since it’s almost 3 AM already.

I wanted write something about D-day. Eighty years. It’s been eighty years since Americans, Canadians, Britons and others of the Greatest Generation landed on the beaches of Normandy, opening a much-awaited second front in the global struggle against fascist totalitarianism.

The result: An imperfect, yet enduring world order, Pax Americana, which brought historically unprecedented peace, prosperity, and security to the majority of humans living on this planet.

Perfect it was not. Totalitarianism never vanished. Even after Stalin’s death, the USSR and its empire prevailed for another 36 years. Some of the worst excesses of communism were yet to come. And there were wars, big wars: I thought I’d list a few but there were too many. Even so, this was a period of global peace, a rules-based system that endured, beyond expectations I should say: When I was growing up, no sane adult existed anywhere I think who expected the world to survive beyond the year 2000 without a major nuclear war, yet here we are in 2024, and there are still no nuclear wastelands.

But eventually, all good things come to an end. This world order is crumbling. Will we survive without a civilizational catastrophe? I don’t know. I worry. Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan… who knows what else. The retreat of democracy and the rise authoritarianism. The storm is brewing.

Anyhow, enough about D-day. There were some good news. Boeing’s Starliner, though limping a little, made it to the International Space Station. Those astronauts were brave souls. Considering recent news from Boeing, their newfangled attitude towards quality control and safety, I expected, feared rather, a disaster. I am relieved that it has not happened, but NASA should still dump that overpriced, unsafe contraption.

Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX had a major success: Starship completed a full test, involving successful launch and “landing” (onto the ocean for now) of both its first stage and Starship itself. The re-entry was not without challenges, but they made it. This is a big milestone, a very big one. The promise of Starship is basically the holy grail of space travel: Fully reusable, rapidly refurnished vehicles. The fiery reentry was perhaps a bit more dramatic than planned, but the spacecraft made it, and that means that they can learn from the issues and improve both the vehicle and its landing procedure.

And I was only marginally paying attention because I am still struggling with forced upgrades: CentOS 7, the Linux version that I’ve been using since 2016, is coming up EOL (end-of-life) which means I must upgrade. But I cannot upgrade to CentOS because Red Hat turned CentOS into a bleeding edge version of Linux with a short support cycle. Joy. Anyhow, today I managed to complete another milestone of my transition plan, so I may still be able to get everything done in time.

Would you kindly…

Computer Games, Cybernetics No Responses »

May 272024

One of the catch phrases of the famous computer game, Bioshock, is “would you kindly”. It’s only near the end of the game that we learn that the protagonist is compelled to respond to this phrase and act accordingly. Presumably, omitting this phase would have had unpleasant consequences for the game’s antagonists.

I was reminded of this as I was playing with the “behind-the-scenes” setup instructions that I have for the language models GPT and Claude at my site wispl.com. The models are instructed on how to use tools, specifically Google (for searches) and Maxima (for computer algebra). I was perplexed as to why both models tended to overuse Google even when the conversation began with a question or request that should have required no searches at all.

The relevant part of the instructions sent to the chatbot at the beginning of a conversation used to read as follows:

“If your answer requires the most recent information or current events, respond solely with CSEARCH(query) with no additional text. For general queries or fact-checking that is not time-sensitive, respond solely with GSEARCH(query) and no additional text.“

In a moment of inspiration, however, I changed this to:

“If your answer requires the most recent information or current events, respond solely with CSEARCH(query) with no additional text. If your answer requires general queries or fact-checking that is not time-sensitive, respond solely with GSEARCH(query) and no additional text.“

Can you spot the tiny difference? All I did was to repeat the “If your answer requires” bit.

Problem (apparently) solved. The chatbot no longer appears to do Google queries when it doesn’t really need them. I just needed to make sure that the magic phrase explicitly accompanies each request. Much like “Would you kindly”, in the world of Bioshock.

N-body code with Claude

Astronomy, Cybernetics, Physics No Responses »

Apr 232024

Despite working with them extensively for the past 18 months or so, our “little robot” friends continue to blow me away with their capabilities.

Take this: the other day I asked Claude opus 3 to create an N-body simulation example from scratch, in HTML + JavaScript, complete with the ability to record videos.

Here’s the result, after some very minor tweaks of the code produced by Claude, code that pretty much worked “out of the box”.

The code is simple, reasonably clean and elegant, and it works. As to what I think of our little robot friends’ ability to take a brief, casual description of such an application and produce working code on demand… What can I say? There’s an expression that I’ve been overusing lately, but it still feels the most appropriate reaction: Welcome to the future.

Quantum computing vs. the Commodore-64

Computers, Physics No Responses »

Apr 202024

So here is the thing. When you announce to the world your latest breakthrough in quantum computing, you might want to make sure first that the results cannot be replicated using hardware that is nearly half a century old, from the heyday of 8-bit personal computers.

Granted, the paper announcing this result was presented at a joke conference, but the paper itself is no joke: It’s actually quite well-written and the results appear credible.

I admit I loved this result because not only does it provide an example supporting my skepticism of sensationalist quantum computing claims, it also involves the computer that played a significant role in my early career, and which also happens to be the first computer that I proudly owned.

Of course the real point is that sensationalist coverage aside, apart from highly specialized, niche applications in which quantum computers basically play the role of specialized analog computers, the “quantum revolution” will not happen without scalable quantum computing, and scalable quantum computing will not happen without beating the threshold theorem. I am one of the skeptics: I strongly suspect that the threshold theorem will be shown to be a “no go” theorem. It is, of course, entirely possible that I am wrong about this, but in my mind, quantum computing is in the same league as fusion power: a technology that forever remains “just around the corner”.

Everybody wants to save the world, they just disagree on how

Computer Games, Television No Responses »

Apr 172024

I just finished watching the first (but hopefully not the only) season of the new Amazon Prime series, Fallout.

There have been three modern game franchises that I became quite fond of over the years, all of the post-apocalyptic genre: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Metro, and Fallout. Metro has incredible storytelling: For instance, meeting the last surviving theater critic or the shadow artist at the half-flooded Bolshoi station of the Moscow Metro are moments I’ll never forget. And the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series has its own incredible moments, foremost among them when I finished the main storyline of the third installment, Call of Pripyat, by accident in the middle of the night, in-game time, and found myself alone, in the dead silence, near the center of a deserted, pitch dark Pripyat, with my comrades gone. The relief I felt when I retreated to the Laundromat and found that it was now full of lively stalkers like myself, eating, listening to music, sleeping… A reaffirmation of life in that dead city.

And then Fallout… Fallout is in a league of its own. I admit I only played the 3D open world installments of the franchise, starting with Fallout 3. A game that begins with The Ink Spots singing how they don’t want to put the world on fire… with the burned-out, post-nuclear ruins of the DC Mall serving as background scenery. A game in which, after “growing up” inside an underground Vault, you experience true daylight for the very first time, with eyes that never saw anything other than artificial lighting.

So it is this Fallout universe that was turned into a television series on Amazon Prime, and what a series it is. It captures the vibe of the game franchise perfectly, but it also stands on its own as a darn good television series.

The first five minutes of the first episode already contain an instant classic: The line uttered by a little girl as she, horrified, is looking at the growing mushroom cloud enveloping Los Angeles, trying to measure it by holding out her thumb, as taught by her dad. “Is it your thumb or mine?” she asks innocently.

But the real motto of the series is a statement made by one of the main protagonists, Maximus, in episode five. “Everybody wants to save the world,” Maximus observes, “they just disagree on how.”

Doesn’t that perfectly capture our present-day world of 2024, too, as we are slowly, but inevitably, stumbling towards a new “chaotic era” (to borrow an expression from another recent television adaptation, the 3 Body Problem)? I can only hope that we don’t all end up like Shady Sands, the one-time capital city of the New California Republic, pictured above. Because, as all Fallout players know, war… war never changes.

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