#even with the machine tl its so evident that the writing is just that good

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

September 13, 2020

My weekly roundup of things I am working on. Topics include wildfires, exotic energy sources, speculative energy sources, the Biden housing plan, and creative outlets.

Wildfires in Oregon

Oregon, along with the rest of the West Coast, has been in the news for devastating wildfires that are still ongoing. This is certainly the worst I have experienced, much worse that the 2017 fires in California. Both Oregon and California are having their worst seasons on record.

In Oregon, it started last Monday, when a strong (and unseasonably early) east wind came over an already dry state, drying the air further and spreading fires rapidly. The Portland metro area experienced sporadic bad air quality on Monday and Tuesday, and it has been consistently bad since Wednesday. Today is no noticeable improvement. The weather forecast is for clouds on Monday and some rain on Tuesday, which should finally bring about some improvement.

So far there have been dozens of deaths in the West and several dozen more people unaccounted for and significant property damage. My guess is that most of the damage will be harder to see: the impact of the poor air quality on people who are already vulnerable. These events bring about yet more disruption in a region that has already been reeling from the pandemic, economic hardship, and civil unrest.

I made a facetious remark on Twitter about solar radiation management, but I really have been struck at how much the weather has cooled down. The temperature is at least 20 degrees (F) cooler than it should have been, due to soot particles reflecting sunlight. In my neighborhood, the light-sensitive streetlights are on during the day. I can look directly at the Sun without hurting my eyes. Needless to say, I will need to be convinced that any solar radiation management scheme will not significantly harm air quality before I will believe it’s a good idea.

If anyone is actually reading this, I would implore you not to use the fires merely as a talking point for your pet climate policy. This is something that irritates me greatly. In the immediate term, we need relief and a stronger firefighting force. In the medium term, we need better forest management practices. Greenhouse gas mitigation helps only marginally in the long term. Don’t try to tell me that building a bike lane in New York City is the solution we in the West are looking for. Once the fires are extinguished, most climate activists will lose interest in our land use needs and move on to the next disaster.

Exotic Energy Sources

This week I added an Exotic Energy section to Urban Cruise Ship. I had been considering this for a long time, and I went ahead and did it mainly because I have been stuck on some harder projects and wanted to do something relatively easy. There are no graphics planned, as I don’t see the topic as important enough to justify assigning more work to our graphics guy, but there are a few interesting things.

One recurring scheme is various ways to capture piezoelectricity, which is generated through pressure on a surface, such as when people walk over a plate or cars drive over it. One study in Australia found that with more advanced generators, an educational building at Macquarie University might recover 0.5% of its electricity usage by installing generators at high traffic points. With technology that was current at the time of the study, it’s probably more like 0.06%.

As for roadways, I cited several studies that report levelized costs of electricity in the range of multiple dollars per kilowatt-hour (wholesale prices tend to be in the range of 3-6 cents/kWh and retail on the order of 10 cents). The exception was a California study that reported 8-20 cents/kWh, which as far as I can tell is just an uncritical repetition of claims from the vendor. Also not discussed is the fact the source of energy is kinetic energy from cars, so unless the car is braking, the generators are stealing energy from motorists. We might as well be using diesel generators then.

If I were to make a guess, the pilot project is little more than California burning several million dollars on a patently unworkable scheme because of some marketing by a shady vendor. I’m all for trying bold ideas that are not guaranteed to succeed, but one must draw the line at ideas that clearly won’t succeed or where basic feasibility questions haven’t even been asked.

Biomechanical energy harvesting is an idea that got a bit of hype a few years ago, but now few people seem to still be interested. Making some extremely generous assumptions, I estimated that it would have a theoretical of about 1 exajoule per year, or about 0.2% of primary energy supply. More medium-case assumptions would cut that by at least a factor of five. Plus that doesn’t account for extra exertion required by the person or embodied energy in the devices.

There are probably some niche use cases for piezoelectric generators and biomechanical systems, such as low power distributed sensors and personal electronics respectively.

I even commented on the power from rainfall paper earlier in the year, an idea too silly to take seriously.

Speculative Energy Sources

But even with the above we’re not done. I decided to venture into the realm of speculative physics.

In quantum physics, even a system with zero temperature must have some latent energy due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This has been termed the zero point. So naturally that leads people to speculate that zero point energy could be harvested for useful purposes. The near-consensus seems to be that this is impossible, that it must violate thermodynamics somehow, though I found it surprisingly difficult to find a rigorous explanation of why this is the case. This paper from 2019 is all I found, and even then, it only rules out two of three proposed ZPE extraction methods based on thermodynamic principles. Incidentally, the authors hold a patent on the third method and claim there is inconclusive evidence that it works.

Additionally, there is the NASA Eagleworks project to use the quantum vacuum to develop a spacecraft that can operate without onboard propellant.

There is a lot of interesting physics here that I don’t understand. I was expecting to write a short, dismissive comment for the website, but it would seem that ZPE is a legitimate area of scientific research. Maybe this will actually work for energy production someday. But there is no solid evidence yet, and any claims of a currently working ZPE device can be safely rejected.

Some other ideas that pop up, based in speculative physics, including hydrinos, neutrinos, quark fusion, and the ever popular perpetual motion machine. At least neutrinos and quark fusion are legitimate physics, but as far as useful energy production goes, these are all pathological ideas. I’ll add more as I see them. I briefly covered cold fusion a while ago on the Fusion page.

I expect that when the site is finally done, of the many things people could fairly accuse me of, not being comprehensive will not be one of them.

The Biden Housing Plan

Evidently I am a few weeks late, but the Biden-Harris campaign has a housing plan. The tl;dr is that there might be a few good things here, but I’m not too impressed.

When it comes to housing affordability, the principle I’ve tried to reiterate over and over again is that it comes down to supply. If there are 1,000,000 people who want to live in a city with a zoned capacity for 800,000, then 200,000 people will not be able to live there. It doesn’t matter if you impose rent control, eviction moratoria, inclusionary zoning rules, offer Section 8 or other subsidies, or whatever. As long as the supply is fixed, all these do is change the rationing mechanism from price to something else. Which, it must be acknowledged, is often the intent.

Traditionally, the federal government has a limited role in zoning. That could change of course; the federal government today has major roles in many areas where it previously had a limited or no role. As it is now, I see two plausible hooks for federal involvement in the near term. The first is the Fair Housing Act, where it can be argued fairly convincingly that zoning rules have disparate impact on protected groups, and in some cases intentional impact; and the second is to tie zoning reform to federal Community Development Block Grants or transportation funding, where reform is a matter of insuring that federal spending is actually used effectively.

The Biden plan calls for reinstatement of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which while imperfect, I think is better than what the Trump Administration decided to go with, which is nothing. As for the second, I momentarily got my hopes up when I saw that they were promoting legislation to do just that. But upon reading the details of the HOME Act (which was introduced last year but I was unfamiliar with until now), I see that the list of measures the bill calls for to promote “inclusive land use” are wide-ranging, and only some of them can reasonably be expected to increase the housing supply. It could be a good piece of legislation, but much rides on the implementation. Zoning reform advocates at the state level routinely underestimate the creativity that municipalities will show in evading the intent of their laws.

Anyway, there is a lot of other stuff here on racial discrimination, energy efficiency, and the Davis-Bacon Act (which probably makes housing less affordable by running up construction costs), but I won’t belabor the issues. All in all, it’s a plan that reflects the set Democratic interests pretty well, has a lot of stuff in it, and would do little to achieve broad-based housing affordability.

Creative Outlets

Like many people, I have been continuing to struggle with a variety of stressful circumstances. I took more time than usual this week on some creative projects, which has helped.

The newest one I am calling Project Epsilon, which for now is a maze generator. I’ve long had a fascination with generative content, and I would like to see how far the concept can be taken, but for now it is really just for fun. It is not deployed, but someone knowledgeable with Python and Flask in particular can download and run it fairly easily. Not that there is much to see yet. All it does it let the user input a few parameters and make a maze.

The other is Repair the Cosmos, which is deployed but hasn’t been updated publicly in a long time, despite considerable local activity. This is an incremental game that is meant to tell the story of humanity from the Paleolithic to the far future. I started it in January and have been working very intermittently since then, but I finally have a burst of creativity going for the first time in months. I still expect at least a few weeks before the next update, and I can only go for so long before I start feeling guilty about not doing real work.

[nicolekidmanwigfactory]

my current depressive episode was caused by “Lady Bird”  TL;DR the end

this is just a rant. i didn’t edit it except to correct errors as I went. Either read it or don’t. the run up to finals are stressing me out and bringing out my insecurities so i need to vent. don’t reblog. Beware it goes all over the place. 

Other than the fact i’m now depressed, i really did like lady bird (laurie metcalf is my current pick for supporting actress, but it’s still early to be definitive)

tl;dr at the end.

i saw lady bird over the weekend and the experience of going to a single sex catholic high school has me dwelling on everything i chose to miss out on bc i was fat, bc i felt i didn’t deserve to be happy bc fat people don’t deserve happiness (or at least if they;re me). she was doing all of that teenager bs and i don’t think there was a single thing in that movie she did that I can say I did in high school.

like, i lost the weight in undergrad. but got cancer and developed and eating disorder in the process. so it’s like i was never intended to be thin. always destined to be fat and unhappy bc fat = unhappy. yes i know that’s not true but it’s still my gut rxn even though i always challenge it

but since lady bird all i can think about is what i missed out on. had i been thin in hs, would i have realized i was gay then? would i have realized i didn’t actually like girls bc maye then i’dve gotten some attention from them. i mean, that was my main evidence for denial in undergrad. i can’t be gay bc “i’m not thin enough for girls to like me yet. i’m only having this attraction to guys out of desperation” or some shit like that. had i been thin in hs, maybe i’d’ve had a support system for the eating disorder and depression- those are in the family history, idk if they’d have gone away if i’d been thin to start with. if i’d been thin in hs maybe i wouldn’t be so jaded about the catholic hs i went to. maybe id still be in the blind about what a hypocritical republican vote machine it is (through no fault of the jesuits themselves). that it’s just a mecca for the wealthy to put their sons in one place, or that its emphasis on catholic social teaching attracted them to the school but then they get angry when theyre busted for telling the few (mostly) lower income hispanic students to go back to mexico (i saw that on the news) or telling the black students they only liked and voted for obama in ‘08 bc he’s black, a “half N-word” meaning a “good” black person (that is seared in my brain) or that white people only voted for Obama bc that was the cool thing to do

but rn, i’ve been dwelling on a lot of the social experiences i missed out on in hs. i wasn’t out of the closet yet, but i wasn’t even doing the “straight” ones. i don’t regret not going to prom and homecoming (never appealed to me) but i didn’t have a group of friends to hang out with on the weekends, or meet anyone from the all girls school through them. being “cousin” schools of sorts seemed to make it possible for everyone to reach those milestones of puberty- first kiss, make out sesh, dry hump, and on... everyone but me it seemed (obviously not though). i was already struggling with being gay and trying to deny it, and seeing how my homophobic classmates treated the one out kid my freshman made me never want to go through that. it just seems that if i’d been thin, i could’ve hetero non-confirmation and figured out i was gay earlier and learned to handle it with confidence. bc there was a gay my senior year i could’ve fallen for if i’d let myself

i’m rambling i know. i didn’t intend to write on and on like this but here i am

but since i saw lady bird the other night the stuff that i’m really dwelling on, in case you can’t tell, is the romance stuff from my hs days, and that’s what i really struggle with in terms of my body image and eating disorder issues. lady bird got herself two really cute guys just like that it seems. and they were both thin of course. the romantic aspirations of the one fat character in the movie was, of course, treated mostly as a joke by giving her a crush way out of her supposed league (I mean, he was also a teacher and clearly wasn’t sending or returning signals).

so i again got to witness others having the adolescence i denied myself bc i decided i didn’t deserve it. because i was fat. because fat people don’t deserve happiness. because fat people don’t deserve love. because fat people don’t deserve anything good. because fat people don’t deserve good things

i know this is 100% false. but i STILL fight these thoughts everyday. they’re not consistent and active, but they’re still in the background, nagging at me and reminding me why i’m worthless and a failure if something goes wrong or something bad out of my control happens. “that parking ticket is bc you’re fat” or “that chair broke bc you’re fat, not bc your knee was in the weak spot.”

so when i saw lady bird having those adolescent experiences, it just reminded of the adolescent experiences that i’m not having now. i didn’t come out until after i graduated from undergrad, so they say at age you live through the teenage growing pains and such of sex and romance in your twenties bc you didn’t have the chance to do it when your were “supposed” to. but i’m not doing it now. i’ve only gone on a total of three dates since i came out and in all of them i was still catfishing with my old photos before regained the weight i lost in undergrad when my bulimia turned into non-compensatory binge eating disorder. the first guy didn’t show. the second guy seemed disappointed by saw it to the end. he never texted me again (but i didn’t either bc i was so ashamed). and the guy i liked most, i confessed what i did and cancelled the date bc i felt so bad. he was disappointed but i think he appreciated the (eventual) honesty. we still chat on snap from time to time. and then there was a really hot guy who knew what i actually looked like and wanted to go out, but he turned out to be an escort

even looking like i do, i know i could go out and find a quick hook up but i guess being the product of 18 years of catholic education has impressed on me the value of commitment in a relationship before sex. i’m not saying you gotta be 100% exclusive or get married, but for me, i need to know the person, even if its just a friend. the idea of a nsa hook up leaves me uneasy and while i fantasize about having a hoe phase, until i at least go through that adolescent phase i saw my classmates go through and then relived when i saw lady bird, it’s not gonna happen.

this all makes sense in my head but i’m not going back to edit or clarify what i’ve written. it defeats the purpose of a rant

tl;dr i saw lady bird and it triggered a weird depressive episode rooted in the  extent to which i denied myself happiness during my teen years bc i was so ashamed of being fat since i thought i didn’t deserve to be happy. seeing lady bird have so many of the experiences i’ve never experienced, even as a gay man in his 20s when late-blooming gays are supposed to go through that phase, makes me feel like i’m wasting my time on earth. i’ve beaten cancer and i’m successfully treating my eating disorder and depression, but have nothing to show for it. and when else except the homestretch of the semester for all of this to occur?

[adamsecedu]

Reflection of Week 7 Lecture

Richard went through a couple of the questions from the mid-term exam and realised that one question didn’t really have an acceptable answer so he gave everyone extra marks.. yay.

Diffie-Hellman

This is a method for key exchange so we can share secret keys. Diffi-Hellman is not encryption, no encryption or decryption is performed. it is simply a method used to exchange secret keys that can be used to encrypt and decrypt messages.

How does it work?

1. It takes 2 parameters p and g. Both p (large number) and g are prime numbers and in the public (i.e. not a secret)

3. Person A chooses a large number X as their private key and person B chooses a large number Y as their private key

4. Person A calculates the below and sends to person B

5. Person B calculates the below and sends to person A

6. Calculate the shared key by person A and person B as below

and

The shared key K can now be used by both person A and person B

7. Person A and person B can now use the shared key to encrypt and decrypt messages they send between themselves

Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability is a flaw or weakness in a system that can leave it open to attack. It includes procedures, bugs in software, poor personal security awareness (e.g. phishing).

Exploit

An exploit takes advantage of a vulnerability.

Software bugs

There are many types of bugs and include the following:

memory corruption (as a user should not be able to change memory in the program...) other: integer overflow (understand how it works) if you know there is a counter the integer can overflow and overwrite from the beginning  

Buffer overflow

What is a stack (first in last out - used when functions are called

What is a heap (when an amount of space is required need more space put in the heap, programmer needs to free it up but most people forget to clean up) 

How functions are called in C (look up how this works, i.e. Stacks, registers, instruction pointers)

Format string, at one point all programs were vulnerable to format strings, e.g. launching rockets etc. once the vulnerability was discovered, big companies generally patched it but many companies did nothing.

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Format_string_attack

Call printf arguments format string, anything in format string that ... Supposed to pass in 2 arguments

          e.g. Printf("%s\n", "hello world")           most people wrote printf("Hello World")           name = "adam"           printf(name);    -- can have special characters in the name variable, the                special characters will be processed           Will look for next argument in the stack,           "%x %x %x %x %x %x"    -- will print out the contents of the stack              "%n"    -- writes to memory (print command will write to memory) - difficult to do though

Exploits

Shell Code  - get your own shell/ console to pop up so you do what you want to do, call built in functions that open shell functions, tell the os to jump into your program (can try all addresses brute force to get it working, may also rely on memory leak to work out where things are in memory) try to get a range of codes that will get os to execute your program

NOP Sled - do nothing instructions scattered through the memory (look for long runs of do nothing looks suspicious can also make things try to simulate doing nothing)

Protection Mechanism

Good vulnerabilities will be put onto a national vulnerability database

Responsible disclosure - vendor would generally ignore it, can escalate to CERT -- need to look at these

OWASP make sure you look into this (top 10 web vulnerability)

https://www.owasp.org/index.php

Identifying Assets

How do we identify what are the assets we want to protect

What are we trying to protect? We need to know otherwise we could protect the wrong things

Car analogy with door bell - what is asset your life or the car

Car window is more valuable than couple of dollars in the car, leave window open so it does not get broken

Aids syringe, should have given robber wallet (value $5) rather than being infected with aids

i.e. Its easy to protect the wrong thing

UNSW computing machines were identified as assets, could be other things such as students, reputation, staff, privacy data

First thing to do (as security engineer) is to find out what are the assets of the organisation. - ask as many people as possible to find this out (look at other companies and see what is being attacked

Periodically revise audit (never think you have it all)

Have a plan, people are good at criticising, show a list and let people pull it apart

Standards are a good start, but they miss a lot of information, need further analysis

Look at what standards are available (infosec)

Read about Privatising Land and property title, what are the risks?

Coke formula is not real asset, the Brand is the asset

Drink pepsi lights up different part of the brain coke lights up different part of the brain

Assets that are difficult to protect still need protecting

Evening Session

Bug Bounties

Bug bounty programs compete to find bugs and notify the company about it

https://bugcrowd.com/tesla

Process of doing bug bounties

Find a suitable program

Review the scope

Find target via recon

Hit target and find vulnerability

Submit report

Training Resources

Hacker 101

EdOverflowFuzzing

Technique used to look for bugs

Keep providing program with input

Different types of fuzzers

Mutation based vs generation based

Aware input structure vs not aware of input structure, e.g.Why is fuzzing effective

Human written tests are precise but not many of them

Fuzzers are not precise and test lots of things

Heartbleed bug

American fuzzy lop

Pen Testing

Lecture

Example of Arun (the computer) trying to work out by messages who it is - this is problem of authentication

Computer must have been pre loaded with shared secrets, how do you know who did this

Diffie Hellman - good at establishing confidentiality

How do we do authentication on internet?

Asymmetric ciphers - publish public key and use to communicate securely (one way authentication)

How do I know I am not communicating a fake public key?

Man in the middle - intercepts official public key and replaces their public key

Cannot recover if it was done in the beginning

How we setup so can avoid man in the middle attack

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

Also know as SSL/TLS

Read Bruce Shneirer's paper

Eg. Passport - tamper evident (plinks photo with name and certified by office)

x509 certificate (links public key with domain, not the company etc, certificate has been signed by signer, need to know public key of signer but this is ok as not many signing organisations

Browsers come preloaded with companies that are certified signers

Padlock should be displayed when certificate has been verified

Look at certificate make sure you know what information can be taken from certificate e.g. fingerprint hash

Solves the man in the middle problem

Problems I can create my own certificate authority (CA) create a domain and create a certificate for the website

E.g. I create Gooogle.com and get a certificate issued for the domain, people then think that is a legitimate site

Certificate Authority does not tie a public key to a person, they just tie it to a domain

Registration Authority ...

Shonky companies become CAs

Browser take money for installing root certificates

Padlock means identified, not safe

Green bar - extended certification

Conflict of interest, you pay money to get a certificate

Extended verification, organisation verification

I can add my certificate into the browser store

[confessionsofalionholic]

The RMA Fiasco & Staff / Userbase: My Two Cents

First, let's get a few things straight.

Disclaimer: This is based on what I remember based on Jackster's and these blog posts, LD threads, screenshots and other stuff. I'm not Jackster or the staff so I can't have a 100% clear view of both perspectives and I haven't covered everything 100%, but I tried to be objective. All my arguments are based on the assumption that Jackster's screenshots, quotes, post claims and facts from their blog are all true ( and I have no reason at the time to doubt them as of now. ) They could be withholding or warping information, but I highly doubt it. My opinion can be subject to change as information changes. Also, I hope my arguments make sense as I'm kinda distracted writing this. If anyone actually cares about this I'd love to debate open-mindedly and courteously and clarify things.

***************************************

Here is the RMA intro excerpt from the news post when it was introduced to the game:

"This awesome 1 GB oasis item is something entirely new! As you pick a slot, a random marking will fill it up with a random opacity. It's of course to be expected the marking will be a common or a custom one, HOWEVER, there is an extremely rare chance to get a Raffle marking, Event marking or Applicator marking, and even rarer chance that a Rosette marking will pop up!

Notes: *Future markings will automatically be affected by this item in proper rarity types *Mane Markings are included *Markings can duplicate, as it's completely random *Mottled Rosette or any future mutation related markings are excluded"

Posted on 2016-06-24 13:53:44 | ( No edits to news post visible )

We can nitpick and throw words and definitions and technicalities around all we want but there's no refuting this evidence. Jackster and Locust chose to invest the money in LD for an item that doesn't guarantee special marks and the news intro and item description, seen every time the item is used ( though the description alone explains well enough ) clearly state what it does and definitely don't claim or imply there is an equal chance for a special or event marking to appear.

Furthermore, here is another definition of random from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

"adj. Mathematics & Statistics

Of or relating to a type of circumstance or event that is described by a probability distribution"

Based on THIS definition, the item truly is random. As Abbey / Kitty confirmed, there are different percentages for the rarity tiers but still, this would be the "probability distribution." Anyways, it's already obvious there isn't an equal chance for the non custom or NCL / Oasis markings, those are "super rare" outcomes. 

As far as I know the description of the RMA hasn't changed; it's always been: 

"You can choose a slot and have a chance at it filling up with any random common or custom marking at random opacity. BUT! There is a super rare chance for a rare type marking such as raffle, event or even a rosette!"

The issue is that a few users claim the percentages should be public in the description as they only purchased the item thinking it was more likely for rare markings to appear. I don't see a need to divulge the exact percentages different marking pool outcomes as that would kind of take the fun out of it, and the item itself explains it adds a random common or custom marking BUT there is a "super rare" chance for rare markings.  

As an example, would exact percentages for random mutations popping up in breeding be publicized, or, say, the chances of certain breeding items of producing each type of mutation tier we would all likely be discouraged. We already know mutations are rare with the less common ones being even rarer as they should be to preserve "specialness", but despite these small chances, people have gotten leopons and lethals and other super rare mutations from both item and natural breedings. GMO cows, for example, often produce common mutes and fails but some have gotten pons and other specials from them.

When I saw the rare marking percentages publicized myself all thoughts of purchasing a couple to try for project / rare mark disappeared, however, even if they implemented RMA only special markings.

 "This Week's Game Poll:

Would you like Random Marking Applicator to have markings that are exclusive entirely to the Applicator itself? 

877:  Yes! Gamble will bring a unique reward!" 

Personally, I think upping the chances of the RMA applying rare / event markings just a liiiitle bit would promote more RMA sales as those who purchase them for projects and customization goals would be willing to spend more if they see results at least more often. Either that or maybe an item extra you could purchase to slightly up the percentage for a certain marking of your choice since the odds are so against you?

It's kinda like egg yolks. Some people purchase them in bulk from the TC with GB purchased from the site, supporting LD. Upon use they sometimes fail and give little to no stats, "wasting" the purchaser's money, but the risk is worth it as sometimes they give up to 15 stats (?) and even if they don't work that well they give a decent amount of stats if you purchase a decent amount which is relatively attainable during the event due to their relatively cheap price and they don't give you 0 stats more than a few times in a row. It depends on your budget, stat goal and how many yolks you get but you're pretty much guaranteed at least some stats from using a couple of yolks so most people are satisfied and purchase more, though some bulk buyers say it is a bit expensive in the long run.

The staff had no responsibility to "refund" this oversight, as the item explains itself clearly in its description in my opinion, a description visible every time you use it, mobile or not. I've defended it further above.

What's more of an issue in my opinion is why they revoked the offer to Jackster, which there is no solid evidence for. We can't see what Jackster said and if it warranted the staff's removal of the offer and can only rely on incomplete, personal accounts of what happened. From what I see Jackster sees polite, reasonable and courteous, but then again people here have said they're rude and brag often in chat, so I don't know. I do think it would be a nice touch to give Locust and Jackster, who have both contributed to the community a little freebie for the trouble if the likelihood percentage is implemented, and even if not it would be a nice gesture. Staff just has to be careful that other members don't see this as an opportunity to beg and guilt trip them into other favors which is the difficult part.

**** As for staff, I think people have gotten too ...jaded with their presence. They may claim "Oh, so and so is an ___, they ___." but they offer no proof. People interpret things differently and can share this opinion anywhere, even here. Some people may believe hearsay from this blog and hate staff with no real evidence of their character. Some users can be overly defensive or entirely misinterpret gentle reminders from staff and go here to complain. Pretty sure one user even said this months ago on this blog about a mod, taking back their original claims that X member of staff was rude saying they were upset at the time and the mod was actually super sweet.

I don't know any of them personally, but all of my dealings with staff & admins have been courteous and given the opportunity a few have gone out of their way to help me out with tickets & questions on their own time, and I've seen almost if not all of them be kind, friendly and helpful in general to others. Staff are humans too, and though they may not always be objective they do their best. They're all humans with lives and worries and forgetfulness and downfalls every now and then, just like you and me. That doesn't excuse any unfair behavior, but they do make mistakes and overlook things. We all do.

Likewise, Jackster seems to be a notorious LD member, yet I don't see why. They seem interesting, intelligent, well articulated, courteous and even generous, though then again I don't follow the community or chat 24/7 or even that closely at all. I could say much the same for all the staff members I have seen in forums and such and talked to personally - they've always been courteous, helpful, interesting, and a few, given the opportunity, have even gone out of their way, taking time out of their busy days to help me out in a pinch.

Tl;dr: There's too much animosity and baseless accusations of staff and also between the general userbase itself. No, it's not always rainbows and unicorns, sometimes some staff may do unfair things but if there is no proof then take those claims with a grain of salt. Many complain about other users or staff here but provide no evidence. If there is proof, courteously confront them if you can. Kindness can go a long way, and often if you don't go causing trouble you never get into it. If you're afraid of being silenced, you could find someone who will help you here.

As for the RMA, maybe for website profit and growth best interests and for users to get more out of the item it would be a good idea to up chances of rarer marks, and maybe an additional item could up the chance of a certain mark and / or pool. Furthermore, a "compensation" gift for the trouble could be given to those heavily impacted who have helped the community out as a kind gesture such as Locust and Jackster as long as staff doesn't turn into a freebie machine.

[we-future-first]

Why GAI and/or the singularity is much closer than you think

I've been interested in neural networks and AI for a couple years now. I am a hobbyist programmer and have played around with the common machine learning libraries like tensorflow here and there.

Over the last few months I have been particularly impressed with somethings I have seen in the space recently. Deepfakes in particular have become incredibly good over the last year. Here is one of the best ones I've seen so far.

A couple months ago I was playing with text generation based off of the keras model which is able to create fairly convincing text that sounds like something Nietzsche would write which can be trained on an ordinary desktop.

What I found so incredible is that the machine learning model knew nothing about English or even language. The only thing that was hardcoded was the alphabet (plus a few ASCII characters) and **from the training examples it only took about 45 minutes for it to learn English, grammar, a vocabulary, and even replicate (albeit not perfectly, but damn close) the writings of someone who many people consider a genius. This to me was quite puzzling considering that super computers are still not even close to the processing power of a human brain let alone my desktop computer.

Human brains are still way better than computers

In 2014, researchers in Japan tried to match the processing power in one second from one percent of the brain. It took the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world (the K Computer) 40 minutes to crunch the calculations for a single second of brain activity. Of course human brains aren't as good at certain tasks as computers due to the design differences, but nonetheless the processing power of the human brain is still 240,000x of supercomputers , and about 80,000,000x of my desktop computer according to my back of the envelope calculation.

If the human brain is millions of times faster than computers, why is AI already beating it in certain tasks?

Many people consider language to be a very high order function and one of the traits that distinguishes the human intellect above all other creatures, and yet this trait can be convincingly replicated in an hour? How is this possible?

To make things even crazier, researchers published one of the best text generation models I have seen yet called GPT-2 just a few months ago. It is even better than the previous model I was playing with. There is even a subeditor dedicated to bots created using this model that I recommend everyone check out called r/SubSimulatorGPT2. Without context and knowing that this is an AI you'd probably think most of the comments were generated by humans, so it already passes the soft turing test.

So how is it that machines with 80,000,000x less computational speed/power can already replicate human like behavior?

Raw computer power is a faulty metric for GAI

When estimating when we will have GAI or hit the singularity, almost all the estimates base it off of purely computing power relative to human brain power. The idea being that once a computer can perform as many operations per second as the human brain, we will be able to create GAI. This estimation puts GAI happening around 2040-2060 if current hardware trends persist.

I have come to the conclusion that this estimation could be off by an order of magnitude. Why is it off? Because as with my experiments with AI on my home desktop, it demonstrates that you don't need human brain level computational power to replicate human level behavior. Convincingly human text generation is already possible on desktop computers, which I argue passes a "soft" version of the turing test. Which just means that the average person (without context) would not be able to tell or wouldn't suspect that it was created by a bot.

The fact that these desktop AIs are passing soft turing tests despite having access to significantly less computational resources should tell us that using computational power as the metric for the GAI is completely wrong.

Think Smarter, Not Faster

I think the reason why is because most people, including myself until recently, naturally believe the human brain uses the most effective algorithms for its computations. However I think that this probably self evidently false. Natural selection doesn't evolve organisms to be the best, it just evolves them to be "good enough" to survive in their environment. It is entirely possible that there are far more efficient designs of a brain that there hasn't been enough time or selection pressure for us to evolve. We are not the apex, or the best we could be.

It may be true that the human brain is superior in raw processing power to supercomputers, but in terms of its approach to processing information algorithmic-ally, it could be very, very bad. So as to say it is not using its processing capability to the fullest possible extent.

When approaching computational problems the algorithm you choose or develop can lead to vastly different outcomes in resource usage.

Algorithms > computational power

Consider an optimization algorithm like a genetic algorithm vs a random search. Richard Dawkins wrote a computer program called the weasel program. For a computer to randomly come up with some arbitrary input phrase like "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" it would take longer than the age of the universe. However, by using a genetic algorithm instead of an entirely random search a common desktop computer can do it in a second.

This is a demonstration of the power of a superior algorithm. There are many examples of getting massive improvements in computational time simply by changing the algorithm being used. So in the same way, it could be that neural networks can find vastly superior algorithms for certain computational tasks than whatever algorithms are genetically hard-coded into the human brain, thus significantly reducing the need for computational power.

We have no idea how well our brains are optimized relative to how well a neural network could be optimized for the same problem. But as with the examples above, it appears that neural networks can already find algorithms which are millions of times more efficient than whatever the human brain need/uses to compute the same task.

The limits to AI going forward have more to do with their ability to optimize themselves than computational power.

Its the mathematics behind the calculations that can give exponential improvements faster than we can develop better hardware for raw computing power.

So because of the fact that we are using AI to develop algorithms that are already better than humans on certain tasks despite being at a huge disadvantage with computation power, I think that it is possible to create machines that can do virtually any job a human can do but with significantly less compute power needed. This moves the time frame to be much much earlier than people think.

Potentially within a decade virtually any human job could be replaced with an AI since its not nearly as hard as people for turing complete neural networks to come up with superior algorithms than that which the human brain uses.

TL;DR: Due to algorithms (mathematics) leading to massive improvements in computational time faster than hardware is getting improved, most estimates for GAI are probably way off. We could see GAI within 10 years.

submitted by /u/cryptonewsguy [link] [comments] source https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/c0ayn1/why_gai_andor_the_singularity_is_much_closer_than/

[latesttechnologytricks]

tl;dr: Four years ago there was an EVE battle where $300,000 worth of stuff was destroyed, and it made the news. After that battle, EVE’s greatest player, The Mittani, made a bunch of money selling out his massive 15,000 person super-organized gaming community to other games for cash. This went well, but then he tried to raise $150,000 in a kickstarter to get Sci-Fi Author Jeff Edwards to write a book about himself and a famous war he won in EVE Online. The rest of the EVE player community revolted against this idea, the kickstarter fell short in spectacular fashion, and the community then united to destroy The Mittani’s EVE empire once and for all, bank rolled by a massive EVE casino run by one guy. Towards the end of that war, the guy who ran that casino was banned because the CS:GO gambling scandal made the game company behind EVE afraid of lawsuits related to gambling. With no money bankrolling them, the EVE community split apart before they could deal the final blow, and now 15 months later, EVE’s greatest player is back for revenge in what could be EVE Online’s first $1,000,000 battle.Hi, IAMA fleet commander in the MMO video game EVE Online. EVE Online is the game that many of you “love to read about, but would never actually play”. I don’t blame you, it’s a complicated time sink, and if you’re not careful it can add a few years to your college career (plenty of people take 6 years to graduate though, so it’s no big deal). It’s likely that the last time many of you read about this game was back in 2014 when roughly $300,000 worth of warships were destroyed in a single day, as reported by Wired, CBS, ABC, etc. Well, nearly four years later, a crazy timeline of events has led us to what is going to be EVE Online’s first $1,000,000 dollar battle, that will dwarf the size of the famous battle four years ago. This battle will be occurring tomorrow at roughly 20:00 UTC (3 pm US Eastern). Since plenty of you gamers enjoy reading about the crazy people who play EVE Online, I’ve decided to type up a simple guide to the battle happening tomorrow as well as the unbelievable events that led up to it, so you can continue to read about EVE from a safe distance.A super basic guide to EVE Combat:EVE combat really isn’t that hard to understand if you’ve ever played even just a few video games and understand basic video game concepts. EVE has many many ship classes, divided into three main groups: subcapital, capital, and super capital. But there are really only two that matter: Titans (the biggest super capital class), and Force-Auxiliary Carriers (the only capital class ship that can efficiently heal capital and super capital ships). Titans are the best ships in the game because they have the largest hitpoint pool by a large margin and they do the most damage. Titans are also the most expensive ships in the game by a large margin, which is why two sides with lots of titans rarely fight each other, and when they do it tends to make the news. The big fight that happened in 2014 that I mentioned above is the last time that two real titan fleets faced off against each other. In that battle, each side fielded roughly 80 titans, with the losing side losing 59 titans and the winning side losing 16 titans. Tomorrow, each side will field over 250 titans, and likely 1,000 support capitals and super capitals. The story of how the game went from a 100 titan battle to a 500 titan battle in 4 years, with no big battles in between, is truly amazing and worth reading for even the most casual observers, but before I get into that here’s a brief aside on why all the news media like to quote EVE battles in $$ values (hint: for clicks, but it’s technically accurate).How did $300,000 get destroyed four years ago? And why is this a $1,000,000 battle?Though a majority players are content to just pay the monthly subscription and play the game, EVE Online has a convenient method for calculating the conversion rate of in-game currency (called ISK, I’m going to use ISK from now on) to real world currency because it allows its players to buy “subscription time” and sell it on the in-game market for extra ISK. Basically, I can take $15 dollars, buy a 30 day subscription code, put that on the in-game market, and someone can use ISK to buy that game time and play the game for free. Using this, we can calculate the conversion rate for any ship or item to generate amazing headlines so the EVE players can justify how much time they all spend on this game.Fun Fact: Just like other games with microtransactions, there are crazy people in EVE who blow stupid amounts of money on this game. Not many EVE players know this, but the current Chinese Player group (Fraternity Coalition) has had their current war funded by one guy for the last two months, and he has spent $70,000 doing that, and they’re still going to lose anyway, which is kind of hilarious.But enough about that, let’s get to the fun part, the crazy story of how the game got to where it is today.Why are $1,000,000 worth of nerds facing off in a battle tomorrow?The great thing about this story is that we can pick up right where we left off in 2014. After that big giant battle, the winning side (The ClusterFuck Coalition, CFC from here on) were kings of the universe. While they didn��t own all of the space, it was clear that no one could challenge their power. Their leader, The Mittani, had built the largest and most organized online gaming organization on the internet, with an estimated member count exceeding 15,000 people, and capable of summoning over 1,000 players to login to the game at a moment’s notice. With nothing left to conquer, he decided to try and grow the CFC into something even greater. He had already started a gaming news website named after himself, so he started a Twitch channel to go along with it, and then started cozying up to people in the gaming industry. He started approaching different gaming companies and offering to bring the CFC to their game if they would give them special promotions and free ingame items, and this worked. They did this for Planetside 2 and H1Z1. The Mittani would constantly push these promotions on his members in the CFC, and for the most part this went pretty well.Then, in late 2015, they decided to aim even higher. The Mittani had somehow gotten to know Sci-Fi author Jeff Edwards, and convinced him to write a Sci-Fi book about a war that happened in EVE Online. The Mittani was going to do a $150,000 kickstarter to pay Edward’s fee, and his media machine spun into full action to attempt to raise the money from not just the CFC, but the entire EVE Online community. There were two problems with this plan though: 1) The CFC was starting to turn on the idea of being constantly harassed for money, and 2) The war he wanted to write about was one that his side won, and The Mittani, famous among EVE players for his ego, was likely going to be the main character. The final straw was when he renamed his gaming organization to ‘The Imperium’, because ClusterFuck Coalition wasn’t advertiser friendly. The events surrounding the failed kickstarter are immortalized in one of /r/eve’s greatest postThe EVE community was ready to revolt, but it took the richest person in EVE Online to get them all together into a cohesive coalition capable of defeating The Imperium/CFC. That person was Lenny, who ran a wildly successful casino website where players could use ISK to play. Bank Rolled with virtually infinite money, the newly formed Moneybadger Coalition absolutely steamrolled the Imperium in a few months, taking every single piece of land they owned. The Imperium retreated out of their territory, and most of the Moneybadger Coalition was content to let them run away, satisfied that if the Imperium ever threatened again that Lenny would be there to throw money at the problem.Rock Paper Shotgun wrote a good summary of the warThen, the CS:GO Gambling scandal happened, and the company that makes EVE Online, CCP, became scared that lawsuits could start coming their way if they continued to allow a giant casino website to run using in game money. This was exacerbated by the Imperium publicly whining and complaining about the casino website for weeks, until CCP made an announcement. The announcement declared that gambling was no longer allowed with ISK, and that they had identified one player who was trading ISK for real life currency against the rules. Though Lenny still denies it and no concrete evidence was ever provided, Lenny was banned from the game and all of his in game assets frozen. Moneybadger's bank disappeared in a single day.It was August 2016 by the time the dust settled, nearly 10 months after the failed kickstarter, and the galaxy slid into a semblance of peace. But The Mittani swore revenge (publicly on his twitch channel), and what followed was the game’s greatest arms race, with the Imperium/CFC and the former Moneybadger forces each building massive super capital fleets. Over the past few months the Imperium has been hinting at a major invasion, even feigning a few attacks north into Moneybadger space. But that time is now over. Suddenly and without warning, the Imperium turned a harmless border skirmish into a full scale invasion, catching the Moneybadger forces with their pants down. Tomorrow is the first decisive battle of this new war, it could potentially dwarf the famous battle from four years ago.So what will actually happen?In all likelihood? Nothing. And it’s at this point that I must reveal the reason for typing this post. You may be thinking, “Wow, EVE has a really engaged community for someone to take the time to type up a post like this”, but oh how naive you are. The purpose of this post is to point out that the fleet commanders on both sides of this battle are nothing but complete cowards.I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen. The Mittani will hype his people up for hours, and the Moneybadger people will do the same. Then their fleet commanders will get their fleets onto the field of battle and place them into their “safe zones” that they’ve setup for themselves (it’s a dumb new game mechanic). Then, they will stare at each other for literally hours, and send out NPC drones that they barely control that mostly do nothing, while leaving all of their Titans in complete safety. They will then each make up a bunch of excuses, declare the other side as “cowardly” for not directly charging into their defensive position, and tell everyone to log off from the game. Don’t believe me? Everyone in EVE knows this, even the players involved in tomorrow’s battle. I’m serious, here was the top post on /r/eve for most of today from a group within the ImperiumDon’t let these people tell you it’s “the game’s fault that they can’t fight each other”, it’s no one’s fault but their own. I’m just hoping that both sides don’t end up staring at their computer screens for 8 hours tomorrow doing nothing, but that all depends on the fleet commanders. via /r/gaming by How To Wiki