More AI hype

You’ve probably already seen the video of the stupid Russian AIbot falling flat on its face in its debut, but here it is again.

This is all a waste of money, time, and effort. Before you reply with that “what use is a baby?” line, there’s no there there — these aren’t aware, thinking machines, they all need pre-programmed tasks to follow in their slow, clumsy way. You wouldn’t want one with full autonomy, anyway, given how erratically AI performs in simple text tasks.

Near the end of the above video, they talk briefly about industrial automation, which is good, I’m all for it. Those are repetitive tasks in which you do give the machine a set of programmed operations, and you gotta wonder…what is the “humanoid” part for, anyway? Wouldn’t it be smarter to have just an arm, with specialized grasping elements?

This is just another example of hyping up AI, because a bunch of billionaires make more money by selling server farms and stolen information, but they need flashy stuff to convince the rubes to buy into it.

Also, some of these robots aren’t even independently controlled by AI — they’ve got a guy behind a screen diddling switches and joysticks, in which case they should just cut out the middle android.

NFTs are still a thing?

I thought they were ugly, stupid, and pointless a few years ago, but apparently, there’s still a market for them.

Wait until they realize they don’t own them after all — they all belong to Amazon, and when Amazon sneezes, the bored apes all curl up and die.

Amazon owns everything, and the recent loss of service also meant that the Canvas application we use for teaching was having seizures, too. Fortunately, I wasn’t teaching this term, and even if I was, I go to class with all my teaching stuff stored locally on my laptop. Because I’m not a dumbass.

No, that broken robot does not need human rights

A guy who works for OpenAI makes an observation. I agree with the opening paragraphs.

AI is not like past technologies, and its humanlike character is already shaping our mental health. Millions now regularly confide in “AI companions”, and there are more and more extreme cases of “psychosis” and self-harm following heavy use. This year, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of chatbot interaction. His parents recently filed the first wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, and the company has said it is improving its safeguards.

It’s true! Humans are social creatures who readily make attachments to all kinds of entities. We get highly committed to our pets — people love dogs and cats (and even spiders) and personify the animals we keep — furbabies, you know. They don’t even need to be animate. Kids get attached to their stuffies, or a favorite blanket, or any kind of comfort toy. Some adults worship guns, or cuddle up with flags. We should not be surprised that AIs are designed to tap into that human tendencies.

We should maybe be surprised at how this author twists it around.

I research human-AI interaction at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. For years, we have seen increased humanization of AI, with more people saying that bots can experience emotions and deserve legal rights – and now 20% of US adults say that some software that exists today is already sentient. More and more people email me saying that their AI chatbot has been “awakened”, offering proof of sentience and an appeal for AI rights. Their reactions span the gamut of human emotions from AI as their “soulmate” to being “deeply unsettled”.

It’s not that humans readily extend humanization to all kinds of objects…it’s that AI is becoming more human! That people think AI is sentient is evidence that AIs are sentient and deserve rights. Some people are arguing for rights for software packages before being willing to give puppy dogs those same rights. This is nuts — AI is not self-aware or in need of special privileges. Developing social attachments is a human property, not a property of the object being attached. Otherwise, I’ve been a terrible abuser who needs to dig into a landfill to rescue a teddy bear.

This author has other absurd beliefs.

As a red teamer at OpenAI, I conduct safety testing on their new AI systems before public release, and the testers are consistently wowed by the human-like behavior. Most people, even those in the field of AI who are racing to build these new data centers and train larger AI models, do not yet see the radical social consequences of digital minds. Humanity is beginning to coexist with a second apex species for the first time in 40,000 years – when our longest-lived cousins, the Neanderthals, went extinct.

AI is an apex species? It’s not even a species. It is not equivalent to the Neanderthals. It is not in competition with Homo sapiens. It is a tool used by the already-wealthy to pry more wealth out of other people and to enshittify existing tools.

A totally predictable AI delusion

Mark Zuckerberg has sunk billions into AI, and a whole slew of grifters have been doing likewise, so I really appreciate a good pratfall. He set up an elaborate demo of his Meta AI, stood on a stage, brought up a chef, and asked the AI to provide instructions…to make a steak sauce. Cool. Easy. I could open a cookbook or google a recipe and get it done in minutes, but apparently the attempt here was to do it faster, easier, better with a few vocal requests.

On a stage contrived to make Zuckerberg look so small

Except it didn’t work.

“You can make a Korean-inspired steak sauce using soy sauce, sesame oil…” begins Meta AI, before Mancuso interrupts to stop the voice listing everything that happens to be there. “What do I do first?” he demands. Meta AI, clearly unimpressed by being cut off, falls silent. “What do I do first?” Mancuso asks again, fear entering his voice. And then the magic happens.

“You’ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate a pear to add to the sauce.”

Mancuso looks like a rabbit looking into the lights of an oncoming juggernaut. He now only has panic. There’s nothing else for it, there’s only one option left. He repeats his line from the script for the third time.

“What do I do first?”

There’s then audience laughter.

“You’ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate the pear and gently combine it with the base sauce.”

Poor Mark, publicly embarrassed in a demo that was all designed to make a trivial, rigged display, and it flopped.

What’s so joyous about this particular incident isn’t just that it happened live on stage with one of the world’s richest men made to look a complete fool in front of the mocking laughter of the most non-hostile audience imaginable…Oh wait, it largely is that. That’s very joyous. But it’s also that it was so ludicrously over-prepared, faked to such a degree to try to eliminate all possibilities for error, and even so it still went so spectacularly badly.

From Zuckerberg pretending to make up, “Oh, I dunno, picking from every possible foodstuff in the entire universe, what about a…ooh! Korean-inspired steak sauce!” for a man standing in front of the base ingredients of a Korean-inspired steak sauce, to the hilarious fake labels with their bold Arial font facing the camera, it was all clearly intended to force things to go as smoothly as possible. We were all supposed to be wowed that this AI could recognize the ingredients (it imagined a pear) and combine them into the exact sauce they wanted! But it couldn’t. And if it had, it wouldn’t have known the correct proportions, because it would have scanned dozens and dozens of recipes designed to make different volumes of sauce, with contradictory ingredients (the lack of both gochujang and rice wine vinegar, presumably to try to make it even simpler, seems likely to not have helped), and just approximated based on averages. Plagiarism on this scale leads to a soupy slop.

What else would you expect? They’re building machines that are only good for regurgitating rearranged nonsense, and sometimes they only vomit up garbage.

The real WWII experience

Yesterday, I was looking forward to visiting a local airshow. I made it. I was disappointed.

It was not the fault of the airshow organizers, or the collection of planes they had on view. The problems were entirely due to the godawful weather we’ve had lately.

I left home at about 7:30, under dark gloomy skies, driving rain, and non-stop thunderbolts arcing across the sky, a most inauspicious morning, but it’s been like that sporadically for a couple of weeks. We get these horrendous storms that last for a few hours, and then they burn off and we get clear skies, so that’s what I anticipated. The drive was stormy, but the roads were empty, I saw only one other car the entire hour and a half I was on the road. That wasn’t a problem.

Once I got to the airport, though, I discovered that the whole show was delayed for two hours, which made sense. Visibility was only about a mile, the rain was pounding down hard, I wouldn’t want to fly in that weather, and as a spectator I wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway. So I turned around and went back to Granite Falls to nurse a coffee for a while.

When I went back, I encountered a new problem: no parking. There was a large empty field that was supposed to be used as a parking lot for the event, but this is what it looked like:

It was swamp with ambitions, trying to become a lake. This fit with what I’d heard on the drive — I was getting constant warnings of flash flood conditions, and saw rivers running over their banks, and fields that were underwater. So no convenient parking.

The organizers improvised. What they had us do is drive out on these gravel access roads and park on the edge…which meant that all the visitors were strung out in a long line from the airport to distant points. I did that. I had to park a mile and a half from the airshow and walk in.

I’ve mentioned that this was my summer of knee problems. I did not invest enough in my energy budget for a hike, nor was I prepared for the maintenance and repair costs of keeping shank’s mare running smoothly for a long walk. I did it anyway. I was stupid. The result: another blown out knee, and I’m going to be paying for this exercise for the next few weeks. Fortunately, when it was time to leave, they had local police and neighbors volunteering to drive golf carts up and down that road — I got delivered directly to my car, which was good, because otherwise I might have been a crying cripple laid up in a drainage ditch.

Finally, I’m at the airfield, there’s a selection of planes all lined up, getting fueled. The first set are about 8 Navy fighters/bombers/torpedo planes (ooh, look at that lovely Corsair), and they’re getting ready to taxi out to the runway. I was up close — I was standing right under the wingtip of a Helldiver as it was firing up it’s engine. It was loud, it reeked of fuel vapors, I could feel the vibrations in my bones. It was the highlight of the day for me.

Unfortunately, what followed was not so exciting. Three planes taxied out to the end of the runway, a Dauntless, an Avenger, and a Helldiver, and prepared to take off, when Minnesota weather struck again. One of them got stuck in the mud. It was a major anti-climax, because instead of planes, we then spent an hour watching forklifts hauling stacks of plywood to try and give them a firm surface to be dragged onto.

It was OK! I wandered around the hangars instead, where they had iconic aircraft on display.

They did eventually get some planes aloft, but at that point my knee was whimpering, and I decided the best thing to do was go home and stop making it work.

Despite the weather-related glitches, this was a good airshow. I’m going to come back next year when the fields have all dried out, there’s convenient parking, and runways that haven’t turned to glue. I did come away with an appreciation of the struggles the ground crews had to have gone through to keep planes and runways operational. My father-in-law was a bad ass Marine sniper in the Pacific theater, while my grandfather spent the war driving bulldozers and building runways on remote islands — much respect to both of them.

PS. One thing I was concerned about was that this was a celebration of military technology, and I was afraid I’d get there and be surrounded by a sea of red MAGA hats. I was not. I didn’t see a single red hat the whole time. I did see a lot of old veterans, though — maybe a celebration of a triumph over fascism scared away the Nazi wanna-bes from showing up.

Airshow today!

I’m driving to Granite Falls, MN this morning. It’s only about an hour SSE of Morris, so I’ll still be in the middle of nowhere in west central Minnesota. A while back, though, I was searching for local museums and discovered this one: the Fagen Fighters WWII Museum. I was surprised. This looks like a big deal with all kinds of old US aircraft from the the 1940s, and many of them still fly. I’ve been planning to visit it all summer long, but those plans got wrecked by a torn meniscus that limited my mobility — I’m feeling much better now, so I think can handle walking around some hangars and watching airplanes fly by. My brother and I used to bicycle out to local airports all the time just to watch private planes buzz by, so this is going to bring back memories.

I’ve been to the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, as well as the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle, and while this museum is a bit smaller than those, tomorrow is special: they’re celebrating the 250th anniversary of the US Navy & Marine Corps, so an additional assortment of aircraft are flying in. How can I resist? I want to see a P38 Lightning, an F4U Corsair, and an F6F Hellcat. Eighty year old airplanes still flying!

Tickets are still available, so if you’re a Minnesotan interested in this sort of thing, maybe I’ll see you there.

Jim Acosta, ghoul

My impression of the ex-CNN news announcer, Jim Acosta, was that he at least had some principles. He quit cable news, after all, and that’s a positive mark in my estimation. Unfortunately, he has now indulged in the cheapest, sleaziest, most ghoulish stunt of his career.

If you are sufficiently prolific on the internet, people can take your stored writings and videos and build a model of “you”. For instance, I would be good candidate for this kind of program — over 30 years of nearly daily commentary, all stored in online databases, you could probably make a decent predictive model of my internet behavior. Would it be “me”? No. It would be a crude simulacrum of just my public persona. You could also take the voluminous writings of St Augustine or Albert Einstein and make a similar model, but it would all just be window dressing and wouldn’t actually “be” the person.

Some grieving parents compiled the internet output of one of the students killed in the Parkland shooting into a video talking head. I can sort of understand the desire — they want to hear their child’s voice again — and it’s the same sort of impulse that would make someone preserve an answering machine voice message so they can hear a loved one again after their demise. It’s not the person, though, it’s an echo, a memory of someone.

So Acosta “interviewed” the model of a dead student.

Jim Acosta, former chief White House correspondent for CNN, stirred controversy on Monday when he sat for a conversation with a reanimated version of a person who died more than seven years ago. His guest was an avatar of Joaquin Oliver, one of the 17 people killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.

The video shows Oliver, captured via a real photograph and animated with generative artificial intelligence, wearing a beanie with a solemn expression. Acosta asks the avatar: “What happened to you?”

I feel like asking Acosta “What happened to you?”

“I appreciate your curiosity,” Oliver answers in hurried monotone without inflection or pauses for punctuation. “I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school. It’s important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone.” The avatar’s narration is stilted and computerized. The movements of its face and mouth are jerky and unnatural, looking more like a dub-over than an actual person talking.

Ick. Why not dig up his corpse, attach marionette strings, and have a conversation with it? That wasn’t Joaquin Oliver. The only insight you are going to get from it is possibly the interpretations of the person who compiled the code.

Here’s another example:

Others have likewise used AI avatars to simulate the speech of victims of crimes. In May, an AI version of a man who was killed in a road rage incident in Arizona appeared in a court hearing. Lawyers played an AI video of the victim addressing his alleged killer in an impact statement. “I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have and I still do,” the victim’s avatar said.

The presiding judge responded favorably. “I loved that AI, thank you for that. As angry as you are, as justifiably angry as the family is, I heard the forgiveness,” he said. “I feel that that was genuine.”

Jesus. That was not evidence before the law — that was an appeal to the judge’s sentimentality, and it worked.

They have to be desperate to resurrect boomer technology

This generation…they claim to have reinvented the bus, the train, the bodega, and now, the 45 rpm record?

On Monday (Aug. 4), a small but mighty new physical music format arrived: Tiny Vinyl. Measuring at just four inches in size, Tiny Vinyl is a playable record that can hold four minutes of audio per side.

The disc, according to a press release, aims to “[bridge] the gap between modern and traditional to offer a new collectible for artists to share with fans that easily fits in your pocket.”

OK, there are differences. This thing is played at 33rpm, not 45rpm, and is smaller than the old format, which was a 7 inch disk, but I don’t see any advantage. It doesn’t matter that it fits in your pocket — in order to listen to it you also need a turntable and a set of speakers. They also cost $15 each. It’s a gimmicky promotional toy, not a serious means of distributing music. People are used to loading up thousands of MP3s on their phones and being able to play them through ear buds, you’d have to be a serious hipster to think that unlimbering a turntable and a pair of portable speakers so you can listen to singles at the coffeeshop is “cool”.

My first recipe from a Neandertal cookbook

I’ve taught human physiology, so I already knew about the limits of protein consumption: if you rely too much on consuming lean protein, you reach a point where your body can’t cope with all the nitrogen. Here’s a good, succinct explanation of the phenomenon of “rabbit starvation.”

Fat, especially within-bone lipids, is a crucial resource for hunter-gatherers in most environments, becoming increasingly vital among foragers whose diet is based heavily on animal foods, whether seasonally or throughout the year. When subsisting largely on animal foods, a forager’s total daily protein intake is limited to not more than about 5 g/kg of body weight by the capacity of liver enzymes to deaminize the protein and excrete the excess nitrogen. For hunter-gatherers (including Neanderthals), with body weights typically falling between 50 and 80 kg, the upper dietary protein limit is about 300 g/day or just 1200 kcal, a food intake far short of a forager’s daily energy needs. The remaining calories must come from a nonprotein source, either fat or carbohydrate. Sustained protein intakes above ~300 g can lead to a debilitating, even lethal, condition known to early explorers as “rabbit starvation.” For mobile foragers, obtaining fat can become a life-sustaining necessity during periods when carbohydrates are scarce or unavailable, such as during the winter and spring.

I’d never thought about that, outside of an academic consideration, since a) I don’t live lifestyle that requires such an energy rich diet, and b) I’m a vegetarian, so I’m not going to sit down to consume over 1200 kcal of meat (I feel queasy even imagining such a feast). But when I stop to think about it, yeah, my hunter-gatherer ancestors must have been well aware of this limitation, which makes the “gatherer” part of the lifestyle even more important, and must have greatly affected their preferred choices from the kill.

There is very little fat in most ungulate muscle tissues, especially the “steaks” and “roasts” of the thighs and shoulders, regardless of season, or an animal’s age, sex, or reproductive state. Mid- and northern-latitude foragers commonly fed these meat cuts to their dogs or abandoned them at the kill. The most critical fat deposits are concentrated in the brain, tongue, brisket, and rib cage; in the adipose tissue; around the intestines and internal organs; in the marrow; and in the cancellous (spongy) tissue of the bones (i.e., bone grease). With the notable exception of the brain, tongue, and very likely the cancellous tissue of bones, the other fat deposits often become mobilized and depleted when an animal is undernourished, pregnant, nursing, or in rut.

So a steak is dog food; the favored cuts are ribs and brisket and organ meats. This article, though is mainly focused on bone grease and its production by Neandertal hunters. I didn’t even know what bone grease is until the article explained it to me. Oh boy, it’s my first Neandertal recipe!

Exploitation of fat-rich marrow from the hollow cavities of skeletal elements, especially the long bones, is fairly easy and well documented in the archaeological record of Neanderthals. On the basis of ethnohistoric accounts, as well as on experimental studies, the production of bone grease, an activity commonly carried out by women, requires considerable time, effort, and fuel. Bones, especially long-bone epiphyses (joints) and vertebrae, are broken into small fragments with a stone hammer and then boiled for several hours to extract the grease, which floats to the surface and is skimmed off upon cooling. For foragers heavily dependent on animal foods, bone grease provides a calorie-dense nonprotein food source that can play a critical role in staving off rabbit starvation.

Skimming off boiled fats does not sound at all appetizing…but then I thought of pho, which is made with a stock created by boiling bones for hours, or my grandmother’s stew, which had bones boiled in the mix, which you wouldn’t eat, but made an essential contribution to the flavor. Those we don’t cool to extract the congealed fats, but they were there. Then there’s pemmican, made by pounding nuts, grains, and berries in an animal fat matrix, which now sounds like the perfect food for someone hunting for game for long hours in the cold. It’s one of those things which seems superfluous when you’re living in a world filled with easy-to-reach calories, but it makes sense. I’m going to have to think about that when I’m prepping for the Trump-induced apocalypse.

Examples of hammerstone-induced impact damage on long bones from NN2/2B.
(A) B. primigenius, Tibia dex., impacts from posteromedial (no. 4892). (B) B. primigenius, Humerus sin., impacts from posteromedial (no. 4283). (C) B. primigenius, Tibia dex., impact from anterolateral (no. 8437). (D) Equus sp., Humerus sin., impacts from posterolateral (no. 21758).

The main point of the article, though, is that they’re finding evidence of cooperative behavior in Neandertals. It analyzes a site where Neandertals had set up a bone grease processing ‘factory’ where hunters brought in their prey to be cut up, the bones broken apart, and then everything was boiled for hours along a lakeside. The place was strewn with shattered bone fragments! They also found bits of charcoal, vestiges of ancient fires. There was no evidence of anything like pottery, but they speculate that “experiments recently demonstrated that organic perishable containers, e.g., made out of deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food”.

Not only do I have a recipe, I have a description of the technology used to produce the food. Anyone want to get together and make Bone Grease ala Neandertal? I’ll have to beg off on actually tasting it — vegetarian, you know — so y’all can eat it for yourselves.