A friend of mine sent me a link to this; we were discussing prevailing currents in the Pacific in the context of ancient rafters maybe going to South America from Africa and vice-versa. So, this is just cool. I’m not sure of its longterm usefulness but when Canada catches on fire this year I’ll turn the mapping on an see how it looks.
This post almost certainly will not be as well-organized as I wish it could be. I feel that the topic is of great importance, but I am unconfident of my ability to organize an argument, and I am painfully aware that I know far less about the topic than I ought to. Consequently, I welcome dismissive comments as well as substantive ones – part of what I need/want to do is learn more about the topic, and I’m having trouble even figuring out where to start. This will all become clear in a bit, I hope.
This is something I had heard nothing about, until last week, when I stumbled over it as a result of a google search (I was researching links for the Lituya Bay mega-tsunami).
It’s funny how much effort we put into building redundant and reliable systems (e.g.: “cloud computing”) that scale and replicate well – yet they are subject to the simplest of attacks that can disable them.
I’m not afraid to read a book (if I can handle it) but I feel you need to know something of a field, in order to know which books are definitive and represent a consensus.
[This is a second attempt at this posting; the first went way off into the weeds. This is a tricky topic!]
… is anyone actually surprised by this? Disappointed, sure – but surprised?
I paid a brief visit to my old friend Gary McGraw, who used to work in computer security with me, but has switched to focusing on AI applications in that field. He’s my “go to guy” when I have questions about AI, and I was surprised that his view of ChatGPT3, etc., is that they are toys.
Field-expedient repairs are sometimes expected. You haven’t got all the gear to make a proper fix, so you log a maintenance report saying something like, “I did not have the correct threaded bolt to replace it correctly, so I forced the wrong bolt on to the nut with a pipe-wrench, just to hold the thing together until we got home.”
I’ve been struggling with a problem: “what happens if someone tells an AI to ‘code a better version of yourself?’ and – whoosh – the singularity happens?