Category: Thoughts (Page 1 of 19)

Death By Lightning

Death By Lightning is a mini-series on Netflix. The show tells the story of the assassination of James Garfield.

Once again I am reminded about how many powerful stories are present in history that are never taught. The story was fascinating and seemingly very close to the actual story. The show is based on the book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard.

The show is filled with excellent performances; especially Matthew Macfadyen, as Charles Giteaux, Michael Shannon, as James Garfield, Betty Gilpin, as Crete Garfield and Nick Offerman, as Charles Arthur.

Also fascinating that Presidents traveled pretty much like anyone else during this time (i.e. no bodyguards or special considerations). Those additional protections didn’t start until after William Mckinley assisination in 1901.

Web work

My Moodle instance is currently out of date. I can’t update it until my web host updates the SQL version on that shared host. They have kindly offered to update the SQL version, if I’m using less than 10GB of total space. Unfortunately, I’m currently using more than that. So, I’ve identified where the space is being used. I’m running several websites off that account. Mail turns out to be one of the biggest pieces of the pie. So, working with some accounts to put mail on a reduction plan. Part of this comes from years ago, where it was “save everything”.

So, I’m closer to my under 10GB goal, but not quite there yet.

Winter Prep

Rarely is timing my strong point. However, this past weekend I undertook the following chores:

• HeatMats installation
• Tire Swap
• Wiper Blades installation

And boy was my timing actually good. Tuesday was a “no school” day due to Veteren’s Day. Although I didn’t think it was in the forecast, we got snow. Not just enough to look at, but snow that builds up on the ground snow. The Heat Mats were purchased a few years ago after someone nearly fell on the back stairs. The Heat Mats keep the stairs snow free so that you have to go down a bit before you fall (;-( )

Similar situation with the snow tires. I was due for an oil change, so I figured that I would take care of both that and the tire swap. Good thing.

52 Frames

I’ve continued to keep my 52Frames streak alive.

Harishankar has a terrific write up about a Smart Vacuum. His curiosity turned into quite the revelation. It is always fun when someone uses their skills to learn and share with others. So, what do all of the “smart” IOT devices in your home do? Here is the story of one such device.

This is definitely worth a read.

It all started innocently enough.

As these things often do. We frequently learn quite a bit not by being intentional, but being curious.

I decided to monitor its network traffic, as I would with any so-called smart device.

We may guess as to what is being sent, but with a little bit of skill, we can know.

I noticed a steady stream of packets being sent to servers located halfway across the world. My robot vacuum was constantly communicating with its manufacturer, transmitting logs and telemetry that I had never consented to share.

For a few days, everything seemed fine. It continued to clean, map, and obediently avoid the furniture. However, one morning, it failed to power on.

Coincidence?

I sent it for repair. The service center assured me, “It works perfectly here, sir.” They sent it back, and—miraculously—it worked again for a few days. Then, it died once more.

This became a surreal cycle:

1. I shipped the robot off.
2. They “fixed” it.
3. It worked briefly.
4. It died again.

I began to feel like I was losing my mind. How could a simple IP block disable a vacuum cleaner that is supposed to work offline as well?

Then, one day, the service center refused further service.
“Out of warranty, sir.”

Once it is out of warranty, with nothing to lose, a complete disassembly and review take place. It is well worth the read to learn about what a smart vacuum does.

In the end, he provides a completely documented experience and a github repo.

The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me

Baldur Bjarnason has a fascinating write-up entitled “The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con“.

Essentially, Baldur Bjarnason makes the observation that LLM’s frequently end up following the same path those that do “cold reading”. He notes that many people are becoming convinced that language models are intelligent. There is no reason to believe this, but he offers two possibilities:

1. The tech industry has accidentally invented the initial stages a completely new kind of mind, based on completely unknown principles, using completely unknown processes that have no parallel in the biological world.
2. The intelligence illusion is in the mind of the user and not in the LLM itself.

He falls squarely in the second camp. I love the way that he clearly lays out the reasoning. He describes, quite clearly, how cold reading works. Then he mirrors those same steps in how an LLM works. He not only lists the areas, but goes on to provide examples and further clarification.

For example, in a cold read situation, the first issue is that the “Audience Selects Itself”.

Most people aren’t interested in psychics or the like, so the initial audience pool is already generally more open-minded and less critical than the population in general.

The first issue in LLM’s as a Mentalist? The Audience Selects Itself.

People sceptical about “AI” chatbots are less likely to use them. Those who actively don’t disbelieve the possibility of chatbot “intelligence” won’t get pulled in by the bot. The most active audience will be early adopters, tech enthusiasts, and genuine believers in AGI who will all generally be less critical and more open-minded.

This is a fantastic read and well worth your time.

I recently read an article by Dan Sinker entitled “What Felt Impossible Became Possible“. This is a good article to remind us of the history of the United States, ok, a portion of the history of the United States.

Dan Sinker is writing about the KKK in the 1920’s. Most people do not realize how prevalent the KKK was.

It’s not a history you learn about in school—we were whitewashing history long before the current executive orders—but the Klan in the ’20s was everywhere. There will millions of Klan members across the country. People joined it like they were joining a golf club or the Elks Lodge. There was a women’s auxiliary. There was the Ku Klux Kiddies, for children.

See, the KKK wasn’t some fringe group. The KKK was fully embedded into American culture. Some think that the KKK was just a few white men in the south.

Once you start learning about the KKK, you may see a few familiar points.

The Klan of the ’20s was a little different than what you might think of now. They didn’t just hate Black people (though, obviously, anti-Blackness was a central driver), they also went hard after immigrants, Jews, and Catholics too. The Klan’s slogan at the time? “America First.”

A big part of the story is the experience of George Dale from Muncie Indiana. George Dale “hated the Ku Klux Klan”. And the KKK was powerful in Muncie, Indiana at that time. Hating the KKK was not a safe thing to do. There was a ton of “proactive compliance”, after all, you never really knew for sure who was in the KKK (there is a reason for the white hoods). Hm, proactive compliance to avoid possible repercussions, does that sound familiar?

George Dale also ran a newspaper. So, he published the names (see page 1) of some of the Klansman. George suffered physically and economically. The KKK tried to kill him. His business lost advertisers and customers. However, George never gave up.

It nearly got him killed, when hooded men broke into his house and tried to shoot him. Dale said that he wrestled the gun away and killed one of them instead.

And hating the Klan sent him to jail repeatedly, rounded up by the Klan cops and put in front of a Klan judge with a Klan-packed jury. It was reported at the time that he was sent to the Muncie jail so often that inmates would applaud when he’d return.

His letter from 1927 lays out what happened.

There is good news.

And I think about people like George Dale—there were many like him—who, despite it feeling impossible, and despite paying incredible personal cost, kept fighting anyway.

And they won.

Two years after the letter, George Dale became Mayor of Muncie. He fired all of the cops and stripped Muncie of Klan members.

This tracks with my deeper learning and understanding of history. I attended a terrific college, Go Blue!, with a minor in history. However, I have learned so much history via reading after graduation. There is just so history that isn’t taught, even at the finest of fine collegiate institutions. The problem really is that by not teaching a full accounting of history, heck, even a balanced accounting, we truly do present people with a really bad, inaccurate background to base understandings.

America has always been more of an idea to shoot for rather than an accomplishment. However, we have tended to teach and act like America has reached those goals and is a shining example of them. Although our Founding Fathers stated that “all men are created equal”, they owned slaves. The Founding Fathers clearly didn’t act like all men were created equal. Naturally, we can discuss whether “men” meant mankind (i.e. included women) or white men who owned property.

One of the biggest areas that I had to learn about on my own was Eugenics (kind of surprised that this website hasn’t been shut down by those in power, so I’ll also link to the Internet Archive version as well). Unfortunately, these beliefs are making a comeback.