One year ago today: October 25, 2019, a Karaoke tug.
Five years ago today: October 25, 2015, remember the smart gene?
Nine years ago today: October 25, 2011, no phone, no medicine.
Random years ago today: October 25, 2007, financially, the worst.
This photo is a reflection of what life for me can be like without a band or a motorcycle. Pretty ho-hum. I set off the smoke detector, and it’s the morning’s high point because of the root cause. You cannot buy a decent toaster in America any more. They all have long waits for the first slice. After that it is okay. Some toasters can be tricked by turning the dial all the way to dark which makes the elements hotter. However, you have to be standing right there when the toast reaches your liking. I was 30 seconds too late. Hey, it's not my toaster.
It might be low-effort posts for a while. I feel like I’m living in a deep freeze. I’ve been sleeping as much as the doggies. We did a major walk around the dam today, seems half the town with dogs had the same idea. Stayed in and did mostly research on matters of my own interests, like A.I. I saw a list of the jobs that could never be replaced by A.I. and it was skimpy. The industrial revolution replaced a lot of labor and the computer revolution dealt with drudgery. The advent of the Internet showed us that people with computers are no more creative than those without. And A.I is poised to replace that crowd. When they started working on Zoom, the demand for cosmetic surgery went up 57% in Wales and make-up sales soared.
First we replace the muscle, now the brain, and what is left? It was recently thought that trades like lawyers and doctors could never be replaced by hardware and software. But A.I. is already doing a better job than the average human on those counts. I concluded that when I first looked at machine learning back in the 80s. My opinion is that the only reason it took so long to get A.I. to this stage was the massive sidetracking of computer development caused by the rise of the Internet. We spent the last 30 years making toys instead of instruments.
Another claim says A.I. cannot replace management. Really? Say that were true, it overlooks the chance that these devices may do away with any need to manage humans. It makes little difference if a computer can’t show “deep empathy” when humans and their foibles are removed from the equation. To me it looks like just another round of low skill workers being replaced and that’s been a constant as long as I remember. These people price themselves out of the market. There are machines flipping burgers these days.
Technology. I say it is harder to follow nowadays, with every headline claiming to be the experts. Developments I like are the UK’s plan to label products with repairablilty and reuseablily icons. Firms that build new products will be required to supply spare parts for a minimum of 10 years. If it was me, I’d make that 30 years for software support, particularly device drivers, on-line manuals, and backward compatibility.
1940’s real costumes.
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For the first time ever, the doggies balked at going for an afternoon walk. That gave me time for reading, but I’ve read everything in the house except the odd New Age books. So I continued looking at technology. How about that apparatus that can paint walls? It’s complicated to look at, but consists of a few sensors, a motor, and a microcomputer. It would be interested to build an analog adder circuit using automobile relays. But not cheap, unless you can round up a supply of the relays. Up near Seattle, they’ve used tracking sensors attached to hornets to track down and destroy nests of invasive Asian species.
NASA blows it again with their asteroid samples. The unit collected surface dust from an asteroid but pieces of the sample jammed the hatch. The sample particles are leaking away. In other words the door jammed open to the tune of $800 million.
ADDENDUM
That lady who hosted the Biden-Trump debate (Kristen Welker) was wearing so much make-up I thought she was wearing a plastic mask. I did not know she was black. Freaky-looking, if you ask me. The media praises how fair she was in the debate, but consider what they mean by fair. Too bad her silence on the Biden corruption will just make most of us wonder how deep the coverup really is. The memorable phrase of the debate may become Trump’s assertion that Biden is the reason he was elected.
Speaking of elections, there is talk of converting voting machines to work with blockchain, which few people understand. It is similar to cloud technology where the information is spread out into millions of computers rather than a centralized database. It uses the same pubic and private key system already in place. A record is broken into small pieces, each with a hashtag to the piece before and after itself in the chain. Presumably, only a person with the correct private key could reassemble the pieces into a copy of the original record.
I’m not the authority on this stuff but its operability is entirely theoretical. For example, it could make billions of daily transactions available for anyone to see, but encrypt all information about the parties. It is up to you if you think that is secure. I say no, because it is only a matter of time until the pattern of transactions reveals the end points. The blockchain adherents claim the system is unhackable where it really has many flaws. That is based on another theory, that to hack a chain, one has to gain control of over half the computers in the system, the “51% attack”. To me, that says it is only a matter of time.
The system is vulnerable simply because the information itself is not private. It becomes possible to, what’s the word, cyber-steal by manipulating the system rather than having to steal or hack the actual information. This is always a danger when information is too public. Who was that gangster they caught because he made so many phone calls to a single restaurant? That’s the concept, they did not need to know the contents of the calls. We’ve become the country of such show trials. Remember Martin Shkreli. Remember Martha Stewart? Remember how they caught the Silk Road guy and gave him two life sentences?
The Silk Road guy made the old mistake of not giving the right people a cut of the action. You can bet the system he devised is now in daily operation with the people who arrested hime. I don’t know the details but he used Tor technology to anonymize transactions, which attracted a lot of the wrong kind of people. (Section 230 protects the provider rom being sued, a civil matter, but does not help in criminal cases, as if nothing illegal is ever done on eFAG.) I disagree with the sentence given to the Silk Road guy because of the lack of proof he was actually responsible for any of the illegal activity. He was a video game coder.
This is the danger of all pubic records. It is only time before they are used for other purposes than those given. Usage patterns cannot be entirely hidden and the Silk Road conviction shows that direct evidence is not even necessary. My guess is they simply followed enough bitcoin transactions to narrow down the search to the point where real evidence was no longer important—you remember that. A mere pattern is enough to put you away. The bottom line with blockchain is its entire claim to fame is that cracking their codes requires an “improbable” amount of computing power. Or one quantum computer.
[Author’s note – these types of show trials are increasingly common, an unfortunate development in this country. People are being convicted on what is basically circumstantial evidence. It means people are being tried on testimony alone, no real evidence or witnesses present. Nobody arrests the phone company for enabling drug deals, but the small operator is vulnerable to this type of entrapment, It’s ianother aspect of police work that needs to be defunded, there are others. Hundreds of thousands of people have petitioned to let the guy go and are simpy ignored.]
