Quotulatiousness

November 6, 2020

The World’s Most Recycled Material

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 6 Aug 2020

Exploring the complexities that go into the creation and application of asphalt concrete.
Use code 80PRACTICAL to get $80 off with purchase, including free shipping on your first box https://bit.ly/30sYo7c Go to HelloFresh.com for more details.

Of all the ubiquitous things in our environment, roads are probably one of the least noticed. Our roads see tremendous volumes of traffic and withstand considerable variations in weather and climate, and they do it on a pretty tight budget. That’s really only possible because of all the scientists, engineers, contractors, and public works crews keeping up with this simple but incredible material called asphalt.

-Patreon: http://patreon.com/PracticalEngineering
-Website: http://practical.engineering

Writing/Editing/Production: Grady Hillhouse
Editing and Direction Help: Wesley Crump

This video is sponsored by HelloFresh.

October 26, 2020

QotD: Living in the modern world

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What if … bear with me a moment … checking social media every 15 minutes keeps us in a state of constant stress & agitation without actually keeping us better informed than the old days of reading the morning paper & occasionally watching the evening news did?

Zack Stentz, Twitter, 2018-07-16.

October 20, 2020

The watchful algorithms of the Nanny State’s AI tools

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren considers the evolution of the Nanny State’s arsenal of technological surveillance (supplemented by the Karenstapo):

While it is not in my interest, currently, for gentle reader to get off the Internet, the idea must have occurred to him. In times like these, why put yourself under watch from Big Brother (or, Big Sibling, as he might prefer)? Why surround yourself with his electronic eyes, the way I am presently surrounded by jackhammers?

Granted, Nanny State was devising ways to track its citizens, and to exercise “crowd control,” long before the Internet was invented. But we had the advantage with them, for they were incompetent, often laughably inept. However, Internet-plus-meejah-plus-activists-plus-Guvmint makes a more capable adversary.

I am not recommending a systematic withdrawal from the world. That is for people with a religious calling, or some grave eccentricity. Rather I am thinking of self-defence, in the spirit of buying a gun. Of course, I am writing from Canada, one of the countries where owning a gun is more-or-less illegal; as is any other form of self-defence. (“When seconds count, the police will be here in minutes.”) Though I have noticed that, upcountry, the “No Hunting” signs tend to be used for target practice.

The “other side,” as I see it, which always worked on numbers, now has algorithms. “Artificial Intelligence” can home right in. The Nanny State never took the individual seriously, except when he was offering a threat. Now it is threatened by anything human. It is, as it were, utilitarian in outlook — “the greatest good for the greatest number” — along with other fatuous concepts, unamenable to reason. By its nature, it is positivist, nominalist, relativist, and “idealistic” in a very abstract way.

Whereas we, so far as we are human, take ourselves quite personally. In a clinch, we often prefer our own survival, and the survival of family and friends, to the requirements of a bureaucratic “policy.” That this is “selfish” should be immediately affirmed.

Because the masses are now deprived of a Christian education, they misconstrue the “selfishness” of Christian teaching, which tells us that we ought selfishly to become saints. Our intention should be to get ourselves to Heaven, along with any we know who can be taken with us. But charity is not “selfish,” in ways they understand. Under modern tenets of “multiculturalism,” even fidelity to the old Christian view is decried as a form of selfishness, calling out for persecution. For this is because it is “cultural,” not “multi” — for all the many languages it speaks.

Our enemy wants us to eschew uniqueness, and become instead “diverse” — by which it means homogenized and narrowly interchangeable. Increasingly, this adversary has the means to enforce its arbitrary will.

October 18, 2020

Larry Correia on the danger in allowing Big Tech to decide what speech is and is not allowed to be heard

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The recent now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t over allegations that former Vice President Biden’s son used his father’s influence to gain vast sums of money are — ahem — unproven but persuasive. The frantic efforts of companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to keep those allegations out of the public eye get Larry Correia very angry:

If social media had banned Obama’s press secretary, and then stopped Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer from sharing articles from the New York Times, and then shut down the Obama campaign page nineteen days before his election against Mitt Romney, everyone would have lost their fucking minds. And rightfully so! Because that kind of blatant manipulation of information is evil.

If I put that into a thriller my editor would tell me it was too far fetched. Nobody would buy into such mustache twirling villainy, even if I was writing cyberpunk dystopia.

But Correia, they are private companies and you are usually against meddling in the affairs of private companies, you big hypocrite! Yeah, usually I am, but this is also something new, the likes of which mankind has never seen before, with these entities being the primary exchange of information for BILLIONS of people, so it’s kind of hard to put this thing which didn’t exist before into historical context. Facebook has no real competitors, and it has something like 2.7 billion regular users. With the flick of a switch it can stop a third of the Earth’s population from seeing whatever it doesn’t want them to see. Humanity has never had that before.

That’s real fucking power right there.

Now, unlike most people on the internet, I am not compelled to pretend to be a lawyer who just got my law degree from the University of Internet. Communications law is not my area, and I’m not going to be a Dunning-Krugerand talking about section 230 or whatever.

However, what I do know is that this is some seriously dangerous bullshit, and if we keep going down this road it is going to lead to some very bad ends. Freedom of speech functionally ceases to exist when both sides speak, but only one side is heard. If social media is a forum, then it needs to be an actual forum. If it is functionally a propaganda arm of the DNC, then so be it, but it can’t keep pretending to be something it’s not, while mindfucking the populace.

They are subpoenaing the Twitter CEO to come testify before congress but I expect that to be another utterly useless clown show where dummies ask dumb questions about something they don’t understand to some clever asshole who is just going to lie.

Like most liberty minded people, I have a reflexive dislike for government regulation of the free market. If the government can screw something up, it will. However I doubt I’ll feel that strongly about the sanctity of the free market as I’m being starved to death in a re-education gulag, after conservatives were stupid enough to let a tiny group of control freak statists have absolute power over the whole country’s speech and information.

What we’ve got right now with a handful of organizations having a monopoly over news and knowledge is stupid, getting stupider, and going to end extremely badly.

I don’t give a shit if you are liberal or conservative, the idea of some entity like Google determining what mankind is allowed to know or not know should terrify the shit out of you. Free speech becomes a meaningless concept if only approved speech is ever seen. And if you are cheering this shit on because right now it is helping your team score points against the other team, you are fool. Because once they have that power it is only a matter of time until one of your beliefs ends up on the naughty list too.

(note, that’s not an issue for Kool Aid drinking progs, because they don’t actually have any beliefs beyond GET POWER. It took them less than 24 hours to change “sexual preference” to a bad thing in the dictionary)

The only good thing about this situation is that even though Facebook and Twitter are trying to monopolize the flow of information, they are still bad at it. This week’s attempt at shutting down the New York Post‘s expose will probably go down as the biggest Streisand Effect in history. Their painfully obvious censorship will make far more people pay attention and lend credence to the report. Because after all, they wouldn’t try this hard to squish it, if there wasn’t some meat to it.

October 17, 2020

Actually, his photo has that effect on me too …

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

… except that I still keep the beard. David Warren, on the other hand, is clean shaven:

“Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square founder, in a London cafe in November 2014.” by cellanr is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Every time I see a photograph of Jack Dorsey, I want to wash and shave. It is seldom that another human being has such an hygienic effect on me; especially one I have never personally met. Thanks to him, I may report to gentle reader that, up here in the privacy of the High Doganate (surrounded by jackhammers), I am quite clean-shaven this morning. I was able to resist the temptation to bathe in Dettol, but my shower was the next best thing.

I’m going out on a limb here. I am assuming my reader knows who Jack Dorsey is. (It’s not hard to find his picture.)
The boss of Twitter is among the “deep tech” executives who have, in a less ambiguous way than ever before, shut the accounts of the Trump campaign, within three weeks of a national election, and are blocking those (rather numerous) subscribers who are trying to forward the meaty revelations appearing in the New York Post. Those, incidentally, unambiguously show that one of the presidential candidates (Biden, of all people) is seriously fraudulent and corrupt. Who’d have guessed it? (Well, I did.)

Now, when I write “deep tech,” some reader will accuse me of touting a conspiracy theory. I use this expression on the analogy of “deep state.” Curiously, I don’t think this is a conspiracy at all. In the District of Columbia, where the bureaucratic institutions of the Merican Nanny State are chiefly located, Democrats routinely take well over 90 percent of the vote. Republicans do not necessarily finish second, however. That the labour pool for these institutions is overwhelmingly “progressive,” is something I infer.

Ditto for Silicon Valley. The residents do not need to conspire, although the speed at which identical editorial decisions are reached, is amazing. This I attribute to their electronic hardware.

Some seven years ago, under the influence of well-intended friends, I did a three-month experiment of “being on Twitter.” They said it would immensely increase my “hits,” and it did — while dramatically decreasing attention to them. I was flattered by all the fan-mail I received, because I am a shallow person, but when the three months were up I got off. For I do not covet a mass audience, or that kind of fame. Engaging in live-time battles of wits with other Twitterers is fun for a while, but sooner or later one recovers one’s self-respect. Or at least some people do.

October 15, 2020

QotD: What the GDP is failing to show (even though it’s there)

Filed under: Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There simply isn’t a technology that has come anywhere close to arriving in the hands of actual users as fast as the smartphone and mobile internet. The next closest competitor is the mobile phone itself. All others running distant third and behind.

Our problem is that we know technological revolutions produce growth. Yet economic growth is limp at best, meagre perhaps a better description. So, there’s something wrong here. Either our basic understandings about how growth occurs are wrong and we [are] loathe to agree to that. Not because too much is bound up in that understanding but because too much of it makes sense. The other explanation is that we’re counting wrong.

[…]

We know that we’ve not quite got new products and their falling prices in our estimates of inflation quite correctly. They tend to enter the inflation indices after their first major price falls, meaning that inflation is always overstated. Given that the number we really look at is real growth – nominal growth minus inflation – this means we are consistently underestimating real growth.

[…]

The more we dig into this the more convinced I am that our only real economic problem at present is counting. Everything makes sense if we are counting output and inflation incorrectly, under-estimating the first, over- the second. If we are doing that – and we know that we are, only not quite to what extent – then all other economic numbers make sense. We’re in the midst of a large technological change, we’ve full employment by any reasonable measure, wages and productivity should be rising strongly. If we’re mismeasuring as above then those two are rising strongly, we’re just not capturing it. Oh, and if that’s also true then inequality is lower than currently estimated too.

The thing is, the more we study the details of these questions the more it becomes clear that we are mismeasuring, and mismeasuring enough that all of the claimed problems, the low growth, low productivity rises, low wage growth, simply aren’t there in the first place. And if they ain’t then nothing needs to be done about them, does it? Except, perhaps, count properly.

Tim Worstall, “Where’s All The Economic Growth? Goldman Sachs Blames Apple’s iPhone”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-07-03.

October 9, 2020

Speaking in code and public health

Filed under: Government, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Joshua Hind relates the tragedy that forced US emergency services to wean themselves off their many confusing (and sometimes conflicting) spoken codes and use plain language to help reduce tragic misunderstandings among different emergency response organizations:

“First responders on site of the Lac-Megantic train derailment” by TSBCanada is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In the beginning, it was standardized, and the best-known codes, like “10-4,” were consistent from town to town or state to state. But it didn’t take long for newer codes to emerge, which often meant different things depending on where you were. Efforts to reorganize the codes every 20 years or so only compounded the problem. On a local level, in any one town, it wasn’t a problem. But when cops or firefighters from different towns had to work together it could lead to disaster.

In 1970, a particularly severe wildfire season in California killed 16 people in a 13-day period and laid bare the cost of bad interagency communication. The rat’s nest of codes, abbreviations, and jargon prevented firefighters from different towns from communicating with the speed and clarity a major disaster demands. To address the problem, the U.S. Forest Service created FIRESCOPE, the first complete system for organizing and managing major incidents. One of the primary principles of this new system was to “develop standard terminology.”

Despite this effort, which later went national and then international (the province of Ontario has its own version, the “Incident Management System”) coded language continued to proliferate. Nearly 30 years after FIRESCOPE was launched, on September 11th, incompatible technology, lack of protocols, and a refusal to harmonize terminology likely contributed to the deaths of 121 firefighters who were caught in the collapse of the North Tower because they either didn’t hear or couldn’t understand the warnings that the building was about to fail.

Which brings us back to 2006, and FEMA’s notice to first responders. After decades of asking agencies to stop using coded language, the federal government made funding contingent on compliance. “The use of plain language in emergency response is a matter of public safety,” the memo’s introduction read. “There simply is little or no room for misunderstanding in an emergency situation.” From that point forward, all interdepartmental communication would have to be un-coded. A fire would be called “fire.” A shooting would be “a shooting.” And if you needed help, you’d say “HELP!”

Police, fire departments and paramedics slowly but surely got on board and started using some form of the incident management system which included plain language. As use of the system spread, other sectors, like large music festivals and other live events, began adopting the concepts to better synchronize public safety programs with the first responders who support them. Today it’s not unusual for producers, technicians and event security staff to attend training at the police college right next to fire captains and police officers.

Then COVID-19 happened, and we realized that no one had told Public Health.

October 1, 2020

English lead and the European markets of the 1600s

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, History, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the meteoric rise in lead production in England and Wales from the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe:

The well-preserved ruins of Fountains Abbey, a Cistercian monastery near Ripon in North Yorkshire. Founded in 1132 and dissolved by order of King Henry VIII in 1539. It is now owned by the Royal Trust as part of Studley Royal Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Photo by Admiralgary via Wikimedia Commons.

In the early sixteenth century, England was a minor producer of the stuff. It was widespread and cheap enough to be used for roofing buildings (unlike much of the rest of Europe, where copper was preferred), but the country never produced more than a few hundred tons per year. It didn’t really need to. Like stone in [the game] Dawn of Man, you could amass a stockpile and not worry too much about any leaky bucket problems [where stockpiles need to be replenished due to wastage or other “drains”]. The lead in roofs could always be recycled, and hardly any more was needed for pipes or cisterns. The vast majority of the demand came from Germany, and then the New World, where it was used to extract silver from copper ore. Even this dissipated in the mid-sixteenth century, when the New World silver mines began to switch to using mercury instead.

Yet by 1600, England was producing about 3,000 tons of lead a year, up from just 300 in the 1560s. By 1700, it was producing two thirds of Europe’s lead — a whopping 20,000 tons a year. How?

Unlike copper or iron, there is no evidence that lead mining or processing techniques were imported. If anything, they seem to have emerged from the Mendips, in Somerset, where production costs fell with the introduction of furnace smelting in the 1540s. As well as raising the extraction rates from the ore coming up from the mines, the new furnaces allowed previously unusable ores — found in the easily-accessible waste tips of old mining camps — to be smelted after some simple sifting. Unfortunately, we don’t have a clear idea of who was responsible for the innovation.

Yet the source of England’s supremacy was really, at first, religious. Following the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the melting down of their roofs dumped some 12,000 tons of lead onto England’s markets — at least a year’s worth of Europe’s entire output. Although the immediate effect was to annihilate England’s own lead industry, the medium-term effect was to send the other European producers into disarray. By the 1580s, once the stockpile had depleted, England’s lead producers were among the only ones left standing. The sale of monastic lead ensured that the English retained a foothold in foreign markets, while the cost-saving innovations then gave them the competitive edge. These factors explain, at least, England’s eventual hold over the European lead market.

But there was yet another phenomenon responsible for the industry’s massively increased scale: the development of hand-held firearms. Gunpowder technology was of course centuries old, but cannon had largely fired balls made of stone or cast iron. Muskets and pistols, however, used bullets made of lead. With the proliferation of the weapons over the course of the seventeenth century, lead thus acquired a major leaky bucket problem. Bullets were too costly to recycle, leading to an estimated fifth of Europe’s annual production of lead disappearing every year — a wastage that only increased as armies grew, weapons’ rate of fire improved, and the continent experienced extraordinary violence. Europe lost an estimated fifth of its population to the Thirty Years’ War, and England itself succumbed to civil strife.

England’s lead industry thus had to drastically increase its production just to maintain Europe’s stock of lead, let alone increase it. It was from soldiers entering the fray, to trade bullets across sodden fields, that it owed its extraordinary success.

September 26, 2020

Perdition to Conspirators! Magnificent 14-Barrel Flintlock

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 May 2020

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

Colonel Thomas Thornton was a wealthy and somewhat flamboyant character in England in the late 18th and early 19th century. He commanded a militia unit with which he had some disagreement, and which mutinied against his comment at Roborough Camp in 1795. Some years later, he commissioned this quite unique firearm from Dupe & Company of London.

The gun is a single stock with two flintlock actions, two triggers, and two clusters of seven .30 caliber rifled barrels each. Each trigger fires a complete barrel cluster simultaneously. In addition to the firepower of this very remarkable weapon, he also had it finished in a truly magnificent fashion, including the fantastic line “PERDITION TO CONSPIRATORS” on ons of the barrel clusters — clearly he harbored some resentment towards his unruly militia subordinates even years later.

In addition, he had a second stock made to fit just one lock plate and barrel cluster, for when 14 barrels might be a bit of overkill. That stock is even more decorated that the first, with beautiful wooden relief carvings and the motto “A Verite Gagner“, meaning something to the effect of “Truth From Victory”.

This gun is part of the Liege arms museum’s display of civilian arms, and I’d like to thank them for taking it out of their display so I could show it to you! If you are in Liege, stop in and see the museum:

https://www.grandcurtius.be

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

September 23, 2020

Federal minister admits the Libranos’ plan is a shakedown to “get money from web giants”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist on a rare moment of honesty from Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault on the federal government’s atrocity of an internet regulation plan:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

As Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault prepares an Internet regulation plan that features the prospect of licences for linking, undermining net neutrality, and trade sanctions, he has typically argued that “it’s about fairness”, suggesting that foreign companies unfairly benefit from the Canadian market at the expense of domestic companies. Yet when Guilbeault appeared at a production sector town hall last week, he was far more candid. Guilbeault told the sector that in a minority government situation, his department had to choose between a massive bill changing “everything under the sun” or to slice it up into smaller pieces. Having chosen the piecemeal approach, Guilbeault pointed to his top priority: get money from the foreign Internet companies (his exact words at 47:58 were “the most pressing thing we needed to do was to get oxygen into the system, which is money. And go and get that money where that money is. Which is web giants.”)

In certain respects, the acknowledgement that this amounts to little more than a shakedown makes sense. CRTC Chair Ian Scott has said that Netflix is now probably the largest contributor to film and television production in Canada and the sector enjoyed record production numbers pre-COVID-19, so the data simply does not support claims that the streamers are hurting the industry. As for the news sector, the Minister has failed to deliver millions in promised tax credits and seemingly now wants an alternative that involves creating a licensing regime for linking to content.

Yet if the goal is simply a matter of wanting more money from Internet companies that can be used to support Canadian cultural policies, it is not clear why this is a matter for the Heritage Minister. Everyone wants more money from the Internet companies and countries around the world have a credible argument that the huge global Internet revenues should be more equitably apportioned among them. In other words, the way to “get money from web giants” is for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to tax them on their revenues. Those tax revenues would go into general tax revenues and can be spent in an transparent manner without the need for specialized subsidy programs. This isn’t easy. The U.S. unsurprisingly objects to a potential reduction in its tax revenues, which means that Canada must find allies with other countries in seeking global solutions on tax. Further, Guilbeault candidly recently told a publisher town hall that changes to the tax code is far more difficult than direct program spending.

The problem with Guilbeault’s preference for direct program spending subsidized by Internet companies is that it raises a host of complications and negative effects. For example, mandated Canadian content spending for companies such as Netflix could require the companies to pay into a fund that supports Canadian content production. However, the current rules make it challenging for those same companies to access those funds for their own productions. That leads to either a trade challenge (and the possibility of tariffs against key Canadian sectors such as dairy and steel) for being forced to pay into a system that is inaccessible to foreign providers or a reform to the system that would open things up to foreign providers and in the process undermine the competitiveness of domestic producers and broadcasters who are more reliant on tax credits and funding programs.

September 20, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on the politically deranging effects of social media addiction

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest Weekly Dish installment, Andrew Sullivan decries the extreme polarization of the US electorate and points an accusing finger at social media for making things much worse:

An Electoral College victory for Trump, if he loses the popular vote again, would, in this new elite consensus, prove beyond doubt the centuries’ long grip of “white supremacy”. Some are already calling such a victory illegitimate, even though it would be completely constitutional, under the rules everyone has agreed to. The sickening street violence that the far left has downplayed, and permitted to run riot in major cities could be a mere taste of what is to come — along with ever-stronger white nationalist gangs instigating or responding in kind. (Trump’s toleration of this dangerous right-extremism in the past four years is as unforgivable as the left’s excuses for murderous violence.) But the upshot is the same: we will be lucky if the country doesn’t erupt in large-scale civil violence by the end of all this.

And the reason this dystopian scenario is so credible is not just the fault of these political actors. It’s ours too — thanks to the impact of social media. I think we’ve under-estimated just how deep the psychological damage has been in the Trump era — rewiring the minds of everyone, including your faithful correspondent, in ways that make democratic discourse harder and harder and harder to model. The new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, is, for that reason, a true must-watch. It doesn’t say anything shockingly new, but it persuasively weaves together a whole bunch of points to reveal just how deeply and thoroughly fucked we are. Seriously, take a look.

The doc effectively shows how the information system necessary for democratic deliberation has, in effect, been jerry-rigged in the last decade to prevent any reasoning at all. It’s all about the feels, and the irrationality, and the moment, which is why Trump is so perfectly attuned to his time. And what’s smart about the documentary is that it shows no evil genius behind this unspooling, no sinister plot deliberately to destroy our system of government. One of the more basic motives in American life — making money — is all you now need, the documentary shows, to detonate American democracy at its foundation.

For Facebook and Google and Instagram and Twitter, the business goal quickly became maximizing and monetizing human attention via addictive dopamine hits. Attention, they meticulously found, is correlated with emotional intensity, outrage, shock and provocation. Give artificial intelligence this simple knowledge about what distracts and compels humans, let the algorithms do their work, and the profits snowball. The cumulative effect — and it’s always in the same incendiary direction — is mass detachment from reality, and immersion in tribal fever.

With each passing second online, news stories, graphic videos, incendiary quotes, and outrages demonstrate their stunning utility to advertisers as attention seizers, are endlessly tweaked and finessed by AI to be even more effective, and thereby prime our brains for more of the same. They literally restructure our minds. They pickle us in propaganda. They use sophisticated psychological models to trap, beguile, outrage, and prompt us to seek more of the same.

[…]

And online is increasingly where people live. My average screen time this past week was close to ten hours a day. Yes, a lot of that is work-related. But the idea that I have any real conscious life outside this virtual portal is delusional. And if you live in such a madhouse all the time, you will become mad. You don’t go down a rabbit-hole; your mind increasingly is the rabbit hole — rewired that way by algorithmic practice. And you cannot get out, unless you fight the algorithms to a draw, or manage to exert superhuman discipline and end social media use altogether.

But the thing about algorithms and artificial intelligence is that they don’t rest, they have no human flaws, they exploit every weakness we have, and have already taken over. This is not a future dystopia in which some kind of AI robot takes power and kills us all. It is a dystopia already here — burrowed into our minds, literally disabling the basic mental tools required for democracy to work at all.

If you watch video after video of excessive police force against suspects, for example, and your viewing habits are then reinforced by algorithms so you see no countervailing examples, your view about the prevalence of such excessive force will change, regardless of objective reality. A new study shows how this happens. Watching the videos, even more than reading text about them, raises the percentage of white liberals who believe the cops frequently or always use excessive force by around 20 percentage points. The actual data are irrelevant. The BLM movement this summer was less a racial reckoning, as we’re constantly lectured, than a moment of web-induced mass hysteria.

September 19, 2020

The perils and pitfalls of developing open source software

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Diff, Byrne Hobart looks at the joys and pains-in-the-ass of open source software development:

“How university open debates and discussions introduced me to open source” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

We’re in a strange in-between state where software is increasingly essential, the most important bits of it are built by dedicated volunteers, and there’s no great way to encourage them to a) keep doing this, and b) stay motivated as the work gets less and less fun. That was my main takeaway from Nadia Eghbal’s Working in Public, published this week.

The book is a tour of the open source phenomenon: who builds projects, how they get made and updated, and why. This is an important topic! Almost all of the software I use to write this newsletter is either built from open source products or relies on them: the text is composed in Emacs, on a computer running Linux; I browse the web using Chrome, which mostly consists of open-source Chromium code; my various i-devices run Unix-based OSes (iOS is not open-source, but there are as many open-source implementations of Unix as you want); etc. All of this software Just Works, and I don’t directly pay for any of it. Clearly there are some incentives at work, or it wouldn’t exist in the first place, but generally the more complex an activity is, the harder it is to coordinate without pricing signals. Somehow, open-source projects don’t fall victim to this.

As Working in Public shows, they do face a demoralizing lifecycle. When a project starts, it’s one coder trying to solve a problem they face, and trying to solve it their way. Sometimes, there’s a good reason their preferred solution doesn’t exist yet, and the project languishes. Sometimes, the project catches on, acquiring new users, new contributors, and new bug reports and feature requests.

[…]

Software projects go through this exact cycle: at first, they’re mostly producing and building on “software capital,” code that executes the underlying logic of the process. Over time, more of the work involves integration and compatibility, and as all the easy edge cases get identified, the remaining bugs are a) disproportionately rare (or they would have been spotted by now) and b) disproportionately hard to fix (because they have to be the result of a rare and thus complicated confluence of circumstances). So, over time, a software project falls into the Baumol Trap, where high productivity in the fun stuff produces more and more un-fun work where productivity gains are hard to come by.

This is depressing for project creators. Early on, they have the triumphant experience of building exactly what they want, and solving their nagging problem. And the result is that they’re cleaning up after a bunch of requests from people who are either annoyed that it doesn’t work for them or have unsolicited feedback on how it ought to work. No wonder Linus Torvalds gets so mad. Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.

Emphasis mine, not in the original article.

H/T to Colby Cosh for sharing the link.

September 17, 2020

Britain’s technological edge in the Battle of Britain

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Over at The Register, Gareth Corfield lists some of the advanced technological kit the Royal Air Force had access to during the Battle of Britain in 1940:

Restored Battle of Britain operations room in an underground bunker at former RAF station Uxbridge.
Photo by Ian Mansfield via Wikimedia Commons.

Technology played its part, mostly behind the scenes – yes, we mean the backroom boffins – in equipping Britain to hold firm and defeat the Germans. As today’s commemorations focus on the pilots and ground crew who saw off the Luftwaffe, spare a thought for the technologists whose efforts also saved the western world.

The Chain Home Tower in Great Baddow Chelmsford.
Photo by Stuart166axe via Wikimedia Commons.

Radar and radio

Chief among the technological innovations that gave the RAF the edge was radar. In the 1930s Britain was one of the world leaders in radar (thanks in part to a bizarre and unsuccessful experiment to kill sheep with a death ray) leading to the building of radar stations all around the British coast.

Sir Robert Watson-Watt, today regarded as the father of radar, was instrumental in devising a method of bouncing radio waves off a flying aeroplane to figure out its location. He turned that 1935 concept into the fully operational Chain Home and Chain Home Low air defence networks inside four years.

Without radar, the RAF was totally reliant on humans with binoculars spotting incoming formations of German bombers; radar gave the air force an early warning capability as hostile aircraft formed up over France before crossing the Channel.

Before radar came radio direction-finding. The RAF’s Home Defence Units were first established in the 1920s and mastered the art of pinpointing an aeroplane’s location from radio transmissions made by its pilots. Though less high profile than radar, the HDUs’ activities allowed the RAF to “see” beyond the range of radar as Luftwaffe bomber formations, transmitting to each other over France, formed up ready for a raid over British soil.

Signals intelligence and compsci

Not far behind radar was the crucial role of what was then the Government Communications and Cipher School (GC&CS), based at Bletchley Park. Today the site is home to the National Museum of Computing but in the dark days of the 1940s it was where codebreakers deciphered German military communications.

Breaking Nazi Germany’s encryption was a vast task, and in the days before computers extremely labour intensive; between 9,000 and 12,000 personnel worked at Bletchley during the Second World War. The demands of RAF and other military commanders for speedy decryption of enemy messages directly contributed to the development of early computer science; Alan Turing worked at Bletchley Park, helping devise improvements to electromechanical crypto-breaking machines that resulted in the Bombe, a very early computer.

Why Does Road Construction Take So Long?

Filed under: Environment, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 3 Jun 2020

Explaining how earthwork works, and why road construction often takes so long.

Sign up for Brilliant for free at www.brilliant.org/PracticalEngineering and get 20% the annual premium subscription!

Like it or not, roads are part of the fabric of society. Travel is a fundamental part of life for nearly everyone. Unfortunately, that means road construction is too. But, I hope I can give you a little more appreciation for what’s going on behind the orange cones.

-Patreon: http://patreon.com/PracticalEngineering
-Website: http://practical.engineering

Writing/Editing/Production: Grady Hillhouse
Editing and Direction Help: Wesley Crump

This video is sponsored by Brilliant.

September 14, 2020

QotD: Airportland

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Most readers have spent time in Airportland. We know its particular wan light; the general flatness that makes the incline of jetways such a shock; its salty, sugary, and alcohol-infused cuisine; its detached social ambiance; its modes of travel (the long slog down the moving walkway, the hum of the people-moving carts, the standing-room-only shuttles, the escalators, the diddly-dup diddly-dup of roller bags, and — oh, yes — the airplanes); its fauna (emotional-support animals) and flora (plastic ficus); its mysterious system of governance; its language. Now and then, in Airportland, you spot a first-time visitor — confused by TSA rules, late for her flight, burdened by too many carry-ons. If you think the French are rude to those who don’t speak their language, you haven’t been paying attention in Airportland. We Airportlanders give these newbies no quarter. We sigh in exasperation as they’re sent back through security check for all the things they neglected to remove from their person. When they’re wandering Concourse E looking for their plane, because they thought they were in seat E68 (you know, like in a theater), when actually their flight leaves from B12 and their ticket class is E, we may take pity. But we hardly remember being that person, because once you’ve inhabited Airportland a handful of times, you’re a native.

And like native speakers, we don’t think much about the strange lingo we speak in Airportland. Take Gate. Some years ago, flying out of Peshawar, Pakistan, I passed through a dark set of catacombs inhabited by ruthless security guards and intelligence personnel with perhaps five checkpoints all lit by flickering overhead bulbs. Finally, like C.S. Lewis’s Lucy passing through the wardrobe into Narnia, I emerged into what I thought at first was a harshly lit bus station. It had the requisite faded plastic chairs and desultory counter offering stale packaged snacks and room-temperature soft drinks. Then I saw the sign over the doorway leading outside: GATE. I breathed a sigh of relief. Unlikely as it seemed, I had found my way to Airportland. But why Gate? Well, apparently there once was an actual gate, which stayed closed until the propellers of the plane were safely tied down and the passengers were free to pass through and board from the tarmac. (There were, of course, no “Jetways” — once a trademark, now generic — back in the day.)

Other terms of art abound in Airportland. Take concourse. It’s from the Latin, meaning “flowing together,” and outside Airportland it generally refers to an open area where passageways meet and people gather. In French, concours means “contest.” At the airport, the concourses are simply wide corridors, usually designated by letter, but if you like you can think of them as flowing, since they’re usually filled with a stream of humanity, and it often feels like a contest simply to reach the gate without incident.

Lucy Ferriss, “The Language of Airportland”, Lingua Franca, 2018-06-10.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress