Quotulatiousness

October 30, 2024

Zuckerberg’s bad bet on Virtual Reality

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

Ted Gioia notes the anniversary of Mark Zuckerberg’s worst financial decision — the plunge into virtual reality:

A big birthday happens tomorrow. But don’t expect a celebration.

There will be no party, no disco. There will be no cake, no clown, no bouncy house for the kids. No Marilyn Monroe cooing the birthday song.

Just dead silence. But make no mistake — this is a very expensive birthday.

Exactly three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg placed a huge bet on virtual reality. On October 28, 2021, he even changed the name of his company — from Facebook to Meta.

A new company was born. But that’s now a huge embarrassment.

The name Meta is a lasting reminder of the most foolish decision Zuck ever made — even worse than Facemash or those ugly T-shirts.

Of course, that’s not how he saw things three years ago.

“Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life,” the company announced. “In the metaverse,” Zuckerberg bragged, “you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.”

There was a catch — the tech billionaire needed to convince millions of people to wear virtual reality headsets.

But they looked ridiculous — you literally had to wear blinders if you wanted to enter Mr. Zucker’s neighborhood.

The very next day, I declared that “Meta is for losers”.

“This will never be cool.”

Zuckerberg was “making the wrong bet”, I warned — and gave my reasons:

    The interface looks goofy and cartoonish. Instead of entering the gritty, exciting world of Blade Runner, you’re trapped inside a bad episode of Family Guy …

    And users will look creepy too. You need to lock yourself into a headset to get the full benefit of the metaverse — and there’s no way that Zuckerberg can make that look cool. The people who spend hour after hour in his metaverse will be the subject of jokes and mockery …

    They will be nerds and incels and the most disgruntled members of society, each desperate for escape.

Mark Zuckerberg eventually figured this out. But the company lost more than $20 billion over the next two years in a desperate attempt to convince normal people to abandon reality and enter his fake world.

Even as consumers resisted, Meta refused to admit it had made such a colossal mistake. Just last year, Zuckerberg still denied that he was abandoning virtual reality.

“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse,” he told shareholders. “So I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate.”

Then he did exactly that — retreating from the metaverse he had spent so much money building.

Fortune warned three months ago that Mr. Z’s metaverse “may finally be running out of cash”. Then in August, Meta cancelled the development of a next generation VR headset.

October 22, 2024

VIA Rail’s $1B investment somehow ends up making the trains … slower

Filed under: Cancon, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Chris Selley explains why VIA Rail’s newest locomotives — part of a $1B motive power upgrade program — are making the trains run more slowly in the heaviest-traffic portion of the passenger rail network:

VIA SCV-42 2202 Charger pushing Train 33 through Michael St. in Ottawa over level crossing, 7 March 2023.
Photo by Tiernan Johnson via Wikimedia Commons.

The news this past week for Canada’s long-suffering rail passengers would be funny if it weren’t so utterly pathetic: Government-owned Via Rail’s brand new, nearly $1-billion, much-ballyhooed new Siemens Venture train sets will take longer to navigate the Windsor-Quebec City corridor than their predecessors.

“Via Rail Canada would like to advise its passengers that we are currently experiencing delays on certain trains due to unexpected speed restrictions imposed by CN, the railway infrastructure owner,” a recent email to customers read. “Delays of 30 to 60 minutes are possible on trains travelling on the … corridor.”

The issue concerns signalling at level crossings. CN requires train sets to have a minimum of 32 axles in order to guarantee warning bells and barriers are properly activated as they approach. The Siemens train sets have 24 axles, meaning they have to slow on approach to at least some level crossings — of which there are many hundreds on the corridor — to ensure the signals have indeed activated. These trains were exhaustively tested beforehand on CN rails, which are what Via mainly uses.

The mind boggles as to how this issue could have been missed, and it’s not clear whose fault it is. CN warned Via of the 24-axle issue way back in 2021, according to CN spokesperson Ashley Michnowski, and confirmed the issue once it became official that the Siemens trains wouldn’t meet the 32-axle requirement. Via counters that this all came “without prior notice.”

Either way there’s no excuse. This has been a known issue with these same basic train sets on other North American passenger railways. And maybe the worst part: There’s a workaround technology called a “shunt enhancer” — an alternative way to trip the level-crossing signals remotely — that Siemens actually manufactures. Amtrak announced months ago it was installing them on the same Siemens locomotives Via now uses. Years too late, apparently, Via now says it’s looking at the technology.

Via customers are remarkably forgiving and earnest people, in my experience, but I imagine learning of possible “delays of 30 to 60 minutes” must have set eyes rolling. In my wretched experience in being sentenced to travel Via rail, a 30-minute delay between Ottawa and Toronto counts as a red-letter day. In the week before the new restrictions went into effect on Oct. 11 — just in time for Thanksgiving! — ruinous Via delays included a train that was one hour and 39 minutes late arriving in Toronto from London, which is a two-hour bus ride away. On one Saturday, trains arriving in Toronto from Ottawa and Montreal were on average 71 minutes late.

October 17, 2024

Failing upward into the federal civil service

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

Woke Watch Canada charts the rise and rise of Kimberly Murray from failure to higher-paid failure to the federal civil service on a six-figure annual salary:

Kimberley Murray – Image from APTN News

Kimberly Murray has just wasted $10 million dollars of Canadian taxpayers’ hard-earned money with the blessing of two successive Ministers of Justice, David Lametti and Arif Virani.

By June 2022 — after five years as Executive Director at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a one-year stint as Executive Lead at the Survivors’ Secretariat looking for allegedly missing children — Kimberly Renée Murray had failed to produce the name of a single verifiably-missing residential school child.

Despite this abysmal record of six years looking for the name of a verifiably missing child without being able to find one, Kimberly Murray was appointed by Order in Council as a federal civil servant under the Public Service Employment Act as special adviser to the Minister of Justice at a salary in the range of $228,900 – $268,200 to continue her fruitless search:

    Appointment of KIMBERLY RENÉE MURRAY of Toronto, Ontario, to be special adviser to the Minister of Justice, to be known as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, to hold office during pleasure for a term of two years, effective June 13, 2022.

    Her Excellency the Governor General in Council, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, under paragraph 127.1(1)(c) of the Public Service Employment Act, appoints Kimberly Renée Murray of Toronto, Ontario, to be special adviser to the Minister of Justice, to be known as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, to hold office during pleasure for a term of two years, and fixes her remuneration and certain conditions of employment as set out in the annexed schedule, which salary is within the range ($228,900 – $268,200), effective June 13, 2022.

During the two years of her mandate, while going through her $10 million dollar budget (and according to one of her interviews, knowingly exceeding Treasury Board guidelines), Kimberly Murray failed in her primary mission — i.e., to produce the name of at least one verifiably-missing child.

Despite this spectacular failure, and her admission to the Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples on 21 March 2023 that there are no missing children, the current Minister of Justice, Arif Virani, re-appointed Kimberly Murray for a further six months by Order in Council on 28 May 2024, this time at a salary in the range of $254,000 – $297,800.

September 20, 2024

The Me163 Komet – Rockets Are Dangerous

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published Jun 3, 2024

The story of the Me163 is a complex and multifaceted one, and I have attempted here to draw together a number of different sources into a narrative covering the political, structural, scientific and operational history. Necessarily I will have missed things and probably got things wrong. Where I know a mistake has been made, you’ll find it in the pinned comment marked “snagging” – one obvious example is Winkle Brown flew a “sharp” start after the war ended on an Me163 in Germany, and a towed flight in the UK, which I missed.

The below then is an extremely limited subset of the resources I’ve pulled on:

Me163 Rocket Interceptor – Stephen Ransom and Hans-Herman Cammann – not for the faint of heart, a book with brilliant nuggets, a drunken editor and a lot of very pretty pictures. This was my primary source.
Rocket Fighter – Marno Ziggler – Now out of print, this is a Hitler Jugend‘s Own Adventure story most of which has some truth in it but a lot of which is Marno wishing to be in his early 20s and flying for the Führer again. You can find it online fairly easily.
The kids probably haven’t got a clue what a video tape is, never mind Betamax https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/vh… – Betamax vs VHS
Baxter, AD: Walter Rocket Motors for Aircraft, RAE Technote Aero 1668, September 1945 – a Technical note that’s incredibly hard to get hold of, but which I managed to find, quite by chance, in some papers I got years ago. Probably available from the UK National Archives still.
http://www.walterwerke.co.uk/walter/i… – a fantastic archive of all things Walter but it isn’t an https site as a warning.
https://hushkit.net/2019/03/29/the-li… – The coal powered bomber rammer P.13
https://donhollway.com/me-163/ – Bat out of Hell – great website for images of the Me163 as imagined in the Artists’ fever dreams
WW2 Gun Camera: 8th Air Force VS Mess… – Gun Cam Footage of the Me163 and Me262s being shot at and down by various USAAF pilots.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection… – Air and Space Museum have their usual, brilliant photos and terrible descriptions.

August 27, 2024

Food at your regional end-of-summer fair/exhibition/extravaganza

Filed under: Food, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For us in the Greater Toronto Area, it’s the Canadian National Exhibition but for a lot of Americans it’s their State Fair. James Lileks considers the sad fact that the interesting and exotic food choices at these shindigs is … overrated:

“Fruity Cereal Tenders”, one of the weird food offerings at the 2024 Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.
Photo from blogTO, “Here’s all the outrageous food and drinks at the 2024 CNE”

I do not understand is why people go to the Fair and queue up at the hamburger stand. I often think this as I am in the queue at the hamburger stand.

After all, there’s so much more to eat. Corn dogs, for example. A low-flavor tube of minced abattoir sweepings, dipped in batter, plunged in oil, and served on a stick with a sharp point on the end. When you get to the last few bites, you either have to shimmy the butt of the corn dog up the skewer, or sword-swallow the thing so the sharp point spears your soft palate. Condiments? Why, yes — a smear of ketchup, or a smear of mustard, or, if you’re one of those people who believe in grabbing life by the lapels and shouting give me all you got, you have both.

Never in my life have I ever thought “I could go for a Corn Dog right about now,” but put me at the Fair and I have to eat one within five minutes of entering the grounds. It’s like the pistol shot that starts a race, and, like a bullet, goes through you just as fast.

It’s the same with mini-donuts. When I was doing the trivia contest at the newspaper stage, one of the questions was “how many mini-donuts can you eat before you are overcome with self-loathing?” The answer varies, I suppose, according to how much pre-existing self-loathing you bring to the job. Maybe you’re already hating yourself for eating a Sweet Martha’s bucket of cookies, a popular item at the fair. It has a handle so you can amble around as you eat. One of these years I expect it will come with a yoke and a spring-loaded tab that pops them in your you at present intervals, for hands-free consumption. My friends, a bucket of cookies is to personal girth management as a cup of quarters at a casino is to financial planning.

This year’s hot new item is “deep fried ranch dressing”, which seems impossible, like “sugar-dusted humidity on a stick”. How do they do that? Just pour the ranch in the roiling oil and and scoop out a globule?

“Well, first you shape the dressing into patties, then — ”

Wait, no, you cannot shape dressing. It defies your attempts to give it form, unless you’ve added a thickening element. (Of course, everything they serve at the Fair is a thickening element, in a sense.) It’s supposed to be delicious, but I wouldn’t eat one without first unbuttoning my shirt and smearing conducting gel on my chest, just to save time. Maybe even draw a dotted line on my sternum.

Updated to add the correct URL. Management would like to apologize for this error. The people responsible for it have been sacked.

August 9, 2024

A crisis of competence

Filed under: Business, Government, Military, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds on one of the biggest yet least recognized issues of most modern nations — our overall declining institutional competence:

Almost everywhere you look, we are in a crisis of institutional competence.

The Secret Service, whose failures in securing Trump’s Butler, PA speech are legendary and frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example. (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)

The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.

Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world.

The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn’t build a workable floating pier in Gaza.

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner crew ship approaches the International Space Station on the company's Orbital Flight Test-2 mission

And of course, Boeing, whose Starliner spacecraft is stuck, apparently indefinitely, at the International Space Station. (Its crew’s six-day mission, now extended perhaps into 2025, is giving off real Gilligan’s Island energy.) At present, Starliner is clogging up a necessary docking point at the ISS, and they can’t even send Starliner back to Earth on its own because it lacks the necessary software to operate unmanned – even though an earlier build of Starliner did just that.

Then there are all the problems with Boeing’s airliners, literally too numerous to list here.

Roads and bridges take forever to be built or repaired, new airports are nearly unknown, and the Covid response was extraordinary for its combination of arrogant self-assurance and evident ineptitude.

These are not the only examples, of course, and readers can no doubt provide more (feel free to do so in the comments) but the question is, Why? Why are our institutions suffering from such widespread incompetence? Americans used to be known for “know how,” for a “can-do spirit”, for “Yankee ingenuity” and the like. Now? Not so much.

Americans in the old days were hardly perfect, of course. Once the Transcontinental Railroad was finished and the golden spike driven in Promontory, Utah, large parts of it had to be reconstructed for poor grading, defective track, etc. Transport planes full of American paratroopers were shot down during the invasion of Sicily by American ships, whose gunners somehow confused them for German bombers. But those were failures along the way to big successes, which is not so much the case today.

But if our ancestors mostly did better, it’s probably because they operated closer to the bone. One characteristic of most of our recent failures is that nobody gets fired. (Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle did resign, eventually, but nobody fired her, and I think heads should have rolled on down the line).

August 6, 2024

The CrowdStrike outage and regulatory capture

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

Peter Jacobsen discusses the July technical and financial fiasco as a faulty software patch from CrowdStrike took down huge segments of the online economy and how regulatory capture may explain why the outage was so widespread:

“CrowdStrike outage at Woolworths in Palmerston North” by Kiwi128 is marked with CC0 1.0 .

On July 19th, something peculiar struck workers and consumers around the world. A global computer outage brought many industries to a sudden halt. Employees at airports, financial institutions, and other businesses showed up to work only to find that they had no access to company systems. The fallout of the outage was huge. Experts estimate that it totaled businesses $5 billion in direct costs.

The company responsible, CrowdStrike, was also severely impacted. Shareholders lost about $25 billion in value, and some are suing the company. The outage has led to expectations of, and calls for, stricter regulations in the industry.

But how did the blunder of one company lead to such a massive outage? It turns out that the supposed solution of “regulation” may have been one of the primary culprits.

Regulatory Compliance

CrowdStrike, ironically, is a cybersecurity firm. In theory, they protect business networks and provide “cloud security” for online cloud computing systems.

Cloud security, in and of itself, is likely a service that businesses would demand on the market, but the benefit of increased security isn’t the only reason that businesses go to CrowdStrike. On their own website, the company boasts about one of its most important features: regulatory compliance.

[…]

When experts who have relationships with companies are called in to help write regulations, they may do so in a way favorable to industry insiders rather than outsiders. Thus, regulation is “captured” by the subjects of regulation.

We can’t say with certainty that this particular outage is the result of an intentional regulatory capture by CrowdStrike, but it seems clear that CrowdStrike’s dominance is, at least in part, a result of the regulatory environment, and, like most large tech companies, they’re not afraid to spend money lobbying.

In any case, without cumbersome regulations, it’s unlikely that cybersecurity would take on such a centralized form. Despite this, as is often the case, issues caused by regulation often lead to more calls for regulation. As economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out:

    Popular opinion ascribes all these evils to the capitalistic system. As a remedy for the undesirable effects of interventionism they ask for still more interventionism. They blame capitalism for the effects of the actions of governments which pursue an anti-capitalistic policy.

So despite the reflexive call for regulation that happens after any disaster, perhaps the best way to avoid problems like this would be to argue that in terms of regulation, less is more.

Me262 – Why It Was Rubbish

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published Feb 16, 2024

A brief and sober discussion of the multi-faceted nature of aircraft development in the 3rd Reich, and an assessment of the aircraft itself in context of the political and organisational challenges and changes from 1939-1945. Or to put it another way, why it was rubbish from start to finish.

Timestamps
00:00 – 00:22 – Trailer
00:22 – 01:49 – Introduction
01:49 – 05:14 – Willy Messerschmitt’s World Falls Apart
05:18 – 08:03 – Udet’s Flying Circus
08:07 – 11:26 – Me262’s Development
11:26 – 11:32 – Popcorn
11:33 – 13:37 – The Me163 Affair
13:42 – 19:30 – Milch Tries to Break His Willy
19:33 – 30:18 – Hitler’s Big Brain Moment
30:21 – 42:03 – Speeds and Feed of the Me262
42:05 – 46:53 – Operational History
46:54 – 48:50 – Survivor’s Club
(more…)

July 29, 2024

W.H. Smith attempts to rebrand their stores to “raise awareness” or something

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

British bookseller from time immemorial, W.H. Smith, apparently decided that the corporate branding they’d been using since the 18th century was just too boring for modern consumers, so they brainstormed a daring new design for the 21st century … that sucked.

When the British retailer, W.H. Smith, rebranded its logo last year, confusion and bafflement ensued.

The high street fixture, its Times New Roman logo mostly unchanged since 1792, earned its reputation by selling books, stationery, and for fleecing bleary-eyed travellers in airports. Through sheer zombie persistence, W.H. Smith remains a constant of British retail. Never mind the threadbare carpets, the general dilapidation, or the desperate staff forced to offer you a bottle of knock-off perfume with your twenty Lambert and Butler.

W.H. Smith endures because its business model concentrates on a captive audience. Go to an airport or a hospital — any place in which people cannot escape — and you’ll find a W.H. Smith reliably charging double for a Lucozade Sport. W.H. Smith will outlive Great Britain. The retailer’s existence — puzzling to the most scientific of minds — defies natural law.

Last year, creative designers attempted to play God. They sanded off the logo’s regnant edges and stripped “Smiths” altogether. The dynamic branding screamed minimalism: a plain, white “WHS” stamped on to a blue background.

I’d imagine the big revelation underwhelmed those paying for the work. “That’s interesting.” Or “It’s certainly different“.

Mockery ensued. “Baffling” said one. “It looks like the NHS logo,” observed another.

No doubt the designers plotted a revolution in design. Of course, these “creatives” — invariably young and invariably uncreative — fancied their vandalism as “forward thinking” and “dynamic”. I’ll wager at least one thought the new logo addressed the plight of some faraway progressive cause to which they subscribe. The public, unschooled in the most voguish developments in design, concluded: The new logo is shit.

W.H. Smith soon backtracked. Passive-aggressive defences of the staid new logo melted into sulky denial. It’s just a trial, they mewled.

A breathless spokesman revealed the truth. Or some addled version of the truth. The fresh signs, they revealed, were “designed to raise awareness of the products W.H. Smith sells”. What else, I wonder, is a shop sign meant to achieve?

The phrase “raising awareness” is one of a litany of linguistic evasions which say nothing. By shoehorning that ghastly phrase into a sentence, the speaker hopes to evade criticism. Reader, I’m not ploughing through a duty-free bottle of Chateau le Peuy Saincrit in the obscene Bulgarian sunshine. I’m raising awareness of the plight of southern French winemakers.

That passive-aggressive statement of the obvious — our shop sign raises awareness of our shop — you plebeian fools — crystallises the creative industry’s age problem.

Three-quarters of the creative industry is under 45. Perhaps this age gap (not the sexually consensual and fun kind) explains why so much of what we see and hear is cliché-riddled evasive hoo-hah.

When talking to anyone under 45, I mentally add a question mark to the end of their sentence. Millennials and Zoomers avoid declarative sentences. Listen. Almost every utterance sounds like a question. Further to this quirk, I note the adverbs and filler words. Young people stuff their speech with “basically”, “actually”, “literally”, and “like”. Zoomers are especially militant. They eschew capital letters. Capital letters are grammatical fascism. Full stops reveal a latent proclivity for Zyklon-B. Influencers add another tic to this repertoire of anxiety and unsurety. They crackle their voice as if a frog has lodged in their throat.

July 25, 2024

M14: America’s Worst Service Rifle – What Went Wrong?

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 15, 2024

While the US never adopted a significant variation of the M1 Garand (excluding sniper models), testing continued on new iterations and features throughout the war. By the time the war ended, the US military had some specific ideas about what it wanted in a new service rifle. That being, something lighter, capable of automatic fire, and to have one single platform replace the M1 Carbine, M3A1 Grease Gun, M1 Garand, and M1918A2 BAR. New rifles to meet these requirements were developed by Springfield, Remington, and Winchester, ultimately competing against the FN FAL for US service use. The Springfield T44E4 won out (barely) and was adopted on May 1, 1957 as the M14 rifle.

Production of the M14 was plagued by problems, largely due to quality control lapses. Early in production there were heat treatment problems that led to sheared looking lugs and broken receivers. Once those were addressed, the main problem became one of accuracy, with a shocking number of M14s failing to meet the 5.6 MOA minimum accuracy standard. Ultimately production ended in 1963 with 1.38 million M14s produced, and the M16 took over as the new American service rifle.
(more…)

June 3, 2024

The “hallucination” problem that bedevils all current AI implementations

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Orlowski explains the one problem shared among all of the artificial intelligence engines currently available to the general public:

Gemini’s ultra-woke responses to requests quickly became a staple of social media postings.

AI Overviews hasn’t had the effect that Google hoped for, to say the least. It has certainly garnered immediate internet virality, with people sharing their favourite answers. Not because these are helpful, but because they are so laughable. For instance, when you ask AI Overviews for a list of fruits ending with “um” it returns: “Applum, Strawberrum and Coconut”. This is what, in AI parlance, is called a “hallucination”.

Despite having a market capitalisation of $2 trillion and the ability to hire the biggest brains on the planet, Google keeps stumbling over AI. Its first attempt to join the generative-AI goldrush in February last year was the ill-fated Bard chatbot, which had similar issues with spouting factual inaccuracies. On its first live demo, Bard mistakenly declared that the James Webb Space Telescope, launched only in 2021, had taken “the first pictures” ever of Earth from outside the solar system. The mistake wiped $100 billion off Google’s market value.

This February, Google had another go at AI, this time with Gemini, an image and text generator. The problem was that it had very heavy-handed diversity guardrails. When asked to produce historically accurate images, it would instead generate black Nazi soldiers, Native American Founding Fathers and a South Asian female pope.

This was “a well-meaning mistake”, pleaded The Economist. But Google wasn’t caught unawares by the problems inherent to generative AI. It will have known about its capabilities and pitfalls.

Before the current AI mania truly kicked off, analysts had already worked out that generative AI would be unlikely to improve user experience, and may well degrade it. That caution was abandoned once investors started piling in.

So why is Google’s AI putting out such rotten results? In fact, it’s working exactly as you would expect. Don’t be fooled by the “artificial intelligence” branding. Fundamentally, AI Overviews is simply trying to guess the next word it should use, according to statistical probability, but without having any mooring to reality. The algorithm cannot say “I don’t know” when asked a difficult question, because it doesn’t “know” anything. It cannot even perform simple maths, as users have demonstrated, because it has no underlying concept of numbers or of valid arithmetic operations. Hence the hallucinations and omissions.

This is less of a problem when the output doesn’t matter as much, such as when AI is processing an image and creates a minor glitch. Our phones use machine learning every day to process our photos, and we don’t notice or care much about most of the glitches. But for Google to advise us all to start eating rocks is no minor glitch.

Such errors are more or less inevitable because of the way the AI is trained. Rather than learning from a curated dataset of accurate information, AI models are trained on a huge, practically open-ended data set. Google’s AI and ChatGPT have already scraped as much of the web as they can and, needless to say, lots of what’s on the web isn’t true. Forums like Reddit teem with sarcasm and jokes, but these are treated by the AI as trustworthy, as sincere and correct explanations to problems. Programmers have long used the phrase “GIGO” to describe what is going on here: garbage in, garbage out.

AI’s hallucination problem is consistent across all fields. It pretty much precludes generative AI being practically useful in commercial and business applications, where you might expect it to save a great deal of time. A new study of generative AI in legal work finds the additional verification steps now required to ensure the AI isn’t hallucinating cancel out the time saved from deploying it in the first place.

“[Programmers] are still making the same bone-headed mistakes as before. Nobody has actually solved hallucinations with large-language models and I don’t think we can”, the cognitive scientist and veteran AI sceptic, Professor Gary Marcus, observed last week.

Another problem is now coming into view. The AI is making an already bad job worse, by generating bogus information, which then pollutes the rest of the web. “Google learns whatever junk it sees on the internet and nothing generates junk better than AI”, as one X user put it.

I was actually contacted by someone on LinkedIn the other day asking if I’d be interested in doing some AI training for US$25 per hour. I really, really need the money, but I’m unsure about being involved in AI at all …

May 29, 2024

A visit to failure pier

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CDR Salamander has some advice for any US congresscritter with a spine (unfortunately, that probably means none of them):

This old operational planner has one bit of advice to Congress in their role of having oversight of the Executive Branch; subpoena the Decision Brief for the Gaza pier operation.

This was on the lowest of low scale of military operations, Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Response. There is little to nothing classified about any of this rump of a capability. Call in member of the Joint Staff who were involved in this planning — and I would prefer if you could find a few terminal O5/6 to testify as well. You might actually enjoy some candor.

The Commander’s Intent, the Higher Direction and Guidance, the Planning Assumptions, the Constraints and Restraints, the Critical Vulnerability analysis, etc. It is all there. If not, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense should tell the American people to their face.

This is a larger issue than anything happening in that impossible corner of the globe. Over the weekend, we saw yet more indications of an empire in decline deteriorating from bad to pathetic.

From the time the first load came off the pier, the aid barely made it past 300 meters until it disappeared into Hamasistan.

I’ll go ahead and tap the sign;

[…]

Generally this latest act in this other-end-of-the-Med-from-the-Greeks tragedy that has unfolded in front of everyone. As we saw at the top at Ashkelon Beach, first some ancillary bits floated over to Israel as the Eastern Mediterranean reminded everyone it is at the eastern end of a big sea with weather and waves and stuff.

We then found out that three soldiers were injured in a forklift accident. Just to add insult to injury, as the locals laughed, it appears more of the business end decided to try to make it to Haifa on its own.

[…]

I’m not sure how you scatter Army property all over the Eastern Med without a boot getting dry, but maybe I’m wrong. Gaza is lava, and all.

Empires don’t often die in a blaze of glory, no. More often than not they end in simpering apologies and excuses from poor leaders putting the wrong people in positions they have no place being, and when they fail — there is no accountability.

April 23, 2024

KICKING IT TO THE MOON? Canada’s Military Procurement: A history of broken promises

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Esprit de Corps Canadian Military Magazine
Published Apr 22, 2024

The Liberal government have finally released their long awaited Defence Policy Update which promises billions of dollars in increased spending for the CAF. Critics wonder if such promises are worth the paper they are printed on. History says that when it comes to military budgets, promises are made to be broken. Good Grief.
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April 15, 2024

The MOST INCOMPETENT Railroad You’ve Ever Seen!

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Southern Plains Railfan
Published Jan 6, 2024

In today’s video, we recount the time Penn Central let nearly all of Maine’s potato harvest rot in Selkirk yard; ruining thousands of lives and nearly taking down other railroads in the process.

Merch Shop: http://okieprint.com/SPR/shop/home

April 14, 2024

More evidence of Canada’s dwindling state capacity – not enough judges

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Gurney discussed this issue along with several others in this week’s Line podcast (highly recommended listening/watching, by the way):

Superior Court of Justice building on University Avenue in Toronto (formerly the York County Court House).

An evolving line of defence we see from the federal Liberals is that they’re actually doing a great job. It’s those darned provincial premiers that are screwing things up.

We touched on this in our last dispatch. And you know what? There’s some truth to it. Some, I stress. A lot of issues that are much vexing Canadians today aren’t fully or even primarily in federal jurisdiction. Health care and housing are two obvious examples. Canada is a complicated place, and the Liberals no doubt prefer to not talk about things that they’ve done that have exacerbated challenges faced by other orders of government. But the basic point is fair: Justin Trudeau ain’t to blame for all that ails you. Or at least, the blame ought to be spread around some.

This national disgrace, though, lands squarely on him.

You might have read about the shortage of judges across the country. It’s a pretty niche issue, so you might have missed it. Even if you’ve heard about it, you may not have paid much attention to it. Most Canadians won’t have much contact with the criminal justice system over their lives, let alone make their careers in it. But the crux of the issue is this: appointing judges to provincial superior courts, where many of the most serious matters are heard, is in the federal jurisdiction. Solely. Ditto appointments to the courts of appeal: totally in the federal jurisdiction. And the feds have fallen way behind on filling vacancies and aren’t appointing judges fast enough to erase the backlog. Despite a spate of recent appointments, there are dozens of vacancies across the country. These are funded positions that ought to be filled and overseeing cases. But they aren’t, entirely because the feds haven’t made the necessary appointments. That’s the issue.

A lack of judges is creating bottlenecks in the justice system. Arrests are being made and charges are being laid and cases are being prepared and then … nothing happens. Because you can’t hold a trial if there isn’t a judge available to oversee it.

The Toronto Star‘s Jacques Gallant has established something of a bleak speciality in his recent reporting. He’s written a series of articles in recent months documenting serious criminal cases that are being thrown out of court, with the accused set free, because their trial has been delayed so much that it cannot be completed before the Supreme Court-ordered limit for a “reasonable” wait for a trial runs out. That’s 18 months for more minor issues, and 30 months for serious ones.

To be clear: the decision to throw out the cases is, in a legal sense, correct. Indeed, it’s mandatory. The Supreme Court determined what a hard limit should be, and a case that exceeds that is dead. Full stop. That’s the law of the land. The judges forced to preside over these dismissals are not to blame, and are increasingly venting their frustration in their rulings. They’re mortified, and they’re criticizing the government in unusually blunt terms, to put it mildly. You don’t often read court rulings that come off more like op-eds, but we live in weird times.

But it’s a good thing that they’re saying something. Because these vacancies are having appalling real-world consequences. Gallant wrote recently about a case that I felt would mark the low point in the entire embarrassment. A woman had accused a man of raping her. She did a brave thing and reported it. The police believed her and made an arrest. The Crown reviewed the evidence and believed her, and proceeded with a trial. A jury believed her, and after considering the evidence against the accused and hearing his defence, convicted him of the crime.

And then the judge tossed the case, setting aside the verdict and letting the accused go free, innocent in the eyes of the law. Because the clock had run out.

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