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  Happy Stanislav Petrov day! Petrov was responsible for overseeing an early warning system and judging whether a retaliatory nuclear strike should be launched in the event of an attack against the Soviet Union. The system indicated an attack was inbound. He judged it to be a false alarm, and disobeyed his orders. There's a lot more to the story, but the part I find most interesting is how it was suppressed. To quote the wiki article: According to Petrov, he received no reward because the...

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  I spent a few hours yesterday trying to do all the KYC stuff with an online payment processor (I'll share the reason why in a while 😉​). Website verification was one of their required steps, but their crawler got caught and banned by my anti-scraper defenses, and I couldn't figure out which bot was theirs, so I temporarily disabled it that system and unbanned all the IPs that might have been theirs. I forgot to reenable it after verification was complete. Traffic to my webserver spiked...

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  I recently did a review of what I think might be the entire body of literature concerning watermarking and steganography using LLMs. I'm still interested in the applications for steganography despite otherwise having no desire to use LLMs. In environments where cryptography is restricted you would be able to hide arbitrary ciphertext in plausible cover text, making it effectively impossible to restrict private communication if any communication is allowed. I think that's conducive to so...

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  Once more, for the people who missed my previous rants on the topic: It's okay to adopt the stance that age verification is a bad idea. You don't need to weaken your position by saying it might be okay if they eventually used Zero-Knowledge Proofs or pseudonymous systems. First, such schemes aren't suitable for this domain even at a theoretical level. If you think they might then you don't understand the problem. Second, even if ZKP was an applicable solution, it would still p...

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  Today I learned that there is an AI data center being built in the Indian city of Raipur, where I used to live. Raipur is very hot (Wikipidia says the record high is 47.9C), and I'm pretty sure that doesn't take the effect of humidity into account. It wasn't always this hot, but it gets a little worse each year and that has added up. The majority of the city's electricity is sourced from coal power plants, and for a variety of reasons its grid is not especially stable, with par...

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  I was today years old when I learned that the perpetrators of the Jonestown massacre used "Flavor Aid" to poison their followers. It was misidentified as Kool-Aid by police. Nearly 50 years later we're still using Drinking the Kool-Aid to suggest cult-like behaviour.

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  The extent to which slop has permeated everything tech-related has made a domain that is both my profession and hobby pretty unbearable for a while now. I felt like I was reclaiming some space for myself by figuring out effective ways to detect, ban, or poison scrapers that requested resources from my server, but that too became unrewarding after a while. I still believe that it's important to resist these technologies, but I'd prefer to direct my energy towards rather than against som...

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  I just sent my first-ever DMCA takedown request because I discovered that some slop/aggregator website is hosting a complete copy of one of my blog articles but with tons of ads/tracking scripts 😠​

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  Lots of people have compared today's shitty AI to radium, and asbestos, and lead. Those are fair comparisons, but hear me out... What if LLMs are more like homeopathy? We've known that homeopathy doesn't work any better than a placebo for decades, and yet here we are. People still study to become homeopathic practitioners. People still choose it over treatments which have been validated by rigorous scientific studies. People still get rich selling sugar pills, and spend a portion...

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  A chat with @davidbenque about the modern use of the sparkle emoji to signify #AI led me to wonder if there was a good way to track exactly when this trend started. It then occurred to me that because emojis are just a type of text, usage of sparkles should show up in google trends. Sure enough, it did. At first I thought we might have passed "peak sparkle", because interest appeared to decline after February, but that seems to be an artifact of having generated the graph halfway thr...

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  A friend sent me a link to some music on youtube ("1 hour Iranian Jazz"). It was just a still image with some music in the background, a classic pattern for slop music, so I was suspicious. I looked in the description and saw some jazz musicians I recognized, so I figured maybe it was just an audio recording from some live session that got thrown on youtube. After listening for a bit, I started to get the sense that it wasn't who it claimed to be. One of the listed musicians was...

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  At some point in the past I put World Frog Day on my calendar because silly events like that are an easy way to make my future self laugh. Unfortunately, it seems that the guy who runs the World Frog Day website has gone all-in on "AI art", aka #slop. His "art" page is a bunch of frog images generated with MidJourney, and I guess he's already gotten so much hate mail about it that he wrote up a page explaining "The Environmental Benefits of AI-Generated Art" w...

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  I find it very distressing to see that ImageMagick is included in the "open-slopware" list, not due to "purity culture" as boosters propose, but because of good old-fashioned threat modeling. It is incredibly difficult (bordering on impossible) to write large projects in the C language without introducing memory-safety issues that can introduce Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities. Code for converting between exotic media formats is particularly prone to bugs which e...

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  happy Suez Canal Obstruction day to those who celebrate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Suez_Canal_obstruction #boatStuck