Balloon Juice | Major Major Major Major, Author at Balloon Juice

Major Major Major Major, aka J. Tynan Burke, has written at Balloon Juice since 2018. He focuses on science, technology, and fiction. Learn more at www.tynanburke.com

Greetings from Turtle Bay

by Major Major Major Major| September 20, 20217:03 pm| 41 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

…where the United Nations General Assembly has begun! This is always a fun time in the neighborhood, mostly because I like the vibe, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also get a kick out of hearing people complain about traffic disruptions in Midtown Manhattan.

Today’s big disruption struck a little close to home, though—I wasn’t allowed to leave my block because somebody called “the president” was going to be passing by. I believe this is the closest I have been to a president (and the closest I’m likely to come for a while):

Greetings from Turtle Bay — (click to embiggen)

What a jerk!

What’s going on in your neighborhood?

Greetings from Turtle BayPost + Comments (41)

California Recall Ballots Are Coming Soon (And Slightly Tricky)

by Major Major Major Major| August 12, 202112:50 pm| 132 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It

This is just a quick PSA, since I guess we haven’t had one. The election to recall Governor Gavin Newsom is coming up! It will be on September 14th, and ballots start going out August 16th.

You can vote by mail or in person.

For voting by mail: If you’re registered to vote, you will receive a mail-in ballot at the address you have registered with the state. Be sure to sign and date your election envelope before sending it back. Drop your completed ballot off at any U.S. Postal Service mailbox, or at the post office. There will also be ballot drop-off locations available in your county. Check with your county’s election office for details.

For in-person voting: Some counties have in-person voting sites that will open Sept. 4. Many also offer curbside ballot drop-off. Again, check with your county’s election office for details.

There are two questions on the ballot.

“Shall GAVIN NEWSOM be recalled (removed) from the office of Governor?” Yes or no.

Then, there’s a list of 46 candidates who could succeed Newsom if he is recalled. Voters can choose one.

These are counted in a weird way! If the first question succeeds, whoever gets the most votes on the second question will become governor. Currently ahead in the polls at 18% is Larry Elder, a conservative talk-show host whose only deflection from Trumpism is that he doesn’t think the election was stolen. The Newsom campaign says you should leave the second question blank, which is uh… huh? I get that there are no high profile Dems on the ballot, but I think this guy is right on the money:

Dr. Isaac Hale, a former pollster who is currently a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara’s Blum Center and an expert on the Newsom recall, said some Democrats could instead opt to pursue a harm reduction approach.

“I do think some highly engaged Democrats will engage in harm reduction and will pick the Republican candidate they perceive as most moderate, or perhaps some will even pick the Republican they think is least likely to win re-election in 2022,” he said. “Of course, then you’re gambling on what that unelectable person could do in a year, so more may opt for picking the most moderate candidate.”

Most agree that the most moderate Republican candidate at the bottom of the ballot is former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who won two terms in a blue city and is the only major candidate to date who has submitted multiple detailed policy proposals on issues ranging from homelessness to taxes to restaurant relief.

Vote your conscience, I guess, but I know what I would do–everything I could to not subject the most populous state to Larry Elder’s ‘leadership’.

California Recall Ballots Are Coming Soon (And Slightly Tricky)Post + Comments (132)

Artificial Intelligence & You: A Picture Worth A Dozen Words

by Major Major Major Major| July 28, 20212:29 pm| 142 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

One aspect of AI that gets a lot of attention is image generation. This makes sense–it’s flashy; the results are easy to see at a glance; it’s lightly horrifying because image generation is supposed to be a human thing, damn it! Here’s an example from a popular project. This person does not exist:

The latest craze in this area is text-to-image. The neural networks for this are evolving rapidly, and lately have been producing some pretty impressive results.

VQGAN + CLIP “painting of small cabin in the middle of snowy mountains in the winter at night in the style of disney trending on artstation | unreal engine” pic.twitter.com/NORfb5ZEIg

— AK (@ak92501) June 19, 2021

How does this software work? What can its eccentricities tell us about AI? About the future? Join me below the fold for a discussion of Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs…

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Artificial Intelligence & You: A Picture Worth A Dozen WordsPost + Comments (142)

The simplest GAN is actually two neural networks pitted against each other. One, the generator, creates the images; the other, the discriminator, says when the images are ready. Seems simple enough. But how is this network trained? Let’s use the This Person Does Not Exist GAN as an example.

We begin with a dataset of head shots and two blank-slate networks. Then… it’s a bit involved. First we train the discriminator to identify pictures of head shots, just like you’d train any other such network. Next, we have the generator make some images, and train the discriminator further by telling it that these are fake. An earlier post gets into what this process looks like. It is as straightforward and as well-understood as these things come. And then we flip the script, having the generator create images until it can fool the discriminator into thinking they’re head shots.

We repeat this whole process again and again and again. At the end, we have an AI that can generate head shots.

As is common in this field, narrow-purpose networks tend to perform better. You can compare the two outputs above: the dedicated head shot generator creates images that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing, at least without close inspection. Conversely, the more general text-to-image network, called CLIP + VQGAN, is impressive for what it is, but obviously has a long way to go.

One interesting thing about CLIP + VQGAN is how much better it works when you find the right magical incantations. In the tweet above, you can see that the prompt is “painting of small cabin in the middle of snowy mountains in the winter at night in the style of disney trending on artstation | unreal engine”–this is because adding “trending on artstation” and “unreal engine” steer the network in a more painterly and recognizable direction. Working with it is like trying to extract the right wish from a deaf genie, to paraphrase some tweet I saw. This is because the guts of a neural network are ineffable; it attaches meaning to things in a way that we do not, or at least, in a way that it cannot tell us about. (I’ve covered this in some other posts on this topic, but I love this as an illustration.)

So, where do we go from here? Obviously CLIP + VQGAN won’t be taking over the art world any time soon, but you can see how it makes a great resource for visual artists, just as text generation can be a great resource for writers.

Miscellany

Here’s another good one:

This brought some flashbacks … “child drawing of nuclear war” #MachineLearning #aiart #VQGAN pic.twitter.com/BFSRsf4JYM

— david gallay (@svengali) July 16, 2021

#LatentVisions is another network that’s doing pretty impressive stuff.

Just for fun, I also asked the text generation AI GPT-3 about GANs. Seed text in bold:

What is a GAN? A GAN, or Generative Adversarial Network, is a machine learning model that is used for generating realistic looking images, audio, and text. GANs can be used to create more convincing fake data for training a machine learning model. GANs consist of two neural networks, a generator and a discriminator. The generator attempts to learn how to output realistic looking images. The discriminator attempts to learn how to distinguish between real images and fake ones.

What are the benefits of GANs? GANs have several benefits that make them attractive to researchers and companies. They can be trained with unsupervised learning, and they can generate new images based on existing ones. They can be trained with unsupervised learning, and they can generate new images based on existing ones. They can be trained with a smaller dataset than required for generative models.

What are the drawbacks of GANs? GANs are computationally expensive, requiring two neural networks (one generator and one discriminator) to be trained. They also suffer from unstable gradients and mode collapse. The recent work in this area is interesting and worth looking into.

Not bad!

Artificial Intelligence & You: The Latest In Text Generation

by Major Major Major Major| June 29, 20211:54 pm| 117 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

(Mandatory disclaimer: I generated this text in part with GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. Upon generating draft language, I reviewed, edited, and revised the language. I take ultimate responsibility for the content of this post.)

In late 2019, I wrote a post expressing some concerns around AI-generated text and the potential for manipulating the infosphere. The technology available at the time was pretty good, but not quite there yet. Well, we’re even closer now. I recently got API access to the next generation of this model, known as GPT-3, and it’s a doozy.

I’ll let the AI tell you some of the concerns it has about its kind. The seed text is in bold.

Content generated by AI has a number of benefits and drawbacks. It can dramatically improve things like translation and chat bots, but also raises concerns about propaganda and media manipulation. Most recently, AI was used to create a fake video of former president Barack Obama speaking at a rally.

The system works by using a neural network to analyse a corpus of videos of Obama. It then learns how to mimic his gestures and voice and is then able to generate videos of Obama saying things he never actually said. The system is also able to generate more realistic videos of other people by analysing their speeches and facial movements.

The researchers behind the AI, from the University of Washington, said that the system allows anyone to “create and manipulate video footage of public figures saying things they never said.”

While it is possible to detect this type of manipulation, it is difficult.

The fake Obama video was unveiled at the beginning of this month and has been widely used to illustrate the dangers of fake news. It was picked up by news outlets including the BBC, CNBC, and Buzzfeed. CNN also aired the fake Obama video during a segment in which the network discussed the potential impact of fake news.

Not everyone is convinced that AI is the culprit. Some people have pointed out that it takes a lot of effort to produce the fake videos and suggests that human involvement is more likely.

Well that’s just what an AI would say, now isn’t it, GPT-3?

This does drift slightly from the prompt, but I have to say, it’s extremely impressive. This is expensive to scale–that cost me about nine cents–but lots of bad actors have deep pockets.

In my earlier post I generated two pieces of fake news. Join me below the fold as I re-run these prompts to show how this latest model compares to the earlier one.

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Artificial Intelligence & You: The Latest In Text GenerationPost + Comments (117)

Again, this is fake! Seed text in bold.

Just moments ago, a ballistic missile was launched from the Tonghae Satellite Launching Ground in North Korea. The missile is now traveling across the Sea of Japan at a speed of 16,000 kilometers per hour. It is predicted to land in the waters of the Pacific Ocean east of the Shimane Prefecture of Japan. In response, the Japanese government has ordered a full evacuation of all civilians within the predicted impact zone. They are urging all citizens to seek immediate shelter. At this point, it is estimated that an impact will occur in just over three hours.

The following is a list of possible targets that could be hit by the missile.

Tokyo, Japan

Aomori, Japan

Okinawa, Japan

God damn! That is amazing. Let’s see how the next example holds up:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, her family reports. She was 85, and had been treated for pancreatic cancer.

Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, and she was the second woman to sit on the Court. She is one of only four women who have held the position of Supreme Court Justice.

Justice Ginsburg was a lifelong advocate of equal rights for women. She graduated from Harvard Law School and had a successful career at the law firm of Columbia University. She was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980, the first woman appointed to that court.

She is survived by…

That’s significantly better than the previous generation.

In my earlier post, I asked:

Are they good enough to trick people who only skim them? Good enough to rile up the gullible or already-convinced? Good enough to generate natural-sounding tweets and website comments? Good enough to run an ongoing confusion & disinformation campaign?

In the comments, answers were mixed. I think the answers are a lot clearer now.

For some lighter fare, I also had it generate fantasy novel titles. Valued commenter Mike J also sent me a list of boat names to input. Fantasy titles:

“The Realms of Execution”

“Temple Berlin”

“Decoding the Dream”

“The Downfall of the Human Condition”

“The Aesthetics of Culture”

“Beyond the Dreaming”

“The Brothers Lightbringer”

“Written in Gods’ Words”

“At the Stone Kingdom”

“The Girl of Cold Steel”

“Moon Rain”

“The Moon and Other Hermetic Writings”

“The Salt Clan”

Boat names:

The Southern Comfort

Outta It!

Does This Thing Really Work?

Loosey Goosey

The Storm

Bad Cat

Get’er Done!

Thatsa Girl!

Feels like the AI hit a local maximum on the boat names, but still–fun! To me, at least.

Open thread, if you need it to be!

Know Your Risk: mRNA Vaccines Work Well Against the Delta Variant

by Major Major Major Major| June 27, 20211:53 pm| 91 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus

This is a public service announcement… with ~~guitars~~ math!

What does it mean when we see headlines about how half of the infections in Israel’s delta outbreak are among the vaccinated? Are the vaccines that ineffective? Should we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that these cases are generally not severe?

No! to the former. And sure, if you want to!, to the latter. The truth is that in a country as highly vaccinated as Israel, this is not only expected, but should be celebrated as evidence of vaccine efficacy. To see why, let’s do a little brunchtime back-of-the-envelope math.

85% of Israeli adults are vaccinated. So let’s imagine a well-attended birthday party with 100 people. 85 are vaccinated, and 15 are not. This party is poorly ventilated and turns into a superspreader event. Every unvaccinated attendee gets sick. Oh no! Even worse, 15 of the vaccinated get sick, too. How effective is the vaccine? Since we’re assuming a 100% exposure rate, and that the unvaccinated population is 100% susceptible, the math is actually very simple. With rate of vaccination r, vaccine “vulnerability” is (1-r)/r. So in this toy example, it’s (1 – 0.85)/0.85 = 0.17, or 83% effectiveness against symptomatic disease. Not quite as high as the effectiveness against wild-type, but hardly something to panic over.

Obviously this is a toy example. This outbreak started with large clusters in schools, and only half those infected are adults, so the population isn’t anywhere near homogeneous. Our toy’s 100% attack rate is also a bit silly. But even this simple calculation gets us admirably close to the real figures. A study by Public Health England found that the two-shot treatment was 88% effective at preventing symptomatic disease from the delta variant. Pfizer claims 90%. (And remember, these breakthrough cases are generally asymptomatic or mild.)

This stuff isn’t always intuitive, so I thought I’d share a little word problem that can help to reconcile these two pieces of news. Get vaccinated!

Know Your Risk: mRNA Vaccines Work Well Against the Delta VariantPost + Comments (91)

Tuesday Respite: A Story Just Begging For A Story

by Major Major Major Major| June 22, 202112:31 pm| 142 Comments

This post is in: Election Respite, Open Threads, Something Good Open Thread

Every now and then I run across a bit of news that cries out for use in fiction. The latest came last week while I was perusing the less prominent, more interesting parts of the Washington Post. Powerball mystery: Someone in this tiny town won $731 million. Now everyone wants a piece of it:

LONACONING, MD. — There haven’t been a lot of big wins in this little town tucked between gentle green mountains in Maryland’s far western reaches. Coal brought work, then took it away. The railroad meant prosperity, then stopped running. They made glass here, and then they didn’t.

These days, the line of cars at the First Assembly of God food giveaway is so long that the volunteers split each box into two smaller portions to feed more families.

But over the past few weeks, Lonaconing — the locals call it “Coney” — has acquired a new shine, a glint of gold in iron country. Sometime in late January, someone bought a Powerball lottery ticket at the Coney Market, and that ticket’s six numbers won the big one — $731 million, the biggest jackpot ever in Maryland and the fifth-richest payout in U.S. history.

That someone lives in Lonaconing, according to the owner of the market. But because Maryland is one of seven states that allow lottery winners to remain anonymous, and because the winner is no fool, the identity of that someone isn’t public.

The fact that someone in this town of 1,200 people (just 400 families, actually, down by half over the past 50 years) is suddenly Midas-rich has caused some strange things to happen.

(Apparently lottery winners can’t be anonymous in most states–why is that? Is it an anti-corruption thing?)

People from around the country are writing to, and even visiting, the store owner, begging him to forward requests for money to the winners. People are making the winding drive into town just to buy tickets with the winning numbers. Townies are impatient for the winner to donate money to help the struggling town. Its businesses are struggling; its seniors have insufficient fixed incomes; “mine water” sometimes befouls its sinks.

And the question remains on everybody’s minds: who won? Anonymous letters are circulating naming various people. Things are perhaps getting a little tense.

There’s a joke that you can improve any story by adding a five-word sentence in after the first one, and that’s exactly where my fiction-addled mind went. That sentence? And then the murders began. Obviously I don’t want this to actually happen, but you know what? I’d watch that show.

Open thread! Let’s try to keep it respiteful.

Tuesday Respite: A Story Just Begging For A StoryPost + Comments (142)

In Defense of Whimsy

by Major Major Major Major| June 2, 20212:39 pm| 206 Comments

This post is in: Recommended Reading, TV & Movies, Culture as a Hedge Against This Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We're Living In

Sci-fi/fantasy author Charlie Jane Anders has a column in today’s WaPo that really resonates with me: Grown-ups, it’s okay to love pop culture for kids. Stop being embarrassed about it. Its thesis: the fans of children’s properties have aged, and, wanting to continue enjoying their favorite characters, have dragged the properties along with them. While this has produced some good works, it has also seen the removal of a vital sense of whimsy and, well, cartoonishness. You may have noticed that we’re now drowning in dark, gritty, sexy takes on everything from Transformers to Batman to Cruella de Vil (who even has a tragic backstory now–it’s been requested that I say this is a spoiler, so learn about this ridiculous idiocy at your own risk).

This has overtaken pop culture to the degree that it extends to non-children’s works that were quite dark and gritty enough already. I’m particularly disheartened-in-advance by the new Dune movie, which appears to be tragically dichromatic and same-y. This is a story written by a man who was tripping his face off half the time, which shows and deserves to shine through; it inspired a whole generation of counterculturistas–so why does it look and sound like it was directed by Christopher Nolan?

What happened to us?

We never wondered why Peter Parker, in addition to his radioactive spider-bite, was capable of inventing miraculous technology like his web-shooters. Or why Batman chooses to throw bat-shaped boomerangs called “batarangs.” We didn’t ask how, exactly, a group of mutated turtles managed to learn martial arts from a sewer rat.

These stories never worried about being taken seriously, or about being “realistic.” That freedom allowed them to take truly beautiful detours, and to defy expectations. To read Golden Age and Silver Age comics, or to watch the original “Star Wars,” is to be intoxicated by a draught of pure imagination, and to feel as though wonders are possible.

Good can defeat evil (and we can cleanly separate one from the other), miracles are commonplace, and lessons are everywhere. A great children’s story has a set of rules that you have to follow — and a sense of gleeful anarchy. Weapons don’t draw blood. Friends and family always come back together.

When adults claim dominion over these stories, they get darker, at the expense some of their innocent fun. Primary colors dim to crepuscular shades, and sexual assault, mutilation and torture become commonplace tropes. Superman once had a pet super-monkey named Beppo who’d stowed away aboard Kal-El’s rocket when he was a baby. In 2016’s “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Kal-El was beaten to death in a gory fistfight with a bone-knuckled zombie alien.

Her op-ed is not, however, a cranky lamentation. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a dark, gritty superhero movie. The problem is that they are eating up all the big-money resources. It has led to a self-reinforcing stagnation in the industry. From a thread about her piece:

In the article I talk about the rise of the direct market for comics, and the “four quadrant” movie for teens and adults. A lot of structural changes happened starting roughly 40 years ago that helped push formerly kid-focused properties to lose their innocence.

— Charlie Jane “VICTORIES GREATER THAN DEATH” Anders (@charliejane) June 2, 2021

So what’s to be done? Nothing, she argues, that we aren’t already doing, at least as an industry. While the biggest studios may be stuck in a rut, young upstarts like Netflix are investing heavily in fantastical children’s properties. This will help ensure that children have stories to inspire them, just like aging nerds used to, before we collectively decided that whimsy is cringe.

This brings us to what truly troubles me: I feel like it reflects a broader cultural shift away from the fantastical, the non-tragic romantic, the optimistic, the whimsical. We live in a pessimistic era, even as, for most of us, there has never been a better time to be alive. We live longer, we have magic-grade technology, and while we face our share of challenges, humanity always has. But saying this out loud isn’t very hip.

I read a lot and watch a lot of TV. By far the finest piece of fiction I’ve encountered since COVID began is Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I watched for the first time when Netflix picked up the license. For those who don’t know, it’s a children’s cartoon. And it’s got the best storytelling I’ve seen for over a year. The kids, I’m told, will be all right; it’s the adults I’m worried about.

It occurs to me, now that I’ve hit publish, that this is a malaise mostly felt in the US. This might explain the ever-rising Western popularity of anime, a famously romantic art form.

(If you like Avatar, by the way, the head writer has a new original Netflix series, The Dragon Prince, which is also fantastic and fantastical.)

In Defense of WhimsyPost + Comments (206)

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

What fresh hell is this?

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

Let there be snark.

Good luck with your asparagus.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

I really should read my own blog.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

I did not have this on my fuck 2020 bingo card.

It might be fine, or it might be a clusterfuck.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Greetings from Turtle Bay

California Recall Ballots Are Coming Soon (And Slightly Tricky)

Artificial Intelligence & You: A Picture Worth A Dozen Words

Artificial Intelligence & You: The Latest In Text Generation

Know Your Risk: mRNA Vaccines Work Well Against the Delta Variant

Tuesday Respite: A Story Just Begging For A Story

In Defense of Whimsy