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Major Major Major Major

You are here: Home / Archives for Major Major Major Major

Major Major began writing at Balloon Juice in 2018.

Artificial Intelligence & You: Some Light Reading

by Major Major Major Major|  May 13, 202012:22 pm| 79 Comments

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

Part three of a series on artificial intelligence.

My earlier posts on this topic dealt with some fairly sophisticated text-generation AI’s from the present and (likely) near future. But most of the AI you experience is very mundane, and often slips under your radar. AI is more ubiquitous than you may hope… and significantly stupider than you may fear.

So goes the thesis of Janelle Shane‘s newish book, You Look Like A Thing And I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works And Why It’s Making The World A Weirder Place. It’s an easy-to-read, fun introduction to what AI is, what it is not, how it works, and how it doesn’t. And it has very cute illustrations. Here is a brief introduction to some of the concepts in the book, told much less accessibly than Shane does, alas. Please bear with me for a moment.

What we call AI is many different things doing different tasks in different ways. Much of the time you hear about AI, it’s about deep learning. What is deep learning? It’s actually just a highly lucrative rebranding of multilayer perceptron neural networks, which have been around in one form or another since the 1960’s. What is a perceptron? Inspired by neurons, perceptrons convert a series of inputs to a single output via a weighting function. Let’s imagine a shape-classification perceptron with inputs like ‘number of corners’, ‘ circumference:area ratio’, and for some reason ‘color’. This would begin with random weights–let’s say it thinks ‘number of corners’ is very very important. But each time it calls a diamond a square, the weights are adjusted, just a little, so that it will be less wrong in the future (or so we hope). Where can this go wrong? Let’s say that the data this perceptron is trained on contains a lot of shapes from playing cards. It would end up learning that color was highly predictive. In the future, when you showed it a red circle, it would probably tell you it was a heart!

A multilayer perceptron is simply when perceptrons feed into each other. So the next one in the chain would consider the output of our ‘which shape?’ perceptron, alongside other data, when performing its own task. You can probably see how this compounds errors in odd ways. Most of the time an individual perceptron’s rules are ineffable, so these things can be rather hard to debug.

Take the example of Microsoft’s image-classification AI, Azure. It was very good at identifying pictures of sheep while it was being trained. But when it was put to the test, it identified any green pasture as a picture of a sheep! It also saw giraffes everywhere. It learned that ‘giraffe!’ was often a better answer than ‘I don’t know’, probably because there were a few too many pictures of giraffes in the training data. And if you asked it how many giraffes there were, it would give you a weirdly high number–because the training data didn’t have any pictures of individual giraffes. This stuff can get very weird, very fast. As Shane illustrates in her book,

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Artificial Intelligence & You: Some Light ReadingPost + Comments (79)

Artificial Intelligence & You: Some Light Reading

AI’s are also lazy, lazy cheaters–or rather, they optimize for exactly what you tell them to optimize for. One time, researchers wrote an evolutionary algorithm tasked with designing robots that could move, from a pile of parts. The training judged how good a robot was at moving by how quickly it could reach a goal at the other end of a virtual room. So the AI ended up making robots that were just big towers of parts, which then fell over in the direction of the goal. In another experiment, researchers asked an AI to design a circuit that could produce oscillating waves. The AI instead evolved a radio that picked up and reproduced oscillating waves from nearby computers.

Well don’t get mad–they did what you asked.

We all deal with AI’s every day, and surely we are encountering errors like this all the time, whether we can recognize them or not. And these errors can have significant repercussions. Let’s look at some examples of biased training data (like in the above hypothetical about playing cards). Facebook and Apple (and many, many others) have made facial-recognition algorithms that didn’t work on black people and/or women because the training data didn’t have very many of them. A self-driving Tesla that had never encountered a stopped perpendicular trailer thought it was a billboard, ignored it, and then crashed into it, killing the driver.

If you’d like to learn more stuff like this, along with many entertaining and illustrative examples (like telling an AI trained on Harry Potter fanfiction to write recipes), I highly recommend checking out this book! It’s great for everyone from beginners to semipros, and possibly beyond.

Midmorningish Open Thread

by Major Major Major Major|  May 7, 202012:20 pm| 92 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads

I understand my absence has gone noticed. I am okay! Just laser-focused on my sanity, which doesn’t involve commenting about the news for more than 280 characters. I have a couple of posts about AI and contact tracing technology I want to write, but all my typing seems to be going towards a novel rewrite.

So, apropos of nothing, here are some mental health tips that work for many!

  • Move a little! Here’s a great little 8-minute workout you can do with about twenty square feet and a chair.
  • Getting some fresh air is probably extremely safe, as well, even here in the plaguelands NYC!
  • Set hard stops for beginning and ending the workday
  • Wear real pants for at least a few hours every day
  • Nothing bad will happen if you ignore Trump a little. My husband and I have sort of both faded away from the news, much to our benefit
  • Nothing bad will happen if these tips aren’t for you!
  • It’s okay to just be like Samwise sometimes

Midmorningish Open Thread

I was hoping to find, as a companion piece, a good picture of him looking grumpy, or being mid-complaint; alas I don’t seem to have any. But you get the idea.

Open thread!

Midmorningish Open ThreadPost + Comments (92)

Noonish/Morningish Open Thread: Three Cheers for TCP/IP!

by Major Major Major Major|  April 17, 202011:45 am| 247 Comments

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

Many years ago, computer scientists at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, chief among them Robert Kahn and Vincent Cerf, had a wacky idea. What if, instead of having computers talk to each other like people do on the phone–with dedicated long-term connections, hello and goodbye messages, and a centralized service responsible for connection reliability–we created a new kind of system, where the chopped-up pieces of information moved autonomously through a network of abstract nodes and edges, to be assembled by the recipient, where only the sender was responsible for correctness? This idea–championed throughout its lifecycle by, yes, Vice President Gore–undergirds what we now call the Internet. It is fault-tolerant, able to route messages around broken nodes, and it can scale so effortlessly that we have repeatedly run out of addresses for nodes. And it is proving itself right now as never before.

Few pieces of modern information technology have reached this level of longevity. Few pieces of historical information technology are so important to the world–the book; the data-transmission cable; the human-readable programming language. You may have seen one of the latter in the news–COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. People like to make fun of how it’s still in use today, but the fact is, you only hear about it when the world breaks–when, say, New Jersey’s COBOL-based comptroller system can’t handle the influx of unemployment claims caused by a pandemic unprecedented in modern history. Contrast that to a website such as this one, which probably doesn’t run correctly on half our computers, though the Internet happily routes its packets to us almost instantly. (Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, while awesome, was not actually heavily involved in COBOL’s development, but go ahead and watch her explaining a nanosecond anyway.)

Mr. Cerf recently recovered from the coronavirus. “I don’t recommend it,” he said. The Washington Post had a good article about him, and the Internet, and the test it is currently passing. So let’s hear it for the things keeping the world from completely shutting down, especially Kahn and Cerf and their team; truly, they have won the Internet. A series of interconnected, independent systems through which we can all communicate, even when some of them are bad actors–a model of collaboration we should all aspire to.

Open thread!

Noonish/Morningish Open Thread: Three Cheers for TCP/IP!Post + Comments (247)

An Afternoon Respite Exercise

by Major Major Major Major|  April 2, 20202:46 pm| 316 Comments

This post is in: Nature & Respite

Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 47, and post the fourth sentence. Don’t mention the title.

— adam harris (@AdamHSays) April 2, 2020

Mine is aggressively on-brand:

“Vogonity,” Ford hissed at him. https://t.co/sxJSUYPZqF

— ꧁Tynan꧂ (@TynanPants) April 2, 2020

What’s yours? Consider this a thread for all your respiteful needs, which do not include discussing a certain bullshit pneumonia dust* that shall not be named.

*stolen, unable to find source

An Afternoon Respite ExercisePost + Comments (316)

Can You Hear The People Sing?

by Major Major Major Major|  March 31, 202012:38 pm| 165 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

This came across my feed and absolutely made my day. Just the pick-me-up I needed to make it through the afternoon. Seems like the sort of thing my family might have done, back when I was the younger brother’s age and hadn’t realized that musicals were gay and must be shunned*.

This is the talented Marsh Family.

Here are three minutes and fifty four seconds that will make your day better. Promise.

A COVID-19 lockdown version of Les Mis — with lyrics.

“One Day More.🌎❤️🎶😉pic.twitter.com/Ax3nqJaxcg

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) March 31, 2020

Here’s a nice open thread for you all! Apologies if I’m bigfooting somebody, though it looooks unlikely.

*Well I got better.

Can You Hear The People Sing?Post + Comments (165)

The Presumptive Nominee Speaks on Coronavirus

by Major Major Major Major|  March 23, 20201:38 pm| 18 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Healthcare

Vice President Biden, who will be the Democratic nominee when Sanders either drops out or loses on the first convention ballot, delivered remarks on the novel coronavirus this morning. It was lost in the shuffle, but here it is for you all to watch!

You can watch it in this tweet:

I’m about to deliver remarks on the Coronavirus pandemic. Tune in to watch live: https://t.co/HpaqlEb7D1

— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) March 23, 2020

If that doesn’t work for you, you can watch it here. (The first couple of minutes is the splash screen, so skip ahead.)

Biden also issued a statement on the ACA lawsuit.

UPDATE: He will also be on The View in the morning to talk about it.

TOMORROW: Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president @JoeBiden joins us LIVE via satellite to discuss the latest on the coronavirus pandemic, how he thinks Pres. Trump is handling it, and what’s next for his campaign amid the national crisis. pic.twitter.com/xsC0E0B6Hr

— The View (@TheView) March 23, 2020

The Presumptive Nominee Speaks on CoronavirusPost + Comments (18)

Scenes from the Apocalypse

by Major Major Major Major|  March 20, 202011:04 am| 65 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

Donned my PPE and went for a walk last night. I usually go along 1st Avenue because we live near a nice view over the East River, but mister husband wanted to check out Times Square instead. And it sure was something.

Scenes from the Apocalypse

Basically just buskers and cops. Pity the poor knock-off muppets and superheroes, I guess; it seems like a very high-risk occupation at the moment. No pity for the people who tried to foist CDs on me, and then made fun of me for saying “no thanks”, and then pretended to attack me when I walked around them at a distance, and then screamed “corona!” at me over and over as I passed. The only reason I don’t hope they get sick is that they apparently like to scream at people in public places.

About half of the pedestrians here are good at staying away from each other. Dodging the rest is an interesting game. A surprising number of food carts are still around. I don’t know–it’s obviously sunk in for most residents, but (see above) many seem to be missing the point!

Anyway, all the more reason to stay inside and play Animal Crossing. Open thread!

Scenes from the ApocalypsePost + Comments (65)

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