Notices by Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)

I guess the idea of “checks and balances” is that your Space Czar works towards the goal of a human settlement on Mars, while your Health Czar does his best to ensure that it will swiftly succumb to the measles.

First it was my neighbours’ airconditioner showing up in my WiFi lists, now it’s their “55-inch Samsung The Frame QLED 4K TV” showing up in my Bluetooth. No wonder would-be burglars drive around with Bluetooth scanners looking for things to steal.

Breaking: leading AI moguls have predicted that by 2029, their bots will not only be indistinguishable from humans, they will be able to prove the Riemann Hypothesis with all three-and-a-half legs tied behind their backs.

Does anyone really watch foreign-language programs dubbed into English, when subtitles are available? I hadn't been hit with the old lips vs dialogue mismatch for about 50 years, but suddenly I’m seeing Apple TV promos as hilarious as those dubbed spaghetti Westerns from the 70s.

“A small asteroid – approximately 1 meter wide – will strike Earth’s atmosphere today (September 4, 2024) over the Philippines around 16:46 UTC according to the European Space Agency.”

https://earthsky.org/space/small-asteroid-hit-earth-philippines-sept-4-5-2024/

“Scavengers Reign” is something else — it’s as if Miyazaki decided to remake Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on, but as a gloriously hallucinatory xenobiological dream, I’m happy to just sit and stare at all the strange creatures chittering around.

On Guam, they tried to protect nesting boxes for birds from brown tree snakes by placing them on top of smooth, slippery poles.

Snakes: We call this lasso mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRjrawDTFXU

Article in Science:

https://www.science.org/content/article/guam-s-invasive-tree-snakes-loop-themselves-lassos-reach-their-feathered-prey

I heard about this on the wonderful “What the Duck” podcast:

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/what-the-duck/snakes-and-ladders/104010396

Crowdstrike have advised that the world will be reverted to its last valid backup set, dated 7 Jan 2014, within the next 30 minutes. Please make paper notes of anything important to you from the intervening period, and tape them to your refrigerator door in a prominent position.

This was the cringiest thing I’ve heard on the AI front, period. Apart from the fact that all but the crappiest LLMs do a better job at faux-conversation than this, foisting such an obnoxious toy on people in aged care would be a form of torture.

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/radionational-breakfast/robot-developed-to-work-in-aged-care-homes/104089424

Wow, lucky people in Sydney are seeing a fairly rare kind of soliton cloud known as a “roll cloud”: tubular clouds that appear to be rolling across the sky.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-04/nsw-sydney-roll-clouds-explainer/103934424

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcus_cloud#Roll_cloud

Wow, Thomas Hales and Koundinya Vajjha have proved Mahler’s First Conjecture! (That’s Kurt Mahler, not Gustave.)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04331

Mahler’s First Conjecture says that the centrally symmetric convex shape with the *worst possible* packing ratio is made up of straight lines and arcs of hyperbolas, like the smoothed octagons shown in the animation below (demonstrating a 1-parameter family of slightly different packings all with the same density).

Whether these smoothed octagons are, as Karl Reinhardt conjectured, the actual worst case is still an open problem.

A bit more detail on Reinhardt’s conjecture in this article by @johncarlosbaez :

https://blogs.ams.org/visualinsight/2014/11/01/packing-smoothed-octagons/

and this thread by Koundinya Vajjha on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/KodyVajjha/status/1790211313618362848

Saw someone hyperventilating over LLMs “passing the mirror test”, so …

TL;DR This short program “recognises itself”: show it a file containing its own source code and it will print “This is me!”

Underwhelmed? You should be! But I did have to type a lot of backslashes.

Of course you can estimate π by dropping needles on the floor, but it’s much more fun to do it by integrating the Gaussian curvature across the surface of any 3-holed doughnut, then dividing the result by –8.

Yeow. Corporation suffers weird fantasy that it somehow doesn’t matter if it uses a hallucinating chatbot to supply information to customers because it can somehow wash its hands of whatever nonsense it says ... only to find out that the law doesn’t work like that.

“Air Canada, for its part, argued that it could not be held liable for information provided by the bot.

"In effect, Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions. This is a remarkable submission. While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website," Rivers wrote.

"It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot."”

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

H/T @j_bertolotti

The fallacies about bad software:

• If software would do harm, it won’t be deployed.
• If it *does* get deployed, the harm won’t be significant.
• If the harm *is* significant, it will quickly be identified, acknowledged and rectified.

Australia has gone through its own horrendous episode of persecution and suicides with the Robodebt scandal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

so I’m looking forward to watching the acclaimed dramatisation of the UK’s Horizon scandal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

“Mr Bates vs The Post Office”, which screens on Channel 7 / 7plus in Australia starting next Wednesday.

Needless to say, everyone rushing to insert LLMs into every conceivable nook and cranny of the commercial, scientific, administrative and judicial systems should be strapped to their chairs with their eyelids pinned open and made to watch this fifteen times.

I never used to store fruit in the refrigerator, but now that it’s hit 42°C, and likely to be not much cooler for the next two days, it seems prudent … and I’ve just discovered that I actually much prefer the taste of oranges and bananas when they’re well below room temperature.

"As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs. During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original.”

(A) Adobe, WTF?
(B) Users: either dump the app or learn to switch the “AI” off.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-30/victorian-mp-georgie-purcell-altered-image/103403664

#IslamicArt #genuary17 #genuary2024

Wireless keyboards shouldn’t need to be charged, they should just power themselves by trapping and metabolising spilt crumbs.

AppleScript is a very weird language.