When I see the phrase “prompt engineering”, I read it as “programming in a new, different, and underspecified language that has weird semantics and that you don’t know as well as you should.” https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/113142792603203381
@mattblaze I don't think so—the desirability of triggering it would depend on on the geopolitical situation, how many pagers had been handed out, etc. But I think that there are pager groups—the only time I carried one, it was for messages to all members of the Medical Aid Squad at Bell Labs Murray Hill—and you sent pages by calling a particular number. (These days, with text pages, it's probably a web service.) Any bets on Israel not knowing the login/password/group id? Not from me…
@inthehands@mattblaze and I have talked about some complex mechanical things that we no longer do: railroad interlockings, lever voting machines, the cell door locks at Alcatraz, and doubtless many more I don’t know about. (Railroad interlockings make sure that signals and switch tracks only change state in a safe order. For example, a signal must be turned to STOP before a switch is lined against oncoming traffic.)
I spent some time yesterday listening to WCBS-AM, to get some last listening in before its demised. The programming was basically a retrospective look on the history of the station, going back to the 1930s. Sad to see it go—when I was living in North Carolina, I'd sometimes even listen to it at night. The range was almost 700 km, but it was a 50 kilowatt clear channel station, so it (often) worked.
“Mama, why did the bear turn around and run away?” “RFK Jr. was there.” "Is that a problem for us?” "Yes, he does weird things with ravens, too." “Help!”
New report: “Challenging the Machine: Contestability in Government AI Systems”, by Susan Landau, James X. Dempsey, Ece Kamar, Steven M. Bellovin, and Robert Pool: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10430
There are features, such as the ability to delay patch installation, that at least at some point Microsoft enabled for enterprise versions of Windows but not for consumers. I wonder if they’ll do the same for Recall. (As noted by others, Recall is a gift to hackers and opposing counsel, which means that any decent-sized enterprise will disable it or not run Windows. But consumers? Most won’t know and/or will think themselves safe and won’t care, and can’t switch to Linux or MacOS.)
@jvagle I am writing one, but it's a personal one for my family, not for the public—I doubt that anyone is interested in my childhood beyond what I shared today. I mean, does anyone here care that there was at least one house on block with a coal furnace, in the 1950s? The slides do have a link to an interview in ;login: a few years ago; very soon, there will also be an oral history interview with me available.
As many recent news articles have noted, Columbia was a hotbed of student unrest during the Vietnam War era. When I moved into the dorms and unpacked, I found that my parents had put this cartoon into a suitcase…
@mattblaze Instead of Kyllo, next teach Kylo (Ren). (Aside: many years ago, back at Bell Labs, I had a supervisor who loved SF movies. Any time a good new one had opened, he'd declare the afternoon time for a computer graphics conference and we'd all head out…)
I'm a computer science professor and affiliate law prof at Columbia University. Author of "Thinking Security". Dinosaur photographer. Not ashamed to say that I’m still masking, because long Covid terrifies me.https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb