@blogdiva @Lana Trump drained it and had it painted dark blue. Dark colors encourage algae growth. Good question about the pool cleaners.

@patrickcmiller The article is spot on. #AI is not an individual productivity tool, is an empowerment tool. But AI is transformative on a much deeper level than individual human workers. Effective use of AI transforms patterns of communication, organization and distribution of work. It is not something you superficially spackle on existing business practices. Anything that looks like an assembly line is very likely to be obsolete. It is too early to make judgements about productivity. If anything, we should expect a drop in organizational productivity as businesses struggle to transform themselves. That’s what s-curves are all about. Many businesses will fail to transform and become obsolete. This is what major innovations have always done.

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @MichaelEMann @democracynow Adaptation is the key. There is no “going back” to a pre-global warming #climate. And it’s not about adapting to today’s weather, it is adapting to constant change and what we can reasonably predict. That information is not a mystery. Climate scientists have been telling us what to expect for decades.

@kims I’ll add two orthopedists I’ve known to your list. Signed baseballs, jerseys, photos, everywhere you look. I be much more interested if they decorated the waiting room with x-rays of famous sports injuries.

@futurebird 100% agree! These sudden, hoped-for but unexpected reprieves are great fun. I remember snow days before I became a workaholic grouch. (I’ve since recovered.)

During the McCarthy era, my dad — a University of Michigan professor — was asked by the FBI to name communists or other subversives at the University. He refused. He told us they came several times to his office to pressure him, even threatening him with being called before the Committee (a career-ending event everyone feared). He refused every time. The University administration backed him up. A decade later I overheard some faculty (partygoers at our house) talking about the events with respect.

I never thought those days would come again.

Don’t be a snitch on friends and colleagues. Don’t cooperate. Keep your self respect and earn the esteem of others. Plus it is the right thing to do.

@evan @Em0nM4stodon @reiver @ezeno789 That is too bad, because it would also allow the spontaneous threads we participate in to become something more like curated essays or conversations. But maybe that is too far from the central function of Mastodon as it exists today. Feature creep is not good.

@mathewi 2/n

Here are the main areas where current self-driving cars/trucks need more development and/or change before I would consider them safe on the road (much less safer drivers than most human drivers):

1. Design (the technology)
2. Development
3. Testing, Verification and Validation
4. Social factors

Notice I did not mention science — that is because there are no theoretical questions in #AI, #robotics, #software systems, etc. that remain to be solved before #autonomous vehicles are possible. What remain are engineering and social factors.

Continued…

@mathewi 1/n
I agree with you in principle, that self-driving cars are an unambiguous social good, but the reality is that it is still too early to say.

I was deeply involved in the development of #autonomous vehicles since the 1980s, the last 6 years with automobiles in particular. My role also included technical due diligence on startups, early stage and mature companies working in the area. I know the technical leaders. I have “looked under the hood” of virtually every version, in the lab and on the road.

My conclusion: Not ready. Very promising, but there are significant performance limitations and unsolved technical issues that will shock you. I will elaborate and justify my opinion in replies (within the limitations of non-disclosure agreements) but since I’m pressed for time those will come later today.

To be continued…

@mathewi 4/
I’m going to delay elaborating my other concerns about the maturity of #SelfDriving #autonomous vehicles. For now, please consider the following:

1. #AI in general, self-driving cars in particular, are not people. These technology systems do not have our human-lived experiences, they do not think like us, even if you believe that thinking is computational. With a few exceptions, such systems have no common sense ability to reason about the world. They don’t understand human behavior the way we do.

2. They will not make the same mistakes that humans make while driving. That is not only a requirement, it follows from 1. Instead, they will make their own mistakes. We are already seeing plenty of these. Sure, engineers will grind out most of these, but not all.

3. The first two points mean that the behavior of self-driving cars will be difficult to predict in all but the most common vanilla driving situations. People complain about how rigid the current vehicles are at following the law. What? Now you want them to break the law when it is expedient?

4. There are a near infinite number of “edge cases” and those are when safe driving is the most difficult — exactly when we want self-driving vehicles to excel. There are too many to test. The complexity of the real-world, specifically edge cases, cannot be simulated in a laboratory. A decade or more experience on the road is required.

5. Cars are increasingly connected and computerized, and that makes them a new #security threat. Any modern car today can be hacked and remotely controlled. AI systems add multiple new attack vectors. Yes, companies are working on security, but so are the bad guys. #Infosec people will tell you their world is hand-to-hand combat. The more such cars are on the road, the greater the opportunity and attraction for mischief (or worse).

The big question is when will we, as a society, feel safe and convinced by the benefits of self-driving cars? That question is a trap, because most people don’t know the details. It is already happening.

Speaking as an expert and a grandfather, I will not be putting my grandchildren in the back seat of a self-driving car any time soon.

@mathewi 3/
Design issues of #autonomous vehicles:

This COULD be a very long list, but that is not for social media. Instead, I’ll highlight a few major topics. These criticisms are limited by my first hand observations and knowledge.

1. Over-reliance on associative #AI, the branch of machine learning that many people love to hate. There are some tasks it is really good at, such as low-level perception in multiple modalities, categorizing, and similar tasks dominated by massive amounts of data (including uncertainty).

2. Under-reliance on conceptual/symbolic AI, the “classic” AI technology of automated reasoning, problem solving, situational awareness and recognition, constraint resolution, logic and inference, and more. Don’t let anyone fool you by claiming associative methods are just as good or better.

3. Software/Hardware System architecture. This is both a technology design challenge and a development challenge. Architecture is generally given cursory consideration (e.g., in comparison to #NASA systems) when it should be first priority, dominant and enforced. All kinds of issues, design flaws and more flow from ill-considered system architecture. I saw exactly ONE case where the system was praiseworthy. It takes high skill, training, years of experience, and core discipline to do this right. It is expensive, time-consuming and the talent needed is rare. HOWEVER, there are plenty of examples of good autonomous system architectures to emulate.

4. Naive consideration of the importance of #temporal reasoning, non-monotonic reasoning, guaranteed real-time “good enough” decision-making. (See 2 above)

5. Very little or no explicit knowledge about the world (see 1 above). To illustrate this, I used to give this test to the self-driving technology leadership at companies: Your car is driving along when a ball rolls out into the street from between two parked cars. What does your car do? The typical answer was like this:

Them: yes, the car would see the ball (size of obstacles issue) and it would brake/would not brake (because a car can run over a ball).
Me: what about the kid?
Them: what kid?
Me: The kid chasing the ball into the street?
Them: You didn’t tell us about the kid.
Me: I shouldn’t have to. Kids chase balls into the street.

Arghh! Then the would talk about coding specific scenarios. In other words, the knowledge (in some form) that is CENTRAL to safe driving.

To be continued …

@Nonilex If there is any belief shared by virtually all Americans, it is that #pedophilia is an intolerable, terrible evil. I think war with #Venezuela is unlikely to distract us more than a day or so. The #Epstein Affair will stick to #Trump.

@ai6yr The #squirrel #insurgency has been on going for at least a decade. I remember this terrifying map of squirrel attacks on the U.S. power grid.

@gme @mcnado In the US, the #HIPAA law states that you are entitled to know the name, qualifications and contact information for anyone and everyone who has or had access to your #healthcare information.

Every institution that has access to your personal identifiable health information must comply with HIPAA. They are required to have a “HIPAA Compliance Officer.” You are entitled to know that person’s name and contact info. Find out and contact them to complain about a possible HIPAA violation. That should get you the info you seek.

If you are still stonewalled, you can file a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services (#HHS). That will trigger an investigation.

As a researcher, I received the official compliance training and became HIPAA-certified. The info on the government website I linked below is limited, but it is a start.

Fair warning: it is fair to say the vast majority of people who must comply with HIPAA have zero knowledge. But now YOU know, so use it. These are your rights. You can’t waive them (as one health provider once asked me to do).

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/index.html

@RickiTarr Luciferase is the generic term for the substrate and enzyme that result in #bioluminescence in a number or organisms. Luciferase genes can be synthesized in the lab through #genetic engineering and inserted into organisms or transfected into cells. It is used in the “action” part of a synthetic molecular switch to provide evidence that the switch worked. The Wikipedia article is a decent explainer. In addition to the applications it mentions, it has been used in pigs and rabbits.

https://www.lubio.ch/blog/luciferase

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

@inthehands I had no idea that Tesla was selling carbon credits. Carbon credits are a scam for corporations to avoid reducing greenhouse gas #GHG emissions. That’s it. So yes, this idea should go away. However, if a company can demonstrate that they are in fact sequestering significant amounts of GHG, then this should be rewarded in some way, but not at the expense of greater emissions by some other company. The book, “Ministry of the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson has some good ideas along this line and lots of others too.

@ai6yr I’m in Albuquerque right now. We’ve had several of these zero visibility dust storms go through today. Other times, visibility has been a quarter mile at best. Looking at the local radar at this moment, winds are sustained at 10-20 mph, gusting to about 50 mph. It is also extremely dry. There is practically no vegetation in this part of desert, nothing at all to hold the sand and detritus to the ground. My first time witnessing this kind of weather.

@inthehands I agree, it is a worthy vision. I am struggling to understand the method to “put the people they’ve marginalized in positions of actual power, give them actual ownership.” For a publicly owned company, does that mean something like a shareholder revolt? Or hostile takeover? For a privately owned company, the means are even more obscure to me. One thing I think we know for sure is that court ordered sales/breakups, anti monopoly legislation, or state seizures of #MSM property are not viable in the current political reality. Ideas? 🤷🏻

@inthehands @DrGeof This is in part because the batteries require constant cooling. That system runs all the time. That is, until it doesn’t.

@davesdogmaggie @Nonilex It is prudent to assume plans for “special” federal police — probably not #FBI — are being prepared, if not already being implemented. The “Brown Shirt” equivalent are the Proud Boys and similar right wing vigilantes who do the intimidation work. At this stage in Hitler taking power, the Brown Shirts were being double-crossed so Hitler could convince the Generals not to resist, that he would not bypass them. Expected next: Night of the Long Knives.