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Comment Re:Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) (Score 3, Informative) 108

by Shag (#64190860) Attached to: Aviation Sector Sees No Fast Tech Solution To GPS Interference Problem

It's not the "entire" problem. INS updates from GPS because it has to update from something. You can't INS your way from New York to Paris.

Why not? "Doc" Draper INS'ed his way from Hanscom Field outside Boston to Los Angeles in a B-29 in 1953. With only one planned human course correction en route, the INS was only 10 miles off after a 2,600 mile trip. JFK-CDG is 40% longer, so you should be good to within 15 miles... you are using a 70-year-old INS, right? If you can't flat-out eyeball the airport at that distance, any kind of beacon the airport itself has should be pretty helpful.

(Of course, Draper and his folks hadn't had time to test that version of the INS before their flight. And they made the flight to attend a top-secret conference the government was hosting with University of California researchers to discuss the possibility of inertial guidance... where Draper promptly ruined everything by explaining that it wasn't just possible; they had used it to get there.)

Comment Needs more humans (oh, the horror) (Score 1) 426

by Shag (#64178453) Attached to: What's the Solution to Gridlocked EV Chargers?

I heard a piece on NPR's "Marketplace" last month about ChargerHelp, a startup that trains people to fix software glitches that make chargers stop working. That's a great idea, since having more chargers working more of the time means less waiting as things scale and build out. But there must still be some lag from a charger breaking to it being noticed to it being reported to a tech being dispatched to the charger being fixed.

I grew up mostly in a "full-serve" state, and even in the "self-serve" state where I now live, multiple gas stations in my town offer "full-serve" - sometimes exclusively - and do so at the same price as "self-serve" stations. So why not hire folks with associate's degrees in electrical / electronic / computing fields from local community colleges as "charging station attendants" and give them the training and tools to keep the chargers functional? They might also help maintain order at busy times (which would be less busy if all the chargers were functional) and help Granny plug in her car (while explaining that no, they can't check her oil).

Comment Re:Note to self (Score 1) 28

I asked it "who is" questions about my wife and myself. It gave correct information about my wife, who's become much more visible online in the last several years.

I, on the other hand, have become less visible, and although my name isn't particularly common, there are a few other people around the world with the same name. So it decided that I was a freakishly multi-talented person who worked as a Wall Street trader, actor, astronomer, rugby player and writer. While amusing, at least 40% of this was wrong, but I didn't have the time to tell it that.

Hopefully the forces of evil will consult Perplexity on their way to my door, and be misdirected.
AI

'What Kind of Bubble Is AI?' (locusmag.com) 100

Posted by FirehoseFavorites from the you're-really-not-going-to-like-it dept.
"Of course AI is a bubble," argues tech activist/blogger/science fiction author Cory Doctorow.

The real question is what happens when it bursts?

Doctorow examines history — the "irrational exuberance" of the dotcom bubble, 2008's financial derivatives, NFTs, and even cryptocurrency. ("A few programmers were trained in Rust... but otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.") So would an AI bubble leave anything useful behind? The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They're expensive to make, with billions spent acquiring training data, labelling it, and running it through massive computing arrays to turn it into models. Even more important, these models are expensive to run.... Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical.

AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments... There just aren't that many customers for a product that makes their own high-stakes projects betÂter, but more expensive. There are many low-stakes applications — say, selling kids access to a cheap subscription that generates pictures of their RPG characters in action — but they don't pay much. The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can't think of anything that belongs in it.

There are some promising avenues, like "federated learning," that hypothetically combine a lot of commodity consumer hardware to replicate some of the features of those big, capital-intensive models from the bubble's beneficiaries. It may be that — as with the interregnum after the dotcom bust — AI practitioners will use their all-expenses-paid education in PyTorch and TensorFlow (AI's answer to Perl and Python) to push the limits on federated learning and small-scale AI models to new places, driven by playfulness, scientific curiosity, and a desire to solve real problems. There will also be a lot more people who understand statistical analysis at scale and how to wrangle large amounts of data. There will be a lot of people who know PyTorch and TensorFlow, too — both of these are "open source" projects, but are effectively controlled by Meta and Google, respectively. Perhaps they'll be wrestled away from their corporate owners, forked and made more broadly applicable, after those corporate behemoths move on from their money-losing Big AI bets.

Our policymakers are putting a lot of energy into thinking about what they'll do if the AI bubble doesn't pop — wrangling about "AI ethics" and "AI safety." But — as with all the previous tech bubbles — very few people are talking about what we'll be able to salvage when the bubble is over.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

Comment Spread the news this holiday season! (Score 5, Interesting) 45

by Shag (#64066659) Attached to: 23andMe Moves To Thwart Class-Action Lawsuits by Quietly Updating Terms

Mention 23andme's shenanigans to your friendly local State Attorney General.
Mention 23andme's shenanigans to your friendly local TV News investigative / problem-solving reporter.
Both of these people would probably find the shenanigans extremely interesting.
And "all publicity is good publicity" for 23andme, right?

Comment Re:Why the anti Jew stuff? (Score 1) 503

The ever rising Palestinian population shows the utter, brutal effectiveness of Israeli genocide.

A Zionist friend has made this same argument, which I haven't dignified with a response in our chats since it's the least defensible of his arguments.
It's right up there with Sideshow Bob's "ATTEMPTED murder? Do they award a Nobel for ATTEMPTED chemistry?"

Trust me, if "you can't charge us with genocide because it wasn't successful" were a good argument to make, we would've heard it before.

Comment Re:Time to update your records (Score 1) 20

Yes, ARPA-E is not at all a "division" of DARPA. It's totally Department of Energy, while DARPA is Department of Defense.

There's also ARPA-H under the National Institutes of Health, and IARPA under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

I may be missing / forgetting others.

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