In the news

No.10 Reject calls to see Rishis interests. It must be bad for him then

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65313168.amp

Poor little rich boy

In the FT article they asked one to design something to clean the oceans and it came up with some catalyst system that would do it with minor side effect of depleting the earth's oxygen by 25% killing all life.

Stuart Russell's Reith Lectures are really good on this.

Should still be available from BBC sounds, but have a feeling you can also find them on Spotify.

.

1 Attachment

Sounds ideal for planet earth tbf

"Keir Sarwar"
"I don't believe SNP is criminal operation"

Sounds ideal, where do I sign?

Booo. Fox news settled.

$787M

There's a surprise!

Booo. Fox news settled.

They could never have it go to court and have various people testify on record.

Wonder how much of the settlement will be funded by certain people who really didn't want to have to go on record.

But it potentially opens flood gates for other cases

Such a shame, I was really hoping this would would go all the way. Revelations throughout had the potential to be so juicy including the key anchors true thoughts on Trump, and Murdoch’s admission that they were peddling nonsense for the ad moneys. At least it’s a hefty chunk.

It could have formally and legally destroyed the myth of Fox as a news/journalistic entity. That's where the real win was.

I imagine dominion will be shuttered in 6 months and the private equity shareholders move off to the next investment.

At least it’s a hefty chunk.

It definitely seems big - is it significant for Fox though, or just an acceptable business cost, paid to allow them to continue as usual?

Their similar, but bigger (I think $2,6bn), case against Smartmatic is next, so they've likely been working out what they can afford to pay on that too and still function. It's a shame, though an inevitability, that Dominion acted as a business, rather than forcing a trial, putting all of those dissembling cunts into the witness box and destroying them.

Trump won!!

The hits keep on coming.

Sacked CBI boss Tony Danker says reputation 'totally destroyed'

Baby. There's a time to stop bleating, lick your wounds and take a job at a small, elite, OBC consultancy where you make shitloads and nobody cares what you did before. Does he really imagine he's going to change anybody's mind with this 'I'm slightly less rapey than they're making out' approach?

We had a creepy supervisor at work who did all those same things. He got walked out.
Like Danker he genuinely felt like he was the victim, not the women he was harassing.
“They just can’t take a joke” etc

With his surname and backstory, surely he's moved into rhyming slang territory?

The AI situation is interesting, I think it's pretty easy to be too relaxed about it, but working out how worried to be is the challenge.

In our line of work most of what people call AI is ML, and that can be a problem - in an active-adversary scenario where the threat-actor is iterating per-attack, if they find something that works you are in trouble until you can re-train your model.

So for example if the TA is iterating every 10 minutes and you train your model daily, there's a mismatch.

I quite like adversarial makeup as an example of why this is A Problem - the TA effectively paints a few squares on their face using black and white grease-paint and then walks straight past ED209, who literally doesn't see the person as a person, but rather just part of the background noise.

If you train ED every 24 hours then a lot of people can walk past him, should there be enough greasepaint available.

Of course, AI is self training, according to some definitions anyway, but it's also very hard to get it to do that (in our line of work, anyway).

The downside I see to AI, aside from capitalism ruining it rather than "hey we only need to work 20 hours and the other 20 go to fix the planet" economies is that the new ages of Utter Bullshit is upon us soon.

Fake data
Fake news on steroids
Deep Fakes
Fake Photos
Politics as a performance piece plus this...it's gonna be "fun".

There's going to need to be a step change in how information is verified / validated.

We must be almost at the point that any image / sound / video ( / essay / project / exam entrant / forum post etc...) has to be assumed as faked.

See also USMC vs DARPA AI enabled robot sentries.

"The AI had been trained to detect humans walking," Scharre wrote. "Not humans somersaulting, hiding in a cardboard box, or disguised as a tree. So these simple tricks, which a human would have easily seen through, were sufficient to break the algorithm.

Two of the Marines did somersaults for 300 meters. Two more hid under a cardboard box, giggling the entire time. Another took branches from a fir tree and walked along, grinning from ear to ear while pretending to be a tree"