Larry Hosken: New: Tag: trust-the-machine

I'm sufficiently vain to set a Google alert so I find out when I'm mentioned someplace new on the World Wide Web. Thus I found out I'm in the Acknowledgments section of a recent academic paper. Oh, neat!

Some nerds at a company called Scale A.I. set up a new benchmark for AIs. Here, a "benchmark" is a set of questions and answers; ask the same questions to several AIs, grade those AIs based on how many answers they get right. This new benchmark was unusual: They gathered together puzzles from places like the MIT Mystery Hunt and Puzzled Pint. I, with esteemed puzzle editor Neal Tibrewala, made some Puzzled Pint puzzles, thus the acknowledgment. (Some question the utility of this benchmark; is it useful to measure a chatbot's wordplay ability if customers don't care about that and instead want the chatbot's advice on, say, setting a tariff rate on an uninhabited set of islands in the Antarctic? This is a valid point. One nice thing about puzzles: They have unambiguously correct answers. Grading the answers to questions like "What tariff should we apply on these penguins?" isn't so straightforward.)

I chuckled. I wanted to keep up with whatever other silly things these "Scale" people came up with. I looked around to see if they had a blog I could follow. I found their blog! I saw some recent articles:

"Scale AI products approved for purchase on AWS Marketplace for the U.S. National Security Community" (military intelligence can use Scale's A.I. vision tech to track my movements through a crowd so that autonomous drones can find and kill me)
"Machine Perception for Human Protection: Creating Vision Algorithms to Augment Perimeter Security" (Finally, some good news: This tech would only try to kill me if I were on a boat, which is only rarely)
"Introducing Thunderforge: AI for American Defense" (They're working with the ghouls at Anduril to make AI for military decisions, e.g., whether to find and kill me vs some other potential target.)
"Letter from Alexandr Wang to President Trump on Winning the AI War" ("There is incredible evidence about how AI can improve government efficiency, decision-making, and service delivery." This is technically not a lie, since "incredible" can mean unbelievable.)

When a bunch of AIs try to solve Mystery Hunt puzzles and get 0.00% correct, it's a fun chuckle. But when Israel's military uses AI to figure out who to kill and ends up murdering aid workers and reporters, nobody's laughing.

Whew! Who knew looking over a vanity alert would just lead to a reminder that there are people playing at keeping me safe by means of scattershot murder. Here's hoping they fail at the scattershot murder part.

I moved my backups off of Google servers.

screen shot of text: Canceled / Your subscription will end on Jun 1, 2025

Many months ago, April 2024, Google fired workers protesting Project Nimbus, a Google-Amazon-Israel project, during an intense period of the Gaza Genocide. This suggested that Google Cloud Services, the part of Google that works with outside-of-Google programmers to use Google's services, had fired a lot of competent people—I figure that most of the Googlers still there didn't think they could find work elsewhere and thus had been scared to protest.

Google isn't a monolith; just because Google Cloud Services was messing up doesn't mean all of Google was falling apart. But I knew that my backups used Google Cloud; my reliable backups didn't feel so reliable anymore.

It took me a few months to move my backups. Well, it took me a few months to fail to move my backups the hard way; then almost no time to move them the easy way. I wasted a lot of time trying to keep my scheme mostly the same, just storing stuff on someone else's storage. I liked my custom-made system, and to keep things simple I wanted to keep using it instead of learning some new-to-me system… But eventually I realized I was putting a lot of effort into failing to figure out how to keep my "simple" system going without Google cloud storage. Learning one of these ~~new~~ not-so-new anymore systems was pretty easy by comparison.

(I was using rclone mount, and thought I had a lot of choices about where to store my files; a lot of places support rclone! But when I looked more closely, I found out almost all those places support rclone mostly—they support it except the mount feature.)

Once I had my backups flowing to the new place, I didn't delete my old backups from Google right away. I had an annual subscription; so it seemed worthwhile to leave the files up there for a few months while I made sure that my new backups were working OK. That finally happened, so I finally canceled. That little task just took me nine months.

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