confeit | 5 years ago | on: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
confeit's comments
confeit | 5 years ago | on: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
I am convinced that Q, if not started, was quickly taken over and turned into a Russian psyop. I expected the Mueller report to validate this (gross online astroturfing campaigns by state actors), but unless it is in the redacted parts, it is not there. But even casually investigating banned Twitter accounts used for Russian propaganda, you see a lot of clear connections with the "totally organic" Christian MAGA Qanon soccer mom accounts.
Leaves me mere speculation: I believe Q was initially conceived in case Trump had lost the election. It was to be a group of useful idiots/unwitting agents protesting about the "rigged" election, maybe even riled up to the point of taking up arms. Then when Trump won it was repurposed to sow disinformation about child sacrifice and child porn rings by the elite democrats. 9/11 saw the same thing: Massive efforts by Russia and Middle Eastern countries to seed inside job conspiracy theories. With the result that many Americans now believe 9/11 was an inside job, and can't really trust their government anymore (social cohesion damaged).
I believe some of these unwitting agents are so impressionable and gullible, that they can be made to act as "manchurian candidates", doing the bidding of foreign intelligence agencies (spreading propaganda, muddying the waters with disinformation and conspiracy, picking up a gun and going out to free children from a basement of a pizza parlor). I believe these intel agencies are able to infiltrate grassroots movements and subvert their ideals to be hostile to their host countries. I believe these agencies are able to create fake online realities, where unwitting agents are made to be believe they are part of something big, and everyone agrees with them, while they are psychologically manipulated.
confeit | 5 years ago | on: Are we in an AI Overhang?
> Canberra is the capital city of Australia.
confeit | 5 years ago | on: Are we in an AI Overhang?
> anything trained on internet data is kinda doomed to poison itself on the high ratio of garbage floating around here?
Low-quality noise cancels out and leaves the high-quality signal. In the limit, the internet offers the true sequence probabilities for compression of natural text.
You can also put more weight on authoritative data sources, such as Wikipedia and StackOverflow, but even uniformly weighted: It is possible to sequence-complete prime numbers, despite the many many pages online with random numbers.
GPT-3 is trained on a filtered version of Common Crawl, enhanced with authoritative datasets, such as Books1, WebText, and Wikipedia-en. Moderation is done automatically, with a toxicity classifier/toggle. If GPT-n becomes good enough to be accepted in authoritative datasets, then it is perfectly fine training data, a form of semi-supervised learning.
Bias is going to be a double-edged sword: I believe it will be impossible to prescribe common sense, nor to sanitize common sense to remove, say, gender bias, and still be able to understand a sexist joke about female programmers, or male nurses. We want an AI to be human, but we don't want it to associate CEOs with white males, dark hair, wearing suits. That will conflict.
confeit | 5 years ago | on: Are we in an AI Overhang?
You can get a glimpse by scrolling websites like: https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog?ppl=view200&sort=title&ocF... [.mil] and looking at DARPA and Office of Naval Research sponsored ML/AI research. The military has been deeply involved with ML/AI research since its inception, and it is near impossible to avoid first - or second degree involvement, if active in ML/AI.
The military wants: automated chat agents/web users that can be sent to dark web markets and hacker IRC channels and report back intelligence. Common sense inference from security and drone footage: predict who the killer is when watching a movie. Author deanonimization and cross-device tracking. Global-scale 99.9%+ accurate face detection.
The Dutch Intelligence Agency organizes a yearly competition with difficult codes to crack. [1] It is rare for someone to answer all questions correctly. The answers require logic, creativity, common sense, linguistics, causal inference, spatial reasoning, expertise, analysis, and systematic thinking. I bet the military would be mighty interested in an automated problem solver for that. And mighty scared some other country gets there first.
confeit | 5 years ago | on: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
My cursory research, after sensing something was amiss or forced with the narritive, is that the situation is much the same as border detention centers. These cages were in use during Obama era, but only went viral under Trump. The same thing is happening here: The same not-so-secret police was active during the Ferguson Riots, but only now do we make a big stink out of it.
The police is not secret: They are from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (DoJ), called the Special Operations Response Team, specialized in disturbance/riot control and to assist local police in case of emergency.
Don't play the semantics game: Even rioters are protesters. It makes as much sense for a SORT to arrest innocent protesters than it makes sense for a taxi driver to sweer onto the pavement and hit people.
confeit | 5 years ago | on: Low-Background Steel
I saw it linked from the comments on a Tweet by Karpathy and found it intellectually curious.
> By posting GPT generated text we’re polluting the data for its future versions
confeit | 5 years ago | on: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin
Giving certain people, highly visible on social media, pre-public access to the model, and letting them cherry pick their completions to post without the prompt or amount of tries, is a smart form of propaganda/hype building/PR management, that we have come to expect from "GPT-2 is too dangerous to release" openAI
Sometimes I forget that, while this model was created by scientists, and released with a scientific paper, it is essentially a for-profit business product, and such cheap tricks deserve harsh criticism.
confeit | 5 years ago | on: Coursera valued at $2.5B after a finance round of additional $130M
I don't care if you followed a two month course by Joel Grus on Fizzbuzz and graduated magna cum laude. I care if you can actually code Fizzbuzz.
Coursera courses on your resume, is like listing your Microsoft Office skills. It would be noteworthy, if for some reason, you can't find your way around MS Office, or can't pick it up in a weekend.
confeit | 5 years ago | on: Bringing the print statement back
> You're flying! How?
> Python! I learned it last night! Everything is so simple! Hello world is just: print "Hello, world!"
> SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print("Hello, world!")?
> I dunno... dynamic typing? Whitespace?
> Come join us! Programming is fun again! It's a whole new world up here!
> But how are you flying?
> I just typed: imports antigravity as ag
> TypeError: imports() takes 2 positional arguments but 3 were given
confeit | 5 years ago | on: Bringing the print statement back
> Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print(1, 2, 3)?
Yes, Python, I meant exactly that! I've never seen this error message in error. Now you know what I mean, please fix it automatically, I know you can do that. Heck, throw a single warning if you really want to enforce this. I can ignore warnings that I don't care about.
confeit | 5 years ago | on: Dutch Scientists Find a Novel Coronavirus Early-Warning Signal
Since at least 2011, the Dutch test wastewater of cities for traces of drugs, such as cocaine and XTC, and use this to inform public policy.
Already in 2009 it was known that coronaviruses can survive and remain infectuous in sewage water for up to two weeks.
Early covid wastewater research mostly focuses on waste water and stool as a possible infection vector, and in March 3rd the WHO suggested that COVID patients use their own toilet, to avoid spread through aerosolization during flushing, and to increase chlorination efforts of sewage systems.
From the first outbreak of SARS-CoV, it was found that apartment plumbing can be an infection vector, and due to this, in Hong Kong, people suggest closing the toilet lid before flushing.
confeit | 5 years ago | on: Tell HN: Microsoft Skype Security Is Flawed
Did you reuse the password at any other site? Check your haveibeenpawned.
confeit | 6 years ago | on: Study confirms vitamin D protects against colds and flu (2017)
Vitamin C, taken orally, reduces length of cold with 8% in adults, and 12% in children.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10796569
Vitamin C deficiency makes you more susceptible to the cold and severe infections.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16988135
Vitamin C has shown inhibitory effect in chickens for avian coronavirus.
https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/52/6/1049/731701
Chinese are testing intravenous Vitamin C for treating COVID-19 with promising results for reducing cytokine-induced damage to the lungs.
https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=2...
I am really not sure why news organizations all around the world feel the need to debunk Vitamin C usage for novel coronavirus. For instance: https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/03/09/coronavirus-its-time-... . Their conclusions all amount to: washing hands is better, you may get a tummy ache, and don't believe folk remedies.
confeit | 6 years ago | on: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic
Thanks, makes sense. Iceland also did voluntary testing and then estimated 1% of their population is infected. I doubt 1% is even showing mild symptoms. Remains the significance of asymptomatic spread. If someone does not cough or sneeze, are they shedding enough to be a formidable source of contagion?
https://grapevine.is/news/2020/03/15/first-results-of-genera...
confeit | 6 years ago | on: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic
> "The vast majority of people infected with Covid-19, between 50 and 75%, are completely asymptomatic but represent a formidable source of contagion".
The Professor of Clinical Immunology of the University of Florence, Sergio Romagnani
> Asymptomatic infection has been reported, but the majority of the relatively rare cases who are asymptomatic on the date of identification/report went on to develop disease. The proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi...
> Clinical and epidemiological data from the Chinese CDC and regarding 72,314 case records (confirmed, suspected, diagnosed, and asymptomatic cases) were shared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (February 24, 2020), providing an important illustration of the epidemiologic curve of the Chinese outbreak. There were 62% confirmed cases, including 1% of cases that were asymptomatic, but were laboratory-positive (viral nucleic acid test).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK554776/
Weird discrepancy on the order of 75x. I'd love to trust the experts, but who? I am leaning towards truly asymptomatic spread being rare, since you get infected by SARS-CoV-2, not COVID-19 (COVID-19 is the disease), the level of uncertainty of 25% is higher than for other reports, and the main reported mode of transmission is through symptomatic cough droplets.
confeit | 6 years ago | on: Harvard epidemiologist: my colleagues assumed UK coronavirus plan “was satire”
In Italy they use old laws for murder when you violate your isolation and infect others.
Australia, NZ, U.S., Italy, they all see sustained local community spread. Australia is still exponentially increasing. Shutting down flights when there is local community spread is show politics, something to point to afterwards and say: We took decisive action. It is purely symbolic.
Sure, U.S. could pass emergency law and use their military surveillance systems to track, tag, and contact trace all of their civilians, as if they were Chinese spies.
But is this desirable in a free society? And what difference does it make when there are 100.000 infections in a single state, of which you will miss a 100 and start all over again 2-3 weeks later, but now with 99.900 angry citizens with guns?
One of the reasons that SARS-CoV is deemed a useable bioweapon is exactly because isolation security methods are very expensive and invasive at scale. The cultural damage would be enormous if people receive letters from the government after they had a private chat on Facebook about symptoms.
confeit | 6 years ago | on: Harvard epidemiologist: my colleagues assumed UK coronavirus plan “was satire”
During quarantines people are not shaking hands. I am not saying quarantines necessarily select for a higher death rate (a dead host can not spread), but for a more severe disease (the main drivers of a spread are when people ultimately develop severe symptoms).
Community viruses mutate to see a lower mortality, severity, and infectiousness, since there is no selective pressure to have an r0 much higher than 1. For a community virus there is also no selective pressure to mutate to a vastly different strain, so the antibodies for other strains don't help, whereas if the virus is confined inside a city like Wuhan, the only way to reinfect is to mutate to a vastly different strain.
confeit | 6 years ago | on: Harvard epidemiologist: my colleagues assumed UK coronavirus plan “was satire”
https://www.businessinsider.com/presentation-how-hospitals-a...
> estimated projections of as many as 96 million cases in the US, 4.8 million hospitalizations, and 480,000 deaths associated with the novel coronavirus.
All Western countries moved to fase 2 of epidemic control: Stop testing and contact tracing, since you have many many clusters of local community spread and no idea where it is coming from. They are hesitant to come out and outright say it. Some do, but not with permission of their superiors:
https://nypost.com/2020/03/13/ohio-health-officials-believe-...
Mild cases continue to spread, and don't self-isolate, because they may not even realize they are infected.
China and South Korea have laws that allow for containment: If you message your friend on WeChat and say you have a cough, then you can expect a visit from the Chinese containment crew. If you buy cough syrup in the drug store with your credit card, then South Korea health officials know this.
Containment is pragmatically impossible with an r0 > 2 in the West. Just slowing down is possible.
confeit | 6 years ago | on: Harvard epidemiologist: my colleagues assumed UK coronavirus plan “was satire”
> Human intervention may have placed more severe selective pressure on the L type, which might be more aggressive and spread more quickly.
Harder to detect I would see in a strain that has a longer asymptomatic spread period. The only way for a virus to escape a strong quarantine and survive is to survive on surfaces longer, be asymptomatic longer, cause more severe illness (spread through cough and sneezes, especially in hospitals), linger in the air longer, etc.
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4Chan has been very involved with these intelligence ARGs since after Project Chanology. Pedowood morphed into Pizzagate. "Seth Rich murder" was pushed hard on 4Chan, to detract from the fact that the Russians hacked the democrats. And it works: Instead of being insulted and angry that a foreign nation state so polutes the brains of your country and riles up the population to the level of riots and extreme polarization, some like to think that Hillary had Seth Rich assassinated for leaking. With so much smoke, who knows what to think? All the while you see artificial KONY2012-style meme campaigns accusing Mueller of being a deep state fixer, synced on Twitter, Facebook, and 4chan.