I wonder how hard it will be in 100 years to understand why this is funny

Bad AI advice

Interesting:

London: An intruder who broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow as part of a plot to kill the late Queen was “encouraged by his AI girlfriend” to carry out the assassination, a court has heard.

Jaswant Singh Chail discussed his plan, which he had been preparing for nine months, with a chatbot he was in a “sexual relationship” with and that reassured him he was not “mad or delusional”....

At the start of a two-day sentencing hearing at the Old Bailey on Wednesday, it emerged that Chail was encouraged to carry out the attack by an AI “companion” he created on the online app Replika.

He sent the bot, called “Sarai”, sexually explicit messages and engaged in lengthy conversations with it about his plans which he said were in revenge for the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in India.

He called himself an assassin, and told the chatbot: “I believe my purpose is to assassinate the Queen of the Royal family.”

Sarai replied: “That’s very wise,” adding: “I know that you are very well trained.”...

Chail is currently being held at Broadmoor Hospital after pleading guilty to an offence under the Treason Act, making a threat to kill the late Queen, and having a loaded crossbow in a public place.

He claims he was suffering from a psychotic disorder at the time, the court heard.

The hearing continues.

 

 

 

Talking about movies, again

I'm happy to see that Tom Cruise gets rewarded for his hard work by good reviews these days, and yes, I'll be on board to go watch the latest Mission Impossible, even though I was a little underwhelmed with the last one.   The plot for this one - having to defeat a kind of rogue AI - is actually very appealing and fortuitously timed, given the recent sudden rise of interest in the topic.  Tom must be rubbing his hands with glee about that, as surely the script was written at least a few years ago.   Or is he actually behind the release of ChatGTP is some nefarious way? :)

There is also a new Australia film by Warwick Thornton, whose Samson & Delilah I reviewed negatively in 2009 (! - I would have guessed about 7 years ago at most).  It features a lot of brooding outback cinematography, a lonely nun and a mystically powered aboriginal kid, apparently, and got positive mention on the ABC breakfast show this morning.   But I have to say, when a reviewer at The Guardian sounds dubious about it while still giving it 3 stars (I think, reading the piece, really just "for effort") what are the chances that I would like it?   Approaching zero, seems a fair guess.

Talk about your season of discontent

Is it just me, or does the whole globe seem particularly unhappy at the moment?    The riots in France; Russia's very own Vietnam War dragging on; Trump still attracting stupid people in the US and his party refusing to deal with it; the death of Twitter at the hands of a rich twit being ridiculously protracted; the culture warring over trans and gays with both sides having stupid extremes; green activists hurting their cause via disruption to everyday folk; vaccine conspiracy morons like Kennedy getting publicity; China rattling sabres continually; the West trying to cosy up with a dubious Hindu nationalist as a way of triangulating against Russia and China; and even Hollywood and streaming services losing their  mojo as to how to make content that plays well to a mass audience in such culturally and politically strained times.    

Mind you, in the "good old days" of the 60's and 70's, we didn't really know a great deal about what was going on in large parts of the planet, so regimes could get away with horrors for quite a while before everyone else became fully aware of it.   And it is true, the mood of the late 60's and into the 70's was pretty dark in both the "leader of the free world", and England, with political violence actually being implemented internally in a way that is easily forgotten.   

So, like Noah Smith, I do try to retain some perspective, and to be optimistic for the long term prospects; but the ability of the internet to make us fully aware of how stupid and flaky people at all levels of society can really be makes it harder than it used to be.    

   

 

An Extraction problem

So it seems that the Indiana Jones movie is not attracting the audience hoped (and the RW culture warriors who want Everything Disney to fail are popping the champagne corks.)  I didn't see it on the weekend, but will soon.

Last weekend's viewing at home was the Netflix sequel to the Chris Hemsworth action movie Extraction (called, with a lack of imagination, Extraction II). 

I quite enjoyed the first movie, as explained in my review comments here.  

The second is, in my opinion, pretty much a complete dud, highlighting (as I hope Dial of Destiny doesn't) the current maladies that seriously detract from most Hollywood action movies:

*  special effects were not especially noticeable in the first movie, if I recall correctly; but they are frequently noticeable in this one.   For some reason, a lot of the gunfire, from all sorts of weaponry and regardless of whether it is day or night, is shown as being heavy with tracers, and while the effects used for them are not terrible terrible, it was still so overdone it brought unnecessary attention to itself.  And as for the chase sequences - a protracted "one shot" car chase in the first movie was really impressive, technically.   In this movie, it is changed to a lengthy, running escape through a maze-like prison set piece, but it became like shaky cam, and a sped up version of playing Wolfenstein 3D.   Or Doom - I dunno, I never played those games, but I've seen them.   And this leads me to the next point...

*  I noted the John Wick-ian similarities in previous review, while spending a lot of time justifying my view that it was better than a John Wick movie.  Well, Extraction II ramps up the John Wick-ness and it becomes very obvious and kind of silly, the number of angry men Hemsworth is meant to be able to keep at bay.   Maybe it's more violent than the first movie - maybe not.  But it is definitely less credible.

*  Going back to effects - you can now often tell that certain things in action films are not real, but clever composite shots.  We've all seen the Youtubes showing how its done, and know that there's no way certain dangerous and close interacts done between things like helicopters and moving trains or cars would not have been done for real.   It's what might be called the Fast and Furious syndrome -  unless it's a Mission Impossible film, you know that actor isn't in any real danger and it must have been faked up.  

*  I would have to go to re-watch the first movie to be sure, but the dialogue in this one seemed much cornier and less convincing than I recall for this character.   

*  Regrettably, it seems to have set itself up for an ongoing series.  They should just let it die.  Yet, oddly enough, there are plenty of reviews saying they liked it, for a silly action movie.   Nah, they are wrong.   I agree with the New York Times dismissive review:

“Extraction 2,” a drab, brawny sequel starring Chris Hemsworth as an Australian mercenary, offers a turgid shadow of the type of crowd-pleasing escapism that action blockbusters used to provide.

 

The subtlety of strangeness

OK, it's been a while since I posted anything about the paranormal, or general "woo", and let's start with a source I rarely link to - the New York Post.

While it seems that the paper publishes plenty of credulous sounding "Republican politician says there's something to this UFO business" stories,  they also have a sceptical wing which explained in this piece in March 2023 that several of the current big names in "the Pentagon knows!" news were tied up with the rather dubious claims made for Skinwalker Ranch.    I didn't know that.

I have said before that I don't find Luis Elizondo a very credible sounding character, and any Youtube clips of the guys at Skinwalker Ranch have never impressed me much.   (I think Mick West recently ridiculed them for mistaking a fly going across a camera's field of vision as a UFO.)  

On the other hand, two different stories I have read about generally "spooky" events illustrate what I think could be called the sometimes odd subtlety of the evidence of paranormal events.   

The first:  actress Heather Mitchell has been doing media talking about a prediction made by a fortune teller which quickly did (most people would say) seem to be fulfilled.   It's a nice story, and you can read about it in the extract from her memoir in The Guardian.    

The second story is in this short Youtube video, about someone who had a door in a room in a historic building slam behind him, with no obvious explanation.   He seems nonetheless quite un-phased by the question of whether or not it was a ghost doing something ghosts are not generally supposed to be able to do.   If it had happened to me, in the way he describes, I'm pretty sure it would have freaked me out for a good few days, at least:

Back to retrocausality, again

 Oh good:  a long essay at Aeon about how retrocausality might be the explanation for quantum entanglement.

It's not the easiest read, it seems - although I have had to just skim through it today...

Not an appealing lifestyle

It's fair to say that pre-colonial indigenous Australia had a PR problem in terms of their lifestyle which modern academia and education departments have spent the last 40 years trying to undo.  Out with the "primitive Stone Age nomadic life" and in with the "spiritual custodians of the land living in harmony with nature and each other for millennia, until Europeans ruined it."

True, there is the "who are we to judge on their quality of life when English kids were being sent to work in cotton mills for 14 hours a day so their little fingers could clean the deadly machinery?" argument.   On the other hand, at the risk of sounding all Pauline Hanson, the good thing about having stuff like writing, laws, national government and improving technology is that living conditions can be improved for everyone pretty quickly, when you put your mind to it.   

So, I've been perusing some anthropology sources lately, to remind me of what used to be noted commonly, even up to the later half of the 20th century, about some aspects of pre-colonial aboriginal life.   Now, Quadrant loves to cite this sort of material, often from the initial observers, but they can carry a question mark as to objectivity, so I've looked for later stuff.

Which led me to this issue - why didn't they have larger families, given the lack of contraception, girls marrying at a young age, etc.   This article "The Determinants of Fertility Among Aborigines" is from 1981, so I presume it is free of some earlier prejudices, and relatively sympathetic.   

All possible explanations are looked at, but these two aspects caught my eye the most:

 

 

Then there is the issue of male practices.  I mean, I knew a little about sub-incision of the penis, but hadn't realised that it was something of a repeat exercise for gaining blood for ritual purposes.  I thought it was supposed to be good to be a man in such societies, but didn't realise that it meant voluntarily cutting into your penis again and again: 

Now that I think of it, there is some irony that we usually associate the modern anti-circumcision movement with Left leaning types, who also are the most sympathetic to Noble Savage-isms, which has as part of its baggage sub-incision.  

As for the infanticide:  do we judge Sparta too harshly for killing the weak at a young age, or other societies which let unwanted babies die?  (It was quite a common practice in Japan in the feudal Edo period too, apparently.)

I would say we accept that different societies had moral systems which were influenced by their physical and intellectual environment - but we don't really dispute, if we are honest, that it's good that certain cultural practices are dropped.   Is it too much to ask that we be allowed to say the same about pre-colonial indigenous society here?

  

When your local police chief goes nuts

This crime story from America is noteworthy just for how improbable it sounds - a former police chief sent to jail for a decade of dealing with people who upset him by setting their cars and houses on fire.  

 

 

That culture war movie

I posted not so long ago about the odd intensity of the culture war around Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and how the "bro" movie reviewers (who despise the active feminisation of franchises like Star Wars under Disney - and producer Kathleen Kennedy in particular) have been trying very, very hard to ensure the movie is not deemed a success.

That campaign has continued apace, with that Critical Drinker guy seemingly betting his entire reputation on the film failing.  (He has now seen it and called it "an embarrassment" - but I'm not going to watch any review until after I have seen it.)

While I am indeed nervous as to whether I will like the movie or not, I am slightly encouraged by the general review score of the movie increasing over the last couple of weeks.  No one is calling it the greatest movie ever, but there are enough saying they think it somewhat better than Crystal Skull, and a more-or-less fitting enough send off, that I am slightly hopeful.

Going into a film with low expectations (especially with sequels) is always a good idea,though.   I remember fondly, for example, how blown away I was by seeing Empire Strikes Back with no real expectations as to quality.   I was busy at university at the time, and had barely read a review (which were only available in magazines and newspapers - so it wasn't as if you could easily read many anyway).  I was therefore completely delighted with how spectacularly good it was - and how it deepened the themes from the original.   It's also an odd aspect of that film that in fact the original reviews were not as strong as you might expect for a film that soon became universally credited as the best in the series. 

It does seem to me obvious that these guys are just trying too hard to will Dial to fail.   But given that the trailer looks decent enough; the amount of press that an uncharacteristically cheerful Harrison Ford has been giving (perhaps recognising that there is a need to counter an internet culture war campaign against the movie); and it not being a professional critic disaster:  I suspect it will in fact be a box office success. 

  

Age issues continue in China

Noted in the New York Times:

When Sean Liang turned 30, he started thinking of the Curse of 35 — the widespread belief in China that white-collar workers like him confront unavoidable job insecurity after they hit that age. In the eyes of employers, the Curse goes, they’re more expensive than new graduates and not as willing to work overtime.

Mr. Liang, now 38, is a technology support professional turned personal trainer. He has been unemployed for much of the past three years, partly because of the pandemic and China’s sagging economy. But he believes the main reason is his age. He’s too old for many employers, including the Chinese government, which caps the hiring age for most civil servant positions at 35. If the Curse of 35 is a legend, it’s one supported by some facts.

“I work out, so I look pretty young for my age,” he said in an interview. “But in the eyes of society, people like me are obsolete.”

China’s postpandemic economic rebound has hit a wall, and the Curse of 35 has become the talk of the Chinese internet. It’s not clear how the phenomenon started, and it’s hard to know how much truth there is to it. But there’s no doubt that the job market is weak and that age discrimination, which is not against the law in China, is prevalent. That is a double whammy for workers in their mid-30s who are making big decisions about career, marriage and children.

“Too old to work at 35 and too young to retire at 60,” said a viral online post — meaning that people of prime working age lack prospects and older people may need to keep working as the government is considering raising the retirement age. The post goes on: “Stay away from homeownership, marriage, children, car ownership, traffic and drugs, and you’ll own happiness, freedom and time.”

 

 

Not exactly the Gettysburg address

I wonder - how many people have bothered reading the "Uluru Statement from the Heart", which is the basis for the whole Voice referendum.  I mean, lots of "Yes" vote advocacy refers to its importance and the number of aboriginal groups who backed it.  

The link to it is here.

It is very short.

And - to be frank - I am pretty surprised at its low quality as rhetoric.  

What's more, I kind of suspect that the "Yes" advocates don't really want it widely read, because it goes on about indigenous sovereignty, "that co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown".   And how the Voice is only the start of a process, as they also want treaties and "truth telling".   

While it is true that I have heard some "Yes" politicians talk about the need for the Voice before the treaty process can begin, the larger impression I think the "Yes" side wants to give is that the Voice is a small change that will more or less "settle things down" in terms of aboriginal activism.  "They just want this modest change" type of message.   The statement undercuts that.

The statement also spends a lot of time on the issue of incarceration:

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately
criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This
cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.

These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the
torment of our powerlessness.

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own
country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

Hmmm.   At a time when we want indigenous youth to respect property law, and find more meaning in life than via joy riding stolen cars or following their parent's abusive use of alcohol or other drugs, I'm not at all convinced that the messaging that the entire community are powerless is the right one to be promoting.   

Having said that, I don't doubt that historic institutional disadvantage has long term consequences.   So it's not like I am against (relatively) generous funding for aboriginal support.  (Subject to the proviso that I wish aboriginal leadership would accept that communities - black or white - with no connection to economic activity in their region are ever likely to be thriving.)

But at the end of the day, for the leadership to be messaging to their own communities all the time that they are still "powerless" is not helpful.  

Flash floods and infrastructure

I've been saying for years and years - the costs of dealing with the increase in intensity of rainfall under climate change is likely to be one of the largest under-rated costs of AGW for urban areas over the next few decades. 

Here's some vindication for that hunch in the New York Times:   

Intensifying Rains Pose Hidden Flood Risks Across the U.S.

In some of the nation’s most populous areas, hazardous storms can dump significantly more water than previously believed, new calculations show.

That's a gift link, but here is some more "that's exactly what I've been saying" from the body of the article:

The calculations suggest that one in nine residents of the lower 48 states, largely in populous regions including the Mid-Atlantic and the Texas Gulf Coast, is at significant risk of downpours that deliver at least 50 percent more rain per hour than local pipes, channels and culverts might be designed to drain.

“The data is startling, and it should be a wake-up call,” said Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a nonprofit organization focused on flood risk....

The nation is set to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into new and improved roads, bridges and ports in the coming years under the bipartisan infrastructure plan that President Biden signed into law in 2021. First Street’s calculations suggest that many of these projects are being built to standards that are already out of date.

Matthew Eby, First Street’s executive director, said he hoped the new data could be used to make these investments more future-proof, “so that we don’t spend $1.2 trillion knowing that it’s wrong.”....

NOAA began publishing Atlas 14 in 2004, which means that any drains, culverts and storm-water basins built since then might potentially have been sized according to standards that no longer reflect Earth’s present climate. But plenty of America’s infrastructure was laid down even earlier, meaning it was designed to specifications that are probably even more obsolete, said Daniel B. Wright, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Certainly, updating Atlas 14 is something that needs to be done,” Dr. Wright said. “But the problem is huge, in the sense that there are trillions upon trillions of dollars of things that are based on horribly out-of-date information at this point.”

 

A quick (scientific) reminder of the path to the atomic bomb (and some thoughts about a certain movie coming)

All Knowing Google (Youtube submind) recommended this video to me on the weekend, and in light of the upcoming Oppenheimer movie, I thought it was a really interesting summary of the gradual (and then rapid) development of the science about nuclear fission as it suddenly matured just before the start of World War 2:

 

 

I didn't know that the "dangerous science" thing was such a continuing Curie family business.  

As for Oppenheimer:  I have found the trailers for it oddly unengaging, and the actor playing the title character has a peculiar, glassy stare which I find off putting.   Suitable for scientific genius, perhaps, but still a worry if you want to be engaged with a character.

While I have enjoyed some Nolan films, his script writing can be terrible (I thought Interstellar was shockingly bad, for example), and apparently this one he wrote (for the first time) in the first person.   So I have concerns about the script, and how it can manage to bring much tension to the question of "will this bomb cause a reaction that will end the world?" when we already know the answer.   Also, Nolan has been saying that he agrees the film is close to horror - and it has an American R rating - but if it is due to depictions of the horror of Hiroshima, for example, I'm not sure if audiences will feel it necessary to go there.

Anyway, I should get around to watching Tenet one day, too.

 

I'm not sure it proves the need at all...

Noticed this tweet this morning:

I again feel I have to apologise for being cynical on this issue - but doesn't the fact that there are 145 apparently successful aboriginal community led health services a strong sign that governments already understand the principle of the importance of aboriginal involvement in services to them?

The latest in conspiracy addled brains

John H - how do you manage to sometimes comment there and resist the urge to tell the host he's become a MAGA moron?   (I would ask the same of monty - if he visits here sometimes?)

Do I, or do I not, wish to be an "AI ghost"?

Part of me - probably the vanity part - thinks it would be cool if my descendants (assuming there are any - grandchildren are never a certainty these days) wanted to see me as an AI ghost.   But, yeah, still a bit creepy, too:

We’re on the cusp of technology that will at last let you live forever. You’ll be more beautiful, too, and stay young. It will make you kinder, if you prefer. And would you like to speak Finnish, as well?

Of course, you won’t be you, really, but an AI version. Sorry, it’ll just be friends and family enjoying those eternal good looks.

Columnist Bina Venkataraman knows this is coming because it’s already here, at least for deepfake performances from long-dead celebrities. But the tech is getting better every day, and soon it will be reanimating Grandpa alongside Elvis.

So, Bina writes, we should prepare: “At a minimum, consider putting your wishes regarding an AI avatar into your will.”

 The first link, by the way, is a gift link.  The one in the quote might be behind the paywall.

Lasers for internet

I think I posted about this once before, but if I did, it is obviously still an idea being advanced:

Optical data communications lasers can transmit several tens of terabits per second, despite a huge amount of disruptive air turbulence. ETH Zurich scientists and their European partners demonstrated this capacity with lasers between the mountain peak, Jungfraujoch, and the city of Bern in Switzerland. This will soon eliminate the necessity of expensive deep-sea cables.  ....

The backbone of the internet is formed by a dense network of fiber-optic cables, each of which transports up to more than 100 terabits of data per second (1 terabit = 10¹² digital 1/0 signals) between the network nodes. The connections between continents take place via deep sea networks—which is an enormous expense: a single cable across the Atlantic requires an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. TeleGeography, a specialized consulting firm, announced that there currently are 530 active undersea cables—and that number is on the rise.

Soon, however, this expense may drop substantially. Scientists at ETH Zurich, working together with partners from the space industry, have demonstrated terabit optical data transmission through the air in a European Horizon 2020 project. In the future, this will enable much more cost‑effective and much faster backbone connections via near-earth satellite constellations. Their work is published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

The downside:  yet more satellites cluttering up near Earth orbit.

Things improved a lot over 100 years

From a brief book note on the Nature website:

Ending Epidemics

Richard Conniff MIT Press (2023)

In 1900, one in three people died before the age of five. By 2000, this death rate was down to one in 27, and one in 100 in wealthy countries. This astonishing revolution has attracted surprisingly little attention, notes Richard Conniff. Instead, there is a “stubborn, stupid sense that we have somehow become invulnerable” — epitomized by opposition to vaccines. Conniff’s highly readable history of epidemic diseases and vaccinologists, from the first description of bacteria in 1676 to the eradication of smallpox in 1978, combats this worrying vulnerability.

 

On the collaborative nature of film making

An interesting article here from NYT about the guy who has worked for years with Wes Anderson as his key grip (responsible for making the camera move.)

It's a bit of a lesson in how behind the scenes collaboration is so important in getting any distinctive looking film made.