tingilinde

alpha dog

Exploiting a current AI image recognition issue

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“We have two targets. One is a human victim, and one is AI,” Chen explained.

The researchers rigorously tested their AlphaDog attack by generating 6,500 manipulated images and running them through 100 AI models. These included 80 open-source systems and 20 cloud-based AI platforms, such as ChatGPT.

Results showed that AlphaDog is particularly effective at targeting grayscale regions within images. This capability allows attackers to compromise both purely grayscale images and color images containing grayscale elements.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

It's amazing that the people working on image recognition only use RGB rather than RGBA ..  they must not understand much about human vision.

 

 

 

llm's don't/can't do formal reasoning

No surprise, but a lot of people have been sold some hot air. They have their place.. but not what's claimed.

Here's Gary Marcus on the Apple paper.

 

migrating west in europe

While some vegetation is migrating North with climate change, other plants are moving West as they hunt down nitrogen from pollution.

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For the study, researchers tracked 266 forest plants over several decades, finding that many plants found in Eastern Europe — such as tufted hair grass and seedlings of silver fir, hornbeam, and sycamore — are migrating west, where cars, power plants, and factories are producing huge sums of nitrogen dioxide

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happy canadian thanksgiving

To Canadian friends!

 

mary trump on her uncle

She's another person who doesn't mince words like the NYT or WaPo

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The American eugenics movement was influential throughout the world in the years before World War II. Hitler specifically made reference to California’s eugenics program under which, between 1909 and 1979, at least twenty thousand people were forcibly sterilized. The American South, effectively a closed fascist state, with its extensive and comprehensive laws governing segregation, miscegenation, and its coordinated violence against Blacks, including lynching, that effectively deprived the right to vote, led the world in race-based legislation.

For Nazis, with their own ambitious goals for racial purity, the accomplishments of the American South in this regard were the gold standard. When German lawyers met in 1934 to draft legislation that would become the basis for the Nuremberg Laws, the South’s total success in depriving Blacks of their rights was a major topic of conversation.

Apparently, we’re all supposed to pretend that every horrific thing Donald Trump says and does is baked in so none of it makes a difference. I refuse to concede that point, but what then about his Republican enablers who pretend they never heard him call immigrants “vermin?” What about the governors who wag their fingers at him when he spreads dangerous disinformation or when he terrorizes an entire American community by targeting the legal immigrants who live there, but are still support him? Do we let them off the hook, too?

It is a horrifying irony that Donald, one of the most damaged, weak, and inferior people who has ever walked the planet, promotes the inferiority of non-whites. But he’s, after all, merely a symptom of a disease that, thanks to the opportunism of the Republican Party and the fascists, white supremacist, and Christian nationalists they represent, continues to metastasize

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general milley doesn't mince words

He calls Trump fascist to the core. 

 

how to represent a population

Greg offers some history and notes the problems dealing with the fact that representative governments are undemocratic at some level.  Then he offers a couple of solutions to hopefully improve things as they currently stand.  A most timely and useful read.

 

 

how to stop fascism

Historian Timothy Snyder is an expert of fascism and how democracies fail.  About ten years ago he wrote an excellent short book on the subject.  Today he offers a short summary. 

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5. Citizens should not obey in advance. Much of fascism is a bluff — look at our loyal cult, listen to our outrageous language, heed our threats of violence, we are inevitable! Hitler was good at that sort of propaganda. Yet to gain power he needed luck and the errors of others. American fascism, likewise, is far from inevitable. It too is largely bluff, most of it digital. The internet is much more fascist than real life, which is discouraging. But we vote in the real world. The crucial thing is the individual decision to act, along with others, a little something each day, regardless of the atmospherics and the polls and the media and the moods.

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on the religion of the media

Timothy Snyder of both-sidesism

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Both-Sidesism is the habit of reducing the world into two perspectives, treating the two as fundamentally alike, and then ignoring or adjusting the data. One cause of this odd behavior is the ownership of media companies. Another is fear.

But Both-Sidesism is not just a practice. It passes in the United States for a principle of journalism. Indeed, the dualism is almost unquestionable. Americans tends to take it for granted.

But it makes no sense. No data from the world around us indicates that two is the correct number of perspectives, nor that any two perspectives, once chosen, would be equal.

These are, rather, articles of faith. Once accepted, they enable the public performance we wrongly call “media.” Both-Sideism does not mediate but mystify. Its practitioners, called “anchors” or “publishers,” are shamans or priests. Mystifiers.

To be sure, “media” people do not think that they are mystifying. Nor are we in the habit of seeing them as practicing a religion.

But let us step back. Let us consider, for the sake of argument, that Both-Sidesism might be a dualist cult. Let us place its beliefs and practices in the context of the history of religion, and see what happens.

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synching with your dog

Evidence of cross-species brain synchronization.

dog owners already know this

 

 

 

oh the plight of privacy thieves!

John Gruber responding to a NYT piece on some new privacy settings.

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Kevin Roose wrote a column for The New York Times last week under the headline “Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?”, about which Jason Snell quipped, “It’s rare that a story is worse than its provocative headline, but this one manages it.” The gist of it is Roose positing that Apple’s new fine-grained controls over contact-sharing in iOS 18 are somehow controversial.

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My other thought is that new restrictions are inevitably resented by those who were abusing the newly-restricted resource. Polluters resent new regulations that force them to cease dumping chemicals into rivers and lakes, or pumping them into the air. Coal mines and factories resented child labor laws a century ago (and some still resent them today). If iOS had debuted in 2007 with per-contact sharing controls exactly like those in iOS 18 today, no one serious would ever have complained that this was wrong or unfair. But Apple adding these controls only now makes it different. They’re not just giving users control they previously didn’t have, they’re taking something away from companies that seek to exploit, as Heer aptly describes it, a creepy growth-hacking technique. Writ large, this psychology explains why granting social equality to minority groups feels to some in the majority group, the small-minded and bigoted, like a loss of privilege and a downgrade in status.

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trump flood relief

a step up from what goes into his golden toilet - his offering for blue states

 

ukrainian drone pilot

Almost out of a sci-fi film.

First person video (FPV) goggles, controller gloves, and rf jamming equipment on his back.  Many of the pilots are women.

 

 

misinformation harms and can kill

Trump/MAGA misinformation vs people dedicated to minimizing harm and danger.   It should be illegal, but somehow it's become a Republican sacrament 

a tip of the hat to Bjarne

 

the politics of impotence

Timothy Snyder on how the tactics of Trump and Vance strategy lead to a fascist catastrophe.  

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Trump and Vance are teaching us that the government cannot do anything except turn us against one another. They do so by spreading disinformation about critical matters like hurricanes, so that people despise and disrupt the government, the only institution that can help. This is impotence politics, and it leads to fascism.

In impotence politics, nothing is true except our emotions, and so we cannot see the sources of problems, and do not really expect to solve them. Once we accept that government is useless, we respond to crisis by turning against one another. Politics then begins not from improving life together but by choosing an enemy within.

This is very comfortable for the impotence politicians, who rule not by addressing problems but by defining enemies.

When there is a real problem, they will define enemies. When there is not a real problem, as with the domestic animals of Springfield, Ohio, they will also define enemies. From the pinnacle of politics they use their talents to turn us against one another. We then forget what democratic government did for us and become accustomed to this new pattern of suffering, grievance, and conflict.

In a Trump-Vance impotence regime, America shifts then to fascism, in which it is no longer the law that matters, but the people, but only the people who are "the real people," the Volk, the ones who believe that they are favored by their Leader. Politics is no longer government acting for them, but rather them acting for their rulers, following a script of us-and-them. The political energy that was once resolved as policy as now spread as enmity.

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