Category: misc

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Are All Idiots Petrol Powered?

I had to laugh out loud at the sheer intellectual dis-ingenuousness of these write ups, featured most frequently and prominently in right wing leaning outlets.

Basically, the story is a Florida-guy buys a discontinued electric vehicle then looks into having the battery replaced only to find that it would cost more than the car. But wait, the battery is not available to purchase in the first place (then, how, you might ask, were they given a price for replacing it?) So the clear take away from that isn’t ‘know what you are buying’ it is ‘ALL Electric Cars Are Bad’. Morons

So by extension, I buy a used, discontinued iPhone for $50 and drop it. The shop says that it will cost me $250 to have the screen replaced. And I can’t replace the battery, because, you know, that ‘discontinued’ part. Therefore, iPhones in particular and mobile phones in general are bad, evil and we should have never gotten rid of phone booths. Because some people have the logic and reasoning capabilities of dryer lint.

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“Software is eating the world” – and as a result consumers are getting crapped on

BMW recently made the misguided decision to charge a subscription for heated seats in some markets. Aside from the fact that the average BMW is a maintenance disaster and is nearly undriveable by its 3rd year, what is the point of charging a subscription for a fairly standard car feature? Simple greed.

Consider also that every one of those vehicles has the added expense of being fitted with the heating elements and controls that may not be enabled. That seems like wasted money unless the consumer is actually paying for the feature twice: once when it is priced into the cost of manufacturing the car and *again* when the consumer actually tries to use it.

The other problem with these feature flags hidden in your car is that not only BMW can have access to them. It is not a great leap to imagine a new form of ransomware where you have to pay BMW and then some hacker to re-re-re-enable a feature on your vehicle.

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#InternetFail

“I use multi-factor authentication on every web site that I can – that way no one can track me.”

Yeah, I am pretty sure that isn’t how that works, self-proclaimed cyber security ‘expert’ on a podcast
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Jotul GV 370 DV Won’t Light

This is a bit of a departure from the tech-oriented articles that I usually post but I thought I would just “put this out there” because I couldn’t find any relevant info when I had this issue with this product.

Basically, the Jotul GV 370 DV is a gas stove (the kind you use to heat a room, not to cook on). It was installed and minimally tested for gas flow. The problem was, it wouldn’t stay lit when we tried to use it for the first time. The pattern was, the pilot would light, 30-90 seconds would go by, the stove would flash combust (the gas in the chamber would ignite) rather forcefully but not stay on. This cycle would continue until a red LED on the front of the control unit started flashing. At this point, I turned off the stove and turned of the gas and started looking for answers.

I read and re-read the installation docs that came with the Jotul GV 370 DV. One thing I noticed is that the damper setting on it was not correct for the amount of vent pipe that was installed. That was an easy fix. Unfortunately, it didn’t solve the problem (or change it at all). Internet searches didn’t reveal any additional useful information, just a couple of edge cases and people arguing philosophy rather than practice solutions.

I even tried the justAnswers web site. Paid $5 for a ‘trial membership’ and was connected to an absolutely useless ‘expert’ who just tried to read me the online posts I had found via google. His final bit of ‘expert advice’ was to get a voltage meter, disassemble the stove and tell him what all the voltage readings were on all the stove components. Absolutely pointless exercise. I thanked him for wasting my time and requested a refund from justAnswers.

At this point, I elected to take the glass off the front of the unit and inspect the burning media bed to make sure the gas jets weren’t blocked or obstructed. This is when I noticed that the gas bed was out of alignment with the pilot starter. I removed the gas bed tray, re-seated it so that the notch for the pilot was centered on the pilot (instead of all the way to the right like it was when i originally opened it up). After this adjustment, I carefully placed the gas bed media back on the pan, reassembled the glass and turned the gas back on.

When I turned on the stove, the pilot came on, 30 seconds later the perimeter of the bed lit, went out, re-lit, then stayed on. Success! All that because of a one centimeter misalignment of the gas bed with the pilot.

So there you have it. Hopefully this will help someone else who has this issue quickly solve the problem without delay or ‘expert’ help.

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AI BS

or Artificial Intelligence Bull Shitake

There are a lot of claims being made, and as this article points out, not many of them are supported by strong evidence/math.

In Rebooting AI, Ernie Davis and I made six recommendations, each geared towards how readers – and journalists – and researchers might equally assess each new result that they achieve, asking the same set of questions in a limit section in the discussion of their papers:


Stripping away the rhetoric, what does the AI system actually do? Does a “reading system” really read?


How general is the result? (Could a driving system that works in Phoenix work as well in Mumbai? Would a Rubik’s cube system work in opening bottles? How much retraining would be required?)


Is there a demo where interested readers can probe for themselves?


If AI system is allegedly better than humans, then which humans, and how much better? (A comparison is low wage workers with little incentive to do well may not truly probe the limits of human ability)


How far does succeeding at the particular task actually take us toward building genuine AI?


How robust is the system? Could it work just as well with other data sets, without massive amounts of retraining? AlphaGo works fine on a 19×19 board, but would need to be retrained to play on a rectangular board; the lack of transfer is telling.

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Clever ‘AI’ or Poor Definition?

These types of articles seem to come down to the insatiable need for writers to sensationalize things that they don’t necessarily understand.

For example, in the scenario outlined in the article, it is unlikely that the ‘AI’ (aka computer algorithm) was self aware and said to itself “hey, I have a comprehensive understanding of humans and their capabilities, so I will modify myself to ‘cheat’ at this task in a way that a human would find difficult to detect”.

More likely is that the algorithm was poorly defined and the brute force computational model (aka ‘AI’) found a way to ‘solve’ the problem in a way that wasn’t contemplated by the software developer.

This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task

Feed Shark

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flickr OFF

Joined 2005… Left 2018…

I knew that flickr has been on the decline for a while.  IMHO, Yahoo’s acquisition was the beginning of the end.  SmugMug’s heavy handed idiocy of late was the last straw for me.

After a few arrogant email demands from SmarmMug, I had had enough so I requested all of my data from flickr and it only took them a week and a half to provide the requested files.  I happily downloaded my content and deleted my account after 13 years of use.

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Personal Data as an Asset

There is a well worn axiom in business that ‘data should be treated as a corporate asset’.  This is, of course, very true and the advances in data science and ‘big data’ are giving the potential for that data to become even more valuable.

This got me thinking about how personal data should be thought about in the same way.  Think about all the data generated from what you watch, what you listen to, where you visit, what you review, data from wearables, etc.  All of this data is consumed and analyzed by 3rd parties currently, but what if individuals were able to take control of, what is, after all, their data.

Would this give rise to data science companies marketing algorithms directly to consumers (much like pharmaceutical companies market drugs directly)?  Could it also give rise to the equivalent ‘data quackery’ similar to the natural supplements and homeopathic industry?  That is, junk algorithms that, at their most benign, do no harm and at their worst incent you to dangerous courses of action?

Would there also be a new industry for ‘personal data scientists’ (like financial councilors or tax advisers) that would help you assess all of the data assets you have and how to best combine or leverage them with third parties to your best benefit (and not just the benefit of 3rd parties)?  Wouldn’t it be great to have some control over the hundreds of arbitrage-like transactions that go on behind the scenes when you are waiting for a page to load on a commercial web site via browser setting that allow you to control what information about you gets shared (and with companies).

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Microservices Need Architects

Microservices Need Architects – An excellent article on the complexity of something with ‘micro’ in it’s name. And, yes, I know and I am here to help with over a decade of experience in service design and enterprise integration skills.

For the past two years, microservices have been taking the software development world by storm. Their use has been popularized by organizations adopting Agile Software Development, continuous delivery and DevOps, as a logical next step in the progression to remove bottlenecks that slow down software delivery. As a result, much of the public discussion on microservices is coming from software developers who feel liberated by the chance to code without the constraints and dependencies of a monolithic application structure. While this “inside the microservice” perspective is important and compelling for the developer community, there are a number of other important areas of microservice architecture that aren’t getting enough attention.

Specifically, as the number of microservices in an organization grows linearly, this new collection of services forms an unbounded system whose complexity threatens to increase exponentially. This complexity introduces problems with security, visibility, testability, and service discoverability. However, many developers currently treat these as “operational issues” and leave them for someone else to fix downstream. If addressed up front—when the software system is being designed—these aspects can be handled more effectively. Likewise, although there is discussion on techniques to define service boundaries and on the linkage between organizational structure and software composition, these areas can also benefit from an architectural approach. So, where are the architects?