Reg the Fronkey Farmer

I think Lindberg is correct when he is talking about the success of intelligence led counterterrorism at the domestic level. He is entitled to ask, “if preventing another mass-casualty foreign attack was one of the principal objectives, how can that result simply be called failure?”  Yes, there have been jihadist attacks since 9/11 but over…[Read more]

Have a great week!!

If your worldview can be predicted entirely from one label, you may have downloaded the bundle rather than examined the components.

RTFF.

The problem is that an LLM can recognize the malicious text perfectly well as an instruction, but the boundary determining whether that instruction has authority is not as intrinsically rigid as the security boundaries we are accustomed to in conventional computing. The problem reminds be of “buffer overflow” or cross-site scripting that def…[Read more]

An interesting opinion piece on ethics and moral identity.

We could solve the charging-time problem by sending the fully charged battery backwards in time to before it was plugged in? No engineering deadlines required. Why is the patent office always closed when I go there?

The quantum batteries that upend the rules of charging.…..The important thing is that “bigger” means more coherently participating quantum units, not simply a physically larger battery. Adding more cells appears to reduce the charging time. But remember that nuclear fusion is still only 10 years away, since we began waiting for it 60 years ago 🙂

Echoes gets a regular airing in my house 🙂

Strega….If the rain becomes persistent and you discover you’ve been staring through the same window for twenty minutes……..

Have a great week!

Some nights I sneak around the Campus, spray-painting ‘QUALIA’ on the walls of the Psychology Dept block then strike it through.

RTFF

*Governments and legal systems still tend to conceptualize atheism and humanism merely as an absence of religion rather than positive philosophical convictions entitled to equal respect. Freedom of religion or belief doesn’t mean religion plus an exemption for everyone else. The State doesn’t get to decide that theological convictions are…[Read more]

“Disproportionate”? Sorry, I should have specified ‘relative to what’.

Yes, Israel is disproportionately represented in scientific and technological innovation relative to its population and size. I would say that Israel produces more high-level scientific and technological output than you would expect from its population, land area, or even it…[Read more]

I would have like to have been in the meeting when that idea was first floated. I think Israel’s longstanding advantage has been disproportionately dense networks connecting universities, engineering, medicine, entrepreneurship and venture capital. That produces a cultural environment in which somebody can plausibly say “Can I have some money to g…[Read more]

Have a great week!

Thanks Jake, I appreciate that. Yesterday a friend of mine said “Reg, I am so glad you are an atheist!” I looked a bit bemused as we know each other a long time and are both of us are ‘militant’ anti-theists. She caught my look and continued…..”I mean, even as an atheist, you would be able to convince certain people that God is real”. I replied…[Read more]

Let’s take the ‘Kafka Intifada’  a little further. However, I will coin it the “The Samsa Effect”.

Gregor does know that something has happened to him. What he fails to grasp initially is the significance of his transformation. His world has changed beyond recognition, but his inherited routine of thought continues running as though nothing fu…[Read more]