Took me a few seconds to figure this out. Register for VibeCon – the biggest vibe coding conference! .
The funny part is that a lot of folks who are ‘Vibe Coding’ will not get the joke here…
Source: Mastodon: @leyrer@23.social
– Suramya
Changing passwords regularly is a good way to ensure that your accounts are secure. Yes I know about the new NIST guidelines on password changing but I disagree with it. If you are using a password manager (and you should be) then changing passwords on a regular basis is not a hard thing to do.
In any case, I noticed that the password on a bunch of my accounts had not been changed in a while so was updating them; one of the accounts is on OpenAI that I had created when it had launched but not really used much after that. After logging in I spent a few minutes trying to find the option to change my password but couldn’t find it, finally had to go to the FAQ’s to find out how to change the password and I saw the following:
How to reset your ChatGPT password
They really don’t know how to implement a simple change password functionality… I mean this is not something I expect from a billion dollar company. I have seen this on sites created by startups but never at a large company. Although, if their site is created using their AI code generation then that would kind of explains this. đ
– Suramya
99% of what we see about what AI can do is basically hype, especially stuff from VC’s (Venture Capitalists) or other leaders in companies that have invested in AI. Then you have people like Marc Andreessen who seem to be living in an alternate reality all together because that’s the only explanation I have for them making statements like the one below. I mean it is an interesting take that your super power AI will be able to generate actual art like paintings, books and poems etc but not be able to be a VC because ‘it (being a VC) is more art than science.’ I mean if it can generate actual art (that doesn’t suck) what is stopping it from doing a VC job even if it more ‘art’ than science? After all you are claiming that it can perform other intangible skills so why not your job?
The funny part is that an AI can actually do a VC’s job more easily than create art that that people like. I would love to have an AI that actually works. I mean, I am a Sci-Fi fan, so yeah I would absolutely geek out about AI in real. Unfortunately what we have now is nothing close to being intelligent and that just sucks.
– Suramya
The more I see posts about some of the proposed use cases for AI the more I feel that some people just don’t want to use their brains and want to outsource all thinking to the ‘AI’. The latest example that triggered this post is screenshoted & Quoted below:
Though malloc is a very useful function in c, it is not without its problems. The biggest is that it can be confusing for some to decide how much memory to allocate, needing complicated statements with sizeof . To solve this I propose a new alternative to malloc that utilizes the power of modern developments in Al, mallocPlusAI . The usage is simple.
int* x = (int*)mallocPlusAI(“Enough memory to store up to 5 integers”);
mallocPlusAI takes in a character array which is forwarded to a ChatGPT instance alongside an initial prompt “You are a memory allocator for a computer, and you need to tell me how many. bytes of memory I would need to accomplish a certain task. Make sure to give your response as only a whole number of bytes, do not provide any other text. Here is what I request: “
So instead of doing something like the following
5 * sizeof(int) + allocation overhead
Because apparently it is too hard to type 5 * sizeof() * Allocation Overhead, we will call an external API which brings the following downsides:
Can someone please explain to me why you would use something like this instead of spending 2 mins thinking about what size of memory to assign?
– Suramya
The more I read about the kind of products these so call ‘AI Founders’ are coming up, the more I feel that they all need some serious therapy. The latest example of this is intouch.family which is an AI powered chatbot that calls your elderly parents so you don’t have to. I mean seriously? The official description is:
InTouch is a subscription service for seniors which regularly calls and keeps company to your parent, evaluates their well-being and alerts you if assistance is needed.
I get that we are all busy and it sometimes gets hard to call people and keep in touch, but anyone who thinks that AI is a replacement for the human touch especially in keeping up relationships needs to get their head examined.
I am quite bad at remembering birthdays and anniversaries except for close family and friends. When I was in college I thought that it would be nice if I could automate wishing folks Happy Birthday without having to actually wish them myself. So I wrote a program where I fed in all the birthday’s and the idea was that at a random time during the day it would email them a message wishing them. I even had a lot of enhancements planned, like use the ‘Poet’ program (it generated poems, based on certain criteria) and add it as part of the message to make it more personal. Spent a few days creating the program and it worked perfectly.
I was about to start using it and then realized that the whole point of wishing folks on their birthday was to keep in touch with them, not discharge an obligation. Especially if you have not talked to someone for a while, wishing them allows you to initiate a conversation. So I ended up changing the software to email me a reminder (This is in the days before Google Calendar and other reliable online calendars) so that I could call/email/text the person wishing them.
The whole idea behind technology is to make human contact easier, not to replace human contact. Telegrams allowed us to send urgent news quickly, then came phones that allowed us to talk to people who were far away, then we had VoIP/Voice Calls that allowed you to call without massive bills. Then came video calls such as zoom/Whatsapp etc that allow you to see the person you are talking to as well as hear them. In the near future we will have VR calls where you will feel that you are in the same room as the other person.
Unfortunately, most of the ‘AI’ services we see are being created/marketed as a replacement for human contact instead of as an aid to it. For example, instead of making friends to talk to, someone has created a AI ‘friends bot’ that you can share stuff with. (can’t find the link right now) Another genius created a whole social network that contains only AI bots that respond to your posts and create content.
I know making new friends can be scary at times but you need to find out what works for you. The stereotypical nerd who is anti-social is not something you want to aim for because that is absolute nonsense. You need to work with others if you want to succeed in life. If you are on the spectrum it can be harder for you to make friends but you need to see what works for you. One of my close friends is like that and we stay in touch over chat and emails as I know that they prefer non-verbal communications. With others I call or email or meet face to face. At one point a lot of my existing friends became busy with life (Got married/had kids etc) and I had to go out and make new friends so I started hiking and joined groups where we would go out for weekend trips or hikes. Ended up making new friends and actually met my wife in one of these trips. (Which was awesome!) I also have a lot of online friends that I have never met face to face (but I hope to when I can) and we email/message each other all the time.
Tech is awesome but nothing beats the human touch. Use Tech to enable/improve your connections/interactions but don’t make it a replacement for them.
– Suramya
AI (or rather what is call AI right now), is not really intelligent but it does have a lot of risks associated with using it. We all know about the Deep Fakes and the hallucinations etc but those are not the only risks of using generative AI. The researchers at MIT have cataloged the over 700 risks of using generative AI.
The risks posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are of considerable concern to academics, auditors, policymakers, AI companies, and the public. However, a lack of shared understanding of AI risks can impede our ability to comprehensively discuss, research, and react to them. This paper addresses this gap by creating an AI Risk Repository to serve as a common frame of reference.
This comprises a living database of 777 risks extracted from 43 taxonomies, which can be filtered based on two overarching taxonomies and easily accessed, modified, and updated via our website and online spreadsheets. We construct our Repository with a systematic review of taxonomies and other structured classifications of AI risk followed by an expert consultation. We develop our taxonomies of AI risk using a best-fit framework synthesis. Our high-level Causal Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies each risk by its causal factors (1) Entity: Human, AI; (2) Intentionality: Intentional, Unintentional; and (3) Timing: Pre-deployment; Post-deployment. Our mid-level Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental, and (7) AI system safety, failures, & limitations. These are further divided into 23 subdomains. The AI Risk Repository is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to rigorously curate, analyze, and extract AI risk frameworks into a publicly accessible, comprehensive, extensible, and categorized risk database. This creates a foundation for a more coordinated, coherent, and complete approach to defining, auditing, and managing the risks posed by AI systems.
They have published a paper on it: The AI Risk Repository: A Comprehensive Meta-Review, Database, and Taxonomy of Risks From Artificial Intelligence that you should check out. They have also made their entire database available to copy for free as well.
Check it out if you have some free time.
Source: Boingboing.net: MIT’s AI risk database exposes 700+ ways AI could ruin your life.
– Suramya
With new technology and ‘AI’ it is becoming easier and easier to create fake images that look realistic enough to fool the casual eye. The problem is that this can be used to promote lies or scams etc. So we need to be able to identify if a given image is AI generated or real. Unfortunately, this is something that is easier said than done because as soon as the detector comes up with a way to identify fake images, the generators make changes to fix the issue resulting in a on-going game of whack-a-mole. That being said, it is important that we can identify and there is a lot of fascinating work that is happening in this space.
In an actually useful implementation of AI, researchers have trained a system called MISLnet that searches for statistical traces left in synthetic images by their source generator. It looks for relationships between pixel color values that are present in images taken by a digital camera which are not there in the AI generated image. This allows the system to identify AI generated images with over 98% accuracy.
I read the paper Beyond Deepfake Images: Detecting AI-Generated Videos(PDF) and honestly a lot of it went over my head. But based on tests it seems that MISLnet does perform well in identifying AI generated images.
The new tool the research project is unleashing on deepfakes, called âMISLnetâ, evolved from years of data derived from detecting fake images and video with tools that spot changes made to digital video or images. These may include the addition or movement of pixels between frames, manipulation of the speed of the clip, or the removal of frames.
Such tools work because a digital cameraâs algorithmic processing creates relationships between pixel color values. Those relationships between values are very different in user-generated or images edited with apps like Photoshop.
But because AI-generated videos arenât produced by a camera capturing a real scene or image, they donât contain those telltale disparities between pixel values.
The Drexel teamâs tools, including MISLnet, learn using a method called a constrained neural network, which can differentiate between normal and unusual values at the sub-pixel level of images or video clips, rather than searching for the common indicators of image manipulation like those mentioned above.
The tool specifically targets images taken with a digital camera. It does not take into consideration that the image might have been taken by an Analog camera or is a scan of a printed images. In both those scenarios the relationships between pixel color values that the tool uses to identify real images will not exist, potentially leading the tool to falsely classify the image as fake or AI generated.
That being said, this is pretty interesting research and I am looking forward to testing the tool once it is released for general use.
Source: Schneier on Security: New Research in Detecting AI-Generated Videos
– Suramya
Found this hilarious but accurate write up on AI and how the current Hype is spoiling the industry: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. It is a little rude, filled with profanity but accurately covers the current state of AI. It is filled with gems such as:
So it is with great regret that I announce that the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne, i.e, I am going to fucking break your neck. I am truly, deeply, sorry.
…
…
Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything – or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here’s a secret, they didn’t do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. This is a solved problem – with smart people who can collaborate and provide reasonable requirements, a competent team will knock this out of the park every single time, admittedly with some amount of frustration.
Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup
The current hype and insistence by companies to insert AI capabilities in everything whether it is needed or not is getting to the point where it is actively annoying and in some cases dangerous. The recent attempted release of Recall + Copilot by Microsoft is a good example of dangerous. Then we have companies releasing AI powered BIOS , that “interpret the PC userâs request, analyze their specific hardware, and parse through the LLMâs extensive knowledge base of BIOS and computer terminology to make the appropriate changes to the BIOS Setup. This breakthrough technology helps address a major hurdle for PC users that require or desire changes to their BIOS Setup for their personal computers but do not fully understand the meaning of the settings available to them.”
I really don’t need AI in my mouse or use AI to create a perfect smoothie or the thousand other things folks are shoving AI into. ChatGPT can’t do simple addition or multipications and keeps making up stuff. Google’s AI Gemini recommends that people add glue to their pizza’s, it misidentified a poisonous mushroom as an edible one and there are many many more such cases out there (I have posted some examples earlier).
The problem is that folks (grifters to be honest) are selling AI as the cure all for all problems a company wants to solve. This is overshadowing the actual work being done in the field which is solving actual problems and use cases.
What we have right now is Machine Learning that has a good track record in predicting responses, but it is nothing close to being intelligent. A cat has more intelligence in it than the current ‘AI’. This is not to say that we won’t have AI systems in the future. I have been hearing the claim that AI is just around the corner for about 25 years now but we are not there yet.
Till recently if you wanted to spy on someone and see what they have been doing on the computer, you had to infect their computer by making them visit a dodgy site or get physical access and download a RAT (Remote Access Trojan) & install it on the target’s computer, configure the Antivirus to ignore it and put in a backdoor so that you can access the data remotely. Obviously this was a lot of work so looks like some cyber criminals reached out to Microsoft (MS) and asked for help. MS being a super helpful company, has added a functionality called ‘Windows Recall’ to it’s windows 11 Preview build to solve this. Recall takes a snapshot (literally) of the screen every few seconds and stores it in a searchable database ‘stored locally’. Basically it does exactly what spyware does without having to install anything new on your system. As per the company below is how the Recall works:
Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds. The snapshots are encrypted and saved on your PCâs hard drive. You can use Recall to locate the content you have viewed on your PC using search or on a timeline bar that allows you to scroll through your snapshots. Once you find the snapshot that you were looking for in Recall, it will be analysed and offer you options to interact with the content. What actions you can take depend on the content and the chat provider capabilities in Copilot in Windows. For example, you may highlight a block of text and decide to summarise it, translate it, or open it with a text editor like Word or Notepad. If you highlight an image, you will be able to edit it or use your chat provider in Copilot in Windows to find or create a similar image.
Recall will also enable you to open the snapshot in the original application in which it was created, and, as Recall is refined over time, it will open the actual source document, website or email in a screenshot. This functionality will be improved during Recallâs preview phase.
The best part is that according to their own announcement the snapshots will not hide passwords/account numbers etc. However, it does block you from recording DRM’d video you might be watching because protecting that is important not simple things like personal information etc.
Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry.
This is a gold mine for data thieves, abusers, industrial espionage, identity thieves and other cyber criminals. Once they have access to a PC they don’t need to do anything else except copy the data from the Recall DB to their own system and happily browse through the users personal data at their leisure.
I don’t think MS has thought about folks who use public computers such as the ones in an Internet Cafe or Hotels or Libraries. With this feature enabled all someone has to do is wait a few days then come back and copy incredibly private information that they can then sell/use. Privacy and Domestic Abuse experts are raising questions about this as well because sure as night follows day, abusers will use this to track what their victims are doing on a computer and that can go bad very quickly.
Even if the data is supposedly only on the local machine we don’t know when MS is going to force it to be uploaded to their servers using OneDrive or other similar setups. All the coverage I have seen for this functionality 99% of them have raised similar concerns about the security, privacy and quite frankly the need for this kind of surveillance.
Imagine what would a regieme like Taliban, China or other conservative/restrictive governments do with information they get from this system. You are dreaming if you think that they will not force MS to make this information available to them at the risk of losing access to that market if they don’t. Once you have the capability to do this, feature creep will happen for sure and we will end up in a Surveillance state.
The only Windows 11 system at my place is my wife’s laptop and you can be sure that I am going to disable this ‘feature’ as soon as it launches.
Source: Bleepingcomputer: Windows 11 Recall AI feature will record everything you do on your PC
– Suramya
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