An Article Dump

I have read much recently, links and stuff that I want to keep available, and thus it goes in to a post.  You might find some of it interesting as well.

Who thinks about AI?  I do, some of the time.  What I think about a lot is the fact that when developers are "training" their AIs, they're doing it with other peoples' content.  By scraping published or copyrighted content, they're stealing other people's work to make an AI.  Eventually, the AI made with  others' work will put those people out of a job.  On twitter the other day I saw a reference to a product called Nightshade.  It's AI poison, and this is so dang clever, it just hurts me.  This is what it does.

Nightshade works similarly as Glaze, but instead of a defense against style mimicry, it is designed as an offense tool to distort feature representations inside generative AI image models. Like Glaze, Nightshade is computed as a multi-objective optimization that minimizes visible changes to the original image. While human eyes see a shaded image that is largely unchanged from the original, the AI model sees a dramatically different composition in the image. For example, human eyes might see a shaded image of a cow in a green field largely unchanged, but an AI model might see a large leather purse lying in the grass. Trained on a sufficient number of shaded images that include a cow, a model will become increasingly convinced cows have nice brown leathery handles and smooth side pockets with a zipper, and perhaps a lovely brand logo. 

The article is here, and they go deeper into the weeds, but currently I'm entranced by the AI believing cows have handles and a logo.

Google's AI, Gemini, has come under fire as of late.  From CBS and others we learn the following. "The new search tool, which the company has touted as revolutionary, came under fire after some users asked it to generate images of people drawn from history, such as German soldiers during World War 2, and popes, who have historically been White and male. Some of Gemini's images portrayed Nazi soldiers as Black and Asian and popes as female." "AI-powered chatbots are also attracting scrutiny for the role they might play in the U.S. elections this fall. A study released on Tuesday found that Gemini and four other widely used AI tools yielded inaccurate election information more than half the time, even steering voters head to polling places that don't exist."  This is not good.  Pichai, one of the Google leaders, is taking considerable heat for all of this.

Marriage is not doing so well in these United States.  Women, who often as not, work full time and yet are expected to keep the house, make the food, take out the trash and shoulder the mental load of making sure things run smoothly have had it.  Lyz Lenz published an excerpt of her book, This American Ex-Wife, in the WAPO.  One of the things that sent her over the edge was this.

I shut myself in the bedroom and called my husband.  "Come home,” I sobbed.  He did. He got the kids, and I refused to come out of the bedroom until it was the baby’s bedtime. I simply could not face them. When I did come out, I found my husband had fed the children. There was Chinese takeout waiting for me. This is good, I thought. Maybe he sees. That night, after I put the baby to bed, I scrubbed my daughter’s poop off the carpet. Then my husband told me I needed to get it together. Maybe, he suggested, I should sleep more. And I realized he didn’t see me at all.

What must it be like for her ex-husband.  He's in the book, he's in the excerpted section in the WAPO.  He's referenced in another article that discusses a slew of new books out on divorced women.  This man, as well as other referenced men, is now in print as being self-absorbed and oblivious to the situations of their marriages.  I would find it humiliating.  It would be interesting to see a follow up on how they're doing.  Ms Lenz is doing just fine.  One of her more interesting points is that quite often men don't realize they're about to be left, only when she doesn't come home do they twig to the situation.

And then there is water.  In Arizona, we're frequently thinking about water.  Restoration Cowboy Style recently published a post about the drilling that is going on where they live.  To this day, Arizona does not have a coherent water management plan in place.  Governor Hobbs sent the Saudi farms packing, so they are no longer draining an aquifer, but it still goes on in the state.  Alfalfa and nut trees use too much water.  You know who else uses too much water?  AI training facilities.  Microsoft is cooling their data centers in Goodyear (near Phoenix) with water.  I don't know if they're recycling or not.  Then there is the chip fab being built in Tempe which will also use a ton of water.  This is a desert, why do people treat water like it's an infinite resource?

Who is aware of the ransomware attack against Change Health Care?  Who has ever heard of these people?  This has been going on and today is the first day I've seen any MSM coverage.  Change Health Care is a switch, doctors and pharmacies submit charges, Change Health sends it out for payment, and then remits to the billing party. The ransomware people have encrypted Change Health's data and are holding it ransom for money.  They have also stolen a lot of patient data and put it out on the dark web.

WAPO finally put up an article.  Here is something that's not paywalled.  Anyway, this is bad.  People can't fill their prescriptions, the PBMs are impacted, doctors can't bill, patients can't be released from hospital because their prescriptions can't be filled to go home with them.  I follow angrypharmacist on twitter, he also has long form writing.  This piece is worth reading, I will warn you that he uses  language that some people will find objectionable, but it captures the situation very well.

Century Link is sending out technician number four tomorrow.  The will require us to be home the entire day and wait for arrival.  Thus far I have remained pleasant to the techs, but tomorrow I may have to deploy my tone of exasperation to express how much this is pissing me off.  I have a new phone cable, a new modem, and a new phone cable wall plate.  Since all the local stuff is new, perhaps they could go to the DSL switch in the office and jiggle some wires there.

Ok, internet is down again, I'm publishing as soon as it comes back up, so sorry about any undiscovered typos.  I'll get them later.