The big gap between LLMs and human minds

An LLM learning English is like a blind person learning words like "red," "green," and "blue."

It can and does learn how the words are used — that they are alternatives — that the sky is said to be blue, blood is said to be red, and so forth.

It can answer questions such as, "What color is the sky?"

But it has never seen the sky. It has never had the experience of seeing blue. It therefore has no internal representation of that experience.

The only thing an LLM is born knowing is that words influence what words can appear near them. (And, in images, pixels.)

A human being is born with plenty of instinctive knowledge that we hardly know how to characterize — directions, space, perception, movement, and also the structure of language, enabling a human baby to learn English from far less training data than an LLM requires.

That is why I don't think LLMs are the complete future of AI.

Also posted on Facebook and LinkedIn.

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What if AI improves employment?

There was a time when the 40-hour work week could have been interpreted as massive job loss.

"What, there's not going to be enough work to keep everybody busy? If you can only work 40 hours a week, you're going to be poor! That's terrible!"

Fortunately, the expectation became normal that 40 hours should provide a living wage — not two thirds of a 60-hour living wage.

What if AI does something like that? Shortens our work week and raises our standard of living? As long as it raises productivity, it perfectly well could.

BTW, I do not expect this to happen as an apocalypse. It could happen through careful adoption of new technology where it is beneficial.

Also posted on Facebook and LinkedIn.

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More wheelchair engineering

Yesterday's project was replacing the threshold on our carport door. Thank goodness our house can be entered from the car without going up any steps — that fact has been a boon to Melody. But the new power wheelchair wouldn't go over the threshold, which was the kind that has been common for about 60 years, steep, about an inch high in the middle. Here's what it looked like after removal:

So we got a new threshold, shallower and wider, and also a rubber door sweep to fill in the gap:

Crucially, this is a carport door; snow doesn't pile up outside it, nor does it get rained on. I'll probably install a second door sweep on the interior side of the door, mostly for the sake of appearance.

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Microsoft activation codes (from before 2012) have been cracked

I have an old PC on which I run several operating systems, among them Windows XP to support an older SCSI slide scanner and to run old software. I made some small modifications to the disk (putting Debian Linux in another partition) and Windows XP asked for its activation code.

I probably do have that activation code somewhere — it's definitely validly licensed, and has run on this PC for a long time — but digging it up would have been hard. Fortunately, there's an alternative.

Microsoft activation codes for Windows and some other software from before the Vista era (2012) have been cracked. You can tell the software you want to activate by telephone, then take the digits that it gives you and give them to UMSKT and get an activation key.

I don't advocate running any software without a proper license. But, realistically, there is plenty of validly licensed older software that is no longer easy, or even possible, to activate the conventional way. UMSKT is a completely above-board, open-source project and will be helpful to those of us who still run older software.

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Computer security in wartime

BE ALERT! This is a rough time for computer security. The United States is at war, and, as usually happens, computer crime is up. I have no specific evidence that particular computer attacks are tied to Iran or other foreign powers, but the experts think it's happening.

Foreign-sponsored cyberattacks, if that's what they are, look like ordinary computer crime, but often with a repetitious and pointless quality, because they are trying to bother people and degrade communications more than actually steal anything.

A recent attack on software used by gas stations is attributed, by authorities, to Iran.

The recent ransomware attack on Canvas, the educational recordkeeping system, looked domestic, but I know from experience that it is easy for total strangers to recruit low-level local cybercriminals to carry out their schemes.

The web site of an organization I belong to was hit with a denial-of-service attack, and some browsers still mark it as unsafe (which it no longer is). Quite a few other web sites now have "prove you are human" safeguards in place where they shouldn't be needed.

My spam folder has started getting a few variations on the same themes, over and over, all day long:

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO? The same things as always...

(1) Be alert.

(2) Don't obey strangers! Don't click on links sent to you. Don't even believe people who call you on the phone and claim to be your bank...

(3) Check on your less experienced friends and relatives and make sure they are being cautious, too. Now is not the time to "just do what it says on the screen."

(4) Do not use passwords that anybody could guess! If there's a chance that anybody else in the world has used the same password, then criminals will try it on your accounts. You're not the only "BravesFan" or "2017grad" and certainly not the only "123"! Your password needs to look like absolute gibberish.

(4) Back up your important files, and remove the backup device from your computer once the files are on it. (Malware on your computer could erase anything that is attached to it.)

(5) Expect the Internet to be less reliable. Things aren't always going to work. Expect outages and slowdowns.

(6) Again, be alert.

For more about cybersecurity in wartime, see this.

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Has AI made education obsolete?

I want to quickly pull together a few key ideas about the impact of AI on education and employment. All of this is elaborated in other places.

• Thinking "now that AI has all the knowledge, we don't need to go to college" is the same kind of foolishness as if you said, "now that libraries have all the knowledge, we don't need to go to college." You need to learn how to understand and use the knowledge!
• Cassie Kozyrkov, whom I quote frequently, points out that our most important human intellectual skill is knowing what to pay attention to. Digging up facts and finding applications is easier than ever thanks to AI (and, earlier, libraries, and the invention of writing). But what do we ultimately want to do?
• Automation (AI or not) replaces tasks, not people. If your job is simply to do one rather straightforward task, you're in danger, and you always were. The jobs that are safe are those that involve planning, maintaining the big picture, and responding to the unexpected.
• You need a broad education. Those philosophy, mathematics, or English courses that you thought were useless are going to be the ones that sustain you. Learn to express yourself and learn to think about unfamiliar things. Above all, learn how to learn.
• Be aware that narrow vocational training is a different world. Training in skilled trades can make you very employable. Plumbers and electricians have to solve problems on-site, creatively, every day, and there will always be work for them. They know the technology is going to change and that they have to keep up with it, and that trade school didn't give them a general education; they have to pick up general knowledge elsewhere.
• Don't fall into the trap of getting a narrow education while pretending it's a broad one. College degrees in business and other "pre-professional" fields can be a trap. They only prepare you for the first few years of work. You might end up qualified to be a kind of middle manager or software jockey that will be automated out of existence by improvements in software.
• Go to college to get a broad education that will prepare you for the unexpected. If you learn something technical, make sure you understand the science and mathematics under it.

For more about what a broad education is, click here.

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Didn't expect to be famous for this...

The Georgia Museum of Art took note of our visit, and even read an entry in the Daily Notebook five years ago, and put this in their weekly e-mailed newsletter:

So now we are famous for being lovers. Not a kind of fame I expected, but I do note that we have lasted over 4500 times as long as Romeo and Juliet...

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Short notes

Plastic bag recycling is real: There have been allegations that plastic grocery bags are not really recycled at all, even though some places collect them for that purpose. Certainly, our regular recycling service doesn't take them, and that made us uneasy. But now (thanks to a friend who is both a famous violinist and a great Internet sleuth) I have confirmed that the recycling done at Kroger is real and goes to a company called NexTrex that makes outdoor deck flooring and the like. From their web site, you can find where to drop off your bags.

Perfume is different: Sharon advises me that present-day perfumes and colognes tend to be a bit different from earlier ones — and weaker — thanks to smoke-free indoor air. What was just smellable at 1960 social events is now too strong. The composition of the scents is a little different, too.

Golden Calf: When the Israelites made the golden calf, they claimed to gather around it for a feast to the Lord God, not just to worship the calf. (Apparently God didn't believe them.) See Exodus 32.

Tacking lipservice to God onto something ungodly doesn't excuse it.

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More 50th anniversaries

Let the record show that Melody and I marked the semicentennial of our second date — but we marked it one day late, and by doing something unlike that date though like many later ones — going for Mexican food, this time at El Real in Bethlehem, Georgia. Click here for more details, written on the 45th anniversary.

Upcoming semicentennials: my first dinner with her parents (May 21, after which 18-year-old Michael was allowed to take 17-year-old Melody out in the evenings); our "photo safari" to Braselton (June 21). Details are in the May and June 2021 Daily Notebook, where we were marking the 45th anniversaries of the events.

And we grew up and got married and lived happily ever after!

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Bitlocker encryption: blessing or curse?

[Update:] Bitlocker has reportedly been cracked, not by breaking the encryption, but by activating a mechanism built into Windows for recovering from damage.

Windows will be updated to reduce the risk, but it will remain the case that Bitlocker provides less protection than you thought, and that's another reason you may choose not to use it. Read on...

I got to the UGA library this afternoon, settled down to work with my 14-inch ThinkPad T490s laptop, booted into Windows after using Linux, and found it in another of its snits in which it wanted the Bitlocker encryption key every time it booted Windows. This time, Secure Boot and TPM were working normally, the problem was persistent, and I could only imagine that Bitlocker was corrupted by a recent Windows update (said to have happened to a few people, not many), Linux had done something to it, or Bitlocker was upset because I had repartitioned a disk drive (see below about dev drives).

Well... my considered decision was to turn off Bitlocker and also not store clients' confidential data on this laptop. Nowadays, when working on clients' data, I remote in to Ignatius (my big desktop) over Tailscale VPN. I can do this with the laptop running either Windows or Linux.

I thought earlier that Windows Updates were liable to turn Bitlocker back on again. Apparently, one of them did, but if you turn it off again, it stays off.

The big benefit from turning Bitlocker off is that now Linux can read the Windows disks, increasing the usefulness of the dual-boot machine.

The only real reason I don't switch this laptop to Linux entirely — which may happen eventually! — is that I use it to control my telescope and capture image data. The software for that, N.I.N.A. among other things, is only available for Windows.

Why might this not be a good idea? Some thought is called for. Bitlocker encrypts your disk drive so that if someone steals your laptop, they can't put your hard disk into a different computer and read it. So when I did away with Bitlocker, I also had to stop carrying clients' confidential data on the laptop. I handle some data that is required by law to be protected.

If you run Windows, please check whether you have Bitlocker running, and back up your keys. It's a straightforward thing to do. I backed up my keys to my Microsoft account and also to an unencrypted drive on another machine (a USB drive would be fine) and also printed them out — I carry the printout in my wallet!

And consider turning off Bitlocker if there is little risk of your laptop being stolen, or if the data on your disk would not do a lot of harm if it fell into the wrong hands.

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Do you need a dev drive?

If you process large amounts of data, and particularly if you copy large amounts of data onto your computer from elsewhere, you may need a dev drive. Click to learn more.

Dev drives are disk drives (or partitions) with a new high-performance file system and, crucially, by default, a less time-consuming kind of virus protection. Basically, Windows Defender scans files when time is available, rather than while they are being written.

Use a dev drive for data you are processing. Do not use it for downloading from the Web; you want virus protection to take priority then.

I created dev drives on my two laptops, the one on which I acquire astronomical images and the one on which I process them.

Caution: In view of my previous experience I recommend turning Bitlocker off before creating a dev drive (and turning it back on afterward). Just a hunch. On one of my laptops I ignored that precaution and had no problems.

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Remote Desktop Protocol now wants .RDP files digitally signed

If you connect to a remote Windows computer by clicking on an .RDP file, as I do several times a day, you may have started getting a warning. Microsoft now wants all .RDP files to be digitally signed. Click here for more explanation.

Apparently, some people somewhere have had problems with counterfeit .RDP files. Someone could give corporate users a fake .RDP file that connects to a fake server rather than the one they want to access — and immediately collects their username and password for nefarious use.

For now, there's a registry fix that eliminates the warnings, although it may not work forever. I used it. Details here, near the bottom of the page.

Here is a handy utility for self-signing .RDP files — I have not tried it yet. You don't need to pay for a certificate; just self-assign one, since you only want it to be trusted on specific computers, and you can tell each of them to do so.

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A thought about Windows vs. Linux vs. macOS

One final thought: Many of us formed our expectations about operating systems back in the early 2000s, or inherited expectations from others who formed them then, and back then, there was a bit of a software shortage that has greatly lessened.

From the dawn of microcomputing to well after 2000, you had to choose your OS to run your software. If you wanted a great variety of software for common tasks, you had to choose Windows. On the Mac you could have excellent software, but only a limited selection of it (it was especially weak on programming tools), and Linux was hit-or-miss.

Not any more! I'm still seeing a bit of that kind of shortage in software for astronomical imaging, but not much else. You can buy Microsoft Office for the Mac; LibreOffice, freeware, practically supersedes it anyhow and is available for all three OSes; the best graphics software actually spread from the Mac to the PC; Audacity audio editing is available for all three; and, to my delight, Microsoft's crown jewel, the .NET Framework and Visual Studio Code, is available for all three.

So my choice of OS now depends on what clients need. I may actually be getting a Mac soon, to experiment with neural networks on its high-performance CPU.

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