tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-283447202024-03-19T02:48:13.513-06:00Chip Overclock®90% of everything I say is crap. Because 90% of everything is crap.Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.comBlogger381125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-70729746471752888502024-03-07T12:22:00.003-07:002024-03-07T20:30:43.741-07:00AI in the BattlefieldThe name, "Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node" (TITAN), is pretty clever. Peter Thiel's Denver-Based Palantir Technologies, a software-driven data analytics company in the defense and intelligence domain, just won a US$178M contract to build an AI-driven mobile battlefield sensor fusion platform. From Palantir's home page: "AI-Powered Operations, For Every Decision". In this context, Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-14508703379099694982024-02-20T08:26:00.002-07:002024-02-21T10:22:18.023-07:00Pig Butchering with Large Language ModelsI have my Facebook default privacy settings locked down so that only my FB friends can see my posts on my timeline. And I only accept friend requests from folks I feel I know pretty well, and typically only those I know in meat space. But when I shared my post about selling a BMW motorcycle to my motorcycle club's group on FB, I had to change the privacy setting of that particular post from Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-27025736154280839172024-02-14T07:57:00.013-07:002024-02-20T12:50:10.746-07:00Are AI Generated Works Intellectual Property?The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has once again stressed that only humans can be listed as inventors on patents. And the U.S. Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress and typically a small bureaucracy with just a few people, is about to make big news as it evaluates whether AI generated works can be copyrighted.If the USPTO declines to recognize AI "inventors", and the Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-71492259298530803882024-01-25T09:59:00.004-07:002024-02-14T07:58:51.247-07:00Large Language Models/Generative Pre-trained Transformers(I'm turning this stock comment into a blog article so that I can refer to it in the future.)My concern is that by the time we figure out we need an enormous volume of high quality content created and curated by human experts to correctly train Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, we will have eliminated all the entry-level career paths of those very same human experts by using those same Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-79385582555000692792024-01-13T08:25:00.019-07:002024-01-18T08:20:03.658-07:00Military EMSO Versus Commercial AircraftJeff Wise wrote this interesting article about how commercial aircraft are getting all crossways - figuratively and literally - as nation states and other actors are jamming and spoofing GPS/GNSS and using other ElectroMagnetic Spectrum Operations (the broader term that has replaced Electronic Warfare) generally targeted at military activity. Like a lot of embedded systems, the boxes inside Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-1766721808843267542024-01-11T07:26:00.027-07:002024-01-12T08:25:57.002-07:00The Disastrous Cultural Evolution of BoeingThe news is full of the most recent Boeing debacle involving the 737 MAX 9 airliner and its door plug that bailed out during flight to land in someone's back yard, leading to sudden cabin depressurization and an emergency landing.A colleague of mine (Thanks, Jeff!) passed along this interesting and short-ish article on some of the recent history of Boeing, published in The Atlantic about the timeChip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-15619483420836265112024-01-05T08:20:00.005-07:002024-01-05T09:15:26.587-07:00Right to Repair, Polish Train Hackers, and the NSA's GhidraGoogle "Polish train hackers" and you'll find dozens of articles in the tech press about this story. Here is the link to the one I read, which was translated from the original Polish. It's terrific. Compelling reading if you're interested in the misuse of Digital Rights Management or the Right To Repair movement. Or if you're into embedded systems development and troubleshooting. Or just if Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-27059798531115485062023-12-18T07:12:00.009-07:002024-02-21T10:30:13.268-07:00Bruce Schneier: AIs, Mass Spying, and TrustIf you do anything with high technology (I do) you don't have to be a cybersecurity expert (I'm not) to learn something from reading security guru and Harvard fellow Bruce Schneier. His recent weekly newsletter had two articles that really gave me new and different points of view."Mass Spying" - Mr. Schneier makes a distinction between surveillance and spying. An example of the former is when a Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-15231106018739286322023-12-09T08:19:00.012-07:002023-12-13T11:14:55.338-07:00Unusually Well Informed DeliveryThe U.S. Postal Service scans the outside address-side of all your mail. Obviously. They have to have automated mechanisms that sort the mail by address, most especially zip code. So they have some pretty good character recognition technology, for both printed and handwritten addresses.But did you know they keep a scanned image of your mail? U.S. law enforcement agencies - and sometimes Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-8979721974973027992023-12-04T14:20:00.001-07:002023-12-18T07:14:31.529-07:00Lessons in Autonomous Weapons from the Iraq WarRead a good article this AM from the Brookings Institution from back in 2022, about issues in the use of automation in weapons systems: Understanding the errors introduced by military AI applications [Kelsey Atherton, Brookings Institution, 2022-05-06]. It's in part a case study of a shoot down of an allied aircraft by a ground-to-air missile system operating autonomously during the Iraq Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-76985306206662497242023-12-02T16:22:00.006-07:002023-12-02T17:29:10.174-07:00Time, Gravity, and the God DialDisclaimer: my knowledge of physics is at best at a dilettante level, even with more than a year of the topic in college, one elective course of which got me one of the only two B letter grades of both of my degrees. (Statistics similarly defeated me.)I've read that there is no variable for time in the equations used in quantum physics, no t, because (apparently) time doesn't play a role. That's Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-353108925257043662023-12-02T16:11:00.010-07:002023-12-05T08:41:13.564-07:00Will Optical Atomic Clocks Be Too Good?Read a terrific popsci article this morning in Physics Today on time keeping: "Time Too Good To Be True" [Daniel Kleppner, Physics Today, 59.3, 2006-03-01]. (Disclaimer: it's from 2006, so it's likely to be out of date.)The gist of the article is that as we make more and more precise atomic clocks by using higher and higher frequency resonators (like transitioning from cesium atomic clocks that Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-45465105894938070612023-09-01T08:10:00.001-06:002023-09-01T08:10:38.212-06:00A Swiss Cheese of Errors In 2021, an F-35B fighter jet rolled off the front of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth during a failed take off. "Rolled" is the probably the right term, as British carriers do not use a catapult like U.S. carriers. The pilot ejected and landed on the flight deck with only minor injuries.It was discovered later that a protective cover - part of the "red gear" because of its color - Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-26200999211318307802023-08-02T07:28:00.012-06:002023-08-02T10:56:35.381-06:00Boom TownIn 1969, a forty-kiloton nuclear bomb was detonated underground in Colorado, near the town of Parachute, between Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction, west of Denver and a little south of what is now Interstate 70. The test shaft was over 8,400 feet deep. It was a test to see if small nuclear devices could free up natural gas deep underground, part of Project Plowshare. Edward Teller, one of the Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-69688022981579258642023-07-26T09:21:00.010-06:002023-12-18T07:14:43.019-07:00Model CollapseA few decades ago I was working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a national lab in Boulder Colorado sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Although our missions were completely different, we had a lot in common operationally with the Department of Energy labs, like Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, regarding supercomputers and large data storage systems, so we did a lot ofChip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-91877949474060795552023-07-22T10:29:00.004-06:002023-07-22T10:36:13.450-06:00BarbenheimerThe movie we've all be waiting for, the movie about a beloved childhood toy, opened in theaters everywhere this week. I am talking, of course, about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.Who knows how many little girls were inspired to enter STEM fields by playing with their "Oppie" dolls. The Spousal Unit has regaled me with stories about the many happy hours spent dressing her Oppie in different Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-65832252750328490502023-07-22T10:06:00.007-06:002023-07-23T08:01:27.926-06:00Using Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 11I recently bought a new laptop that runs Microsoft Windows 11.And I didn't immediately install a Linux distro over top of Windows.Shocking, I know, for a guy who for years has been, and remains, firmly in the Apple ecosystem: laptop, desktop, phone, and tablet. And who, for the past few decades, has been writing software for the Linux ecosystem (including for Android). But I didn't own a hardwareChip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-87907418875210589152023-07-16T08:46:00.026-06:002023-12-18T07:14:49.888-07:00Large Machine Learning Models Are Not Intrinsically Ethical - And Neither Are Large CorporationsI think the screen actors and writers concerns about the use of large AI models is legitimate, since the models cannot exist and could not be successful without being trained using a ginormous amount of human-created input, typically without the permission or even knowledge of the original creators.But that's just the tip of the iceberg, being currently the most visible public example of this Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-4201310738030204232023-07-03T09:38:00.016-06:002023-07-17T10:59:42.879-06:00Hazer with the U-blox NEO-F10T GNSS Receiver on the Ardusimple SimpleGNSS BoardIt's been a while since I talked about my GPS/GNSS efforts. Some time ago I bought a SimpleGNSS board from Ardusimple to try out. The SimpleGNSS has the new U-blox NEO-F10T GNSS receiver. This was my first experience using a new U-blox generation 10 device. It is the first GNSS device of any kind I've used that includes features specific to the latest version 4.11 of the National Marine Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-12233956796522421952023-06-10T12:44:00.021-06:002023-07-29T13:33:43.101-06:00The Expanse of Cosmic Horror(This blog article is a mash up of two long social media posts I made some time ago, so it might seem a little fragmented and repetitive, even though I've tried to edit it a little.)The late H(oward) P(hillips) Lovecraft [1890-1937] is credited with inventing the genre of cosmic horror - one of my favorite genres in either print or visual media. I don't classify his iconic creation Cthulhu as Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-46309163519749744942023-06-08T07:39:00.007-06:002023-06-08T16:29:10.366-06:00Widows and Orphans and Working from HomeTerrific - and terrifying - article from The Atlantic's "Work In Progress" blog by Dror Poleg, author of the book Rethinking Real Estate: the next crisis will start with empty office buildings.The commercial real estate market - once so stable it was considered a widows and orphans investment - is changing radically. 25% of commercial real estate in large cities is empty, and that only counts theChip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-49546052197488260762023-06-07T08:01:00.006-06:002023-06-07T11:09:28.121-06:00Bug Blast from the PastI found a Day One bug in some unit test code today that I wrote in 2014, nine years ago. What caused the bug to show up now? I had botched where I had put a thread scheduling yield function call relative to a critical section in the unit test. Apparently this is the first time I have ported this multi-threaded C code to a single-core processor - in this instance, a Raspberry Pi Zero. This isChip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-16703852808943164562023-06-03T10:09:00.003-06:002023-06-03T11:29:15.146-06:00The Short TailWay back in 2004, Chris Anderson, who was then editor in chief of WIRED magazine, wrote an article, and later a book, about "The Long Tail". The idea is that technology and economics have made it possible for companies to provide some kinds of products for which each individual item might have low demand, but the number of items would be so large, that it would be profitable. The classic example Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-72468190056465892042023-03-09T11:45:00.011-07:002023-03-11T11:57:59.537-07:00Not Quite the Bootstrap ParadoxSubmitted for your approval are two 3.5" floppy diskettes.I found the diskette on the left underneath our rear deck, when it was demolished to be replaced with a concrete patio this past fall. That was in 2022, just to be clear. It had clearly been under the deck for a long time, covered in dirt, and weathered enough that the label is mostly illegible.The floppy disk was originally included with Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28344720.post-37062006228587122572023-02-12T11:26:00.016-07:002023-09-18T12:58:56.989-06:00Bob Greene RoadIt will probably come as no surprise that I'm all about Google Maps: the maps, its Satellite View, its Street View, all that stuff. If I see a street address in something that interests me, pretty much for any reason, I'll look it up on Google Maps, check out the Satellite View, drop into Street View and look at the 360º image.Growing up I used to spend my summers living in the old Greene family Chip Overclockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11195242013008369733noreply@blogger.com0