Hasnain says:

"According to the book——the eight marines parked the AI robot in the middle of a traffic circle and played a game: Whoever could reach the robot from a long distance away without being detected won. And all eight marines were able to do so. Some did cartwheels, throwing off the robot’s detection algorithm. Another pretended to be a tree, using branches and slowly moving toward the robot, smiling the whole time. But perhaps the best tactic used by the marines: hiding under a cardboard box.

Apparently, two different marines shared a single cardboard box and hid under it while moving toward the robot. “You could hear them giggling the whole time,” said a person in the book referred to as Phil.

As explained in the book, the AI system was trained to spot humans walking and running, not people doing somersaults or hiding in boxes. So these fairly simple and childish tactics worked and fooled the AI. Meanwhile, any average person would have easily spotted a moving box or a flipping soldier, showcasing a major issue with AI and its reliance on previous data and algorithms."

Hasnain says:

"According to archival nautical charts and aerial photographs, the Ashby Shoal first formed sometime around the middle of last century. One theory connects its appearance to the construction of Interstate 80, which runs along the nearby waterfront. “Mud was pumped from the highway site out into the bay and sand pumped from the bay back to the site, since fine bay mud is not ideal for building on,” according to a 1982 research paper authored by Allison Turner."

Hasnain says:

Am definitely curious to see if/when the no fly list gets published (even if it is from 2019).

“so what happens next with the nofly data

while the nature of this information is sensitive, i believe it is in the public interest for this list to be made available to journalists and human rights organizations. if you are a journalist, researcher, or other party with legitimate interest, please reach out at nofly@crimew.gay. i will only give this data to parties that i believe will do the right thing with it.

note: if you email me there and i do not reply within a regular timeframe it is very likely my reply ended up in your spam folder or got lost. using email not hosted by google or msft is hell. feel free to dm me on twitter in that case.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking this for the future - I wish I’d known about this earlier!

“In the past I’ve had to write queries to convert data in a table into user-friendly display text. One way to do this is with CASE expressions.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. The author asks a neural network to learn a common but complex function (binary addition) and then keeps making the model smaller until it’s explainable - and then discovers the solution is quite unexpected. Great visualizations and explanation.

“Even if this particular solution was just a fluke of my network architecture or the system being modeled, it made me even more impressed by the power and versatility of gradient descent and similar optimization algorithms. The fact that these very particular patterns can be brought into existence so consistently from pure randomness is really amazing to me.”

Hasnain says:

Great example for that “software bugs cost real money” post from a few weeks ago.

“The source said the NOTAM system is an example of aging infrastructure due for an overhaul.

"Because of budgetary concerns and flexibility of budget, this tech refresh has been pushed off," the source said. "I assume now they're going to actually find money to do it."

Hasnain says:

“Sarah, for her part, did recognise that her job had pushed her to the breaking point and left. But instead of moving within the industry, she took another path. She now works for a creative agency outside of fashion. She says she's much happier in her new role that offers clear progression, challenging work and varied daily tasks. “[Fashion] may have sounded like an impressive place to work,” she says, “but I realised it’s more important to have a fulfilling job than a cool name on a CV.””

Hasnain says:

This is amazing.

“It alleges that Javice and Amar first asked a top engineer at Frank to create the fake customer list; when he refused, Javice approached “a data science professor at a New York City area college” to help. Using data from some individuals who’d already started using Frank, he created 4.265 million fake customer accounts—for which Javice paid him $18,000—and had it validated by a third-party vendor at her direction, JP Morgan alleges. The complaint includes screenshots of the professor’s invoices and claims that Javice went to notable lengths to ensure documentation of this work was either destroyed or altered to avoid raising eyebrows. Amar, meanwhile, spent $105,000 buying a separate data set of 4.5 million students from the firm ASL Marketing, per the complaint. Amar and ASL Marketing did not yet respond to a request for comment.”

Hasnain says:

This was pretty eye opening! Not something I’ll use soon; but worth thinking about the ideas expressed here.

“Unison is an amazing new programming language that I am sure will not only start being used, very soon, in the niches that can mostly benefit from its purely functional nature and distributed computing friendliness, but it is also set to fundamentally influence what is expected of software development UX in the years to come.

It solves problems that most of us didn’t even know were problems that could be solved. And it’s just a very nice language all around. I found it quite a lot easier to grasp than Haskell, for example, while still feeling that it gives me more than enough power to write clean, reliable code without subjecting me to some hassle that most other languages would (long, complex builds, unreliable tests, dependency version conflicts…).”

Hasnain says:

Still eagerly waiting for the day when this feature is banned and someone faces criminal penalties for this.

“The video and new photographs of the crash, which were obtained by The Intercept via a California Public Records Act request, provides the first direct look at what happened on November 24, confirming witness accounts at the time. The driver told police that he had been using Tesla’s new “Full Self-Driving” feature, the report notes, before the Tesla’s “left signal activated” and its “brakes activated,” and it moved into the left lane, “slowing to a stop directly in [the second vehicle’s] path of travel.””