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Friday, May 19, 2023

19: TikTok

Should governments ban TikTok? Can they? A cybersecurity expert explains the risks the app poses and the challenges to blocking it On May 17, 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed legislation banning TikTok in the state. The law imposes fines of US$10,000 per day on any app store that offers the popular Chinese-owned video social media app, and on the app maker itself if it operates in the state. Individual users are not subject to penalties. The law, which is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2024, is the first total ban by a U.S. state government. The company claims 200,000 users in the state of 1.1 million people.......... What data privacy risk does TikTok pose? What could the Chinese government do with data collected by the app? Is its content recommendation algorithm dangerous? Is it legal for a government to impose a total ban on the app? And is it even possible to ban an app? ........... most apps collect data that the companies use in part to fund their operations. This revenue typically comes from targeting users with ads based on the data they collect. .......... what makes TikTok different from the likes of Pokemon-GO, Facebook or even your phone itself? ........ If most apps collect data, why are governments worried about TikTok? First, they worry about the Chinese government accessing data from TikTok’s 150 million users in the U.S. There is also a concern about the algorithms used by TikTok to show content. ......... If the data does end up in the hands of the Chinese government, the question is how could it use the data to its benefit. The government could share it with other companies in China to help them profit, which is no different than U.S. companies sharing marketing data. The Chinese government is known for playing the long game, and data is power, so if it is collecting data, it could take years to learn how it benefits China............ One potential threat is the Chinese government using the data to spy on people, particularly people who have access to valuable information. The Justice Department is investigating TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, for using the app to monitor U.S. journalists. The Chinese government has an extensive history of hacking U.S. government agencies and corporations, and much of that hacking has been facilitated by social engineering – the practice of using data about people to trick them into revealing more information. ............ TikTok and most social media apps have algorithms designed to learn a user’s interests and then try to adjust the content so the user will continue to use the app. ......... The Montana law aims to use fines to coerce companies into enforcing its ban. It’s not clear if companies will comply, and it’s unlikely that this would deter users from finding workarounds. .......... if the federal government comes to the conclusion that TikTok should be banned, is it even possible to ban it for all of its 150 million existing users? Any such ban would likely start with blocking the distribution of the app through Apple’s and Google’s app stores. This might keep many users off the platform, but there are other ways to download and install apps for people who are determined to use them. ......... A more drastic method would be to force Apple and Google to change their phones to prevent TikTok from running. While I’m not a lawyer, I think this effort would fail due to legal challenges, which include First Amendment concerns. The bottom line is that an absolute ban will be tough to enforce. ........ By some estimates, the Chinese government has already collected personal information on at least 80% of the U.S. population via various means. So a ban might limit the damage going forward to some degree, but the Chinese government has already collected a significant amount of data. The Chinese government also has access – along with anyone else with money – to the large market for personal data, which fuels calls for stronger data privacy rules. ............ Independent of a ban, families should have conversations about TikTok and other social media platforms and how they can be detrimental to mental health. These conversations should focus on how to determine if the app is leading you down an unhealthy path. .

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MY LONGEVITY PRACTICES PART 2: SLEEP

The US has lots to lose and little to gain by banning TikTok and WeChat The executive orders are based on national security grounds, though the threats cited are to citizens rather than the government. Foreign policy analysts see the move as part of the administration’s ongoing wrestling match with the Chinese government for leverage in the global economy. ......... The bans threaten Americans’ freedom of speech, and may harm foreign investment in the U.S. and American companies’ ability to sell software abroad, while delivering minimal privacy and cybersecurity benefits........ The Australian military accused WeChat, a messaging, social media and mobile payment app, of acting as spyware, saying the app was caught sending data to Chinese Intelligence servers. ....... banning the apps and requiring Chinese divestiture also has a national security downside. It damages the U.S.‘s moral authority to push for free speech and democracy abroad. Critics have frequently contended that America’s moral authority has been severely damaged during the Trump administration and this action could arguably add to the decline......... The administration’s principal argument against TikTok is that it collects Americans’ personal data and could provide it to the Chinese government. The executive order states that this could allow China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage. ....... Skeptics have argued that the government hasn’t presented clear evidence of privacy issues and that the service’s practices are standard in the industry. TikTok’s terms of service do say that it can share information with its China-based corporate parent, ByteDance. ........... The order against WeChat is similar. It also mentions that the app captures the personal and proprietary information of Chinese nationals visiting the United States. However, some of these visiting Chinese nationals have expressed concern that banning WeChat may limit their ability to communicate with friends and family in China. ............ While TikTok and WeChat do raise cybersecurity concerns, they are not significantly different from those raised by other smart phone apps. In my view, these concerns could be better addressed by enacting national privacy legislation, similar to Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, to dictate how data is collected and used and where it is stored. Another remedy is to have Google, Apple and others review the apps for cybersecurity concerns before allowing new versions to be made available in their app stores. ......... Perhaps the greatest concern raised by the bans are their impact on people’s ability to communicate, and whether they violate the First Amendment. Both TikTok and WeChat are communications channels and TikTok publishes and hosts content. ........ In the case of TikTok, banning an app that is being used for political commentary and activism would raise pronounced constitutional claims and likely be overturned by the courts. ............. put the U.S. in uncomfortable territory: the list of countries that have banned social media platforms. These include Egypt, Hong Kong, Turkey, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Russia and China. ........ Social media gives freedom fighters, protesters and dissidents all over the world a voice. It enables citizens to voice concerns and organize protests about monarchies, sexual and other human rights abuses, discriminatory laws and civil rights violations. When authoritarian governments clamp down on dissent, they frequently target social media. ......... China and the U.S. have already gone through a cycle of reciprocal company banning, in addition to reciprocal consulate closures. ........ They also cut U.S. firms off from the high-growth Chinese market. ......... The issues could be solved through better oversight and the enactment of privacy laws that could otherwise benefit Americans.

ChatGPT has now a big problem.

Google just updated its free competitor, Bard.

Here are 8 things impossible on ChatGPT but that Bard can do (for free):
— Paul.ai (@itsPaulAi) May 11, 2023

Monday, May 15, 2023

15: AI

What Gandhi’s Rare Win Over Modi Means for India’s 2024 Vote Swing state Karnataka gives some clues for the national polls ...... Opposition Congress party, Gandhi scion retain some relevance ........ A big Indian state election win has given a boost to Rahul Gandhi’s Congress party in its quest to unseat Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a national vote next year. But it still faces a long road ahead. ..... The victory in Karnataka over the weekend was one of the most significant for Congress against Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in major state elections since he took power nearly a decade ago. Now the question is whether Gandhi can build on that momentum in the five remaining state assembly elections before the 2024 vote. .

How AI Knows Things No One Told It Researchers are still struggling to understand how AI models trained to parrot internet text can perform advanced tasks such as running code, playing games and trying to break up a marriage ........ “Everything we want to do with them in order to make them better or safer or anything like that seems to me like a ridiculous thing to ask ourselves to do if we don’t understand how they work,” says Ellie Pavlick of Brown University, one of the researchers working to fill that explanatory void. ........ GPT (short for generative pretrained transformer) .......... The models rely on a machine-learning system called a neural network. Such networks have a structure modeled loosely after the connected neurons of the human brain. The code for these programs is relatively simple and fills just a few screens. It sets up an autocorrection algorithm, which chooses the most likely word to complete a passage based on laborious statistical analysis of hundreds of gigabytes of Internet text. Additional training ensures the system will present its results in the form of dialogue. In this sense, all it does is regurgitate what it learned—it is a “stochastic parrot,” in the words of Emily Bender, a linguist at the University of Washington. But LLMs have also managed to ace the bar exam, explain the Higgs boson in iambic pentameter, and make an attempt to break up their users’ marriage. Few had expected a fairly straightforward autocorrection algorithm to acquire such broad abilities............ That GPT and other AI systems perform tasks they were not trained to do, giving them “emergent abilities,” has surprised even researchers who have been generally skeptical about the hype over LLMs. “I don’t know how they’re doing it or if they could do it more generally the way humans do—but they’ve challenged my views,” says Melanie Mitchell, an AI researcher at the Santa Fe Institute. ............. The philosopher typed in a program to calculate the 83rd number in the Fibonacci sequence. “It’s multistep reasoning of a very high degree,” he says. And the bot nailed it. When Millière asked directly for the 83rd Fibonacci number, however, GPT got it wrong: this suggests the system wasn’t just parroting the Internet. Rather it was performing its own calculations to reach the correct answer. ........... Researchers are finding that these systems seem to achieve genuine understanding of what they have learned. ......... The researchers concluded that it was playing Othello roughly like a human: by keeping a game board in its “mind’s eye” and using this model to evaluate moves. Li says he thinks the system learns this skill because it is the most parsimonious description of its training data. “If you are given a whole lot of game scripts, trying to figure out the rule behind it is the best way to compress,” he adds. ............ The system had no independent way of knowing what a box or key is, yet it picked up the concepts it needed for this task. ......... Researchers marvel at how much LLMs are able to learn from text. ......... the wider the range of the data, the more general the rules the system will discover. ....... “Maybe we’re seeing such a huge jump because we have reached a diversity of data, which is large enough that the only underlying principle to all of it is that intelligent beings produced them,” he says. “And so the only way to explain all of this data is [for the model] to become intelligent.” ...........
LLMs do, in fact, learn from their users’ prompts—an ability known as “in-context learning.”
“It’s a different sort of learning that wasn’t really understood to exist before,” says Ben Goertzel, founder of the AI company SingularityNET. ............ Its outputs are determined by the last several thousand words it has seen. ......... Entire websites are devoted to “jailbreak” prompts that overcome the system’s “guardrails”—restrictions that stop the system from telling users how to make a pipe bomb, for example—typically by directing the model to pretend to be a system without guardrails. Some people use jailbreaking for sketchy purposes, yet others deploy it to elicit more creative answers. “It will answer scientific questions, I would say, better” than if you just ask it directly, without the special jailbreak prompt ............ “It’s better at scholarship.” ........ Another type of in-context learning happens via “chain of thought” prompting, which means asking the network to spell out each step of its reasoning—a tactic that makes it do better at logic or arithmetic problems requiring multiple steps. (But one thing that made Millière’s example so surprising is that the network found the Fibonacci number without any such coaching.) ........... in-context learning follows the same basic computational procedure as standard learning, known as gradient descent. This procedure was not programmed; the system discovered it without help. .............
LLMs may have other latent abilities that no one has discovered yet. “Every time we test for a new ability that we can quantify, we find it”
.

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A hero's strength is yours with ChatGPT. paramendra.mykajabi.com
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ChatGPT Literacy (4) #ChatGPT #GPT4 #AI #OpenAI #artificialintelligence
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ChatGPT Explains Why AIs like ChatGPT Should Be Regulated We asked the text-generating AI ChatGPT to talk about its own flaws ....... When we asked ChatGPT to generate a Scientific American editorial, it produced a thoughtful-sounding essay. ........... Despite sounding more sophisticated and realistic than perhaps any language model before it, ChatGPT cannot actually think for itself—and it can produce falsehoods and illogical statements that merely look reasonable. .............. ChatGPT is capable of spouting incorrect information with apparent confidence. ......... the potential for ChatGPT to be used for nefarious purposes, such as impersonating individuals or spreading misinformation. .......... Overly strict regulations could stifle innovation and prevent the technology from reaching its full potential. On the other hand, insufficient regulation could lead to abuses of the technology. .......... the creation of ChatGPT and other large language models that are trained on vast amounts of text generated by human writers. These writers, who may include novelists, journalists, and bloggers, receive no compensation for the use of their work in training these language models. .......... ChatGPT and other language models could be used to generate fake news articles, impersonate individuals, or spread other forms of misinformation. ......... In the case of a question like “how to change a lightbulb,” it’s possible that ChatGPT may provide a response that is accurate and helpful. However, it’s also possible that the model may provide an inaccurate or incomplete response, in which case it would be up to the user to use their own judgment and verify the information provided by the model. ............ Large language models like ChatGPT are trained to generate text that is fluent and coherent, but they may not always be able to generate responses that are as nuanced or creative as those written by a human. ....... prompts written by large language models may include repetitions or unusual combinations of words and phrases. This is because language models are trained to generate text by identifying patterns and regularities in the data, and may sometimes produce responses that contain repetitive or unusual elements. ......... As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I do not have personal experiences or the ability to browse the internet.

Saturday, May 13, 2023

With ChatGPT You Can Soar High

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13: AI

ChatGPT Literacy Course: Blog Posts

Friday, May 12, 2023

12: Ukraine

China Orders Tesla to Recall 1.1 Million Vehicles Over Braking Risks Defects on certain Tesla models could lead drivers to step on the accelerator pedals for longer than necessary, increasing the risk of collisions, China’s market regulator says........ Tesla said it would fix the vehicles with a software update sent wirelessly to the vehicles ....... China is a significant market for Tesla, with revenue from the country increasing to $18.2 billion last year from $13.8 billion in 2021. The recalls will begin on May 29, and Tesla will notify relevant car owners by mail or text.

How a Solo Gig Can Give You a Stronger Retirement Becoming a solo entrepreneur in the years after leaving an employer can give your Social Security benefit and savings a boost. Here’s what to know....... Mr. Eanes was a hiker and cyclist, and he decided to fashion a new life of independent work around those interests and his spirituality. His first move was self-publishing a book in 2019 about his pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, followed by starting a business aimed at helping other writers publish their books. ...... Along with paying income taxes, you’ll be responsible for the self-employment tax, which covers the full cost of your contributions to Social Security and Medicare. As a self-employed worker, you can deduct half of these costs from your income taxes. .... “It’s a great way to stay active and engaged, and bring in the extra income I need.”

‘Christianity’s Got a Branding Problem’ I’d never really thought of religions as brands. I’ve always thought of them in the context of personal, somewhat private beliefs — or in the way that I, as a Jew, think of Judaism as a value system passed down from previous generations....... Many said that while they no longer attend church or ally themselves with a particular faith tradition, they still believe in God, miss the sound of the choir and find transcendence in nature....... Political polarization, however, isn’t the only reason for the rise of the “nones” — a catchall term for atheists, agnostics and those who say they have no religion in particular. Nones went from 0 percent to 2 percent of the population in the 1950s, according to Gallup, to somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent of Americans today ....... the 1950s as a boom time for American religiosity, in part because “religion represented patriotism” during the Cold War against “atheistic communism.” They continue: “It was no accident that ‘under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954” and the words “In God We Trust” that we see stamped onto our coins became the national motto in 1956. Not believing in or subscribing to “Judeo-Christian” values was often considered un-American. ........ With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, it became easier to “come out” as having no religion ....... Religion became less tightly connected to nationalism, so it was no longer seen as treasonous if you “wouldn’t show up on Sunday at church.” ........ “most pastors are not political because they don’t gain anything from being political”; they only risk alienating their flocks.

Ukraine’s Advances Near Bakhmut Threaten Russia’s Flanks

The Second Phase of the Biden Presidency Through the infrastructure law and many other measures, Team Biden directed huge amounts of money to create working-class jobs and to increase benefits to working-class families. That spending contributed to white-hot labor markets that have lifted wages, brought people back into the labor force and turbocharged American capitalism...... Today, its main purpose is to prepare the nation for a period of accelerating and explosive change. ........ there have been three periods of transformational change over the course of human history: the Neolithic period, which brought about settled farming, writing and the birth of cities; the Industrial Revolution, which gave us factories, mass production and cars; and the information age. ........ The information age is accelerating and growing more disruptive. The first cause is artificial intelligence. A.I. will produce pervasive breakthroughs and threats that none of us can now predict. ....... Another cause is the emerging cold war with China. This will produce a remorseless technological competition that will turbocharge developments in biotech, energy, chip manufacturing, trade flows, political alliances and many other spheres. ........ When Covid hit, the United States successfully pivoted and threw trillions of dollars at that problem. But the United States may not be able to mobilize that kind of response in the future. That’s because we’re now manacled by debt. ......... During the Trump administration, the debt increased by roughly $7.8 trillion, and during the Biden administration, it has increased by about $3.7 trillion. Over the past 50 years, the annual federal deficit has averaged about 3.5 percent of G.D.P. Over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office expects that deficits will average 6.1 percent of G.D.P. ......... The United States is projected to spend roughly $640 billion this year merely paying interest on that debt, a figure that is expected to more than double by 2033. That’s about the time the Social Security Trust Fund will become insolvent ........... Any prudent family saves money as hurricane season approaches, so it can deal with the coming storms. With self-destructive recklessness, the United States is doing the exact opposite. ........ In contrast to Donald Trump, who is all about himself, Biden can be the source of security in times of chaos.

Kyiv’s gains near Bakhmut raise alarms in Russia that Ukraine’s counteroffensive has begun
Recriminations plague Russian forces as Ukraine steps up pressure
China will send an envoy to Russia and Ukraine in a quest for peace talks. Beijing had said that Mr. Li would “conduct in-depth communication with all parties” to try to reach a “political settlement.”
The United States is wiring Ukraine with radiation sensors to detect nuclear blasts

Putin Is Fighting, and Losing, His Last War Today’s Russia issues an unending stream of nuclear threats. In the West today, unlike during the Cold War, these are discussed in psychological rather than strategic terms. How does Mr. Putin feel? How do we feel? ....... Americans’ fear of escalation delayed the supply of weapons that could have allowed Ukraine to win last year. One after the other, the weapons systems deemed escalatory have now been delivered, with no negative consequences. But the cost of delay can be observed in the Ukrainian territories that Russia still controls: the death pits, the torture chambers and the empty homes of kidnapped children. Tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides have unnecessarily died. .......... Strategic thinkers point to deterrence and note that nuclear use would not in fact bring a Russian victory. It would ensure a dramatic Western response and make Russian leaders pariahs. But there is a deeper explanation: Russia’s nuclear talk is itself the weapon. ......... Russian nuclear propaganda assumes that the bully always wins. But the bully does not always win. Russian propagandists want us to think that nuclear powers can never lose wars, on the logic that they could always deploy nuclear weapons to win. This is an ahistoric fantasy. Nuclear weapons did not bring the French victory in Algeria, nor did they preserve the British Empire. The Soviet Union lost its war in Afghanistan. America lost in Vietnam and in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Israel failed to win in Lebanon. Nuclear powers lose wars with some regularity........ Russia has been defeated in Ukraine, on its own terms, again and again. What it has proved is its ability to change those terms after each defeat. .......... Russia can lose without being cornered. It has 11 time zones of space for retreating soldiers and plenty of practice in propaganda refashionings. Indeed, Russian leaders have already indicated what they will do if they believe that they are losing: change the terms of reference and change the subject in Russian media. Mr. Putin’s kleptocratic state as a whole and its dependencies such as the Wagner mercenary army are public relations projects with a military arm. The assumption in Russian politics is that rhetoric overcomes reality. And the rhetorical preparations for defeat have been made. ............ Beneath Mr. Putin’s vague bellicosity is the idea that Russia wins if it avoids (in his words) “strategic defeat” imposed by NATO. Almost no matter what happens, it will be easy for him to define the war in Ukraine as a strategic victory. Since the Kremlin claims that it is fighting NATO, all Mr. Putin has to say is that Russia stopped NATO from crossing into Russia. The commander of Wagner wrote recently, in this spirit, that Russia can end the “special military operation” at any time and just claim that its goals have been achieved, so long as Russia does not retreat from any more occupied Ukrainian territory. ........ If nuclear blackmail enables a Russian victory, the consequences will be incalculably awful. If any country with nuclear weapons can do whatever it likes, then law means nothing, no international order is possible and catastrophe beckons at every turn. Countries without nuclear weapons will have to build them, on the logic that they will need nuclear deterrence in the future. Nuclear proliferation would make nuclear war much more likely in the future. ........... The Russians talk about nuclear weapons not because they mean to use them but because they believe a large nuclear arsenal makes them a superpower. Nuclear talk makes them feel powerful. They see nuclear bullying as their prerogative and believe that others should automatically yield at the first mention of their weapons. The Ukrainians have not allowed this to affect their tactics. ......... If Russia detonated a weapon, it would lose that jealously guarded treasure of superpower status. Such an act would constitute an admission that its army has been beaten — a tremendous loss of face. Worse still, neighbors would build (or build up) their own nuclear arsenals. That would deprive Russia of superpower status in the minds of the Russians themselves. That is, for the Russian leadership, the one intolerable outcome of this war. In my view, the greatest risk of a Russian nuclear action would therefore be one that Moscow would lay the blame for on Ukraine, such as the deliberate destruction of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. ........... When Russians talk about nuclear war, the safest response is to ensure their very conventional defeat.

Wednesday, May 03, 2023

Global Warming: Herman Hesse: ChatGPT

Write an essay about global warming in the voice of Herman Hesse.

As a writer who deeply reflects on the state of the world, I cannot help but ponder the crisis of global warming that has gripped our planet. It is a profound and urgent issue that requires our immediate attention and concerted action. We must recognize that our planet is a fragile and interconnected ecosystem, and that the consequences of our actions will reverberate for generations to come.

Global warming is a direct result of human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. The accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has led to a rise in global temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events. These changes are already affecting our planet, and will continue to do so unless we take decisive action.

One of the most troubling aspects of global warming is the disproportionate impact it has on vulnerable communities, particularly those in developing countries. The effects of climate change, such as droughts, floods, and food shortages, have a devastating impact on people who already face significant challenges. We must recognize that addressing global warming is not only a matter of environmental responsibility, but also a moral imperative to protect the lives and livelihoods of people around the world.

As a writer who deeply cares about the state of humanity and the world, I am deeply concerned about the future of our planet. We must take bold and immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to renewable energy sources. We must also invest in technologies and policies that can help us adapt to the inevitable consequences of global warming.

But beyond technical solutions, we must also fundamentally rethink our relationship with nature. We must recognize that we are not separate from the natural world, but rather deeply interconnected with it. We must learn to live in harmony with the planet, rather than treating it as a resource to be exploited.

In conclusion, global warming is one of the most pressing issues facing our world today, and demands our urgent attention. We must take bold and immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, invest in renewable energy sources, and adapt to the inevitable consequences of climate change. But we must also fundamentally rethink our relationship with nature, and learn to live in harmony with the planet. Only then can we hope to create a sustainable future for ourselves and for generations to come.

Trees - whoever knows how to speak to them whoever knows how to listen to them can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and percepts.They preach undettered by particular the ancient law of life. Thank @PravatKafley sir 🙏 you made my day .https://t.co/cABcUIMEjm
— Prabhakar Bagchand (@PBagchand) May 3, 2023

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Friday, May 19, 2023

Monday, May 15, 2023

LLMs do, in fact, learn from their users’ prompts—an ability known as “in-context learning.”

LLMs may have other latent abilities that no one has discovered yet. “Every time we test for a new ability that we can quantify, we find it”

Saturday, May 13, 2023

Friday, May 12, 2023

Wednesday, May 03, 2023