Internet of shit
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@kazitor said in Internet of shit:
And the regret didn’t set in the moment it was turned on?
“I wish it were more sticky and unpleasant around here” is a thought I have never had.
If you live in a place that’s already too humid, you don’t need a humidifier. If your place is dry as fuck, you do.
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@Zerosquare said in Internet of shit:
@kazitor said in Internet of shit:
“I wish it were more sticky and unpleasant around here” is a thought I have never had.
Well, not everyone can afford a trip to Australia
Or survive there long enough to tell the tale
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@kazitor said in Internet of shit:
And the regret didn’t set in the moment it was turned on?
“I wish it were more sticky and unpleasant around here” is a thought I have never had.
"Moisty Boy is working hard to make Living Room more comfortable!"
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@Zerosquare said in Internet of shit:
@kazitor said in Internet of shit:
“I wish it were more sticky and unpleasant around here” is a thought I have never had.
Well, not everyone can afford a trip to Australia
During the non-frozen season, Chicago is a fetid swamp
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@topspin said in Internet of shit:
@kazitor said in Internet of shit:
And the regret didn’t set in the moment it was turned on?
“I wish it were more sticky and unpleasant around here” is a thought I have never had.
If you live in a place that’s already too humid, you don’t need a humidifier. If your place is dry as fuck, you do.
Hold on, what?
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@Gribnit said in Internet of shit:
@Zerosquare said in Internet of shit:
@kazitor said in Internet of shit:
“I wish it were more sticky and unpleasant around here” is a thought I have never had.
Well, not everyone can afford a trip to Australia
During the non-frozen season, Chicago is a fetid swamp
It's also flat enough that you can see next week's weather coming in from the
SearsWillis Tower.
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@topspin said in Internet of shit:
@kazitor said in Internet of shit:
And the regret didn’t set in the moment it was turned on?
“I wish it were more sticky and unpleasant around here” is a thought I have never had.
If you live in a place that’s already too humid, you don’t need a humidifier. If your place is dry as fuck, you do.
And some of us live in a place where you need a humidifier in the winter and dehumidifier in the summer.
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@dkf said in Internet of shit:
It's also flat enough that you can see next week's weather coming in from the
SearsWillis Tower.They've finally named a tower after Bruce Willis?
How tall is it compared to Nakatomi Plaza?
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@Zecc said in Internet of shit:
@dkf said in Internet of shit:
It's also flat enough that you can see next week's weather coming in from the
SearsWillis Tower.They've finally named a tower after Bruce Willis?
How tall is it compared to Nakatomi Plaza?
I can see my house from the top of Bruce Willis, but not from the other - so Willis must be taller.
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@izzion said in Internet of shit:
Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids | Cornell Chronicle
Smart thermostats may be falling into a dumb trap. While these devices save homeowners money, Cornell engineers found they may be prompting unintentional energy spikes on the grid.
Also, people change the energy saving presets and use more energy.
Daily on Energy: A new finding that smart thermostats may not save energy at scale - Washington Examiner
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine and get Washington Briefing: politics and policy stories that will keep you up to date with what's going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!SMART THERMOSTATS MAY NOT SCALE UP: An important new study finds that “smart” thermostats...
“If Commander Spock was given one of these, he would install it and use it correctly. But unfortunately, most households are like Homer Simpson,” he told Breanne. “They receive the technology and they go in and they undo the good stuff— in this particular case, they undid the presets, or they undid the defaults that came from the manufacturer. And when households did that, they undid all the ‘good stuff,’ and engineers’ estimates of what we would save in terms of energy.”
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@boomzilla said in Internet of shit:
undo the good stuff— in this particular case, they undid the presets
Ugh. The presets are the bad thing here. Because they are the same in all the devices. When people undo them, they spread the load a bit depending on when they personally wake up and how long their particular house takes to heat up.
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@Bulb pretty good deal, huh?
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There's good reason to store all your data in the cloud.
Google even achieves to make your digital photos look like aged water stained analogue photos. Would you ever be able to do so on your local storage device? E.g. by putting your rusty hard disk in water?
Look Out for "Water Stained" Images When Accessing Google Photos
Users have reported seeing "water damage" and other types of distortion when looking up images from the cloud.
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This looks like a really grand idea. What could possibly go wrong with an autonomous thing with a whirling blade.
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@dcon Autonomous things with a whirling blade have been in use for at least ten years and there does not seem to be much going wrong with them so
.This one does seem worse than the usual as the blades are stretched out from the tracked platform, so they can get somewhat exposed when in reaches top of a hill. Most of the robotic mowers have the blade between their three wheels, so similar thing can't happen.
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@Bulb said in Internet of shit:
@dcon Autonomous things with a whirling blade have been in use for at least ten years and there does not seem to be much going wrong with them so
.Well, they're kind of the bane of hedgehogs.
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@Rhywden said in Internet of shit:
@Bulb said in Internet of shit:
@dcon Autonomous things with a whirling blade have been in use for at least ten years and there does not seem to be much going wrong with them so
.Well, they're kind of the bane of hedgehogs.
Also bears. Birds do okay.
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@loopback0 said in Internet of shit:
License plates are already a subscription service. They're tied to your car registration, which is a tax you pay to the government periodically. If you don't pay the registration tax, your license plates stop being valid and you can get pulled over for driving an unregistered car.
Also, if you have a custom license plate (one of your state's special designs or a vanity plate where you get to pick the license plate number), that's normally also tied to a periodic tax.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear and now people who pay that tax can pay an extra subscription so their fancy digital license plate can show their renewed registration.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Internet of shit:
License plates are already a subscription service.
And the nice thing about that is that (at least in CA), the subscription price actually drops over time. (Part of it is based on the car's value)
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I've seen movies where high-tech bad guys have reconfigurable license plates on their vehicle to fool the police. I had no idea they you could actually buy those
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@Zerosquare I wonder if the cops’ in-car computer, when they do a licence plate check, tells them whether or not you’re supposed to have the digital kind. If not, then, of course, the best part of all of this is that any screen of the right size will do for your DYI plates …
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@loopback0 said in Internet of shit:
Warum, kurwa?
Isn't the point of a license plate that it cannot change?
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@Bulb Not if it gets in the way of Free Enterprise making another easy buck.
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@Zerosquare said in Internet of shit:
I've seen movies where high-tech bad guys have reconfigurable license plates on their vehicle to fool the police. I had no idea they you could actually buy those
Also, how long until these are hacked to show whatever you want them to?
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@Carnage said in Internet of shit:
Also, how long until these are hacked to show whatever you want them to?
30
dayshoursminutes
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@Carnage said in Internet of shit:
@Zerosquare said in Internet of shit:
I've seen movies where high-tech bad guys have reconfigurable license plates on their vehicle to fool the police. I had no idea they you could actually buy those
Also, how long until these are hacked to show whatever you want them to?
You ask that as if you are afraid of seeing pr0n on the rear bumper in front of you
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@izzion said in Internet of shit:
@Carnage said in Internet of shit:
@Zerosquare said in Internet of shit:
I've seen movies where high-tech bad guys have reconfigurable license plates on their vehicle to fool the police. I had no idea they you could actually buy those
Also, how long until these are hacked to show whatever you want them to?
You ask that as if you are afraid of seeing pr0n on the rear bumper in front of you
It's more of an opportunity, and seeing how they seem to do OTA updates, it should also be possible to push porn to all of them..
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@Carnage push out a virus that randomly changes the license plate for everyone, plausible deniability when you drive around with the wrong numbers. (Commit crime, …, profit.)
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@topspin said in Internet of shit:
@Carnage push out a virus that randomly changes the license plate for everyone, plausible deniability when you drive around with the wrong numbers. (Commit crime, …, profit.)
Nonono. The virus has to change the plates to "FCKCOPS" - but only when
is right behind the car.
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@dcon said in Internet of shit:
@topspin said in Internet of shit:
@Carnage push out a virus that randomly changes the license plate for everyone, plausible deniability when you drive around with the wrong numbers. (Commit crime, …, profit.)
Nonono. The virus has to change the plates to "FCKCOPS" - but only when
is right behind the car.13/12 would install again
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@izzion said in Internet of shit:
@Carnage said in Internet of shit:
@Zerosquare said in Internet of shit:
I've seen movies where high-tech bad guys have reconfigurable license plates on their vehicle to fool the police. I had no idea they you could actually buy those
Also, how long until these are hacked to show whatever you want them to?
You ask that as if you are afraid of seeing pr0n on the rear bumper in front of you
And I honestly feared it would show annoying ads.
Now I am relieved.
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@topspin said in Internet of shit:
@Carnage push out a virus that randomly changes the license plate for everyone, plausible deniability when you drive around with the wrong numbers. (Commit crime, …, profit.)
It should change the plate to an image of the plate generated by Dall-E (or whatever AI image generator is the fad of the day). This way it looks like a plate when not looking at it closely, but whenever you actually try to read the number, it's just garbage. The mind being great at filling holes (
), there's a good chance anyone looking at the plate quickly will think they saw some number, but never the same (nor the right one, of course).Also, it adds a layer of "AI" to the IoS thing, so it's all good for marketing. We just need to add some blockchain to make it perfect.
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@remi said in Internet of shit:
The mind being great at filling holes (
), there's a good chance anyone looking at the plate quickly will think they saw some number, but never the same (nor the right one, of course).E.g (this was my first result for "A license plate"):
Is that an S, or a G ... maybe a 6...?
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@Watson Exactly.
This is an interesting feature of those AI generators, that they manage extremely well to produce something that looks right from afar, but is almost always very wrong when looked at closely. I have no idea why this is, but I find it striking as it is by no means the only way they could get it "not quite right, but not quite wrong either."
And it's not just text, the same thing happens with e.g. facial features, or even stuff like the rivets on your picture (the bottom ones seem OK but the top-left one is weirdly wrong, but still looks OK at first glance -- and I'm not mentioning the inconsistent lighting, which is probably a more subtler effect to get right (so I'm less surprising the AI doesn't manage it), but still plays a role in making the picture subtly wrong).
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@remi said in Internet of shit:
@Watson Exactly.
This is an interesting feature of those AI generators, that they manage extremely well to produce something that looks right from afar, but is almost always very wrong when looked at closely. I have no idea why this is
They are programmed by impressionists, obviously.
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@Watson said in Internet of shit:
Is that an S, or a G ... maybe a 6...?
It's a citation and a visit to court.
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@remi said in Internet of shit:
@topspin said in Internet of shit:
@Carnage push out a virus that randomly changes the license plate for everyone, plausible deniability when you drive around with the wrong numbers. (Commit crime, …, profit.)
It should change the plate to an image of the plate generated by Dall-E (or whatever AI image generator is the fad of the day). This way it looks like a plate when not looking at it closely, but whenever you actually try to read the number, it's just garbage.
… or an adversarial image for whatever OCR the cops use. If a human tries to read it, they get one number, but if the speed camera OCRs it, it gets a different number.
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@dkf said in Internet of shit:
@Watson said in Internet of shit:
Is that an S, or a G ... maybe a 6...?
It's a citation and a visit to court.
I did not do anything with it, your honor. Someone must have hacked it.
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@Bulb do classical OCR systems have as terrible failure modes as ML garbage? (Where you can change a single pixel to go from cat to battleship)
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@topspin No idea, really. But they may have. And many of them is neural networks anyway and those usually do.
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@remi said in Internet of shit:
they manage extremely well to produce something that looks right from afar, but is almost always very wrong when looked at closely. I have no idea why this is, but I find it striking as it is by no means the only way they could get it "not quite right, but not quite wrong either."
It reminds me of something that has the same characteristics: the stuff you see in dreams. I wonder if it's a coincidence, or if there's a deeper meaning to it (dreams being the outcome of a somewhat similar process?).
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@Zerosquare I suspect there's a lot of similarity, with dreams being what happens when the story-generating part of the brain is running but not connected to the senses and so not able to rein itself in to its usual task (working out why the world is doing what it does). The reason it does that is because it strengthens the neural connections for reasonably likely neural pathways, making them easier to think about while awake, even if at this point they're all in a jumble together and so make little sense.
That's in contrast to deep sleep, which seems to be when the brain relaxes, gets repaired, and forgets the unimportant trivia of the day before.
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@Bulb said in Internet of shit:
@loopback0 said in Internet of shit:
Warum, kurwa?
Isn't the point of a license plate that it cannot change?
Well that's where the blockchain comes in.
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@remi said in Internet of shit:
or even stuff like the rivets on your picture (the bottom ones seem OK but the top-left one is weirdly wrong, but still looks OK at first glance -- and I'm not mentioning the inconsistent lighting, which is probably a more subtler effect to get right (so I'm less surprising the AI doesn't manage it), but still plays a role in making the picture subtly wrong).
I've noticed, looking at intermediate steps, that there's a gradient-descent thing going on, and as it progresses the steps get shorter, and the scale over which changes are made also shrinks. So there is a chance of it getting stuck in a local minimum in one area that's inconsistent with the minimum it reaches in another, but it would take too much time/effort to lift itself out and find a consistent compromise.
It's actually fairly good at global features like lighting angle. It failed in the wheel because inserting the starting image was basically done by chopping off those early large-scale/large-step moves and replacing them with "here's an intermediate image we prepared earlier", and leaving it to fill in the smaller-scale stuff. So the highlights on the hub and rim come from different angles, but they correspond to bright features in the original.
Where it really falls down is composition. It's just trying to get a high score on "does this image match the prompt?" and while the result might have all the pieces, putting them together into a coherent picture is another thing entirely.
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@Watson said in Internet of shit:
I've noticed, looking at intermediate steps, that there's a gradient-descent thing going on, and as it progresses the steps get shorter, and the scale over which changes are made also shrinks.
That wouldn't really surprise me, yes, since this is after all an optimisation problem. Though OTOH, if you squint just right, almost any problem (even something as basic as computing the average) can be seen as an optimisation problem, so this doesn't say much.
So there is a chance of it getting stuck in a local minimum in one area that's inconsistent with the minimum it reaches in another, but it would take too much time/effort to lift itself out and find a consistent compromise.
In many other domains, the current wisdom seems to be that for AI to work, you need to first reparameterise the problem in a way that's consistent with the underlying physics. From my own optimisation experience, this is consistent with a too high-dimensional problem with too many local minimums that are too similar to be truly distinguishable, and separated by high-enough "peaks" that you can't easily cross over from one to the other with minimal perturbations. Without reparameterisation, you can tweak the objective function or the optimisation method all you want, you will never robustly get a satisfying solution. All in all, my conclusion on the image generation stuff is that probably the AI similarly needs to be reparameterised in a space that aren't just "2D visual features" (note that I know nothing about those AIs so maybe they already do that...).
But then the question becomes what else should be used? When generating real world objects (i.e. fake pictures) you could try and put some physical rules (e.g. have the AI model a 3D scene and then render it, which for example would immediately get the lighting right). But when generating random "artwork" pictures (dragons, pictures "in the style of...") you can't use the physical reality as a guide, so I guess the rules would have to be based on what makes our brain think an image "works" and I can't imagine that we're really close to being able to do that...
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@remi said in Internet of shit:
the AI similarly needs to be reparameterised in a space that aren't just "2D visual features" (note that I know nothing about those AIs
Same.
so maybe they already do that...)
They do.
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Well, they clearly still haven't found the Right
parameterisation, since images are still crap, so I can still say my idea is new. 
(tbh I would have been pretty astonished if it wasn't already done, I'm not going to claim to be smarter than each and every person who's ever worked on that... but when has that ever been
?)
