Last time I used GPT-3 to suggest forbidding landscapes that would repel future civilizations from our nuclear waste disposal sites. There’s something about taking a subject that’s very very permanent - some kinds of nuclear waste remain deadly for over 250,000 years - and then trying to add to it with something that’s very very ephemeral. GPT-3 bases its predictions on a snapshot of internet text from around October 2019. When I give it text, it adds completions that are its best guess at what would have been on one of those webpages.
A 1993 Sandia report had the following list of messages that they wanted to somehow convey to future nuclear waste site visitors:
If I gave the above set of messages as a prompt to GPT-3, what would it add to this? The datasets of “things early 21st century people put on the internet” are not a perfect overlap with the dataset of “things early 21st century people carve into stone”, so its interpretation of the situation may be lacking a bit of gravitas.
Other completions had, if anything, too much gravitas.
Or sometimes GPT-3 continued in the correct vein of “warn the humans to please go away” but interpreted it less as “science danger” and more like “cosmic horror”.
Quite often, GPT-3 would put itself in the role of interpreter and would theorize about what the message might mean.
It sometimes gets quite weird.
In the examples above I prompted GPT-3 with the existing text alone, no context given. But what would happen if I told it where the message was located and asked it for interpretation? Amusingly, many of its completions assume that of COURSE you’ll be investigating the strange site. (Below, the prompt is in bold.)
“The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.“
What does your party do next?
A)Move towards the center, being the heart of the “Scorpion Stars” and extending from an area several miles in diameter in all directions.
B) Try to enter the monument through the underside, using powerful magic to do so.
C) Decide to camp in the monument, where it is completely safe.
To read a few more explanations, including one involving ancient Martian artifacts and an Elven goddess, check out the bonus post!
“Going through the motions” is what I use. I think, in a poetic moment, I might have said something about mimicking shadow puppets. I’m not comfortable with cargo cult either, but even if you are turns out it isn’t a well enough known reference to be useful.
My 2019 book RADICALIZED opened with a novella called Unauthorized Bread, a tale of self-determination versus technical oppression that starts with a Libyan refugee hacking her stupid smart-toaster, which locks her into buying proprietary bread.
I wrote that story after watching the inexorable colonization of every kind of device - from implanted defibrillators to tractors - with computerized controllers that served a variety of purposes, many of them nakedly dystopian.
The existence of laws like Section 1201 of the DMCA really invites companies to make “smart” versions of their devices for the sole purpose of adding DRM to them, because DMCA 1201 makes it a felony to unlock DRM, even for perfectly legal purposes.
That’s how John Deere uses DRM: to force farmers to use (and pay for) authorized repair personnel when their tractors break down; it’s how Abbott Labs uses DRM, to force people with diabetes to use their own insulin pumps with their glucose monitors.
It’s the inkjet business-model, but for everything from artificial pancreases to coffee-makers. And because DMCA 1201 is so badly* drafted, it also puts security researchers at risk.
*Assuming you’re willing to believe this isn’t what the law was supposed to do all along
Adding networked computers to everyday gadgets is a risky business: as with any human endeavor, software is prone to error. And as with any technical pursuit, the only way to reliably root out errors is through adversarial peer review.
That is, to have people who want you to fail go through your stuff looking for stupid mistakes they can mock you over.
It’s not enough for you to go over your own work for errors. Anyone who’s ever stared right at their own typo and not seen it knows this doesn’t work.
Nor is it sufficient for your friends to look over your work - not only will they go easy on you, but sometimes your errors come from a shared set of faulty assumptions.
They CAN’T spot these errors: this is why no argument among Qanoners ever points out the most important fact, which is that the whole fucking thing is batshit.
The default for products is that ANYONE is allowed to point out their defects. If you buy a pencil and the tip breaks all the time and you do some analysis and discover that the manufacturer sucks at graphite, you can publish that analysis.
But DMCA 1201 prohibits this kind of disclosure if it means that you reveal flaws that might be used to disable the DRM. Security researchers get threatened by “smart device” companies all the time.
Just the spectre of the threat is enough to convince a lot of organizations’ lawyers to advise researchers not to go public with this information.
That means that a defect that could crash your car (or your implanted pacemaker) only gets disclosed if the company that made it authorizes the disclosure.
This is seriously bad policy.
Companies add “smarts” to get DRM, because DRM lets them control how their customers use their products, and lets them shut down competitors who try to give control back to customers, and also silence critics who reveal the defects in their products.
DRM can be combined with terms of service, patents, trade secrets, binding arbitration, and other forms of “IP” to deliver near-perfect corporate control over competitors, customers and critics.
But it’s worse than that, because software designed to exercise this kind of control is necessarily designed for maximum opacity: to hide what it does, how it does it, and how to turn it off.
This obfuscation means that when your device is compromised, malicious code can take advantage of the obscure-by-design nature of the device to run undetectably as it attacks you, your data, and your physical environment.
Malicious code can also leverage DRM’s natural tamper-resistance to make it hard to remove malware once it has been detected. Once a device designed to control its owners has been compromised, the attacker gets to control the owner, too.
Which brings me to “Smarter,” a “smart” $250 coffee maker that is remarkably insecure, allowing anyone on the same wifi network as the device to replace its firmware, as Martin Hron demonstrates in a recent proof-of-concept attack.
Hron’s attack hijacks the machine, causing it to “turn on the burner, dispense water, spin the bean grinder, and display a ransom message, all while beeping repeatedly.”
As Dan Goodin points out, Hron did all this in just one week, and quite likely could find more ways to attack the device. The defects Hron identified - like the failure to use encryption in the device’s communications or firmware updates - are glaring, idiotic errors.
As is the decision to allow for unsigned firmware updates without any user intervention. This kind of design idiocy has been repeatedly identified in MANY kinds of devices.
Back in 2011, I watched Ang Cui silently update the OS of an HP printer by sending it a gimmicked PDF (HP’s printers received new firmware via print-jobs, ingesting everything after a Postscript comment that said, “New firmware starts here”).
A decade later, there is no excuse for this kind of mistake. The fact that IoT vendors are making it tells you that the opacity and the power to punish critics is not a power that companies wield wisely - and that you shouldn’t trust any IoT gadgets.
keeping elaborate notes, writing down your dreams, etc is a way of staying ahead of the fake news and propaganda spread by the Central Government of the Self
I enjoy forecasting, pretty much in the same way other people enjoy video games, or stamp collecting. It’s also an activity broadly in line with my values. I think the world would be a much better place if people approached predicting the future with the same level of rigor they have when explaining the past. Yet incalculably more books have been written about the past than about the future, and the fact that studying the past is more tractable than studying the future only partly explains this asymmetry. I think most people approach forecasting in what some authors call “far mode”: as an exercise whose primary purpose is not to describe reality accurately, but to signal our aspirations, or something along those lines. However, as Robin Hanson likes to say, the future is just another point in time.
If something is worth doing for free, it’s worth doing nerd-out obsessively-compulsively for free.
“Free” implies the purest kind of surplus leisure energy. It should be unshackled from ordinary ROI thinking. You’ve *already* accepted zero returns. So why hold back?
My mate has just seen the Chernobyl documentary. He actually grew up in Ukraine in the 1980’s and was able to count at least 8 historical inaccuracies on one hand.
I’ve read about LSD being given to just about any animal you can think of: snails, fish, dogs, cats, elephants, spiders, guinea pigs. I didn’t think I could be surprised any more, but today I came across the delightful experiments of Heinz Lehmann, who gave LSD to dandelions.
we don’t necessarily have to make books work. We can make new forms instead. This doesn’t have to mean abandoning narrative prose; it doesn’t even necessarily mean abandoning paper—rather, we can free our thinking by abandoning our preconceptions of what a book is. Maybe once we’ve done all this, we’ll have arrived at something which does indeed look much like a book. We’ll have found a gentle path around the back of that intimidating slope. Or maybe we’ll end up in different terrain altogether. So let’s reframe the question. Rather than “how might we make books actually work reliably,” we can ask: How might we design mediums which do the job of a non-fiction book—but which actually work reliably?
This review of The Social Dilemma on @libshipwreck is 🔥🔥🔥
Every paragraph is a gem. Read it, savour it, and realise how “humane technology” is about making Silicon Valley the solution to the problem it created itself. https://t.co/X7E6iHAZ01pic.twitter.com/GsG8Vzh5lE
The AppleVision Display L featured a unique shaped CRT, allowing a connected Macintosh to see multiple virtual screen zones, including configurations that simulated a portrait display, widescreen display, and many others all switchable on the fly. pic.twitter.com/Siw5sM2tFP
This review of The Social Dilemma on @libshipwreck is 🔥🔥🔥 Every paragraph is a gem. Read it, savour it, and realise how “humane technology” is about making Silicon Valley the solution to the problem it created itself.
If you stopped at a deserted rest area to use the restroom and found it filled with turtles who all silently, balefully, turned their heads to look at you, how many turtles would it take to scare you off? That number is your Uncanny Rest-Area Restroom Turtle Number.
RT @_foam: FoAM’s autumn digest (soundtrack included) Harvested from the ambiguity & turbulence of 2020. Navigating viral biosecurity tips, strategic unplanning, tools, practices and feral sustenance, while attuning to birds, cities, swamps, seas and each other…
New workshop series coming up for @ImpaktFestival! Marine Zoönomy will investigate marine permaculture as a strategy for transforming obsolete fossil-fuel infrastructures in the North Sea. Info:
The usual categorisations of music don’t work, howabout:
Classical music = music practices which are no longer changing
Contemporary music = music practices which recently changed/are changing
Traditional music = music practices which have a long history of change
We’re all preppers now. Whether we want to be or not. It’s hard to think about, but we’re just in the opening credits to the apocalypse movie. This is the calm before the storm. This is your moment to get ready. We can get through this. A thread.
In mice and one person, scientists were able to reproduce the altered state often associated with ketamine by inducing certain brain cells to fire together in a slow-rhythmic fashion. “There was a rhythm that appeared and it was an oscillation that appeared only when the patient was dissociating,” says Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Stanford University. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41586-020-2731-9
Here’s the link to the website for the United Nations report, entitled, “Global Biodiversity Outlook 5,” described in this story. From there, you can download a summary, or the entire report.
The story tells us that this report is the fourth in a parade of reports on biodiversity that have been issued over the past year. I’ve posted links to all of them, and summarized what I learned about them. A summary of these reports from this New York Times story:
Last year, an exhaustive international report concluded that humans had reshaped the natural world so drastically that one million species of animals and plants were at risk of extinction. This year, the World Economic Forum’s annual global risk report identified biodiversity loss, in addition to climate change, as one of the most urgent threats, saying that “human-driven nature and biodiversity loss is threatening life on our planet.” Last week, a respected index of animal life showed that, on average, the populations of almost 4,400 monitored mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish had declined by 68 percent since 1970.
Trends in biodiversity (various metrics, left axis) have been declining and are projected to continue to do so under business as usual scenarios (trend line). Various areas of action could reduce the rate of biodiversity decline, and the full portfolio of actions, in combination, could halt and reverse the decline (bend the curve), potentially leading to net biodiversity gains after 2030. These are, from bottom to top: (1) Enhanced conservation and restoration of ecosystems; (2) climate change mitigation; (3) action on pollution, invasive alien species and overexploitation; (4) more sustainable production of goods and services, especially food; and (5) reduced consumption and waste. However, none of the areas of action alone, nor in partial combinations, can bend the curve of biodiversity loss. Moreover, the effectiveness of each area of action is enhanced by the other areas (see Part III of the full report for discussion).
Excerpt from this
New York Times story:
The world is failing to address a catastrophic biodiversity collapse that not only threatens to wipe out beloved species and invaluable genetic diversity, but endangers humanity’s food supply, health and security, according to a sweeping United Nations report issued on Tuesday.
When governments act to protect and restore nature, the authors found, it works. But despite commitments made 10 years ago, nations have not come close to meeting the scale of the crisis, which continues to worsen because of unsustainable farming, overfishing, burning of fossil fuels and other activities.
“Humanity stands at a crossroads,” the report said.
It comes as the devastating consequences that can result from an unhealthy relationship with nature are on full display: A pandemic that very likely jumped from bats has upended life worldwide, and wildfires, worsened by climate change and land management policies, are ravaging the American West.
“These things are a sign of what is to come,” said David Cooper, an author of the report and the deputy executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the global treaty underlying the assessment. “These things will only get worse if we don’t change course.”
The report looked at a decade of efforts by national governments. In 2010, after painstaking scientific work and arduous negotiation, almost every country in the world signed on to 20 goals under the convention to staunch the biodiversity hemorrhage.
At the time, the science was already clear: Human activity was decimating animals and plants across the planet, causing a wave of extinctions and throwing ecosystems so out of balance that the domino effects threatened humans themselves. The agreement, with a deadline of 2020 for the new goals, was a hard-won diplomatic triumph.
The report, which assesses progress on the 20 goals, has found that the world is doing far too little.
This is an excellent article. Unfortunately for those of us with little time on our hands, it’s long. But if you can find the time, it’s worth it, because the author is pointing out to us that which ought to be obvious: the climate and the associated weather patterns, along with the inevitable flow of capital (i.e., money, particularly from homeowners insurance companies and mortgage lenders), will be forcing us to move from those areas most directly impacted by the changing climate to more suitable spots.
Excerpt from this story from the
New York Times:
For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in their own backyards. The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature. In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have largely gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.
I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives? And if so — if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing — was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban planners, and I mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America’s shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (See a detailed analysis of the maps.)
What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across the United States, some 162 million people — nearly one in two — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least four million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation’s federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo.
As part of the next #cardstock on Friday 25th, @changeist and I will be talking about the new How To Future cards we’ve collaborated on - all details here -
I AM CONCERNED THAT THE RISING TIDE OF FASCISM, RAMPANT PLAGUE, AND EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE HAVE EFFECTED MY ABILITY TO EFFECTIVELY PERFORM DATA ENTRY
Ice breaking off the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier in Northeast Greenland in a satellite image handed out on Aug. 27, 2020. Copernicus Sentinel-2 / ESA via AFP - Getty Images file
Excerpt from this story from
NBC News:
An enormous chunk of Greenland’s ice cap has broken off in the far northeastern Arctic, a development that scientists say is evidence of rapid climate change.
The glacier section that broke off is 110 square kilometers (42.3 square miles). It came off of the fjord called Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden, which is roughly 80 kilometers (50 miles) long and 20 kilometers (12 miles) wide, the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland said Monday.
The glacier is at the end of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, where it flows off the land and into the ocean.
The ice shelf has lost 160 square kilometers (62 square miles), an area nearly twice that of Manhattan in New York, since 1999.
“We should be very concerned about what appears to be progressive disintegration at the Arctic’s largest remaining ice shelf,” said GEUS professor Jason Box.
In announcing the new pledge Thursday, Ardern tied the goal to a green recovery from the coronavirus, SBS News reported.
“The COVID-19 economic recovery represents a once in a generation opportunity to reshape New Zealand’s energy system to be more renewable, faster, affordable and secure,” she said.
Ardern’s pledge ups her Labour Party’s previous goal of phasing out non-renewable energy by 2035. New Zealand currently produces 84 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, according to the government. However, these only account for 40 percent of the energy actually used in the country, since it still imports coal and oil from outside.
The promise is part of Labour’s broader clean energy policy, unveiled Thursday. The plan also includes electrifying transportation and industry, investing in new technologies like green hydrogen, working to make energy more affordable and spending an additional $70 million on a pumped hydro storage solution for dry years.
We need a term for the sense of loss accompanying the realization that possible futures have been made impossible. Wisftul recollection of lost futures.
An international team of astronomers, led by Professor Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, today announced the discovery of a rare molecule – phosphine – in the clouds of Venus. On Earth, this gas is only made industrially, or by microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments. Astronomers have speculated for decades that high clouds on Venus could offer a home for microbes – floating free of the scorching surface, but still needing to tolerate very high acidity. The detection of phosphine molecules, which consist of hydrogen and phosphorus, could point to this extra-terrestrial ‘aerial’ life. The new discovery is described in a paper in Nature Astronomy.
The office as the default way of working is dead. But the office itself isn’t dead. With working from home, what we gain in work-life balance we might lose in innovation and creativity. There are people who could directly challenge that sentence but I suspect they will come from highly mature companies who have fully mastered the remote working learning curve. Many of us are still at the stage of doing what we did in the office , just remotely. The timorous amongst us may use the lack of productivity net gains as a reason to regress rather than push through the ‘pain barrier’ as Matt Mullenweg describes it. We can do so much better, for ourselves, our customers and society if we stop being so frightened or so certain of the future.
Eight people in Gresik regency, East Java, were ordered by local authorities to dig graves for those who have died of COVID-19 as punishment for not wearing face masks in public. Cerme district head, Suyono, said that he punished residents who did not wear face masks by making them dig graves at a public cemetery in Ngabetan village.
I wrote about those orange wildfire skies turned grey in pictures. Cameras aren’t mirrors that capture the world; they are machines that make images out of it. https://t.co/MocVXbow7y
Generally around this time every year, teams start gathering to begin preparing their end-of-year trend reports: predictions for the year ahead. This year, don’t do it. Don’t make the 2021 Trends Report or the snazzy Predictions For 2021 deck. Use your resources wisely.
When it comes to the security defects in kids’ smart watches: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” For years, these tracking-cuffs have been the locus of awful security scandals. Now it’s happened again.
Some background: in 2017, the Norwegian Consumer Council audited 4 brands of kids’ smart watch and revealed that strangers could monitor children’s movements and see where they’ve gone, covertly listen in on them, and steal their personal information.
The watches gathered copious amount of data and sent it, in the clear, to offshore servers. The watches incorporate cameras and the photos children take were also easily plundered by hackers.
A year later, Pen Test Partners audited the popular MiSafes watches for 3-12 year olds were also insecure, and could be used as covert listening and tracking devices, and even to alert attackers when a target child was nearby.
But it’s been a year since that happened, and guess what? The watches are still flaming garbage that you strap to your kids’ wrists. Writing in Wired, Andy Greenberg reports on a Münster University of Applied Sciences paper analyzing the watches.
* send voice and text messages to children that appear to come from their parents
* intercept communications between parents and children
* as listening bugs
The manufacturers were informed of all this in April, and they didn’t fix it.
It’s not like these are subtle errors. The watches have no authentication, no encryption, and can be tracked with their SIMs’ IMEIs.
The backend servers are vulnerable to SQL injections.
“When WIRED asked Schinzel if three years of security analyses gave him the confidence to put these smartwatches on his own children, he answered without hesitation: ‘Definitely not.’”
One of the authors of the referenced report in this
USA Today story is Dr. Fauci. Excerpt:
COVID-19 may only be the beginning of global pandemics – a future scenario in which climate change may also play a role.
“We have entered a pandemic era,” said a recent study in the journal Cell. Written by Dr. Anthony Fauci and medical historian Dr. David Morens, both of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the study paints a picture of a future where pandemics become more numerous.
“I don’t have a crystal ball, but what we are seeing looks very much like an acceleration of pandemics,“ Morens told BuzzFeed News. Causes he cited include deforestation, urban crowding and wet markets for wild game.
But climate change’s possible role is complicated: We know that the virus survives longer in cold temperatures than hot, so that could mean that a warmer planet would slow the spread of the disease, said meteorologist Jeff Masters, who writes for Yale Climate Connections. On the other hand, he said heat waves cause people to spend more time indoors in air-conditioned spaces, where the spread of the disease increases.
“We do know that climate change alters how we relate to other species on Earth and that matters to our health and our risk for infections,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, director of Harvard University’s T.HChan C-CHANGE program.
“As the planet heats up, animals big and small, on land and in the sea, are headed to the poles to get out of the heat,” he said. “That means animals are coming into contact with other animals they normally wouldn’t, and that creates an opportunity for pathogens to get into new hosts.”
In addition, Masters said the diseases of most concern globally that are worsened by climate change are the ones spread by mosquitoes, since mosquitoes like it hot and wet – conditions that are becoming increasingly common because of global warming. Malaria, Zika, chikungunya, dengue fever and the West Nile virus are all expected to spread into areas where they currently are not endemic, he said. Tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease will also spread.
Bernstein said climate change has already made conditions more favorable to the spread of some infectious diseases, including Lyme disease, waterborne diseases such as Vibrio parahaemolyticus (which causes vomiting and diarrhea) and mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.”
I edited a piece by someone who used the locution “disabled people and people who are not (yet) disabled” and I haven’t stopped thinking about what taking that truth seriously would mean
I spent much of this year moving, amid bush fires, lockdowns and reopening. During our last move (which occupied most of the summer and is now more-or-less complete) @zzkt & I wrote and stress-tested a checklist to help us find a suitable pandemic shelter https://t.co/ojiTJsEEWH
Fun fact: 1/3 of the static on our TVs is left over from the Big Bang. 1/3 is from our own atmosphere and 1/3 is from Jupiter’s magnetic field. https://t.co/Ebm65Z41R7
I’m sincerely wondering if anyone is seriously expending any time in one of our new post covid metaverses, or we are just fooing ourselves. Fortnite excluded, I mean.
Up to 30% of Belgians are anywhere from sceptical to strongly opposed to receiving a potential coronavirus vaccine, a new international survey showed. Among the 27 countries, only Turkey and Peru had equal rates of negative attitudes to a potential vaccine, contrasting sharply with Brazilians and Australians (12%), as well as with respondents in China, where opposition to a vaccine plunged to a mere 3%. The survey also showed that 22% of Belgians polled said they would not get a vaccine because “they are against vaccines in general,” landing Belgium among the six countries with the highest number of respondents to hold this view. Overall, Russia and Italy had the highest degree of anti-vaccine responses (30%), followed by France (24%), South Africa (23%) and the United States (20%).
Folks, I cannot stress this enough, do not let billionaire capitalists drill holes in your head and stick their tech into your brain just for funsies. You already have enough problems with Apple, Facebook and Google knowing everything about you from your cell phone.
According to pretty much every publisher I know Jeff Bezos is personally responsible for the destruction of the book industry. They can no longer pay most authors anything as it all gets squeezed by Amazon.
If anyone would like to commission me to write a somewhat skeptical/conspiratorial piece on MKultra, Human Experimentation, Cybernetics and Neuralink hit me up.
— ⚫ Your roots are in the infinite (@thejaymo) August 29, 2020
Terunobu Fujimori (November 21, 1946) is an architect and architectural historian, a lateral thinker and surrealist.
Fujimori is known as a modern eccentric with an architectural sensibility drawn from ancient Japanese traditions and influences of Le Corbusier and Claude Nicolas Ledoux. His architecture is characterized by fantasy and humor, use of natural materials and the subversion of traditional techniques.
A well known author, cultural commentator, and TV host in Japan; as well as a longtime professor of Japanese architecture at the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo. Fujimori came into his design career late in life—he got his first commission at age 44, 27 years ago—but he has since conceived some of Japan’s most startlingly original buildings, on average one per year.
Fujimori basically fell into designing buildings after his native village (a tiny, rural village two hours south of Nagano) commissioned him in 1991 to design a small history museum, Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum. As he pondered what form the building should take, he felt the weight of all of architectural history bearing down on him. “Since I was a famous architectural historian,” he says, “I thought my architecture should be totally unique, dissimilar to any architecture that came before.”
His peers found the building intriguing. “Terunobu Fujimori has thrown a punch of a kind no one has ever seen before at ‘modernism,’” wrote the architect Kengo Kuma. Encouraged, Fujimori decided to continue designing. With no other clients in sight, he built a house for his family in a Tokyo suburb, the Tanpopo (Dandelion) House with strips of volcanic rock affixed to the facade, and flowers and grass blooming in the grooves between them. While Fujimori admits that his buildings tend to be ecologically sensitive and extremely energy-efficient, he is wary of the contemporary conception of green design. “As an architect, I deal with the visual effects. Energy conservation is an engineer’s work. My intention is to visibly and harmoniously connect two worlds—the built world that mankind creates with the nature God created.”
In a pioneering professional career now spanning almost 30 years, the architect has produced two-legged teahouses suspended 20 metres above the ground; homes whose chimneys are planted with pines and whose roofs are covered in leeks and chives; and guesthouses that perch precariously atop small segments of white wall. Whereas his contemporaries – starchitects like Tadao Ando and Toyo Ito, who he counts as close friends – embrace Japanese simplicity, conceptualism and new materials, Fujimori prefers eccentricity, tradition, character and natural elements local to the sites at which he works (mud, wood, stone, coal, bark, mortar and, often, living plants) evoking sometimes real life Hayao Miyazaki cartoons. “My work is all about keeping the fun of childhood alive,” says Fujimori.
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has published RFC8890, The Internet is for End Users, arguing that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should ground its decisions in what’s good for people who use the Internet, and that it should take positive steps to achieve that. Why does this need to be said? Is it going too far? Who else could they favour, and why should you care? As author of the RFC and a member of the IAB that passed it, here are my thoughts.
As the EU works through the contours of the new Digital Services Act, my EFF colleagues Svea Windwehr, Christoph Schmon and Jillian York have published a set of four principles for sound digital platform regulation.
I. Give Users Control Over Content: Let users decide how their feeds are ordered, mandate interop so that it’s easy for users to install plugins that do this work for them, ban ToS that forbids reverse-engineering and interconnection.
Abandon the idea that platforms have the final word about what is and isn’t objectionable and/or harassing. Let users choose what they want to block and what they want to see, rather than petitioning platforms and hoping they get a hearing.
II: Algorithmic Transparency:Platforms should divulge the criteria they use for recommendation and flagging, and explain in clear terms when/why/how algorithmic systems are used. Allow third-party and regulatory audits of algorithms.
III. Accountable Governance: Make platforms notify, explain and consult on content policy changes, require meaningful consent to new policies and allow for opt-outs, and make policies machine readable and accessible to humans without specialized knowledge.
IV. Right to Anonymity Online: Ditch “real names” proposals aimed at fighting disinformation and respect the will of individuals not to disclose their identities online.
That was my summary, but I urge you to read the original: as befits their prodigious communications skills, it’s a sprightly and eminently readable doc!
You’ve probably heard Zuboff’s excellent coinage “Surveillance Capitalism” and perhaps you’ve read the paper it was introduced in, or the book that it led to.
Today, I’ve published a response to that book, “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism.”
I wrote “How to Destroy…” after reading Zuboff’s book and realizing that while I shared her alarm about how Big Tech was exercising undue influence over us, I completely disagreed with her thesis about the source of that influence and what should be done about it.
Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a “rogue capitalism,” a system that has used machine learning to effectively control our minds and shape our behavior so that we can no longer serve as market actors whose purchase decisions promote good firms and products over bad ones.
Because of that, Big Tech has a permanent advantage, one that can’t be addressed through traditional means like breakups or consent decrees, nor can it be analyzed through traditional privacy lenses.
But I think that’s wrong. It’s giving Big Tech far too much credit. I just don’t buy the thesis that Big Tech used Big Data to create a mind-control ray to sell us fidget spinners, and that Cambridge Analytica hijacked it to make us all racists.
So I wrote “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” a short book that delivers a different thesis: Big Tech is a monopoly problem. In fact, it’s just a part of a wider monopoly problem that afflicts every sector of our global economy.
Accidentally and deliberately, monopolies create all kinds of malignant outcomes. If the company that has a monopoly on search starts serving wrong answers, people will believe them - not because of mind control, but because of dominance.
But monopolies have an even graver failure-mode: when a large, profitable industry collapses down to 4 or 5 companies, it’s easy for those companies to agree on what they think policy should be.
And being monopolists, they have lots of spare cash to convert that agreement to actual policy. What’s more, once an industry is monopolized, everyone qualified to understand and regulate it probably came from one of the dominant companies.
Think of how the “good” Obama FCC chairman was a former Comcast exec and the “bad” Trump FCC chair is a former Verizon lawyer.
There’s a name for regulatory outcomes driven by collusion among monopolists whose regulators come from their own ranks.
We call them: “Conspiracies.”
When social scientists investigate conspiracists, they find people whose beliefs are the result of real trauma (like losing a loved one to opiods) and real conspiracies (the Sackler family and other Big Pharma barons suborning their regulators).
The combination of real trauma and real conspiracies gives ALL conspiracies explanatory power. This is brilliantly documented in Anna Merlan’s “Republic of Lies,” one of the most important books on the rise of conspiratorial thinking I’ve read.
Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem, but not because it accidentally led to a working mind-control ray and then turned it over to Nazis.
It’s a problem because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo.
And Big Tech DOES exert control over us, but not with mind-control rays. Lock-in (and laws that support it) allows Big Tech to decide how we can use our devices, who can fix them, and when they must be thrown away.
Lock-in is an invitation to totalitarianism: the Chinese government observed the fact that Apple alone could decide which apps can run on Iphones, then ordered Apple to remove apps that allowed Chinese people privacy from the state.
I’m sure that the Uyghurs in concentration camps and the Falun Gong members having their organs harvested are relieved that Apple abetted their surveillance for reasons other than mere marketing.
This is the core of my critique, the reason I wrote this book: we should be suspicious of all corporate control over our lives, and should insist on nothing less than absolute technological self-determination.
The idea that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” suggests the simplistic solution of just charging for everything. But the reality is that in a monopoly, you’re the product irrespective of whether you’re paying.
We deserve to be more than products.
I am so grateful to Onezero for the incredible look-and-feel of my new book. It’s a free read on their site, with a really fantastic new nav system that will help you pick up where you left off.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the spectacular artwork that Shira Inbar did for the book, and the tireless efforts of my editor, Brian Merchant, who championed it internally and is ultimately responsible for the brilliant package you see before you.
I’m also excited to note that this will be shortly coming out as a print book, doubtless just as beautiful as this digital edition.
I know it’s a longread, but I hope you’ll give it a try.
Big Tech NEEDS a corrective, and that corrective - antimonopoly enforcement - is part of a global movement that addresses deep, systemic problems in every sector. This is a moment for us to seize, but we have to understand where the problem really lies.
Dinosaur Dust was made between 2014-19 over several trips through the Mojave Desert in California. Subjects become collaborators in this open-ended narrative, both experienced and directed, telling stories of life lived with a heightened sense of mortality and longing in this isolated landscape. The work explores encounters between people and nature, playing with light, impermanence and the faculties of seeing.
Deserts stand as a monumental symbol of emptiness, a seemingly infinite landscape that serves as a powerful incarnation of the sublime. But travel through the boulders and dunes, the washes and the canyons of the Mojave and the image of virgin territory is revealed as a mirage. Just beneath the surface, the sounds and traces of all kinds of activities, experiments, myths and utopias can be heard, tales of exile and promise, temptation and death.
These desert communities offer the opportunity to begin again, providing a blank slate of sorts for people attracted to this fragile environment, to make a new life in a ruthless clime that is nowhere near as empty as it looks. Many women are drawn to the desert, often living alone, building new homes and embracing this formidable wild life. Submit to the great meteorological forces and it’s a reminder of how it feels to be alive, drawn to this edge, like someone experiencing vertigo, with an inexplicable urge to jump into the abyss.
book - ‘Dinosaur Dust’ is our latest photobook release from Another Place Press, just launched for pre-order this week! You can see sample spreads below, and just click on the link to pre-order a copy! It’s available as a standard edition for just £17, or as a limited special edition of 30 for £55, each of which comes with an A4 print signed and numbered by Zoe (see image below).
One thing we note a number of times in @howtofuture — it’s not just for business, tech and design — It was also written with activism in mind. It takes a future you want to fight a future you don’t. Small groups, teams, and solo activists and innovators: it’s for you, too.
“Though Russia is only one foreign actor capable of targeting US political audiences through the QAnon community, its history of operations appear to be the most ideologically aligned with the overarching QAnon theory,” the report said. “Russia also appears to have made the most effort to gain credibility within the community thus far.” QAnon was named by the FBI as a potential instigator of domestic terrorism, and followers have been charged with making a terror threat, murder and other crimes.
Today in his excellent new newsletter “The Magnet,” Mark Frauenfelder discusses “transitive dice” - D6s with the weird property that while Die A has an advantage over Die B and Die B has an advantage over Die C, Die A LOSES to Die C on average.
That is to say, if you give an opponent the choice of any of the three dice, one of the remaining two dice will always beat it. This is some pretty eldritch probability stuff (and an example of how counterintuitive propability can be).
The key is in understanding the probability distributions. Die A has five “4” sides and one “6” side. Die B has five “3” sides and one “6” side. Die C has three “5” sides and three “2” sides.
That means: “A beats B 25 out of the 36 possibilities. C beats A 21 out of 36. C beats A 21 out of 36.”
Frauenfelder notes that Warren Buffet is obsessed with nontransitive dice, which makes sense. After all, Buffet has repeatedly, publicly proclaimed that he only invests in companies that are in noncompetitive markets.
For example, here’s why he bought a huge stake in Moody’s: “I know nothing about credit rating. The only reason I bought it is because there are only three credit rating agencies and they serve the whole country, and they have pricing power.”
His ideal company is one with a monopoly so secure, “even your idiot cousin could run it.” Presumably, you could teach that same idiot cousin to memorize which die beats each of the others, too.
Wow. Huge if true.
“According to a machine learning analysis of dozens of languages […], the meaning of words does not necessarily refer to an intrinsic, essential constant. Instead, it is significantly shaped by culture, history and geography.” https://t.co/Cl8hrb5Pko
Paris Encourages All Citizens to Become Urban Gardeners
Parisians can garden anywhere in the city limits according to the “permis de végétaliser” (greenery permit) in an effort to make the French capital more green and plant-friendly.
7 February 2020
Hörn Arnarsdóttir
It’s a simple strategy with a big impact: give every citizen the right to plant, grow and harvest on any free plot of urban land. The recently passed law “permis de végétaliser” is one of many green initiatives that the current mayor Anne Hidalgo has introduced. By 2020, she wants to meet her target of adding hundred hectares of green space to the cityscape of Paris by offering easier access to gardening and gardening materials to its dwellers.
Residents can apply for a three-year permit, which can easily be renewed, to garden in their local area whether it is on their rooftop or creating a vertical garden on their building wall. Permit-holders are asked to sign a charter to ensure that pesticides are avoided and sustainable gardening methods are used instead. The planting of bee-friendly plants is encouraged and urban gardeners can even request a planting kit including topsoil and seeds to help them get started with greening their local areas….
A German university is offering “idleness grants” to applicants who are seriously committed to doing nothing, as part of a design research project: “What can I refrain from so that my life has fewer negative consequences on others?”https://t.co/tXGhgauMNW
Google sucks at IoT so, in the time-honored tradition of monopolists, it bought a successful company, Nest, bricked much of its existing gear, failed catastrophically to integrate it for YEARS, exposing users to hacks, shuffled it around and around the corporate structure…
Locked out competing devices, hid secret microphones in new, “microphone-free” devices, and now…
…they’ve bought a $450m stake in home security giant ADT, which will turn ADT customers into nonconsensual Nest customers.
Under the deal, ADT customers’ security cameras will be “upgraded” to Nest devices whose videos will be sent to Google for long-term storage and machine-learning analysis.
Home automation and home security have become the shittiest end of the Internet of Shit. On the one hand, you have Ring, who turn your home security system into part of a warrantless, off-the-books mass-surveillance grid for local cops:
Then there were the internal empire-builders at Google that kept Nest from being properly secured, leading to a rash of voyeurs who spied on and terrorized Nest owners by screaming obscenities at them and their kids:
None of this should be happening. For decades, America’s competition law operated on the presumption of “structural separation” - the idea that companies should not be allowed to form vertical monopolies:
These monopolies are inevitably not just inefficient, plagued by “the curse of bigness,” but they also crowd out GOOD companies with superior products, by using the vertical integration to keep them from getting into the market.
De 20 ˢᵗᵉ gemeente wordt ondersteund door organisaties die werken rond tijdelijk gebruik. Ze hebben een maatschappelijk doel: ze engageren zich om de lege gebouwen in Brussel open te stellen voor de Brusselse gemeenschap. Ze willen dat burgers de stad maken. Wij waarschuwen voor het creëren van een parallelle sub-huurmarkt waar de rechten van bezetters worden uitgehold. Wij verzetten ons tegen actoren die enkel financiële winst als doel hebben. Wij vragen de overheid om Leegbeek, de 20ˢᵗᵉ gemeente, te beschermen tegen de uberisering. Wij vragen dat de oppervlakte van Leegbeek wordt gewijd aan het zoeken naar oplossingen voor de dringende behoeften van onze samenleving.
Locks are pretty rubbish. The lock on your door is more of a “keep out” sign than an actual way to keep someone who wants to get in from coming in. My daughter was 5 or 6 when I first took her to Defcon and she learned to pick locks in an hour.
So can you! Try Toool, The Open Organization of Lockpickers, and go to town. It’s a super fun, soothing way to pass the day. Like knitting, but simultaneously more and less practical.
Once you’ve learned to pick locks, you get a profound realization about security: there are billion-dollar companies whose products are just GARBAGE and always have been, who, despite this, have been in business for decades or even centuries.
You also realize why: security is hard. Making locks that can be easily opened with a key, not easily opened without the key, can be serviced and mass produced? That’s just hard.
Moreover, the materiality of locks - the fact that they’re made from STUFF, and that STUFF has its own characteristics, flaws and behaviors, makes those problems a million times gnarlier.
For years, we’ve known that amateur lockpickers can reproduce your keys by taking pictures of them. There are even grocery store machines that take a picture of your key and duplicate it. The shape of your key is itself a security vulnerability.
But it turns out it’s not just the SHAPE of your key, it’s the SOUND. Spikey is an exploit from a NUS Comp Sci team lead by Soundarya Ramesh, laid out in this (paywalled) ACM Hotmobile paper.
Spikey is an acoustic attack on traditional six-pin locks. It analyzes a sound recording of a key entering the keyway and hitting the pins and infers what the key must look like based on the sounds.
The hard part isn’t the analysis, it’s obtaining the recording. You need to get a smartphone to within a few centimeters of the key as it enters the lock, which is pretty obvious. On the other hand, it may be possible to capture the audio by hacking a “smart” doorbell’s mic.
Speaking as an author of technothrillers, this is a fantastic bit. (attn: John Rogers).
What’s more, it dispenses with the need for lockpicking altogether: obtain an advance recording, infer the key, make the key, enter the premises.
Ramesh speculates that a generic defense against this attack can be found in subtle alterations in the geometry of the key - by making the ridges smoother, it could dampen the sounds they make when hitting the pins, frustrating attempts to infer the pin configuration.
If you want to learn lockpicking (and I think you should try!), I recommend the picks and practice locks from Sparrows Tools, which have never steered me wrong.
You’ve probably heard that Fortnite publishers Epic are suing Apple over the right to sell software to Iphone owners without cutting Apple in for a 30% vig on every sale. Epic wants a court to order Apple to allow software vendors to offer direct sales.
Apple apologists insist that Apple should have the right to both lock its devices so that Apple customers can only get their software through the App Store, AND that Apple should be able to cream off 30% of every sale in the store.
There’s been some smart commentary on this. In particular, I recommend Jay Freeman’s long thread on whether the App Store is monopolistic (it most certainly is) and whether that’s good for users or software developers (it most certainly is not).
I’ve made my own contribution to the debate. In a new article for Slate’s Future Tense, I talk about the role that interoperability could and should play in safeguarding user rights and blocking monopolistic conduct.
True believers in Apple’s business model argue that Apple customers don’t even WANT to buy software elsewhere (similar to how they argue against the Right to Repair by insisting that Apple customers are happy to be limited to getting repairs from Apple).
This is a frankly bizarre argument. Apple isn’t spending millions are hiring entire buildings full of lawyers to block right to repair or independent app stores on general principle - the only reason to block these things is because you think your customers would use them.
As my EFF colleague Mitch Stoltz says, the argument that Apple users don’t want flexibility is like the argument that the Berlin Wall isn’t there to keep East Germans IN, it’s there to keep the bourgeoisie out of the Worker’s Paradise.
If the DDR really believed that people were happy to be behind the wall, they could easily test the proposition: just install a gate that anyone could pass through and see whether anyone stayed.
Likewise, if Apple’s convinced that no one wants independent repair or third-party app stores with more dev-friendly policies, it can just put a gate in ITS walled garden and see what its customers do.
The Apple version of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy (“You’re not a true Iphone owner if you object to the company you gave $1000 to for a phone charging software vendors a 30% commission”) was always absurd.
But it would be fascinating to find out how many “true” Iphone users there are by those lights. If we were to allow owners of Iphones to treat them as their property, to use without regard to the shareholders of a $1T corporation, what would they do?
Apple probably won’t unilaterally disarm its DRM arsenal. That’s why EFF is suing the US government to overturn the law that makes it a crime to bypass DRM.
The past decade was the hottest ever recorded globally, with 2019 either the second or third warmest year on record, as the climate crisis accelerated temperatures upwards worldwide, scientists have confirmed.
Every decade since 1980 has been warmer than the preceding decade, with the period between 2010 and 2019 the hottest yet since worldwide temperature records began in the 19th century. The increase in average global temperature is rapidly gathering pace, with the last decade up to 0.39C warmer than the long-term average, compared with a 0.07C average increase per decade stretching back to 1880.
The past six years, 2014 to 2019, have been the warmest since global records began, a period that has included enormous heatwaves in the US, Europe and India, freakishly hot temperatures in the Arctic, and deadly wildfires from Australia to California to Greece.
Last year was either the second hottest year ever recorded, according to Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or the third hottest year, as recorded by the UK Met Office. Overall, the world has heated up by about 1C on average since the pre-industrial era.
Over a fifth of Europe’s energy was generated by solar panels and wind turbines in the first half of 2020. Solar and wind energy generation was higher in some European countries. Denmark came out on top, generating 64 per cent of its energy from these renewable sources, closely followed by Ireland (49 per cent) and Germany (42 per cent), according to the report from independent climate think-tank Ember. In a half-year review released in July by the think tank, all renewables - including wind, solar, hydroelectricity and bioenergy - were found to have exceeded fossil fuel generation for the first time ever. They produced 40 per cent of the EU’s power from January to June with fossil fuels contributing 34 per cent.
Over a fifth of Europe’s energy was generated by solar panels and wind turbines in the first half of 2020. Solar and wind energy generation was higher in some European countries. Denmark came out on top, generating 64 per cent of its energy from these renewable sources, closely followed by Ireland (49 per cent) and Germany (42 per cent), according to the report from independent climate think-tank Ember. In a half-year review released in July by the think tank, all renewables - including wind, solar, hydroelectricity and bioenergy - were found to have exceeded fossil fuel generation for the first time ever. They produced 40 per cent of the EU’s power from January to June with fossil fuels contributing 34 per cent.
A common perspective is that types are restrictions. Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making sure they satisfy the constraints the programmer wrote down in the type annotations. Of course, the typechecker can’t really predict the future, so when the typechecker gets it wrong—it can’t “figure out” what a value will be—static types can feel like self-inflicted shackles. But that is not the only perspective.
![What is the danger? We do not know.
[Image: alien hand] Visualize your hand before you now. Is it in front of you, with the fingers towards you? Or perhaps it is to one side of you? Or behind you? Or perhaps it is heading towards you, at some speed.
Whatever choice you make, understand that your choice is a substantial physical change with significant energy changes caused as a direct result.
That change in position of the hand is dangerous and we do not recommend that you choose the hand moves in this way, especially toward yourself.
Trace in your mind the well traveled path your fingers have travelled. That path is repulsive to many species, not just to us, and especially in the sequence which you have traced it.
Collectively map the well travelled paths of your fingers, and imagine the energy field that must surround the hand.
Do not do that.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/7de8b4ebd78ca72fa64d949f248f0803/0f3ef112a1aac88c-50/s540x810/9d2e7122d702ed08bbbe4fe0086f528445039b1a.png)
