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Misc

Animation showing the biggest Black Holes

Via Kottke

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Misc

Cancer

Categories
Misc

The AI Dilemma

Categories
Misc

Al & Capitalism

So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey — a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100 — and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

Via Kottke
Categories
Hardware Software

Flipper Zero: Waiting for SD card

Just got myself a Flipper Zero because .

However, the updating process from 0.6x.y to 0.82.3 was not very smooth sailing:

  • First it was stuck in synchronising on the iOS app refusing to initiate the update (had to force quit + reboot Flipper Zero to get it to continue)
  • After that, once I managed to upload the new firmware, it was stuck on Waiting for SD card after the Flipper rebooted.

The SD card I tried was an old 2Gb Samsung SD I had lying around (have 3-4 of these).

Tried several times, but alas, until I tried a different SD card… Then the update process went fine and the firmware updated as expected.

So looks like this is a sign the SD card is not properly performing (even though format, benchmark and uploading firmware worked fine).