Kevin D. Peterson

ICANN has opened a process to allow new top level domains. I just wanted to be the first one to make the obvious pun.

ICANN Announcement

I use Subversion to manage documents and projects at home. I ran into a problem when I changed the IP I had assigned to the box hosting the svn repository. It isn't obvious how to change where Eclipse keeps track of this information. I found some replies to this old message, which got me to try the Switch then Relocate commands in TortoiseSVN. This made it possible to synchronize, but I wasn't able to get to options like Configure Tags. The fix is to go to the SVN Repository view (or perspective), neither of which I use very often. Here you can access the Relocate command.

It's almost impossible these days to find a monitor or laptop that isn't wide screen. They are even making their way into bed room size televisions. Is this the wonderful progress of technology, bringing us fantastic products for lower prices every day? Not really. It's actually just a marketing ploy to let them use a bigger number, much like the Athlon 4800+ which actually runs at 2500mhz.

Monitor sizes are quoted in diagonal measure, just as TVs have been for decades. This has worked well because the aspect ratio used to be constant at 4:3. But when we start playing with the shape of the screen, things get very different. If you have a 20" diagonal screen, at normal 4:3 aspect ratio, the screen is 16" across by 12" tall. This gives an area of 192 sq in. But if you have a 20" at 16:9, you get a screen that is indeed wider at 17.4", but it's also shorter, at 9.8". This gives a screen area of only 170.9 sq in. That's 11% less than the normal aspect ratio screen.

You can calculate the area of a screen by squaring the diagonal measure (20 * 20 = 400), then multiplying by 0.427 for widescreen, or 0.48 for normal 4:3. If you come across the somewhat unusual 16:10 ratio, it's closer to widescreen, with the ratio being .449.

For a TV, especially if you like to watch movies in their original aspect ratio, widescreen makes sense. For computers, it doesn't. Not only do you get less area, but the way that computer interfaces are designed, you usually lose space where you need it most: the top (title bar, menu bar, buttons) and bottom (status bar, taskbar) of the screen.

If you want to see the math, that's in the "More" below.

» Read More

I'm running for office because I'm pissed off. I'm pissed off at police that kick down doors using military tactics with no concern for the constitution, under the reasoning that accidentally shooting a few innocent bystanders is a small price to pay to make sure AIDS patients can't smoke marijuana. I'm pissed off at having 15% of my earnings go to fund a retirement plan which will most likely go bankrupt. I'm pissed off at “terrorism alerts” which accomplish nothing but to keep the populace in a perpetual state of fear, and at airport security which detains children for having a similar name to someone on a secret “no fly” list. I'm pissed off because FEMA is declaring places like Foster City a flood zone so that they can force home owners to buy flood insurance to pay for the poorly managed fiasco in New Orleans.

I'm pissed off that political debate in this country is entirely about whether the Washington should force everyone to do something, or ban them from doing it, and it seems to never pass through anyone's mind that maybe, just maybe, an individual can make his or her own decisions.

I support freedom and individual choice. I support copyright reform which expands fair use rights and oppose retroactive extensions of copyright. I support ending the failed war on drugs. I support full equal rights for gays. I oppose costly government bailouts of private corporations. I support the right of all law abiding citizens to own a gun. Most of all, I support you. I support letting you make the choices that affect your life, and leave government to deal only with those cases where it's necessary.

Visit Peterson for Congress 2008 and help turn back the tide. If you are a registered libertarian in the 12th Congressional District, I need your signature to get on the ballot. Email me if you have not received a form in the mail already.

Looking for the perfect gift for the capitalist on your list? Try this Milton Friedman T-Shirt available from Arthur's Hall of Viking Manliness.

They also have a good article How tree-Hugging hippies are destroying our environment. You gotta love any website that offers a "manly answer to Oprah's Book Club".

Given the overhead for sales taxes, income taxes, etc etc, it takes about 2 hours for me to earn enough to buy one hour of the time of labor from someone who makes the same salary as me.

Let's assume someone makes $20 / hr. Let's assume that he works for someone who makes something I want. It costs $20 for parts, overhead of the facilities, tools, etc. It takes 1 hour of the worker's time. So they have to pay the worker $21.60 to cover their share of the employment tax. Adding in 8.5% tax on the 41.60 gives a total price you would have to pay of $45.14 for this item. How much does the worker take home? Using number from my actual check stubs, he loses 19% to federal income tax, 7.65% to his half of the employment tax, and 7.4% to state income tax, so the worker takes home $13.19. So the worker has to work for two hours to be able to buy back his original one hour of labor ($45.14 - $20 (materials/overhead) = $25.14 just under $26.38).

Note that I've assumed taxes make no contribution to the cost of the raw materials and overhead. If these were included, the worker would be losing even more to the government.

If half of my labor goes to the government, do I get half of what I use from the government? Not even close.

(Title inspired by Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson)

I'm guessing that either this place recently changed ownership, or just that the completely incompetent work the weekend shift. Mangiare was completely empty this Saturday morning, and it's no surprise since the service is the worst I have ever received. There were eight of us. The first person to receive his food was about 20 minutes after we ordered (at the register). The last person received her food about a half hour after that. They got two orders completely wrong -- Jenny had to send hers back. Samantha got the wrong order, and when she pointed this out to the cashier he had the audacity to argue with her about what she had ordered. She decided to take it and eat it anyway, since she was hungry and at this point everyone else had already finished their breakfast.

No one got the right kind of toast. Apparently they were out of everything but rye and onion bagels so decided to replace sourdough with a random selection of either.

My food was okay. The potatoes were slightly undercooked and the butter was a little foil packet still at refrigerator temperature, but it was okay.

Is service normally this shitty? Or is the abysmal service just a clever strategy to make money off the $.50 they change for coffee refills while you are waiting for your food?

In good news, I can still run 3 miles in just over 21 minutes, and Samantha came in under 27. This was supposedly a 5k, but I think they just rounded down based on a few GPS readings I saw.

When I got my ballot pamphlet a few weeks back, I was disappointed to see that they were moving to electronic voting. I think the chain of reasoning here is pretty clear:

1. Senile idiots in Florida can't figure out how to operate paper.


2. Electronic voting systems are even harder to use for easily befuddled retirees.


3. Electronic voting systems cost a lot more and make more money for government contractors.


4. Clearly we should move to electronic voting systems.

They list all sorts of ways I know that my vote is secure, like "rigorous logic and accuracy testing", and "stored in four physically separate locations for backup". All of this is smoke and mirrors. In fact, all established methods of testing make the assumption that the person producing it intends for it to work as described. The problem with the security model they are using to evaluate these systems is that electronic votes behave like pieces of paper. That is, they assume that the system accurately records the vote cast, that the system will not change the vote without malevolent outside intervention, and that the system will accurately count the votes. None of these types of controls will do anything to prevent an insider (someone at the manufacturer) from adding code to switch votes to a preferred candidate.

There is mention that the source code was audited by an outside source. Even assuming that it was feasible to do this audit in the time provided (a separate issue), and that an audit can find flaws in a short period of time (it can't generally find security flaws, but it should prevent intentional vote manipulation by insiders), there is a remaining problem. We will assume that the source code was audited, and the auditors found no problems because there were no problems to find -- the source code was perfect. (this wasn't the case) The remaining issue is, how do I know that the source code matches what is actually running on the machines? It's a long process to go from source code to the actual machines sitting in polling stations. Nothing guarantees that the source code didn't have malicious bits purged before giving it to the auditors. Nothing guarantees that the machines won't get a "more up-to-date version" of the software. Nothing guarantees that someone in the manufacturing plant doesn't replace the software with something of his own design. Even if the audit was perfect, all we get is that some source code looks like it works right, but this tells us nothing about the machines that are supposedly running that software.

But they have a voter verifiable paper trail. And this is all that saves the process. Computers are a great way to produce something which is easy to read. They make it easy to catch spelling errors, and so on. So the eSlate is a thousand dollar machine to make sure that the paper ballots are readable. All the security features are a waste of tax dollars.

So close -- one second per mile and I would have been sub-4:00. It's close enough that I'm satisfied for now though. I don't plan on running another marathon for quite a while.

I did my training better this time around. I was following something similar to the FIRST Training Program, but I wasn't as strict about the pace of my workouts. I did MWF bicycle, TThS run, with Tuesday being intervals (1/2 mile with 2 minute rest), Thursday temp (6-8 miles at about 8:15 pace), and Saturday long run (with 3 20-milers, 7 weeks, 5 weeks, and 3 weeks before the marathon). I was a little rushed, because I jumped into training right after recovering from San Francisco, so I think I can do better if I do another full proper training cycle, starting from a good base without any injuries or recent overtraining.

Samantha did her first marathon in 5:32. Ted took first in his age group at 3:15. Frances took second in her age group for the half at 1:57. Annie finished her first half marathon at 2:17.

I'm currently at the Singularity Summit 2007 at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. I'll post updates during the day.

I will eventually (swear to the flying spaghetti monster), put these into a more coherent form. But here's some things that stuck in my head as a relative outsider to "futurism" per se, but someone fairly familiar with AI and longtime reader of the sl4 list. Some of these are my ideas triggered by something mostly unrelated.

Day One

• Morality is an attempt to avoid guilt. Guilt is an emotional response based on projecting the self onto others. We model other people but we cannot separate the emotions experienced while being them from our own.
• The evolutionary origin of the brain, and the physical substrate it runs on, place constraints on how careful we have to be in mapping, measuring and simulating it. The onus is on Penrose to explain how a dirty system like the brain could evolve to use some mystical microtubules computation method.
• Interesting phrase from Wendell on robot rights: "are they conscious in a way that we cannot prove they are not?" I like people who are this precise in exactly what they are trying to communicate.
• I think my idea of the doctrine of subjective immortality, that death only has negative value by its perception, means that we can freely turn them off, since in principle they can always be restarted.
• Motivated by Sam Adams response to the rights question. Would a computer's "recognition of the other" be hindered if the "other" did not recognize it? That is, is the refusal to recognize robots as our moral equals a potential problem in the early childhood development of something like Joshua Blue?
• Does Kismet use the same subsystems for generating its own facial responses as it does for analyzing those of others?
• Marcos says system will scale to 100 billion neurons on system using approx 500 TB ram. I'm just assuming realtime. Rough calculations: 500 TB = 4 GB / machine * 125,000 machines * $1000 / machine / $125,000,000.
• Jamais Cascio can give the "in a world where ..." guy a run for his money. His question "if we need to get more people involved how do we get their attention?" makes me feel bad for not encouraging Sam to come.
• Steven Omohundro's presentation was fascinating to me, right up my alley with the game theory. I will be reading his paper, then starting on the references. His thesis is sort of like the Coase theorem for self improving systems: a self improving system will approach ideal economic rationality. AGI will protect its utility function at all costs. Most other work is concentrating on the belief function.
• Peter Voss is a little spooky. I find it interesting that he just automatically assumes that life, continued existence, is of value, and dismisses the need to justify this. I've heard that he is a hard core Objectivist, and this position is consistent with Rand's. Voss says as soon as five years.
• What in the world could "treaty verification" as a field for narrow AI mean?
• Ben Goertzel wants to embody AGI as a baby to be used as a fashion accessory in Second Life so that they get lots of interaction with humans. I'm looking forward to more Kraftwerk scored demo reels. They may be ready to demo Novamente in Second Life by the Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose October 10th. I should get his book Hidden Pattern. I have metacog.org in my notes, think it's background. Also a book Probabilistic Logic Networks is coming out from Springer Verlag soon. He mentions releasing some of the Novamente framework open source to get narrow AI implementers to start thinking in a more AGI way. I wonder if it will possibly allow the development of standardized interfaces, allowing, for example, more or less biologically valid models of different components of mind for different purposes. Particularly, you can cheat and feed predigested stuff to your AGI to get it interacting with a simulation well before you can start embodying it.
• Paul Saffo read the poem "Machines of Loving Grace" by Richard Brautigan. He encouraged us to spread the world of what's going on to those who are not geeks.

Day Two

Peter Norvig

His position is more along the lines of building the subcomponents, then trying to assemble them. He considers key components probabilistic first order logic and hierarchical representation and problem solving. I'm not too clear on what he means by the second. He talks about how whether you see an acceleration depends heavily on how you interpret the data. Some data sets show no such accelleration. It is unclear that a perceived accelleration or recentness-of-important-events is real or caused by observer bias. My example: what we now see as different phyla are descended from what were once different closely related species. Is asked about smooth transition without noticing an AGI. He says is possible, but will be noticed afterwords. I think mostly pointless question because a human level AGI will be quickly followed by a post-human AGI, and then there will be no difficulty with the question. Annoying "question" that starts "it seems to me". Note to world: "it seems to me..." is not a question-word. But question is about training technicians versus scientists and whether the university system fails. Some smart ass finds contradiction in his points.

J. Storrs Hall: Asimov's Laws of Robotics -- Revised

I recognize the name as a frequent writer on SL4. Interesting to put a face to him now. Has a book out on machine ethics. Analogy: Hammurabi trying to hand down a code to prevent Enron. Thesis: ethics considered as behavioral ESS converges to something like friendly behavior. Seems to me to omit the issue of how they will deal with us. Seems to strongly conflict with Omohundro's point, but has the advantage of taking into account situations like Hammurabi.

Peter Thiel

If singularity, then either the world goes to shit or it is a sustained boom. No sense in investing for the former. I think I've written before on this topic of ignoring extreme bad situations. How to invest for singularity? Thiel seems to be handwaving over the issue that just because there may be a massive growth, it doesn't mean that pets.com will have any part of the growth. Says Warren Buffett is moving toward investing in catastrophe insurance.

Michael Lindsey: XPrize

They are trying to formulate an XPrize in the area of educational software. Another long question and answer session. And by "question", I mean whiny hippie "why aren't you adopting my idiot pet method of looking at the world" soapboxing. Except the elearning person who points out exactly what I was thinking: this is not a well defined prize like "2 space launches in 10 days".

Christine Peterson: Open Source Physical Security

I think she was walking the line between wanting to actually go into detail for how this has been thought out, and risk boring and boggling people, versus the "Isn't open source great?" cheering section. She points out some good things about Open Source, but I'm skeptical of the claim that Open Source is good at debating things like physical security. The defining feature of physical security, or at least the current usual example of airport security, is that the choice made by one person affects many other people. As I argue in my previous post, the value of open source comes from the market, the freedom to choose that solution that best fits the needs of the person doing the choosing. I'm not even sure I'm a fan of the principle of openness in physical security, at least not to the degree many people take it. Remember, the idea of security through obscurity was such a difficult idea to overcome in computer security precisely because it is such a useful idea in physical security. I am a fan of her libertarian decentralization ideas, but that isn't specific to anything related to the conference.

James Hughes

Made a good point to at least mention the "millenialist cognitive biases", but I think his political vision is hopelessly obsolete. Data is easier to hide, easier to move, and vastly more potentially useful than guns, but somehow the same political system which cannot prevent misuse of guns even when they do restrict legitimate use will magically gain the ability to shackle AGI with regulations.

Eliezer

Also mentions the editing of value functions. Seems to want something more similar to Hall's model than to Omohundro's. Uses terminology "terminal values" and "instrumental values". Possibly these are easier to understand when spoken. I think I prefer ends values and means values for written. Someone, not sure who, asked a question to the panel of the three above about whether AGI will impose it's morality on us. Eliezer cites importance of valuing freedom as an intrinsic / terminal / ends value. Hughes waves his hands and says that somehow multi-national governmental bodies are going to be better at regulating such things than designing for friendliness. I'll be sure to feel happy and safe when Iran is chair of the UN Commission on Permissible Uses of AGI.

» Read More