Maybe cars can teach themselves to drive in the more structured states (the MANIAC book)

by philg

I recently finished The MANIAC, a concise novelized biography of John Von Neumann bizarrely bolted onto a history of computer programs that dominate chess and go. Somehow the combination works! What I hadn’t realized was how quickly programs that play chess and go can evolve when entirely freed from human guidance. Apparently, in a matter of just a few hours, a program can go from knowing almost nothing about chess other than the basic rules to being able to beat a grandmaster.

This kind of success has famously eluded those who promised us self-driving cars. We’ve gone from failing via humans encoding rules to failing via AI-style training sets of good driving and bad driving (coded by people in India? if you’ve ever been to Delhi or Mumbai maybe that explains the failure). Benjamin Labatut (the MANIAC author) reminds us that when the situation is sufficiently structured computers can learn very fast indeed.

Returning from a helicopter trip from Los Angeles to Great Barrington, Maskachusetts, my copilot commented on the chaos of road markings as we entered Cambridge. “Are there three lanes here or two?” he asked. This is a question that wouldn’t be posed in most parts of Texas or Florida, I’m pretty sure, and certainly not on the main roads of the Netherlands or Germany. Instead of the computer promising to handle all situations, I wonder if “full self-driving” should be targeted to the states where roads are clearly structured and marked. Instead of the computer telling the human to be ready to take over at any time for any reason, the computer could promise to notify in advance (via reference to a database, updated via crowd sourcing from all of the smart cars) that the road wasn’t sufficiently structured/marked and tell the human “I won’t be able to help starting in 30 seconds because your route goes through an unstructured zone.” The idea that a human will be vigilant for a few months or even years waiting for a self-driving disconnect that occurs randomly seems impractical. The MANIAC suggests that if we shift gears (so to speak) to redefining the problem to self-driving within a highly structured environment a computer could become a better driver than a human in a matter of weeks (it takes longer to look at videos than to look at a chess or go board, so it would be weeks and not hours). We might not be able to predict when there will be enough structure and enough of a data set and enough computer power for this breakthrough to occur, but maybe we can predict that it will be sudden and the self-driving program will work far better than we had dreamed. The AI-trained chess and go systems didn’t spend years working their way into being better than the best humans, but got there from scratch in just a few hours by playing games against themselves.

Regardless of your best estimate as to when we’ll get useful assistance from our AI overlords, I recommend The MANIAC (note that the author gives Von Neumann a little too much credit for the stored program computers that make the debate regarding self-driving possible).

Separately, based on a visit to the Harvard Book Store here’s what’s on the minds of the world’s smartest people (according to Harvard University research)..

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Trans Day of Visibility in Florida

by philg

I recognize that Trans Day of Visibility was Easter Sunday, ending Bisexual Health Awareness Month, and that today is Lesbian Visibility Day (we’ve moved past International Asexuality Day, National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, Day of Silence, National Transgender HIV Testing Day, and Nonbinary Parents Day (calendar)).

Despite the intervening five 2SLGBTQQIA+ holidays, I thought readers would appreciate seeing how Trans Day of Visibility was celebrated in Florida. Manatees who identify as bunnies:

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The fraud in GDP growth statistics continues

by philg

New York Times, today:

The U.S. economy remained resilient early this year, with a strong job market fueling robust consumer spending. The trouble is that inflation was resilient, too.

Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, increased at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was down sharply from the 3.4 percent growth rate at the end of 2023 and fell well short of forecasters’ expectations.

The word “population” doesn’t occur in the article, though it is critically important. If the population is growing at a 1.7 percent annual rate, for example, Americans are currently on track to become poorer on a per capita basis.

How much did the population grow? It’s almost impossible to say because our population growth is driven by undocumented migration and the error bars on estimates are huge (see “Yale Study Finds Twice as Many Undocumented Immigrants as Previous Estimates”).

Separately, the GDP of Harvard Square is growing. An “essential” marijuana retailer seems to have opened up on Church Street. Photos from this evening:

It’s also a great time to be a tent retailer. The “Free Palestine” encampment in Harvard Yard, view from outside Harvard’s police-guarded border wall:

Here are the stickers that supporters of Hamas/UNRWA/Palestinian Islamic Jihad have added to Harvard’s “the Yard is closed” signs:

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Coronapanic and landlords

by philg

An aviation connection owns 250 apartments in the middle of the country. I asked him whether he’d lost a lot of money during coronapanic when nobody had to pay rent and he was barred by order of the CDC from evicting anyone. “No,” he said. “Nearly all of my tenants kept paying and, in fact, many of them applied for and received government assistance to pay their rent. I already had 20 percent Section 8 vouchers and ended up with about half of my income coming from the government.”

He took the opportunity to refinance his properties at a 2 percent rate and also substantially raised the rents that he was charging (i.e., his costs fell and his revenue soared). He estimates that his property doubled in nominal value between 2019 and today. He raised rents by 50 percent.

Who else got rich? “The local car dealer [in his small town] bought a Phenom 300 and a Bell 407” (that’s $15 million worth of aircraft; the Phenom 300 is made by Embraer in Brazil)

What else has been working for him? Open borders. “I love having Latinos as tenants,” he said (sorry about the hateful failure to use proper English (“Latinx”), but it is a direct quote), “but sad to say that the English-speaking tenants get upset if there are too many Latinos in their complex. They complain about Mexican music being played and noise. I don’t want to be racist and exclude people on the basis of being Hispanic because it makes other tenants upset.” Has the rising cost of labor eroded his increased profit margin from the 50 percent rent boost? “No,” he replied. “White people have pretty much stopped working, but there are plenty of hard-working Latinos. I wish that I spoke Spanish because then I could do a better job explaining what I need.”

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Harvard’s border wall has been breached

by philg

An addendum to Harvard’s border wall to exclude the undocumented… Although the signs on the border wall explicitly say that no tents are allowed, it appears that a tented pro-Hamas demonstration is thriving nonetheless. View from outside the border wall:

Outside of the Yard, the exclusion of the undocumented is done on an building-by-building basis. Example:

The bakery selling $72 (updated via sticker) pies has a Black Lives Matter sign in the window:

The Harvard-owned theater up the street says that Black and BIPOC lives matter:

Folks in Cambridge apparently agree that a Black life on the sidewalk is not a matter of concern:

Maybe someone would care about the sidewalk dwellers if they flew Palestinian and/or rainbow flags?

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Harvard’s border wall to exclude the undocumented

by philg

Harvard’s best and brightest minds have proved Scientifically that border walls don’t work (see this 2019 Harvard Gazette story, for example, and “Laurence Tribe sues Trump over border wall” (MSNBC coverage of the Harvard Law School prof’s fight to keep the border open)).

This week, however, Harvard Yard is closed to the undocumented and the border fence is guarded by police. Photos from last night:

Harvard Square (the commercial area adjacent to Harvard Yard) is still open. Anyone wanting to protest against homelessness and/or assist homeless people was free to do so. However, we didn’t see any students or professional progressives stop to try to help the people sleeping on the sidewalk right in the heart of Harvard Square:

The local public high school does have an official government banner reminding people that one group of humans deserves special attention, but the group is not the noble Gazans:

Circling back to the border wall built by people who say that border walls are immoral and impractical… “Harvard Yard Closed Until Friday in Anticipation of Pro-Palestine Protests” (Crimson):

The University restricted access to Harvard Yard until Friday afternoon in apparent anticipation of student protests, amid a wave of high-profile pro-Palestine demonstrations at universities across the country including Columbia University and Yale University.

The closures are a sign that Harvard’s leadership is hoping to avoid its own version of the scene at Columbia, where more than 100 students were arrested Thursday by the New York City Police Department for their participation in an ongoing pro-Palestine encampment on the school’s main quad.

An announcement of the closure, posted to Yard entrance gates, warned of disciplinary measures against Harvard students and affiliates who bring in unauthorized structures such as tents or tables or block access to building entrances.

An email sent to students and staff who work in the Yard stated that the closures are being done “out of an abundance of caution and with the safety of our community as a priority.”

Note how “abundance of caution”, the leitmotif of the Covidcrats, was woven in! Also that “safety” is the most important goal for a human, not liberating Al-Quds, destroying the Zionist entity, or stopping a genocide and famine that is intensified by a population explosion (60,000 pregnant women, an unspecified number of pregnant people of other genders, and more than 183 births per day (source)).

The arrests at Columbia sparked a wave of solidarity protests at universities across the country, including at Harvard, where more than 200 Harvard affiliates rallied in Harvard Yard Friday demanding that the University “disclose and divest” from Israeli companies and investments in the West Bank.

The rally at Harvard was co-organized by a coalition of recognized and unrecognized pro-Palestine groups. Unrecognized activist organizations — including the African and African American Resistance Organization and Jews for Palestine, which staged an occupation of University Hall in November — have increasingly led pro-Palestine organizing on campus.

The University “shifted to HUID access only to stay ahead of potential issues with non-Harvard recognized groups,” College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo wrote in a statement to The Crimson on Sunday.

Apologies if the photos are blurry. I’m here in Cambridge after five days in a Robinson R44 and my hands are still shaking a little. The trip was from Los Angeles to Great Barrington, Maskachusetts. Within 30 minutes after arriving in Massachusetts, I was offered free marijuana samples from one of the “essential” businesses that was allowed to stay open while schools were closed:

Every crosswalk in Great Barrington is painted in the sacred colors:

Not too many people were out and about in Great Barrington on a Tuesday afternoon in the off-season so, though I saw some folks wearing masks I wasn’t able to get a photo of an outdoor masker in a rainbow crosswalk.

Related…

Also, NYU decides that a border wall might work in some circumstances…

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Did the fate of Iran’s ballistic missile attack against the Zionist entity prove Ronald Reagan correct?

by philg

Iran launched 120 ballistic missiles at the Zionist entity earlier this month (Wikipedia) and most of them were shot down.

America’s expert class ridiculed Ronald Reagan for his credulous belief that ballistic missiles could be intercepted either in space or on their way down to earth. The Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) was Edward Teller‘s dumbest idea ever, certainly! New York Times, 1985:

A computer scientist has resigned from an advisory panel on antimissile defense, asserting that it will never be possible to program a vast complex of battle management computers reliably or to assume they will work when confronted with a salvo of nuclear missiles.

The scientist, David L. Parnas, a professor at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, who is a consultant to the Office of Naval Research in Washington, was one of nine scientists asked by the Stategic Defense Initiative Office to serve at $1,000 a day on the ”panel on computing in support of battle management.”

Professsor Parnas, an American citizen with secret military clearances, said in a letter of resignation June 28 and in 17 pages of accompanying memorandums that it would never be possible to test realistically the large array of computers that would link and control a system of sensors, antimissile weapons, guidance and aiming devices, and battle management stations.

Imagine a dusty academic quitting an easy job that paid $1000/day in pre-Biden money! At official government-certified CPI, that’s equivalent to nearly $3000/day right now.

The geniuses at the New York Times were so fond of feeling smarter than Reagan that they were still talking about this after Reagan had left office. From 1993, for example:

Star Wars can never work as a defensive system because there are too many targets in the U.S. and because the weapons arrayed against it are too diverse and powerful.

But do the recent interceptions of Iranian missiles prove that Ronald Reagan was actually smarter than the expert class?

Separately, the Iranian attack seriously injured a 7-year-old Muslim Israeli. Given that 20 percent of Israel’s population is Muslim, what is the plan among the Iranians, Houthis, Gazans, et al., who are going to destroy the Zionist entity? How will they protect fellow Muslims and, especially, Muslim children?

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Why are there foreign do-gooders working in Gaza?

by philg

We regularly read about foreigners doing heroic deeds on behalf of Palestinians seeking to liberate Al-Quds, destroy the Zionist entity, and establish a river-to-the-sea nation. Most dramatically, we have learned about the deaths of six foreigners working for World Central Kitchen (Wikipedia):

The IDF claimed that before the incident, the WCK cars had escorted an aid truck that had a gunman on its roof that fired a gun … A second gunman was spotted at the warehouse joining the first gunman, leading to the drone operators assuming that they were of Hamas, claimed the IDF. As a result, according to the IDF, the IDF drone operators believed that the WCK cars were being used by Hamas militants, and further suspected that they saw a person entering a WCK car with “a rifle but at the end of the day it was a bag”, in a “misclassification”. The IDF claimed that the drone operators believed that the WCK aid workers had remained at the warehouse with the aid truck, instead of leaving in the cars.

It doesn’t surprise me that people get killed by mistake in a war zone (especially if they share a warehouse with armed men who look just like one side’s fighters). If the risk weren’t there one couldn’t claim credit for heroism by volunteering to work in a war zone. What does surprise me is that WCK employs non-Palestinians to work in Gaza. Even before the October 7, 2023 resistance action, only a minority of adult Palestinians worked (one of the lowest rates of labor force participation of any society ever to exist, presumably at least partly due to the fact that EU and US taxpayers provide food, health care, education, etc. via UNRWA). If the majority of adult Palestinians don’t work, why can’t an aid organization do whatever it wants to do with an all-Palestinian workforce? Gaza has an enormous surplus of potential labor, in other words, so it shouldn’t make any sense to send workers rather than cash and material goods.

Here’s UNICEF, for example, sending a blond do-gooder to delivery food and water:

Instead of paying her salary, why not hire 10 locals with the same money?

There are plenty of Palestinians who can drive trucks, stock shelves with food and water, and cook. Why do UNICEF and WCK bring in foreigners to do these jobs?

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Meet at the Miami Grand Prix (F1 race)?

by philg

Who wants to meet at the Miami F1 race, sort of, on Saturday, May 5? This is one day before the “big race” that rich people are desperate to see. There are a lot of events throughout the day, including a spring race, the F1 Academy (from which 73 genders recognized by Science are excluded and this exclusion is the epitome of social justice), and some Porsche racing.

The official F1 site sells only 3-day tickets. A lot of buyers, however, don’t want to show up on Friday and Saturday. Individual days thus show up as verified resale on Ticketmaster. A “campus pass” that lets you walk around is about $120 and a ticket in a grandstand is $200-300 (this also includes the right to wander).

Given the often-brutal Miami heat and sun, I picked tickets in the Turn 18 grandstand. This has its back to the sun and rows beyond about N are shaded (our tickets are in Q). [Post-race update: M is the best row! It is in front of the columns that hold up the shade roof but is still completely shaded. Some of the rows below M also are well-shaded, particularly on the west side of the Turn 18 grandstand, as the afternoon develops.] It has views of cars braking out of the longest/fastest straight and then navigating a couple of turns. The one knock against this grandstand is that it might be a long walk to the Fountains and Promenade areas. The Marina grandstands might be better for taking that one perfect photo of a race car in front of boats, but I don’t think the cars are moving as fast in this area.

It looks as though parking passes are sold on SeatGeek and VividSeats. I’m thinking that traffic won’t be terrible on Saturday because people will arrive gradually and also leave gradually depending on which of the events they’re interested in. On Sunday, by contrast, there is literally nothing on the schedule after the 6 pm finish of the Grand Prix per se (which I’d rather see on television so that I would have a chance of understanding it) and, therefore, there will be a mad rush for the exits.

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Monogram 36-inch gas range (versus Wolf)

by philg

Our house came with a 36-inch gas range made by Bertazzoni that sat flush to the counter/cabinets, which looked clean, but an inflexible and inappropriate-for-us set of burner sizes. The cooktop was also a little tight on space and it was sometimes tough to use more than two pans on the six burners. The most serious problem, however, was that the oven wouldn’t light reliably or stay lit. A Florida house is almost indestructible, but a range that fills it up with natural gas is risking an explosion test.

We couldn’t get the “leaks gas into kitchen” issue fixed, so we decided to replace the range. Without sacrificing a wall oven we didn’t have enough electric power to install an induction range and, in fact, didn’t really have enough electric power for the typical “dual fuel” range (a single 20-amp 240V circuit behind the range). Retrofitting wiring in a concrete Florida house with no basement or attic is not a simple proposition. Thus, the only reasonable choice was another all-gas range.

The choices quickly came down to Wolf and Monogram. The Wolf sits flush to the counter/cabinets, as the Bertazzoni had, but that means a little less space in the oven and on the cooktop. The Wolf GR366 also has wimpy burners compared to the Monogram: five at 15,000 BTU and one at 9,200 (compare to two 23,000 BTU burners, two 18,000, and two 15,000 for the Monogram).

Consumer Reports found that the 30-inch Wolf oven was dramatically inferior to the Monogram’s gas oven:

The 30-inch Monogram’s ratings:

The Monogram also has LED rings behind the burner controls to show at a glance whether a burner has been left on. (For even more peace of mind, the range talks to an app that can show whether any burners are on and that allows direct control of the oven.)

The Monogram was about $700 cheaper and came with a $1,500 discount on a GE Monogram Advantium wall oven that we wanted to buy. We got it at Best Buy and signed up for their credit card, which took another 10 percent off in the form of credits to spend at Best Buy. So it works out to nearly $3000 cheaper than the Wolf for a more capable machine. Here’s what the $7,100 ZGP366NTSS looks like sticking out beyond the cabinets:

The controls could be improved. The legends for which burner a knob corresponds to are unreadable when looking down at the knob from in front of the range. They should be above and to the right of each knob, not below. The screen is tiny. The massive rotary knob for controlling the oven is impressive, but it would have been much better if the range had a tilted-up touch screen for controlling the oven, timer, and other functions (and the confusing buttons underneath the screen would be gone). As the range is laid out, the numbers for the displayed time are half the height of what you’d find on a $99 microwave from Walmart. The best way to describe the design aesthetic is Derek Zoolander’s display meets Godzilla’s range.

We’re very happy with the range so far. We probably use 10 pans on the rangetop on an average day, though we seldom use the oven (the Breville super toaster oven is the go-to). An induction cooktop that could be wiped completely clean in 45 seconds would probably be better, but this range is more fun. The monster 23,000 BTU burners work great on the low setting, which lights up only an inner ring. Visitors to the house have remarked favorably on the appearance of the range and nobody has asked, “Why does it stick out?” Apparently, when the “pro-style range” craze began in the 1990s it was conventional for the ranges to be deeper than the counter. Sticking out, therefore, is an indicator that the kitchen owner is a rich douche (or at least a douche).

Another possibility if you want a range that sits flush is Bluestar. Their “culinary series” open burner range is about $5,000 and comes in huge range of colors. The burners are only 15,000 BTUs but supposedly act like hotter burners due to being open (I’m not sure that I believe this!).

Related:

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