> You might want to take a look at differential privacy
Differential privacy is just a bait to make surveillance more socially acceptable and to have arguments to silence critics ("no need to worry about the dangers - we have differential privacy"). :-(
A carpenter uses tools to shape wood into furniture. Each tool in the toolbox has different uses, but some are more efficient than others. For example, a table saw lets the carpenter cut more quickly and accurately than a hand saw. Nobody would say "that's not a real carpenter, he cheats by using a table saw".
A carpenter can also have an assistant (and I'm specifically not talking about an apprentice) who can help with certain tasks. The assistant might be trained by someone else and know how to perform complex tasks. When the carpenter builds something with the assistants help, is that considered a team effort? Does the carpenter need to take responsibility for the assistants mistakes, or the trainer? Who gets credit for the work?
I don't have answers for these questions, but I think the parallel to software is straightforward: we have a new tool (assistant) that's available, and we're trying to use it effectively. Perhaps it's going to replace some of our older tools, and that's a good thing! Some of us will be lazy and offload everything to it, and that's bad.
I do think that learning the fundamentals is as necessary as ever, and AI is a great tool for that as well.
(Disclaimer: I've been programming for about 15 years, and haven't integrated AI into my workflow yet.)
I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to, but one avenue to implement AI is genetic programming, where programs are manipulated to reach a goal.
Lisp languages are great for these manipulations, since the AST being manipulated is the same data structure (a list) as everything else. In other words, genetic programming can lean into Lisp's "code is data" paradigm.
As others mentioned, today everything is based on neural networks, so people aren't learning these other techniques.
I'm referring to the fundamental idea in AI of knowledge representation. Lisp is ideal for chapters 1 through 4 of AIMA, and TensorFlow has shown that NN can be solved well with a domain specific language which lisp is known to be great for.
I read somewhere that a black hole with the mass of the moon will absorb about as much cosmic radiation as it emits Hawking radiation. This is a fine line between "the black hole disappears before we can examine it" and "oops, we got eaten by a black hole".
If it's in a stable orbit in the solar system, it wouldn't be able to "eat" us. Black holes gravitate exactly the same as any other mass, so it would have the same gravitational effect on Earth as any object if the same mass.
What makes black holes special is that you can get much close to their center of mass than you can with normal objects. When you're that close - inside the radius that a normal density object of that mass would have - then you experience gravity at a much higher strength than normal.
Put another way, even if our Moon was a black hole with the same mass, very little would change except that it would no longer reflect sunlight. Ocean tides on Earth would remain the same. You wouldn't want to try to land on it though...
There was a movie where Moon was a hi-tech 'megastructure' with a white dwarf inside. I wonder if it would be theoretically possible to set up such a mini-dyson sphere around a mini-blackhole.
A black hole, or neutron star, would make much more sense in that scenario than a white dwarf.
A white dwarf smaller than the moon seems unlikely, if not impossible. If it were that small, unless it was in the (fast) process of collapsing to a neutron star, it wouldn't have enough mass to remain that compact.
A neutron star or black hole would work fine, because both can easily have radii much smaller than the Moon's.
> “There are just so many things wrong with [the idea of a white dwarf inside the moon],” says Romer. “Now, a white dwarf is a very compact object. But, you know — people have heard of neutron stars — neutron stars are ultra-compact objects, they’re a few tens of kilometres across. White dwarfs are actually about the size of a normal star.”
You can come up with scenarios where white dwarfs are much smaller than a star, but smaller than the Moon is iffy at best.
As for the Dyson sphere idea, the biggest problem with it in this scaled-down scenario is stability. You can't exactly support it with struts, or something.
On that subject, I highly recommend the video "dyson spheres are a joke": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM , by astrophysicist Angela Collier. But you need to either watch all 53 minutes, or skip to near the end, to find out just how literal the title is.
If you set it up at the right radius it would have 1g gravity at the surface, like a little mini-world. It wouldn't be able to hold an atmosphere though, so it would have to have pressurized buildings on it.
Hey, its not like an analog of "Yeah, lets just throw some more mass at the newly-forming black hole in our neighbourhood", said every human that has ever thrown things into the fire, forever ..
Black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners. They're just super super super compact objects.
I've actually posted this a few times:
If you suddenly transformed the Moon into a black hole of the same mass, it would continue to orbit the Earth in the same spot. It wouldn't suck up the Earth or anything. The ocean tides would continue as normal under the influence of the black-hole-moon's gravity, which would be the same if it was orbiting at the same distance. You wouldn't see a moon in the sky, but if you focused a good telescope on where it was you'd see gravitational lensing. It would be a little smaller than a BB.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention OpenASIP [0], which not only helps you define the architecture, but also provides RTL synthesis and a working (if not always useful) compiler.
I think the issue here is that the server would have to store a copy of the register per peer, as it can't calculate which one is the most recent. Using FHE allows the server to hold a single copy.
In other words the server could forward and not store if all parties are always online (at the same time).
Server will store encrypted blob and its hash/etag.
Client before upload of data, check for hash/etag of blob he originally fetched. If blob on server has different one, it will download it, decrypt, patch new data on existing one, encrypt and reupload.
Whats the catch?
AES is hardware accelerated on the most devices - so with all the ops it will be significantly faster than any homomorphic enc nowadays.
I too was wondering the same thing. FHE is cool tech, but this seems to me to be a bad application of it since it will undoubtedly be less efficient.
FHE is useful when trying to compute on data from various sources who all mutually want to keep some information secret. For example, Apple's use of FHE to categorize photos [1]. In this case all the server is really doing is "compressing" for lack of a better word, the change sets, so each offline client doesn't need to sync every message since they are already merged by the server.
If all you want is to keep a synchronizing server in the dark, but all clients can be trusted with the unencrypted data, traditional key exchange and symmetric encryption should suffice.
This sounds like the "only following orders" argument.
_If_ developers _collectively_ were to quit jobs that don't line up with their morals and ethics, we _might_ see a change. I'm not saying this is an easy decision to make, and I definitely don't want to judge someone who decides to take a higher paying job, but there's potential here to shift the direction AI is taking.
I mean, I do agree with the only following orders part. But I guess we humans are nuanced. We aren't logical but emotional beings.
You are saying its not easy to leave a job? That's so understating it
Imagine a family where the father has to worry that food might not be on their young daughter's table because he was 'logical', I guess, I don't want to be logical in such scenario where my loved ones suffer because of some greater good which might not even get to fruition anyway. (Stopping ai, in my pessimistic point of view, it won't)
You may want to look at Lua[0]. It's often used as an embedded scripting language in larger projects (and games), has good performance, is memory safe, and is extensible in the same manner as Python (write your performance bottleneck in C/C++).
I don't remember specifics, but there are some odd footguns to look out for.
You also need to account for how "easy" it is to de-anonymize a profile.
(Sorry I don't have links to sources handy.)