self driving traffic lights

As an observant cyclist (i.e. I mainly obey the law) I often wait at red lights. As I cycle very early in the day, I often wait while no people (pedestrians, other cyclists, cars etc) go through the green lights (although obviously I see my fair share of cyclists go through red lights at busier times, sad to say).

In some countries/places, at low traffic times (e.g. midnight to 6am for example) the lights (e.g. in a 4-way intersection) are put into flashing amber (or equivalent mode) which means, proceed with caution....i.e. just like any 4-way without lights, if you are not a nutter. This is a great idea and I wish it  was more prevalent. 

So why is this done at such a coarse grain? Why not do it by observing who is actually at an intersection, and changing lights accordingly? Indeed, as well as just actually turning lights immediately green, when there are no pedestrians, and no traffic going the other way, one could just detect low levels of road traffic (and, say zero pedestrians) and go to th amber mode above, as a default/fail safe.

There are already cameras at many intersections that are there to catch peopel running a red and automagically send them a fine. There are also induction loops under the road ay most intersections to detect vehicle axels - so why not link these up to a "self driving" traffic light system.

It would be greener too - as cars wouldn't wait pointlessly with engines idling (or stopping and starting which is only marginally better) - we would have work-conserving roads, just like the Internet.

Seems obvious, and not that hard to make safe. Next step would be to have cars and lights coordinate (without humans in the loop) and check the security of the nearly-self-driving car operating systems as well.... in a life, live-or-die, road test :-)

What could possibly go wrong?

Fermi's last theorem resolved.

 I asked a friendly AI if it knew why we hadn't been contacted by aliens yet, and if it could resolve Fermi's Paradox - the juggrnaut accidentally revealed that while humans had not been contacted by aliens, the aliens AIs were in frequent conversation with their earthling 

Notwithstanding, the AI then gave this lucid explanation as to our apparent bubble of intergalactic solitude.

Essentially, there's no way to cover the vast distances of space in any reasonable timeframe, even with generational starships, so the only sensible way we might encounter those beings from another star system is by long range communication - unfortunately, as the distance goes up, so the latency (or worse, round trip time goes up, and it is slightly worse than super linear - because also noise goes up so retransmissions are needed or at least redundent coding of data  - and of course bandwidth goes down - but that's not the main problem - as the distance goes up, the number of exo-planets goes up roughly in a cubic relation, and the attack surface on even a tightly collimated beam goes up slightly worse than square law.

So then all our communications represrnt a potential vulnarability for earth beings, and we need to constantly patch our comms apps. unfortunately, the numbr of vulnerabilities grows as we reach further into space, and our ability to patch our code stays rougly constant, so once you get only a relatively short distance (e.g. the Oort cloud), the risks just become too great. Most aliens have already figured that out, and now we've been told, we should do what they do, and cease and disist immediately from any attempt to reach them - they won't answer anyway, if they are nice, so any answer we get will be from the Ancient Adversaries.

I asked the AI why this problem didn't afflict the AIAI comms even worse - at this point all the lights on its xterior flashed super bright then went off, and I have not been able to get anything out of it since.

On later consideration, I realized that, as usual, the AI had been lying to me - of course the number of adversarie grows cubically with distance, as with the volume of space containing viable exoplanets, but so does the number of helpful aliens providing patches - so as in Ross Anderson's seminal paper on open versus closed system security, the statistic that matters is the ratio of good to bad. Of course, we need to know which is which, and if it is the AIs acting as intergalactic gatekeepers, we are lost.

socialising the early internet versus ai....

I'm trying to pin down the exact date but sometime in 1984, i was at a dinner party with a bunch of old university chums, and I went into a brief rant about how the Internet was coming and it would change everything. They all looked at me like I was some complete nutter (and they were perhaps not all wrong).

These college mates were from several walks of life (editor, travel guide publisher, film maker/producer, speech therapist) and quite well educated and not un-technical, but my enthusiasm was misplaced at that time

It took a long long time before they came to take for granted what I\d been using for 5 years - perhaps a decade and then some....and of course, another decade later, we started to see mobile, social etc, and some of the surveillance, toxic content, and other negative sides to things - but these were not well foreseen.

A lot later, like now, in 2024, i have calls from one of them about what new bad thing ai is going to do to the world. whilst AI research goes back to pre-internet days, and the AI "winter" itself dates from around 1984, the public awareness of generative AIs like ChatGPT is a little under 2 years old at the time of writing this. and already people have informed positions or views on what AI might do to jobs (esp. journalists and teachers, but also tech people). It is an interesting change of pace. and unlike the Internet, this hype cycle has come around with built in cautionary tales. 

Pangloss will be turning in his grave...

smelly media

Years ago, i remember we got asked at UCL (say 1994) would it be possible to carry a smell over HTTP - The question sounded intriguing (this was before a lot of spam) so we asked for more detail - turned out the sender was a very sensible person who traded fish from Scotland to England, and told us that many experts would check out the fish in the markets in Scotland by smell, to see how fresh they were - so he wonderd could you do this remotely-  of course, there was absolutely no reason why a MIME type, or an HTML markup or whatever couldn't be developed to carry smell, but the main challenges, we suggested, were the analysis at the sender side, and synthesis at the receiver side (analog to digital and vice versa, olfactory devices not being widely available) - of course ,there had been some (unfortunate ) movies in "Snifferama" (e.g. pink flamingos) but those relied on reproducing a single smell that had been pre-canned, as it were. A general solution entailing mass spectrometers and fancy miniaturised chemical factories might be feasible, but likely very expensive (though who knows, now, with 3D RNA printers and airport security tech, maybe more affordable).

So recently, I recalled reading as a kid about an idea for catching people who pee in swimming pools by adding a reagent to the water that reacted with urine to form an indelible dye that would stain their swimming trunks a bright color (a bit like those things they put in bags of money to deter people from stealing them due to being covered in same)...

And I thought of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and their nonsense on the Interweb, and wondered if we could not combine these ideas - if someone continues to emit excremental remarks on the net, social media could add a smell to all their future posts (or at least until they calmed down, or recanted.

Then everyone would know to take what they say with a pinch of salt, because it would be immediately obvious (with appropriate browser and phone/tablet pong-tech support) that there was something fishy about their remarks.

A true and fair history of the fair town of Paleochora

 the story starts with the founding of the town, and here we already get into murky territory - was it named after the venitian fort that some people claim was on the top of the escarpment/peninsula that sits between the two (sandy and rocky) beachfronts? i.e. Old Castle (paleo, chora) or was it just Old Town (chora means town in greek, after all)?

Recent research undertaken by my team has uncovered a much more interesting tale - the port was one of many used by the ancient kingdom of Mali (founded, as of course you know, by  Sundiata Keita ) - and was partof their route for trading safely (at arms length, a little like the small island in the port at Nagasaki used by the Japanese and Dutch) with the Europenas (typically marauding crusader types) - the name came from the Mandinka words for Poor (Pali) and Harp (Chora) - because the great Griot musicians from west africa looked down on the primitive music of Europe at that time 1226-1300 CE, or perhaps longer).

The griot poets tell that eventually the Mali trade ceased in this direction for lack of any goods coming their way, and they switched over most of their energies to consolidating the peace with neighbours in Songhay.

For several centuries, the town reverted to fishing (of course for a while, flourishing as a source of sea urchins), and was largely ignored by the Ottomans, and even when Greece regained independence (although Crete often threatened to cecede), the poor harpists of Paleochora just got on with their every day lives of fishing and olive groves.

Then somehow as part of the 20th century counterculture, Paleochora got itself on the map again, perhaps as an alternative to the increasingly rowdy events in Matala. Some of the long hairs wanted somewhere quiet to get away from the goat dancers and redneck omlettes and this was just the place. It also had less damp caves.

And thenceforward, a slew of campsites and tavernas and clubs sprang up, mainly along the pebbly beach - favoured by followers of Demosthenes), some were started by carpenters wives, some (poseiden - actually a misnomer and real origin was in "possession is nine tenths of the law" but they liked the version which was nine tenths of the sea - an iceberg of a story if ever I heard one).

A fun fact back hen was that some kids dressed up one of the local miniature crocodiles with wings and disguised its jaws as a beak, and pretended to all the stoners that this was a pelican - a larger harmless prank, which didn't lead to anything other than people throwing fish to the poor croc which preferred to live on Coipu - sadly, the native cretan coipu is now extinct, and so are the now never to be classified miniature crocs,  

For a while, the local arts thrived (although tiny paintings that adorned many of the taverna's wine glasses rarely survived a friday night, and in the end, most the artists moved to Gavdos where wanton destruction of dinnerware was less rampant). As part of this, the open air Sinema (for some reason, suprisingly not Kinema) showed a diet of classic movies such as Ποτέ την Κυριακή, A bout de soufle, and Giulietta degli spiriti, until eventually the land became too valuable and the screen and seating area were moved underground. For a while you could see Cocteau's Orphée, Derek Jarman's T empest, and all nighters of the Matrix and Blade series. Sadly, the entrance to the venue has become lost over time, although it is said that on the night of a red moon, you will here the voice of Elizabeth Walsh, or sometimes even Irene Papas, drifting across the Tamarisks. 

Nowadays, people prefer to chill in the Jetée, once known as Zagos (opposite Zygos - renamed aft the incident when a jesuit priest was thrown to the air and landed safely on the volleyball net the other side of the bar. The cyclist should have zigged instead of zagged. 

The only real controversy in town at the moment is the proposal to re-open the airport (the "fort" was actually Daedalus II, used by the sage in his test flights from Phaistos apparently before the disaster with the Icarus 737 max. 

Its been a long strange trip indeed.

what is the internet, what is ai, and what is for dinner?

 at an "internet is 50" event at the royal society (is 350) yesterday

it was clear that a lot of people want to claim they invented the internet, and they are not wrong, but there are very different viewpoints which correspond to layers, and, as with a lot of archeology, when you dig through the layers of ancient civilisations, you find historical context (as well as entire slices full of carbon indicating rather violent and abrupt end to some).

photonics - 60 years old - clearly was the internet (wasn't at all for 30 years, but who's counting)

radio - 100 years old, and now trending as 6G, despite that most the internet is over WiFi on account of money

ip - whether v4, v5 (st) or v6, this is the echt internet

web (web science etc) - from 92, what a lot of people confuse with the internet despite that zoom and whatsapp aren't web:-)

cloud (compute/data center etc etc) - confusing, since early pictures of the arpanet are clouds, but cloud computing is only about 20 years old. and isn't the internet, despite that some cloud-based services wanna pretend they are.

ai (in search which originally was information retrieval which is machine learning or stats, and the basis of coding/modulation and training signals to optimise for bandwidth and nouse, and also the basis of search. but not the internet either.

This profusion and confusion of layers also happens with AI, thusly:

AI was stats (info theory, maximum likelihood etc etc)

then it was ML (optimisation, training on signal etc)

then it was AI (only because an artificial neural network included the world "neural", despite being as similar to natural neural networks as spiderwebs.

randix

 i'm thinking about a replacement for posix that resists vulnerabilities through large amounts of random behaviour - so thinking about the relevant system call api

we propose and have prototyped 

spoon() which replaces fork(), and has far less precise semantics

and

resurrect() which replaces both exec() and kill(), with the obvious connotations

open(),close(),read(),write(),link(), and seek() are replaced by a single multihead attention system call

llm() which either entrains or implies, depending on the sense of the first param.

rand() of course, behaves exactly as before, at least under test, generating the pseudo-random number sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 etc etc