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Month: November 2021

Mall Madne$$

Mall Madne$$

Missing the malls of the 80’s? Go pick up one of the Mall Madness board game that helps you relive some mall shopping fun.

Sadly, this is just for the shoppers. I would have loved to see the variety of characters with different motivations. What about the skateboard slackers that just drink Orange Julius and meet up with friends? What about the video gamer that wants to set the high score at the arcade and score the latest gamestop game? I think there could be some interesting ideas for a new, improved version of mall madness…maybe one that teaches you about the 80’s cultural phenomenon like Oregon Trail did…

GPT-3 and the rise of the machines

GPT-3 and the rise of the machines

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.

It is the third-generation language prediction model in the GPT-n series (and the successor to GPT-2) created by OpenAI. GPT-3’s full version has a capacity of 175 billion machine learning parameters. People have created unbelievably accurate question-based search engines, ghost write articles, chatbots that can fool almost anyone, code generation based on text descriptions, compose guitar tabs, re-write articles in a different style, write creative fiction, and many, many more. Here’s some other examples. Or how about an entire Reddit forum that is nothing but bots talking to each other. Yes, everything on that forum is a bot. It should give you pause when responding to social media articles in the future…

How good is it?

The quality of the text generated by GPT-3 is so high that it can be difficult to determine whether or not it was written by a human, which has both benefits and risks. An initial experiment of 80 US subjects were asked to judge if short ~200 word articles were written by humans or GPT-3. The participants judged incorrectly 48% of the time, doing only slightly better than random guessing. Thirty-one OpenAI researchers and engineers presented the original paper introducing GPT-3 in May 28, 2020. In their paper, they warned of GPT-3’s potential dangers and called for research to mitigate risk.

Here’s a great example of what it can generate automatically – with no human intervention (click the link for the full article):

I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.

What are those risks?

Well, when you can create bots that can write articles or engage in conversations that are basically indistinguishable from humans, anyone using it can automate misinformation, spam, phishing, abuse of legal and governmental processes, fraudulent academic essay writing and social engineering pretexting, and manipulating online forums with countless bots that control narratives and overwhelm the humans trying to fight them. Machines never tire.

In an unprecedented step, Microsoft announced on September 22, 2020 that it had licensed “exclusive” use of GPT-3; others can still use the public API to receive output, but only Microsoft has access to GPT-3’s underlying model. The API to use GPT-3 is still available, but at a per-use cost. Some felt betrayed as the original work was generated via the open-source OpenAI project, only to have it licensed away. Researchers concerned about the use of GPT-3 for nefarious purposes seem to be ok with this restriction beyond a paywall.

Others have tried to re-created GPT-3 – such as GPT Neo, GPT-J, and many others. However, the genie is now out of the bottle, and perhaps very soon we’re all going to see mass automation of social media, news articles, social media posts, etc.

The question is, can we survive it? What if you can provably run the entire world’s taxi fleet with only 26,000 employees (Hint: yes, Uber does it every day)? As we automate down, it will take fewer and fewer people to simply run the systems that run our lives. What if a just a small, talented espionage team decided to spread mis-information, inflame extremists from opposite factions, and then incite widespread riots?

We’ve already seen the clear rise of cyber-based manipulation of media and social media to influence elections, COVID, public policy, etc. Cyber shutdowns of critical infrastructure and even governmental overthrows are already well underway as our last 2 US elections have shown. There’s plenty of evidence social media bots are being used by foreign and domestic groups to target public perception and inflame extremists groups.

Combine that with the provably unhealthy effects of social media use, and perhaps we must come to the same conclusion the AI in War Games did…

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. (Wargames) | Matthew  broderick movies, Movie quotes, Movies
Best Marshalling/Reshipping Companies for Japan

Best Marshalling/Reshipping Companies for Japan

I have been to Japan a few times and really love visiting. One of the things I enjoy most is the amazing and well crafted products. While Amazon and other companies are increasingly selling Japanese products domestically, they often cost a fortune or still have a lot of things you simply can’t get in the US. Having a friend in Japan who can mail you your favorite items is one way, but not if you do a fair amount of this.

Enter marshalling and reshipping companies. They are companies that operate in Japan, provide you with a Japanese mailing address, and then re-ship anything sent to that address to you overseas. All with increasingly minimal handling fees. I used a few of these services a few years back, but they have become much more efficient and recommend.

Tenso

Tenso is a complete but more manual solution. It provides you a bonafide local Japanese address that you can give to Japanese individuals or companies to ship your products to. When your package arrives at their shipping center, they re-ship it to your domestic address.

There are some hurdles. You must provide documented proof of your identity and it takes a few business days to get that registration done. However, you can quite literally give the address to anyone in Japan, have them mail things to you there, and receive them re-shipped to you. This is also one of the cheapest solutions, only adding a few dollars of handling.

Buyee

Buyee is a more user friendly version that only handles the big online retailers in Japan. If you want to buy things on Yahoo! Japan auctions, Amazon.jp, Mercari, Rakuten, Aomori, and a few others, then this might be your best choice. They have a simple web plugin that you add items to your cart. They order the items from the retailer for you – filling in their re-shipping address and doing a lot of the legwork.

How much does this all cost? You pay the retail price, plus a $5-7 handling and re-shipping fee. Honestly, that’s incredible considering that’s the entire price – including the shipping to the US.

Denuvo DRM and Intel hybrid core architectures

Denuvo DRM and Intel hybrid core architectures

12th Generation processors are built on a new hybrid core architecture of big and small cores working together. However, it turns out that some DRM software has issues with this hybrid

“Certain third-party gaming Digital Rights Management (DRM) software may incorrectly recognize 12th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors efficient-cores (E-cores) as another system. This prevents games implementing that DRM software from running successfully. Games may crash during launch or gameplay, or unexpectedly shut down.”

However, there is already a workaround for this issue with Denuvo DRM. Give it a try if you find you have one of the affected games:

  • Power-up system and enter system BIOS setup.
  • Enable switch Legacy Game Compatibility Mode to ON (one-time only) in BIOS.
  • Save BIOS setup changes and exit.
  • Boot to OS.
  • Toggle Keyboard Scroll Lock key ON.
  • Launch affected game title.
  • Toggle Keyboard Scroll Lock key OFF after ending game title.
ASUS Hyper M2 x16 NVMe Quad RAID card

ASUS Hyper M2 x16 NVMe Quad RAID card

My current computer is about 6 years old so I’m currently setting up for a 12th Gen Intel system build. While looking at all the new motherboards, I found that ASUS has a really interesting RAID card for up to 4 NVMe drives. I found this an intriguing bit of hardware, and the fact it seems to get near linear doubling with each drive you add was even more impressive.

BuildOrBuy shows the somewhat confusing steps of how to set this beast up.

Crosstrek maintenance schedule

Crosstrek maintenance schedule

Oil change places and shady mechanics are all over in the industry. Oil change places especially LOVE to scare and upsell people on services they do not need. All one has to do is look in their manual to find out they’re being peddled services that are often unnecessary. The NTSB and various manufacturers even issued warnings that these services often damage your vehicle.

Honestly, this info is all over in the manual, but it was great to find this info in one place.