I had thought that ‘pareidolia’ referred exclusively to the human tendency to see human faces everywhere – any time you see two dots or circles and a line below them, boom :) it’s a face. It can be triggered by rocks, clouds, shadows, uneven browning on a tortilla or a pancake.

It turns out, though, that pareidolia covers any kind of overactive pattern matching. Humans look for meaningful patterns all the time, without thinking about the search, and when something trips the right thresholds in our brain, we seize upon it. The result can be faces, voices, music or just a cloud that looks like a moose.

Here’s my thesis: the large language models (LLMs) and similar generative software processes that people currently refer to as “AI” – those are exceptionally well-tuned to produce patterns that will trigger threshold recognition in human brains. Not by accident – that’s the goal. They are pareidolia-circuit stimulators.

The problem is that LLM output is exactly as meaningful as any other kind of pareidolia. Every well-formed paragraph is a false-positive error.

And when people repeatedly mistake their overactive pattern recognition for reality, we call that a mental disorder: psychosis.

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Some people play Wordle to get their brains moving in the morning. I find one of Linked-In’s incredibly stupid “AI”-driven “articles” where they limit you to 750 characters of commentary (times 5-7 article segments) and write a cohesive answer to the whole thing in one block.

Herewith: “How Do You Work With Other IT Departments To Manage Security Risks”

Either your company understands that security is the prime risk assessment and management tool, or it does not. Figure this out first.

Assuming your company cares, get an executive mandate. Bring the IT, Ops, Network Engineering, Security, Software Development, Hardware Engineering, Legal, and all other relevant groups together. Establish a common vocabulary, write a policy, and appoint a committee that has the authority to approve exceptions and change policy.

Policy is implemented in plans, and if your company is large enough, some groups will need their own plans. Write them to a common skeleton, and publicize them internally.

Include Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery as subsets of Security: that’s where they belong. Done in 750.

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This is what I would like you to know about my mother:

She didn’t like what people were doing to the world; she found some ways she could be effective at making things better; she did them.

It is not required of us that we fix the world, but it is required that we try to leave it better than when we came into it. Mom succeeded.

I’m going to tell you the secret (it’s not a secret) to building reliable, operable, debuggable infrastructure. This is going to be terse, but hopefully understandable to someone with just a little experience.

Let’s take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn’t have access to ~every book ever written.

Previously:

In the office, my desktop feeds an Apple USB-C DAC ($9, no sale needed) to an optoisolator to a NAD 712 stereo receiver. I bought the NAD in 1998, new, no discount. It has a 1/4” headphone jack which automatically disconnects the speaker connections – a pair of Paradigm Monitor 3 Mark 3s. The usual headphones are Superlux 688b, Truthear Zeros, TRN V90s, or occasionally Sennheiser 280HDpro. The desktop runs equalization software (PulseEffects on top of PipeWire) that corrects each output, though it does have to be selected whenever I change outputs. The Paradigms were purchased used from a guy driving a white van, for $200 the pair – an excellent value.

Now:

My desktop is connected to a Topping MX3s ($199) via USB. The MX3s is a tiny box – about one quarter of a standard box of tissues – with a USB DAC, a headphone amplifier, and a 50W (4 Ohm) stereo amplifier. Yes, for real speakers. This is basically the same power output as the NAD 712, which is merely six times the weight and half the power efficiency. The headphone jack is 1/8” and does not automatically disconnect speakers, but the front button allows selection of headphones, speakers, or both. All other bits remain the same.

It’s really quite nice.

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If you have some sort of data or power cable that you tend to plug and unplug frequently, consider putting a sacrificial extender cable in between. The cost of replacing a jack on a motherboard or other fixed device is pretty high; the cost of replacing a plug on a device is often similar to the cost of the device in the first place.

For a headphone connection, for example, you can get a 6” extender for a cost less than the shipping. USB extensions are a little trickier - you need to match a bunch of different characteristics, but pretty reasonably priced when available. Power plug extensions are cheap, but it may take a little while to find one short enough to be reasonable.

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I will bet a shiny nickel that in 2028, you will be able to buy newly made spinning disks and that they will be economically justifiable for large media collections, backups and archives. Not sure I’d make that bet for 2033, though.

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My wife worked for the first public ISP for several years. My first job, still in college, was for a local ISP, eventually becoming the head of all technical operations. And my next job was at a major commercial ISP, one which leased POPs to AOL among other businesses.

Here’s how they worked, at a technical and business level:

It’s a nice title, but what this really is, is my personal preferences on interfaces for reading fiction. Everyone is allowed to have preferences. Mine are special because I read a lot – on average, a little over 200 books each year…

‘Due diligence’ is the business terminology for taking care of details when you enter into a contract. Those details include very basic things like:

• does the seller exist?
• do they have a history of fraud?
• are they on a list of terrorist supporters? (yes, really)…

It is essential to realize that these technologies [large language models, currently called AI] do not answer questions about a model of reality, but about a model of language.

The utterances that they produce are statistically good at being plausible conversation related to the input prompt. Any relationship to reality is basically coincidental. Our tendency to view it as meaningful is a product of anthropomorphism and the social conventions of our culture.

People who use tools are responsible for their actions.

(I first wrote a slightly altered version of the above on the XBBN mailing list on January 30, 2023, in response to a query from Candy Sidner.)

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The thirty year history of the World Wide Web seems to be one of barely glomming together a relatively robust, relatively well maintained set of information sources and then destroying them at the first sign of a company offering a slicker product… which then spectacularly dies.

– Jason Scott @textfiles [twitter.com] June 28, 2022

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