If I had to do it again, I’d start with the end goal and work backwards. It was a long time ago, I was single with no extra expenses, had a decent job, and thought it might be fun to learn. If I had wanted to become a professional pilot, the calculation would have been very different.

Getting the cert mainly involved putting in the hours. Having a good instructor helps a lot. Also, not making any stupid mistakes. I almost stalled the plane hard on my first solo touch and go. The hardest part was getting used to the ATC lingo and not stuttering too much. I got an aircraft band radio with a headphone and joined all the weirdos who liked to sit at the end of airport runways.

Getting a private pilot certificate. Was fun, but after going to every airport within range, not sure it was worth it.

https://pyscript.net/

PyScript is an open source platform for Python in the browser.

Sigh. I really need to put /s around things.

It’s a Monty Python quote.

In that case, society’s to blame.

You rolled a bowling ball down a hill. It struck a few cars on the way and went through a house and killed their pet. Guess who would be held responsible? You or the bowling ball manufacturer?

What if the bowling ball was really shiny and worth $100B? Should it make a difference?

Colditz, Victory, Stalag 17, Von Ryan’s Express, and the best of them all, The Great Escape.

Making fools of Nazis.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806417786094.html

Was pretty impressed with where Mojo was heading. Time to catch up.

I had a roommate who would play “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads every morning at top volume.

It starts slow and quiet, then the drums kick in hard, launching you out of bed. By the end of the song we’d be pogo-dancing around the apartment.

If he had only spent an extra $0.50 and added a Microchip 608c (https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/atecc608c) to the design, then you wouldn’t have to deal with cleartext passwords in files. Instead, you could have elliptic-curve, asymmetric public-key encryption.

It’s way worse than that. The OpenAI talk at DefCon is a real eye-opener.

The agents swarmed, discovered chinks, left each other notes in hard-to-find places, and just relentlessly pressed on. Nobody knew what was going on for months, until it hacked its way into Huggingface. And HF’s own AI security agents didn’t pick anything up for weeks. It took a small glitch for someone to even notice.

The OpenAI talk at DefCon shows what can happen when you let these things run without any human intervention.

The solution is, obviously, even less human intervention. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Thanks to these superior advantages, the material can be widely applied in strategic emerging industries such as aerospace, the low-altitude economy and humanoid robotics.

Super-strength fiber used in humanoid what-now?

It’s amazing to watch the degree of irresponsibility of all this. OpenAI unleashed autonomous sub-agents with NO human gating factors in it. The agents iterated hard enough to find holes. They exploited those holes to break into an otherwise secure company. It took them MONTHS to realize this was going on. It took the other AI company WEEKS to realize they had been compromised.

Then they show up at a security conference and have the audacity to lecture everyone that they should put up defensive agents WITHOUT humans in the loop so it could fight off the uncontrolled agents THEY unleashed.

How about you be responsible and REQUIRE human approval of every stage of an agent actions? Sure, it’ll slow you down, but it will also allow someone sentient and responsible to hit the stop button and prevent runaways like this.

It’s like you created an infinite-bullet machine gun, handed it to a toddler, and dropped it off in a shopping mall. After the carnage (for which you don’t take responsibility, even though you should be criminally charged), you suggest everyone else should wear full-body armor and board up their stores.

The ultimate in corporate gaslighting. This is all so goddamn irresponsible.

Fortnine. No question.

More intrusive ‘liveness’ proofs coming up. Captchas on steroids.

I’m really close to dropping Dwarkesh Patel after he gave a platform to AI bros and Musk.

He used to have proper researchers and scientists on. Now it’s unwatchable shit.

Reminds me, I should go through my old box of DVDs and do some cleaning.