Energised communities
Last week I went along to a group at once new and very familiar. They all
were passionately keen about a new technology, and yet they'd all had to
explain the benefits over and over again to disbelievers. Most of them were
working on their own projects but came together as a larger community.
While they all knew it was the inevitable way of the future, powerful
commercial interests were working against them and governments and the
general public seemed indifferent to their cause.
This was, of course, electric vehicle hobbyists.
For my part, I'm keen on constructing an electric motorbike. I'm also interested in adding open source components and microprocessor controllers to various parts of the project, partly to keep the cost down (some of the proprietary parts are really expensive) and partly for the fun of tinkering.
There were three main topics of discussion during the night:
Firstly, there's a lot of interest in the local group in starting a EV racing standard and, within one to two years, getting actual races happening. Initial ideas revolved around a standard car chassis that is fully CAMS approved (which is necessary for official racing), but then someone mentioned go-karts as a lower-cost entry level category which also got a lot of nods. There's already moves in this direction (CAMS has had an Alternative Energy division since August 2008) but getting the community groups - schools, Scouts, youth groups, etc - involved is a great idea.
Secondly, the group is trying to collect information about building EVs into an online resorce. I put in my oar and proposed using a wiki (which they sort of have already) and keeping it public (opposing the person who said it could be monetised in the future), both of which met with general agreement. The current process they're using is for one person to be a 'subject matter expert' that collates all the ideas from the group into an article, and that then gets put on the Wiki and people can edit it from there. This combines the best of both practices of document writing, and I think it's an excellent way to go.
Thirdly, there was a lot of interest in the hardware hacking theme that is all the rage at the moment. Everything from makerbots and repraps to arduinos and programmable fridges was met with interest and requests for more detail. I'm trying to find their email list to make a general announcement and I'm hoping that I'll get a few people coming along to the next CLUG meeting. There's a number of projects out there, from David Rowe's work on controllers to the Tumanako project that are applicable to EVs. I really need to point the Canberra EV group in the direction of the Electric Saker sports car - a New Zealand project!
My main quest for this month is to make the plans for my new electric motorbike,
and to understand what a battery management system does and find one that
doesn't suck.
posted at: 17:35 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
WOMBATs in the health care system
A couple of weeks ago I had an appointment with a specialist (the details
of which are otiose to this blog post). I turned up on time at the
surgery, and the receptionist asked for my referral form. Stupidly, I
had forgotten it. This turned out to completely prevent me from seeing
the specialist at all, as the doctor's surgery didn't have the referral
on file and thus couldn't fax it through, and I wouldn't be able to make
the round trip back home to pick the form up before my booking time had
expired. So I had to schedule this work for another day, which is
tomorrow, and I'm already nervously thinking through the list of every
concievable piece of paperwork and ephemera that they could want in order
to make sure I have it with me tomorrow.
So let's think this through. What actual purpose does this form serve? It's not needed to book the appointment - they did that over the phone and didn't require any form of identification or authentication information then. It's not needed to validate me as the person who made the booking - I have plenty of other valid forms of identification on me. It's not needed to validate me as the person requiring the treatment - the doctor's surgery could easily do that, and in many ways that would be more secure than me doing it via the form. I can't use this form to access any other specialist for this particular problem because it specifically names the agency that's going to provide the service, so giving me the form doesn't serve as a general letter of introduction to any specialist I want. About the only reason to give me the form is so that I can read what's written on it, but that's hardly useful as its written in medical jargon that I can only decode by being already familiar with the problem.
So as far as I can see there is no actual purpose served by giving a patient their referral form and requiring it to be given to the surgery before treatment can proceed. When this doesn't happen, and I'll bet dollars to cents that it happens a lot, it's lost time for the patient, lost time for the surgery, and a lot of hassle all round. That hurts people and it hurts the economy. All because, as far as I can see, the doctor's surgery doesn't send the form directly to the specialist.
I'll ask the doctor and the specialist when I see them in time, but in
the mean time I'd love to hear
from anyone who can give me some good reasons why things are done this
way.
posted at: 16:00 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Martial Arts for the knowless man
With a view to improving my fitness with something also useful, on a whim
I went to a Martial Arts "Birds of a Feather" session at LCA yesterday
evening. Cool things were seeing the different types of martial arts,
from Aikido to Shaolin Gung Fu (Pia Waugh on animal styles, unlit poi
balls and quarterstaff) and having a friend, dealing with a knee injury
and Leukaemia, show that he can still easily demonstrate some pretty
effective combat styles. Slightly painful but still fun things were
having the various holds tried on me, including a surprising number of
ways you can make someone's wrist really hurt (fortunately, for a short
period of time). Slightly less fun but fortunately not painful was the
Capoeira guys, who had a bit too much ego for their own good I felt.
Capoeira is a rather curious combination of martial arts, dance moves
and gymnastics, but I don't think I'll be trying it any time soon.
We started with a bit of a warm-up, and then the experienced people in the group demonstrated some of the different styles. I don't remember much of the exact details, so the highlights were:
posted at: 12:17 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Capitalising on success
I watched "RiP: A
Remix Manifesto" the other day on SBS - good on them for showing it
on mainstream TV. I fear it won't really have reached many more than
people like myself, who already know the problems and want to get to
the solution, but on the other hand any activism is good in this issue,
because there are a bunch of memes we're fighting against here that need
taking down good and proper.
The main one that struck me now is that the underlying theme is hypocrisy. The copyright industry is hypocritical in so many ways that it just permeates the whole process. Take, as an example, Walt Disney animating the old fairy tales - Snow White, Pinnochio, Cinderella, and so on; these were stories that had no copyright attached, and then Walt Disney (by redoing them) attached a copyright to them and prevented anyone from using them. That's perhaps a broad statement, but just imagine reprinting the story of Snow White and illustrating it without being a target for lawsuits from Disney Corporation - it's basically unthinkable. That's how much Disney has appropriated an out of copyright story and put their own copyright on it. The film documents countless other examples of artists using a riff or melody from someone else who's no longer around (or large enough, or is still naive enough to think that it's OK), and then suing any further artists who try to do the same thing with the melody they've just appropriated.
Strangely, I see this hypocrisy as actually now forming the basis of the whole "intellectual property" castle in the sky. Ask yourself why we have the laws of copyright, patents and intellectual property. Well, you tell yourself, imagine I'm some inventor with a brand new gadget, or a musician with a new song, or a film-maker with a new movie. If I don't "protect" that new thing, someone's going to come along and rip it off, and all my hard work will have been wasted because the cost of duplicating my work is much less for them than for me. That's why we have "All Rights Reserved" on CDs - because the idea that someone could take your hot drum lick and make the next Amen Break out of it and become instantly famous without paying you a cent and leaving your less popular work mouldering in the dust is a harsh thought to bear.
But let's think about this for a moment. Who is actually likely to carry out this threat here? Well, it might be someone you know or someone you show your thing to, but even in the days of ubiquitous internet distribution that's still a tiny tiny fraction of the actual people around. (Remember, we're ordinary people, we're not already famous - so we're unlikely to have people targeting us specifically.) For the most part the people that actually appropriate our work are going to be people just like us - artists, inventors, photographers, sculptors, and so on - and we all know what goes around comes around, and sooner or later if I copy my next door neighbour's work she's going to find out. Likewise, they probably don't have a huge internet following or lots of money to print CDs or pictures, so their ability to actually capitalise on taking our idea is limited. So it's not likely that we are the people who will take our fellow person's intellectual property and rip it off.
The people we have to most watch out for have three basic properties. One is lots of money - it means that any costs of duplicating our ideas isn't going to be an immediate barrier. Two is lots of distribution - not just big servers or copying machines but the ability to take that idea and distribute it to lots of people to generate some sales. Three is legal untouchability - not that they might be right in taking our thing (we've already established that we're using patents or copyright or whatever to prevent that) but the ability to entangle us in legal battles far beyond our resources to fight - or even the ability to take that new spatula idea and sell two million of them in China where you never go and have no knowledge. Who has all these three properties in one?
Well, it's obviously a what: the big corporations. That's right, the same big corporations who have been telling us that copyright and patents and intellectual property is for our own good; that it protects the artists who are just like us, that it stops people doing things we don't want with our ideas, and (in the case of patents) it helps puts ideas in the public domain for everyone to use. And we know that at the same time they're telling us its for our own good they're forcing us to pay for everything and fighting against every possible fair use of their products. It's hypocrisy on such an awesome scale that it's hard to take it all in.
I mean, we know that companies like Microsoft regularly rip off everyone else's intellectual property (e.g. the i4i lawsuit) at the same time as their vigorously defending their own intellectual property (e.g. the Tomtom lawsuit). We know in the software industry that its an unwritten rule not to look at anything that even hints of anyone else's intellectual property lest you be found to be deliberately infringing (rather than just 'accidentally' coming up with the same idea). We know that our ideas down here at the bottom of the heap don't matter one whit and its only the big end of town that gets a patent on every little idea they have and enforces it. We know that that "intellectual property" is being so vigorously enforced that DVDs force you to watch their ads and CDs install root kits to prevent you copying them and other forms of massive collateral damage in the neverending hopeless quest to prevent ideas doing what they do naturally, which is spread.
And yet to sell us on the idea that it's for our own good that we submit to this kind of intellectual thuggery takes guts. Guts, I'd argue, and a complete and childlike faith that the system is right.
Because we know that "intellectual property" is really a dead end. It's a noose that the corporations have made for us, but it tightens not around our necks but theirs, slowly choking them of talent and ideas and good will until they thrash around gasping desperately for the people that will not buy their goods and will not sell their ideas to them and will not buy into the marketing. We've known this since before John Lennon wrote "Imagine", but a more forceful statement of the truth is hard to find.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one; I hope some day you will join us and the earth will live as one.
Postscript: I'm surprised that it's not made more of in the film, but the
absolute key statement of the pro-copyright position is in the section
where a spokesman from the RIAA talks to a bunch of schoolchildren about
illegal copying. One kid asks him why they charge so much for copying
each song (with the tacit comparison to the little you can pay for the
same song if you'd bought it on a CD), and he goes briefly into a spiel
about copyright. He posits writing a song about love, and as an aside
says "Of course, I can't copyright the idea of love, boy, I'd love
it if I could do that..." (emphasis, of course, mine). If they
could get away with it, they would copyright the idea of love, and
charge everyone who feels it in whatever form at whatever time howsoever
derived. The fact that he even thinks it not only contemplatable but
desirable that one person could own the idea of love and prevent others
from thinking about it or feeling it shows how truly beyond rationality
the intellectual property corporations are.
posted at: 00:26 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Power from the people
I read the article at http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2778257.htm
with a kind of despairing interest - because what it says is absolutely
right, and it makes me feel very sad about the democracy we supposedly
live in.
A precis of the story is: the "Mandatory Filtering" the Federal Government is proposing to introduce will not be stopped by writing letters to your Member of Parliament or to Senator Conroy, signing a petition or blacking out your home page or avatar. It will be pushed through, because the ALP is (supposedly) indebted to the Australian Christian Lobby (the ACL) and because they wield enormous lobbying power at the highest levels of government. We need to change our tactics of getting through to our politicians, Josh says, or fail to stop the filtering being enacted.
The problem here, I would argue, is not that those opposed to the mandatory filter (like myself) are mumbling to themselves. We are doing all the traditional things that people do when trying to get their members of parliament to listen to their opinions: writing letters to politicians, talking to our friends and organising media coverage. These have worked for most issues in the past. Trying to organise avatar blackouts and internet recognition is a way of socially protesting in modern times, and it isn't really intended to reach the politicians.
The problem I see here is that politicians such as Senator Conroy and the various other ministers I've written to and spoken to are all basically plugging their ears to the voice of their electorate. We get form letters that reiterate their invalid, nonsensical and specious arguments, don't answer a single point we raise, and keep on going in their own direction without listening in the slightest to anything we say. They're listening, instead, to the ACL, who get to whisper in their ears directly and imply that they have all these unseen, unnamed christian voters out there who agree with them. As Josh says, the ALP owes the ACL a few favours - favours that the ACL are more than happy to imply are worth much more than they really are.
And the opponents to mandatory filtering are not without friends in Parliament House. Politicians from Senator Kate Lundy and NSW Minister Penny Sharpe down are trying to also counter the spin and the denialism of Senator Conroy and the ACL. But what are the ordinary people supposed to do? Have a cake sale and raise a couple of hundred thousand dollars to buy a couple of high-profile lobbyists? Start setting fire to cars and blowing up ISPs? Donate some money to the ALP with a little note in the bag? Do as Bernard Keane suggests and create a letter so complicated and confused that bureaucrats actually time to answer it (as if...)?
The problem here is that the public are not being listened to. A majority of Australians don't want mandatory filtering. It's being sold as stopping child pornography but the Minister has said that it could be extended to blocking information on euthanasia, abortion and safe sex - things which the Christian right gets all hot under the collar about but where the information alone is not illegal in Australia. It doesn't stop the real criminals, or even a determined teenager, and the whole illusion of children being randomly exposed to 'unwanted' content is a nebulous decoy.
What are we supposed to do if the politicians who represent us don't listen?
posted at: 18:18 | path: /personal/rants | permanent link to this entry
Power seller
I had known for some months that my laptop battery was gradually waning
in power. When, at OSDC, the battery
light started flashing three short orange and one long green, I didn't
need to Google it (though I did, of course) to find out that this was the
laptop's electronics saying "you really need to think about changing that
battery soon".
The problem was, however, that in my previous examination of the situation I discovered that most of the people selling laptop batteries under website names that look like they should be Australian are, in fact, pretty much one or two companies in Hong Kong operating a plethora of different web fronts. Using 'whois' on their domain names mostly tells you the truth, as these people don't bother to get an address in Australia to use as their administrative contact. Do not be fooled by use of '.au' in their domain names or Australian flag icons appearing in their banners.
These are made more dodgy still by then having spammed the Canberra Linux Users Group list shortly after I posted to it asking "where do I buy laptop batteries at a decent price from an Australian company?". The behaviour makes me think of the stereotypical chinese market hawkers, yelling at you to try their products, very cheap, for you special price, broken English permeating the whole transaction with the feeling that somewhere, somehow, you're going to be ripped off. I resolved, after OSDC, to find an Australian company that would sell me a battery for my still perfectly serviceable Dell Inspiron 6400.
Lo and behold I found one - Laptop Plus, which advertises itself as "Proudly Australian Owned & Operated". I also found a few eBay sellers advertising batteries, but since eBay cares as much about verifying the location of their sellers as they do about checking whether the postage is reasonable, I decided against shopping there. There are a reasonable number of sellers of Inspiron laptop batteries claiming to be in Australia, some even selling the 7200mAH batteries. But I decided to go with Laptop Plus, even though they were more expensive.
My decision was rewarded with prompt service, prompt answering of my
questions, and speedy delivery. The battery came in a nice foam-padded
box and checks out by the laptop hardware. It just worked, and I'm
very happy with their service. I can only hope they will be around in
another three years so I can buy another battery from them.
posted at: 23:08 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
The new age of programming
I gave a lightning talk at OSDC
this year and thought I'd write my thoughts up into my blog. It was
the confluence of a number of ideas, technologies and thoughts
gradually merging, and I think it's going to be an increasingly
important issue in the future.
Most laptops now have at least two cores in them. It's hard to get a desktop machine without at least two. The same chips for ordinary x86-architecture machines will soon have six, eight and twelve cores. The Niagara architecture has at least this many and quite possibly more. The Cell architeture allows for up to sixty-four cores on-chip, with a different architecture and instruction set between the FPE and SPE cores. The TileGX architecture includes one variant with a hundred 64-bit cores, connected to three internal DDR-3 memory interfaces and four internal 10-gigabit ethernet interfaces.
The future, it can therefore be said, is in parallel processing. No matter what new technologies are introduced to decrease the size of the smallest on-die feature, it's now easier to include more cores than it is to make the old one faster. Furthermore, other parts of our computers are now hefting considerable computation power of their own - graphics cards, network cards, PhysX engines, video encoder cards and other peripherals are building in processors of no mean power themselves.
To harness these requires a shift in the way we program. The people who have grown up with programming in the last thirty years have, by and large, been working on small, single-processor systems. The languages we've used have been designed to work on these architectures - parallel processing is either supported using third-party libraries or just plain impossible in the language. There have been parallel and concurrent programming languages, but for the most part they haven't had anywhere near the popularity of languages like Basic, C, Pascal, Perl, Python, Java, and so forth.
So my point is that we all need to change our way of thinking and programming. We need to learn to program in small units that can be pipelined, streamed, scattered and distributed as necessary. We need larger toolkits that implement the various semantics of distributed operation in the best way, so that we don't have people reinventing thread processing badly all the time. We need to make languages, toolkits, and operating systems that can easily share processing power across multiple processors, distributed across cores, chips, and computers. We need to help eachother understand how things interact better, rather than controlling your own little environment and trying to optimise that in isolation.
I think it's going to be great.
posted at: 11:48 | path: /tech/ideas | permanent link to this entry
The journey is the destination
I attended CodeCon
2009 this year, along with two friends from Canberra. This is an event
where you go camping in a nice out-of-the-way location with no internet
connection, take along your laptop, and hack away on code. There's lots
of talk, lots of coding, enough seeing and walking and doing to keep the
various personalities interested, and lots of sharing of ideas and thoughts.
Peter Miller organises it, including hiring a generator and bringing along
a bunch of tarps, poles, cables, and other stuff to make it all work - he
does a splendid job and gives a lot of his time to making sure it all runs
smoothly.
My feelings, coming back from the event, are overwhelmingly positive. This is the sort of affirming event that LCA is to me - talking to people who share the same jokes and ideas and worries, being able to help as well as ask for it, and realising that there are people of all ages who enjoy both geeking out and camping out. It's not for everyone - you have to be prepared to bring everything you'll need, cook your own meals, set up your tent and not have running water or a light at the reach of your hands. But obviously some people do enjoy it, and that's just fine by us.
Highlights for me were those belly laughs from brilliantly timed witticisms by other people; seeing a Lyrebird about 20 metres away (thanks, Kate, for lending me your small binoculars); getting a whole bunch of coding done; those quiet times discussing how life works; and how, sometimes, you just have to be a bit patient to wait for the annoyances to move off.
This isn't really a hour-by-hour account, as I'm not sure that kind of write-up would do it justice. But it was really great, and if you're at all interested in camping and hacking on code then it's well worth making the effort to go to. You don't really need access to the internet to get things done!
(I should investigate the possibility of running something similar at the
Yarrangobilly
Caves - thermal springs ahoy!)
posted at: 23:10 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
The wonders of modern technology
On Sunday I had some friends around to play computer games. Actually, due
to one of those typical glitches in communication which happen when trying
to arrange things a fortnight in advance with people on a Sunday night, only
one friend turned up. The game we were most familiar with was StarCraft,
which I still think has the best idea for getting people interested in
playing - a 'spawn' version that allows you to run up to eight people on
one registered copy of the program. Considering the problems I'm having
trying to convince these friends to spend even $10 (for Supreme Commander
through Impulse), a spawn
version of some of these games makes perfect sense to get people interested
without them having to shell out up front.
Of course, we first had to go through that dance of getting the networking set up and the machines talking to eachother. My machine would appear on his display when I first set up the game but would immediately disappear. Wireshark from another computer on the same switch showed traffic from both, but short of being on a dumb hub (and who has them these days) I couldn't tell where the problem was. Probably a firewall problem somewhere. Rather than spend a lot more time faffing around with networking settings in Windows, something I'm not entirely familiar with these days, I went with plan B.
Plan B worked perfectly, first time. Instantly we could see eachother, and our games went perfectly smoothly with no lag or hitches. What was this wonderous technology?
Serial cable.
By some miracle both computers had nine pin RS-232 serial ports; by another miracle I had a null modem cable with nine (and twenty-five) pin connectors. I deduced that it was a null modem cable because it had two female plugs. StarCraft did the rest. Hours of enjoyment.
The next day I found how to get the two machines talking to eachother - more
precisely, how to convince the Windows Firewall that StarCraft was one of
those programs it could deliver outside packets to. So next time we won't
have to get the serial cable out. But I'm pretty happy that the option was
there...
posted at: 16:35 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
Understanding the chinese room
The Chinese Room
argument against strong AI has always bothered me. It's taken me a while
to realise what I dislike about the argument and to put it into words,
though. For those of you who haven't read up on this, it's worth perusing
the article above and others elsewhere to familiarise yourself with it, as
there's a great deal of subtlety in Searle's arguing position.
Firstly, he's established that the computer program as is comfortably passes the Turing Test, so we know it's at least an artifical intelligence by that standard. Then he posits that he can perform the same program by following the same instructions (thus still passing the Turing Test), even though he himself "doesn't understand a word of Chinese". Then he proposes that he can memorise that set of instructions to pass the Turing Test in Chinese in his head, and still doesn't understand Chinese. If he can do that while not understanding Chinese, then the machine passing the Turing Test doesn't "understand" Chinese either.
So. Firstly, let's skip over the obvious problem: that the human trying to perform the computer program will do it millions of times slower. This speed is fairly important to the Turing Test, as we're judging the computer based on its ability to interact with us in real time - overly fast or slow responses can be used to identify the computer. A human that's learnt all the instructions by rote and follows them as a computer would still, I'd argue, be identifiably slow. We're assuming here that the person doesn't understand Chinese, so they have to follow the instructions rather than respond for themselves.
And let's skip over the big problem of what you can talk about in a Turing Test. Any system that can pass that has to be able to carry on a dialogue with quite a bit of stored state, has to be able to answer fairly esoteric questions about their history or their current state that a human has and a computer doesn't (e.g. what did you eat last, what sex are you, etc). I'm skipping that question because it's an even call as to whether this is in or out for current Turing Test practice: if an AI was programmed with an invented personality it might be able to pass this in ways a pure 'artificial intelligence' would not. It's a problem for the Chinese Room, because that too has to hold a detailed state in memory and have a life outside the questioning, and the example Searle gives is of a person simply answering questions and not actually carrying on some external 'life'. ("Can I tell you a secret later?" is the kind of thing that a human will remember to ask about later but the Chinese Room doesn't say anything about).
It's easy to criticise the Chinese Room at this point as being fairly stupid. You're not talking to the person inside the room, you're talking to a person inside the simulation. And the person executing all those instructions, even if they're in a high-level language, would have to be superhumanly ... something in order to merely execute those instructions rather than try to understand them. It's like expecting a person to take the numbers from one to a million in random order and sort them via bubble sort in their head, whilst forbidding them from just saying "one, two, three..." because they can see what the sequence is going to be.
To me the first flaw in Searle's argument is that his person in the room could somehow execute all those instructions without ever trying to understand what they mean. If nothing else, trying to learn Chinese is going to make the person's job considerably easier - she can skip the whole process of decoding meaning and go straight to the 'interact with the meaning' rules. Any attempt by Searle to interfere here and say that, no, you're not allowed to do that really has interfered with any attempt to disprove that the person doesn't understand Chinese - if he makes her too simple to even understand a language, then how does she read the books; if he makes her incapable of learning then how did she learn to do this process in the first place, etc. So the basis on which Searle's judgement that the AI doesn't really "understand" because the person in the room doesn't "understand" is based on the sophistry that you can have such a person in the first place.
But, more than this, the fundamental problem I have is that any process of trying to take statements / questions in a language and give responses to them in the same (or any other) language is bound to deal with the actual meaning and intelligence in the original question or statement. It's fairly counterintuitive to make an AI capable of interacting in a meaningful way in Chinese without understanding what makes a noun and a verb, understanding its rules of tense and plurality, or understanding its rules of grammar and structure and formality. If Searle would have us assume that we've somehow managed to create an AI that can pass the Turing Test without the programmers building these understandings of the actual meaning behind the symbols into the program, then I think he's constructed somewhat of an artificial (if you'll forgive the pun) situation.
To try and put this in context, imagine the instructions for the person in the room have been written in English (rather than in Python, for example). The obvious way to write this Chinese Room program, therefore, is by having big Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionaries and a book of rules by which the person pretends that there's another person (the AI) answering the questions based on the English meaning of the words. I argue here that any attempt to obfuscate the process and remove the use of the dictionaries is not only basically impossible but would stop the Chinese Room being able to pass the Turing Test. It's impossible to remove the dictionaries because you're going to need some kind of mapping between each Chinese symbol and the English word that the instructions deal with, if for no other reason that Chinese has plenty of homographs - symbols which have two different meanings depending on context or inflection - and you need a dictionary to distinguish between them. No matter how you try to disguise that verb as something else, you'll need to put it in context so that the person can answer questions about it, which is therefore to make it meaningful.
So once you have a person capable of learning a language, in a room where symbols are given meaning in that language, you have a person that understands (at some level) the meaning of the symbols, and therefore understands Chinese.
Even if you introduce the Python at this point, you've only added an extra level of indirection to the equation. A person reading a piece of Python code will eventually learn what the variables mean no matter how obscurely the code is written - if we're already positing a person capable of executing an entire program literally then they are already better than the best maintenance programmer. If you take away this ability to understand what the variables mean, then you also (in my view) take away the ability for the person to learn how to interpret that program in the first place.
Searle's argument, therefore, is based on two fallacies. Firstly, that it's possible to have a human that can successfully execute a computer program without trying to learn the process. Secondly, that the program will not at some point deal with the meaning of the Chinese in a way that a person would make sense of. So on both counts Searle's "Chinese Room" is no argument against a machine intelligence "understanding" in the same way we understand things.
What really irritates me about Searle's argument here - and it does not change anything in my disproof above - is that it's such an arrogant position. "Only a real *human* mind can understand Chinese, because all those computer thingies are really just playing around with symbols! I'm so clever that I can never possibly learn Chinese - oh, wait, what was that?" He's already talking about an entity that can pass the Turing Test - and the first thing I would argue about that test is that people look for understanding in their interlocutors - and then says that "understanding" isn't there because it's an impelementation detail? Give me a break!
And then it all comes down to what "understand" means, and any time you
get into semiotics it means that you've already lost.
posted at: 17:17 | path: /tech/ideas | permanent link to this entry
The cost of beliefs
I was recently walking around the Australian
National Botanic Gardens with friends when we discovered a sign that
had been vandalised. References to geological times had been scratched
out in a crude attempt to remove any reference to how long ago various
features of the Australian continent were formed. My partner, who frequents
the gardens, noted that the Creationists had vandalised the sign. It was
certainly hard to refute - nothing else on the sign was touched, and the
erasure was limited to those specific words, so there's little evidence for
any other objective than obscuring the date ranges of geological periods.
I have a large amount of contempt for the vandal(s) that did this, and those that think that defacing public property is reasonable as long as it supports their own world-view. It costs the gardens about $1000 to replace that sign - that vandal has just asserted that their point of view is worth $1000 or more. And in the grand scheme of things it's hardly proving their point - they leave no other information or evidence to prove any contrary assertion. So really this is just a childish attempt to stop someone else from being heard by shouting louder.
Yet this is not done by a child - the scratching is fairly precise and it's too high for a child to reach. So some adult has thought that it's perfectly valid to deface public property to keep their own little world-view intact. The same adult would presumably be outraged if their church was defaced; so why is their defacement OK?
The thing that really annoys me is that it's not even a scientific debate. There's only one type of person who does this - people who believe that a literal interpretation of their own holy book is absolutely right and no amount of scientific evidence can show differently. They're so prepared to ignore scientific evidence they'll try to remove any sign of it. These people fiddle with scientific procedures to prove their own conclusions - they put their hand on the scale when weighing the evidence. Science and logic has always tried to reason out its arguments based on common ground that we all agree on. This person hasn't even tried to be reasonable.
Why do we keep being reasonable with them?
posted at: 17:43 | path: /personal/rants | permanent link to this entry
Paul's top ten songs
Pia's
post of her top ten songs has made me think about what ten songs I consider
most memorable - things that have really changed my life.
Look Mum, no bugs!
I recently encountered
a
bug in RhythmBox where, if you rename a directory, it thinks that all
the files in the old directory have disappeared and there's a whole bunch of
new files. You lose all the metadata - and for me that was hours of ratings
as I worked my way through my time-shiftings of the chillout stream of
Digitally Imported. Worse, if RhythmBox was
running during the rename, when you try to play one of those files that has
'gone missing' it will just say "output error"; when you restart it because
(naturally) you think it's borked its codecs or something, it then removes
all those previous entries (giving you no chance to fix the problem if you'd
just renamed the directory in error).
I decided to try to be good, so I found the GNOME bugzilla and tried to search for "directory", or "rhythmbox", or anything. Every time it would spend a lot of time waiting and then just finish with a blank page. Deciding that their Bugzilla was hosed, I went and got a Launchpad account and logged it there. Then, in a fit of "but I might have just got something wrong", I went back to the Bugzilla and tried to drill down instead of typing in a keyword.
Lo and behold, when I looked for bugs relating to "Rhythmbox", it turned up in the search bar as product:rhythmbox. Sure enough, if I typed in product:rhythmbox summary:directory then it came up with bugs that mentioned 'directory' in their summary line. If you don't get one of those keywords right, it just returns the blank screen as a mute way of saying "I don't know how to deal with your search terms".
So it would seem that the GNOME bugzilla has hit that classic problem: developer blindness. The developers all know how to use it, and therefore they don't believe anyone could possibly use it any differently. This extends to asserting that anyone using it wrong is "obviously" not worth listening to, and therefore the blank page serves as a neat way of excluding anyone who doesn't know the 'right' way to log a bug. And then they wonder why they get called iconoclastic, exclusive and annoying...
Sadly, the fix is easy. If you can't find any search terms you recognise,
at least warn the user. Better still, assume that all terms that aren't
tagged appropriately search the summary line. But maybe they're all waiting
for a patch or something...
posted at: 22:44 | path: /tech/web | permanent link to this entry
SELinux for SLUGs
Last Friday I gave two talks at the
Sydney Linux Users Group, at the
new Google offices. It was a pretty full-on day, as I'll explain in
another post, and I was keen to get to the meeting pretty quickly.
Fortunately the light rail in Sydney is pretty good, and finding ones way
from the Star City stop to the offices was pretty easy. I happened to
meet two people who were also going to the meeting, a lady escorting her
young nephew (if I recall correctly) - she came and asked me if I knew
where the linux group meeting was. I talked with them for a bit on the
tram, but I'm sorry to them if I was a little distracted - my thoughts
were on getting to the meeting, getting set up correctly and giving the
talk.
We arrived in the twilight zone between the day, when the lifts allow you to get to any floor without a pass, and the night, when the SLUG Google employees were shuttling people up to the fifth floor. So we climbed the ten flights of stairs - I was in the need of a bit of a stretch. I then picked up my name badge - they were using Anyvite, so they could print out named labels easily for those that had bothered to RSVP on the site so beforehand. I had a brief bit of hesitation when my laptop shut down because it thought it was out of power, a curious interaction between the failing battery and Fedora 11, but all came good. Then it was time to work out how to get connected to the projector.
This was the source of two startling discoveries. Firstly, Fedora 11's screen detection now works pretty much seamlessly - if you plug in a new screen and click the 'Detect Monitors' button, it just finds the new output on the VGA port and sets it up appropriately. Secondly, Open Office 3.0 has a 'presenter' mode that can take advantage of two screens and display your 'now and next' screen on your laptop screen while the projector just displays the current slide in all its streamlined beauty. This was one of those "Wow, It Just Works™" moments where you see how fast the pace of Linux development really is - I was all ready with arcane xrandr voodoo but this just worked perfectly.
Sadly, due to slight cabling problems my laptop was sitting on a server cabinet six meters away, but when I muttered to the nearest person that what I needed right now was a wireless presenter device, the same guy just pulled one from his bag and handed it to me. Whoever you are, you really made my day - thanks! Still, I would be deprived of the handy 'now and next' view and would occasionally have to look over my shoulder to make sure I was talking about the right thing. I'd practiced both talks beforehand, so I was able to move on fairly smoothly. If you're going to do presentations, you have to do this - reading off your slides or looking at the screen to see where you are is really embarrassing.
The two talks went well, though I didn't receive anywhere near the amount of heckling that the CLUG people gave me when I gave the same talks. The questions asked were generally quite insightful, and I had to think hard about my answers. I remembered to restate the question for the microphone, and got to give two T-shirts to people who asked good questions. So overall I was pretty pleased about how it went.
I was talking with Andrew Cowie after the talk, and he gave me some very useful advice for approaching talks in the future. After you've done your initial bit of research working out who you're talking to and what level your should pitch your talk at, you really just have to go for it. I'd been worried that it might be too technical for some and not technical for others - and it was, of course; the point is that that's not really my problem. There always will be that spectrum of knowledge in the people attending a talk at a volunteer organisation, and it's not the presenter's problem to try and cater for everyone. You simply have to do the best you can and reach the most people you can, and not worry about whether you've got everyone interested.
After the talk I got to spend a bit of time with Andrew talking about trades and professions, what makes good meetings and presentations, and many other things that are now lost in the blur that that Friday became. He's an excellent speaker and, like me, wants to see people doing the right thing - being moral and ethical in all their dealings. I also have a small envy of his globetrotting ways, and admire his ability to write Java as fast as think about it in Eclipse, so it was good to get a chance to talk to him for an extended time rather than the usual 'nod in the corridor' meetings we've had in the past.
Overall, a good night. I've put both the
SELinux
for Beginners and
SELinux
for Sysadmins talks up on SlideShare for people to read.
posted at: 23:59 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
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