Google Is Humming Like a Well Oiled High School Science Club: A Sensitive Science Club
April 18, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I believe everything I read on the Internet. Therefore, I am accepting as the truth inscribed on the floor of the Great Pyramid of Giza. (It’s numbers in case you did not know this factoid.)
The article “Dream Job Nightmare: Google Leaves New Hire Jobless and Without an Apartment” reports this slick personnel move executed with extreme prejudice by the Google. Yep, that Google. I noted this statement in a letter quoted by BoingBoing:
Unfortunately, these [Google internal budget] reviews mean that we have had to make the difficult decision to terminate the contract of employment which you signed with Google UK Ltd, and this letter is formal notice of termination.
What makes this statement interesting is that the never hired but fired Googler is:
- The individual fired before starting the Google job lives in Russia
- Getting in and out of Russia is not a simple nor risk free process
- Getting a job in the gloom of the special operation in Ukraine is more difficult that it was before the tanks got mired on the road to Kiev.
I suppose there is an upside to this story: Opportunities exist to enlist in the Russian armed forces. With computer skills, there are openings in the computer branch of several Russian agencies. In fact the boss of one of the advanced persistent threat units may be seeking his future elsewhere.
I am impressed with the coordination within the Google human resources people unit. I think this is one more example of how Google works to maintain the management panache of a high school science club organizing a field trip to a junior cotillion dance.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2023
Good Enough Is Not Good Enough. Sorry, You Get an F from Me
April 17, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I have become increasingly concerned about the idea of good enough. Whether it is the quality of Amazon’s customer service or the work of a handyman planting bushes, the idea of excellence has vaporized.
How far has the rot of “good enough” chewed into the philosophy of over achievers? I would say that the wooden structure of excellence has been beavered into woodchips. The result is that the woodchips have clogged the stream, flooded basements, and drowned children and pets.
One outstanding example of “good enough” is the essay (thank heavens, the write up was not presented as “real” news) is “Being Mediocre Sets You Free.” I wonder if the author would have been able to submit this to William James as a required analysis of motivation in his Harvard psychology class in the 19th Century? My hunch is that Mr. James would have offered the aspiring student to consider might be called the pursuit of excellence.
The article posits as a truth which can be extended to cover a wide swath of intellectual ground ideas like this statement about being a so-so gardener:
There was no performance with this hobby. No end goal. No metric of success other than I suppose, do I enjoy it? And even enjoyment isn’t quite the right word for enjoyment has its own never ending metrics. I suppose gardening brings me a modest sort of happiness. It focuses me. It releases me from my head and my nerves. And that is quite enough.
The idea exerts a powerful magnetic pull on those who lack the gumption to commit to a task, master it, and deliver excellence. Who judges excellence? May I suggest it is a result obtained from others engaged in the same activity. What if the person does not enjoy the activity? My response is, “Suck it in. Do the job in the best way possible?”
Mediocrity provides the warmth and comfort of a heavy blanket filled with plasticized pellets. Excellence means cold fingers wrestling with flower bulbs or recalcitrant books in a library, making notes when others are working on pre-diabetes at a tavern, or slapping plaster in a careless manner in order to watch TikToks.
I don’t need to learn about good enough. I want work done in an excellent way. Good enough is a C. Average. Sure, there is comfort in the normcore. Why not find solace in excellence? Why define freedom as gray? The bright colors of life shine from doing one’s best.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2023
Google versus Microsoft: Whose Marketing Is Wonkier?
April 17, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I want to do what used to be called a comparison. I read Microsoft’s posts on April 12, 2023 (I don’t know for certain because LinkedIn does not provide explicit data and time information because who really cares about indexing anymore.) The first post shown in the screenshot is from the Big Dog himself at Microsoftland. The information is one more announcement about the company’s use of OpenAI’s technology in another Microsoftland product. I want to shout, “Enough already,” but my opinion is not in sync with Microsoft’s full-scale assault on Microsoft users. It is now a combination of effective hyperbole and services designed to “add value.” The post below Mr. Nadella’s is from another Softie. The main point is that Microsoft is doing smart things for providers and payors. My view is that Microsoft is doing this AI thing for money, but again my view is orthogonal to the company which cannot make some of its software print on office printers.
Source: LinkedIn 2023 at shorturl.at/egnpz. Note: The LinkedIn url is a long worm thing. I do not know if the short url will render. If not, give Microsoft’s search function a whirl.
Key takeaways: Microsoft owns a communications channel. Microsoft posts razzmatazz verbiage about smart software. Microsoft controls the message. Want more? Just click the big plus and Microsoft will direct more information directly at you, maybe on your Windows 11 start menu.
Now navigate to “Sundar Pichai’s Response to the Delayed Launch of Bard Is Brilliant and Reminds Us Why Google Is Still Great.” I want to cry for joy because the Google has not lost the marketing battle with Microsoft. I want to shout, “Google is number one.” I want to wave Googley color pom poms and jump up and down. Join me. “Google is number one.”
The write up strikes me as a remarkable example of lip flapping and arm waving; to wit:
Google secures its competitive advantage not necessarily by being the fastest to act, but by staying the course on why it exists and what it stands for. Innovation and product disruption is baked into its existence. From its operating models to its people strategy, everything gets painted with a stroke of ingenuity, curiosity, and creativity. While other companies may have been first to market with new technologies or products, Google’s focus on innovation and improving upon existing solutions has allowed it to surpass competitors and become the market leader in many areas.
The statements in this snippet are remarkable for several reasons:
- Google itself announced Code Red, a crisis. Google itself called Mom and Dad (Messrs. Brin and Page) to return to the Mountain View mothership to help figure out what to do after Microsoft’s Davos AI blizzard. Google itself has asked every employee to work on smart software. Now Google is being cautious. Is that why Googler Jeff Dean has invested in a ChatGPT competitor?
- Google is killing off products. The online magazine with the weird logo published “The Google Graveyard” in 2019. On April 12, 2023, Google killed off something called Currents. Believe it or not, the product was to replaced Google Plus. Yeah, Google really put wood behind the hit for a social media home run.
- The phrase “ingenuity, curiosity, and creativity” does not strike me as the way to sum up how Google operates. I think in terms of “poaching and paying for the GoTo, Overture, Yahoo online advertising inspiration,” perfecting the swinging door so all parties to an ad deal pay Google, and speaking like a wandering holy figure when answering questions before a legal body.
Key takeaways: Google relies on a PR firm or a Ford F 150 Lightning carrying Google mouse pads to get a magazine to write an article which appears to be a reality not reflected by the quite specific statements and actions of the Google.
Bottom-line: Microsoft bought a channel. Google did not. Google may want to consider implementing the “me too” approach and buy an Inc.-type publication. I am now going to be increasingly skeptical of the information presented by Inc. Magazine. I already know to be deeply suspicious of LinkedIn.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2023
Big Wizards Discover What Some Autonomy Users Knew 30 Years Ago. Remarkable, Is It Not?
April 14, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
What happens if one assembles a corpus, feeds it into a smart software system, and turns it on after some tuning and optimizing for search or a related process like indexing. After a few months, the precision and recall of the system degrades. What’s the fix? Easy. Assemble a corpus. Feed it into the smart software system. Turn it on after some tuning and optimizing. The approach works and would keep the Autonomy neuro linguistic programming system working quite well.
Not only was Autonomy ahead of the information retrieval game in the late 1990s, I have made the case that its approach was one of the enablers for the smart software in use today at outfits like BAE Systems.
There were a couple of drawbacks with the Autonomy approach. The principal one was the expensive and time intensive job of assembling a training corpus. The narrower the domain, the easier this was. The broader the domain — for instance, general business information — the more resource intensive the work became.
The second drawback was that as new content was fed into the black box, the internals recalibrated to accommodate new words and phrases. Because the initial training set did not know about these words and phrases, the precision and recall from the point of the view of the user would degrade. From the engineering point of view, the Autonomy system was behaving in a known, predictable manner. The drawback was that users did not understand what I call “drift”, and the licensees’ accountants did not want to pay for the periodic and time consuming retraining.
What’s changed since the late 1990s? First, there are methods — not entirely satisfactory from my point of view — like the Snorkel-type approach. A system is trained once and then it uses methods that do retraining without expensive subject matter experts and massive time investments. The second method is the use of ChatGPT-type approaches which get trained on large volumes of content, not the comparatively small training sets feasible decades ago.
Are there “drift” issues with today’s whiz bang methods?
Yep. For supporting evidence, navigate to “91% of ML Models Degrade in Time.” The write up from big brains at “MIT, Harvard, The University of Monterrey, and other top institutions” learned about model degradation. On one hand, that’s good news. A bit of accuracy about magic software is helpful. On the other hand, the failure of big brain institutions to note the problem and then look into it is troubling. I am not going to discuss why experts don’t know what high profile advanced systems actually do. I have done that elsewhere in my monographs and articles.
I found this “explanatory diagram” in the write up interesting:
What was the authors’ conclusion other than not knowing what was common knowledge among Autonomy-type system users in the 1990s?
You need to retrain the model! You need to embrace low cost Snorkel-type methods for building training data! You have to know what subject matter experts know even though SMEs are an endangered species!
I am glad I am old and heading into what Dylan Thomas called “that good night.” Why? The “drift” is just one obvious characteristic. There are other, more sinister issues just around the corner.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2023
Has the Interior Magic of Cyber Security Professionals Been Revealed?
April 14, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
The idea of “real” secrets is an interesting one. Like much of life today, “real” and “secret” depend on the individual. Observation changes reality; therefore, information is malleable too. I wonder if this sounds too post-Heisenberg for a blog post by a dinobaby? The answer is, “Yes.” However, I don’t care, particularly after reading “40% of IT Security Pros Say They’ve Been Told Not to Report a Data Leak.”
The write up states:
According to responses from large companies in the US, EU, and Britain, half of organizations have experienced a data leak in the past year with America faring the worst: three quarters of respondents from that side of the pond said they experienced an intrusion of some kind. To further complicate matters, 40 percent of IT infosec folk polled said they were told to not report security incidents, and that climbs to 70.7 percent in the US, far higher than any other country.
After reading the article, I thought about the “interior character” of the individuals who cover up cyber security weaknesses. My initial reaction is that individuals are concerned about their own aura of “excellence.” Money, the position each holds, the perception of others via a LinkedIn profile — The fact of the breach is secondary to this other, more important consideration. Upon reflection, the failure to talk about flaws may be a desire to prevent miscreants from exploiting what is a factual condition: Lousy cyber security.
What about those marketing assurances from cyber security companies? What about the government oversight groups who are riding herd on appropriate cyber security actions and activities?
Perhaps the marketing is better than the policies, procedures, software, and people involved in protecting information and systems from bad actors?
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2023
Professional Publishers: You Have Failed Big Time
April 14, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Over the years, I have done some small tasks for professional publishers. Don’t get me wrong. I love these firms, their editorial policies, their pricing models, and the quality of the content. (I won’t raise the issue of commercial funding of research-centric papers, the role of special interests related to certain medical articles, or the marketing-centric rah rah about smart software from grant seekers and frightened online advertising vendors. Will I mention non-reproducible results? Sure, many peer reviewed articles are glorified tweets. There you go.)
Midjourney’s rendering of a big roll of baloney similar to that contained in many peer reviewed articles.
I will, however, point you toward the essay “A Whole Lotta Money for Nothin’.” The article explains that the peer-review methods have not worked to advance knowledge. What has been advanced is movement on a tenure track, “proof” that a government entity granting funds has evidence about the location of the institution to which the grant is delivered, and revenue for professional publishing outfits.
I noted this statement in the essay:
Does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published? It doesn’t.
Plus, papers have errors or made up data (hello, president of Stanford University, have you resolved your data issue yet?)
I noted this passage as well:
When one editor started asking authors to add their raw data after they submitted a paper to his journal, half of them declined and retracted their submissions. This suggests, in the editor’s words, “a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning.”
As I recall, I learned how to do footnotes following assorted style sheets. The discipline of mastering the correct style was more interesting to me than the baloney in some of the journal articles I cited.
Professional publishers, what’s up besides charging libraries so much for subscriptions to journals with questionable research? Never mind. Don’t answer. I know already.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2023
A Trend? Silicon Valley Type Media Squabbles
April 13, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
In rural Kentucky the Silicon Valley type media don’t capture the attention of too many in Harrod’s Creek. I noted several stories from what I call the Sillycon Valley “real” news outfits which may suggest a trend. And what is the OMG slay?
Let’s let three examples shape what’s shakin’ in “real” news:
ONE: The write up “Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It” makes clear that author Matt Taibbi is not up to the “real” news standards of an online publication called “TechDirt.” The charges are interesting; for instance, “Taibbi shrugs, sighs, and makes it clear he’s totally out of his depth when confronted with facts.” That’s clear: Facts are important.
TWO: A publication with a logo I find minty but at odds with the silly idea of legible typography published “Substack CEO Pushes Back at Elon Musk, Says Twitter Situation Is Very Frustrating.” The article explains that a financially challenged Silicon Valley reinterpretation of old-fashioned magazine publishing called Substack is struggling with the vibe checked outfit Twitter. The article provides examples of some back and forth or what my deceased grandmother called “tit for tat” talk.
THREE: The world-changing owner of Twitter (an old school TikTok) labeled the very sensitive National Public Radio as state sponsored radio. Apart from the fact that NPR runs ads, I suppose the label would annoy some people. However, the old school Fortune Magazine reported that the “real” news outfit Twitter had changed the facts. “Elon Musk Changes NPR’s Twitter Label to Government Funded Media after US State Affiliated Media Draws Heavy Criticism.” said, “Musk is known for being impulsive, and on Friday he tweeted, “I am dumb way more often than I’d like to be.”
Is the trend navel gazing at drip outfits. If one takes each of the publications as outfits which want to capture the spirit of Silicon Valley (oh, please, exclude Fortune Magazine from the Silicon Valley set. The Time Inc. legacy and New York attitude make its stories different, well, sort of.)
I find the uptick in criticism about the ripples in the “real” news pond originating from Sillycon Valley interesting. I am watching for the scrutiny to vibrate in social media. Who knows? Maybe “real” TV will pick up the story? One can hope. Ad hominem, spiteful remarks, and political characterizations — yes, “real” news Sillycon Valley style.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2023
The Great Firewall of Florida Threatens the Chinese Culture!
April 13, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read an amusing write up presented as “real news.” The story was distributed by the Associated Press and made available to its licensees / owners. The title is “Chinese Student Groups at UF condemn Banning of TikTok at Florida Universities.” Note that you will have to pay to view this article, which seems reasonable to me because I live in rural Kentucky and survive intellectually on outputs from the AP and newspapers in Florida.
The main point of the article is that Chinese students have written an essay which expresses outrage at the banning of Chinese applications. What applications? TikTok for one and a couple of messaging applications. The method for banning the applications relies on WiFi filtering and prohibiting the applications on university-owned computing devices.
The action, as I understand the write up, makes it difficult for a Chinese student to talk with relatives. Furthermore, the grousing students might lose their cultural identity.
A couple of observations:
- Are the Chinese students unaware and unable to work around the Great Firewall of Florida? The methods seem simple, cheap, and quick to me, but I, of course, am not in a mental tizzy about TikTok.
- What happens to Chinese students within the span of the nation state of China when these individuals use Facebook, Google, and other applications? My perception is that one’s social credit score drops and interesting opportunities to learn new skills in a work camp often become available?
- Is the old adage “A Chinese person remains Chinese regardless of where the citizen lives” no longer true? If it is true, how is one’s cultural identity impinged upon? If it is not true, what’s the big deal? Make a phone call.
Net net: The letter strikes me as little more than a propaganda effort. What disappoints me is that the AP article does not ask anyone about the possibility of a weaponized information action. The reasons:
- Not our job at the AP
- The reporter (stringer) did not think of the angle
- The editors did not have sufficient time to do what editors once did
- The extra work is too difficult and would get in the way of the Starbucks’ break.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2023
PS: Why didn’t I quote from the AP story? Years ago some big wheel at the AP whose name I don’t recall told me, “You must not quote from our stories”; therefore, no quote, and my perception that an important facet of this student essay has been ignored. I wonder if ChatGPT-type software wrote the article. I am not sure that’s my job. I cannot think of this angle. My editor did not have time. Plus, the “extra” work screws up our trip to Panera. The Starbucks’ near my office is — how shall I say this — a bit like the modern news business.
Human Abstract Jobs: These May Be Goners
April 12, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
In the late 1960s, the idea of converting technical information to online formats lit a rocket engine under the commercial database industry. I am not going to revisit topics I have covered in this blog since 2008. The key point is that humans created the majority of the digital versions of journal papers, technical reports, and other academic content. The cost of a single abstract in 1980 was about $17 per summary. Some commercial database producers spent less (Agricola, Pharmaceutical News Index, etc.) and other spent more (Chemical Abstracts, Disclosure, etc. )
In terms of time, an efficient production process could select, create, and index an abstract in a two or three day period, assuming a non-insane, MBA efficiency freak was not allowed to fiddle with each knowledge value task making up the commercial database workflow.
That is officially. Good, bad, or indifferent, the old school approach is not possible for many reasons. The big one is the application of technology in the SummarizePaper.com system. Navigate to https://summarizepaper.com and follow the instructions. I exactly two and one half minutes a mostly unreadable Google paper was converted into a list of dot points, a comprehensive summary, a ninth-grade reading level version, and a blog post (maybe a sixth grade reading level?) Plus the summary was indexed with a reasonable set of index terms.
You can plug in the name of the author (Jeff Dean, a Googler famous for his management acumen) and test the process on his November 2022 apologia “Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference.” Snappy, eh?
With the authors’ abstract and the machine-generated dot points, the content of the article is easily absorbed.
Sayonara, commercial database publishers relying on human knowledge workers. Costco and WalMart are still hiring I hear. Why spend money per hour on a human demanding breaks, health care, and vacations, when software can do a job almost as good or better than an expensive bio-centric creature. Software does not take bathroom breaks which is another plus.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2023
The Chivalric Ideal: Social Media Companies as Jousters or Is It Jesters?
April 12, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
As a dinobaby, my grade school education included some biased, incorrect, yet colorful information about the chivalric idea. The basic idea was that knights were governed by the chivalric social codes. And what are these, pray tell, squire? As I recall Miss Soapes, my seventh grade teacher, the guts included honor, honesty, valor, and loyalty. Scraping away the glittering generalities from the disease-riddled, classist, and violent Middle Ages – the knights followed the precepts of the much-beloved Church, opened doors for ladies, and embodied the characters of Sir Gawain, Lancelot, King Arthur, and a heaping dose of Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great (who by the way figured out pretty quickly that what is today Afghanistan would be tough to conquer), and baloney gathered by Ramon Llull were the way to succeed.
Flash forward to 2023, and it appears that the chivalric ideals are back in vogue. “Google, Meta, Other Social Media Platforms Propose Alliance to Combat Misinformation” explains that social media companies have written a five page “proposal.” The recipient is the Indian Ministry of Electronics and IT. (India is a juicy market for social media outfits not owned by Chinese interests… in theory.)
The article explains that a proposed alliance of outfits like Meta and Google:
will act as a “certification body” that will verify who a “trusted” fact-checker is.
Obviously these social media companies will embrace the chivalric ideals to slay the evils of weaponized, inaccurate, false, and impure information. These companies mount their bejeweled hobby horses and gallop across the digital landscape. The actions evidence honor, loyalty, justice, generosity, prowess, and good manners. Thrilling. Cinematic in scope.
The article says:
Social media platforms already rely on a number of fact checkers. For instance, Meta works with fact-checkers certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which was established in 2015 at the US-based Poynter Institute. Members of IFCN review and rate the accuracy of stories through original reporting, which may include interviewing primary sources, consulting public data and conducting analyses of media, including photos and video. Even though a number of Indian outlets are part of the IFCN network, the government, it is learnt, does not want a network based elsewhere in the world to act on content emanating in the country. It instead wants to build a homegrown network of fact-checkers.
Will these white knights defeat the blackguards who would distort information? But what if the companies slaying the inaccurate factoids are implementing a hidden agenda? What if the companies are themselves manipulating information to gain an unfair advantage over any entity not part of the alliance?
Impossible. These are outfits which uphold the chivalric ideals. Truth, honor, etc., etc.
The historical reality is that chivalry was cooked up by nervous “rulers” in order to control the knights. Remember the phrase “knight errant”?
My hunch is that the alliance may manifest some of the less desirable characteristics of the knights of old; namely, weapons, big horses, and a desire to do what was necessary to win.
Knights, mount your steeds. To battle in a far off land redolent with exotic spices and revenue opportunities. Toot toot.
Stephen E Arnold, April 2023
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