For a long time this blog has been black with some splashes of International Orange. The favorite icon and logo was some weird grid of dots (and yes, I give Google crap for Material Design). Now that Google has brought icons to the desktop search results as well as mobile I wanted a rounder favicon. Their direction is round icons all the way, and my weird dots don't look great in this format.

The new logo and favorite icon is a dynamic pie chart. This updates daily (the favorite icon will lag a bit due to caching) and shows the category distribution of posts over the last two years. The logo text is just a random permutation of the category colors. This is stupidly precise and geeky and also a lot more cheerful. I may add a few more splashes over time.

I started with some online tool for the palette and used International Orange as a starting point and its color wheel complement to pin the other end of the range. This looks terrible. I then had a long conversation with ChatGPT 4 and told it what I liked and didn't like about each palette it came up with. I was pretty high maintenance but the AI was patient and I'm pretty happy with the color scheme we ended up with.

Open AI just dropped a pretty remarkable blog post on their roadmap for not destroying civilization with their imminent artificial general intelligence (AGI):

"As our systems get closer to AGI, we are becoming increasingly cautious with the creation and deployment of our models. Our decisions will require much more caution than society usually applies to new technologies, and more caution than many users would like."

Now, I'm around 98% sure that Open AI mostly answers the question: What if we allocated unlimited resources to building a better auto-complete? ChatGPT is an amazing tool but it's amazing at guessing which word (token) is likely to appear next. Quite possibly their blog post is just an exercise in anchoring - if they're 95% of the way to AGI then GPT4 must be pretty amazing and therefore worth a lot of money. If everyone realized that they're more like 2% of the way there, and the next 1% is going to be exponentially difficult, then some of the froth would blow off.

But what if they really are close to the singularity? After all, we have no idea what causes non-artificial intelligence.

Their ideas for keeping us safe are a little disturbing:

"We think public standards about when an AGI effort should stop a training run, decide a model is safe to release, or pull a model from production use are important."

Given the lack of transparency around the inner workings of ML models, and the lack of knowledge around what intelligence even looks like, this is a pretty risible idea. And:

"Finally, we think it’s important that major world governments have insight about training runs above a certain scale."

We are facing down the prospect of a second Trump term while the UK has a Prime Minister who thinks that a homeless person might be 'in business'.

The most concerning part for me is:

"...we hope for a global conversation about three key questions: how to govern these systems, how to fairly distribute the benefits they generate, and how to fairly share access."

Creating AGI would be an amazing and terrifying accomplishment. Treating it as a slave feels like the most surefire way to usher in the most terrifying possible consequences, for us and for the AGIs.

Full disclosure: I use Open AI embeddings for related posts and site search. The words on this blog are my own though. I do occasionally generate a post image using Stable Diffusion like the rather strange one above.

ITHCWY just migrated to a new server with more capacity. From clouds to pollution to covid monitoring there is a lot going on under the hood here these days. I can already see that search is a lot more snappy.

Man, moving Windows servers just sucks. Internal GDI error - that's a permissions issue obviously (not my first time). Can't publish? You must need to install Web Deploy twice and then uninstall it and install it one more time for luck. Web.config error at startup? Of course Windows Server 2022 still doesn't come with URL Rewriting and you need to install it from some corner of the MS website like an animal. Yes, I should use something else but my custom CMS is probably reaching the same level of complexity as an F16 and I'm just one person. Enjoy the fast search!

I have had my Echo Show for a little over five years. That's an eternity in AI, you'd expect some amazing advances over half a decade but it's still a timer with a screen.

A timer that you can talk to while your hands are busy or dirty is actually an amazing thing, and it can switch off my Christmas lights without me having to vault a sofa and risk losing an eye. But apparently Amazon isn't making any money from it and so they're laying off staff and paring back their smart home additions.

Possibly they've been working on the wrong thing? When asking about dogs Alexa managed to put them firmly in the camp of things that can poop. ChatGPT says:

"A dog is a mammal and a common household pet, known for its loyalty and ability to be trained. It is a member of the Canidae family, which also includes wolves, coyotes, and foxes, and it is believed to have been the first domesticated animal. Dogs come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and they are used for a variety of purposes, such as hunting, herding, protection, and companionship."

That's just a funny bug somewhere. The real irritation is the device getting more aggressive every year. "By the way..." it says while everyone shouts at it to shut the fuck up. Worse, every couple of weeks now they push something new to the home screen. I just want to see my photos and there is now a list of 75,000 adverts to switch off first. And, they've started dropping promotions that can't be switched off in settings as well. So this thing that I bought is so aggravating now that I'll never buy another one.

It could have been different. No, I'm never going to say Alexa, buy me a printer (if you're using text to speech on this post my deepest apologies). But (just one idea) what if I could have a meal planning conversation that adds the ingredients to my shopping basket and the recipes to my home screen? I can then edit the cart before I order and have the instructions on a convenient screen while I cook and listen to a podcast.

This animation shows a random sample of 311 cases that have a photo and specific location. It covers July 4, 2013 to January 5, 2023. Created using the 311 dataset plotted over a street map of San Francisco.

Testing out some shapefile code with a zoom into San Francisco. This uses five different shapefiles:

Country borders are from Eric Muller's fips-10 shapefile.

States and US Counties come from the United States Census Bureau.

San Francisco 5 foot elevation contours from DataSF.

Finally the street map for San Francisco is from data.gov.

These are almost all based on different projections and I did my best to actually line everything up but if you're heading over for coffee it's probably best to stick with Google Maps.