Jim @sullybiker@sully.site

ive said this before but i dislike the term "hallucination" for AI because that implies that there's some malfunction going on when it says glue is delicious on pizza, when in reality it's doing the exact same thing as it was before. it's only doing symbol manipulation and is running into the exact same hurdles that computer scientists ran up against in the 1960s: it only knows about the signifiers and not the things they signify

Today in 1976, 48 years ago: in Buenos Aires, the Argentine civil-military dictatorship (1976-1983) "disappears" (murders) Raymundo Gleyzer (1941-1976), a 34-year-old Argentine film director, critic and journalist.

#OnThisDay

Today in 1984, 40 years ago: The Danube–Black Sea Canal is opened, in a ceremony attended by the Ceaușescus. It had been under construction since the 1950s.

#OnThisDay

I was reading a very interesting presentation and technical article by LANL and Honeywell on "Thermal Neutrons in Airplanes"¹ which I remembered downloading a while back.

The reason was the recent incident with turbulence and I remembered that there had been an issue with SEE ("Single Event Effects") on a Quantas flight causing it to lose altitude abruptly.

The original reason for downloading it was somewhat historical - SEEs had been plaguing our first three DEC Alpha machines at Imperial College (1993…) over weekends or, rather, the machines were inexplicably crashing with a machine check error over the weekend, and only over the weekend. At the time it turned out that a particular experiment in the Physics department next door to us (Mathematics, proper stuff ;P) ran over weekends and "might produce some stray neutrons." We did not deploy tinfoil (hats or otherwise) but there was an "environmental change" to the experimental setup²

The bottom line is that if you have neutrons hitting your chips it is Not Good™

Now, in avionics and, in particular on the poor Quantas 72 flight, this had rather dire consequences³ but this can be expanded to other systems.

In a previous life I was loosely associated with the Centre for Software Reliability at City University and got a bit of a hammering on the subject matter of dependable computing (actually, this should be hammered in the heads of so many people we'd cause a hammer shortage world-wide) and this is still something very close to my heart: in everything I design I always try to include "fail safe" and "dependable" as parameters.

Now, as more and more data is moved into the cloud and with it the associated processing I think we have an interesting problem coming up.

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¹ "TINMAN Thermal Neutron Detector for Aircraft", 2021 - https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1783494 - !!rabbit hole alert!!
² a particularly contrived combination of British understatement and burocratese.
³ see "Ghosts in the code: the near crash of Quantas flight 72" - https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ghosts-in-the-code-the-near-crash-of-qantas-flight-72-b4faebc90e27 (Medium, sorry)