With so much AI in the news, I thought our special guest for this first episode for 2024 should be Justin Warren, “consultant, freedom of information tragic, hexagon enthusiast, and creator of the CyberRating™ labelling scheme”.
In this episode we talk about panic, generative AI, millipedes, why Taylor Swift fans are so few in number that we need to create more of them using AI, smart toothbrushes, Elon Musk (briefly), disinformation, and the enshittification of everything.
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Justin Warren has been on the Edict several times before.
Episode Links
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CyberRating™ pioneer, OopsRisk™ evangelist, hexagon and FOI enthusiast, cheese noticer, digital rights advocate. Probably not a vampire. He/him.
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My name is Justin Warren, and I live in Melbourne, Australia. Eigenmagic is my personal blog. Mostly it’s about technology and management, with a smattering of other topics thrown in for good measure. I write about whatever I think people might be interested in. I tend towards long form prose because I often don’t have time to make things shorter.
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This is where you buy your “Danger: Hexagons” warning signs and the like.
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We specialise in marketing strategy, positioning, and messaging for technology companies, particularly startups. As a boutique firm, we offer custom consulting tailored to individual client needs, as well as a range of standard packages.
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[14 February 2024] It's been a day of wild extremes across Victoria, with soaring temperatures sparking fire emergencies in the west, followed by damaging storms which swept across the state. In Melbourne a storm lashed the city on Monday afternoon, causing chaos on the roads and damage to homes.
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Etymology: Unknown. Attested from 1902, originally meaning “in a bad way” or “in bad condition”, malfunctioning of an appliance. Perhaps from German name. Fritz, or onomatopoeic (here, imitating the sound of electric sparks jumping).
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[15 February 2024] When six towers toppled in Geelong's northern suburb of Anakie on Tuesday this week, more than half a million Victorians were cut off from power.
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[7 February 2024] A widely reported story that 3 million electric toothbrushes were hacked with malware to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is likely a hypothetical scenario instead of an actual attack.
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[7 February 2024] It’s not.
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[14 August 2019] A Twitter user’s claim to have tweeted from a kitchen appliance went viral but experts have cast doubt
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[15 February 2024] Theory that singer is plotting to help Biden win election has flourished in rightwing media after she started dating Travis Kelce
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The powerful owl (Ninox strenua), a species of owl native to south-eastern and eastern Australia, is the largest owl on the continent. It is found in coastal areas and in the Great Dividing Range, rarely more than 200 km (120 mi) inland. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species also refers to this species as the powerful boobook.
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[27 December 2023: It seems this story is old and the recent press release we discussed was a rehash] DataStax, the company that powers generative AI applications with real-time, scalable data announced the launch of SwiftieGPT , an AI-powered chatbot that knows everything about Taylor Swift. Timed with the award-winning artist’s 34th birthday, SwiftieGPT provides Taylor Swift fans, better known as “Swifties,” with access to any and all publicly available data via a conversational bot that knows Taylor all too well.
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[29 January 2024] Social media platform X has blocked searches for one of the world’s most popular personalties, Taylor Swift, after explicit artificial intelligence images of the singer-songwriter went viral.
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[14 February 2024] The temporary group is part of the Australian Government’s interim response to the safe and responsible AI consultation.
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[30 March 2017] I’m training a neural network to generate recipes based on a database of about 30,000 examples, and although the network has managed to produce identifiable recipes, and even sometimes sort sweet from savory, it hasn’t actually managed to produce any good ones. Only a very few of them are technically doable. Three typical examples:
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In 1958 H.L.A. Hart posed a hypothetical. Here it is: A legal rule forbids you to take a vehicle into the public park. Plainly this forbids an automobile, but what about bicycles, rol- ler skates, toy automobiles? What about airplanes? Are these, as we say, to be called "vehicles" for the purpose of the rule or not?'
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[July–November 2013] The Portuguese millipede, Ommatoiulus moreleti, was first recorded in Australia on Eyre Peninsula, South Australia in 1953. By the early 1980s, O. moreleti had spread to several sites across southern Australia where it had become a significant nuisance pest invading houses in large numbers in autumn and spring.
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[3 September 2020] Online and in real-life demonstrations, two viral conspiracy theories are increasingly coming together.
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[22 March 2023] Last Sunday a group of men dressed in black performed the Nazi salute on the steps of the Victorian parliament, amid a clash between protesters for and against transgender rights.
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By Christopher M Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Hodder & Stoughton (1990)
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Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG (????? ?????????? ????????????; born 10 October 1938) is a former colonel of the KGB who became KGB resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London. He was a double agent, providing information to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1974 to 1985. After being recalled to Moscow under suspicion, he was exfiltrated from the Soviet Union in July 1985 under a plan code-named Operation Pimlico. The Soviet Union subsequently sentenced him to death in absentia.
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Operation Denver (sometimes referred to as "Operation INFEKTION") was an active measure disinformation campaign run by the KGB in the 1980s to plant the idea that the United States had invented HIV/AIDS as part of a biological weapons research project at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
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95. The 9pm Edict
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"Four Seasons in One Day" is a song by rock group Crowded House, released as a single in June 1992. It was co-written by Neil Finn and brother Tim Finn, originally intended for their debut Finn Brothers album; however, it was moved onto the Woodface project as the two projects amalgamated. The song's title references a common saying used in Melbourne to describe the city's changeable weather. The song reached number 26 on the UK Singles Chart and number 47 on the Australian ARIA Singles Chart. The song also peaked at number 68 in Canada, but was not released in the US.
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The official music video for "Four Seasons In One Day" by Crowded House. From the album "Woodface". Video directed and produced by Kerry Brown & Bruce Sheridan in New Zealand's South Island.
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[13 February 2023] All four units at AGL's Loy Yang A power station in the Latrobe Valley have shut down on a day when temperatures were soaring in Victoria.
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In computer science, a generator is a routine that can be used to control the iteration behaviour of a loop. All generators are also iterators. A generator is very similar to a function that returns an array, in that a generator has parameters, can be called, and generates a sequence of values. However, instead of building an array containing all the values and returning them all at once, a generator yields the values one at a time, which requires less memory and allows the caller to get started processing the first few values immediately. In short, a generator looks like a function but behaves like an iterator.
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[15 August 2023] This seems comical-funny, until you remember that people rely on Google a LOT for search accuracy. It turns out that (at the time of writing) Google doesn’t think Kenya exists… sort of.
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[11 October 2023] If every search on Google used AI similar to ChatGPT, it might burn through as much electricity annually as the country of Ireland. Why? Adding generative AI to Google Search increases its energy use more than tenfold, according to a new analysis.
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[February 1995] The author contends that software's girth has surpassed its functionality, largely because hardware advances make this possible. He maintains that the way to streamline software lies in disciplined methodologies and a return to the essentials.
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[27 June 2023] Early notes on how generative AI is affecting the internet.
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By B. Kliban, Workman Publishing Company, 1976
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Most millipedes are detritivores and feed on decomposing vegetation, feces, or organic matter mixed with soil. They often play important roles in the breakdown and decomposition of plant litter: estimates of consumption rates for individual species range from 1 to 11 percent of all leaf litter, depending on species and region, and collectively millipedes may consume nearly all the leaf litter in a region. The leaf litter is fragmented in the millipede gut and excreted as pellets of leaf fragments, algae, fungi, and bacteria, which facilitates decomposition by the microorganisms.
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[16 February 2024] More than 20 sites contaminated with asbestos-laden mulch, forcing school closures and the cancellation of a Mardi Gras celebration.
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[30 January 2024] We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.
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Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).
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In machining, numerical control, also called computer numerical control (CNC), is the automated control of tools by means of a computer. It is used to operate tools such as drills, lathes, mills, grinders, routers and 3D printers. CNC transforms a piece of material (metal, plastic, wood, ceramic, stone, or composite) into a specified shape by following coded programmed instructions and without a manual operator directly controlling the machining operation.
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Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that were linked to one mainframe computer.
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A wild tale of how Allende's engineers and a British management consultant dared challenge corporations and spy agencies - and almost won. Written and presented by Evgeny Morozov.
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[30 January 2024] Tech billionaire Elon Musk has claimed his Neuralink company has successfully implanted one of its wireless brain chips in a human. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, he said "promising" brain activity had been detected after the procedure and the patient was "recovering well".
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[28 September 2023] Elon Musk says no primates died as a result of Neuralink’s implants. A WIRED investigation now reveals the grisly specifics of their deaths as US authorities have been asked to investigate Musk’s claims.
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The Crux is a weekly newsletter about enterprise technology, cloud, and infosec. Every week we share a curated list of links to articles we’ve read and think are worth your time, with a weekly tip from our analysts. As a bonus, we share the occasional long read that we suggest you sit down with when you have the time to really concentrate.
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Thank you, Media Freedom Citizenry
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CONVERSATION TOPICS: Two people who choose to remain anonymous.
THREE TRIGGER WORDS: Dave Gaukroger, John Lindsay, Peter Viertel, Phillip Merrick, and one person who chooses to remain anonymous.
ONE TRIGGER WORD: Andrew B, Andrew Wright, Bernard Walsh, Bic Smith, Bruce Hardie, Christopher Biggs, David Heath, Drew Mayo, Frank Filippone, James Moore, James Moore again, Jamie Morrison, Joanna Forbes, Joanna Forbes again, John Avocado, Karl Sinclair, Katrinas Szetey, Kimberley Heitman, Mark Newton, Michael, Miriam Faye, Paris Lord, Paul Williams, Peter Blakeley, Peter Blakeley again, Peter McCrudden, Rhydwyn, Ric Hayman, Rohan, Roy Brown, Susan Ireland, and five people who choose to remain anonymous.
PERSONALISED VIDEO MESSAGE: Karloscar.
PERSONALISED AUDIO MESSAGE: Elissa Harris, Jens Hartmann, Karen Purser, Matthew Moyle-Croft, Syl Mobile, Warren McDonald, and two people who chose to remain anonymous.
FOOT SOLDIERS FOR MEDIA FREEDOM who gave a SLIGHTLY LESS BASIC TIP: Brenton Realph , Eric T F Bat, Greg Randolph, James Henstridge, Jim Campbell, Matthew Crawford, Michael Harris, Rohan Pearce, and two people who choose to remain anonymous.
MEDIA FREEDOM CITIZENS who contributed a BASIC TIP: Mark Hollands and Regina Huntington.
And another nine people chose to have no reward, even though some of them were the most generous of all. Thank you all so much.
Series Credits
- The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian via The Freesound Project.
- Edict fanfare by neonaeon, via The Freesound Project.
- Elephant Stamp theme by Joshua Mehlman.