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The IT Thread

The IT Thread
The one thing—a major, limiting thing—that AI and/or ML
may never incorporate is logic. As in human logic. Which
is why we need not fear robots taking over the world, as
some people seem to think.

The sentient HAL 9000 is merely a fifty-year-old fiction.
I'm a creationist;   I believe that man created God.
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The IT Thread
(08-13-2024, 01:51 AM)SYZ Wrote: The one thing—a major, limiting thing—that AI and/or ML
may never incorporate is logic.  As in human logic. Which
is why we need not fear robots taking over the world, as
some people seem to think.  

The sentient HAL 9000 is merely a fifty-year-old fiction.

Or mebbie not:

Quote:Park and his colleagues initiated this study after a 2022 Science study by Meta caught their attention. The study described CICERO, an AI system created by Meta to excel in the alliance-building, world-conquest board game Diplomacy...

Their analysis showed that CICERO failed to be honest despite being trained to be truthful. It learned to misrepresent its preferences to gain an upper hand in the negotiations, the paper noted. It also built a fake alliance with a human player to trick them into leaving themselves undefended during an attack.Link
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The IT Thread
(08-13-2024, 03:01 AM)Inkubus Wrote: ...
Quote:Park and his colleagues initiated this study after a 2022 Science study by Meta caught their attention. The study described CICERO, an AI system created by Meta to excel in the alliance-building, world-conquest board game Diplomacy...

Their analysis showed that CICERO failed to be honest despite being trained to be truthful. It learned to misrepresent its preferences to gain an upper hand in the negotiations, the paper noted. It also built a fake alliance with a human player to trick them into leaving themselves undefended during an attack.Link

(my bold)

That's a classic example of ML, rather than true AI...  I think?
I'm a creationist;   I believe that man created God.
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The IT Thread
(08-13-2024, 03:01 AM)Inkubus Wrote:
(08-13-2024, 01:51 AM)SYZ Wrote: The one thing—a major, limiting thing—that AI and/or ML
may never incorporate is logic.  As in human logic. Which
is why we need not fear robots taking over the world, as
some people seem to think.  

The sentient HAL 9000 is merely a fifty-year-old fiction.

Or mebbie not:

Quote:Park and his colleagues initiated this study after a 2022 Science study by Meta caught their attention. The study described CICERO, an AI system created by Meta to excel in the alliance-building, world-conquest board game Diplomacy...

Their analysis showed that CICERO failed to be honest despite being trained to be truthful. It learned to misrepresent its preferences to gain an upper hand in the negotiations, the paper noted. It also built a fake alliance with a human player to trick them into leaving themselves undefended during an attack.Link
Some guy from MIT wrote a seminal paper on this topic. In it he speaks of the fact that once you define a state where an agent is forbidden from X, which takes a lot of resources, it requires almost no resources to "flip the bit" and do X anyway. The problem is that in creating the angel, you also create the demon.
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The IT Thread
A bit long but I was fascinated:



Quote:We are as a matter of fact right now building creepy super capable amoral psychopaths that never sleep, think much faster than us, can make copies of themselves and have nothing human about them whatsoever. What could possibly go wrong.

Quote:AI is now deployed in the pentagon's top secret Cloud. Edward Snowden said the intersection of AI with the ocean of mass surveillance data is going to put terrible powers in the hands of an unaccountable few and they may not be able to keep hold of it. Paul Cristiano said that eventually AI systems will be able to prevent humans from turning them off but much sooner than this AI will get out of control.

Quote:Humanity's AI evolution is not out of our control not yet, there are promising areas of research. The problem is that nearly all AI research funding of hundreds of billions per year is pushing capabilities for profit, safety efforts are tiny in comparison.

Quote:Nick Bostrom and the future of Life Institute, join us in calling for international AI safety research projects. We don't know if it will be possible to maintain control of superintelligence but we can point it in the right direction, instead of rushing to create it with no moral compass and clear reasons to kill us off. There will be no warning shot. Our greatest risk is increasingly hidden even as it spreads into all our systems.

It was popularly said around these parts a bucket of water would sort it. Not any more.
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The IT Thread
In this video, I [the author] test the interaction between a
neodymium magnet and a copper sphere using the principles
of Lenz’s Law. By experimenting with this setup, I explore
whether a magnet can float or move differently inside the
sphere due to the electromagnetic effects. Join me as I walk
through the process of building the copper sphere, setting up
the experiment, and analyzing the results. This is part of a
continuing exploration of how copper and magnets behave
together.

I'm a creationist;   I believe that man created God.
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The IT Thread
Complicated passwords make you less safe, experts now say.

Using a mixture of character types in your passwords and
regularly changing passwords are officially no longer best
password management practices.

For years, conventional wisdom advocated for passwords
that were highly complex, combining upper and lower case
letters, numbers and symbols. Over time, NIST found that
this focus on complexity was counterproductive and actually
weakened security in practice
.

The new guidelines were published in September 2024 as
part of NIST’s second public draft of SP 800-63-4, the
latest version of its Digital Identity Guidelines.

Password strength is often measured by entropy, which is a
measure of unpredictability. While complexity can contribute
to entropy, length plays a much bigger role.   (As the actress
said to the Bishop.)  Sorry.

A longer password with more characters has exponentially
more possible combinations.

Long passwords that are easy to remember, such as
passphrases made up of several simple words. For example,
“big dog small rat fast cat purple hat jello bat” in password
form, so minus the spaces, “bigdogsmallratfastcatpurplehatjellobat”
is both secure and user-friendly. A password like this strikes
a balance between high entropy and ease of use.

A 64-character password using only lowercase letters and real
words would be extremely difficult to crack. If capitalised letters
and symbols are included, cracking the password would be close
to mathematically impossible
.

  —This is all very well, and makes a lot of sense, but I see two
     drawbacks with this report, one major and one minor.  Who,
     in their right brain (I'm a "left brain" person ha ha) is really
     going to manually type in 64 characters whenever they choose
     to log into a site?  I'd guess nobody!

     And the minor(?) problem?  How many sites will allow you to
     type in a 64-charcter password/code?  I encounter plenty of
     sites that reject my 10-character password with the message
     "Maximum 8 characters exceeded" (or similar).
I'm a creationist;   I believe that man created God.
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The IT Thread
(01-03-2025, 06:28 PM)SYZ Wrote: Complicated passwords make you less safe, experts now say.

Using a mixture of character types in your passwords and
regularly changing passwords are officially no longer best
password management practices.

For years, conventional wisdom advocated for passwords
that were highly complex, combining upper and lower case
letters, numbers and symbols. Over time, NIST found that
this focus on complexity was counterproductive and actually
weakened security in practice
.

The new guidelines were published in September 2024 as
part of NIST’s second public draft of SP 800-63-4, the
latest version of its Digital Identity Guidelines.

Password strength is often measured by entropy, which is a
measure of unpredictability. While complexity can contribute
to entropy, length plays a much bigger role.   (As the actress
said to the Bishop.)  Sorry.

A longer password with more characters has exponentially
more possible combinations.

Long passwords that are easy to remember, such as
passphrases made up of several simple words. For example,
“big dog small rat fast cat purple hat jello bat” in password
form, so minus the spaces, “bigdogsmallratfastcatpurplehatjellobat”
is both secure and user-friendly. A password like this strikes
a balance between high entropy and ease of use.

A 64-character password using only lowercase letters and real
words would be extremely difficult to crack. If capitalised letters
and symbols are included, cracking the password would be close
to mathematically impossible
.

  —This is all very well, and makes a lot of sense, but I see two
     drawbacks with this report, one major and one minor.  Who,
     in their right brain (I'm a "left brain" person ha ha) is really
     going to manually type in 64 characters whenever they choose
     to log into a site?  I'd guess nobody!

     And the minor(?) problem?  How many sites will allow you to
     type in a 64-charcter password/code?  I encounter plenty of
     sites that reject my 10-character password with the message
     "Maximum 8 characters exceeded" (or similar).

I let my Mac decide the password and remember it.  Because I keep my drive encrypted, Apple remembers them for any new purchase and my iPhone and iPad.  Never been hacked…

When we went to full computerization at the hospital, we had to each have a password to log into the lab software.  That was fine.  Then, they decided we needed to change it every three months.  Very stupid as most of us just continued using the same password and adding a 1, then 2, etc. or a letter A, then B.   Plus, it also introduced the problem of someone on vacation or extended leave coming back with an expired password and needing an IT visit to reset.  They had a timer on how long an expired password was able to be changed by the employee because it might belong to an employee no longer at the hospital!  Management is IT illiterate and knows much more that the IT folks do (not).
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The IT Thread
(01-03-2025, 06:46 PM)pattylt Wrote:
(01-03-2025, 06:28 PM)SYZ Wrote: Complicated passwords make you less safe, experts now say.

Using a mixture of character types in your passwords and
regularly changing passwords are officially no longer best
password management practices.

For years, conventional wisdom advocated for passwords
that were highly complex, combining upper and lower case
letters, numbers and symbols. Over time, NIST found that
this focus on complexity was counterproductive and actually
weakened security in practice
.

The new guidelines were published in September 2024 as
part of NIST’s second public draft of SP 800-63-4, the
latest version of its Digital Identity Guidelines.

Password strength is often measured by entropy, which is a
measure of unpredictability. While complexity can contribute
to entropy, length plays a much bigger role.   (As the actress
said to the Bishop.)  Sorry.

A longer password with more characters has exponentially
more possible combinations.

Long passwords that are easy to remember, such as
passphrases made up of several simple words. For example,
“big dog small rat fast cat purple hat jello bat” in password
form, so minus the spaces, “bigdogsmallratfastcatpurplehatjellobat”
is both secure and user-friendly. A password like this strikes
a balance between high entropy and ease of use.

A 64-character password using only lowercase letters and real
words would be extremely difficult to crack. If capitalised letters
and symbols are included, cracking the password would be close
to mathematically impossible
.

  —This is all very well, and makes a lot of sense, but I see two
     drawbacks with this report, one major and one minor.  Who,
     in their right brain (I'm a "left brain" person ha ha) is really
     going to manually type in 64 characters whenever they choose
     to log into a site?  I'd guess nobody!

     And the minor(?) problem?  How many sites will allow you to
     type in a 64-charcter password/code?  I encounter plenty of
     sites that reject my 10-character password with the message
     "Maximum 8 characters exceeded" (or similar).

I let my Mac decide the password and remember it.  Because I keep my drive encrypted, Apple remembers them for any new purchase and my iPhone and iPad.  Never been hacked…

When we went to full computerization at the hospital, we had to each have a password to log into the lab software.  That was fine.  Then, they decided we needed to change it every three months.  Very stupid as most of us just continued using the same password and adding a 1, then 2, etc. or a letter A, then B.   Plus, it also introduced the problem of someone on vacation or extended leave coming back with an expired password and needing an IT visit to reset.  They had a timer on how long an expired password was able to be changed by the employee because it might belong to an employee no longer at the hospital!  Management is IT illiterate and knows much more that the IT folks do (not).

I keep some passwords on sites I don't worry about on Password. But I also have an old standalone computer (for a few old games). But I also keep important passwords on Excel there. And I print them out on an equally-unconnected printer. No one can hack an off-line computer, LOL!
38 years ago here, I could see The Milky Way. Then only the stars and planets. And now I can barely see the brightest planets sometimes.
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The IT Thread
Quote:The dashes between the four random words, render a dictionary attack futile: the attacker simply can't know where the dashes are in the sentence, so he can't use a dictionary at all. Furthermore, the words are random and don't constitute an existing sentence.

Passwords explained
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