The whole point of AWS Availability Zones (AZ) is that if one location goes out, you still have data elsewhere and it would automagically recover. The default for services in one Region is 3 AZs. Some regions like us-east-1 have 6 AZs.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/

From their own map, it looks like both Bahrain and UAE had 3 AZs.

https://builder.aws.com/content/3ADBRZtN2DSQEgLOa3ga88M4dnx/how-many-azs-you-need-to-deploy-to-in-prod-environment

Amazon also recommends storing data across at least 3 AZs to avoid data loss.

So either customers actively turned off multi-AZ support, someone screwed up the local installation, or EVERY single one of those AZs got hit.

Edit: article is paywalled, but there’s a small section that says multiple AWS locations were hit in Bahrain.

Turing Test is fundamentally based on fooling humans. Not sure it’s smart to pin humankind’s future on what a birthday magician can do.

One of the fun things about this latest cycle of AI is how the goalposts move. Not the ‘AGI in six months’ one. That might as well be mounted on top of a golf cart with a brick laid on the accelerator. But the one that talks about the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and goals of a product.

One of the things they tell people pitching VCs is that you should be addressing a reasonably big TAM (potential customers) and have sensibly large, yet attainable stakes. With AI, though, the TAM was always questionable. Who would want or pay for a chatty ‘bot,’ especially one that ‘hallucinated’ answers? So they pivoted to change the TAM and the stakes. Your personal assistant. No? Therapist? No. Project Manager? Teacher? Still no?

What we have now is a constant churning of THOSE goals. Now, the TAM is pretty much the whole world, and the stakes are either massive unemployment, widescale industrial shutdown, or destruction of the human race. It’s all getting silly. Once you’ve extracted all the investment money you can by maxing out the stakes and scaring the pants off people, there’s not much higher to go.

Meanwhile, all your actual income is coming from pedestrian applications, like summarizing emails, screening job applicants, or coding assistants. There’s just not enough revenue to cover all the costs you’re incurring to get it to hallucinate a little less. So you have to pump up the stakes. Next up: setting off all the nukes! Shutting down the sun and the moon! Inviting alien colonists!

Speaking of going bigger: https://youtu.be/R8SeysuMpA0

AI software can’t technically kill you unless:

1. It convinces someone who can kill you, to you know, kill you.
2. It gets access to the physical world, which can definitely kill you.

Oh, wait.

1. U.S. military is using AI to help plan Iran air attacks: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/us-military-using-ai-help-plan-iran-air-attacks-sources-say-lawmakers-rcna262150
2. Anthropic Previewing the Model Hardware Standard: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview

See, nothing to worry about.

Anything Monty Python. Also, Gravity’s Rainbow.

Now, someone do VCs.

“You’re not going to believe this…”

Long time ago, I had an indoor ginger cat. Rescue kitten. My girlfriend at the time kept teasing it, rubbing his belly, rough-housing with it. I kept telling her to go easy, but she thought it was fun.

Pretty soon, the cat learned about indiscriminate biting and scratching. All my family and friends hated being around him. I had to lock him up in another room when people showed up.

The girlfriend got a job out of town and moved out and I had to move to a place that didn’t allow animals. Fortunately, I found a friend with a farm who wanted to take him. Last I heard, he was having the time of his life riding on top of sheep and horses.

Humans encounter a wide range of tasks as they grow up from infant to toddler and beyond. We don’t have separate ‘training’ vs. ‘inference’ stages (or at least, it’s a very short window). We also generalize from tasks (as the glass jar demo shows). We also appear to have different types of storage for short vs medium vs long-range memory.

We can combine a bunch of individual tasks into complex, coordinated, goal-seeking tasks and keep them around for later use. Like riding a bike, or learning how to drive, or juggle. We can recall those years later, even if we haven’t done them for a long time.

Plus, we somehow have a meta-layer of ‘common-sense’ or ‘ethics’ that tells us when NOT to do something, or when we SHOULDN’T. Like ride a bike onto pedestrians, or juggle kitchen knives. Hopefully, the research will go into those areas as well.

• 1️⃣ Start screen recording yourself 🎦
• 🦟 Fix the bug and write up the PR, except…
• Throw in a lot of gratuitous emojis 🎉🏆🤝 – em-dashes – and “On the other hands”
• 📤 Submit it
• When they come 😡 screaming at you about no-AI, just show them the video 😎
• All their outrage will be spent on accusing you of using 🤖AI.
• Where it all started will be forgotten 🥳
• Profit 🏆

Comment written by 💯 human

It was a ‘cult revival’ a few years ago. The only movie I ever walked out of. My buddy stayed and says he enjoyed it:

Kull the Conqueror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kull_the_Conqueror

This guy fingerprints.

(hopefully in a good way)

The WebAudio test is not the only measurement in these scripts. Inspection of the bundles found code that queries or measures:

• canvas rendering and toDataURL()
• WebGL renderer information, extensions, and shader precision
• audio oscillator and analyser output
• screen and viewport dimensions
• device pixel ratio
• hardware concurrency and device memory
• installed browser plugins
• supported audio and video formats
• WebRTC behaviour
• browser performance timing
• mouse, touch, focus, and scroll events
• device motion and orientation
• properties commonly associated with browser automation

There is also code for serialising and encrypting results, making requests to Alibaba telemetry services, and sending data with fetch() or sendBeacon().

Not sure you need all this to play audio.

Wow. Totally missed the Qualcomm acquisition.

Mojo is a pretty ambitious project. But they need to figure out how they fit into the latest, fast-moving pipelines. The one niche they would be perfect for is local, high-speed, on-device inference.

No big. Guess I’ll have to wait another year before upgrading my laptop. Sorry for the loss of business.

I thought Cloudflare’s anti-AI defenses were meant to dynamically catch all of this. That’s a lot of work to do to keep bot traffic away.

FWIW, I tried loading it with a VPN, it showed the content, but not all the images. Turned off VPN, it fully loaded. Maybe the blog has different rules.

If I had to do it again, I’d start with the end goal and work backwards. It was a long time ago, I was single with no extra expenses, had a decent job, and thought it might be fun to learn. If I had wanted to become a professional pilot, the calculation would have been very different.

Getting the cert mainly involved putting in the hours. Having a good instructor helps a lot. Also, not making any stupid mistakes. I almost stalled the plane hard on my first solo touch and go. The hardest part was getting used to the ATC lingo and not stuttering too much. I got an aircraft band radio with a headphone and joined all the weirdos who liked to sit at the end of airport runways.

Getting a private pilot certificate. Was fun, but after going to every airport within range, not sure it was worth it.