In A Blog Far, Far Away...

An acquaintance online has a very reasoned blog based around AI, including an AI they themselves have coded.

This particular post to which I refer presents the arguments for AI being the thing that will end us, the "Doomer" viewpoint. As with every page of this author's blog, it's clear and concise and a good read. I enjoyed reading the Doomer viewpoint - and look forward to the counter to it which they'll be publishing in a few weeks.

Now For Something Completely Tangential:

But my (as usual quite irrelevant and off-the-wall) observation and amusement is the cartoon about the AI and chickens. 

It made me think about our place in the ecosphere and how dinosaurs were the apex lifeform for tens of millions of years and only lost the pole position because of a cosmic dice throw. 

We've been around for only an eye-blink by comparison, and are increasingly looking like we'll throw the snake-eyes dice ourselves... 

Chickens lived fairly innocuous lives on the floors of tropical jungles (Larsen caption: "or did they?...") until we decided to mess their role in the ecology up completely and now they've gone from ecological do-gooders to industrial byproduct that also creates more take-away container trash than almost any other animal other than the apex crapper, the Human Being.

The chickens' dino ancestors would be rolling over in their tarpits if they could see what the things that used to be their small warm furry snacks are doing to their great^27 grandkid descendants...

We should never forget two things: 

• Chickens are descended from dinosaur ancestors, are a part of this whole fantastically complicated ecosystem on the planet that keeps us all alive, and as such should be treated with much more respect than we've accorded to them.
• And secondly - they're descended from dinosaurs! - and as such are just as much bad-asses as their ancestors, and perhaps if the scenario in the cartoon comes about, they could very well start a new AI-assisted dinosaur revival - and end our species.

Be nicer to chickens! They may decide our fate really soon!

(Also, they're part of the intergalactic Zorgan ClackerTech Transport system. We should probably not take away our only chance of escape, and also - perhaps chickens were actually the progenitors of dinosaurs on Earth. If you can believe a character as sketchy as Rambard Zorg.)

Seriously though - browse WriterOfMinds' blog because it's a great way to learn interesting things about AI and get a better grasp on the topic. 

As always, share this article and my others far and wide, consider making a one-time or regular donation, and thank you for reading!

Tap Follow-Up, The Saga

It's the "wash-up" at the end of the day. Ohh I have sooo been waiting to use that crappy dadjoke in an article!

And here it is. 

You might first like to read about the tap, and the backstory/reason for this repair. TL;DR the house had two single taps, I wanted a mixer tap so I bought one, and when the house changed hands the new landlord got their plumber to affix the tap for me and I was in Nirvana and then the kitchen had to be remodeled in the part that included the kitchen sink. (As the old saying goes, and as it actually went this time...) Everything about this house is old, lacking in any kind of standards for electrical, plumbing, and even roofing, and the new landlord set about correcting all those major issues and the kitchen stove was the last one that got done, and involved work along the sink as well.

Beginnings

My friend RtP came to visit and we took our best shot at fixing things so I'd have a dual outlet mixer tap again. And after a few hours, we did! RtP arrived with tile glue and plumbing tools, and we were off! As mentioned, not much about the house adhered to any standards, and that included the kitchen sink.

Where most kitchen and handbasin standards mandate a tap on vertical plumbing, this one has two pipes sticking out of the wall, and they're awfully low, making it difficult to wash even a moderately large saucepan let alone a stockpot or decent sized wok.

That also meant having to find a mixer tap that affixes to horizontal plumbing. And those are generally called "bathtub taps" for the reason that - well, because that's where standards say they should go for a bathtub. 

For me, the bathtub tap has two advantages - it allows me to have a mixer style tap and bathtub taps often have a diverter to a hose and handheld shower. I didn't need a shower but I used that fitting to attach a swivel gooseneck instead, to give me a few centimetres of extra height. Best thing ever for a kitchen sink!

So if you read either of the preceding articles you'd have seen a picture of the tap I used to replace the tap that I'd originally bought and that  BtB (also in previous articles) had destroyed the one thing that can't be replaced on those taps... (Yeah, this too is in the old posts I think.) Also, the tap I originally bought had taken me months to find because the kitchen water pipes were 13cm apart and all standard mixer taps I could find have 15cm spacing. 

That was part of the issue, that BtB destroying that original tap meant trying to find that one supplier that had this one style of this one particular mixer bathtub tap that I've ever found online. It actually came through Banggood, that's how long ago this all was... Their system didn't retain the records from that far back, I didn't retain my records from that far back, and one thing I decided was that if I ever got the chance I'd get the pipework etc all spaced the the building standard 15cm. So now ANY modern tap will fit.

First Setback

We needed a grout removal tool. Which we sourced by walking to the nearby hardware store and buying. 

And which made us a bit worried about a second issue, not a setback but definitely an issue. The grout wasn't coming out as dust, but as a paste of moist dust. Mystery was revealed when RtP finally got through the grout and pried the tiles off the sheetrock panel behind. The sheetrock was wet...

That reminded me that when BtB had put the brass garden taps in, he'd had a bit of trouble getting thread tape in there on the hot side pipe. Since we had to remove the fittings he'd put there, that wasn't a problem, and in fact when I did, it proved me right because the thread tape had a distinct water channel through it. That was the cause of the water that'd accumulated on the sink! I finally realised it, and it ceased being an issue because RtP and I were re-working it and we are GOOD at plumbing.

It did leave us with the issue "would tile adhesive stick to wet rockboard?" though. But that's for later n the story.

Second Setback

The cold water side of things was a definite shock when we got to that. We pulled out a hunk of mistreated brass fittings and cobbled-together couplers that wouldjn't have looked out of place in a turn-of-last-century Victorian Steampunk anachronism. Mangled, full of old plumber's paste and electrolysis and - pretty much crap. 

Again, I'm at pains to point out that this wasn't anything the landlord could have known, it took us half an hour to unearth it out of the wall and must have been there for as long as the house was. It does paint a pretty grim picture of what we're guessing was a DIY owner/builder given how many "geological layers" of the house it was in.

So back to the hardware store and purchased some very expensive new brass, cut and prepared it to the required size and replaced that abortion of a  piece of cobblery with the new two pieces... 

Progress From Here Was Smooth

Relatively smooth. We measured the correct distance for the pipes to be apart, measured two new tiles for holes to be made in to fit the new spacing, and cut them without any major complications. We also cut them with RtP's proper diamond holesaw which was a far better fit than BtB's using an angle grinder to - quite literally - chew a hole in the tiles he'd placed. 

We also opened up a bit of space in the wall to allow better access around the pipes, and then it was a trial-fit of the tap to the pipework, and even with the tap on only finger-tight, there were suddenly no leaks. So we glued the tiles on.

It turns out that tile adhesive does stick to damp rockboard, quite well. The tap will have to come off once more to put the trim cups over the currently bare pipework but that has to wait for the grout, so for the moment it looks a bit bare(ish) but it works. The grout will need to wait for everything to dry out from the previously-built-in leak, and as it's getting cold here  that might be a few days to a week.

Result So Far:

I'm so happy to see this installed. Even though it ended up costing more due to the extra lengths we had to go to, it's still cheaper than buying a tap here in Australia at our rip-off-mark-up-buzz-off prices from a plumbing store. And anyway the kitchen now has something that's standard in all the rest of the "little crooked house" syndrome it suffers from... 

Please

I'm doing things like the above because I have to. I turn it into a story for you to enjoy and perhaps learn from, perhaps laugh at, but in any case to be entertained. Please share the URL on your social network, and also please hot one of the donation links and make a donation. I'm a genuine age pensioner, there's not much money to go around, and some of that I'm having to spend to keep this suite of blogs and servers online... 

Stay amused!

AI-buse Of The System

When you're making a mint from AI but can't afford the space to store your audit trail...

This company made software that unearths evidence trails that lead to convictions - but doesn't store the evidence trails to show how it obtained the trails.

Look - AI is hard. You can make a "black box" style AI that you feed a question in, it spits an answer out - but how it got there is a mystery. Most algorithms are a bit like that, unless they're explicitly written to create a map of how they got to the solution. Adding that extra level of difficulty is - difficult.

But you'd think that when you sell such a piece of software specifically designed to sniff out traces of evidence from the Internet and other networks, you'd think you might want to add to the report where you got that piece of evidence from, how you'd found it. 

"The suspect's phone was shown to have pinged off a cellphone tower located at (location in New York) at (time,) placing them in the vicinity of person B" is fantastic to know for securing a conviction. Unless the preceding (and unrecorded) step before that reads "the suspect's phone pinged off a number of cellphone towers across Mexico before - (now read the introductory sentence again.)

You need to show ALL the steps to acquiring evidence. "A search of celltower records (sourced from sites httpXX, httpYY, and httpZZ) showed the suspect's phone number moving about Philadelphia, the suspect's hometown, then in Texas, and subsequently ..." (again, backtrack to the last sentence.)

And since Cybercheck can't prove that those other things didn't happen as well and the last cellphone tower ping wasn't just "cherrypicked" by the program, everything can easily fall apart right there. 

I sincerely hope that the company that makes the software figure it out quickly because otherwise some of the cases that the software provided crucial evidence in, might have to be voided. And it's a pity because this kind of evidence-gathering work would prove to be almost impossible for a human investigator to perform in any reasonable time. 

This is sooo a case of technology outpacing the legalities. We need people in each of these high-tech industries whose job is to work out precisely which legalities the product is likely or possibly likely to fall afoul of, and inform the teams responsible for the product. And then follow up to ensure the advice is being followed, even perhaps having some rights to halt the development cycle until the points are addressed, to prevent the kinds of shitstorms that are currently happening in AI. 

I just need you to share this post to your friends and social media, blog about it, send it to someone you know will appreciate it. Baby steps to activating more and more people. Also, please donate and help me with the costs.

Bloody Taps!

When you have a great landlord - but the road to your hell is paved with their good intentions...

And I have to say again that our landlord is a family trust and the people in it do much of the administering themselves and are fantastic people with whom it's always a pleasure to chat or assist. But as you probably know, my wife has just dodged the Big C bullet and life's been a path strewn with obstacles and dangers. And it's got around a year to go before I can start path-laying again... Here's one paver I have to deal with though...

The *&%# Tap

I'm using (or rather - sad smiley - was using) a bathtub mixer tap with integrated hand shower diverter. Because it saves water AND saves my hands. They look like this:

This is the "replacement" tap, and it's almost 2cm too wide...

And on all the standard ones the centres of the incoming water pipes are around 15cm apart, give or take 0.5cm.  This house, having been jerry-rigged by the original owners with "all the mod cons, on as cheap a budget as we can manage" such as a shower cubicle floor pan with one edge just - cut off it, so that a spare floorboard could be siliconed to it to make a bathchair-accessible step that immediately cracked and has been leaking under the floors for decades. Anyway - I digress. 

The avid homebuilder also added a hot water tap in the kitchen. 13cm away from the cold water one. Both come out of the wall rather than from the sink as is the style for kitchen sinks, so no kitchen tapset will fit. They're both too low to be useful. 

How It Saves Water:

And I want to have a bypass because also thanks to really crap home engineering, the hot water enters the house through a bare copper pipe entombed in a few cubic metres of concrete footpath, meaning the water is always wasting energy that just goes to warming the path... Also, the HWS is about 15mtrs away meaning that before the kitchen sink receives any hot water, just over 3 litres has had to be run. That's up to ten litres a day depending on dishes washed, pots rinsed, etc. 

We put that 3l into milk jugs and then through the filter jugs, and use fitered water for drinking and cooking - no waste. But the garden taps weren't even up far enough to get a milk jug under there, let alone large pots or dishes. Which brings me to the second reason I found it and bought it.

How It Saves My Hands:

I've got carpal tunnel syndrome. (Gone on too far and too long to fix by now) 

And also cold is my arch-enemy. I like to be able to turn on the tap and have warm water for washing my hands when cooking. Once I have the hot water flowing - AND a mixer tap - I can do that.

Anyway - long story short, it took me almost five years to get permission to install the tap, we had it for less than a year before the handyman wrecked it, and now I'm waiting for MY handyman to come and remove and replace the tiles that BtB seems to have gnawed holes in with a hammer and chisel, move the plumbing inside the wall to a 15cm spacing so we can fit the standard mixer tap I bought and then *finally* I'll have at least that bit of the kitchen back to useable.

Hang On - The Handyman Did It? 

I can only say these things: Both the landlord and the handyman whom I  refer to as Bob the Builder (BtB) have the same Kryptonite - plumbing. Oh - not the routing of pipework or siting of fittings - just the actual, you know, making it hold water without leaking...

And so it was no surprise that when BtB fitted my mixer tap, it leaked significantly. But what happened next was still not even his fault. He went outside, shut off the water main, came inside and undid the leaking fitting(s, as it turns out, because both the hot and cold water leaked) and re-doped them with new teflon tape, had just attached the hot side and . . . time for a small digression:

The house on that side of us has been sold and the new owner is a carpenter/builder, and has been pulling siding off, wall linings inside, anything that the old place has had fail in its last thirty - forty years. And on this day he had his 14yo son working with him. And the boy was thirsty and needed water but their water had been turned off because so many sections of house plumbing were out of Code. What to do? What to do? 

As it turned out What To Do was apparently go to our outside tap, realise that the water main was turned off, and turn it back on so he could slake his thirst. BtB roared at the little ass, his father roared more expletives than I thought were possible on a worksite, the water got turned off again, and BtB went back inside.

But it was that little bit too much. BtB isn't a young man, and he was rattled, so he overtightened the cold side of the tap and broke the retaining nut. The only part that's custom-made for that tap, permanently fitted so once it's broken it can't be replaced, and - just like that - its six month reign was over. I was disgusted enough that I tossed it on next door's rubble truck making sure Dad the Di.. Look, I'll just call him DtD,okay? ...made sure that DtD saw it, but you know what? Not one word of apology from him, no offer to make good what at its core was caused by StD (Son the..etc) or anything. 

I as observed bought a new tap that was similar, but forgot that when I'd bought the original, it had taken me a lot of effort to locate one that had 13.5cm spacing rather than the standard 15cm. So I bought the best value for money and it's a thing of beauty and a joy to behold. But because BtB cut the new sheetrock and the tiles to centre on 13.5cm, not even the offsetting fittings could save the situation. Also, BtB has used a shortcut with the old tap and in the process removed a critical thread diameter piece that's buried way inside where all the sheetrock and tiles would need to be removed - and we have only three spare tiles. 

Today a friend and also paid handyman is coming in his professional capacity and we'll solve the problem somehow, and never speak a word to the landlord of BtB. Unless they read my publications, that is...

So - That's It Then, Yeah?

Ummm no. The new extractor fan, that's another thing. The electricians thoughtfully took the old one out and promised to come back to replace it and install a light ASAP (as in, right after Easter) and finally showed up out of the blue last week when I wasn't even home an hour after having an overnight procedure at the hospital, my wife was finally able to sit in the lounge room after her last chemo, and we had another visitor that also couldn't really afford to get casually infected with any community pathogen. 

After telling them to actually MAKE AN APPOINTMENT NEXT TIME they just decided to leave us hanging for more than a week I'm pretty sure I'll have to call them to book another time. At least one of us has some sense of doing business right... 😸

Maybe now you can see why I'm actually literally truly a bundle of nerves right now. I startle at the slightest noise (and with DtD and StD and various other workers ripping into the house and taking truckloads of rubble away almost daily that's a lot of ruffled fur here and not all of it being our three cats' now Dr Furgatroyd's... )

Okay - thanks for your company today, please share the URL with friends or your social group, and if you can hit one of the donation links. It'll let me use the donations for the publications and online costs, and put what I've been slicing off my pension into bringing our emergency jar back to where it was before paying several hundred dollars for the original tap, the new tap, the fittings for the new tap, and the cost on my own handyman. (Because I won't trust BtB with this after the performance...)

Our Emergency Jar isn't *quite* "tapped" yet.

Please help.