Greece will ban bottom trawling in protected marine areas.

University of Cologne retracted an offer of a visiting professorship to Nancy Fraser over opinions she stated about the war in Gaza.

I disagree firmly with Professor Fraser's views — legitimization of HAMAS's large terrorist action, and assertion that Israel's very existence is an injustice. But those are tangents to the issue at hand. People have a right to advocate those views, and should bot be blacklisted for them.

*USC draws backlash for canceling valedictorian’s speech due to support for Palestine.*

Whether she was actually going to talk about that in her canceled speech is unknown, but supposing she was, "support for Palestine" is a rather broad category. There are many different views that qualify, and most of them are not threatening anyone.

The concern for "security" that the university claimed was a bogus excuse — in effect, "We are gagging you for your own safety."

The UK is considering a law to forever ban sales of tobacco to anyone born after 2008.

Tobacco is deadly and addictive. I wish everyone would avoid ever using it, and I wish all smokers would quit. I personally urge people to quit. But I oppose prohibition of drugs that people want to use, because it tends to cause great harm to society in other ways.

Yo, check it. Friday May 17th. That's right, we're doing another CYBERDELIA.

As per longstanding tradition, we are dressing up DNA Lounge as Cyberdelia, the club from the movie HACKERS! This means a 90s cyberpunk movie screening followed by a 90s cyberpunk dance party! Also featuring retro video games, rollerblade ramps, and a costume contest!

But this time we're branching out just a little bit: instead of our traditional pre-party viewing of HACKERS, we will instead be screening the 1995 Keanu Reeves cyberpunk classic, JOHNNY MNEMONIC! The year is 2021 and Johnny is smuggling 160 gigabytes of data in his overloaded brain implant, on the run from zaibatsu assassins. (You may know him better as Johnny Silverhands: Mnemonic was his maiden name.) Dolph Lundgren, Ice T and Henry Rollins co-star. Screenplay by William Gibson himself.

The last time we did a Cyberdelia with a pre-show that was not literally Hackers was that time when we did Tank Girl instead, and some people were confused by that, so lemme emphasize that from 10pm onward this is exactly the same party as all those other times, we're just watching a different movie first.

As I was painstakingly putting the mayonnaise into the bottles putting the new and improved labels on the Cyberdelia floppy flyers, I came across a few classic disks that I was not able to make myself plaster over, see wondrous artifacts below.

Number of times in the last week that I heard a customer ask a bartender, "Are these... coasters??"

Four.

Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules:

The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. [...]

Judges rejected his claim, holding "that the compelled use of Payne's thumb to unlock his phone required no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking."

"When Officer Coddington used Payne's thumb to unlock his phone -- which he could have accomplished even if Payne had been unconscious -- he did not intrude on the contents of Payne's mind," the court also said. [...]

Payne conceded that "the use of biometrics to open an electronic device is akin to providing a physical key to a safe" but argued it is still a testimonial act because it "simultaneously confirm[s] ownership and authentication of its contents," the court said.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Iran is reportedly threatening to attack Jordan if it does not allow Iran's attack drones to cross Jordanian airspace to get at Israel.

The New York Times stated rules of word usage that support Israel's point of view about Gaza and its inhabitants.

The UK has banned the destructive fishing method of bottom trawling. giving some real protection to several "protected" marine areas. The ban applies to all fishing boats, including French ones.

[irony]
France should retaliate by banning bottom trawling in some French waters. Eventually the two countries could entirely eliminate that practice near their coasts.
[/irony]

Modi is weaponizing Hindu pilgrimage sites in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, and trying out repression of Muslims.

Investigating the Los Angeles thug deparment for a series of shootings in which thugs encountered people who were carrying various harmless objects and jumped to the conclusion that they had weapons.

Reportedly US, UK and Jordanian planes shot down Iranian attack drones before they reached Israel.

That was a good way to defeat the Iranian attack — not attacking any Iranians, only their machines.

Some observations on how San Francisco nightlife seems to be transforming into early-evening, get-to-bed-at-a-reasonable-hour life.

I had noticed that many of our live shows were ending really early: a couple times recently, the last band was done and we were closed by 10pm. That seems weird and wrong to me. Especially in the summer: who wants to show up at a night club while the sun is still up? "Why are we doing that?", I asked. Well, Devon did some research, and the answer seems to be, "Because everyone else is doing that too."

From a non-exhaustive survey of local venues of our size or smaller, and a smattering of out-of-town venues as well, the trend now seems to be that doors are at 7 or 7:30 (maybe an hour later on Friday or Saturday) and every show is over by 10:30 or 11. There are almost never more than three bands on the bill, and it's increasingly common for there to be only two bands.

Back in the olden days -- by which I mean the Twenty Tens -- it was pretty standard at a three band show for them to hit the stage at 9, 10 and 11.

That still left you time to hoof it back to BART to catch the last train under the bay, which was a thing that people still did, because that was back before Uber and Lyft had managed to destroy public transportation and normalize paying $60 just to leave the house.

And DJs? Headlining DJs used to go on after 2! That was normal!

This change doesn't seem to be something that has emerged organically from customers, at least not entirely: there is pressure from the bands and their agents to end earlier, and do even shorter changeovers between sets. You can't get a band to agree to go on at 11, because they say they have too much driving to do. (Upside: they don't ask us to pay for hotels as often.)

In the eighties through the aughts, shows started even later: if you dig through our ancient flyers, you'll see plenty of shows where the first band went on after 10; plenty of events that were free before 11pm, because nobody showed up that early; and even a few flyers advertising "DJ dancing every night until 4am." Yes, that was a thing that used to happen! You could go out any night of the week, and there were still places to go at 3am! There was even food! At multiple different restaurants!

Even "last call" doesn't really mean anything these days. It used to be that the most difficult and intense part of the evening for our staff was "hard pull", that time just before 2am when we had to tell customers that they could no longer have that drink in their hands. But nowadays we hardly have to do anything, since even on a busy DJ night, the club has already begun emptying out well before 2, and we're always closed by 2:30. If we stayed open any later, we'd have like 30 people lingering. "Last call" used to mean a rush at the bar. Now it means "start cleaning".

Reader, I do not like it. I do not like it one bit.

I guess in this modern world, now that the downtown office buildings have hollowed out from remote work, everyone has to get to bed early so they can get up on time to not put pants on and not commute to the office.

So welcome to the sleepy seaside town of San Francisco.

I’ve been looking into the inner workings of neural networks and have some thoughts about them. First and foremost the technique of back propagation working at all is truly miraculous. This isn’t an accident of course, the functions used are painstakingly picked out so that this amazing back propagation can work. This puts a limitation on them that they have to be non-chaotic. It appears to be that non-chaotic functions as a group are something of a plateau, sort of like how linear functions are a plateau, but with a much harder to characterize set of capabilities and weaknesses. But one of them is that they’re inherently very easy to attack using white box techniques and the obvious defenses against those attacks, very much including the ones I’ve proposed before, are unlikely to work. Harumph.

To a first approximation the way to get deep neural networks to perform better is to fully embrace their non-chaotic nature. The most striking example of this is in LLMs whose big advance was to dispense with recursive state and just use attention. The problem with recursiveness isn’t that it’s less capable. It’s trivially more general so at first everyone naively assumed it was better. The problem is that recursiveness leads to exponentialness which leads to chaos and back propagation not working. This is a deep and insidious limitation, and trying to attack it head on tends to simply fail.

At this point you’re probably expecting me to give one weird trick which fixes this problem, and I will, but be forewarned that this just barely gets outside of non-chaos. It isn’t about to lead to AGI or anything.

The trick is to apply the non-chaotic function iteratively with some kind of potentially chaos-inducing modification step thrown in between. Given how often chaos happens normally this is a low bar. The functions within deep neural networks are painstakingly chosen so that their second derivative is working to keep their first derivative under control at all times. All the chaos inducing functions have to do is let their second derivative’s freak flag fly.

LLMs do this by accident because they pick a word at a time and the act of committing to a next word is inherently chaotic. But they have a limitation that their chaoticism only comes out a little bit at a time so they have to think out loud to get anywhere. LLM performance may be improved by letting it run and once in a while interjecting that now is the time to put together a summary of all the points and themes currently in play and give the points and themes it intends to use in the upcoming section before it continues. Then in the end elide the notes. In addition to letting it think out loud this also hacks around context window problems because information from earlier can get carried forward in the summaries. This is very much in the vein of standard issue LLM hackery and has a fairly high chance of working. It also may be useful writing advice to humans whose brains happen to be made out of neural networks.

Applying the same approach to image generation requires repeatedly iterating on an image to improve it with each stage. Diffusion sort of works this way, although it works off the intuition that further details are getting filled in each time. This analysis seems to indicate that the real benefit is that making a pixellated image is doing something chaotic, on the same order of crudeness as forcing the picking out of a next word from an LLM. Instead it may better to make each step work on a detailed image and apply something chaos-inducing in between. It may be that adding gaussian noise works, but as ridiculous as it sounds in principle doing color enhancement using a cubic function should work far better. I have no idea if this idea actually works. It sounds simultaneously on very sound mathematical footing and completely insane.

Annoyingly I don’t see a way of doing image classification as an iterative process with something chaos-inducing in between steps. Maybe there’s another silly trick there which would be able to make the white box attacks not work so well.

Side note: It seems like there should be a better term for a function which is ‘not non-chaotic’. They don’t have to be at all chaotic themselves, just contain the seeds of chaos. Even quadratic functions fit the bill, although cubic ones are a bit easier to throw in because they can be monotonic.

Iran launched many missiles and drones against Israel.

Israel's attack on the Iranian consulate was not, in and of itself, a war crime. It was an attack on military personnel of a country which was already at war with Israel.

I don't know what specific targets Iran's missiles and drones were aimed at, but I don't see a reason why that attack would be a war crime. It seems that this is simply not war.

Judged in terms of its effects in the current context, Israel's attack was a manipulative provocation. Netanyahu must have figured that Iran would retaliate, and that this would give Israel an opportunity to attack Iran in a much bigger way and justify it as "retaliation". He may have hoped that western countries would talk western countries into "standing by Israel" in war against Iran.

I am not the only one to suspect that.

I hope those countries' governments are wise enough to refuse to fall for Netanyahu's efforts to lure them into war, or lure them into disregarding the urgency of ending the siege of Gaza.

This could be an opportunity to squeeze Netanyahu out of the Israeli government. They could tell Israel, "We will support Israel against Iranian attack, provided it adopts a defensive posture and provided Netanyahu is not its prime minister."

In the US: join rallies for curbing global heating on April 19 and April 22.