IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

AI, An Approaching Menace? - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I just got an e-mail announcing an upcoming webinar entitled “Artificial intelligence: The next great tech wave?” with an invitation to watch. My reaction was to see this event as “Artificial intelligence: The next great tech threat?”

Certain words tend to invoke popular expectations of magic.

The word “atomic” was one such. The cartoon Mutt and Jeff sometimes had Jeff demonstrate the amazing results obtained using Jeff’s atomic pills. One pill allowed him to fly around the room like a bird. Mutt responded by locking Jeff up in a bird cage.

Jeff's Atomic Pills

A more recent magic word is “laser” as in these two scary business signs.

Now the magic acronym AI (Artificial Intellignce) has made the scene.

I have repeatedly heard an ad on the radio for a “hallucination free” AI product. In connection with that, please see:

AI Hallucinations

Depending on what training has been used in creating that product, maybe its outputs might be of some use or value but there is no way in the world that I would entrust the well being or the lives of anyone dear to me in the advertised AI product or service.

I absolutely NEVER do any on-line banking or use any on-line investment tools because I am firmly convinced by news reports of hacking episodes that on-line security is a deliberately promulgated illusion. (I was tempted to say “hoax”.) Adding AI to that situation doesn’t give me any warm fuzzy feeling at all.

If I am going to accept magic, it will only be as I watch rabbits being pulled out of a top hat.

 

Gee Whiz - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There have been a lot of short articles about astronomical observations lately, often by way of the James Webb observatory. I was looking at one such article when I noticed a reference number I’ve seen before, the distance from Earth to the center of the Milky Way. This one article gave the number as 27000 light years.

I had read some while ago that the period of Earth’s orbit around the galactic center was 200 million years. If the number is correct, I wondered, what would our orbital velocity around the galaxy be?

It comes out like this:

Assuming 365.25 days per year, 24 hours per day, 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute for checking myself, we’re traveling around the galaxy at a little more than half a million miles per hour which certainly seems like a “gee whiz” number, but hold on a moment.

A few years ago, we looked at a rogue “metallic star” that was traveling at two million miles per hour and which was said to be “hurtling out of the galaxy”.

https://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/09/metallic-star-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe-pc.html

It turned out that this star would take 1464 years to traverse the equivalent distance from here to Alpha Centauri so I wasn’t making any plans to wait.

Our trip around the galaxy is at roughly one fourth the speed of that described star which does give one at least some sense of perspective.

Firefox Bookmarks - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I have the Firefox browser on two PCs, one with Windows 10 and the other with Windows 11.

I have read that Firefox can accommodate a very large number of user bookmarks, but there is a bookmarks problem that shows up on both PCs as follows: 

I only have access to forty-two bookmarks. If I try to add a forty-third bookmark, the first one I entered is no longer accessible. If I try to add a forty-fourth, the first two I entered are no longer accessible and so forth.

This bookmark limit is, to put it as mildly as posssible, of great inconvenience. Why does this limit exist to begin with and how can it be overcome?