Happy Facial Recognition Day!

I first wrote about facial recognition back in 2017, shortly after starting this blogue. (stderr) Then, (stderr) I discovered to my complete lack of surprise, that there is a lack of proper paranoia about the topic, and – I suppose that’s justified because climate change is likely to wipe us out, while having no more personal privacy, won’t. I guess we’re arguing about “insult to injury” which is a great way of spicing up your injuries. Add it to heirarchical storage and, whups, things look bad. (stderr) It seems like just the other day I was laughing at people who were implementing poorly-planned “data lakes” but it seems that, miracle, AI actually has stepped in to help with the problem.

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A Fascinating New Element to Warfare

There are a few things I find fascinating about the current war. First and foremost, it’s a war of attrition and apparently that never occurred to the pentagon command structure. One of the things that Europe learned pretty thoroughly before the Franco-Prussian War, is that an experienced command structure that knows how to communicate and plan is essential. Or so we would think.

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Ignorant Pontificating

I’m going to declare this up front: I have no private knowledge about this topic; my beliefs are formed by a lot of study of the topic since 1978, a lot of strategy gaming, and a lot of news reading. Naturally, any commentary about nuclear strategy is going to be either a) ignorant except for open source material or b) muzzled by secrecy. I.e.: Those that talk about this stuff are ignorant, those that aren’t ignorant are silent.

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An Oldie

Back in the mid 90s I had an unusual experience, in which I was caught in the blast-corona of Operation Sundevil – the Secret Service’s attempt to gain relevance in cybersecurity [wik]. My role was small but it made me realize that the government, at that time, was ignorant enough that they could easily be stampeded into doing stupid things, a form of “terrorism by stupid cop” which I later re-framed as “a denial of clue attack.”

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Half-Assing

Field-expedient repairs are sometimes expected. You haven’t got all the gear to make a proper fix, so you log a maintenance report saying something like, “I did not have the correct threaded bolt to replace it correctly, so I forced the wrong bolt on to the nut with a pipe-wrench, just to hold the thing together until we got home.”

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